Biography

French missionary and teacher. Born in the Dordogne, she was sent to Lesotho in 1877 by the Société des Missions Évangeliques de Paris to teach at the school for girls in Thaba Bosiu. In 1879 she married Rev. Hermann Dieterlen, who had arrived in Lesotho four years earlier to run the Hermon Mission station. In 1887 they left for the mission's headquarters at Morija, where he had been appointed to reopen the theological college. The three local students it admitted that year later became the first ordained Basotho clergymen.

In 1895 the Dieterlens were transferred to the mission station at Leribe, where Anna Dieterlen started a herbarium. She made collections in the high altitudes of the Leribe Plateau, and obtained others from her husband on his visits further inland. She was fluent in Sesotho like her husband, and her specimens, which number more than 2,000, are especially valued because they include vernacular plant names and ethnobotanic notes. This estimate of the total number of specimens conflicts with her own numbering system, which amounts to only 1380, because of her tendency to give the same number to gatherings of the same species that she collected at different times and in different localities.

The couple moved again in 1913, when her husband was chosen for the French Protestant Mission in the Botsabelo Leper Settlement, which had opened on the outskirts of Maseru. However, in 1914 a leper revolt cut short their mission. Instead they spent their last years in Lesotho at Likhoele, and in 1919 retired to Strasbourg. Anna Dieterlen is commemorated in a number of phanerogam species including Euryops annae E. Phillips, Cymbopogon dieterleniae Stapf ex E. Phillips, Rhynchosia dieterlenae Baker f. and Tulbaghia dieterlenii E. Phillips.