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There
are good reasons for studying the life and work of Johannes Rebmann. He was
a 19th-century German Christian, who was trained to be a missionary in
Switzerland, and joined an English Mission, which sent him to Muslim-ruled
East Africa. There he stayed for 29 years, before returning home blind and
sick, soon to die. Although these uncommon facts sound interesting enough
they do not offer the final motivation of my interest in Rebmann. In the
first place he was a faithful servant of God, who used his gifts for the
extension of the Kingdom of Christ. Let us look at him from a spiritual
perspective and from a linguistic perspective.
Spiritual
Perspective
Undoubtedly
father Johann and mother Anna Rebmann in Gerlingen, Württemberg, had no
idea that God had destined their little Johannes to spend more than half of
his life as a missionary in faraway Africa. Yet being shaped by the
19th-century Awakening Movement, in the line of German Pietism and the
Reformation, they believed that God has a plan with every life. Like any
Christian their son was called to be a witness of Jesus Christ and his
Kingdom. But where and how, they would not have realised. East Africa
became his destination. Young Johannes was to give a different witness of
Christ to the Africans than the Portuguese had done when they subjugated
East Africa by military power, symbolised since 1528 by the establishment
of Fort Jesus, still proudly towering over the Isle of Mombasa off the East
African coast. His witness of Jesus Christ also differed from Muslim ideas
on Prophet Isa that were spread by the imams of the Sultan of Oman and
Muscat who had ruled the African East coast, including Zanzibar, and (since
1837) Mombasa, for almost three hundred years. Mombasa
in the north and Kilwa in the south were the two garrison towns of the long
stretched-out territory on the main shores belonging to the Sultanate. Each
had a governor (mangi), customs officers, and a guard (beluch).
Ten
years before Johannes Rebmann’s birth, in Derendingen near Tübingen Johann
Ludwig Krapf was born. He was to develop a far-reaching plan of
counteracting the ever continuing penetration of Islam in Africa, by a
chain of mission stations from the Indian Ocean at Mombasa to the Atlantic
Ocean in the West. In a way Krapf enveloped the life of Johannes Rebmann.
He was there in 1846, when Rebmann arrived in Africa. He stayed there
together with him during seven years of their lives. They kept contact even
after Krapf had left Africa and they had been separated by a great
distance. In 1875 by the end of his life, when Johannes Rebmann came home
in Württemberg, Krapf was there to assist him. Both got deeply involved in
the Swahili world of the coastal regions of present-day Kenya and
Tanzania. However, the vision of both pertained to more than those
regions. Krapf’s main focus was the Galla of Abyssinia. Rebmann felt called
to pave the way for missionaries to the people of central Africa, where at
that time a large interior lake was supposed to be.
Like
many contemporaries Rebmann and Krapf were touched by the enthusiasm of
David Livingstone, born in 1812, who travelled to the interior of Africa,
opening it up to ‘Christianity and commerce’, hoping to heal the ‘open
wound’ of slavery and slave-traffic, and to find the enigmatic sources of
the Nile.
At a time when Africans were in the shackles of slavery, traditional
religions and Islam, Rebmann believed in God’s plan for Africa. God’s plan,
not only for the Swahili, Nika, and Jagga people of Mombasa and its
opposite mainland, among whom he worked, but also for the people of Lake
Nyasa, more than 2000 kilometres from his Mombasa habitat. Rebmann never
visited the land of the Nyasa people, present-day Malawi. He only had vague
ideas about its location and extent. He and his colleague Ludwig Krapf and
so many other explorers of his time had to wait for the discoveries of
David Livingstone before they could adjust their dreams about one huge
interior lake being the source of the Nile, to the reality of a chain of
smaller ones, ending in the lakes of Malawi.
However,
his deficient knowledge and the enormous geographical distance did not
prevent God from using Rebmann in the process of preparations for reaching
out the Gospel to the people of Lake Nyasa. Rebmann was convinced that God
had promised to use him as an instrument for initiating Christianity on the
eastern coast and in the interior of Africa. By the end of his work in
Africa, when he had become practically blind, he continued to believe in
God’s faithfulness. ‘God ist getreu’ (God is faithful), that he wanted to
proclaim at all places (‘an allen Orten’).
Linguistic
perspective
Rebmann
was not only a faithful witness of Christ, but he was also a gifted
linguist. Together with Krapf he made the Swahili and Nika languages
available in writing. The former probably is the largest language in Sub
Saharan Africa. Reading and writing Swahili had enormous positive
consequences for the communication of the Word of God and for multifaceted
development of the Swahili speaking peoples.
Perhaps
just as important is Rebmann’s significance for the language of the people
of Lake Nyasa. He was probably the first to reduce this language to writing,
and the first to compile a dictionary of it into English. A proliferation
of different names, differently spelled, for the same language has
contributed to the relative obscurity of Rebmann’s work. He called the
language ‘Kiniassa’, hence his book is entitled, Dictionary of the
Kiniassa Language. Others have known the language as e.g. Kinyassa,
Kinyasa, Kinyanza, Kinyanja, Chinyanja, and Nyanja. After 1968 it became
generally known as Chichewa, although the name C(h)inyanja is still in use,
especially in Zambia and Mozambique. For a long time Rebmann’s Kiniassa
dictionary remained unnoticed for those who knew the language only by other
names. However, the origin of the Kiniassa Dictionary, which was printed
and published in 1877
shows that Rebmann and Salimini, his resource assistant, are the earliest
fathers of Chichewa lexicography.
What
enabled Rebmann to compile such a collection of vocabulary? He was familiar
with the general structure of Bantu languages to which Chichewa belongs,
but that knowledge on its own does not provide access to Chichewa
vocabulary. In his environment in Mombasa and later in nearby Rabai and
Kisuludini he needed an extra source of information, which was not
naturally at hand. In the way things went we may observe how God breaks
through natural limitations. In this respect God used for a good purpose
one of the biggest exploits of Satan in many centuries of African history,
the phenomenon of slavery. From Africa’s east coast the Swahili Arabs had
penetrated into the interior, and with the help of tribes that they
converted to Islam, they had dragged numerous Africans from their villages,
killing those that they deemed not useful, to the coastal island of
Zanzibar, where they were sold to slave-buyers in Muslim-ruled East Africa,
the Arab world, Persia and India. From early 19th century also the people
of Lake Nyasa had been targeted by Swahili-Arab slave traders and their Yao
or Chewa helpers. From the 1840’s the Jumbe dynasty had ruled over a
Swahili-Arab kingdom at Nkhotakota. Also south and north of Nkhotakota
slave traders settled.
Thousands of Chewa, Mang’anja and Tumbuka were cruelly captured, assembled
and transported across the Lake, to the coast of the Indian Ocean, finally
to places where the Sultans of Oman and Zanzibar had stretched their power.
In Rebmann’s time Mombasa, at almost 250 km from Zanzibar, belonged to the
sultanate. Consequently, it was a place where slaves were used, also slaves
originating from the regions of present-day Malawi.
In
Rebmann’s contact with these people the Dictionary of the Kiniassa
Language was born. His informant was the abovementioned Salimini, a
slave from central Malawi. Subsequently, this tool of communication could
be used in the settlement of freed ex-slaves that was established in
Mombasa about the time of Rebmann’s return home. Also the first
missionaries to Malawi used it. To them it was an instrument for mastering
the language and spreading the Gospel, and indirectly for strengthening
those religious and political influences from overseas that put a definite
end to the shame and misery of slavery and slave-trade in East Africa.
Author’s
Note:
Through
Rebmann’s spiritual and linguistic work and the impact it had on missionary
workers in a large area of Africa God allowed his Kingdom to progress. Of
special interest is that Johannes Rebmann started the history of Chichewa
lexicography.
I am grateful that God gave an example in his servant Rebmann, enabling us
to continue humbly where Rebmann and others began. With a team of resource
persons and other helpers an up-to-date Chichewa Dictionary in ever
improving editions has been made, of which the latest edition was published
by Oxford University Press in 2016.
Since May 2010 the dictionary has also been accessible online through the
internet.
I
trust this sketch of the spiritual and linguistic aspects of Rebmann´s life
and work explains my conviction that we all can profit from taking away the
veils of history that have hidden him. Based on that conviction, I have
published a Rebmann biography,
which may contribute to filling up the gap in the existing knowledge on
him. It is meant as a scholarly presentation of the known facts and aspects
of Rebmann’s life and work. As such it is a monograph and a biography. Our study
not only taps the limited number of German literary sources, but also the
more numerous Rebmann documents in English. We trust the book will throw
more light on the life and work of the missionary, his spiritual and
linguistic significance, and his place in the pattern of 19th century
relationships between Europe and Africa.
Finally,
our presentation of Rebmann as a servant in God’s Kingdom in 19th century
Africa, does not hide that this biography still leaves blank spots and hazy
clouds. May this study set a trend, and encourage other historians to
discover more.
About the
Author:
The Author of this article, Dr. Steven Paas, is a theologian.
He has published on European and African Church History, including a
biography of Johannes Rebmann, the phenomena of
Christian Zionism and Israelism, and the Lexicography of
Chichewa, a language widely spoken in Central Africa.
His most recent book is titled ‘Johannes Rebmann: A Servant of
God in Africa before the Rise of Western Colonialism’. This study
(originally VTR, 2011) has seen a new edition, revised and enlarged (May
2018), 333 pages, published by Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft (VKW) in
Bonn (https://www.buchhandel.de/buch/Johannes-Rebmann-9783862691524), ISBN 978-3-86269-152-4. The book has been co-published by
Wipf & Stock in Eugene, Oregon, USA ( https://wipfandstock.com/johannes-rebmann.html)
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