author
Magdalene Prince
1870–1936
A German memoirist and plantation owner in colonial East Africa, she wrote from direct experience about daily life, upheaval, and exile. Her best-known book offers a vivid firsthand view of German East Africa in the early 1900s.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born Magdalene von Massow in Liegnitz on August 22, 1870, she later became Magdalene von Prince through her marriage to the officer Tom von Prince. She lived for years in German East Africa, where the couple ran plantations in the Usambara region.
Her best-known work, Eine deutsche Frau im Innern Deutsch-Ostafrikas, grew out of her diary notes and recounts her years in East Africa before the First World War. The book became one of the more widely known personal accounts of colonial life written by a German woman, combining travel memoir, domestic history, and her own reflections on settlement and loss.
After the war, she and her husband were forced to leave East Africa. She spent her later years in Europe and died in Vienna on April 22, 1935. Some library records list 1936 as her death year, but major reference sources and her German Wikipedia entry give 1935.