Church and Education in the Lake Nyasa Region of Tanganyika

Abstract

Although in undeveloped countries a major educational problem is the shortage of teachers and schools, in one remote district of Tanganyika on the shores of Lake Nyasa the local problem was very different-a concentration of primary schools with an embarrassingly high proportion of empty places, managed by two competing voluntary agencies, the University Mission to Central Africa and the Roman Catholic Order of St. Benedict. The U.M.C.A. was formed as a result of Livingstone's famous address at Cambridge in 1852.1 This Anglican mission returned to Nyasaland in 18822 from Zanzibar and started schools in 1886.2 Shortly afterwards the Order of St. Benedict began work in Tanganyika, starting at Dar es Salaam in 1888,4 and eventually arrived in the Songea District, beginning their work from their base at Peramiho. In the early years of the first decade of the twentieth century they began to establish missions in the lake shore area on a place already penetrated by the U.M.C.A., albeit not very much earlier. It is not surprising that the German Benedictines were in Tanganyika which was then known as German East Africa.