Van der Kemp took up his medical studies again, in Edinburgh, and in two years had completed his degree, rounded off with some significant experiments into asphyxiation (entailing the drowning of cats). He also prepared for publication a treatise in Latin on cosmology, entitled Parmenides (1781), which was apparently well received by those few who read it. He then returned to the Netherlands, where he practised as a doctor first in Middelburg and then near Dordrecht. Then, on 27 June 1791, his wife and daughter Antje were drowned in a yachting accident from which van der Kemp himself barely escaped. As a result he experienced an emotional conversion back to the reformed Christianity of his family.....[he soon] felt the need to engage in missionary work. In this he was influenced by the Moravian Brethren and by the prevailing millenarian ideas. ...
He arrived in South Africa leading a group of people inspired by the London Missionary Society, in March 1799. There he again insisted on thinking for himself, and
was able to gather together a congregation of African converts whom he imbued with his belief that they, not the colony's white inhabitants, were the true Christians, and that God's wrath would descend on the colony's many sinners. At the same time he rejected the outward signs of respectability, once famously declaring that all civilization came from the devil.
...[The] agitation [of Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp] together with that of his colleague James Read ...[led] to the institution of a more regularized system of justice in the colony, and his campaigning Christianity began a strain which has lasted to this day.
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