Dmitri Alexejewitsch Olderogge

Dmitri Alexeyevich Olderogge ( Russian Дмитрий Алексеевич Ольдерогге * April 23 ^{. Jul} / 6. May 1903 ^greg. In Vilnius , † the 30th April 1987 in Leningrad ) was a leading Russian Africanist , anthropologist , ethnologist and historian .

Life

His father Alexei Olderogge came from the Holstein nobility and was an officer in the Russian army . In 1906 the family moved to Saint Petersburg . From 1912 Olderogge went through cadet training. His father fled abroad after the October Revolution in 1919, so that Dmitri Olderogge was forced to take on various jobs and to train independently.

In 1920 Olderogge joined the Red Army , where he served in the statistical department of a headquarters and did not take part in military operations. After two years the military sent him to the ethnological-linguistic department of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Petrograd , where he focused on studying the origins of the state's development. He initially planned to study Assyrian material on these issues . But since there were no specialists in this area at the university at that time, he turned to Egyptology .

Shortly after graduating in 1925, he became a research assistant at what is now the Kunstkammer . Here the prominent ethnographer Lew Sternberg recommended sending him on a business trip to Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium to gain foreign expert experience in the field of African ethnology . From October 1927, Olderogge stayed in Western Europe for half a year and took on an intermediary role between Western and Soviet Africanists. After his return to the USSR, he first took a Swahili course at the Leningrad Orient Institute and later gave further courses in Bantu languages such as Zulu . At the same time he pursued his scientific career. In the period of the repression of the 1930s , however, Olderogge's works were practically not printed in order not to give cause for persecution in view of its "unreliable origin".

During the Second World War , Olderogge was evacuated to Tashkent with numerous other scientists in August 1942 , returned after the end of the Leningrad blockade in May 1944 and received a medal “For the defense of Leningrad” . In 1945 he became professor of African studies at the University of Leningrad. Together with Ivan Potechin (1903–1964), he published the standard work Die Völker Afrikas: their past and present , which first appeared in 1954 in Moscow. In 1953 he was awarded the Order of Lenin .

During the thaw period , from 1955 to the 1960s, Olderogge was able to establish direct contact with foreign colleagues on numerous work trips abroad. In 1960 he became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR . After an appointment as visiting professor at the Sorbonne in 1961, he traveled to West Africa for the first time, visited Senegal, and met with President Leopold Senghor there . Since the beginning of the 1970s, the influence of Olderogge and his school in the Soviet Union declined significantly, but during this period he enjoyed increasing international recognition. In 1975 he became a corresponding member of the British Academy , and in 1979 he received an award from the University of Leipzig .

Olderogge was married to the Egyptologist Miliza Edwinowna Matje .

He died on April 30, 1987 in Leningrad and was buried in the Bogoslovskoye Cemetery.

International publications

The social order of Songhai in the 15th and 16th centuries // African studies. No. 26 Berlin, 1955.
Osman dan Fodio's uprising and its significance // Files of the XXIV Orientalist Congress, Munich, 1957.
The origin of the Hausa language // Men and Cultures. Selected papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960.
The peoples of Africa: their past and present. 2 vols. Berlin: Dt. Verl. Der Wiss., 1961
The Art of Africa: Negro Art from the Institute of Ethnography, Leningrad. London: Paul Hamlyn, 1969 (with Werner Forman).
A Swahili word list from 1811 from the handwritten materials of Admiral Krusenstern // Word and Religion. Kalima na dini. Ernst Dammann on his 65th birthday. Stuttgart: Evangelischer Missionsverlag, 1969.
The Hamitic Problem in Africanistics // African Notes: Bulletin of African Studies. Univ. of Ibadan. Vol. Vll, № I, 1971.
L'Armenie et L'Ethiopie au IV siecle (a propos des sources de 1'alphabet Armenia) // IV Congresso Internazionale di Studi Etiopici (Roma, April 10-15, 1972). Tomo I. Roma: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei , 1974.
Migration and Ethnic and Linguistic Differentiations // General History of Africa. Volume I. UNESCO, 1981.
Language and Society in Africa. Aspects of cultural history // Social change in Africa and the development of forms and functions of African languages. Berlin: Akad.-Verlag, 1980.

literature

Bondarenko, Dmitri M., and Popov, Vladimir A. Dmitri Olderogge and His Place in History of Russian African Anthropology. In: Social Anthropology. 2005. Vol. 13, No 2. P. 215-220.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Olderogge, Dmitri Alexejewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Ольдерогге, Дмитрий Алексеевич (Russian); Ol'derogge, Dmitrij Alekseevič (transliteration)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Russian Africanist, anthropologist and historian
DATE OF BIRTH	May 6, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH	Vilna
DATE OF DEATH	April 30, 1987
Place of death	Leningrad