Johannes Rebmann

Johannes Rebmann
Author: Steven Paas
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2018-05-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532657625

This book is the revised and enlarged second edition of a biography of the missionary and linguist Johannes Rebmann (1820-1876), a Christian from Germany who worked in 19th-century East Africa. Rebmann was deeply influenced by the Movement of Pietism in his homeland Württemberg. He was trained to be a missionary in Basel, Switzerland, for the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS). From its base in London the CMS sent him to the Muslim-ruled and slavery-ridden Mombasa area of present-day Kenya. There he stayed for 29 years before returning home to Gerlingen near Stuttgart, blind and sick, soon to die. Rebmann was a faithful witness of Christ in word and deed. He experienced a lot of suffering and opposition, but was instrumental in establishing the Church in East and Central Africa. His lexicographical work facilitated succeeding missionaries. He compiled vocabularies of the Swahili and N(y)ika languages. Together with Salimini, a slave captured near Lake Nyasa (now Lake Malawi) by the Swahili Arabs, he made a dictionary of the ‘Kiniassa’, an important language in Central Africa, which is now usually called Chichewa.

Water Brings No Harm

Water Brings No Harm
Author: Matthew V. Bender
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2019-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0821446789

In Water Brings No Harm, Matthew V. Bender explores the history of community water management on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Kilimanjaro’s Chagga-speaking peoples have long managed water by employing diverse knowledge: hydrological, technological, social, cultural, and political. Since the 1850s, they have encountered groups from beyond the mountain—colonial officials, missionaries, settlers, the independent Tanzanian state, development agencies, and climate scientists—who have understood water differently. Drawing on the concept of waterscapes—a term that describes how people “see” water, and how physical water resources intersect with their own beliefs, needs, and expectations—Bender argues that water conflicts should be understood as struggles between competing forms of knowledge. Water Brings No Harm encourages readers to think about the origins and interpretation of knowledge and development in Africa and the global south. It also speaks to the current global water crisis, proposing a new model for approaching sustainable water development worldwide.