Walter of Saint Paul-Illaire

Saint Paul-Illaire (1893)

Adalbert Emil Walter Le Tanneux von Saint Paul-Illaire (born January 12, 1860 in Berlin ; † December 12, 1940 ibid) was a German colonial official in East Africa. He comes from the noble family Le Tanneux von Saint Paul , who immigrated to Prussia in the 17th century. In his honor, was the in the Usambara Mountains discovered and sent in by him as seeds African violets in 1893 by Hermann Wendland as the type species of the genus Saintpaulia first described .

Life

Walter von Saint Paul-Illaire, son of the naval officer and member of the Reichstag, Ulrich von Saint Paul-Illaire , was promoted to lieutenant in the Prussian army . In 1885 he joined the private German-East African Society (DOAG). In January 1886 he took part in an expedition to what is now Kenya for the DOAG . The attempt to acquire an area between Gedi and Mombasa and to have it placed under German protection failed, however. He then became director of customs and, in 1889, general representative of DOAG in Zanzibar (East Africa). In 1891 the German Empire took over the administration of German East Africa from the DOAG and Saint Paul-Illaire became district administrator of Tanga . He headed the district office from 1891 to 1910. During this time he noticed a plant in the shady, humus-rich rock crevices of the nearby Usambara Mountains, which he called African violets because of its blue, violet- like flowers.

African violets ( Saintpaulia ionantha hybrid)

In addition, von Saint Paul-Illaire was a colonial policy employee at the Kölnische Zeitung , founder and head of the East Africa Company and co-founder of the colonial department of the German Agricultural Society . After the First World War , as a result of which Germany lost all colonies, he wrote revisionist texts for newspapers and magazines in which he demanded the return of the colonies. But he also tried his hand at scientific publications. In 1896 he published a dictionary on the East African language Swahili .

Walter von Saint Paul-Illaire had been a member of the Berlin Masonic Lodge Zum Widder since 1912 . He died in Berlin in 1940 and was buried in the Invalidenfriedhof . His grave has not been preserved. The African violet he "discovered" only became popular as a houseplant after his death .

Works (selection)

• Swahili phrasebook. Daresalaam 1896.
• War Xenien: Voices and moods from the world wars. Leipzig 1919.
• The curse of German “conscientiousness”. Berlin 1921.

literature

• Ulrich van der Heyden: Colonial remembrance in a flower pot: The Usambara violet and its “discoverer” from Berlin, in: Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (eds.): Colonialism here in Germany - A search for traces in Germany. Sutton Verlag, Erfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3-86680-269-8 , pp. 220-22.
• Conrad Weidmann : German men in Africa - Lexicon of the most outstanding German Africa researchers, missionaries, etc. Bernhard Nöhring, Lübeck 1894, p. 154.

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter von Saint Paul-Illaire in the catalog of the German National Library