Tanzania

In 1848 the first German missionary Johannes Rehmann arrived on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. After his expeditions to Kilimanjaro and around the Great Lakes of East Africa, he learned to speak several local languages and compiled a dictionary in the Swahili language. In 1890s the Berlin, Bethel and Leipzig mission societies took up mission efforts in then Tanganyika. Bruno Gutmann (1876-1966), a missionary from Leipzig among the Chagas, sought to engraft the gospel by working through African institutions, redirecting rather than destroying them. German missionaries were repatriated after World War I and American and Swedish participation in missionary work began in 1920s and 1930s. The mission reached out to different ethnic groups in the country. Andrea Kajarero, a Haya born in 1870s when the first missionaries arrived, and one of the early Tanganyikan pastors, has written an autobiography on how the church came into being among the Haya people in Tanzania. In 1955, Lutheran leaders from all Africa met for the first time in Marangu, Tanzania. 

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