The Daily Bulletin Archive

Ken Orosz, associate professor of history, will share his research as part of the Emerging Scholar series on Friday, March 9, from noon to 1:00 p.m. in E. H. Butler Library 210. This series of presentations provides early-career faculty with an opportunity to share their intellectual work with the rest of the campus.

In 1915, one of the more bizarre episodes of World War I played out on the surface of Lake Tanganyika. Eager to reclaim control of the lake as the prelude to an allied invasion of German East Africa, the British sent two small motor launches from London by way of South Africa and the Belgian Congo to engage and sink the German steamship Graf von Goetzen. Although the so-called Naval Africa Expedition has long been hailed as the basis for C. S. Forester’s iconic novel The African Queen, Orosz will explain that Forester’s real inspiration appears to have been earlier and much-lesser-known events across the continent in German Cameroon, where a missionary named Alphons Hermann played a key role in efforts to sink the HMS Dwarf using homemade torpedoes.