musste sein ! ’ German settler perceptions of violence during the Herero and Nama War ( 1904 – 1907 ) (original) (raw)
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Journal of Namibian Studies, 2018
German settlers colonizing South West Africa developed specific attitudes towards violence as a result of experiencing the Herero and Nama War (1904–1907). Through analyzing settler discourse at that time period, this article suggests that the war significantly contributed to the development of a distinct settler identity that was gradually growing apart from the German metropole. Settlers increasingly sought transnational examples of racial regimes for South West Africa, noting that their local conflict was part of a global racial struggle. Policies pursued in other, non-German settler societies became more attractive in light of the destructive German military policy and the disparities between settlers and metropole during the war. The war's goal, in the settler view, was to establish a stable oppressive and coercive structure which supported the permanent exploitation of Africans for economic, social and political gain. Therefore, they rejected both the eliminatory violence and the ‘humanitarian’ policies promoted by non-settler actors. To this end, settlers demanded the privilege of using domestic and labor-related violence independently, but also condemned violent behavior of European new-comers.
Journal of Central and Eastern European African Studies
Horst Drechsler made a revolutionary move when he explored the “Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany” a.k.a. Blue Book, written by the South African invaders of German South West Africa. The East German historian, whose book “Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft: der Kampf der Herero und Nama gegen den deutschen Imperialismus (1884–1915)“ meant a paradigmatic change in the research of German colonial history, since the socialist scholar was the first who declared that the German rule in South West Africa was a form of colonial guilt.
Mark Levene & Penny Roberts (eds.), The Massacre in History. New York and Oxford, 1999
In order to define genocide, Helen Fein has proposed a catalogue of questions which not only seek to ascertain the degree of organisation of the perpetrators and the authoritative level at which their genocidal strategies are conceptualised, but also the ideologies, myths and articulated beliefs which justify (or question) such strategies.(1) This chapter, in describing how a German colonial war escalated into the near-annihilation of a whole African people, seeks to consider both the contemporary and historiographical debate regarding the policy making, planning and, indeed, rationalisations of the perpetrators.
The military campaign in German Southwest Africa, 1904–1907 and the genocide of the Herero and Nama
This article examines the military campaign to suppress the Herero and Nama Revolts in German Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1907. These operations led to genocide in both cases. Rather than focusing on ideology (racism) as the main causal factor, this article analyzes the genocide as the result of a conventional European-style military campaign whose tenets and propensity to go to extremes developed out of Imperial Germany's military culture. After analyzing the four phases of the military campaign, the article goes on to delineate the characteristic features of German military culture that led to mass killing.
From Native Policy to Genocide to Eugenics: The Herero Genocide in German Southwest Africa
The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), CH. 3, 2007
This chapter examines the Herero and Nama war, the genocidal German campaign in Namibia, and the war's aftermath in the colony. Special attention is paid to the conflict between the former colonial governor Theodor Leutwein and the General who took over the colony during the genocidal war, and who directed the genocidal military campaign, Lothar von Trotha.
The paper aims to demonstrate how the colonial state, ostensibly engaged in a project designed to promote 'civilisation' and 'development', often struggled to contain serious disagreements about the nature of the colonial project among members of the white settler community. The 19 th century is touched upon to demonstrate a state of affairs sharply at odds with recollections about the period by Europeans. The focus on the German colonial period (1884-1915) points to certain advances and innovations that the South African Administration, it is claimed, either ignored or terminated. The first phase of South African rule, 1920-1950, is a record of ideological conflicts in intra-and intergroup contexts. The post-1950 period demonstrates how South Africa constructed a form of colonial domination that amounted to establishing Afrikaner hegemony over the public sector in particular. From a German point of view, this amounted to a case of de facto internal colonisation.
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2007
This essay explores Afrikaner immigration into German Southwest Africa during the period of German colonialism, 1884-1914. It focuses on the response of the German colonial authorities in Windhoek and in Berlin to the prospect of large-scale Afrikaner immigration as well as the representation of Afrikaners in German colonial discourse. German justifications of colonial rule were psychologically supported by notions of the imagined cultural and racial differences between the colonisers and the colonised. These underpinned the construction of a polarised self – other, white-black dichotomy and separated the indigenous Africans and Europeans into distinct categories of identification. The presence of settlers whose cultural practices and lifestyle did not match with the norms attributed to the desirable settler threatened to undermine the boundaries of difference between the colonists and colonised. Some elements of the German government and colonial press envisaged Afrikaner immigrants as a potential threat to continued German control over the colony. Others welcomed the immigration of the Afrikaners as colonial pioneers. The categories of black and white were deployed and reconstructed in order to assess the desirability of Afrikaner groups, leading to their assimilation or exclusion from settler society, and underlining the organising power of the schema. Cultural markers and economic considerations were used to differentiate desirable Afrikaner settlers from those deemed undesirable. Undesirable Afrikaner immigrants were representationally blackened through the use of racial rhetoric as well as being politically excluded from access to resources and land, and even physically excluded from the colony. In contrast desirable settlers were welcomed and Germanised. The episode of Afrikaner immigration was illustrative of the constant negotiation of categories of identification and the utilisation of a notion of whiteness in creating an exclusive settler society.
International Review of Social History, 2020
tions in their decision-making processes during their working-life trajectories alongside the appeal of accessing material goods. Additionally, Guthrie’s work emphasizes the importance of gender in the LH of Southern Africa, even when women were not wage workers and forerunners in the emerging colonial wage labour market and capitalist economy. By doing so, his work encourages labour historians to pay more attention to the analysis of the weight of the invisible hand of women and family in male workers’ decisions in terms of labour in their life trajectories. Finally, Bound for Work shows the methodological and analytical gains of combining archival research with fieldwork and interviews with workers. In this way, this study is a call to labour historians to move beyond the paper trail of labour and workers deposited in archives and embrace the key role of oral history in the study of labour and labour relations not only in Africa, but worldwide. Overall, by approaching the study of...