In 1932 the missionary territory of Ndanda became an independant Abbacy Nullius. The new Abbot-Bishop Joachim Ammann had to face numerous difficulties: Islam was fighting for predominance, pagan traditions challenged the mission work and developments in Germany had a negative impact on the situation in Tanganyika. The outbreak of WW II brought with it the threat of permanent expulsion of German missionaries from the Territory. Yet the Church grew: new mission stations were established, the Ndanda hospital expanded, catechetical material was published by the mission press, a congregation of African Benedictine Sisters was born, the Ndanda Art School flourished and the first African priests are ordained. The Church in southeast Tanzania has taken root.

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.