Johannes Rebmann (missionary)

Johannes Rebmann

Johannes Rebmann (born January 16, 1820 in Gerlingen , † October 4, 1876 in Korntal ) was a German missionary , linguist and geographer .

Birthplace in Gerlingen

Life

Johannes Rebmann was the fourth of eight children of the Swabian "Wengerters" (winemaker) Johann Georg Rebmann and Anna Maria, née Maisch. He came to the Mission House in Basel in 1839 and to Islington in London in 1844 . In 1846 he traveled on behalf of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) to support Johann Ludwig Krapf to East Africa , where from his station Rabai from the area around Mombasa and the ethnicity of the Mijikenda the field were his missionary activity. Rebmann stayed at this post for almost 30 years.

Rebmann and Krapf made many voyages of discovery into the interior of East Africa . On May 11, 1848 Rebmann "discovered" Kilimanjaro and Krapf on December 3, 1849 the Mount Kenya massif . In Europe, their stories were given that there was ice and snow only about 350 km and 15 km south of the equator , but no belief for years.

In 1851, Johannes Rebmann married the teacher widow Emma Tyler, who was born in 1810 and who he had met on business in Cairo . Their only son, Samuel Rebmann, born in 1854, died in Rabai at the age of five days. His wife also died in East Africa in 1866.

After Rebmann and his colleague Johann Jakob Erhardt had repeatedly received reports on the existence of large inner-African inland lakes (including Lake Victoria ), they put these findings on a first map for the Royal Geographical Society and thus gave rise to Richard Francis Burtons and John Hanning Spekes first trip to Inner Africa (1857 and 1858) and to the discovery of the great lakes in the headwaters of the Nile .

Rebmann also did a great job researching several East African languages, especially through a dictionary of the Swahili language . He stayed in Africa until 1875, an uninterrupted 29 years. During these 29 years, many of his fellow missionaries had to return to Europe due to illness or lack of fitness, or died partly of disease and partly of violent death.

In 1875 he returned to Europe almost completely blind and accompanied by one of his few baptized children, Isaak Nyondo. An eye operation in Great Britain failed. So he returned to Gerlingen with Isaak Nyondo and took up residence in the neighboring Pietistic Korntal with his companion Krapf. He married the missionary widow Louise Finkh and died a year later on October 4, 1876 at the age of 56 in Korntal.

Gravestone in the old cemetery in Korntal

Afterlife and memory

Johannes Rebmann's grave in Korntal has been preserved. Of the more than 500 descendants of his siblings who are alive today, around 170 still live in Gerlingen. Of these, Christian Haag and Markus Rösler in particular were involved in maintaining the house where he was born and in establishing the Johannes Rebmann Foundation in 2002 . The house where he was born is now a museum.

The Rebmann Glacier on Kilimanjaro was named in his honor.

literature

• Ernst Dammann :  Johannes Rebmann (missionary). In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 7, Bautz, Herzberg 1994, ISBN 3-88309-048-4 , Sp. 1457-1458.
• Karl Friedrich Ledderhose:  Rebmann, Johannes . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 27, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1888, pp. 485-489.
• Louise Hoffmann: Mission and language research in East Africa in the 19th century. The example of the Gerlingen missionary Johannes Rebmann . In: Blätter für Württembergische Kirchengeschichte , vol. 115 (2015), pp. 117-138.
• M. Louise Pirouet: Rebmann, Johannes (1820–1876) . In: Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions , edited by Gerald H. Anderson. Simon & Schuster Macmillan, New York 1998, pp. 561-562.
• Steven Paas: Johannes Rebmann: A Servant of God in Africa before the Rise of Western Colonialism . Publishing house for theology and religious studies (VTR), Nuremberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-941750-48-7 .
  • German translation: Johannes Rebmann. A servant of God before the advent of western colonialism . Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft (VKW), Bonn 2018, ISBN 978-3-86269-163-0 .

Further information with references to Johannes Rebmann can be found u. a. in the works of his friend and missionary colleague Johann Ludwig Krapf (1810–1881):

• Clemens Gütl: Johann Ludwig Krapf - "Do 'Missionar vo' Deradenga" between pietistic ideal and African reality (contributions to missiology and intercultural theology, vol. 17). Hamburg 2001.
• Clemens Gütl: Johann Ludwig Krapf's "Memoir on the East African Slave Trade" - an unpublished document from 1853. Edited with an introduction by Clemens Gütl (Contributions to African Studies, Vol. 73), Vienna 2002.
• Jochen Eber: Johann Ludwig Krapf, a Swabian pioneer in East Africa . Johannis, Lahr 2006, ISBN 3-501-01544-5 .

Web links

• North Tanzania information (English)
• Johannes Rebmann Foundation (German, English, esperanto) - Here you can find information about the Rebmann Foundation as well as information about the Rebmann House in Gerlingen, where Johannes Rebmann was born in 1820, about Johannes Rebmann himself and other missionaries from Gerlingen.