Johann Ludwig Krapf

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Johann Ludwig Krapf
Exhibition board in the Tanzanian National Museum in Dar es Salaam

Johann Ludwig Krapf (born January 11, 1810 in Derendingen , today's district of Tübingen ; † November 26, 1881 in Korntal, today's district of Korntal-Münchingen , near Stuttgart ) was a German Protestant missionary in East Africa who was close to Pietism , Explorer , linguist and Africa explorer .

education

Krapf came from a relatively wealthy farming family and attended the Österberg School in Tübingen, which was supposed to prepare for university studies. From May 1827 he received training as a missionary in the Basel Mission , but broke it off after two years and instead studied Protestant theology in Tübingen from 1829 to 1834 . This was followed by two vicariate positions in Altburg near Calw and Wolfenhausen near Rottenburg am Neckar . Because of his pietistic sermons he was recalled in 1836 and worked temporarily as a tutor.

Ethiopia 1837–1843

In 1836 he became a member of the English Church Mission Society . On their behalf, Krapf went to Abyssinia in 1837 . Soon after his arrival in Adua in 1838 he was expelled at the instigation of a Catholic missionary and then in 1839 went to the Oromo (formerly called Galla ) in the Shoah province . After traveling to Cairo in 1842 , where he married a woman from Basel in Alexandria, he was not allowed to return to the Shoah.

East Africa 1843–1855

Krapf Rognon (4,800 m) and Krapf Glacier in the Mount Kenya massif
First page of the publication of Krapf's Bible translation (Genesis 1) in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Boston 1849

In 1844 he founded the first English mission station in East Africa north of Mombasa among the Mijikenda , which he called "Rabbai Mpya" ("New Rabbai") in Kiswahili . Here he began translating the Bible .

Mostly together with the missionary Johannes Rebmann , who had been at his side since 1846, he made several successful trips inland, for example to Teita , Usambara , the Kikuyu area and the Tana River .

During these voyages of discovery into the interior of East Africa, Rebmann discovered Kilimanjaro for the western world on May 11, 1848, and Krapf discovered Mount Kenya on December 3, 1849 . In Europe, the stories of the two missionaries and explorers were given that there was ice and snow only about 350 km and 15 km south of the equator , but no belief for years. It is believed that Krapf gave the mountain its name when he asked local Akamba its name and they replied kiinyaa (which supposedly means 'mountain of the ostrich' because the snow cap looked like the cap of an ostrich). Others say the Kikuyu word was kere-nyaga (white mountain). The whole state was later named after the mountain.

After Krapf and Rebmann had repeatedly received reports of the existence of a large inland lake , they recorded these findings on a map for the Royal Geographical Society , thus initiating Richard Francis Burton's and John Hanning Spekes' first trip to Inner Africa (1857 and 1858) and to discover the great lakes in the headwaters of the Nile .

1855-1881

Memorial plaque at the birthplace of Johann Ludwig Krapf
Gravestone in the old cemetery in Korntal

In 1855 he settled in the Pietistic Korntal for health reasons , where he was later followed by his companion Johannes Rebmann. In 1861 he accompanied two missionaries of the United Methodist Free Churches (UMFC) to East Africa, and in 1868 he served an English military expedition under Lord Napier as a country expert and interpreter. Above all, however, he spent his time studying linguistics. During this time he translated large parts of the Bible into Tigrinya , Oromo (Galla), Amharic and Old Ethiopian .

In 1881 he died of a stroke in Korntal . He was buried there too. A primary school and a street ( Ludwig-Krapf-Straße ) are named after him in his birthplace, Derendingen .

meaning

Krapf as a linguist

Krapf is very important as a linguist. In Ethiopia, Krapf collected manuscripts in the Semitic languages ​​Old Ethiopian and Amharic. For this, the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Tübingen awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1842 .

Krapf studied Amharic and Tigrinya in Ethiopia. He translated parts of the Bible to Tigrinya, he also wrote a vocabulary and in 1870 translated parts of the Bible into Oromo, an East Cushite language. In East Africa he published a vocabulary of the Maasai language and six other East African languages ​​and several Bantu languages. He studied the Mombasa dialect of Kiswahili and the language of the Mijikenda and was the first to put these languages ​​into writing, using the Latin script.

In 1850 he published the first Kiswahili - grammar and 1882 a dictionary for Kiswahili. As early as 1844, he translated the first parts of the Bible, the Book of Genesis, into Kiswahili, thereby laying the foundation for Kiswahili as the lingua franca and literary language of East Africa.

Krapf as a geographer and traveler to Africa

Outstanding is his and Rebmann's discovery of Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya . He sent numerous geographical reports from his travels inland to Europe, maps of lakes they had been told about, and speculations about the sources of the Nile. The material was not very precise, but it aroused the curiosity of the geographers and gave rise to scientifically exact exploration of the interior of the country (in 1858 his travels in East Africa appeared in Stuttgart in two volumes).

Krapf as a missionary

Measured by the number of converted Africans, Krapfs and Rebmann's successes were not very great. Here, too, its importance lies in the pioneering work.

The Church of England regards Johann Ludwig Krapf as the father and founder of the Anglican Church in Kenya.

His house in New Rabbai is now a museum and part of the national museums of the country of Kenya . The building of the German Embassy in Nairobi is called "Ludwig-Krapf-House".

Fonts (selection)

  • Vocabulary of the Galla Language , London 1842
  • Vocabulary of six East African languages. Kiswahili, Kinika, Kikamba, Kipokomo, Kihiau , Kigalla , Tübingen 1850
  • Outline of the elements of the Kisuaheli Language, with special reference to the Kinika Dialect , Tübingen 1850.
  • Travels in East Africa, carried out between 1837 and 1855 . Unchanged reprint of the edition Stuttgart, Stroh 1858. Edited with an introduction. by Werner Raupp , Münster, Berlin 1994 (= African journeys, 2).
  • The Books of the Old Testament. Translation in Amharic Language ., 3 volumes, London 1871–73
  • Dictionary of the Suahili Language , London 1882

literature

Web links

Commons : Mount Kenya  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ype Schaaf: L'histoire et le rôle de la Bible en Afrique , CETA, HAHO et CLE, Lavigny 2000, ISBN 9-966-886-72-9 , pp. 68-81
personal data
SURNAME Krapf, Johann Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German missionary, linguist and Bible translator
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1810
PLACE OF BIRTH Derendingen (Tübingen)
DATE OF DEATH November 26, 1881
Place of death Korntal-Münchingen