Niklaas Koen, a “Khoikhoi”, was sent by the BMS to Germany in 1875 to further his education at a high school at Ducherow in Pomerania and afterwards to study for the ministry at the Berlin "Missionshaus", where he adopted a German version of his name, Klaus Kuhn. Kuhn qualified as a missionary (he also took lessons as a violinist) and, after becoming engaged to a German woman, Maria Brose, returned to Africa to the mission station Königsberg in Natal – where he married his bride in 1878.