Johann Jakob Erhardt

Johann Jakob Erhardt

Johann Jakob Erhardt (born April 17, 1823 in Bönnigheim , † August 14, 1901 in Stuttgart ) was a German missionary who worked in Africa and India.

Life

Erhardt was the son of a master tailor and apprenticed to a cooper in his hometown . Through the Pietists working in Bönnigheim he came to the Basel Mission , where he was trained as a missionary until 1846. From 1846 to 1848 he was with the Church Mission Society in London , where he was ordained in 1848 . He was then sent to East Africa, where he worked on a mission with Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann . Like Krapf and Rebmann, Erhardt was also active in research on geology and language in addition to missionary work and later, when Krapf was almost exclusively devoted to research trips, together with Rebmann, he took care of the expansion of the Rabbai Mpia mission station near Mombasa.

Erhardt returned to Europe in 1855 for health reasons. In 1856 he married in Basel and published a map of East Africa, which also incorporated the results of research by Krapf and Rebmann and which were initially doubted by contemporaries (among other things, snow-capped mountains were considered impossible in Africa). In 1857 Erhardt submitted a dictionary for translating the Masai language into English.

Until 1891 he worked for the Basel Mission at four different mission stations in India. There, too, he conducted language studies and wrote two song books in the local languages.

Erhardt spent his retirement in Stuttgart, where he died in 1901. Jakob-Erhardt-Strasse was named after him in Bönnigheim .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Heinrich Bursik: “Wissenschaft u. Mission should become very close friends ”. Geography and linguistics as instruments of the mission - the African traveler Johann Ludwig Krapf . Diploma thesis University of Vienna 2008 (online resource) ( Memento of the original from February 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 1.4 MB). 
2. ↑ Mémoire to explain the map of East and Central Africa compiled by him and Johannes Rebmann. Along with remarks by W. Desborough Cooley and August Petermann . In: Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen (Gotha 1856) pp. 19–32.
3. ↑ Vocabulary of the Enguduk Iloigob, as spoken by the Masai tribes in East-Africa . Edited by Johann Ludwig Krapf. Ludwigsburg 1857.

literature

• Karl Seeger: Missionary Johann Jakob Erhardt . In: Ganerbeblätter 5 , Bönnigheim 1982