Eberhard Bruno Willy (or Willi) Schoenfelder, farm manager
and plant collector, was the son of Lothar Schoenfelder and his wife Vera, born
Schüman. He studied at the Deutsche Kolonial Hochschule, Witzenhausen, where
he obtained a diploma in agriculture. In 1913 he moved to German South West
Africa (now Namibia), where he worked on various farms. He also undertook a six
month expedition on foot to the Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo (now the
DRC), and other expeditions to southern Angola, Zambia and northern Botswana. Later
he founded and managed the Northern Labour Organisation, Ltd. and during 1928-1930
visited its recruiting stations and trading stores in Okavango and the Caprivi
Strip. On several occasions he met M.K. Dinter* and in the summer of 1933-1934
accompanied him to the northern part of Namibia.
Schoenfelder described some of his travels, and the
vegetation of the regions he visited, in 'Eine Reise im Kaukaufeld' (A journey
in Kaokoland) and 'Suedost-Angola und der Westliche Caprivi-Zipfel' (South-eastern
Angola and the western Caprivi Strip) in Petermann's Mitteilungen (1933, Vol.
79, pp. 118-121 and 187-189; and 1935, Vol. 81, pp. 49-52 and 87-89). The
latter article included a good map. The plant specimens he collected went to
the National Herbarium in Pretoria, the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, the Royal
Botanical Gardens at Kew, and the Botanischer Garten und Botanischer Museum in
Berlin-Dahlem, Germany. The species Brachiaria
schoenfelderi and Alectra
schoenfelderi were named after him.
Schoenfelder also interested himself in the indigenous languages
of northern Namibia. He first compiled a short vocabulary of four Ovambo
dialects entitled Das versteht mein
Ovambo: Zusamenstellung 200 wichtichster Saetze aus dem taeglichen leben in 4
Dialekten (Windhoek, 1936). During World War II (1939-1945) he was interned
at Andalusia, a large internment camp that later developed into Jan Kempdorp.
While there he published a Kwanyama-German dictionary entitled Handwörterbuch des Osikuanjama
(Andalusia, 1943). Upon his release he became manager of a farm owned by Consolidated
Sugar and General Holdings, between Rustenburg and Kroondal in the Transvaal.
He was married to Joyce Blossom Mitchell-Neill. After their divorce he married
Dorothea Louise Marie Wenhold. He had no children.
