Liuli

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Liuli is a place in southern Tanzania on the shores of Lake Nyasa . It belongs to the Nyassa district of the Ruvuma region . It was founded under the name Sphinxhafen at the time of the former German colony German East Africa .

history

The place was founded by German missionaries above a natural harbor around 1890 on Lake Nyassa. It got its name from a bizarre rock formation above the harbor, which is reminiscent of a sphinx .

For the 1893 gone into service small German steamer Hermann Wissmann one was in Spinxhafen Helling built on the steamer was tested annually for maintenance. At the same time, Spinxhafen was also chosen as a storage place for firewood for the Hermann von Wissmann's steam engine , because of the bay's abundance of forests. In addition to the mission station in Spinxhafen, there was only the slipway and a few logging huts.

After the British took over German East Africa, they moved their main base on the eastern shore of the lake to Mbamba Bay, 25 km further south . Today's Liuli is home to the Anglican St. Anne Mission Hospital, which provides medical care for a large part of the Tanzanian southern sea coast.

Military actions against Sphinx Harbor in 1914 and 1915

Shortly after the beginning of the First World War , the British commissioner from Nyassaland (today Malawi ) gave Captain Edmund Rhoades, the commanders of the armored steamer SS Gwendolen, the order to destroy the roughly equal German steamer Hermann von Wissmann . Rhoades knew that the German ship was on the slipway at Sphinxhafen for repairs. At dusk on August 13, 1914, he entered the natural harbor. A British officer explained to the captain of Hermann von Wissmann , Berndt, that war had broken out between the German Empire and Great Britain and that he had orders to render the steamer harmless. Since resistance was futile, Berndt could not prevent British soldiers from dismantling the 3.7 cm gun on his ship, dismantling parts of the machinery and taking the gun and ammunition on board the British steamer. Prager and his machinist were captured by the British.

Apparently, this action was portrayed as a naval victory by the British press. So on August 16, 1914 , the Times headlined: Naval Victory on Lake Nyasa .

On May 30, 1915, Sphinxhafen was attacked again by British troops. It was a landing corps that consisted of 30 European NCOs and officers as well as 200 local soldiers who carried two artillery pieces and two machine guns with them. The place was defended by some German askaris , apparently under the command of a German NCO, who had a machine gun . After the British bombarded the place, the German troop withdrew. The landing corps then made the Hermann von Wissmann unusable until it was floated again by the British in 1919 under the name King George .

literature

  • Albert Röhr / Otto Mielke : On the lakes of German East Africa. "Hermann von Wissmann" steamer. SOS fates of German ships, No. 155, Munich 1958.
  • Ulrich Schäfer: “Hermann v. Wissmann ". A steamer for Lake Nyassa. In: Ship & Time. 35: 11-16 (1992).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heinrich Schnee : German East Africa in the World Wars . Verlag Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1920, page 116
  2. ↑ Imre Josef Demhardt: German colonial borders in Africa: historical and geographical studies of selected border areas of German Southwest Africa and German East Africa. Georg OLms Verlag, Hildesheim 1997
  3. ^ Benedikt Stuchtey: The European expansion and its enemies: Colonialism criticism from the 18th to the 20th century. R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2010, p. 278.
  4. ^ Albert Röhr: German marine chronicle. Verlag Gerhard Stalling, Oldenburg / Hamburg 1974, ISBN 3-7979-1845-3 , p. 196.
  5. ^ Charles M. Good, The Steamer Parish: The Rise and Fall of Missionary Medicine on an African Frontier, 146

Coordinates: 11 ° 5 ′  S , 34 ° 39 ′  E