Ernst Dammann

Ernst Karl Alwin Hans Dammann was a German Africanist. With Walter Markov, he was one of the founders of African Studies in the DDR, and as a student of Carl Meinhof and the successor of Diedrich Hermann Westermann, was part of the "second wave" of German Africanists. A prodigious scholar of African languages and a one-time missionary in Tanga, Tanzania, he was an early member of the Nazi party, and his scientific work was criticized as imbued with racist ideology.