Konrad Meier (missionary)

Konrad Meier (born December 8, 1867 in Freienstein , Canton of Zurich , Switzerland ; † 1931 in Bachenbülach , Canton of Zurich) was a Swiss Moravian missionary .

Youth and education

Meier was born in 1867 as the illegitimate son of a factory worker. He spent his youth in the hamlet of Mülberg in the municipality of Oberembrach .

In 1887 he started an apprenticeship with a Zurich master tailor. As a journeyman, he moved to Neuwied am Rhein (near Koblenz ) on the Walz . This was his first long stay in a Moravian congregation.

At Easter 1892 he entered the newly founded mission school in Königsfeld north of Chemnitz . From 1893 to 1896 he attended the mission school in Niesky, Silesia . On November 13, 1893, he was accepted into the Moravian Church, where he received extensive training for his future missionary work.

In 1896/97 Konrad Meier attended Livingstone College in London , which offered additional medical training for missionaries.

East Africa

Meier was called to the Unyamwezi Mission to German East Africa on February 2, 1897 . His ordination as a deacon took place in Herrnhut on August 22nd . On August 31, 1897 he married Minna Elise Hillberg from Gnadenberg (today Godnów in Lower Silesia). In the same year he traveled with his wife to East Africa, where he arrived at the beginning of 1889.

There he worked in Urambo , northwest of Tabora . Mission in the Unyamwezi area was taken over by the Brethren in 1897 from the London Missionary Society . Konrad Meier was responsible for expanding medical care for the Nyamwezi on the ward . He documented life in this area of ​​what was then the German colony with photographs. The mission station he set up together with the missionaries Edmund Dahl and Rudolf Stern became the starting point for today's western province of the Moravian Church in Tanzania , based in Tabora. It was from here that the three missionaries founded the stations Kitunda (1901), Sikonge (1902), Ipole (1903) and Kipembabwe (1903). In addition to missionary work, the stations were responsible for medical care and school education. Conversion successes during this period were small, as the missionaries concentrated on researching the language and culture of the Nyamwezi in order to better understand their way of thinking and religion. Konrad Meier wrote over a thousand reports and letters and took the first photos of local dignitaries and their houses, but also of the simple workers and slaves, their tools and their fields and herds. This documented a period of time in the cultural history of this country that changed rapidly a little later due to the influence of colonialism .

In the spring of 1900, Meier's 13-month-old son died of a tropical disease , and his wife died a few weeks later. He married again on June 18, 1902. A caravan of 300 men was made available to him to pick up his second wife from the port city of Dar es Salaam , which is over 1100 kilometers away . In 1903 Meier moved to the newly founded Sikonge station.

In 1904 Konrad Meier returned to Bachenbülach in Switzerland with his wife and second son for health reasons. There he was elected to the Reformed Church Administration and was its president from 1922 until his death in 1931. In addition, he worked as a homeopath and preacher in the vicinity of his community.

estate

Konrad Meier was one of the few missionaries in this area of central Tanganyika . Other mission societies concentrated their work on the coast and areas of the East African lakes. In Meier's time there were no other Europeans living in a wide area, and only a few Arabs who traded with their caravans. Little was known about the culture and religion of the native Nyamwezi, who were described in Europe as particularly predatory and warlike. Meier left behind over 1000 letters and reports as well as many photos with which he documented the everyday life of the missionaries and the locals in this part of the colony of German East Africa at the end of the 19th century. When the Staffelhof in Embrach , Switzerland was cleared , some of these letters were rediscovered in 1987; the other documents and photos are in the Unity Archive in Herrnhut .

literature

• Hans Baer: Missionary in Africa. Letters, reports and pictures from Herrnhuter Konrad Meier (1867–1931) . elfundzehn-Verlag, Eglisau 2009, ISBN 978-3-905769-07-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Konrad Meier in the catalog of the German National Library
• Andrea Sailer: A life made up of 1000 letters. In: New Bülacher Tagblatt . April 17, 2009
• Anniversary in Tanzania-West. In: Moravian Mission currently. 13, July 27, 2007

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Constance Hartung: The "Path of the Fathers". East African religions in the mirror of early missionary reports. LIT, Berlin / Hamburg / Münster 2005, p. 446.
2. ^ Author of a Nyamwesi dictionary (Hamburg 1915) and discoverer of Dahl's law .
3. ^ Joseph Edmund Hutton: History of Maravian Missions. London, 1923, p. 454.
4. ↑ K. Nørbygaard: Classification and affection. A study in the formation of Moravian missionary identity in Unyamwezi, 1898-1916. Vol. 39, Folk, 1997, pp. 97-101.
5. ^ Directory from the Moravian University Archive ( Memento from June 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), p. 61, on the website of the University of Leipzig.
6. ↑ Friedrich Ratzel : The origin and migration of the peoples viewed geographically. Reports on the negotiations of the Saxon Academy of Science in Leipzig, Philological-Historical Class, 50. Teubner, Leipzig 1898, p. 12.