Description

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.