Missionaries from Gerlingen: Johannes Zimmermann
- Time spent as a missionary
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"Win the Blacks over the farmland."

Johannes Zimmermann had colonizational ideas which were ahead of his time: utilization of mineral resources, progressive agriculture, increasing export of goods, to improve people's living conditions.

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Zimmermann wants to solve the social problems of Germany:

"... though immigration of the surplus, impecunious and for survival struggling people of the european cultural countries and through their colonization in the fallow lands of the virginal Africa."

Johannes Zimmermann is 25 years of age when he arrives in the west african Christiansborg, a former danish colony, nowadays part of the capital Accra.

The first place that he sees are the former slave forts - silent witness of inhumane times. Shocked at this first impression, Zimmermann spoke for the rest of his life against slavery and exploitation.

Some moths after his arrival in Africa Zimmermann falls ill with "Africa fever". He sees the only alternatives "soon death" or "prompt return trip home". He places himself into a black witchdoctor's hands who cures him in shortest time.

Zimmermann gets in totally with his new home country. He lives like an African with "his" Africans.

In 1851 Zimmermann gets married to the dissolved african women Katharina Mulgrave (see photo on the right). The Mission Society in Basel is shocked about that fact and also because Zimmermann haden't asked them for the explicit prescribed permission. 

Slave traders had kidnapped Katharina when she was eight years old and brought her onto a slave ship from Africa to Jamaica. Near the coast the ship got in distress and sank. Katharina was rescued and then adopted by the english governor Mulgrave.

In 1842 Katharina got married to the African Thompson from the Liberia coast, who had been educated in Basel/Switzerland for a mission assistant. In 1843 the young couple emigrated to the Gold Coast. After six years the couple got divorced.

In 1854 Zimmermann moves his mission activities from Christansborg more to the interior, to Abokobi - a step from the european characterized lifestyle to  original african life. Here Zimmermann does intensive language studies and does translations.

In 1859 Johannes Zimmermann with the mission in Kroboland which forms his life fundamental and lays the foundations for his fame.

Imprint Contact: info@johannes-rebmann-stiftung.de