Hans Cory


Hans Cory was a British colonial officer of Austrian descent, farmer and sociologist with a special interest in traditional lifestyles of ethnic groups in former Tanganyika, now Tanzania.
Born in Vienna, Austria, and having lived most of his adult life in Tanganyika, he died at age 73 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Hans Cory had arrived before the First World War in the former colony of German East Africa. After the German defeat in World War I, Great Britain took over Tanganyika as mandate territory, and Cory was sent to a British prison camp in Palestine as a prisoner of war. After this, he returned to Tanganyika and became a British colonial officer.
Speaking Swahili and several local dialects, he had a special interest in the cultural traditions of different ethnic groups, at the time called "Tribes". A self-taught ethnologist, Cory collected extensive ethnographic field data, traditional paintings or sculptures. Based on this, he published several books in English about such subjects as traditional law, ethnic histories and beliefs, initiation rites, food and plants, traditional songs or poetry. In particular, he collected numerous clay figurines used for initiation rites and published several works on this topic. According to the German ethnologist Elisabeth Grohs who studied initiation rites and figurines in Tanzania in the 1960s, Cory donated a large number of these figurines to the Dar es Salaam National Museum.
From the 1950s onwards, he was conducting a government project to collect and codify the customary law of a number of ethnic groups, such as the Sukuma, Nyamwezi, Haya, Gogo and others. His unpublished papers are collected in the University College Library of the University of Dar es Salaam. – In Ernest Hemingway's account of his safari in Tanganyika, Green Hills of Africa, the author tells of his encounter with the Austrian farmer "Kandisky", who shared his knowledge of local culture and who in reality was Hans Cory.

Published works