The Land.

The German Societies.

(West Coast)

(South Africa)

(East Africa)

Germans at Work for Other Societies.

Scandinavian Societies.

Finnish Lutheran Missionary Society.

Norwegian Missionary Society in Madagascar.

American Societies.

|The Land.| The continent of Africa has been likened to a great ear which waits upon the word of the rest of the world. It is enormous in extent, its area being nearly twelve million square miles. If a line should be run east and west a little north of the Equator, the northern section would enclose all North America, the southern section all Europe. The coast line is low, and the country near the coast unhealthy; the interior is high, composed of vast table lands and mountain ranges. The Congo River, which is said to be thirty times the size of the Mississippi, rushes to the sea over gigantic waterfalls and through deep-cut channels which are almost unfathomable. Besides the Congo there are three other large rivers, the Niger, flowing toward the west, the Nile, toward the north, the Zambesi toward the east.

|The People.| It is estimated that the native population of Africa numbers about one hundred and seventy-five millions. Among this vast throng there is the widest diversity of character, religion and speech. Beside the negroes there are millions of Arabs, Copts, Berbers and Moors. One of the better tribes of negroes, the Kondes of Central Africa, is described by a Lutheran missionary. “You can hardly imagine, for Africa, anything more idyllic than a Konde village. First, well-tilled fields announce that it is near; then we often see a widely-extended banana grove. The dwelling houses are often so neat and clean that they would draw attention even in Europe. The people are strong and of muscular build, their color is dark. You notice among the men many whose features speak of reflection. They are sober and honest. There appears, therefore, to be such a soil for the diffusion of the Gospel as is seldom found.”

Of the worst tribes it is difficult to speak or write. Their degradation seems to put them below the level of the beasts. Indescribable practices, cannibalism and slavery are common. A member of the Congo medical service said of that section of the country: “At N’Gandu, we found that the chief had gathered together about ten thousand cannibal brigands, mostly of the Batatela race. Through the whole of the Batatela country for some four days’ march, one sees neither gray hairs, nor halt, nor blind. Even parents are eaten by their children on the first sign of approaching decrepitude. N’Gandu is approached by a very handsome pavement of human skulls, the top being the only part showing above ground. I counted more than a thousand skulls in the pavement of one gate alone. Almost every tree forming the fortification was crowned with a human skull.”

Commenting upon the conditions in which many Africans live, a missionary says that “when eleven men, women and children, and seventeen goats live together in a hut seventeen feet square, it is difficult for the flowers of love and tenderness to flourish.”

If we wait for evolution to raise these poor people, we will wait forever. Fortunately, here and there, another theory of human development has been applied with magical results.

|The African Woman.| A student of Africa and the Africans has seen in the shape of the continent the figure of a woman with a huge burden on her back, looking toward America. If it is true that “the index of civilization of every nation is not their religion, their manner of life, their prosperity, but the respect paid to women”, then we need seek no further for proof of the sad degradation of the Dark Continent. Bought and sold, rented or given away, living in polygamy or worse conditions, “she is the prey of the strong, her virtue is held of no account, she has no innocent childhood, motherhood is desecrated, and when she wraps vileness about her as her habitual garment, it is encouraged.” In the words of Doctor Dennis, “she is regarded as a scandal and a slave, a drudge and a disgrace, a temptation and a terror, a blemish and a burden”. It is far easier for an African to accept the Gospel for himself than to believe that it is intended also for women. Doctor Day describes the vigorous driving away of the women from his services by the headman or “king-whip” who laid about him briskly as he cried out, “This God-palaver is not for women!”

|The Riches of Africa.| The riches of Africa are for the most part surmised rather than accurately known. The country is fertile and crops can be cultivated with a minimum of effort. Great forests abound--ebony, teak, rosewood, mahogany and almost every other known kind of timber. An investigator with a fondness of mathematical speculation has said that the forests of Africa would build a boardwalk round the globe six inches thick and eight miles wide. The names of certain localities, “Diamond fields”, “Gold Coast”, “Ivory Coast”, tell us of the riches to be found therein. The coal deposits are estimated as covering eight hundred thousand square miles. The copper fields equal those of North America and Europe combined; the undeveloped iron ore amounts to five times that of North America. Nor is the power for the development of these riches wanting. Human strength is there; the black who carries on his back for the many hours of a long march a sixty pound burden can learn to apply his muscles to other tasks. Water power is there in enormous waterfalls, and there are many navigable rivers.

W. E. Burghardt Dubois, himself of African descent, declares that in Africa may be found not only the roots of the present war, but the menace of future wars. Of the process by which the European nations have gained possession of practically all the black man’s continent he speaks with passionate indignation. “Lying treaties, rivers of rum, murder, assassination, mutilation, rape and torture” have marked the progress of these nations in their campaign for African land. There is the spoil “exceeding the gold-haunted dreams of the most modern of imperialists” there is the prize for which nations will struggle indefinitely unless a new spirit is bred among them.

|A Continent Betrayed.| The great missionary command, “Go ye into all the world and preach my Gospel to every creature” is a sufficient direction for the Christian world in its relations with Africa; but re-inforcing it there is, or there should be, our enormous obligation to this most benighted country. Africa is the most helpless continent, the most degraded, and, alas, that it should be so, the most fearfully abused. Livingstone described it as the open sore of the world. Small countries have been exploited, the Papuans of Australia have been almost exterminated, the American Indian has been driven from hunting ground to hunting ground until all that he can call his own is a small donation of the vast land which was once his. But Africa is a whole continent which has been betrayed. The white man has in the main not sought to enlighten, to show the hideousness of sin, to point the better way, but upon the evil fires of paganism he has poured gin so that the smouldering ashes have leaped into destroying flame. The slavery which was one of the most horrible products of paganism he did not try to abolish, but himself stole and bought human beings; in all one hundred million souls.

The history of the African rum traffic would seem to take forever from England and Germany and the United States their boasted name of Christian. Upon the heart of our Doctor Day this fearful evil lay with a heavy weight. Said he:

|The Traffic in Gin.| “Within a stone’s throw of us lay a large steamer laden to the water’s edge with rum. When we remember that one of these steamers carries four thousand tons of freight and that hundreds of them are running to the country laden with rum, the very vilest that chemistry can invent and concoct, we may have some conception of what it means, not only to the heathen, but to missionaries at work there. At the mouth of every river and stream wherever there is a rod of beach smooth enough to land, the traffic goes on. In the name of God, in the name of all that is high and holy, why do not the owners of these ships, who live in luxury in Boston, Liverpool, Hamburg and London, paint their ships black and run up the black flag, or better still, nail it to the mast? Never pirate sailed the seas whose crimes were so black as the crimes now perpetrated on this continent in the name of commerce.

“At Freetown, our ship had a lot of powder to discharge. It could not be landed at the regular wharf, but must be landed in a state of quarantine a quarter of a mile away. What a farce! There lay the liquor ship landing thousands of cases of rum, dangerous in a thousand fold greater sense than all the powder that ever went into the dark continent.

Think too of the awful caricature of ships carrying in their holds these untold millions of gallons of rum, holding on Sabbath the beautiful services of the Church of England! More than all this, along this coast are ships of war, bristling with cannon, and on these ships, too, are read the Sabbath service, and there is a chaplain to read daily prayers. They are here to protect commerce, a trade that is transforming so many of these people into driveling idiots, gibbering maniacs, thieves, harlots, everything that is low and wicked, then launching their sinful souls into the lake that burns.”

To the horror of its own situation Africa is not dull. Like the American Indian, like every poor besotted wretch in his hours of sanity, the African has besought that this curse be removed. In 1883 the natives of the diamond fields implored the Cape Parliament to have public houses removed at least six miles. The petition was refused. |Mohammed-anism in Africa.| A little over six hundred years before the Christian era Mohammed preached his new religion in Arabia, urging upon those who followed him prayer, almsgiving, fasting and pilgrimage to Mecca, and allowing them slavery, concubinage, polygamy and easy divorce. With the rapidity of fire in a field of dry grass the new faith spread, not the least productive of the methods of the prophet being wars of subjugation and extermination.

The Mohammedans soon conquered North Africa sweeping away the early Christianity, and then crossed into Spain from which they were finally driven. For a long time the great desert served as an impenetrable barrier to further advance in Africa, but presently they crossed the desert, and when Christian missionaries arrived on the west coast, they found that Islam had preceded them. Forbidding none of the old practices of heathendom, imposing only a few new rules which are easily followed, the Mohammedan faith has had an enormous following. Between the Crescent and the Cross West Africa must make her choice and upon the Christian Church depends the decision.

In meeting Islam and its active missionaries the Christian cannot but be sadly aware that the evil of drink was and is condemned by the prophet and his followers and that to a true Mohammedan all forms of alcohol are taboo, a fact with which the Mohammedan has not failed to taunt his rival.

Dr. Zwemer and Dr. Westerman estimate the total population of the Moslem world to be two hundred million of whom forty-two million are in Africa. To them as well as to the pagan should the Gospel message go.

A missionary book or a missionary address to which I am not able to give credit describes the parting of an English trader from the African woman with whom he had lived during a long residence in Africa, who had served him and truly loved him. Having accumulated riches, he was about to return to England without even bidding her farewell, but she had heard of his departure and followed him to the shore, where throwing herself at his feet, she besought him not to cast her aside. Indifferent to her grief, annoyed by her importunity, he angrily thrust her from him and embarked. Such have been the dealings of the white race with Africa.

|Africa Under European Flags.| Except for a few almost negligible sections the continent is under European flags. France owns a colony twenty times the size of France itself; Great Britain a colony as large as the United States, which extends almost without interruption from the coast to Cairo, a distance of six thousand miles; Germany, a colony one and one-half times as large as the German Empire in Europe; Belgium, a territory equal to that of Germany; and Portugal, Spain and Italy a twelfth of the continent between them.

|The Picture Not All Dark.| But the picture is not all dark. The mention of Africa recalls to our minds the names of Livingstone, of Robert Moffatt, of David A. Day. The Christian world has in Africa its records of shame, it has also its records of glory. It has at Kimberly the deep shafts of diamond mines, symbol of the pride and lust of man’s heart; it has nearby the graves of many pious German Lutherans. Lingering along the western shore there must be still the cries of the afflicted, the wailing of mothers torn from their children, of husbands beaten from their wives! Yet here are the graves of the children of David A. Day. Into the distant interior penetrated the slave raiders, torturing, driving the inhabitants from their villages, binding them with chains, marking their course with blood; yet here is buried the heart of Livingstone. Whether or not we heed the call, we are bound to Africa by an unbreakable bond.

|The First African Missionary a Lutheran.| It is a satisfaction and an inspiration to know in the searching of heart which should be ours that our own church has heeded the Ethiopian call. If it is true that “when the history of the great African States of the future comes to be written, the arrival of the first missionary will be the first historical event”, then will the Lutheran Church have its Peter Heiling (Chapter I) to record as the first of the Protestants to concern himself directly with the spiritual welfare of the Africans. Would that there were no such gap as that which exists between his going to Abyssinia in 1634 and that of the next Lutheran missionaries!

For purposes of Lutheran missionary study, we shall divide Africa into three sections: first, the West Coast; secondly, South Africa; thirdly, East Africa. As in the case of India we shall consider first the work of the German, then the work of the Scandinavian, then the work of the American Lutherans.

|The Spirit of Faith.| To the eastern side of the so-called Gold Coast went in 1828 the Basel Society to begin a costly work. “Sober and patient”--thus Doctor Warneck describes them. Opposed to them were superstition, dense ignorance, a fearful climate, to say nothing of all the difficulties produced by colonial politics.

Between 1828 and 1842 the society sent to the West Coast of Africa seventeen ministers, ten of whom died within one year, two others in three years, and three returned to their native country confirmed invalids. Yet steadily they pressed from the coast into the still darker interior, working among the Ga, Chi and Ashanti negroes. In Africa there are few native tribes which have a written language, hence the first work of the substantial missionary is to create one. Wars among the natives and wars among the great nations disturbed the mission, but the work went on in spite of all obstacles. After thirty years of labor three hundred and sixty-seven Christians were counted, after sixty years eighteen thousand. Station after station has been founded, school after school established. A theological seminary trains the natives to preach, the famous Basel industrial enterprises train their hands and eyes, and medical missionaries heal their bodies and show them how to live in cleanliness and decency.

|“The Door-Keeper of the Gold Coast.”| Among the most devoted heroes of this mission, was Andrew Riis, a Lutheran. At one time when three or four missionaries had died and persecution had dimmed somewhat the lamp of faith, he was advised to return to Europe. But he would listen to no such advice. Sending back the message, “I will remain”, he went farther into the interior. Presently there arrived two other missionaries and with them the young woman to whom Riis was engaged. When the two newly arrived missionaries died, Riis was left once more, the only “door-keeper” on the Gold Coast. Now he sailed for Europe, not to give up the mission but to rouse the home churches to its support. Successful in this effort, he returned to the field and the mission began anew, now quickly to become prosperous.

The changed conditions in this dark land are described in a German missionary journal.

|A City Transformed.| “In June, 1869, the missionary Ramseyer, of the Basel Missionary Society, was dragged as a prisoner into Abetifi, then a city of Ashantee, with his wife and child. They spent three days in a miserable hut, with their feet in chains. Human sacrifices were then common in Abetifi, which was under the tyrannical rule of the Ashantee chieftains. To-day, in the same streets, under the same shady trees, instead of the bloody executioner going his rounds, a Christian congregation gathers together every Sunday. Christian hymns, such as, “Who will be Christ’s Soldier?” ring joyfully through the streets. The people come out of their houses, the chieftain is invited; he comes with his suite and listens to the joyful tidings of salvation. And it is not vain; many have become the disciples of Jesus. Many even dare to tell their fellow-countrymen in the streets what joy and peace they have found in Him.”

In 1896 the Basel mission opened its eleventh station at Kumassi. It has twenty-four thousand three hundred church members with a school roll of nearly eight thousand pupils. There are thirty-six missionaries and forty-three other Europeans who direct the industrial and commercial work. The mission extends from Ashanti beyond the Volta River.

|The Beauty of Nature and the Depredation of Mankind.| The Basel mission has also a flourishing work in the German colony of Kamerun, among the Bantu negroes. The beauty of the land in which they work and the human misery are described by one of the missionaries. “It is a beautiful wild country which often reminds us of Switzerland; on all sides we see chains of mountains separated by deep valleys, roaring torrents, foaming waterfalls, and forests of palm trees reaching to the highest summits. How many times our hearts have leaped for joy at the glory of the scene! And, on the other hand, what a sorrow it is to see humanity fallen so low! The inhabitants of this paradise live in a real hell, always in unspeakable dread of evil spirits and of death. The dying often quit this world with cries of terror. The different tribes fight constantly with one another. Their moral condition is incredible. There are actually certain localities which exchange their dead in order to devour them.”

How vividly this description brings to our minds a danger not often considered at home, the fearful effect which constant sight of the most hideous immorality upon the missionary who is himself but a man. God be thanked that they hold fast to all that is pure, thinking, in the midst of monstrous crimes, of those things which are lovely!

The Basel Society has here thirteen main stations which extend nearly a hundred miles into the interior. Here there are sixty-three European missionaries. The Christian community numbers twelve thousand.

The Gossner Mission, whose chief work is in India, resolved in 1914 to send missionaries to Central Kamerun. Just before the outbreak of the war four missionaries were sent out to make preliminary studies.

On the Slave Coast the North German or Bremen Society has had a mission since 1847. This society has no mission school of its own, but draws its workers from the mission school at Basel. Its African mission has been continued only at enormous sacrifice. In fifty years sixty-five men and women died. The climate is dangerous, the hearts of the natives are stubborn. The territory in which the mission is situated is partly German and partly English, a fact which causes not only political but linguistic complications since German must be the language of one section, English of the other.

Nevertheless, the Bremen missionaries have persisted. To-day they have nine stations with a staff of twenty-eight, and over ten thousand native Christians. A thorough study has been made of the language, customs and religion of the people, who belong to the Evhe tribe.

Assisting in the work of the Bremen Society are deaconesses. The lives of these godly women have had a marvelous effect especially upon the native women.

|A Land of Many Nations.| By South Africa we mean the great southern portion of the continent extending from Cape Town up to the Zambesi River, which flows toward the east and the Congo which flows toward the west. Here, in addition to the native tribes who are chiefly Hottentots, Bushmen and Bantus, Kaffirs and Zulus, are large settlements of whites, who, unable to go beyond this section on account of the climate, are more and more steadily making the country their own. Their presence, as may easily be imagined, complicates and makes immensely difficult all mission work. To this fertile land, rich in gold, diamonds and other minerals, have gone naturally the adventurous and in many cases the wicked of other nations. There have been already fearful struggles between native and foreigner, black and white. When we realize that among the five hundred and seventy-five thousand baptized native Christians, one hundred and twenty thousand are Lutherans, our interest in the sadly complicated situation becomes keen.

|The Missionary Press.| The first German society to work in South Africa was the Rhenish which, like the Basel Society, is not wholly Lutheran. This society in 1829 established stations first in Nama Land, then in Herero Land, then in Ovambo Land. Here we have another record of opposition, of native wars, of indifference. The mission station lies almost entirely in the German colony. It has in all fifty-two missionaries. The number of Christians is now more than twenty-six thousand. Here also, the Germans have translated and taught with the greatest care. The press is constantly used to bind together the scattered Christians in the sparsely settled districts, two monthly religious papers, one in the Nama, the other in the Herero language, being published.

|A Labor Not in Vain.| Says Doctor Warneck: “It has been a laborious work of patience that the missionaries have done in these great countries, industrially so poor,--a work made difficult by the great inconstancy of the Hottentots and the strong opposition of the Herero, as well as by the entanglements of war,--and more than once in Herero Land the workers were on a point of withdrawing. But German fidelity at last carried the day. Now the whole of the great region from the Orange River to beyond Walfisch Bay, far into the interior of Great Nama Land and Herero Land and even up to Ovambo Land is covered with a network of stations. All the points that could be occupied have been made mission stations and the whole population has been brought under the educative and civilizing influence of Christianity.”

The Rhenish Society has also a mission in the southern part of Cape Colony. Its first station was at Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, established in 1829.

The society has now in all a membership of twenty-one thousand four hundred Christians. A number of its churches are financially independent. Here as everywhere there are discouraging backslidings into the old sins of drunkenness and impurity, but even so the light has shone and will shine with increasing brightness.

|The Discovery of Diamonds.| The Berlin Missionary Society began work in South Africa in 1834, first among the Koranna people between the Orange and Vaal Rivers, and later, in 1838, in Cape Colony itself, its first station being at Peniel. At first few foreigners penetrated into this district between the Orange and the Vaal, but in 1870 when diamonds were discovered, Cape Colony, in spite of the protests of the Orange Free State to which it had belonged, annexed it. At once thousands of adventurers poured in, both black and white. In 1860 the missionaries went north into the Transvaal.

The Berlin Mission is the largest in South Africa. Its last report names fifty-eight stations and one thousand sub-stations. The Christian community, which numbers sixty thousand is organized in five synods of Cape Colony, the Zulu-Xosa district, Orange River Colony, South Transvaal and North Transvaal.

Among the notable Lutheran missionaries of the Berlin South African mission have been Merensky, a famous writer upon missionary subjects, Grützer, who gave forty-nine years of devoted service to the mission, Wuras, who gave fifty and Doctor D. Kropf who did valuable work as a translator.

Another Berlin missionary of large achievement describes his early experience, writing in 1889:

“After having worked myself weary through the week, when on Sunday I saw these wild men of the wilderness sitting before me, absolute obtuseness toward everything divine, together with mockery and brutal lusts written on their faces, I sometimes lost all disposition to preach. Those fluent young preachers who not only like to be heard, but to hear themselves, ought to be sometimes required to ascend the pulpit before such an assemblage. There is not the least thing there to lift up the preacher of the Divine Word or to come to the help of his weakness. As when a green, fresh branch laid before the door of a glowing oven shrivels up at once, such has sometimes been my experience when I had come full of warm devotion, before the Kaffirs, and undertaken to preach. I have sometimes wished that I had never become a missionary. Once the hour of Sunday services again approached. The sun was fearfully hot, and I felt weary in body and soul. My unbelieving heart said: ‘Your preaching is for nothing’, and Beelzebub added a lusty amen. The Kaffirs were sitting in the hut waiting for me. ‘I’ll not preach to-day’, said I to my wife, but she looked at me with her angelic eyes, lifted her finger, and said gravely: ‘William, you will do your duty. You will go and preach’. I seized Bible and hymn book, and loitered to church like an idle boy creeping unwillingly to school. I began, preluding on the violin, the Kaffirs grunting. I prayed, read my text, and began to preach with about as much fluency as stuttering Moses. Yet soon the Lord loosened the band of my tongue, and the fire of the Holy Ghost awakened me out of my sluggishness. I spoke with such fervor concerning the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world, that if that sermon has quickened no heart of a hearer yet my own was profoundly moved.”

The writer, Missionary Posselt, lived to baptize one thousand Kaffirs.

|The Progress of Tropical Medical Treatment.| One of the interesting developments in the Berlin Society mission has been the great decrease in sickness, owing to the progress of tropical medical treatment. No employee of the society, whether missionary, wife of missionary or artisan, is sent to Africa without a thorough course in tropical hygiene. To those faithful scientists who discovered the cause of malaria is ascribed the success of the Panama canal; no less are they to be thanked for the continued life and work of many missionaries.

The Hermannsburg Mission entered South Africa in 1854. Its field is located among the Zulus in Natal where there are twenty-one stations and twelve thousand eight hundred Christians, and among the Bechunas in the Transvaal where there are twenty-eight stations and sixty-one thousand Christians.

|The Ship “Candace.”|. We have learned in Chapter II of the origin of the Hermannsburg Mission in the mind and heart of Louis Harms. After a year or two, a number of German sailors, recently converted, sought admission to the training school, and at their suggestion a ship was built and named the ‘Candace.’ This ship was to carry the Gospel to South Africa, and on October 8, 1853, she sailed from Hamburg. On board were sailors, colonists and missionaries who were to found a missionary colony. To each separate class Pastor Harms gave separate directions, but upon all he urged the necessity for prayer. “Begin all your work with prayer; when the storm rises, pray, when the billows rage round the ship, pray; when sin comes, pray; and when the devil tempts you, pray. So long as you pray it will go well with you, body and soul.”

The missionary colony hoped to settle among the Galla tribes, but were driven away by the Mohammedans, therefore they returned to Natal. On the 19th of September, 1854, they established their first station near Greytown, giving it the dear name of Hermannsburg. Each artisan began to practice his trade, a house was built, and before three months had passed the first converts of the Zulu church were baptized.

|A Truly Lutheran Mission.| No Lutheran mission has so intense a Lutheran spirit as the Hermannsburg mission, whose founder wished all the Lutheran symbols and especially the beautiful Lutheran liturgy to be recognized and used by mission churches as well as by churches in the fatherland.

The good ship “Candace,” one of the most famous and probably the first of the missionary ships of the world, made many journeys. Not the least interesting, at least to those concerned, was her second when she carried to Natal reinforcements and additional colonists, among them a wife for each of the missionaries who had made the pioneer journey.

The Hermannsburg mission has not lacked a baptism of blood. In 1883 thirteen stations were destroyed and Missionary Schroeder met a martyr’s death.

The Hanover Free Evangelical Lutheran Church Missionary Society, branched off from the Hermannsburg Mission in 1892. It has six stations in Natal and Zululand with about twenty-two thousand Christians, and among the Bechunas in the Transvaal three stations with thirty-six hundred Christians.

|German East Africa.| The colonial expansion of Germany in the eighties stimulated missionary interest and activity in its newly acquired possessions in East Africa, where is situated the largest and most thickly populated of the German Colonies, with about seven and a half million inhabitants. The mission field is a difficult one, the natives belonging to one of the lowest human groups. Hard of heart, slow to give up their heathen customs, especially that of polygamy, affected in some sections by Islam, they are difficult to impress and reluctant to be won. Yet among them a harvest has been reaped.

The East African mission field is inseparably connected with the name of a Lutheran, John Ludwig Krapf, who in the employ of an English missionary society founded Christian missions in this section.

|A Call to Service.| ^[6]Krapf was born in 1810 near Tübingen in Germany. A fondness for geography coupled with the reading of a pamphlet describing the spread of missions among the heathen impelled him when he was a mere boy to prepare himself for missionary work. After studying at Basel, he became pastor of a congregation, but he could not shut out from his heart the needs of unchristianized lands. “In the needs of my congregation I recognized those of non-Christian lands in a measure that affected me very deeply; in their sorrow I recognized the wretchedness of the heathen. The grace which I myself enjoyed and which I commended to my own people, was, I felt, for the heathen as well, but there might be no one to proclaim it to them. Here, everyone without difficulty may find the way of life; in those lands there may be no one to show the way.”

|A Slave Market.| Following his inclination, he offered himself for missionary work and was sent by the Church Missionary Society of England, which used Basel missionaries in the work, to its Abyssinian Mission. Leaving England in 1837, he reached Alexandria and started up the Nile. At Cairo he had his first glimpse of Africa’s great curse, the traffic in human beings. He visited the slave markets and there saw the wretched creatures men, women and children, lying fainting under the burning sun, to be examined like cattle by purchasers. Like Abraham Lincoln on his journey down the Mississippi, Krapf vowed eternal hatred for the hideous institution of human slavery.

|The First Repulse.| Journeying to Adoa in the highlands of Abyssinia, Krapf joined other missionaries trained at Basel and employed by the Church Missionary Society, Blumhardt and Isenberg by name, but they were soon driven away by the ruling prince. Thus repulsed, Krapf determined to go to Shoa in the south of Abyssinia, and, accompanied by Isenberg, he arrived there after a severe illness in June, 1859. There, when Isenberg had returned to Egypt, Krapf worked for several years alone.

|Once More the Door Closed.| In 1842, he left Shoa to meet his future wife, Rosina Dietrich, in Egypt and to help on their way two new brethren who had arrived on the coast. Travelling on foot, ill, fatigued and several times set upon by robbers, he reached the coast where he expected to find the two missionaries, only to learn that they had been there and had gone back to Egypt. When he with his bride returned to Shoa they found that its ruler, like the ruler of Adoa, had closed the kingdom against him.

|The First Sacrifice.| The need of the Gallas, a nation to the south to whom no Gospel messenger had been sent, had lain heavily upon the heart of Krapf and now, driven from Shoa, he tried to reach them, but found it impossible. Thereupon he determined to do what he could by circulating the Scriptures. Joining himself to a caravan, he started for the interior, with him his young wife, whose newborn baby was in the course of a few weeks buried in the desert.

|“Cast Down But Not Destroyed.”| Alas, even this long journey and these trials were in vain, for once more was Krapf forbidden to proceed with his work. The brave man, disheartened, but not completely cast down, wrote home: “Abyssinia will not soon again enjoy the time of grace she has so shamefully slighted.... It is a consolation to us and to dear friends of the mission to know that over eight thousand copies of the Scriptures have found their way into Abyssinia. These will not all be lost or remain without a blessing. Faith speaks thus: Though every mission should disappear in a day and leave no trace behind, I would still cleave to mission work with all my prayers, my labors, my gifts, with my body and soul; for there is the command of the Lord Jesus Christ, and where that is there is also His promise and His final victory.”

|A Christian Grave in East Africa.| Krapf now determined to attempt to gain a footing on the coast, in order from there to reach the Gallas, whose language he had learned. With this object in view, he sailed, with his wife, in an Arab vessel from Aden in November, 1843. Strong headwinds and a heavy sea compelled them to return to Aden. In spite of their exertions, the water gained upon them in their leaky boat, and on reaching the entrance to the harbor the land wind drove back the vessel toward the open ocean. Half an hour after they were taken from the vessel it sank. Eight days later Krapf sailed again, and after four or five weeks’ journey arrived at Mombasa. Scarcely, however, had he begun to work at Mombasa when he was called to pass through another sorrow, in the loss of his wife. In prospect of death she prayed for relatives, for the mission, for East Africa, and for the Sultan, that God would incline his heart to promote the eternal welfare of his subjects. The next day she appeared much better, but the day following much worse, while her husband himself was so weakened by fever as to be obliged to leave the care of her almost entirely to others. The next day she breathed her last, and on the following morning--Sunday--they buried her, according to her wish, on the mainland in the territory of the Wanika, her newborn daughter by her side. Krapf, even amid all these trials, wrote in a letter to the secretary of the missionary society: “Tell the committee that in East Africa there is the lonely grave of one member of the mission connected with your society. This is an indication that you have begun the conflict in this part of the world; and since the conquests of the Church are won over the graves of many of its members, you may be all the more assured that the time has come when you are called to work for the conversion of Africa. Think not of the victims who in this glorious warfare may suffer or fall; only press forward until East and West Africa are united in Christ.”

|Two Friends.| In 1846 he had the joy of welcoming a fellow laborer, a Lutheran, Johann Rebmann. The two men were exactly opposite in nature. Krapf, restless and energetic, entertained far-reaching plans, and even saw in imagination a chain of missions stretching from Mombasa to the Niger, and thus connecting east and west Africa; Rebmann, on the contrary, believed in settling in one place and staying there. Nevertheless, the two men worked in harmony. When they finished the building of a house in a village not far from the sea-coast, Krapf felt that the first step toward the dark interior had been taken.

After twelve years of labor, Krapf visited Europe. When he returned to Africa he took with him two missionaries and three mechanics, an undertaking which was not altogether happy. But in the midst of discouragement he took heart.

|Still Undismayed.| “And now let me look backward and forward. In the past what do I see? Scarcely more than the remnant of a defeated army. You know I had the task of strengthening the East African Mission with three missionaries and three handicraftsmen; but where are the missionaries? One remained in London, as he did not consider himself appointed to East Africa; the second remained at Aden, in doubt about the English Church; the third died on May tenth of nervous fever. As to the three mechanics, they are ill of fever, lying between life and death, and instead of being a help look to us for help and attention; and yet I stand by my assertion that Africa must be conquered by missionaries; there must be a chain of mission stations between the east and west, though thousands of the combatants fall upon the left hand and ten thousand on the right.... From the sanctuary of God a voice says to me, ‘Fear not; life comes through death, resurrection through decay, the establishment of Christ’s kingdom through the discomfiture of human undertakings. Instead of allowing yourself to be discouraged at the defeat of your force, go to work yourself. Do not rely on human help, but on the living God, to whom it is all the same to serve by little or by much.... Believe, love, fight, be not weary for His name’s sake, and you will see the glory of God.’”

Twice Krapf tried to penetrate into the distant interior but was both times compelled to return without establishing missions. In 1853 he returned to Europe on account of ill health, but the next year set out to Africa once more, only to be compelled on account of weakness to give up the journey.

Once more, however, he visited the country of his love. Wishing to open a mission in East Africa the Methodist Free Churches requested him to accompany their missionaries and to assist them in establishing the mission. He agreed to go and said of the new station: “The station Ribe will in due time celebrate the triumph of the mission in the conversion of the Wanika, though I may be in the grave. The Lord does not allow His Word to return unto Him void.”

|A Heroic Life Ended.| Returning to Europe, Krapf continued to work and to pray for missions until, in November, 1881, he was found dead, kneeling in the attitude of prayer.

|The Missionary as Explorer.| The names of Krapf and Rebmann are associated not only in heroic missionary labors but in important linguistic work and most valuable geographic discoveries. When they declared that there existed in the center of Africa snow-capped mountains and an inland sea, they were laughed at, but as a result exploring expeditions were sent out to discover that what the missionaries claimed was true. The American poet Bayard Taylor, struck by the marvelous variety of temperature and verdure upon Mt. Kilimanjaro, whose base was surrounded by tropical forests and whose summit was wrapped in snow, celebrated it in verse.