Als Sachse zu den Chagga

Of the German Protestant missionaries in Tanzania, Lutheran or Moravian, none was as famous as Bruno Gutmann, who worked among the Chagga from 1902 – 1938, and only World War prevented him and his wife to live there for the rest of their lives (they had already prepared their burial place among the Chagga). When I did my research there in the early 1970s, I was told that he spoke the Chagga language better than any Chagga, and when reading the three big volumes about the boys’ initiation teaching (parallel in Chagga and German), I believed it. The Chagga honoured him as their Father (Wasahuye O Wachagga) in 1963, and 50 years later the memory is still strong. In Germany his missiological ideas with the value attached to the primal ties of family, neighbourhood and age- group were controversial. In 2016 the Lutheran Leipzig Mission honoured the 50 th anniversary of his death with an academic colloquium, the texts generated by it make up this volume.

This book was co-published with Leipzig Mission