Tessmann, Günter (1884-1969)

Günter Tessmann (1884–1969) was a German naturalist, explorer, linguist and ethnologist. After training in tropical agriculture at the Imperial Colonial School in Witzenhausen, he left for German Kamerun in 1902 as an assistant on a cocoa plantation and then as a recruiting agent. At the same time he carried out naturalist and ethnographic collections, hunted elephants and tried to set up a trading station. In 1907, the Museum für Völkerkunde zu Lübeck entrusted him with a three-year ethnological mission in Fang country, in the south of Kamerun and in the hinterland of Spanish Guinea: this was the Lübecker Pangwe-Expedition, from which Tessmman produced his great work, Die Pangwe (1913), a key monograph on Fang societies, partly because of its attention to the initiation rituals and rites of which he was sometimes the only Western witness. At the beginning of the 1910s and during the First World War, he conducted ethnographic and linguistic studies among the Bubi of Fernando Poo and the Gbaya of Cameroon. He obtained his doctorate in 1928. After several stays in the Peruvian Amazon in the early 1920s, where he searched in vain for his fortune and conducted ethnolinguistic research, he emigrated to Brazil in 1936. He ended his career as a botanist at the Museu Paranaense and then at the Instituto de Biologia in Curitiba. The diversity of his fields, between Central Africa and Amazonia, and his mystico-religious quest for the Amerindian Menschen ohne Gott (Men without God, 1928), which is debatable, have blurred his image in posterity.

Keywords: Colonialism | First half of the 20^th century | Central Africa | Cameroon | Equatorial Guinea | Amazonia | Peru | Brazil | Bwiti | Ethnic awakening | Fang | Bubi | Gbaya | Pahouin | Rituals | Initiation rituals | Anthropology of religion | Anthropos | Henri Trilles