[Early days of the Ocean Road Hospital in Dar es Salaam: from mission hospital to government hospital]

On 1 October 1997 Ocean Road Hospital in Daressalam commemorated one hundred years of its existence. As early as 1888 a provisional hospital had been set up in Zanzibar by the German Lutheran Church to serve the needs of the Germans living and working on the East African coast. But when the British established their protectorate over Zanzibar in 1890, the hospital was moved to Dar es Salaam. As cooperation between Mission hospital and Government authorities proved difficult, the German colonial administration was determined to build an hospital of its own. Lack of funds delayed the construction of the building which had to be built on a more modest scale than originally planned. But when the hospital was inaugurated in October 1897, people were impressed both by its functional usefulness and aesthetic attraction. The history of the German Government Hospital reflects the political context of the time as well as the progress of medicine in combatting endemic diseases. While patients were often segregated by race--the Government Hospital in Daressalam almost exclusively reserved for Europeans--all were benefitting from the results of medical science. For Robert Koch the hospital (and its laboratory) served as basis for his research in the field of malaria, black water fever, sleeping sickness, and relapsing fever. It was from Africa that the embarked on his journey to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in December 1905. During the First World War Ocean Road Hospital, as it was called from now on, was taken over by the British. Since independence, the Tanzanians are in charge. It is presently the only tumor hospital of the country, closely cooperating with the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. Restoration of Ocean Road Hospital, completed at the beginning of this year, was made possible by a grant of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Missionary positions: Christian, modernist, postmodernist

In the late 1960s and early 1970s "the missionary position" became widespread as a technical expression for face-to-face man-on-top sexual intercourse. It was accompanied by standard (and undocumented) stories as to the origin of the expression, stories featuring missionaries and either Polynesians, Africans, Chinese, Native Americans, or Melanesians. By the late 1980s and 1990s the expression had become a core symbol in modernist and postmodernist moral discourses. This paper examines accounts of the origin of the expression, provides evidence that it originated in Kinsey's (mis)reading of Malinowski, analyzes the symbolic elements of the missionary-position narrative as synthesizing modernist objections to Christian morality, analyzes the "missionary position" in postmodernist narratives as synthesizing postmodernist objections to modernist morality, and explores some of the functions of this myth within the academy.

"The abandoned mother": ageing, old age and missionaries in early and mid nineteenth-century South-east Africa

This essay examines issues of ageing and old age in Xhosa-speaking communities to c. 1860. Drawing primarily on records of the Wesleyan Methodist and London Missionary societies, the article examines the construction of Xhosa ageing, old age and death in missionary writings. The primary medium of missionary reflection was the figure of the ‘Abandoned Mother’, modelled on contemporary British metaphors, that represented yet another atrocity story for legitimating the mission enterprise and the emerging colonial regime. It also argues that there were fundamental contrasts in the images of ageing and dying between those of the Xhosa and those of the missionaries. Though older persons found certain themes in the Christian message attractive, they preferred the local cultural model of ageing, old age and death.

Money versus mission at an African-American medical school: Knoxville College Medical Department, 1895-1900

Knoxville College Medical Department (KCMD) was, to all appearances, a missionary medical school established in 1895 by a small black Presbyterian college in the Tennessee mountains to train African-American physicians. In reality, it functioned as a proprietary medical school organized and operated by a group of local white physicians who were more interested in making money than in furthering the school's mission of educating black Christian physicians. KCMD limped along until 1900 when the college's new president reported to the trustees about the white faculty's greed, irreligious behavior, poor teaching, and bad medical reputation, and about how the presence of the medical school on campus undermined the college's overall mission. KCMD graduated two students before closing its doors in 1900. A group of faculty then reopened the school off-campus as the Knoxville Medical College. That school closed in 1910.