Hans von Ramsay

Hans Gustav Ferdinand Ramsay , from 1911 by Ramsay (born May 18, 1862 in Tinwalde , West Prussia , † January 14, 1938 in Tanga , East Africa) was a German officer and explorer.

career

After graduating from high school in Königsberg i. Pr. Ramsay hit a military career and in 1882 he became second lieutenant in Foot Artillery Regiment. 11 in Thorn . In 1891 he was ordered to serve at the Foreign Office and then included in the protection force for German East Africa . In 1893 he was promoted to prime lieutenant, in 1899 he was again commanded to serve at the Foreign Office under position à la suite of the protection force. In 1900 he was passed with the statutory pension and permission to wear the previous uniform.

Activity in the colonies

Ramsay gained his first experience in German East Africa. In 1886, before his transfer to the local protection force, he accompanied the Denhardt brothers to Lamu and Wituland . From February 1889 he was an officer in the so-called Wissmann troop . In 1890 he was station chief in Bagamoyo , from April 1891 district administrator in Lindi . After his transfer to Cameroon , Ramsay succeeded Karl von Gravenreuth as head of the Cameroon North Expedition in 1892. For financial reasons, his engagement in Cameroon was not extended in August 1892. Ramsay therefore moved back to East Africa in 1893 and worked as station chief in Kisaki in 1893 , in Iringa and Ulanga in 1894 , in Lindi in 1895 and from May 1896 as head of the Udjidji station he founded , the first German base on Lake Tanganyika . From 1896–1898, numerous cartographic recordings of the lake area were made here, for the processing of which he was called back to work at the Foreign Office in Berlin in 1898/99.

After retiring from active military service (1900), Ramsay took a position at the Northwest Cameroon Society (GNK), for which he headed the business in Cameroon from 1901–1903 as a general representative. To research and map the concession, he undertook several expeditions through the area between the Cross River and Adamawa . Among other things, he is said to have been the first European to visit the Chefferie Bamum on this occasion in July 1902 . In 1906/07 he also made maps of the area of ​​the South Cameroon Society (GSK) to determine the boundaries of the concession area.

Scientific work

After returning to Germany again in 1907, Ramsay became a lecturer in regional studies of Cameroon and Togo at the seminar for oriental languages ​​at the University of Berlin , began studying law at the same time and took the legal traineeship in 1910. From 1912 to 1913 he stayed again in Cameroon as head of the border expedition in Cameroon (new eastern border). After the First World War, Ramsay was mainly active as a journalist and scientist, among other things as editor of the communications from the German protected areas and editor of the German Colonial Newspaper . In addition, from the summer semester of 1925, he taught again as a part-time, extra-curricular lecturer at the Seminar for Oriental Languages ​​and was a member of the expert committee of the Berlin Museum of Ethnology. In September 1937 he went on another study trip to East Africa, from which he never returned. He died in thong and was buried there.

Awards

Ramsay was the recipient of the silver Gustav Nachtigal Medal of the Society for Geography in Berlin (1898). On May 24, 1911 he was raised to the Prussian nobility. In 1927 the Corps Saxonia Göttingen awarded him the Bierzipfel. Since 1922 he was a member of the Berlin Masonic Lodge Zur Treue .

Own publications

• Report by the head of the South Cameroon hinterland expedition, H. Ramsay, on his journey from the Ediä Falls to the Dibamba (Lungasi) , in: Messages from explorers and scholars from the German protected areas 6 (1893), pp. 281–286.
• Expedition of the authorized representative of the Northwest Cameroon Society , in: Deutsches Kolonialblatt 12 (1901), pp. 234–238.
• Captain Ramsay on his latest trip in the area of ​​the Northwest Cameroon Society , in: Deutsches Kolonialblatt 13 (1902), p. 607 f.
• Nssanakang , in: Globus 85 (1904), pp. 197-202.
• The German banks of the Congo at the mouth of the Ssanga , in: The border areas of Cameroon in the south and east, Berlin 1914, pp. 95–98.
• The Ubangi-Zipfel , in: The border areas of Cameroon in the south and east, Berlin 1914, pp. 110–114.

literature

• Franz Neubert (Ed.): Deutsches Zeitgenossenlexikon , Leipzig 1905, Sp. 1144.
• Florian Hoffmann: Occupation and military administration in Cameroon. Establishment and institutionalization of the colonial monopoly of violence 1891–1914 , Göttingen 2007.

Web links

• Newspaper article about Hans von Ramsay in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hasso von Etzdorf, Wolfgang von der Groeben , Erik von Knorre: Directory of the members of the Corps Saxonia zu Göttingen and the Landsmannschaft Saxonia (1840-1844) as of February 13, 1972, p. 203.