First Reports on Eastern Africa at the Moscow University

Abstract

The article is devoted to the first direct links between the Moscow University and East Africa. At the beginning of the 20th century, three of its employees (I. Puzanov, V.V. Troitsky and V.N. Nikitin) visited the east and the northeast of the African continent (the territory of the modern Republic of Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda). They explored the nature and society of that time, collected zoological and ethnographic collections (part of those is stored in the Museum of Anthropology of the Moscow State University). Their notesfor a long time have been neglected by scholars specializing on African studies , although they were published in the first decade of the 20th century. Those works make it possible to study the situation in the region at thet time, the geography of the settlements and the peculiarities of the life of local peoples, the specifics of the policy of European powers and their rivalry, the beginning of the formation of foreign communities that later became important actors in the economy and politics of East Africa.