[Sidenote: German East Africa.] The colonial expansion of Germany in the eighties stimulated missionary interest and activity in its newly acquired possessions in East Africa, where is situated the largest and most thickly populated of the German Colonies, with about seven and a half million inhabitants. The mission field is a difficult one, the natives belonging to one of the lowest human groups. Hard of heart, slow to give up their heathen customs, especially that of polygamy, affected in some sections by Islam, they are difficult to impress and reluctant to be won. Yet among them a harvest has been reaped. The East African mission field is inseparably connected with the name of a Lutheran, _John Ludwig Krapf_, who in the employ of an English missionary society founded Christian missions in this section. [Sidenote: A Call to Service.] [6]Krapf was born in 1810 near Tübingen in Germany. A fondness for geography coupled with the reading of a pamphlet describing the spread of missions among the heathen impelled him when he was a mere boy to prepare himself for missionary work. After studying at Basel, he became pastor of a congregation, but he could not shut out from his heart the needs of unchristianized lands. “In the needs of my congregation I recognized those of non-Christian lands in a measure that affected me very deeply; in their sorrow I recognized the wretchedness of the heathen. The grace which I myself enjoyed and which I commended to my own people, was, I felt, for the heathen as well, but there might be no one to proclaim it to them. Here, everyone without difficulty may find the way of life; in those lands there may be no one to show the way.” Footnote 6: The account of John Ludwig Krapf is taken largely from the Rev. F. Wilkinson, _Missionary Review of the World_, November, 1892. [Illustration: ADMINISTRATION BUILDING AND CLASS ROOMS, KYUSHU GAKUIN, KUMAMOTO, JAPAN.] [Illustration: PASTOR’S RESIDENCE, CHAPEL, AND STUDENT DORMITORY, TOKYO. AMERICAN MISSIONARIES, NATIVE PASTORS AND WORKERS WITH WIVES AND CHILDREN.] [Sidenote: A Slave Market.] Following his inclination, he offered himself for missionary work and was sent by the Church Missionary Society of England, which used Basel missionaries in the work, to its Abyssinian Mission. Leaving England in 1837, he reached Alexandria and started up the Nile. At Cairo he had his first glimpse of Africa’s great curse, the traffic in human beings. He visited the slave markets and there saw the wretched creatures men, women and children, lying fainting under the burning sun, to be examined like cattle by purchasers. Like Abraham Lincoln on his journey down the Mississippi, Krapf vowed eternal hatred for the hideous institution of human slavery.