The St Paul’s Church Rabai that was constructed by CMS. Rebmann joined Krapf in 1846 in Mombasa and Rabai in the service of the Church Missionary Society.
What you need to know:
Dr Paas’s book introduces many details missing from the English sources, writes Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye.
Johannes Rebmann (1820-1876) is an outstanding figure in the missionary history of East Africa as well as recording and comparing languages within the region.
The name of his colleague Ludwig Krapf is better known because his book, Travels, Researches and Missionary Labours, to which Rebmann and Jakob Johannes Erhardt also contributed, circulated widely in English and German.
Krapf spent much time in Europe, publicising the work and consulting with church and secular authorities.
But it was Rebmann’s quiet persistence through 29 years of participation in coastal life that laid the foundation for future developments.
Dr Steven Paas, a Dutch missionary who has served for many years in Malawi, has produced several books on church and missionary history in southern Africa.
He has now turned his attention to the East African coast with a detailed and closely referenced biography of the German missionary Johannes Rebmann, who joined Krapf in 1846 in Mombasa and Rabai in the service of the London-based Church Missionary Society.
Rebmann remained on the East Coast without returning to Europe till 1875 when, prematurely aged and with failing sight, he was persuaded to sail back to London under the care of his devoted Rabai protégé Isaac Nyondo.
After reporting to CMS and getting some temporary relief from his eye problems he returned to his family home at Gerlingen in Wurtemberg, which he had left in 1844 for training in London, when it was a kingdom with strong evangelical institutions.
By the time he arrived back it was part of the German empire. He died there in 1876.
The book — Johannes Rebmann: A Servant of God in Africa before the Rise of Western Colonialism — is in English, published in Germany, and has black and white illustrations based on prints and a few photographs from Rebmann’s final years.
Dr Paas was drawn to the study of Rebmann more by his linguistic interests than by his work on the ground in the Mijikenda area, the Kilimanjaro region and Zanzibar.
In addition to his pioneering work on Kiswahili and the Rabai/N(y)ika cluster of languages, Rebmann recorded a language which he called Kiniassa spoken by a freed slave known as Salamini.
Later, he recognised it as the same language which was known as Maranu in Mozambique.
Apart from the intrinsic importance of this study of a language as at first written down in the mid-19th century at a precisely dated stage of development, this exercise is also a pointer to the diffusion of information and concepts during the slave trade period in Eastern Africa.
Many of the scattered reports Rebmann and Erhardt used to compile their first inaccurate map of the “inland sea” were received from voluntary or involuntary travellers, who could see only a small part of the terrain.
In contrast his journeys to the Kilimanjaro region were to territories and monarchs known by name, but no advance rumour seems to have prepared him for a snow-capped mountain.
This in turn is in marked contrast to Rebmann’s two arduous and time-consuming journeys to Egypt, where the use of the Arabic language linked together a series of diplomatic outposts, trading stations and local dignitaries that linked the metropolis of Zanzibar with the trade and politics of the region.
Every reader will be shocked by the casual handling of the materials which this pioneering linguist had accumulated and worked on for 30 years.
These were, by the time of Rebmann’s death, outside the hands of CMS. The comprehensive bibliography thus introduces many details missing from the conventional English sources.
Further, Dr Paas has used German sources to explain various movements and revivals within the Lutheran church.
English-speaking evangelicals were seldom deeply divided along denominational lines.
Rebmann himself did not find it difficult to accept Anglican orders despite his Lutheran training, and could appreciate Roman Catholic initiatives in socialising freed slaves.
He had courteous relationships with Muslim scholars. What he found difficult to bear was insulting language and insinuation from those who professed salvation, especially when expressed in racial terms.
Misunderstanding between the “House Committee” and workers in the field under pressure of rapidly changing local conditions is ubiquitous in mission (and diplomatic) history.
This is particularly so when communications are unaccountably slow as they appear to have been in East Africa even after the opening of the Suez canal.
Dr Paas’s book is much concerned with missiology and the implementation of policies, the adaptation of experience gained in one situation to the conditions of another field.
These considerations obviously weighed on Rebmann with his constant recollection of Rabai experience over generations and the harsh conditions and many deaths out of which the tiny body of believers had grown.
Rebmann must have left them behind with a heavy heart together with the graves of his older English wife and their only baby son.
Dr Paas’s book will be of interest to those studying Eastern African language in their historical dimension and the appropriate orthography, those studying and practising primary evangelism, and to those inspired by the life-long service of a single-minded man of God.
Steven Paas. Johannes Rebmann: A Servant of God in Africa before the Rise of Western Colonialism. Nurnberg: VTR Publications, 2011. US$29.95. Reviewed by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
