The cornerstone of Catholicism in southern Tanzania was laid by the Benedictine monks of Ndanda Abbey. This first volumn of the abbey’s history explains how the Missionary Benedictines came to establish the faith in southern Tanzania. Although threatened by wars and hindered time and again by human weaknesses, the small mission stations grew into widereaching territorial abbeys and centers of a lively Church in southern Tanzania. Their early struggles to establish the first Christian communities has blossomed into three dioceses: Mtwara, Lindi, and Tunduru-Masasi.  A bbot em. Siegfried Hertlein began his missionary carrier in Tanzania in 1962. From 1976 to 2001 he was the third abbot of the Missionary Benedictine Monastery of Ndanda. Since then he has been involved in monastic formation and research into the abbey’s history.