Franz Mayr (missionary)

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Franz Mayr (born March 6, 1865 in Nussdorf-Debant ; † October 15, 1914 about twelve kilometers behind Bremersdorp ) was an Austrian missionary and founder of St Joseph's School .

Life

Mayr was the son of Maria and Georg Mayr, a farmer. He suffered from kyphoscoliosis . He grew up with foster parents, his aunt Anna and Franz Harb, a shoemaker in the neighboring town of Lienz . From 1876 to 1884 he visited the Vinzentinum (Brixen) in South Tyrol.

After graduating from high school, he began to study theology at the seminary in Brixen in autumn 1884. Shortly after his ordination on May 6, 1888, he felt called to become a missionary and work among the Zulu in the British colony of Natal . At that time he was working as a chaplain in Hopfgarten and Kals am Großglockner . In one of his letters he mentioned that he wanted to become a missionary because there was a surplus of priests in his home diocese, a success of Vincent Gasser's ambitions to increase the number of priests in the diocese of Bressanone.

The Austrian Trappist monk Franz Pfanner was the founder and first abbot of the monastery of the Mariannhiller Missionaries near Pinetown in the Vicariate of Natal and sent missionary letters.

Missionary work in Natal

After his arrival in Natal May 1890 lived Mayr eight months at the Trappists in St. Michael's Mission , an outstation of the monastery Mariannhill, before moving to the capital of the colony, Pietermaritzburg , set out, where he in January 1891 Bishop Charles Constant Jolivet his services offered.

In the years 1892–93, various cities in Natal introduced mandatory registration for blacks in order to be able to better control them. Since Zulus were often employed temporarily by whites as domestic servants, missionaries had little or no access to the Zulu family unit, except for people looking for work in the city. Zulus usually worked long hours and had a curfew from nine o'clock. A missionary who intended to reach out to the Zulus would therefore have to provide a meeting place, such as a hall or chapel, that would attract the Zulus on Sundays that were their day off. The missionary also had to speak the language well. A missionary's success depended on both the Zulu children and the adults, because if a missionary could reach the children by teaching them, he would often have access to the parents as well. After all, a missionary needed deep trust and dedication because he sometimes went against public opinion and ran into problems with the colonial authorities. Father Franz Mayr had these qualities when he led the first Catholic Zulu mission in Pietermaritzburg.

Bishop Jolivet paid tribute to Mayr's knowledge of English and Zulu and immediately charged him with establishing and leading the Zulu mission in the city. Mayr was allowed to work as an independent secular priest and never joined the Oblates. Indeed, the bishop allowed Mayr a considerable amount of freedom in his work.

At the direction of Bishop Jolivet, Mayr gathered a group of Zulus and built a church. This "native church" was located at Erf 10, Burger Street, near St. Mary's Church. During the week Mayr also ran a primary school for children and gave catechetical instructions to adults and children after mass on Sunday.

On January 15, 1893, Jolivet blessed the simple building and named it the Church of the Holy Name on the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus . The influence of the ecclesiastical mission is evident in the baptismal protocol, which shows how quickly and with what speed the conversions among the Zulu began. The first baptism that took place in this church was that of 30-year-old Peter Makaye on February 19, 1893. Two years earlier, the Zulu Maria Mendaba had been baptized in St. Mary's Church.

"Many Zulus visit our school and chapel" reported Bishop Jolivet in 1894. For this reason, Jolivet and Mayr, inspired by the success of the St. Francis Xavier Catholic Mission near the port of Durban, started a village for African Catholics on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg plan. Soon a piece of land was bought for Maryvale near what is now Ohrtmannstrasse, where Mayr built the Church of the Holy Family. Today the Catholic Church of St. Jeanne d'Arc stands there. Soon Mayr settled African families in the village and another forty hectares of arable land were leased for their use. As in the case of the St. Francis Xavier Mission, every African family was forced to build a European-style apartment and had to grow crops on their own property.

The official opening of the Maryvale Mission by Bishop Jolivet took place on January 27, 1895. The permission to expand the Zulu mission to Maryvale was based on the bishop's confidence in Mayr's ability to evangelize the Zulus successfully.

The development of Maryvale required considerable resources. In order to raise money, Franz Mayr visited Europe and asked the Austrian Countess Maria Teresia Ledóchowska and the Sodality St. Peter Claver for donations. Most of the funds went into the purchase of land and the construction of a school chapel and other buildings. In the spring of 1904 Mayr even traveled to Canada to raise money and recruit missionary sisters for Natal.

Oblate priests eventually took over Maryvale, while Mayr continued his work in the Chapel of the Holy Name in the town of Pietermaritzburg and served in the town jail, where he had been invited to become a chaplain on death row as early as the 1890s. Mayr went to the gallows with the prisoners, converted them to Christianity before they died, and baptized them, sometimes on the day before their execution. Mayr was in Natal until 1909. During this time he established several mission stations throughout the colony and assisted other priests in their work in places like Oakford and Umsinsini.

Work in Southern Rhodesia and Swaziland

In 1909 Mayr was asked by the Mariannhill missionaries to reopen a mission field in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe ). St. Triashill, Mayr's most successful mission station in the region, was in Manikaland , near the border of the Portuguese East Africa colony (now Mozambique). He learned the Manyika language and was soon able to preach the gospel in the local ChiManyika language.

In 1912 Mayr left Africa to offer his services as an English and Zulu teacher to young Mariannhill missionaries planning a trip to Africa. A few months later, he decided to return to Africa to help the Tyrolean Mary Services in Swaziland .

Mayr and the Tyrolean Servites began the first Catholic mission in Swaziland in 1913. Mayr's help was very much appreciated by the servitic superior, Father Arimath Maria Gratl. Mayr immediately set out to found the St. Joseph Mission near Bremersdorp , the capital of Swaziland. The last mission he founded is the place of his burial. On October 15, 1914, Mayr set out alone in his mule wagon. About twelve kilometers beyond Bremersdorp he stopped in a shop to buy a coat. As he was leaving, a young Swazi named Mfanyana Mdluli followed him , stole his money and stabbed him. The regent Labotsibeni Mdluli immediately dispatched a subordinate to look for Mayr's body. There were seventeen wounds on his left arm and leg and one more wound, probably the fatal one, on the back of his neck. Mayr was forty-nine years old.

Various collections by Mayr

When Clemens U. Gütl began his research on the life of the Tyrolean missionary in 1996, he was as good as forgotten. What he found were mostly unpublished sources scattered across Europe and South Africa. He published a few hundred of the documents he found in the book Adieu, You Dear Blacks, along with Mayr's published articles, historical photographs and maps, and commentaries.

Mayr sent several of his collections to scientific institutions such as the Natural History Cabinet of the Vincentian and to his sponsors, friends and relatives in Europe. It is only in the last few years that scientists have started looking at these important collections. The herbarium of the University of Natal houses the hundred-year-old ethnobotanical collection of medicinal plants by Mayr, which he meticulously cataloged in both Latin and Zulu. Scientists at the Botanical Institute are now working with this collection, which is one of the oldest in southern Africa.

From 1909 to 1912 he collected tools, costumes and weapons from the Manyika in southern Rhodesia. He sent many of the ethnological objects to Maria Teresia Ledóchowska for use in her traveling exhibitions, but sent most of his collections to the Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg. William Dewey of the University of Iowa called Mayr's Manyika collection the best he has ever seen in the world.

Publications

In addition to his missionary work, Mayr also found time to write several books, including Zulu Simplified, which was first published in 1899. This was a grammar with the subtitle A New, Practical, and Easy Method of Learning the Zulu Language , the sixth edition appeared under the title An English-Zulu Exercise Book, with Key for Colonists and Natives.

At the behest of the Natal School Inspector, he also published Beginnings of English Grammar and Geography and a songbook in English in 1899 . In 1901 Mayr Incwadi Yokufundisa ukufunda isi Zulu (Handbook for Teaching and Learning Zulu), a Zulu textbook published in Salzburg, finished.

During his time in Southern Rhodesia, Mayr published the book A Chimanyika Spelling Book and several religious books, including the Catholic catechism entitled Katekisma kana Tsamba ye rudzidziso rwe Sangano katolike (Catechism or textbook of the Catholic Church) and a prayer and hymn book entitled Munda we mweya kana Tsambe ye minamato ne ndwiyo (Field of the Holy Spirit or Book of Prayers and Hymns).

The Gore Rinoyera re Sangano kana Mavangeri e Masondo collection contains posthumously published prayers and hymns. Buku re masoko anoyera and chirangano che kare ne chipswa rakawambzirwa nge masoko and Sangano (a Bible story translated into chiManyika) and Easy English for Natives in Rhodesia were published after his death.

Mayr has also left some scientific article about the Zulus, such as Language of Colors Amongst the Zulus Expressed by Their Beadwork Ornaments, Some General Notes on Their Personal Adornments and Clothing (The language of color among the Zulus who in her pearl ornaments expressed and some general notes on her personal adornments and garments.) Mayr's article The Zulu Kafirs of Natal and Zulu Proverbs were published in the anthropological journal Anthropos . The ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt suggested that Mayr and three other Catholic missionaries receive phonographs to preserve indigenous music from different parts of the world.

Although Mayr was not the first to produce Zulu recordings, his audio recordings are among the earliest in the language. His recordings were originally made on wax cylinders and were later copied onto so-called phonograms in the phonogram archive of the then Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Regarding his motivation to record Zulu music, Mayr said: “It is certainly high time for such a study, as European music is rapidly penetrating into every part of the country, and harmonicas, concertinas, etc., are taking the place of the original primitive instruments. " ("It is certainly high time for such a study, as European music is rapidly penetrating all parts of the country and harmonica, accordion, etc. take the place of the original instruments." In one of the protocols that are attached to his Zulu recordings, Mayr wrote, "I intend to write a more detailed treatise on Zulu music for Anthropos after receiving the result of wiretapping the phonograph cylinders." The article was not published in Anthropos but instead appeared in the Annals of the Natal Government Museum as A Short Study on Zulu Music .

literature

  • Clemens U. Gütl: Franz Mayr and "his blacks". A missionary's interest in African countries and cultures. In: Gerda Lechleitner (Ed.): The Collection of Father Franz Mayr. Zulu Recordings 1908 (= Sound Documents from the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences: The Complete Historical Collections 1899–1950 Series 10). Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 2006, pp. 14–32.
  • Clemens Gütl:  Mayr, Franz, 1865–1914. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 27, Bautz, Nordhausen 2007, ISBN 978-3-88309-393-2 , Sp. 921-934.
  • Clemens U. Gütl: The Legacy of Franz Mayr. In: International Bulletin of Missionary Research 33, 2009, pp. 88-91.

Individual evidence

  1. See Clemens Gütl (Ed.): Adieu you dear blacks . Collected writings of the Tyrolean Africa missionary Franz Mayr (1865–1914). Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2004, pp. 27–36, 43–45.
  2. ^ Gütl, Adieu you dear blacks , pp. 54–304.
  3. Register of Baptisms, vol. 3, 1888–1901, Marienkirche, Pietermaritzburg.
  4. Gütl, Adieu you dear blacks , pp. 27–36, 43–45.
  5. Feast of the Holy Family at Maryvale. In: South African Catholic Magazine 3 (1895), pp. 170-171; A la mission de Maryvale. In: Missionen 147 (September 1899), pp. 274-278.
  6. ^ Gütl, Adieu you dear blacks , p. 100, 173ff.
  7. Gütl, Adieu you dear blacks , pp. 305-316, 366-387.
  8. ^ Gütl, Adieu you dear blacks , p. 389 f.
  9. ^ Gütl, Adieu you dear blacks , p. 116 f.
  10. ^ Gütl, Adieu you dear blacks , p. 121.
  11. Franz Mayr, Incwadi Yokufundisa ukufunda isi Zulu (manual for teaching and learning Zulu) (Salzburg-Maria Sorg: St. Peter Claver Sodality, 1901).
  12. ^ Franz Mayr and Aegidius Pfister, trans., Book on the history of the church and on the history of Sangano (Mariannhill: Catholic Mission Press, 1917)
  13. ^ Franz Mayr: Language of Colors Amongst the Zulus Expressed by Their Beadwork Ornaments, Some General Notes on Their Personal Adornments and Clothing In: Annals of the Natal Museum 1 (1906): 159-166.
  14. ^ Franz Mayr: The Zulu Kafire of Natal. In: Anthropos 1 (1906), pp. 453-471 and 2 (1907), pp. 392-399, 633-45.
  15. Box 1, lot 1, file no. 89/1909, archive of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, phonogram archive .
  16. Franz Mayr: A short study on Zulu music. ) In: Annals of the Natal Government Museum 1, pt. 3 (May 1908): 257.
  17. See the protocol attached to the phonogram 1755, Archive of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Phonogram Archive.
  18. Mayr, ("A Brief Study of Zulu Music"), pp. 257–67.