Draft:Rudolf Prietze

Childhood and philological training

Born into a prominent Protestant family in the Altmark region of Germany, Rudolf Prietze was the son of the clergyman Adolf Prietze and of Marie Luise Nachtigal, the niece of the famous explorer Gustav Nachtigal. Prietze was raised in Stendal, where he attended the Winckelmann-Gymnasium, and later pursued studies in Theology, Germanistics and Classical Philology at both Halle and Leipzig universities. While studying Theology at the University of Erlangen, he was taught by the Germanist Rudolf von Raumer, who specialised in the connections between the Indo-European and Semitic language groups..^[1]. In 1876, he joined the Erlangen branch of the student organisation Corps Franconia^[2].

Prietze wished to undertake Doctorate studies in Berlin from 1877, but his uncle Gustav Nachtigal requested his assistance in organising linguistic data collected during his 1869-1874 exploration of the Sahel region, from Borno to Khartoum^[3]. As a result, Prietze abandoned his studies and commenced work on Nachtigal's linguistic data, as well as that of the explorers Gerhard Rohlfs and Heinrich Barth^[4]. Access to Barth's data had been provided by one of his descendants, Gustav von Schubert, who asked Prietze to translate two Hausa texts, collected by Barth from his African companion Dorugu and kept in Barth's personal archive, into German^[5]. In 1897, Prietze published an edited version and translation of these two texts^[6].

The first published Hausa book, Magana Hausa, served as an important inspiration and template for Prietze's work. Magana Hausa was the result of the 1855-1863 partnership between Dorugu and the missionary and linguist James Frederick Schön, and was published in 1885. However, Prietze judged that certain aspects of the Hausa language, such as proverbs, were not well explored by Magana Hausa^[7]. His personal methodological approach to studying languages placed significant emphasis on proverbs and songs, as he was inspired by the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder, which regarded poetic forms and the practice of oratory as capable of reflecting a language's origins, and capturing Volksgeist, the spirit of the people^[8].

After studying these various texts for around ten years, Prietze decided that, in order to study the languages concerned properly, he needed to hear them spoken by native speakers in the regions where they were spoken. Following the tradition of Eduard Sievers, who he referred to as his 'esteemed professor', Prietze advocated for a philological approach based on listening^[4]. This Neogrammarian approach to studying languages placed paramount importance on the auditory perception of sounds, intonations, and accents, in order to capture the distinctive melody and rhythm of a language.

Linguistic research in North Africa

In order to carry out his linguistic research as thoroughly as possible, Prietze travelled to North Africa. There, he would be able to meet speakers of the Sahelian languages he was studying^[8]; because of poor health, Prietze was not able to travel as far as the Sahel. Seeking to make himself known within the networks of Europeans interested in the African continent, and gain funding for his travels, Prietze published a posthumous article about the Ewe language written by his uncle Nachtigal^[9]. This brought him a level of notoriety, and he secured funding from the Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society) which enabled him to make an initial trip to Tunis in 1897-1898^[10][11]. However, his poor health forced him to cut his stay short^[8].

A few years later, Prietze once again gained funding from the Kolonialgesellschaft and the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde, and returned to Tunis in January 1902. There, he met several people from the Sahel, including al-Hajj Ahmadu, a Muslim scholar from Kano who provided Prietze with a series of Hausa texts, including the travel account of the merchant Muhammed Agigi who crossed the central Sahel region^[12]. Prietze's work was again affected by his health, and he was forced to travel to Naples and then to Cairo in search of a dry climate which suited him better, as he mentions in letters written to his parents^[8][13].

Towards the end of 1903, Prietze decided to remain in Cairo for further research, encouraged by the possibility of meeting scholars from the Sahel at al-Azhar University. Indeed, Prietze soon met al-Hajj Musa ibn Hissein, an intellectual from the Bornu region of the Sahel, and the two men entered into a decade-long professional partnership.

Partnership with al-Hajj Musa

Al-Hajj Musa and Rudolf Prietze met in early 1904 and started working together in May of the same year. The two men would meet on a daily basis to work, but would also socialise together. In his writings, Prietze speaks of walking together in the botanical gardens in Cairo, and eating dinner at Musa's house in February 1905^[8]. Prietze lent a Hausa manuscript to al-Hajj Musa, who showed it to the other students at al-Azhar, intrigued by the document. Prietze noted that "for several days, all the students spent sleepless nights sitting in the courtyard listening to [Musa] read it; I even suspect that it was copied. Where would such zeal be found among us?"^[14]

Musa and Prietze mostly communicated in Hausa, and sometimes in classical Arabic. It is difficult to gauge Prietze's proficiency in Hausa, given that he never visited the regions where it was spoken natively. Prietze's approach to collecting linguistic information was the same as he had used with his first informants: he would begin by transcribing texts as he heard them spoken by his informant, then ask them to write down the same text in Hausa or Kanuri Ajami, if they were able, so that he could refine his initial transcription^[8]. As a scholar trained in some of the most prestigious universities of the Islamic world, al-Hajj Musa could perfectly transcribe Kanuri and Hausa, as well as Old Kanembu, an ancient liturgical language native to the Bornu region^[8].

Prietze's goal was to collect the widest possible variety of oral forms, with special focus on those likely to contain Volkgeist, the 'spirit of the people', as theorised by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. He asked al-Hajj Musa to communicate songs, proverbs and fables to him, as well as any other aspect of everyday oral tradition in the Kanuri and Hausa regions. The result was a collection of several hundred transcribed oral texts. Most of the proverbs which make up this collection were provided by Musa's wife, Hajiyya Musa^[15], while other texts were Musa's own compositions, including his "historical reminiscences". Al-Hajj Musa's role in this process was far more significant than simply that of an informer: he was central in the process of transcription and re-transcription, and identified key linguistic elements, distinguishing for example between the two 'r' sounds in Ajami Hausa^[16]. Musa also reviewed the texts that Prietze had collected from al-Hajj Ahmadu in Tunis, proposing additional interpretations of the language used and its meaning. As a result, Prietze described Musa as having "a critical mind, a sensitivity to linguistic and stylistic precision, and an extraordinary awareness of tonal nuances"^[17].

This fruitful intellectual partnership lasted ten years and marked a turning point in Prietze's career, producing an extensive linguistic corpus of the Hausa and Kanuri languages of huge significance to scholars.

Return to Germany and later life

Whilst still in Cairo, Prietze attempted to start publishing the results of his work, probably in the hope of gaining funding for further research. However, his lack of notoriety amongst German academics proved a barrier to the publication of his work. Through the intervention of the explorer Paul Staudinger, Prietze's work was finally published in the journal Mittheilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der Königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin^[8], and later in the reviews Zeitschrift für afrikanische Sprachen and Zeitschrift für Ethnologie.

Prietze returned to Germany in 1914 and finally obtained his doctorate in 1916. He subsequently taught at the Deutschen Kolonialschule für Landwirtschaft, Handel und Gewerbe, the German Colonial School for Agriculture, Trade and Industry, in Witzenhausen^[18]. He spent the last years of his life in a retirement home, Stift Hohnstein, in Wernigerode, where he died on the 6 March 1933. A commemorative plaque dedicated to Prietze was put up in Wernigerode in 2004^[19].

Long an overlooked figure in Africanist linguistics, perhaps because he almost exclusively published articles rather than books, Rudolf Prietze's pioneering work on the Hausa and Kanuri languages was rediscovered in the 1990s thanks to the work of the Nigerien academic Umaru B. Ahmed and the German anthropologist Gisela Brikay-Seidensticker^[20][21].

Linguistics articles

• "Beiträge zur Erforschung von Sprache und Volksgeist in der Togo-Kolonie (Anecho)". Zeitschrift für afrikanische und oceanische Sprachen (in German). 3: 17-64. 1897.
• "Die spezifischen Verstärkungs-Adverbien im Haussa und Kanuri". Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der Königlichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (in German). 11: 307-317. 1908.
• "Ein Vermächtnis Barths und Nachtigals". Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (in German). 5–6: 213-245. 1918.

Collections of Kanuri language texts in partnership with al-Hajj Musa

• "Bornulieder". Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (in German and Kanuri). 17: 1-127. 1914.
• "Bornusprichwörter". Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (in German and Kanuri). 18: 1-88. 1915.
• "Bornu-Texte. Gesammelt und erklärt von Dr. Phil. Rudolf Prietze". Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin (in German, Kanuri, and Hausa). 33: 82-159. 1930.

Collections of Hausa language texts

• "Zwei Haussa-Texte". Zeitschrift für afrikanische und oceanische Sprachen (in German and Hausa). 3: 140-156. 1897.
• Haussa-Sprichwörter und Haussa-Lieder (in German and Hausa). Kirchhain: N.-L.M. Schmersow. 1904.
• "Tiermärchen der Haussa gesammelt und hrsg. von Rudolf Prietze". Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (in German). 39 (6): 916-939. 1907. JSTOR 23030210.
• Prietze, Rudolf (1911). "Pflanze und Tier im Volksmunde des mittleren Sudan". Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (in German, Hausa, and Kanuri). 43 (6): 865–914. JSTOR 23030853.
• "Haussa-Sänger mit Übersetzung und Erklärung". Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Philologisch-Historische Klasse (in German and Hausa). 4: 552-604. 1916.
• Prietze, Rudolf (1931). "Dichtung der Haussa". Africa (in German and Hausa). 4 (1): 86–95. doi:10.2307/1155740. JSTOR 1155740.

Books

• Umaru B. Ahmed (2013. 2 vol.). The Hausa World of Rudolf Prietze : Being the Complete Collection of the Scholar in the Hausa and German Originals and the English Versions. Zaria: Ahmadu Bello Univ. Press. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Ari Awagana; Camille Lefebvre (2025). L'œuvre en kanouri d'al-Hajj Musa ibn Hissein, un savant du Borno (Niger-Nigéria). Leyde/Boston: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-72402-0.

Articles

• Gisela Brikay-Seidensticker (1992). "Prietze's research associates". Borno Museum. 11/12: 27-37.
• Umaru B. Ahmed (1991). "Muhammadu Agigi's Trans-Saharan Saga by Haji Ahmadu Kano: Comments on an Early Hausa Dramatic Text". History in Africa. 18: 23–38. doi:10.2307/3172051. JSTOR 3172051.