Carl Hugo Hahn

Carl Hugo Hahn (1818–1895) was a German missionary and linguist who worked in South Africa and South-West Africa for most of his life. Together with Franz Heinrich Kleinschmidt he set up the first Rhenish mission station to the Herero people in Gross Barmen. Hahn is known for his scientific work on the Herero language.

Hahn was born into a bourgeois family on 18 October 1818 in Aahof near Riga, Latvia. He studied Engineering at the Engineering School of the Russian Army from 1834 onwards but was not satisfied with that choice and, more generally, his parents' way of life. In 1837 he left Ādaži (Aahof) for Barmen (today part of Wuppertal, Germany) to apply at the missionary school of the Rhenish Missionary Society. He was admitted to the Missionary School in Elberfeld (also part of Wuppertal today) in 1838 and graduated in 1841.

Hahn arrived in Cape Town on 13 October 1841. His orders were to bring Christianity to the Nama and the Herero in South-West Africa—not an easy task considering that both tribes were enemies at that time. He travelled to Windhoek in 1842 and was well received by Jonker Afrikaner, Captain of the Orlam Afrikaner tribe residing there. When in 1844 Wesleyan missionaries arrived at the invitation of Jonker Afrikaner, Hahn and his colleague Franz Heinrich Kleinschmidt moved northwards into Damaraland in order to avoid conflict with them.

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