Oblong Folio album (ca. 22,5x31 cm or 9 x 12 ¼ in). 24 card stock leaves with tissue guards (4 blank). With 171 mounted original gelatin silver photos, including over 70 larger images from ca. 8,5x12 cm (3 ½ x 4 ½ in) to ca. 6x8 cm (2 ¼ x 3 ¼ in); the rest of the photos are ca. 2,5x4 cm (1 x 1 ½ in). Most images taken in Africa with period pen captions in German on the mounts (some captions relate to several images); several photos are also dated 1931 or 1933. Period light brown full cloth album fastened with a string. Several tissue guards with creases and tears on extremities, several detached from the stub and loosely inserted, several photos mildly faded, but overall a very good album of interesting photos.

Historically significant album with 171 original gelatin silver amateur photos, documenting the activities of the German Bethel Evangelical Mission (modern-day Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania) in the British Tanganyika Territory in the early 1930s, during the Nazi Party’s steady rise to power in Germany.

Founded under the name of the “Evangelical Missionary Society for East Africa” (EMS), the organization opened its first missionary station in Dar es Salaam in 1887. A new group of missionaries established a station on the northern tip of Lake Nyasa (Malawi) in 1891, which later grew into a network of stations in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands (Manow, Mwakaleli, Kidugala, Lupembe, Mufindi and many others). In 1890, the society changed its name to Bethel and established a station in the coastal city of Tanga and further inland, in the Usambara Mountains (Mlolo, Vuga, Bumbuli, Lutindi and Itete). In 1910, the society opened a station in Bukoba, Kagera region of western Tanzania (then German East Africa), as a base for their proposed evangelization of Rwanda.

“This mission activity continued to bear fruit in spite of the interruptions of the Hehe/German War in 1891, the Majimaji war of 1905/6, the 1st World War 1914-1918 and later on the 2nd World War of 1939-1945. By 1938, there were seven churches in Tanganyika, as the country was known at that time. In 1938, the churches formed a federation known as the Federation of Lutheran Churches in Tanganyika. On June 19, 1963, the seven Churches, under the umbrella of a federation, merged to become synods and dioceses of a single Church, known as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanganyika. The following year, when the union with Zanzibar produced a change of the national name to Tanzania, the Church was renamed the Evangelical Lutheran church in Tanzania” (History/ Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania; see more).

The album was compiled by a German doctor who apparently worked for the Bethel Mission in Tanganyika in the early 1930s (the photos from Africa are dated 1931-1933) and later returned to Germany (nine photos at the back show the compiler, his family and home in Germany during peaceful years, evidently before WW2).

The album opens with four interesting images of Tanga, showing the monument to the Germans fallen during the Battle of Tanga (3-5 November, 1914), “Yakobo Ngombe […?], pastor in Tanga” and a group of Germans having a meal on the veranda of the Bethel Mission’s rest house in Tanga.

About twenty photos of the Bethel stations in the Usambara Mountains show the mission in Mlalo (church and guest house, Usambara mountains, young women from the Shambala/Shambaa tribe), Bumbuli (hospital, native patients at the “poliklinik,” a brass orchestra performing for the 1931 Christmas, interior of the hospital chapel, portraits of male nurses, views from the compiler’s house) and Vuga (mission house with “pastor Steiss,” the interior of “my work room” and a dining room).

Over twenty identified photos from the Kagera region (bordering the western shore of Lake Victoria) show Kamachumu (“view from the church tower” [this and the following captions are given in English translation], waterfall, “our house,” scenes of construction and consecration of the church, portraits of nurses, sick people, including a native woman suffering from leprosy, &c.), Kagera River and native boats, Germans on the shore of Lake Victoria, Bukoba harbour, Tutsi people, Indian (Sikh) men and children, who lived in the area, &c.

About a dozen identified photos from the Southern Highlands show Lupembe (“our house,” mission, “a view from my work room,” “German school, Lupembe,” two group portraits of German missionaries), Kidugala (mission house, an outdoor “seminar”), and Ilembula (exterior view of the local Lutheran church, a “Synode” meeting inside the church).

The album also contains photos from the compiler’s trip to Kilimanjaro (Kibo Peak, view of the mountain from the height of 4500 m, the compiler and his guides posing in front of the Bismarck Hut), several images from a hunting trip “with Herrn Neumann,” views of Dar es Salaam (Ocean Road Hospital, German military cemetery with the graves of “2 Bethel missionaries”), several portraits of the compiler (holding African babies, distributing a medicine in a Tanzanian village, sitting next to a bed of a sick European) and his family (wife and baby in Dar es Salaam), views of a planter’s house, a close-up portrait of “Mein Freund Mfizi,”&c.

Overall an interesting original source on the history of activities of German Evangelical missionaries in Tanzania in the early 1930s.