Burkhart Waldecker
Burkhart Waldecker ( August 19, 1902 in Hagen - 1964 ), actually Ludwig Waldecker , was a German-Belgian Africa researcher and ethnologist .
In 1937, Waldecker succeeded in what other explorers had not been able to do despite the greatest efforts , to discover or map the southernmost source of the longest river on earth, the Nile and the White Nile , the Kasumo , in the mountains of Burundi .
Life
Burkhart Waldecker was born on August 19, 1902 in Hagen , Westphalia . His first name was initially "Ludwig", but in 1931 he had it legally changed. Waldecker played with his name even more often. For professional articles he later wrote, he used the pseudonyms "Tantris" or "René Cruce", "Tantris" was an anagram to "Tristan", which referred to Tristan Risselin (1922-2014), a French concert pianist, the Waldecker Dear. After all, the polyglot classical philologist himself was an avid piano player. In 1930 Waldecker was promoted to Dr. phil. PhD. In 1935, as an opponent of the regime, he evaded the threat of persecution by the National Socialists by leaving Germany. In August 1937 Waldecker emigrated to the Belgian Congo , where he lived in Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi in Katanga ) and received great support and protection from the then Governor General in Belgian Congo Pierre Ryckmans (1891–1959; term of office from 1934–1946), especially at the outbreak of the Second World War , where Germans were usually interned. In 1945 Waldecker received Belgian citizenship in the Belgian Congo . He died in the summer of 1964 while on vacation in Italy.
Researcher life in Africa
The classical philologist Waldecker first explored the country in search of the southernmost sources of the Nile. He was able to find and map them on November 12, 1937 in the mountains of Burundi. The White Nile rises at the southernmost point of all tributaries below the Kikizi mountain as Kasumo (also: Gasumo), which means waterfall or mountain stream, and merges into the Luvironza and the Ruvuvu (hippopotamus river), which eventually becomes the navigable Kagera and Victoria Lake flows out. Mount Kikizi is home to the “roof of Africa”, the watershed between the Nile and the Congo, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
The geographic data of the Kasumo spring of the Nile are S3 ° 55 'and E29 ° 51'; it is at an altitude of 2,440 m.
This source, or to be more precise: two “hardly ½ m wide rivulets”, was determined in 1893 by the Austrian Africa explorer Oskar Baumann as the first European during his “Maasai expedition” from a distance of about 1 km “in pure rain canyons”, but not named more precisely or have been mapped. Baumann only speaks of the fact that he reached the sources of the Nile - unlike Henry Morton Stanley in 1874 - and that it is of "minor importance" "which of the two sources is to be designated as Ruvuvu , as the Nile ".
The discovery of the sources of the Nile was made difficult not only by the geographical, warlike and medical conditions or the lush vegetation, but also by the large number of possible sources of the Nile in a large area. For centuries this question held a great secret and an equally great incentive to unravel the mystery. Even the Roman poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (39-65 AD) had Caesar say: "I wanted nothing more than to know the secrets of the Nile, which had been hidden for so many centuries, wanted to explore its unknown source" (quoted from ). The question of whether the amount of water or the southernmost point should determine the origin of the Nile was also disputed among the researchers. So new results of Africa research were presented again and again, about 1889 one of the Nile springs by the German researcher and later psychiatrist Richard Kandt , who had discovered the strongest of the source rivers of the Nile with the Rukarara Nyabarongo in Rwanda . In 1937 Waldecker met his Westphalian compatriot Friedrich Stracke , a priest and missionary of the Catholic missionary society of the “ White Fathers ” (Africa missionaries), in Usumbura ( Burundi ) before the Nile springs were discovered. Stracke has reported extensively about this and about the researcher Waldecker in his book "Capita Nili".
Nile research life (after Stracke)
Father Friedrich Stracke let the locals tell him how "Rukwabargara" lived, researched and worked; They had given this name to Waldecker - along with two other nicknames: “The man who scratches himself”. Stracke describes Waldecker as poorly dressed and modest, without a vehicle and servants or “boy”, only with two tin boxes, which initially earned him a low social status among the local population. He was clearly different from the other colonial rulers. None of the local population wanted to help the sinister man; no one liked to drill the sand fleas from his feet. “No wonder he suffered from this plague of Africa and had to scratch himself”. Hence the nickname. The sand fleas affected him so much that he wrapped rags around his feet and had to be transported in a carrying chair. Nobody had cooked the ghostly man's food and when he had prepared it himself, he chased away those who were suffering because he obviously couldn't afford enough food himself. Communication with him was difficult for the black farmers because he only spoke Swahili .
But “he tirelessly followed the courses of the rivers, climbed the highest mountains, and wrote a lot, a lot. He patiently waited for an opportunity to take his bed and two tin boxes up to the Moon Mountains and look for the sources of the Nile there. Caput Nili quaerere! (Looking for the sources of the Nile!) For the Latins that meant doing something completely hopeless, something useless, unheard of. - I have to admit, I looked after my compatriot with doubts and shaking my head. ”But Waldecker actually found the tiny headwaters of the White Nile among dozens of candidates.
The stone pyramid
Waldecker finally settled down with the “chief” Bucenyegeri, where he built a strange house in 1938: “actually a roof without a house: it is called Iperamidi ( pyramid )”. Thus, the source of the (White) Nile is marked by a three meter high stone pyramid. The locals wondered for a long time what “Rukwabargara” was building; Finally they came to the conclusion that it had to be a haunted hut for their ancestors - at least they stayed away from the building. The construction went slowly, 30 black workers helped by other Europeans. Waldecker tackled a lot himself. He was able to place the stones precisely in the pyramid because he had measured very precisely beforehand. But the building collapsed twice and once Waldecker was sick in his hut for two weeks. And there was always trouble with the workers because they couldn't agree on an early evening. His modesty, his peacefulness and his zeal to work so impressed the population that they finally loved him - after fear, disregard and amazement. But suddenly the researcher was gone; in the cavity of the pyramid all that was found was fresh flowers in a vase of Nile water.
The table on the stone pyramid
The classical philologist Waldecker had left a plaque on the pyramid in 1938 with a longer inscription in Latin that began with: "PYRAMIS AD CAPUT NILI MERIDIONALISSIMUM" (pyramid at the southernmost point of the Nile). In it, he first honors the then Governor General of Rwanda-Burundi, Eugène (Jacques Pierre Louis) Jungers (1888–1959; term of office from 1932–1946), his helpers, Fathers Colle, Gerard and Monteyne, and the ancient scholar Eratosthenes (from Cyrene ) and Ptolomäus (as the first Nile source descriptor), the Nile explorer John Speke (discoverer of Lake Victoria - assumed to be the source of the Nile), Henry Morton Stanley (considers the Lualaba to be the source river), Richard Kandt (the founder of Kigali considers the Rukarara-Nyabarongo to be the Rwandan watercourse the source of the Nile) "and others". He also refers to an ancient monument to the source of the Nile at Hadrian's Gate on the Nile island of Philae ( Egypt ). In addition, he carefully lists the names of all rivers and lakes that form the source of the White Nile, the Kasumo, which form the Nile (Kasumo - Mukasenyi - Kigira - Luvironza - Ruvubu (= Ruvuvu ) - Kagera to Lake Victoria and further) .
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The pyramid was officially inaugurated in the summer of 1943 by Madeleine Nève, wife of Governor General Pierre Ryckmans, who sent Waldecker a photo of the ceremony. Delighted, he sent her a self-composed poem.
In the Leopold II Museum in Elisabethville
In 1943 Waldecker was appointed deputy curator of the Musée Léopold II in Elisabethville. The museum was founded as a branch of the colonial museum of the same name in Tervuren / Belgium in 1937 by the archaeologist Francis Cabu , with whom Waldecker worked closely. He was specifically responsible for the ethnographic collection and soon took over the management of it in the successor to Cabu.
In his work as a cultural ethnologist, which he described as the “study of peoples in primitive areas” up to the present primitives , he made eclectic use of evolutionism and diffusionism for his exhibition , “following the line of the Boas school”. Franz Boas (1858–1942) is considered to be the founder of the theory of diffusionism and the pioneer of " historical anthropology ". Waldecker did not arrange his exhibition according to regions (such as the "Museum of Native Life" in Léopoldville ), but in the sense of a local ethnography according to ethnic groups and their objects, customs and ideas. For comparison, he repeatedly placed objects from other African cultures such as the Zulus from South Africa in nine exhibition rooms . Among the great tribes he differentiated between pygmies , negroids , Hamites and long-headed Kamites (the black branch of the so-called " Caucasians " like the ancient Egyptians ). He couldn't find the European concept of beauty of “ L'art pour l'art ” among the “Negros”; instead, beauty always seemed to him to be subordinate to a specific purpose. Linguistically he distinguished between Sudanese , Nilotic , Nilo-Kamitic and Bantu . Overall, he found a division according to different " cultural areas ". He believed that he could divide Africa into two cultural areas: one with geometric art , the other with anthropomorphic or zoomorphic art .
literature
- Fabian Fechner: Burkhart Ludwig Waldecker - a man from Hagen as "discoverer" of the Nile springs . In: Fabian Fechner u. a. (Ed.): Colonial pasts of the city of Hagen , Hagen 2019, ISBN 978-3-00-063343-0 , pp. 74-77.
Web links
- Literature by Burkhart Waldecker in the catalog of the German National Library
- Royal Museum for Central Africa on africamuseum.be ( Africa Museum Leopold II in Tervuren)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Maarten Couttenier: Between regionalization and centralization the creation of the Musée Léopold II in Elizabethville (Musée national de Lubumbashi), Belgian Congo (1931-1961). In: History and Anthropology, 2013, Volume 25, No. 1. doi: 10.1080 / 02757206.2013.823056 , ISSN 1477-2612 , pp. 72-101.
- ↑ whc.unesco.org
- ↑ a b c d e f Friedrich Stracke: Capita Nili . Novel of an ancient question. Zimmermann brothers, Balve 1952.
- ↑ a b Oskar Baumann: Through the Masai country to the source of the Nile . Reimer, Berlin 1894.
- ↑ Richard Kandt: Caput Nili . Sensitive journey to the sources of the Nile. Reimer, Berlin 1904.
- ^ Burkhart Waldecker: Une pyramid à la source la plus méridionale du Nil au Burundi. Albert de Vleeschauwer Papers, 336. KADOC Archives, Catholic University, Leuven 1944.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Waldecker, Burkhart |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Waldecker, Ludwig (real name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-Belgian Africa researcher and ethnologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 19, 1902 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hagen |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1964 |