Crazzolara, Pasquale

Father Pasquale Crazzolara joined the Verona Fathers in 1900 and eight years later was sent to Khartoum to begin a lifetime of single-minded service to the peoples of the Upper Nile Region. Apart from his great work as a pastoral educational missionary, he became a leading authority on the languages and ethnology of the many primitive peoples of the Sudan-Uganda borderlands and he did much to further mutual understanding between them and European culture. In 1910 he was posted to the recently established Gulu Mission in the Acholi District of Uganda. Here he strove to relieve the tensions which led to the Lalogi Rebellion of 1911-1912, and he was an eye-witness of an inter-tribal fracas at Chief Ali’s home when he bandaged the wounded Ali’s head. In the succeeding fifty years he has worked in most of his Mission’s stations in the Sudan and Uganda, and particularly in the Acholi and West Nile Districts. Besides grammars of the Nuer and Acholi languages, he is the author of The Lwoo, written in English and published in Italy in three volumes (1950-1954), a definitive work of scholarship, the results of a life-long study of the peoples to whose welfare he was devoted.

Louise Pirouet

This article, used by permission, was written by Louise Pirouet, as part of A Dictionary of Christianity in Uganda (Department of Religious Studies, Makerere University College, 1969), p. 17. Copies available at Africana Section, Makerere University Library (AF Q 276.761 MAK and AR/MAK/99/1); Bishop Tucker Library, Uganda Christian University and in UK at the University of Birmingham; Crowther Centre Library, CMS Oxford and Louise Pirouet Papers, Cambridge Centre of African Studies.