2013 Reports

Making East Africa: Colonialism, Race, and Islam

Unangst, Matthew

I spent three weeks in July and August conducting research for my dissertation at Burke Library
at Union Theological Seminary. My dissertation explores German conceptions of space and race
in today's mainland Tanzania at the outset of German colonization there. For many people living
in German East Africa, missionaries were there primary contact with the European presence.
Missionaries, both Protestant and Catholic, became imbricated in local social and political
networks. Missionary publications and reports are therefore the best source for learning about
local societies, at least for the first decade of German colonization