“The People Who Make Our Heads Spin”: White Violence in German

by

Ryan Masters

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of History University of Toronto

© Copyright by Ryan Masters 2019

“The People Who Make Our Heads Spin”: White Violence in

Ryan Masters Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Toronto

2019

Abstract

This dissertation explores violence perpetrated by the colonial state and white settlers in

German East Africa from the 1890s to the First World War. It examines the place of white violence, almost all of it directed at black bodies, in East Africa and traces the ways in which broader social and political tensions in the German community shaped debates and contestations over the boundaries of “acceptable” white violence in the colony. Violence was a contested issue, one that divided the community of German colonists against itself. The issue was not that

Germans disagreed about their right to treat Africans violently or dominate them by force. Rather disputes arose because the boundaries and limitations of white violence were never clearly defined, so that colonial administrators and German settlers were left to sort it out amongst themselves.

The case of the plantation manager Georg Passarge demonstrates that social conflicts in the German colonial community could play a significant role in drawing officials’ attention to non-official white violence and ultimately in the prosecution of settler abuses. Further, the frustrations and anxieties that beset the German settler community shaped coverage of corporal

ii punishment in the settler-friendly press, which defended whipping and flogging of Africans as integral to the success and well-being of German colonists. Finally, contemporary photography reveals the manner in which German officials tried to distance themselves from disciplinary violence as well as the unease with which some observers documented German colonial violence toward the black population in East Africa.

This study demonstrates that violence was both ubiquitous in East Africa and a contested issue among German colonists. It shows that broader social and political tensions within the

German community were manifested in the colonial courts, the settler press, and in the visual representation of colonial violence in East Africa. These same sources were constructed so as to manage or render invisible the black people who were the targets and victims of white violence.

Accordingly, this dissertation also analyzes German representations of colonial violence and the people who executed it, witnessed it, and felt it on their own bodies.

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Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people who have offered their guidance and assistance during the writing of this dissertation. I would first like to thank my supervisor, Doris

Bergen, whose many years of generosity and guidance have expanded my intellectual horizons and deepened my appreciation of the study and teaching of history. Her insights have been crucial to shaping my thinking about this project, and it is the case that without her endless patience and unwavering support, this dissertation would not have been written. Sean Hawkins has been an important guide during my graduate work at the University of Toronto, and the originality of his thinking about colonialism in Africa has challenged me to approach the German colonial period in unfamiliar and stimulating ways. I would also like to thank John Noyes for agreeing to join my committee and particularly for his encouragement and support during the long process of writing this dissertation, above all at times when I doubted my ability to see it through to completion. I am also grateful to Belinda Davis for generously agreeing to act as an external reviewer for my dissertation and offering her expertise as I move forward with this project. I would like to extend thanks, as well, to my internal externals Mark Meyerson and

Yigal Nizri for lending their time and insights at this most crucial stage.

I would also like to thank Carolyn Kay, who enthusiastically supported my work from early on and whose courses at Trent University first made me aware of my fondness for German history. I am sure that her teaching has had the same effect on countless other students who have studied at the university. Also at Trent University, I owe thanks to Tim Stapleton, who

iv encouraged my interest in African history and was generous with his time in helping me to grapple with issues around violence in modern Africa.

The research for this dissertation was made possible by the assistance of archivists and staff at the Bundesarchiv in , who showed considerable patience in helping a sometimes bewildered Canadian graduate student to navigate the colonial files held there. The staff at the

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin were also exceedingly kind and helpful, and I have fond memories of the afternoons I spent reading in the library when I lived in the city. I would also like to thank the staff of the Photo Archives at the Holocaust Memorial Museum for their assistance during a research trip I made there late in the process of writing this dissertation.

Although the photographs I viewed in the archives did not ultimately end up in this dissertation, I am grateful for having had the chance to immerse myself in the extensive visual archive held at the Museum.

My research has also been supported by number of fellowships and grants, including from the Ontario government, German Academic Exchange Program, Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of

Toronto. I owe special thanks to Professor Natalie Zemon Davis for her generous support, in the form of a Director’s Merit Award in Jewish Studies, which gave me the opportunity to visit the

USHMM Photo Archives. In addition, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to attend the

Annual Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization, at Northwestern University, and the Genocide and Human Rights University Program organized by the Zoryan Institute in

Toronto, both of which helped me to deepen my thinking on the history of violence.

My friendships both within and outside the university have challenged me intellectually and sustained me through the many years of this project. My thinking about history has been

v challenged and influenced by countless discussions with my fellow graduate students in history, in particular Peter Mersereau, Vanessa McCarthy, Lindsay Sidders, Bret Edwards and Dale

Barbour, who have been friends and comrades throughout my studies at the University of

Toronto. My friends Brooke McIntosh, Holly McDaniel, Michael Bruder, Aurora Wells,

Alessandro Marcon and Oliver Jones have been at my side since practically the beginning, and I thank them for sustaining me through all of these years. Finally, I owe more than I will ever be able to repay to my mom, Jill, and my sister, Katie, who never wavered in their support of me during what turned into a decade-long process. This dissertation is dedicated to them.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii-iii

Acknowledgments ...... iv-vi

Table of Contents ...... vii

List of Images ...... viii

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Social Conflict and Colonial Law: Georg Passarge in East Africa ...... 29

Chapter 2: Crossing the Line: Georg Passarge in Court ...... 68

Chapter 3: Disciplinary Violence in East Africa: Boundaries, Uncertainties and Contestations ...... 104

Chapter 4: Visible Violence: Framing, Unease and the Boundaries of Acceptability ...... 155

Conclusion ...... 207

Bibliography ...... 222

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List of Images

Image 1: “Execution of a Punishment in East Africa” ...... 161 Image 2: “American Criminal Justice” ...... 176 Image 3: A flogging in German East Africa, I...... 181 Image 4: A flogging in German East Africa, II ...... 182 Image 5: Mwera prisoners in chains ...... 184 Image 6: “Prisoners in chains in Kilimatinde,” I ...... 185 Image 7: “Prisoners in chains in Kilimatinde,” II ...... 185 Image 8: A flogging in Schirati, German East Africa ...... 186 Image 9: “Our Herero prisoner in Ekupa” ...... 192 Image 10: “Camp cleaning at the Black Cliffs”...... 196 Image 11: Two Herero women drink from a watering hole ...... 199 Image 12: A hanging, German Southwest Africa ...... 203

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Introduction

This dissertation examines violence in German East Africa as a site of unease and the focus of social and political conflict in the German colonial community. Specifically, it looks at how tensions within the German community intersected with and shaped attempts to define the acceptable boundaries of white violence, almost all of it directed at black people, in the colony.

While it was generally accepted among German colonists that wielding disciplinary violence against the African population was the prerogative of every German in the colony, the issue of how much violence was too much violence remained something of an open question throughout the colonial period. Because Berlin only laid down broad guidelines with regard to how violence could be exercised in the colonies, the nature and boundaries of white violence in East Africa were open to contestation between the colonial administration and the wider non-official German community.

The dissertation looks at the trial of a German plantation manager, the coverage of corporal punishment of Africans in the settler-friendly press, and contemporary photography to explore how the German community in East Africa negotiated and contested the boundaries of acceptable violence in the colony. It argues that the broader social and political tensions within the German community in East Africa, and in proper, significantly shaped how the boundaries of white violence were defined. The German administration, it shows, was concerned as much with protecting the image of the colonial service and maintaining social stability in the colony as it was with reining in the worst excesses of white perpetrators. At the same time, settler resentments toward the colonial administration and settler anxieties surrounding African labour and settler security shaped a settler discourse that proclaimed the whip to be integral to

1 the success and well-being of the settler community. On both sides, shifting social and political pressures influenced how the boundaries of white violence were defined and defended. On neither side was the pain and misery of the Africans targeted by German violence given consideration. To the contrary, this dissertation shows that German representations of colonial violence were constructed in ways that obscured its victims.

Broadly speaking, there was a general consensus among German colonists in East Africa that violence was right and necessary when dealing with the subject African population. German rule in East Africa was fundamentally based on force. Imperial Germany’s conquest of the East

African mainland in the late nineteenth century was achieved through uncompromising violence.

When local leaders revolted along the coast in the summer of 1888 against the high-handed behaviour of officials of the German East Africa Company, forces under the command of

Hermann von Wissmann responded with violence and terror. German military leaders resorted to indiscriminate killing and scorched-earth tactics in pursuit of rebel leaders, burning fields and destroying villages, to terrorize local people into submission.1 During the 1890s, German-led forces extended indiscriminate military violence and destruction into the interior of East Africa, particularly during its sustained war against the .2 This decade of violence accompanying the German consolidation of rule in East Africa presaged the massive violence visited by the German on the southern regions of the colony in response to the Maji

Maji rebellion (1905-1907). There, German forces adopted what Susanne Kuss describes as a

1 Jonathon Glassman, “Epilogue: The Ambiguities of Conquest,” Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), ACLS Humanities E-Book, np. 2 Jan-Bart Gewald, “Colonial Warfare: Hehe and , the Wars Besides Maji Maji in South-Western ,” African Historical Review 40.2 (2008): 7-13; David Pizzo, “‘To Devour the Land of Mkwawa’: Colonial Violence and the German-Hehe War in East Africa c. 1884-1914,” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007): 186-217.

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“radicalized policy” meant to starve out the inhabitants of rebellious regions, leading to widespread destruction, famine and the deaths of some 180,000 people.3 Beyond these eruptions of massive military destruction, the military force that formed the basis of German rule in East Africa was reflected in the dozens of fortified stations erected across the colony that served simultaneously as military outposts and local government headquarters and projected

German power into the interior.4

The spectacular violence unleashed by the German Schutztruppe at times of crisis punctuated the everyday violence of colonial rule. Often governing far from the colonial capital in and faced with a vastly larger subject African population, German officials were given broad powers at the local level to dispense colonial justice, including disciplinary violence in the form of whippings and floggings. Imperial laws governing the disciplinary system, first issued in 1896, restricted the number of lashes a prisoner might receive for any one punishment, but did not stipulate the types of behaviour that were subject to corporal punishment, leaving local officials to decide on disciplinary punishments as they saw fit. As it turned out, German officials in East Africa relied heavily on corporal punishment even when compared to their colleagues in Germany’s other African colonies. Each year they sentenced thousands of African boys and men to corporal punishment – often accompanied by sentences of forced labour in chains – and except for the first years of Albrecht von Rechenberg’s governorship, they sentenced increasing numbers of people to floggings and whippings every year. Colonial disciplinary law further extended state-sanctioned corporal punishment into the workplace in East Africa by subjecting labour infractions to whippings and floggings. This

3 Susanne Kuss, German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017): 65, 70. 4 Michelle Moyd, “Making the Household, Making the State: Colonial Military Communities and Labour in German East Africa,” International Labour and Working-Class History 80 (2011): 59-60.

3 meant that, in addition to behaviour more traditionally thought of as criminal, such as theft and assault, male Africans could be whipped or flogged by German authorities for thoroughly racialized infractions like “repeated dereliction of duty and indolence” and “insubordination,” placing the state disciplinary system at the service of non-official German colonists who employed Africans on their farms and plantations.5

Non-official German colonists in East Africa could also dispense disciplinary violence on their own authority. From the early years of German colonization in Africa it was generally accepted that all German colonists, not just officials who exercised criminal jurisdiction over the empire’s colonial subjects, enjoyed what was referred to as a “paternal right to discipline” their

African employees. According to this customary right, German settlers could dispense

“moderate” physical punishments to their African workers and servants on their farms and plantations and in their households.6 As the colonial director at the time, Paul Kayser, made clear, the 1896 disciplinary laws were not meant to interfere in settlers’ disciplinary rights, which were accepted as given – if sometimes only begrudgingly – by most colonial officials in Berlin and East Africa. Although never formally enshrined in law, the so-called paternal right to discipline was accepted as a customary right of each German colonist. Every German in East

Africa therefore could physically discipline Africans on their own authority, right up until the end of German rule in the region in 1916.

5 Verfügung des Reichskanzlers wegen Ausübung der Strafgerichtsbarkeit und der Disziplinargewalt gegenüber den Eingeborenen in den deutschen Schutzgebieten von Ostafrika, und Togo, 22 April 1896, Die Deutsche Kolonial-Gesetzgebung (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1898): 217. 6 Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884-1914 (Helsinki: Tiedekirja; Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1995): 365.

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The extension of disciplinary authority to non-official created what Philippa

Söldenwagner has described as a “culture of violence” in East Africa.7 This consensus in the

German colonial community around the issue of white violence was not lost on the reformist colonial director, , who submitted a secret report upon returning from his trip to the colony in 1907, in which he noted his alarm at seeing the notorious Kiboko whip everywhere he went.8 The infamous “twenty-five,” colonial shorthand for a whipping punishment, was still a well-known phrase in East Africa decades after the departure of the

German colonists.9 Even the Swahili word now used across the region for a white person –

“mzungu” or “muzungu” – associated with going around in circles, is said to have taken on that usage under the colonial rule of the Germans, whose incessant beatings and floggings made people’s heads spin.10

The colonial administration’s approach to white violence could serve only to encourage it further. Colonial authorities in Berlin were reluctant to explicitly define the boundaries of acceptable violence in the African colonies, particularly with regard to the non-official German community. This situation meant not only that broad powers were devolved on district officials to interpret the disciplinary laws as they saw fit, but also that a certain ambiguity surrounded the disciplinary powers of the non-official German community. Berlin may have laid down the basic framework of disciplinary policies and placed broad limitations on state-executed corporal

7 Philippa Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation: European Settlement and Settlers in German East Africa 1900- 1914 (Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 2006): 197. 8 The report is partially reprinted in Fritz Ferdinand Müller, Kolonien unter der Peitsche (Berling: Rütten & Loening, 1962): 74-75. 9 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, 366. 10 The meanings attached to the word “mzungu” have transformed over time. Under British rule, it lost its specifically violent connotations and came to refer to the broader racial category of “white people.” In the course of the structural adjustment era of the 1980s, the word became more so associated with social class and Western behaviour. Conversation with Professor Nakanyike Musisi, University of Toronto.

5 punishments, but it left it to local officials and the colonial courts to define in practice the boundaries of non-official disciplinary authority. Many colonial administrators were in turn sympathetic toward their non-official German countrymen and showed themselves reluctant or unwilling to intervene to curb the violence they perpetrated on farms and plantations and in their households in East Africa. The often lenient sentences handed down by the colonial courts to abusive and violent whites indicated such attitudes on the part of not a few colonial judges.11

Perhaps unsurprising in such a situation – and indicative too of the thinly-spread administrative apparatus in East Africa – violent non-official colonists were often only disciplined after perpetrating numerous or particularly obscene outrages that made their behaviour difficult to ignore by colonial officials. This tendency was made clear during the first wave of colonial scandals that shook the Colonial Division in the 1890s, when the sentencing of

Friedrich Schröder to fifteen years in jail for years of brutal violence and killings on the plantation he ran in Lewa in East Africa made headlines in Germany. Schröder, it became clear, had for years been notorious in the colony for his violent behaviour, including rape and , and was well-known to colonial authorities long before he was finally brought to trial in 1896.12

Scandals of this magnitude were almost encouraged by the general acceptance of white violence in East Africa, the reluctance of the imperial colonial administration to clearly define legal boundaries, and the leeway granted non-official Germans to exercise disciplinary violence on their own authority.

All the same, beneath the surface of the general acceptance of violence in East Africa – whether the exceptional violence of military conquest and retribution or the more quotidian

11 See Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 196-201. 12 Christian Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012): 133-134.

6 violence of day-to-day colonial rule – white violence remained a contentious issue in the colony.

Dernburg’s secret report of 1907, in which he registered his alarm at German colonists’ enthusiasm for the whip in East Africa, points not only to the ubiquity of corporal punishment and normalization of white violence in the colony, but also to the uneasiness and disquiet that adhered to such violence throughout the colonial period. As permissive an environment for white violence as there may have been in East Africa, not all forms of violence were acceptable to colonial administrators concerned with maintaining stability in the colony and protecting the image of their office. Photographs from the period, for example, show that German officials distanced themselves from association with the actual practices of disciplinary violence in East

Africa. German administrators furthermore discussed and debated the so-called paternal right to discipline throughout the colonial period, and some officials – in particular Governor

Rechenberg – were never fully comfortable granting settlers such disciplinary powers. Further, for all of the failings of the racialized colonial legal system, the colonial courts did prosecute a number of German colonists for abusing and assaulting Africans in the colony. Some, like the plantation manager Georg Passarge, were practically run out of the colony after being tried and found guilty of violent abuses.

For their part, German settlers were seemingly never satisfied with the disciplinary powers granted to them as members of the white ruling class. Many settlers viewed any government regulation of corporal punishment as a threat to their autonomy to wield the whip on their own authority and closed ranks when one of their own was caught up in the colonial legal system for overstepping the bounds of acceptable violence. Throughout the colonial period the

German administration and German settlers struggled among themselves to define the

7 boundaries of acceptable violence in East Africa, whether in the colonial courts or in the pages of the settler-friendly press.

This dissertation explores white violence in East Africa as a site of unease and contestation in the German community. It does so first by examining how the boundaries of acceptable white violence were determined in the colonial courts, as well as how the influence of broader social tensions in the white community affected and shaped the legal prosecution of such violence. It then turns to the settler-friendly press, examining how newspaper coverage of corporal punishment in the colony intersected the anxieties and tensions within the settler community. Settler newspapers contributed to a settler discourse that staked out a particular settler identity that claimed disciplinary violence as integral to the white community in East

Africa. Finally, the dissertation looks at photographs depicting chain gangs and floggings in East

Africa in order tease out the ways in which colonial photographers framed and presented disciplinary violence for German audiences, and the unease toward such violence that was characteristic of such images. The central concern of the dissertation is to explore white violence in East Africa as a shifting and contentious issue within the German community, one that both reflected and in turn influenced broader social and political tensions among German colonists in

East Africa and at the same time sought to control and silence the Africans on its receiving end.

Background to the Dissertation

I came to the subject of German violence in colonial East Africa by way of my early academic interest in both modern German and African history. Entering the undergraduate history program at Trent University in 2002, I was broadly interested in the history of the Second

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World War, the subject of so many documentaries that played on television when I was growing up and an event that loomed large in the history of the twentieth century, which came to a close shortly after the end of my high school years. During my undergraduate program at Trent

University, I was fortunate enough to take classes with the historian Carolyn Kay, who through her compelling lectures and seminars convinced me that German history should be the focus of my academic studies. In the course of my studies at Trent University, too, Germany increasingly appeared to me to be at the centre of so much of the drama of twentieth-century history, perhaps never more so than during the Second World War, reiterating to me the importance of coming to a better understanding of that country’s history and its impact on Europe and the world.

Professor Kay encouraged my early academic work on increasingly difficult subject matter that I felt was necessary to grapple with if I were to understand Germany’s twentieth century, including the mass violence perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen and Wehrmacht in eastern Europe during the Second World War.

Parallel to these developments, I also at this time gravitated toward the study of the history of modern Africa. I was particularly influenced in this regard by the historian Tim

Stapleton, whose classes I took from early on in my undergraduate program and who later encouraged my growing interest in twentieth-century Africa with specialized reading courses. As the focus of my reading in German history gradually moved toward violence on the Eastern

Front and the history of the Holocaust, my studies in modern African history increasingly centred on the history of violence on the continent, particularly in the Great Lakes region of

Africa in the twentieth century. The Rwandan genocide became an overriding focus of my reading in modern African history, and I was particularly interested in understanding the connections between the genocide and the longer history of conflict in , Uganda and the

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Democratic Republic of Congo. In the course of my studies it became clear that European colonialism had played a significant role in laying the groundwork for the conflicts and violence that gripped the region for much of the second half of the twentieth century.

The convergence of my parallel interests in German and African history took place at the

University of Toronto. During my Master’s program, Doris Bergen was instrumental in deepening my thinking about violence in German history and encouraged my interest in violence perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen during the Second World War. For my Master’s research project, I examined the records of the Einsatzgruppen trial, held before an American military tribunal at Nuremberg, with a particular focus on how the prosecutors and judges involved in that trial understood and explained the nearly unprecedented crimes committed by the members of the Einsatzgruppen death squads. I tried to show in the paper some of the ways in which

American authorities grappled with the emerging concept of genocide in the immediate postwar period. This research experience also reiterated to me the importance of understanding the phenomenon of genocide and its central place in the history of the twentieth century.

When I entered the Doctoral program in history at the University of Toronto in 2009, I proposed to conduct a comparative study of perpetrators in the Holocaust and the genocide, with a particular focus on the Einsatzgruppen and Interahamwe. Unfortunately, the daunting research challenges and personal linguistic barriers to such a project eventually convinced me that the topic was not feasible as a doctoral dissertation. However, during this early and critical process of choosing the path of my doctoral research, Professor Bergen pointed me toward German colonial history in Africa as an alternative way in which I might still explore my various interests in modern German and African history, as well as the history of violence in the twentieth century. As I had worked with trial records for my Master’s research project, an

10 examination of violent Germans and how they were treated by the colonial legal system appeared as a natural segue into the field of German colonial studies. Sean Hawkins also acted as an important guide during this transition period, encouraging me to think about German colonial history in unexpected ways. In particular, I worked closely with him in preparation for my comprehensive examinations, building a teaching field that explored themes around Germany and its “Others” that helped me to see the colonial period as a formative historical experience and integral to an understanding of modern German history. These experiences early in my doctoral program helped me to see how German colonial history was intertwined with historical developments in Germany and Europe that I had been studying since my undergraduate program at Trent University.

My interest in photography and the visual record of violence in the German colonies has come rather late in the process of writing this dissertation. Two projects, in particular, encouraged me to think more carefully about photographs and their relation to the study of the history of violence. First, I assisted with the preparation of the third edition of Doris Bergen’s book War and Genocide, a work that is concerned with the careful integration and analysis of the photographs that accompany the historical narrative. It was during this time that I really began to think of photographs as historical documents in their own right and to consider the complexities of integrating the visual record of violence into historical analysis. As a member of the design team for the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, Professor Bergen was also instrumental in connecting me with this important project. I was subsequently employed in 2014 as an assistant and historical consultant for photographer Edward Burtynsky’s trip to central and eastern Europe to photograph sites related to the Holocaust; a number of the photographs from this trip were eventually incorporated as large-scale images into the final design of the Monument. Later, I had

11 the good fortune to participate in the preparation of the text and images for the interpretive panels at the National Holocaust Monument, during which process I was forced to think carefully about the selection and integration of images that would be viewed by the general public. All of these experiences have heightened my awareness of visual sources as historical documents, as well as the complexities of integrating and interpreting the visual record of violence.

Research and Historiography

My research for this dissertation focused on material available in German archives. The principle research for this dissertation was conducted at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, where I consulted records from the German Imperial Colonial Office (Reichskolonialamt), particularly legal files pertaining to trials of Germans and other Europeans before the colonial courts in East

Africa and internal discussions of corporal punishment in the colonies. These files have been utilized by a number of scholars working on German imperialism and German colonialism in

East Africa; however, an analysis in depth of individual trial records of violent perpetrators, which my examination of the German plantation manager Georg Passarge attempts to do, has been a feature of relatively little research into German colonialism in East Africa. The

Staatsbibliothek in Berlin further provided initial access to colonial newspapers and journals geared toward a settler audience; the library’s digital archives have provided ongoing access to the most important of the colonial East African newspapers, the Deutsch Ostafrikanische

Zeitung. In late 2012 I also travelled to Dar es Salaam to visit the Tanzania National Archives, in order to broaden and deepen my research into German colonial records. Unfortunately, after two successive applications for research clearance failed to reach the Tanzania Commission for

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Science and Technology, I was unable to gain access to the significant files held there. Although this setback limited the scope of my research, the trip gave me the chance to see in person the city that features so prominently in the history that is the focus of this dissertation.

Digitized archives have also played an important role in my investigation of the photographic record of German violence in colonial Africa. In this regard, I have consulted the

German Colonial Society’s image archive, held at the Universitätsbibliothek of Goethe

University, Frankfurt, and the online image archive maintained by Deutsche Fotothek in

Dresden. The analysis of flogging images from East Africa in this dissertation contributes to a discussion of the visual record of disciplinary violence in the colony that is only in its initial stages, particularly relative to research into the photographic record of violence in Germany’s other colonies, above all Southwest Africa. Beyond these digitized archives, I also conducted research in the photo archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,

DC, made possible with the generous support of Professor Natalie Zemon Davis and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. An earlier draft of this dissertation included an extensive discussion of images examined during this research trip; however, over the course of revisions, it has been necessary to narrow the focus of the analysis and to set aside for now a comparative approach to images of violence from different periods of German history.

This dissertation engages with a varied historiography on European violence in colonial

Africa and, in particular, addresses scholarship concerned with disciplinary violence in the colony of German East Africa. Violence was situated in the centre of discussions about European colonialism in Africa by three seminal works that appeared in the years following the Second

World War and at the height of African independence a decade later. Published in 1950 and 1951 respectively, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and Hannah Arendt’s Origins of

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Totalitarianism both emphasized the central place of violence in the structures of overseas

European rule, as well as the corrupting influence of violence on the colonizers themselves.13

Césaire, in particular, argued that “relations of domination and submission” were central to the architecture of European colonial rule, and that the European colonist acted toward the indigenous colonial subject as “a classroom , an army sergeant, a prison guard,” or “a slave driver” who forced the colonized into the European capitalist system.14

A decade later, in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon described a colonial world divided between the colonizer and the “native” on the basis of force, its borders marked by the

European military barracks and police station.15 For Fanon, violence “governed the ordering of the colonial world” in that it destroyed indigenous institutions and culture and supported a colonial social order built on the maintenance of the boundaries between European colonizers and the much larger indigenous population.16 All three works argued in their own way that violence committed in the colonies posed a threat in the end to the colonizers, whether to their rule in the overseas colonies themselves or to their homelands back in Europe. Césaire’s and

Arendt’s work, in particular, has influenced more recent scholarship on German colonialism, positing as it did connections between the violence of European overseas colonialism and the mass violence of totalitarianism and National Socialism in Europe. This has particularly been the case over the last two decades, following the publication of studies on German Southwest Africa by the historian Jürgen Zimmerer, who posited direct historical connections, as the title of one of

13 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973); Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 14 Césaire, Discourse, 42. 15 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 2004). 16 Ibid., 4-6, 15, 17.

14 his works indicates, “from Windhoek to Auschwitz.”17 The “continuity thesis” in German colonial history has been critiqued by historians for its explanatory shortcomings, and some have objected that it resembles older notions about a Sonderweg, or special path, of German history.18

The study of violence in German East Africa has for the most part remained outside of these debates about continuity in German colonial history. However, the historian Isabel Hull has argued that there are distinct continuities in the violence perpetrated by the German military in

Europe and Africa, including colonial East Africa. In her monograph, Absolute Destruction, Hull examines the massive destruction and death caused by the German Schutztruppe’s scorched- earth policies in response to the (1905-1907), situating this violence within the broader scope of the wars the German military fought in Europe and abroad during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hull argues that a distinctive military culture developed in Imperial Germany, one marked by a tendency toward extreme violence and the targeting of civilian populations, which propelled the type of violence and destruction wrought by German forces in East Africa. Such violence, she contends, was on a continuum with the genocidal

17 Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz?: Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Berlin: Lit, 2011). See also, Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archaeology of Genocide,” Development Dialogue 50.50 (2008): 95-124; Jürgen Zimmerer, “Krieg, KZ und Völkermord in Südwestafrika: Der erste deutsche Genozid,” Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904-1908) in und seine Folgen, ed. Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2004); Jürgen Zimmerer, “The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination,” Patterns of Prejudice 39.2 (2005): 197-219; Benjamin Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz: How Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly 35.3 (2005): 429-464. 18 See for instance, Doris L. Bergen, “Imperialism and the Holocaust,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 27.1 (2013): 62-68. Matthew Fitzpatrick, “The Pre-History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past.” Central and European History 41 (2008): 480; Thomas Kühne, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, and Complexities,” Journal of Genocide Research 15.3 (2013): 339- 362. See also Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, “Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz,” Central European History 42 (2009): 279-300.

15 violence the military perpetrated against the Herero and Nama in Southwest Africa, both being the product of institutional habits tending toward extremism.19

Susanne Kuss, in contrast, has argued against drawing too close a connection between the violence that accompanied the suppression of the Maji Maji rebellion and that of the other conflicts the German military fought overseas at the turn of the century. She argues that the course of the conflict and the methods German forces used to defeat the rebellion, particularly its policy of scorched-earth destruction, differentiate the conflict from the other wars Imperial

Germany fought abroad around the same time, including in Southwest Africa. Local conditions,

Kuss maintains, played the most significant role in precipitating and shaping the course of extreme military violence and destruction in East Africa. 20

Scholars focused more specifically on East Africa have deepened our understanding of how local conditions shaped the military violence that attended conquest and war in the colony.

The pioneering work of John Iliffe on colonial East Africa traced in detail how the complex local conditions German forces faced shaped how conquest unfolded, showing in particular how the violence of German conquest affected local African societies.21 The violence of the pre-Maji

Maji period has also been noted by Jonathon Glassman, who shows that the scorched-earth polices adopted during counter-insurgency operations in the wake of the rebellion were already a feature of the early stages of German conquest.22 The work of Michael Pesek and Erick Mann on

19 Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). See also, “Military Culture and the Production of ‘Final Solutions’ in the Colonies: The Example of Wilhelmine Germany,” The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, ed. Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 141-162. 20 Susanne Kuss, German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2017). 21 John Iliffe, A Modern History of (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 22 Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856- 1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995).

16 the period prior to Maji Maji draws attention to the widespread violence and terror that accompanied German expansion on the East African mainland, and Mann in particular, like

Kuss, argues that local conditions played a significant role in how military violence unfolded.23

David Pizzo’s dissertation on the German war against the HeHe similarly emphasizes the influence of local conditions on how military violence unfolded, most importantly the ways in which isolated German military commanders responded to the HeHe people’s resistance.24 The violence and destruction of the German counter-insurgency campaign against Maji Maji rebels has been the focus of a varied scholarship, including work on the dynamics of violence at the local level and the impact of the German scorched-earth campaign on the inhabitants of the southern regions of the colony.25 Looking more specifically at the role and social position of

African who participated in the conquest and day-to-day of rule of East, Michelle Moyd has traced how African soldiers built up their own positions while fighting for the German colonizers and policing the colonial structures they helped to create.26

23 Erick Mann, Mikono ya damu: African Mercenaries and the Politics of Conflict in German East Africa, 1888- 1904 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002); Michael Pesek, Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika: Expeditionen, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880 (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2005). 24 David Pizzo, “‘To Devour the Land of Mkwawa’: Colonial Violence and the German-Hehe War in East Africa c.1884-1914,” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2007). See also, Jan-Bart Gewald, “Colonial Warfare: Hehe and World War I, the Wars besides Maji Maji in South-Western Tanzania,” African Historical Review 40.2 (2008): 1-27. 25 See for example, Heike Schmidt, “Deadly silence predominates in this district”: The Maji Maji War and Its Aftermath in Ungoni,” Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War, ed. James Giblin and Jamie Monson (Leiden: E.J. Brill,2010): 181-219; Ludger Wimmelbücker, “Verbrannte Erde: Zu den Bevölkerungsverlusten als Folge des Maji- Maji-Kreiges,” Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1905-1907, ed. Felicitas Becker and Jigal Beez (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2005). 26 Michelle Moyd, “‘All People were Barbarians to the Askari…’: Askari Identity and Honour in the Maji Maji War, 1905-1907,” Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War, ed. James Giblin and Jamie Monson (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010): 149-179; “‘From a hurt sense of honour’: Violence Work and the Limits of Soldierly Obedience on a Scientific Expedition in German East Africa, 1896-1897,” Slavery & Abolition 39.3 (2018): 579-601; “Making the Household, Making the State: Colonial Military Communities and Labour in German East Africa,” International Labour and Working-Class History 80.1 (2011): 53-76; Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2014).

17

This dissertation also engages with scholarship that has examined disciplinary violence, specifically corporal punishment, in the German colonies. In the case of East Africa, corporal punishment has not attracted the same level of scholarly attention as the military violence that attended conquest and rebellion. Important monographs on German East Africa, such as those by

John Iliffe, Juhani Koponen and Philippa Söldenwagner, emphasize the widespread use of whipping and flogging by the colonial state and white settlers but situate disciplinary violence within much broader analyses of the colonial state and economy, and settler society.27

Beyond these larger studies, Thaddeus Sunseri’s analysis of colonial legal records shows that corporal punishment, as well as imprisonment in chains, was used by the colonial state to combat what he describes as African “disorder and disobedience,” whether to German government officials, white employers, or local slave-owners.28 Martin Schröder has written the most comprehensive study of corporal punishment in the colonies, which examines how colonial disciplinary laws were shaped both by experiences on the ground in Africa as well as the reverberations of colonial violence in the metropole. Schröder’s work highlights the complex ways in which colonial disciplinary policy was shaped by interactions among German officials, settlers, domestic politicians and the broader German public.29 Henry Schwirck has also done important work on corporal punishment in German Southwest Africa, in particular showing how racialized colonial legal institutions legitimated settler violence against the local African

27 See for instance, John Iliffe, Tanganyika under German Rule, 1905-1912 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969): 105-107; Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884-1914 (Helsinki: Tiedekirja, 1994):359-266; Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 196-201. 28 “The Colonial Creation of the Criminal in German East Africa,” Crime in Eastern Africa: Past and Present Perspectives, conference sponsored by the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the French Institute for Research in Africa, Naivasha, , 8-11 July, 2002: 5. 29 Martin Schröder, Prügelstraffe und Züchtigungsrecht in den deutschen Schutzgebieten Schwarzafrikas (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1997).

18 population.30 It is clear from these studies that corporal punishment was a constant of German colonialism in Africa, though at the same time, the issue of disciplinary violence and its regulation in law continued to be a subject of discussion and debate throughout the colonial period.

This study is concerned in particular with examining how white violence became the focus of tension and conflict within the German colonial community in Africa. A number of studies have examined how violence perpetrated by German colonists abroad produced friction in Imperial Germany during the colonial period, demonstrated most clearly during the two waves of colonial scandals that shook Germany in the 1890s and early 1900s. These scandals made clear that in the German metropole the boundaries of what was considered acceptable white violence in East Africa and the other German colonies were never quite settled.31

There are few studies of the role played by white violence in the conflicts between

German settlers and the colonial administration in East Africa. Norbert Aas and Harald Sippel have contributed an important work in this regard, a close examination of the trials of the

German settler Heinrich Langkopp. Their work shows how settler violence and personal conflicts

30 Henry Schwirck, “Law’s Violence and the Boundary between Corporal Discipline and Physical Abuse in German Southwest Africa,” Akron Law Review 36.1 (2003): 81-132; “Violence, Race, and the Law in German South West Africa, 1884-194,” (PhD Diss., Cornell University, 1998). 31 See for example, Frank Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse: Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Grossbritannien, 1880-1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009); Frank Bösch, “‘Are we a cruel nation?’: Colonial Practices, Perceptions and Scandals,” Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain: Essays on Cultural Affinity, ed. Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwarth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 115-142; Klaus Epstein, “Erzberger and the Colonial Scandals, 1905-1910,” The English Historical Review 74.293 (1959): 637-663; Rebekka Habermas, “Lost in Translation: Transfer and Nontransfer in the Atakpame Colonial Scandal,” The Journal of Modern History 86.1 (2014): 47-80; Rebekka Habermas, “Peitschen im Reichstag oder über den Zusammenhand von materieller und politischer Kultur: Koloniale Debatten um 1900,” Historische Anthropologie 23.3 (2015): 391- 412.

19 between settlers and local officials became intertwined at the local level, and it underlines the limitations of the colonial legal system in disciplining violent settlers.32

The present study therefore also looks to scholarship beyond the , in particular drawing from research on violence in the British overseas colonies. Elizabeth Kolsky’s study of violent Britons in colonial India, for example, shows that violent non-official white colonists also posed a problem for British colonial authorities who were concerned above all with maintaining law and order in the overseas possessions.33 Studies of corporal punishment and white violence in the British colonies in Africa and Australia have similarly emphasized the tensions white violence caused between settlers and local colonial administrations. This research reveals that officials in a number of colonies struggled to rein in violent white settlers who claimed the right to wield the whip against the empire’s indigenous subjects, and shows that colonial legal systems often failed to curb – or indeed encouraged – the violence perpetrated by white settlers in the overseas colonies.34

Essential work on violence in colonial Africa has been done by historians of Africa, and this dissertation seeks to connect with that historiography as well. In a number of works,

Mahmood Mamdani has argued that European colonial structures, particularly bifurcated legal systems, entrenched the unequal treatment of the vast majority of colonial subjects in law,

32 Norbert Aas and Harald Sippel, Koloniale Konflikte im Alltag: Eine Rechtshistorische Untersuchung der Auseinandersetzungen des Siedlers Heinrich Langkopp mit der Kolonialverwaltung in Deutsch-Ostafrika und dem Reichsentschädigungsamt in Berlin (1910-1929) (Bayreuth: Breitinger, 1997). 33 Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 34 See for instance, David M. Anderson, “Punishment, Race and ‘The Raw Native’: Settler Society and Kenya’s Flogging Scandals, 1895-1930,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37.3 (2011): 479-497; Stephen Peté and Annie Devenish, “Flogging, Fear and Food: Punishment and Race in Colonial Natal,” Journal of Southern African Studies 31.1 (2005): 3-21; Brett Shadle, “Settlers, Africans, and Inter-Personal Violence in Kenya, ca. 1900-1920s,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 45.1 (2012): 57-80; Ben Silverstein, “The ‘Proper Settler’ and the ‘Native Mind’: Flogging Scandals in the Northern Territory, 1919 and 1932,” Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economics of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim, ed. Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 89-112.

20 creating a system of “decentralized despotism” and contributing to the massive violence of the postcolonial period.35 A.B.K. Kasozi has emphasized that the advent of British colonial rule in

Uganda was accompanied by numerous forms of violence perpetrated by the colonial state and its local agents, and argues that inequalities that were hardened during the colonial period contributed to postcolonial violence.36 Toyin Falola’s work on colonial Nigeria analyzes how the numerous forms of violence that accompanied British rule supported colonial state structures, while also emphasizing that violence became an important form of resistance against British power.37 Richard Reid has situated the violence of Italian colonialism on the Horn of Africa within a much longer history of violence that accompanied local conflicts and shifting frontiers.38

Stacey Hynd and Tapiwa Zimudzi have furthermore examined how colonial courts in Southern

Rhodesia, Kenya and Nyasaland dealt with violent women in gendered and paternalistic ways that were out of step with the behaviour and agency of the women brought to trial for violent crimes.39 These varied works address different parts of the continent, but all analyze and foreground violence in ways highly instructive for histories rooted in European scholarship and sources, as this study is.

35 See for instance, Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); When Victims become Killers: Colonialism, Natavism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ and Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2002); “Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43.4 (2001): 651-664. 36 A.B.K. Kasozi, with Nakaiyike Musisi and James Mukooza Sejjengo, The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda, 1964-1985 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994). 37 Toyin Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 38 Richard J. Reid, Frontiers of Violence in North-East Africa: Genealogies of Conflict since 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 39 Stacey Hynd, “Deadlier than the Male?: Women and the Death Penalty in Colonial Kenya and Nyasaland, c.1920- 57,” Stichproben: Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien 12 (2007): 13-33; Tapiwa B. Zimudzi, “African Women, Violent Crime and the Criminal Law in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1900-1952,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30.3 (2004): 499-517.

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Chapter Outline

The first two chapters of this dissertation explore in detail the fate of the plantation manager Georg Passarge, from his arrival in German East Africa in 1891 until his ignominious departure in 1902. In July of that year Passarge was charged with unlawful detention, coercion and grievous assault against workers on his plantation at Buschirihof, in the northern Pangani region of East Africa. Originally fined 635 M by the district court in Tanga for his brutal actions, the next month the High Court in Tanga sentenced him to two months in prison. Soon after he was charged for these multiple crimes Passarge was removed as the manager at Buschirihof, fell ill and was hospitalized, and eventually left the colony in disgrace. The central contention of the two chapters is that social tensions and conflict within the German community itself played a decisive role in convincing local officials that Georg Passarge should be prosecuted for the abuses and violence he had committed on the plantation he managed at Buschirihof.

The first chapter examines Passarge’s plantation career in the Tanga and Pangani regions of German East Africa, prior to his prosecution in the colonial courts for assault. It demonstrates that before his trial for violent abuses committed on the Buschirihof plantation the veteran colonist had become enmeshed in the social tensions and conflicts within the local German community, tensions he himself did much to exacerbate. To do so, it traces the arc of Passarge’s career as a plantation manager in East Africa from a period of relative success during the 1890s to more troubled years in the early part of the new century, when he fell out with his fellow

German colonists. Over the course of his tenure in East Africa, Passarge became a disruptive figure in the German community and his vindictive behaviour and personal attacks on colonial officials and other settlers alienated him from his countrymen. Passarge was in fact first brought

22 to trial for personal insult, and wound up in the courts on multiple occasions for accusations he made against colonial officials and fellow settlers.

In the first place, this chapter examines Passarge’s trials for insult in order to better understand the conflicts in which the plantation manager became enmeshed during his tenure in

East Africa. By the time of Passarge’s trial for assault, it is suggested, he had become a thorn in the side of the local colonial administration and alienated himself from the wider German community, setting the stage for his prosecution for abusing his employees on the plantation at

Buschirihof. The analysis furthermore situates Passarge’s trials for insult within the broader landscape of honour in German colonial society through an examination of court proceedings in

East Africa involving the contemporary crime of personal insult. Such trials show that the

German colonial community was deeply concerned with issues of personal honour and insult and

German colonial society was riven by social tensions and personal conflicts that German colonists persistently turned to the colonial courts to resolve.

The second chapter focuses more narrowly on the trials of Georg Passarge for grievous assault and other crimes on the plantation he managed at Buschirihof. In the first place, it examines the court proceedings, testimony and other documents associated with his criminal trial and appeal trial in order to reconstruct the events leading up to his prosecution, including the abuses he committed against employees on the plantation. The trials revealed that Passarge had committed a number of violent acts over a period of months in late 1901 and early 1902. He was accused of assaulting several employees on the plantation, including a plantation manager who was beaten by Passarge in the face with a Kiboko rod, badly damaging the man’s eye. Passarge was also accused of forcefully confining employees on the plantation, and had bound, interrogated and beaten employees whom he suspected of theft. He was charged in the Tanga

23

District Court on eight counts of assault and two counts of unlawful detention and faced years in jail if convicted. Indicative of colonial justice in East Africa, however, Passarge was eventually found guilty on only one count of assault and one count of coercion, and the lower court punished him with a mere fine; on appeal, he was sentenced to just over two months in prison.

This chapter builds on the previous chapter’s analysis of Passarge’s history of conflict with the wider German community and its examination of the colonial courts as a site of social conflict. It is argued that the Passarge trials demonstrate how the prosecution of white violence in the German colonial legal system was shaped by, and in turn shaped, the tensions and conflicts within the local colonial community. Considering the general atmosphere of official and non- official violence in German East Africa during his more than ten years working as a plantation manager, it is almost certain that Passarge would have been party to countless incidents of quotidian violence committed against African and Indian labourers – such violence was inherent to the plantation economy and colonial rule more generally in East Africa during this time. The chapter demonstrates, however, that it was only after Passarge became entangled in conflicts with his fellow Germans – conflicts that repeatedly ended up in the colonial courts – that attention suddenly turned to his behaviour on the planation at Buschirihof. By the time of his formal charging for assault and other violent crimes in April 1902, Passarge’s relations with the local German community had reached a breaking point; several charges of insult had been levelled at him for filing what were considered malicious accusations against German officials and fellow German settlers. Having alienated the district office and made life difficult for other

Germans in the local colonial community, an investigation into his behaviour was launched after a precipitous meeting between one of his German enemies and a wounded employee from the

Buschirihof plantation. Having overstepped the boundaries of acceptable behaviour toward his

24 fellow German colonizers, Passarge, these same officials now decided, had also overstepped the boundaries of permissible violence toward the colonized.

The third chapter turns from the colonial courts to the settler-friendly press to investigate settler discourse around the issue of corporal punishment. It focuses on the most prominent newspaper in East Africa, the Deutsch Ostafrikanische Zeitung (DOAZ), and its coverage of the issue of corporal punishment in the colony. The paper’s publisher for much its existence, Willy von Roy, was an agitator for settler causes and a thorn in the side of the colonial administration, particularly the reformist governor Rechenberg, who was vilified in the pages of the DOAZ. The paper reflected its publisher’s combative stance toward the administration on issues particularly dear to the settler community, including the much-discussed “labour question” that beguiled settlers throughout the colonial period. The DOAZ became ever more politicized as the first decade of the 20th progressed, until it eventually transitioned from agitation on behalf of settler causes to become the formal mouthpiece for a settler economic and political organization for the

Dar es Salaam region. During this time the DOAZ also agitated on behalf of German settlers’ right to use corporal punishment in their dealings with the African population and vehemently protested any encroachments on the institution of corporal punishment by the colonial administration. In doing so, the paper staked out its position that flogging and whipping were integral to the success and well-being of the German settler community in East Africa.

The DOAZ’s discourse around the issue of corporal punishment delineated the settler community as uniquely positioned to determine disciplinary policy in East Africa. The paper contrasted the supposed hard-won experience and tough but realistic outlook of German settlers to the inexperience and naivety of domestic reformers and the colonial administration, arguing that critics of corporal punishment and those who sought to regulate disciplinary violence were

25 ill-suited to make such decisions on behalf of the settler community. German settlers understood better than anybody, the paper maintained, the particularities of African history and the African character that made whipping and flogging ideally suited to the colonial world. In doing so, it propagated tropes about the brutalizing effects of African history on the African mind and body, as well as racial stereotypes about the child-like and indolent African character. The paper’s coverage of corporal punishment asserted settlers’ prerogative to wield the whip based on the settler community’s supposed superior experience and knowledge of the colony’s racialized subjects, in contrast to a colonial administration it painted as under the sway of domestic reformers and colonial officials it chided for lacking the intimate knowledge of colonial conditions possessed by “old-hand” settlers.

However forthright this discourse was about the superiority of the settler community in matters of disciplinary violence, it was also shot through with the frustrations and anxieties of the settler community in East Africa. The DOAZ’s overwrought responses to any moves on the part of the colonial administration to regulate corporal punishment point to deeper concerns in the settler community, as neither the government in Dar es Salaam nor in Berlin ever made a serious effort to more carefully regulate settler disciplinary rights, let alone prohibit them outright, as the paper sometimes insinuated. The paper’s repeated criticism of the administration for tightening up rules around state-sanctioned corporal punishment were inflected by broader concerns in the settler community, particularly with regard to African labour and settler security. Settler frustrations toward the government for failing to intervene decisively to help German settlers procure and control African labour informed the paper’s demands that settlers be allowed to take matters in their own hands when it came to their African employees, to be allowed to flog them on the spot, free of cumbersome regulations and government oversight. In a similar fashion, the

26 paper repeatedly focused on the issue of African criminality to criticize the government for its lax approach to native crime and to call for a more severe disciplinary regime in East Africa. The paper painted a picture of urban centres like Dar es Salaam as overrun with African criminals and portrayed settler households in the countryside as practically under a state of siege. Settler anxieties about the safety and security of their property and lives – fears that were particularly stoked by the Maji Maji rebellion – clearly informed such reporting and the paper’s demands for a tougher justice system in East Africa.

The final chapter examines part of the photographic record of disciplinary violence in

German East Africa. A central contention of the analysis is that, while disciplinary violence was an accepted part of colonial rule, its visual representation reflected an unease on the part of

German photographers to associate such violence too closely with the Germans rulers themselves. It first considers photographs of chain gangs and floggings taken in East Africa taken by German soldiers, scientists and other travellers. In one sense, images showing African subjects chained together by the neck and prone prisoners about to be flogged documented in a direct and arresting manner German disciplinary violence in East Africa. However, such images also served to decontextualize and normalize disciplinary violence in the colony by framing out the German presence and accentuating the role played by African Askari in the execution of colonial justice. At the official level, such unease was inflected by the political fallout from the two waves of colonial scandals that focused in large part on violence committed by German officials overseas, as can be seen in the serious concern officials like Rechenberg voiced about the publication of flogging photographs in the German press. Finally, the chapter broadens the scope of analysis beyond the borders of the colony to consider photographs taken during the

German military’s war against the Herero and Nama people in Southwest Africa. In doing so, the

27 chapter considers such images against the background of a genocidal war in which few inhibitions were exhibited with regard to the visual depiction of violence and tries to show that even under these circumstances, photographs served to decontextualize and reinterpret violence as something other than what it was.

Looking at depictions of colonial violence in photographs from the period reiterates the observation that the boundaries of white violence in German East Africa were never fully settled.

If during the genocidal war in Southwest Africa there were fewer inhibitions about depicting

German involvement in colonial violence, photographers in East Africa were more reticent about depicting the German role, instead showing disciplinary violence as an institution standing at arms-length from the German colonial administration. These somewhat subtle and indirect contestations about the boundaries of white violence were more clearly manifested in the colonial courts and the settler press. In the former, the German administration – however half- heartedly in many cases – attempted to rein in the worst of the white perpetrators through the colonial legal system, while the latter served as a platform for German settlers in their attempt to define and protect corporal punishment as integral to the success and well-being of the settler community. The broader social and political tensions within the German community influenced and shaped these contestations over the boundaries of acceptable white violence in the colony that persisted throughout the period of German rule in East Africa.

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Chapter 1

Social Conflict and Colonial Law: Georg Passarge in East Africa

Introduction

This is the first of two chapters that investigate in detail the trials of Georg Passarge, a

German plantation manager who in early 1902 was charged with, among other crimes, grievous assault against workers on the plantation he managed at Buschirihof, in the northern Pangani region of East Africa. The chapters ask why, in a general atmosphere of arbitrary white violence,

Passarge’s actions on the plantation at Buschirihof were deemed to have crossed the threshold of acceptability. The central contention that unifies the two chapters is that broader social tensions in the white colonial community played a significant – and even decisive – role in bringing

Passarge before the colonial courts for violent abuses. This chapter specifically examines

Passarge’s career in East Africa prior to his trial for assault, a decade-long period in which his energetic work as a plantation manager was accompanied by conflicts with his fellow German colonists. The aggressive behaviour Passarge displayed toward German officials and other settlers and the accusations he made against them eventually landed him in court on charges of personal insult. It seeks to build the case that these conflicts in which the plantation manager became entangled, and in particular the personal animosity that developed between Passarge and local German officials, played a pivotal role in drawing attention to the violence he perpetrated on the plantation at Buschirihof and ultimately in bringing him to trial. In doing so, it argues that

Passarge’s behaviour toward his fellow Germans in East Africa alienated him from the local

29

German community and attracted the ire of local officials who would later play a central role in his eventual prosecution for assaulting his employees on the Buschirihof plantation.

This examination of Passarge’s activity in East Africa before his trial in 1902 is read against the broader social tensions and conflicts in the white community in East Africa. In particular, it looks at Passarge’s early trials alongside the wider prosecution of insult in German

East Africa to explore how local conflicts among German colonists were manifested in the colonial legal system. The analysis focuses on court proceedings involving charges of insult, including a number involving Georg Passarge, in order to examine what kinds of social tensions ran through the German community and the role played by the colonial courts in regulating conflicts among white colonists. On one level, Passarge’s trials for insult demonstrate that, from early in his tenure in East Africa, the plantation manager gained a reputation as a difficult and disruptive personality and by the time of his trial for assault had come into open conflict with the local colonial administration. From a wider perspective, the numerous trials for insult show that personal honour played a significant part in the relations among German colonists and, in particular, in fuelling conflicts among them. The court records show that such trials involved a cross section of German colonial society, indicating that the small German community in East

Africa was riven by social tensions and personal conflicts. From this perspective, the colonial courts can be viewed as at the focal point of tensions and conflicts in the local white community.

Georg Passarge’s trials also have to be considered within the specific structures of the

German colonial legal system at the local level in East Africa. For much of the colonial period, local German officials enjoyed broad authority, within guidelines set by Berlin, to exercise colonial rule in their districts as they saw fit. District officials were invested with extensive powers at the local level, particularly with regard to the colonial legal system, that the

30 geographical dispersion of the thinly-manned colonial administration and the lack of consistent oversight from central authorities served to reinforce in practice. The colonial Schauri, in which the district officer personally decided on matters of crime and punishment for the local African population, were indicative of the personalized nature of German colonial rule at the local level, where a handful of individual officials often wielded enormous powers, particularly over local

Africans who were subject to the whims of isolated officials often operating beyond the purview of regular administrative checks. However, district officials also had the power to discipline local

Germans for their unruly and disruptive behaviour and, when necessary, for the violence they committed against the African population. The broad and ill-defined laws governing white violence in the colony meant that local officials were often left to personally decide on the important matter of when such violence crossed the threshold of acceptability. In these ways local colonial officials wielded significant personal power over the exercise of the colonial legal system.

Georg Passarge’s behaviour in the period before his trial for assault on the Buschirihof plantation served to alienate him from his fellow Germans and, crucially, made him personal enemies in the local colonial administration. This chapter seeks to show how these conflicts in which the plantation manager became entangled set the stage for his later prosecution for assault by making Passarge an intolerable member of white society whom local administrators sought to discipline and even rid themselves of through the colonial legal system. Local officials became increasingly frustrated with Passarge’s behaviour in the period before he was charged with assault, in no small part because of the personal attacks the plantation manager made on local colonial officials. In the midst of his conflict with local authorities and an escalating series of accusations and trials for insult, Passarge was charged with assault on the plantation at

31

Buschirihof. This chapter seeks to demonstrate how these social and legal conflicts with local officials intersected with the administration’s decision to prosecute him for the more serious crime of assault. In making enemies with the local administration, it is argued, Passarge set the stage for his later prosecution for assaulting African workers.

The first part of this chapter outlines Passarge’s career in East Africa that spanned a decade of work in the plantation industry. During this period, Passarge worked for a number of colonial enterprises and made a reputation for himself as an energetic and industrious colonist.

Next, it looks at two early trials for insult in which the plantation manager was involved, reading these initial legal troubles against the broader background of insult and honour in German colonial society in East Africa. The analysis seeks to show the important place of male honour among German colonists and ways in which feelings of personal insult found their way into the colonial courts. Finally, the chapter turns to Passarge’s time at Buschirihof and looks in particular at two initial trials for insult in which the plantation manager was involved. Here it is shown that in the period before he was brought up on charges of assault, Passarge began targeting German colonists with insulting allegations, among them members of the local military detachment and the district administration. Eventually, the plantation manager’s temperamental personality and disruptive behaviour not only landed him in the courts but also earned him the animosity of his fellow German colonists, including those who would play a central role in bringing him to trial for assault on the plantation at Buschirihof.

Historiography

There is a small but varied scholarship focused on the colonial legal system in German

East Africa. Broader studies of the German administration in East Africa have emphasized the

32 piecemeal nature of colonial law and the broad and often arbitrary legal powers devolved upon officials who were tasked with executing colonial justice at the local level.40 Scholarship more narrowly focused on the colonial legal system has shown a particular interest in the racialized nature of the colonial legal system and the ways in which the colonial administration classified and ruled over the colony’s non-white subjects. Monographs in German, for example, have explored the establishment of colonial legal institutions, particularly during the foundational years of German rule in East Africa,41 the creation and maintenance of a legal system specifically designed to police and discipline the “native” in the colony,42 and the differentiated levels of imperial citizenship and subjecthood that were built into the colonial legal system.43 Thaddeus

Sunseri has furthermore used extant legal records to trace how the supposed criminal behaviour targeted by the German legal system shifted over time, particularly in the wake of Maji Maji.44

Scholars have also examined the ways in which local institutions like the Schauri were adapted and transformed by the East African colonial administration in order to project German power into the interior of the colony.45 There are also a select number of works that have looked in- depth at German-orchestrated trials of Africans for alleged violence, and particular interest has been raised by two cases of supposed “cannibalism” in 1908 that resulted in the execution of a number of the accused. The cannibalism cases, scholars contend, reveal ways in which African

40 See for example, Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884-1914 (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1995): 117. 41 Klaus Richter, Deutsches Kolonialrecht in Ostafrika 1885-1891 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2001). 42 Falk Weckner, Strafrecht und Strafrechtspflege für Afrikaner und ihnen gleichgestellte Farbige in Deutsch- Ostafrika (Diss., University of Jena, 2010). 43 Dominik Nagl, Grenzfälle: Staatsangehörigkeit, Rassismus und nationale Identität unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2007). 44 Thaddeus Sunseri, “The Colonial Creation of the Criminal in German East Africa,” Crime in Eastern Africa: Past and Present Perspectives, conference sponsored by the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the French Institute for Research in Africa, Naivasha, Kenya, 8-11 July, 2002. 45 Jan-Georg Deutsch, “Celebrating Power in Everyday Life: The Administration of Law and the Public Sphere in Colonial Tanzania, 1890-1914,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 6 (2002): 93-103;Michael Pesek, “Cued Speeches: The Emergence of Shauri as Colonial Praxis in German East Africa, 1850-1903,” History in Africa: An Annual Journal of Method 33 (2006): 395-412.

33 communities attempted to maneuver within the German colonial system and their dubious nature exposed the limitations and failures of German colonial knowledge.46 Generally speaking, this scholarship on the legal system in East Africa has been focused on the ways in which German power was exercised over African subjects.

There is a small body of work focused on trials of German colonists before the courts in

East Africa. Heike Schmidt, in particular, has contributed valuable studies of colonial trials that highlight the ways in which the colonial legal system regulated relations among German colonists in East Africa and, in particular, how German men sought to defend their honour in court. She argues that a crisis in German masculinity caused by the rapid socioeconomic and political changes of the late 19th century was carried over to East Africa, where the suffocating mixture of social classes in small German outposts and the continuous need to protect an unsullied image of the white male colonist caused disputes around propriety and honour to end up in the courts. German colonists, Schmidt argues, “proved their manliness in the courtroom.” 47

Schmidt has also studied the colonial trials involving Governor Albrecht Freiherr von

Rechenberg, who was accused in the colonial press of being part of a Catholic conspiracy and engaging in homosexual activities. In a long article on the ensuing scandal, she argues that the

Rechenberg case reveals how colonial courts could serve as conduits for tensions within white

German colonial society, including anxieties about colonial masculinity and the need to shield the fragilities of European power from the gaze of the colonized.48

46 See for example, Eva Bischoff, “‘Kannibalismus, wie man ihn sich scheußlicher und tierischer nicht vorstellen kann.’ Verflechtungen zwischen Kolonie und Metropole.” Werkstatt Geschichte 54 (2010): 5-26; David M. Kim, “Scandals of Translation: Cannibalism and the Limits of Colonial Authority in the Trial of (1908),” German Studies Review 34.1 (2011): 125-142; 47 Heike Schmidt, “Who is Master in the Colony?: Propriety, Honour, and Manliness in German East Africa,” German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 109-128. 48 Heike Schmidt, “Colonial Intimacy: The Rechenberg Scandal and Homosexuality in German East Africa,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17.1 (2008): 25-59.

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There are relatively few studies of prosecutions of German colonists before the colonial courts for violence committed against colonial subjects. Philippa Söldenwagner’s study of the often violent “spaces of negotiation” between Europeans and Africans contains a short section on settler violence and its prosecution in the colonial courts. Söldenwagner argues that settlers prosecuted for violent crimes against Africans were motivated by a variety of factors, including a sense of superiority over colonized peoples and the right of German employers to administer corporal punishment.49 Furthermore, she highlights structural tensions in the prosecution of

Germans and other Europeans for violence by pointing out that district courts and the High Court in Dar es Salaam were often in disagreement as to the severity with which whites should be punished – or whether they should be punished at all. However, broadly speaking there was a marked disconnect between the violence German settlers committed and the mild sentences that were often handed down by the colonial courts.50 Harry Schwirck’s dissertation on racialized settler violence in German Southwest Africa reiterates this point, arguing that the colonial courts abetted violence as much as they punished German perpetrators.51 Norbert Aas and Harald

Sippel’s study of the prosecution of the German settler Heinrich Langkopp for violence he committed in East Africa also reinforces the image of a colonial legal system that was lenient toward white violence.52 Their examination of Langkopp’s trials in Iringa, which began after he assaulted an Arab government worker with a whip, also shows that the violent abuses were entangled with personal conflicts with the local colonial administration, particularly after he

49 Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 196-198. 50 Ibid., 200-201. 51 Harry Marschall Schwirck, “Violence, Race, and the Law in German South West Africa, 1884-1914 (Diss., Cornell University, 1998). 52 Norbert Aas and Harald Sippel, Koloniale Konflikte im Alltag: Eine Rechtshistorische Untersuchung der Auseinandersetzungen des Siedlers Heinrich Langkopp mit der Kolonialverwaltung in Deutsch-Ostafrika und dem Reichsentschädigungsamt in Berlin (1910-1929) (Bayreuth: Breitinger, 1997).

35 accused officials of distorting evidence. He was eventually sentenced to jail not for the assaults he committed, but rather for insulting local German officials.53

This chapter builds on this scholarship by situating the Passarge trials against the background of social conflict in the German community. It highlights again the important place of personal honour in the social relations among German colonists, emphasizing in particular the ways in which such matters affected relations between German settlers and the local colonial administration. In part it reemphasizes the observation that the colonial courts were, broadly speaking, lenient toward violent German settlers, but tries to show how tensions between settlers and the local colonial administration could draw attention to the violence committed by German colonists against the colony’s indigenous subjects.

Passarge in German East Africa

In early November 1902, the former plantation manager Georg Passarge found himself embattled in the colonial courts of German East Africa. At this point, Passarge, already returned to Germany after having lived upwards of a decade in the colony, was intertwined in a number of charges and counter-charges and had already spent time in jail. Originally tried and found guilty in July 1902 of criminal assault (Körperverletzung) against several workers at a plantation in

Buschirihof, near Pangani in the north of the colony, he now faced four further charges of insult

(Beleidigung) against German officials in the colony, the trials for which were to begin in

December of that year.54 To top it off, there was a charge of misappropriation of business

53 Ibid., 29-74. 54 In the Imperial German legal code the word Beleidigung, which can also be translated as libel, specifically referred to insults of a personal nature. Sections 186 and 187 of the code dealt more concretely with libel and

36 materials pending against Passarge at the District Court in Tanga, filed by officials of the

Deutsche Agavengesellschaft, his former employers.55 As a result of the investigation, on his way home to Germany Passarge suffered the ignominy of having his luggage seized from a ship of the German East Africa Line and searched at the German consulate in .56

Not one to go quietly, Passarge himself had submitted a series of complaints against many of those involved in the cases against him. In September he claimed “outrageous treatment” at the hands of both the District Court in Tanga and the High Court in Dar es Salaam, particularly in regard to his imprisonment on suspicion that he might flee the colony after his initial trial.57 Particularly egregious, in his eyes, were the actions and inactions of the district officer in Pangani, Dr. Neuhaus. The conflict between the two men had been ongoing for at least most of 1902, and the complaints he filed against Dr. Neuhaus were not the first of their kind.

Among other complaints that crossed desks all the way up to the office of the Governor of

German East Africa and the Colonial Section of the Foreign Office itself, Dr. Neuhaus was said, in addition to having achieved nothing for Pangani District in two years of service, to have failed to support the local plantations, “upon whose prosperity the future of the colony depends,” and – perhaps redirecting the accusations of financial mismanagement – of attempting to “beautify” the

“insignificant little town” of Pangani.58

While Dr. Neuhaus was a focal point for Passarge’s increasingly impotent frustrations, there were others who filled the pages of his complaints submitted to colonial officials, and he seems to have spent an inordinate amount of time petitioning the Colonial Section to have his

calumny, which were deemed to damage a person’s standing in public opinion. See Ann Goldberg, Honor, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany, 1871-1914 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2010): 40-41. 55 Stuhlmann to Colonial Section, 6 November 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 26-27. 56 Wild. 30 June 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 145. 57 Passarge to Colonial Section. 10 August 1902, BArch R 1001/4815: 192. 58 Stuhlmann to Colonial Section, 25 February 1903, BArch R 1001/4816: 106.

37 sentence reduced or commuted. The intertwining accusations and petitions stretched on for years, and offices in both the colony and the metropole were still trying to get Passarge to pay for the various court costs as late as the autumn of 1905.59

By this time, Passarge had spent his savings on various fines and contestations of the charges laid against him; indeed, already in late 1903 he had been forced to move in with his brother, who himself was in financial straits and could not for long help to support him.60 The intransigence of the courts in demanding that Passarge pay for all of the court costs, he believed, would mean his “certain ruin.”61 He claimed he had lost both his health and his modest wealth in

German East Africa, circumstances he only overcame through the kindness of friends. In early

1905 his search for peace was thwarted yet again by another injunction to settle the overbearing court costs.62 It was another blow for a man who, in his own words, had for a long time made every effort to put himself in a position to settle his debts, but whose tribulations had caused him suffering and a steep decline in his health.63

At the time of his trial for assault on the Buschirihof plantation Georg Passarge was an

“old hand” colonist with a decade’s experience in East Africa. Passarge had arrived in East

Africa in 1890, and the next year began managing what was described at the time to be the first rubber plantation in German East Africa, established by a district officer in Tanga.64 This was a period of transition in the colony from the company rule of the German East Africa Company

(Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft, DOAG) to direct administration by the imperial German

59 See BArch R 1001/4817: 120-135. 60 Passarge to Colonial Section, 7 September 1903, BArch R 1001/4817: 23; Passarge to Colonial Section. 5 April 1905, BArch R 1001/4817: 114. 61 Passarge to Colonial Section, 1 November 1904, BArch R 1001/4817: 101. 62 Passarge to Colonial Director Dr. Stübel, 5 April 1905, BArch R 1001/4817: 113-114. 63 Passarge to Colonial Section, 2 April 1904, BArch R 1001/4817: 68. 64 Liebert, BArch R 1001/4815: 197; Der Tropenpflanzer: Zeitschrift für Tropische Landwirtschaft, 3.7 (July 1899): 335-336.

38 government. A year before his arrival, expeditionary forces had put down the first major uprising against the extension of German control to the East African mainland, crushing what the

Germans referred to as the “Arab revolt,” known to historians as the Abushiri rebellion or

Bushiri uprising. Beginning with disturbances at Pangani in September 1888 the rebellion spread along the coast and involved thousands of coastal and hinterland people; within two months the Germans were expelled from every town outside of and Dar es Salaam, with the former facing what came to be a months-long siege.65 The nascent German plantation economy was not spared the dislocations of the rebellion; the planters in Lewa, for example, were all forced under rebel threat to abandon their operations, leaving as the only European presence in the Pangani region.66 The Tanga region, where Passarge first established himself as a planter, was re-conquered and pacified only a year before Passarge’s arrival in the region, in July 1889.

The German plantation industry was still struggling to establish a foothold in East Africa when Passarge began his planting career. In August 1891, for example, the DOAG established the first coffee plantation in the Usambara region, where fifteen plantations were functioning by

1895.67 In 1893 an agricultural mission was sent to Florida by the DOAG, resulting in the first plantings of sisal agave, the fibres of which were used in agricultural twine and rope, also in

1895.68 Efforts to develop a cotton industry had begun in 1892, the year after the founding of the colony, with three plantations established by the DOAG in 1896. In addition to rebellion, the nascent colonial plantation industry also faced daunting natural obstacles. In 1895, for example,

65 Steven Fabian, “Locating the Local in the Coastal Rebellion of 1888-1890.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 7.3 (2013): 435. 66 Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 227, 240. 67 Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 126. 68 Rainer Tetzlaff, Koloniale Entwicklung und Ausbeutung: Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Deutsch-Ostafrikas 1885-1914. Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 1970: 62.

39 the remaining plantation at Kikogwe was abandoned after suffering the loss of draft animals to diseases and the plants to plagues of locusts.69 This was not an isolated case, particularly in the regions in the northeast of the colony where Passarge was employed during this time: plagues of locusts appeared frequently in the 1890s, causing serious damage to crops and leading to famine amongst the indigenous population.70

Investors and plantation managers faced other problems, as well, some of them self- induced. As a result of poor choice of land and poor weather conditions a coconut plantation established by the DOAG in Muoa in 1893 lost a third of its plants within four years. In Kimoni, the Westdeutsche Handels- und Plantaengesellschaft met with near-disaster when, because of difficult soil conditions and lacklustre cultivation, they lost some three-quarters of their coconut plants in five years.71 During this time the imperial government also tried its hand – somewhat half-heartedly – at setting up experimental agricultural stations, first near Dar es Salaam and then in other, more suitably fertile regions of the colony. Like other ventures in crop cultivation and plantation development in the early years of imperial rule, the initial experimental stations met with their own problems. One of the first, established near in 1893, failed after only a year when two of its scientists died under mysterious circumstances; a second station set up in West Usambara in 1896 to bring European crops to the colony simply became too much of a financial burden for the government and was sold off.72

The tribulations faced by the colonial plantation sector in general were clear by the turn of the century; by then European plantations still only represented just over ten percent of the

69 Thaddeus Sunseri, “A Social History of Cotton Production in German East Africa, 1884-1915.” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1993): 145-147. 70 Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 125. 71 Tetzlaff, Koloniale Entwicklung, 58-59. 72 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, 209-210.

40 export economy and none of the plantation projects made a profit until 1902.73 The largest and most influential of the German companies, the DOAG, was even displaying signs of malaise in its internal reports, some claiming the company’s plantation investments and projects were “a failed enterprise.”74 When one looked at the hard numbers the difficulties were obvious: in the decade after 1890 the DOAG had invested some 3.8 million M in the plantation sector, reaping the disheartening sum of 270,000 M in return.75 In German East Africa around the turn of the century, according to Juhani Koponen, the plantation economy had failed to fully replace precolonial economic relations and structures that had been destroyed since the beginning of

German rule.76

Over the course of the 1890s the German East African plantation economy was unpredictable and fragile, which in turn posed serious challenges to those men who ventured to regions where imperial capital and economies were just beginning to establish a foothold, particularly in the northeast. It appears that, particularly in the early years of the colony, more than a few men sailed for the colony imbued with a naïve, perhaps reckless pioneer spirit, only to meet failure in the foreign and difficult environmental and social conditions. As one traveler to

German East Africa wrote in 1891,

Already in the first years of the development of East Africa, before the Company could offer any guarantee for life and property, many courageous people went to the newly acquired colonies as pioneer farmers (Pioniere der Kultur), there to find their luck. Unfortunately not everyone had the same ambition and purpose to achieve something with industrious work. Thus many adventurers (abenteuerliche Existenzen) who took cultivation work much too lightly fell victim to these illusions.77

73 Tetzlaff, Koloniale Entwicklung, 126. 74 Quoted in Koponen, Development for Exploitation, 214. 75 Tezlaff, Koloniale Entwicklung, 59. 76 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, 212. 77 H.F. von Behr, Kriegsbilder aus dem Araberaufstand in Deutsch-Ost Afrika. (Leipzig, F.A. Brockhaus, 1891): 250.

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These early observations would hold true for many farmers and plantation employees until the turn of the century.

Passarge worked for a variety of plantations and other business operations during his first decade in East Africa. Initially employed on the rubber plantation in Tanga, he later moved to the

Panagani area in 1893 as a commercial representative for the DOAG.78 Later he was employed by the colonial government at experimental test sites for the growing of sisal agave.79 At the end of the decade, he became involved in a venture to set up a coconut processing plant in the colonial capital, Dar es Salaam. In March 1899 the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung reported the

“delightful news” Passarge had founded the Kokosverwertungs-Gesellschaft. A provisional committee had been established in Kassel, the paper reported, in order to raise the necessary funds; an initial capital of 250,000 M had already been invested of an overall goal of 600,000

M.80 Passarge’s new company was certainly not one of the largest enterprises in German East

Africa at this time, at least measured by the initial capital investment, but the projected investment was on a level with other plantation schemes set up by the DOAG and its affiliates, including the Usambara-Kaffee-Gesellschaft (1893) and the Sigi-Pflanzungsgesellschaft

(1897).81 Plans were in place to build a factory on the Dar es Salaam harbour for coconut processing to produce copra, or dried coconut used to extract coconut oil, with the enthusiastic hope that in the first two years of operation the coconuts would be moving rapidly through the processing plant at the rate of 80,000 a day.82 The committee behind Passarge’s new company urged that,

78 Dr. Neuhaus to the Colonial Section, Foreign Office, 17 December 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 57-58. 79 Liebert, 30 January 1897, BArch R 1001/4815: 197. 80 “Handel and Verkehr,” Deutsch Ostafrikanische Zeitung, 16 March 1899, 1. 81 Tetzlaff, Koloniale Entwicklung, 56. 82 “Handel and Verkehr,” Deutsch Ostafrikanische Zeitung, 16 March 1899, 1.

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[…] the founding of the Company should proceed, not only in the interest of useful capital investment, but rather also to free German factories that have until now been wholly dependent on England and her colonies, and thus to contribute to the solution of a national task.83

Passarge was named head of the company’s operations in Dar es Salaam. Governor Eduard von

Liebert even weighed in, saying he was “prepared to assist” the new company in “every respect.”84 Despite the enthusiasm surrounding Passarge’s new venture, the enterprise appears to have met with some difficulties. A front-page article published in the DOAZ in November 1899 noted that only sparse updates had reached the public concerning the state of what the author referred to as, “this undertaking so meaningful for our colony.”85 The paper cautioned that past attempts to set up similar industries for the utilization of coconut materials had failed due to a dearth of coconuts in the colony, so there was reason to view Passarge’s project with caution.

However, the paper argued that the prospects were extremely promising, as the company had received its first infusion of capital from overseas and shifted its focus from erecting a processing factory to establishing relatively large coconut plantations, something the planter- friendly paper much appreciated.86 Initial financial estimates produced by Passarge foresaw a plantation of 100,000 trees at a cost of 250,000 M and profits were to be modest until the ninth year, when income would leap from less than 3,000 M a year to over 70,000 M; the planting of hemp amongst the trees only promised to raise the overall value of the plantation further. The processing plant, the paper reported, would be constructed later, when the coconut plantation hit full stride. What enthusiasm the paper still showed toward the project appeared to be based on

83 Der Tropenpflanzer, 117. 84 “Handel and Verkehr,” Deutsch Ostafrikanische Zeitung, 16 March 1899, 1. 85 “Die Kokosverwerthungs-Gesellschaft für Deutsch-Ost-Afrika.” Deutsch Ostafrikanische Zeitung, 4 November 1899, 1. 86 Ibid.

43 the fact that Passarge had altered the company’s original plans, apparently reinvigorating the entire project.87

Passarge’s frequent change in positions – he would shortly again move from the coconut venture to the plantation at Buschirihof – gives the impression that his career in East Africa was one of only modest success. However, his endurance of over a decade in an unstable plantation industry that was still struggling to establish itself in the 1890s appears to have garnered the respect of his fellow German colonists. Reports carried in the local journal Der Tropenpflanzer about colonial ventures with which he was associated invariably noted his long experience in

Africa.88 In its reporting on the coconut venture in Dar es Salaam, the DOAZ credited him with being the driving force behind the reorientation of the company, during which, “after difficult struggle and energetic work, the undertaking has been assured for the good of everyone.” The paper further ventured that Passarge’s work brought to life and animated every project he was involved in.89 The energy with which Passarge approached his various colonial enterprises was noted by colonial officials, as well. In 1897, the governor of East Africa, Eduard von Liebert wrote that Passarge had “always combined willpower with great personal industriousness.”90

Later, after he had been charged and found guilty of assaulting his employees at Buschirihof, the colonial director, Bernhard von Bülow noted in a report about Passarge that “[h]is accomplishments and his energy as a planter have gained recognition.”91 Passarge’s long years of work in East Africa appear to have earned him the respect of fellow German settlers and colonial administrators alike.

87 Ibid. 88 See, for instance, Der Tropenpflanzer 3.3 (March 1899): 117; Ibid., 4.9 (September 1900): 458. 89 Ibid. 90 Liebert, 30 January 1897, BArch, R 1001/4815: 197. 91 Bülow to the Kaiser, 21 April 1903, BArch R 1001/4816: 188.

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However, another side of Passarge’s personality, one that was more aggressive and combative toward his fellow German colonists, was evident during this period as well. A series of trials involving the plantation manager that were initiated on accusations of personal insult show that Passarge was a disruptive figure who became involved in numerous conflicts with his fellow Germans. Already in 1894, shortly after his arrival in Tanga, Passarge came into conflict with a fellow colonialist, the building inspector and railway director Bernhard. The bitter exchanges escalated to the point that the two men ended up in court. On 1 June 1894 the Tanga

District Court sat to hear three cases of insult brought by Bernhard against Passarge.92 The trial revolved around a steadily escalating series of incidents in which both men made accusations with the apparent intention of ruining the reputation of the other. In one incident, Passarge spread a rumour and then officially accused Bernhard of penning an article critical of the government; in another incident, Passarge wrote a disparaging letter to Bernhard after being accused by the latter of stealing materials from a railway worksite. Rechenberg, who at the time presided over the case, noted that he had judged Passarge’s actions “much more severely” in relation to the official, written complaint not only because of the “grave insults” contained in the letter submitted to the authorities, but also because of the plantation manager’s “agitated” behaviour when he had presented his accusations before colonial officials.93 As a consequence, the plantation manager was found guilty and fined for the insults.

Passarge again ended up in court with the railway inspector Bernhard four months later, in September 1894, after an incident at the railway administration building in Tanga. Passarge had happened one day to pass by the building after visiting nearby when he ran into the railway inspector. Bernhard, who clearly felt animosity toward the plantation manager after the events

92 Names of plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses are as they appear in the original files. 93 Rechenberg Decision, 1 June 1894, BArch R 1001/4811: 101, 103.

45 earlier in the year, upon seeing Passarge gathered some African employees and ordered them to seize him in order to remove him from the property; Passarge for his part managed to break free of the grip of one of the African men who grabbed his arm. In this case it was Bernhard, rather than Passarge, who was chastised by the court for his behaviour, in particular for ordering

Africans to lay their hands on a German colonist. In his judgment Rechenberg took umbrage with what he considered Bernhard’s inducement of colonial subjects to violence against a fellow

European: “The accused, who has resided for some time in the colony,” he wrote, “must have appreciated the serious consequences for the entire existence in Tanga that might have followed had his command been obeyed.”94

The first trial for insult involving Passarge and the railway inspector Bernhard was an early indication of the plantation manager’s difficult and disruptive personality and the tensions his behaviour generated with his fellow colonists. The court singled out in particular his

“agitated” behaviour toward colonial officials as a determining factor in the judgment. By the time of his trial for assault in 1902, such behaviour was well-known to the colonial administration. The district officer Dr. Neuhaus, who was a central figure in bringing him to trial for assault, later recalled that soon after the two met in Tanga in 1893 he had been struck by

Passarge’s seeming dual personality. On the surface he was a man of “consummate manners,” but often he displayed the agitation of a “nervous, easily excitable nature.”95 The presiding judge at his trial for assault similarly made note of the plantation manager’s “nervous over-excitability”

(nervösen Überreiztheit).96 Colonial officials were in part sympathetic toward Passarge’s agitated behaviour, although it increasingly gave them headaches. In a letter he wrote on behalf

94 Ibid., 100. 95 Neuhaus to Colonial Section, Foreign Office, 17 December 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 57-58. 96 Decision, 10 July 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 41-42.

46 of Passarge in 1897, Governor Liebert for instance noted “Mr. Passarge’s occasional temper in dealings with Europeans in recent times,” but chalked it up to his long stay in the tropics and bouts of that could be alleviated through an occasional change in climate.97 Similarly, the presiding judge in Passarge’s later trial for assault considered his generally agitated nature to be a mitigating factor in his case. The plantation manager’s nervous system, he wrote, had “suffered significantly” because of his “many years of residence in the tropics,” and “excessive use of gin.”98

At the turn of the century nervous conditions attributed to the unfamiliar climate and rigours of colonial life were a widespread phenomenon amongst European communities in the tropics. As Johannes Fabian has argued, from the time explorers travelled through the interior of the African continent in the 19th century Europeans were preoccupied with the dangers of tropical environments and how to survive them. Maintaining health through cleanliness and proper clothing, for example, was thought to be crucial to surviving the strange and forbidding

African environment. Fear of the effects of strange and unpredictable temperatures, weather, and landscapes on the European body led to an obsession with sickness and “fever.” On a deeper, psychological level, however, “hygiene” meant protecting the mind through self-discipline and self-control. Fabian argues that self-discipline and self-control were important to explorers in this period not only because they were thought to help ward off the physical threats posed by tropical climate and geography, but also because they were understood as crucial to the control and disciplining of Africans. In this context, succumbing to the African environment meant loss of control over oneself and therefore the loss of the ability to rule over Africans.99

97 Liebert, 30 January 1897, BArch R 1001/4815: 197. 98 Decision, 10 July 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 41-42. 99 Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000): 58-63.

47

“Tropical neurasthenia,” as it was often diagnosed around the turn of the century, was part of a wider set of fears related to threats to European health, including disease, as well as the perceived problems of acclimatization to the intense sunlight and isolation that were thought to have deleterious effects on white constitutions.100 In the British colonial context, perceived susceptibility to nervous conditions could block a candidate’s application for colonial service, and diagnoses of tropical neurasthenia were one means by which colonial authorities regulated

British citizens in the colonies, by demarcating the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and removing those men who might become an impediment to British rule through, as Anna Crozier writes, “renegade, bizarre, or lazy (as well as genuinely neurotic) behaviors in tropical colonial outposts […].101

The German discourse surrounding the adverse effects of the tropical environment and long stays in the colonies on white constitutions was far from uniform. The term Tropenkoller was first used as a mocking term to describe colonists’ brutal behaviour in the wake of the colonial scandals of the 1890s.102 Denoting an agitation or even frenzy that overcame colonists when they succumbed to the tropical environment of the colonies, it was an ill-defined and elastic condition in German discourse. Medical professionals, for example, were divided on whether the environmental conditions of the tropics adversely affected the moral character of

Germans travelling to the colonies, or whether the brutal pathologies revealed under colonial conditions were already latent in the men themselves.103 However, the colonial administration

100 Anna Crozier, “What Was Tropical about Tropical Neurasthenia? The Utility of the Diagnosis in the Management of British East Africa,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 64.4 (2009): 519, 529- 535. 101 Ibid., 519, 539-546. 102 Stephan Besser, “Tropenkoller: The Interdiscursive Career of a German Colonial Syndrome,” Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History, ed. George Sebastian Rousseau, with Miranda Gill, David Haycock and Malte Herwig (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003): 304. 103 Ibid., 310-311.

48 became sufficiently concerned about the purported syndrome that potential candidates for service in the colonies began to be screened more carefully for signs of nervousness and irritability, in order to weed out officials who might lose control in the tropics.104 Colonial apologists in the

Reichstag latched on to Tropenkoller as something of an excuse for the excessive violence that was revealed by the colonial scandals to have been perpetrated by German colonists overseas.

The perpetrators themselves, too, sometimes sought to rationalize their brutal actions as the consequence of the tropical climate, as the one-time acting governor of Cameroon, Heinrich

Leist, did when the abuse he had committed against African soldiers and their wives came to light in the course of the scandals.105 According to Söldenwagner, claims of serious debilitations and lapses in judgment, brought on by nervous anxiety related to long stays in the tropics, were in fact the most common explanation for violence provided in colonists’ pleas for clemency. She argues that such claims were a conscious strategy on the part of the guilty, one that invoked the contemporary German discourse on the adverse effects of tropical conditions on German bodies and minds.106

However much sympathy the court showed toward Passarge at this later trial for assault on account of his long stay in the tropics, the plantation manager’s agitated behaviour nevertheless had significant social consequences. Specifically, Passarge’s agitation and his combative attitude toward other colonists, and particularly local colonial officials, had the effect of creating enemies among his fellow Germans. Already by the time of the second trial for insult, for example, Rechenberg described Passarge as Bernhard’s “enemy.”107 In large part this had to

104 Ulrike Schaper, “Tropenkoller: States of Agitation and Mood Swings in Colonial Jurisdiction in the German Colonies,” InterDisciplines 2 (2015): 91. 105 Besser, “Tropenkoller,” 305; Ulrike Schaper, “Tropenkoller,” 75-76. 106 Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 199-200. 107 Rechenberg Decision, 3 November 1894, BArch R 1001/4811: 96.

49 do with the official accusations Passarge had made against Bernhard, which constituted an attack on his character and threatened his reputation among the small community of German colonists in East Africa. An important element in this conflict between the plantation manager and railway inspector was the notion of honour, and in particular the way in which Passarge’s accusations in word and writing constituted an insult to Bernhard’s personal honour. Insults to honour were taken seriously in German East Africa, and Passarge’s later troubles with the colonial administration, which revolved around issues of honour and insult, have to be read against this broader prosecution of insults to honour in the colonial courts.

As part of the liberalization of German law in the nineteenth century, which culminated in the Imperial Code of Criminal Procedure (1877), legal reformers pushed for the expansion of the Privatklage, or right of private persons to bring their own lawsuits for personal damages before a magistrate. This was meant to check the and abuses of the state attorney’s office, and in general to circumscribe state powers, by providing individuals the legal means to defend themselves against personal harm.108 An important impetus for these developments was the notion that insults to honour, along with assault, were so pervasive in German society, and of such a personal nature, that a mechanism was required for the individual to act on his or her own behalf outside of the whims of the state prosecutor.109 As a consequence of these developments,

Beleidigung, or simple insult, was anchored in Imperial German criminal law, punishable with up to 600 M or as much as a year in jail.110 What resulted was an amalgam of traditional notions of corporate honour and the newly democratized legal institutions of the Imperial German state,

108 Ann Goldberg, Honour, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany, 1871-1914 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2010): 24-30. 109 Ibid., 27-31. 110 Karl Lüder, Strafgesetzbuch für das Deutsche Reich vom 15. Mai 1871 (Verlag Andreas Deichert, 1876): 53. Digitized at https://archive.org/details/dasstrafgesetzb00germgoog/page/n4

50 what Ann Goldberg describes as a “hybrid legal culture” that firmly entrenched honour within

German culture and within legal institutions transforming under the pressures of democratization.111 This process led to an increase in the number of cases brought to Imperial

German courts revolving around the issue of insult and injured honour, moving more and more private insults into the public courtrooms.

The specific conditions of colonial life in Africa and elsewhere sharpened European conceptions of honour both in relation to the colonized and to other Europeans. Vastly outnumbered by and fearful of the indigenous population, German communities in East Africa, like other European colonial communities on the continent, were concerned with maintaining markers of racial difference that were an integral part of colonial power. As Dane Kennedy has argued in relation to Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, defining and maintaining racial boundaries was a two-way street, not only separating the colonizer from the colonized, but also placing pressures on the colonized themselves to conform to accepted norms of behaviour and maintain lifestyles appropriate to the elevated position of the colonial European. In this context, “poor whites” and Europeans who had sexual relations with Africans became a concern of colonial authorities and society more broadly because they blurred racial boundaries and threatened to undermine the “prestige” of white settlers that was one basis of colonial rule.112 In British India a

“cult of imperial honour,” focused on individual reputation and British prestige, became a central concern of the vastly outnumbered Anglo-Indian community, serving as a principle that helped to resolve the contradictions inherent to the relationship between the rulers’ claim to moral superiority and the despotic nature of that rule in practice.113 The importance of honour to the

111 Goldberg, Honour, Politics, and the Law, 11, 36. 112 Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987): 167-186. 113 Steven Patterson, The Cult of Imperial Honor in British India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 17-77.

51 identity of the colonizers vis-à-vis Indians and the role it played in legitimizing British rule inspired intense scrutiny within the European community aimed at preserving accepted norms of behaviour. In the case of British India, being white was necessary but not sufficient to one’s belonging to the ruling class – an individual’s conformity to honourable behaviour mattered.114

Germans in East Africa were also preoccupied with honour and its preservation in the face of threats from without and within. In her analysis of the prosecution of honour in East

Africa, Heike Schmidt has argued that the crisis in German masculinity caused by the rapid economic, political and social changes in Germany in the late 19th century was carried over into the colony and complicated by the particular conditions of colonial society. On one hand, she argues, this crisis sharpened the focus on manly honour and “propriety” as bedrocks of German civilization and rule. On the other hand, the close proximity and intermingling of German men of different social classes and the pervasive presence of Africans who (in their role as personal servants, for example) were privy to the intimate lives of the rulers brought out tensions in colonial society centred on insults to masculine honour. In other words, masculine honour was important in German colonial society because both masculine identity and the colonial order were fragile, and this fragility was exacerbated by concerns that German prestige be maintained under the ever watchful eyes of the subject African population.115

The prosecution of insult and related honour-based crimes such as defamation and slander was widespread in German East Africa. Quarterly and yearly reports from district courts show that cases were tried on a continuing basis and accusations brought forward by men from any number of professional and social groups of Germans and other Europeans for the various

114 Ibid., 212. 115 Heike Schmidt, “Who is Master in the Colony?” German Colonialism in a Global Age, ed. Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014): 109-128.

52 crimes falling under the heading of Beleidigung appear to have been second in number only to assault.116 A quarterly report of the Tanga District Court from July 1905 lists a total of five prosecutions of Europeans (Nichteingeborene): one for carrying a rifle without a license; one for theft; and three for slander or insults to honour brought to the court through Privatklage.117

Another report from Tanga covering the first quarter of 1907 noted prosecutions of seven men: three for assault, three for insult, and one for fraud.118 The third quarterly report from the High

Court in Dar es Salaam for 1906 list only two cases, against the mechanic Wilhelm Wiener and the foreman Ernst Goertz, both on charges of insult.119

Prosecutions for insult in East Africa involved Germans of all social classes. Court records show that men from a variety of backgrounds became involved in disputes with their fellow colonists, the nature of which they felt did harm to their personal honour. In March 1904, for example, government clerk Otto Götz took the engineer C.F. Weigel to court for insult. A month later, the innkeeper L. Gierra laid charges against the train conductor Albert Fecker for libel.120 In September 1905 a cartwright by the name of Gustav Wolff charged Sailer, a butcher, with insult.121 The following February, a drugstore chemist and merchant, W. Müller, charged the settler Willy Jaeckel with insult and.122 A number of planters were also involved in cases involving insult, indicative of the stresses and strains of the plantation industry in East Africa. In

116 Kriminalstatistik Übersicht über die im Berichtsjahre 1909/10 gegen Nichteingeborene ergangenen Strafurteile, N.D., BArch R 1001/5098: 200. 117 Ergänzende Übersicht über die in Strafsachen gegen Nichteingeborene erlassenen Urteile des Bezirksgerichts Tanga für das I.-IV. Vierteljahr 1904, 5 July 1905, BArch R 1001/5098: 65. 118 Übersicht über die in Strafsachen gegen Nichteingeborene Erlassenen Urteile des Bezirksgerichts Tanga für das I. Vierteljahr 1907, 10 May 1907, BArch R 1001/5098: 119. 119 Übersicht über die in Strafsachen gegen Nichteingeborene erlassenen Urteile des Obergerichts Daressalam für das III. Vierteljahr 1906, 25 October 1906, BArch R 1001/5098: 105. 120 R 1001/5098: 65. 121 Übersicht über die in Strafsachen gegen Nichteingeborene erlassenen Urtile des Bezirksgerichts in Daressalam für das II. Vierteljahr 1905, 30 October 1905, BArch R 1001/5098: 75. 122 Übersicht über die in Strafsachen gegen Nichteingeborene erlassenen Urteile des Obergerichts Daressalam für das I. Vierteljahr 1906, 23 April 1906, BArch R 1001/5098: 88.

53

July 1904 two planters took their feud to court when H. Bötzow in Sakkarani charged A.

Brunnhof in Kihuhui with insulting his honour.123 In a more protracted case a year earlier, the plantation owner Hermann Mismahl was mixed up with a plantation assistant by the name of

Daebler, as both charged the other with insult in the Tanga District Court in June 1903, Mismahl receiving an additional charge of defamation. Two days later, Mismahl was back in court, charged alongside the foreman Goertz, again for insult and defamation against Daebler. The criss-crossing accusations later made their way to the High Court in Dar es Salaam.124 In another case from 1909 the planter M. Dietert, already facing what were becoming crushing debts to three different firms – “with all of the other difficulties that I have to bear here,” he wrote – received a letter from one of the creditors, the DOAG, extending his repayment schedule but pre- emptively denying him extra credit. Later, his pride wounded, Dietert awoke in a rage in the middle of the night and, in a “senseless, unjustifiable act,” wrote what he called an “atrocious letter” full of insulting statements to R. Thieke, a representative of the DOAG. Despite his remorse, he was fined the maximum of 600 M.125

While many of the inciting incidents leading to charges of insult may have been petty or inconsequential, some trials appear to have been the consequence something approaching a scandal in local colonial society. In late 1911, for example, the Swedish settler Walter Bucher,

123 Ergänzende Übersicht über die in Strafsachen gegen Nichteingeborene erlassenen Urteile des Bezirksgerichts Tanga für das I.-IV. Vierteljahr 1904, 5 July 1905, BArch R 1001/5098: 65. Interestingly, an additional charge of “libelling an official” (Beamtenbeleidigung) was laid according to Paragraph 193 of the Criminal Code, although how and why the dispute between these two planters related to official colonial matters is unclear. Whatever the case, the crime had been formally abolished with the passage of the Criminal Code in 1877; however, in one of the many anomalies of Imperial Germany, in practice prosecutions on the basis of Paragraph 193 were “ubiquitous.” See Goldberg, 33-34, 81-83. 124 Übersicht der Verurteilungen von Europäern während des II. Vierteljahrs 1903 (Bezirksgericht Tanga), 9 October 1903, BArch R 100/5098: 17; Verzeichnis der durch das Kaiserl. Obergericht Dar-es-Salaam im IV. Vierteljahr 1903 erfolgten Aburteilungen, 15 February 1904, BArch R 1001/5098: 27. 125 Governor Rechenberg to Colonial Section, 25 September 1909, BArch R 1001/4797: 3-4; M. Dietert to District Court in Tanga, 26 June 1908, BArch R 1001/4797: 4-5.

54 who ran a rubber plantation he claimed employed some 500 workers, was tried for libel against several European women.126 While the files regarding his plea for clemency do not state explicitly what the precise nature of his crime was, it is clear that he had run afoul of his

European neighbours in Tanga, particularly a group of women about whom he was tried and convicted of circulating malicious rumours. Apparently his actions had caused quite a stir, because the authorities took the insult to the women’s honour very seriously: he was not only found guilty and sentenced to six months in prison, but also expelled from the colony altogether.127 As acting Governor Wilhelm Methner noted at the time, “in consideration of the danger posed to the public by the incidents (Treiben) and the gravity of the insults,” the prosecutor at the appeal hearing had called for Bucher to be jailed for three years; a technicality meant that in the end he was only sentenced to six months.128 High Court Judge Vortisch hinted at the waves caused by the Bucher scandal in local colonial society, arguing that, “in keeping with the sense of justice of the European population in the , the substance of the defamatory remarks made by (Bucher) and the manner in which the rumours were disseminated in Tanga demand a strict punishment (strenge Ahndung).”129 For his part, Bucher claimed that his accusers had themselves subsequently besmirched his good name. Whatever he may be accused of, he complained, “today I am forced to believe that the opposing parties deployed everything in order to ruin me and to set me in the darkest light.” All of this befell him at a time when, “out of a love for the conditions in Africa,” and by means of the work on his rubber plantation of 300 hectares, he was doing his part “to bring European culture to the land.”130 A

126 Walter Bucher to Reich Chancellor, 4 January 1912, BArch R 1001/4838: 16-17. 127 Acting Governor Methner to State Secretary, Colonial Office, 22 November 1911, BArch R 1001/4838: 9. 128 Ibid., 8. 129 Vortisch to Governor, 27 October 1911, BArch R 1001/4838: 11. 130 Walter Bucher to Imperial Chancellor, 4 January 1912, BArch R 1001/4838: 15-18.

55 few months prior Judge Vortisch noted curtly that Bucher – perhaps summing up the official view of Bucher’s noble endeavours on behalf of the civilization – had earned “the reputation of a drinker.”131

Somewhat surprisingly, charges of Beleidigung were not strictly confined to the German community. In seemingly exceptional circumstances, non-Europeans could also have charges of insult submitted on their behalf. In June of 1899 an Askari by the name of Idriss Hamed was patrolling a neighbourhood somewhere in Tanga when he noticed that a street was covered in

“dirt, paper and the like.” When he began organizing the cleaning of the street, sending for locals to come and sweep up, the merchant Herr Ohland became angry when told one of his African servants should help with the sweeping and exchanged heated words with Hamed, eventually lunging at him with balled up fists. Later, a charge of insult against Ohland was filed on

Hamed’s behalf.132 Although the authorities thought Hamed’s actions were regrettably too independent-minded and perhaps even high-handed for an African policeman, nevertheless they also felt that, more generally, the “authority of the Askari in service as security officials must be protected,” and thus a charge had to be laid.133 Another case in early 1904 involved a district secretary, Fritz Langheld, who “in a nervous upsurge” had “allowed himself to be carried away by extreme anger” (schwer gereizt hinreissen lassen) and hit a soldier in the colonial

Schutztruppe. The exact circumstances of the physical upbraiding Langheld delivered to the soldier are unclear. However, as a result of the blow a commander in the colonial force laid a charge against him for insult with violence.134 For reasons the remain unclear the issue stretched on for several years and the High Court in Dar es Salaam only heard the case in March 1907;

131 Vortisch to Governor, 27 October 1911, BArch R 1001/4838: 11. 132 Strafsache gegen Kaufmann Ohland, Beleidigung, 23 June 1899, BArch R 1001/4840: 3-4. 133 Ibid., 19 June 1899, BArch R 1001/4840: 1. 134 Fritz Langheld to Reich Chancellor, 15 June 1908, BArch R 1001/4828: 3.

56

Langheld filed his plea for clemency as late as mid-1908. In his comments on the case sent to the

Colonial Office, Rechenberg argued that, much like in the case of the Askari Hamed, German administrators had a responsibility to uphold the integrity of Africans serving the colonial state.

As he wrote, “Brutal offences against natives merit strict punishment, particularly if it involves excesses by European officials against coloured military officers.”135 It would appear from the above two cases that under certain circumstances German honour could extend to African functionaries of the colonial apparatus as representatives and watchmen of German power and prestige.136

The most spectacular prosecution for insult involved the Governor of German East Africa himself, Albrecht Freiherr von Rechenberg. In November 1910, after a number of years of conflict with the settler community and its representatives over his reform policies following the

Maji Maji rebellion, Rechenberg filed charges of defamation of character against the editor of the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung, Willy von Roy.137 The case revolved, at least in part, around an article published by the paper in July 1910 attacking the government in Dar es Salaam that referred to the Governor’s own office as the Methner-Konzern and claimed that “an

Eulenburg scandal could easily spread in Dar es Salaam.”138 Wilhelm Methner was Governor

Rechenberg’s right-hand-man and the label was a clear reference to the recent Eulenburg

Konzern scandal in the imperial capital in which accusations were levelled that Philip Fürst zu

Eulenburg-Hertefeld was controlling a shadow government behind the throne and part of a

135 Rechenberg to Colonial Office, 6 March 1909, BArch R 1001/4828: 9. 136 On the important role of the Askari in German East Africa see Michelle Moyd, “Bomani: African Soldiers as Colonial Intermediaries in German East Africa, 1890-1917,” German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014): 101-113; Michelle Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014). 137 Schmidt, “Colonial Intimacy,” 33-34. 138 Ibid., 36, 37.

57 homosexual clique with Kaiser Wilhelm II himself.139 In East Africa, accusations of homosexuality spread across the colonial administration through gossip and public denunciation in the papers, African witnesses were paid to spy on high-ranking colonial officials, and there were even claims of a Catholic conspiracy at the heart of the government in German East Africa.

In the end, Roy was found guilty of public defamation and slander and sentenced to six months imprisonment; immediately following the appeal hearing, he was also ordered deported from the colony.140

The record of trials for insult reveal the seriousness with which personal honour was treated in German colonial society in East Africa, as well as that many of the conflicts among

German colonists were fuelled by feelings of personal insult. The trials of 1894 show Passarge was one of many German men who became entangled in conflicts over matters of personal honour that ended up in the courts, while also showing that such conflicts could escalate – at least in the eyes of German officials – into dangerous confrontations among German colonists. In the context of the broader prosecution of insult in East Africa, Passarge’s original accusations against Bernhard that had led to the trial in the first place represented a serious breach of the masculine code in East Africa. It is perhaps not surprising that by the second of the two trials involving the men, the presiding judge, Rechenberg, noted that Passarge had made an enemy in the railway inspector Bernhard.

It was against this background of the steady prosecution of insult, defamation, slander and libel in the intimate colonial society of East Africa that Georg Passarge began to run afoul of the administrative authorities. In early 1901, more than a year before he was tried for assaulting

139 Ibid., 36-37; For the Eulenburg scandal see Isabel V. Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II 1888-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): 109-145. 140 Schmidt, “Colonial Intimacy,” 49.

58 several of the workers on his plantation, Passarge began submitting complaints against

Europeans he felt were conspiring to make his life difficult, the contents of which were considered injurious to his targets’ honour. Indeed, the accusations were of such a nature that he was brought to trial on 7 January 1902 at the District Court in Tanga on three counts of insult; although the records for these cases – which most likely were tried together during one hearing at that date – are not contained in the files, Passarge appealed the verdicts and thus a second trial was held in Dar es Salaam as late as 6 December 1902, by which time Passarge had already left

East Africa and returned to Germany.

His first two targets were Medical Sergeant Schirpke and the survey assistant Sitte, against whom Passarge filed complaints on 17 February 1901. The letter he submitted to the authorities contained accusations that appear to have been calculated to embarrass and aggravate the local authorities. In the complaint Passarge claimed that Sitte, who at the time was conducting measurements of his plantation in Buschirihof, travelled to Pangani on the pretence of fetching some money but in reality went for an appointment with Schirpke, the medical specialist. Shortly afterward Sitte was admitted to the hospital – in Passarge’s words,

“supposedly with a fever.”141 Here Passarge spelled out his suspicions regarding Sitte’s supposed fever. “I say supposedly,” he wrote, “because if [the fever] was really present it must have served as a cloak (Deckmantel) for a venereal disease (geschlechtliche Erkrankung) […] because

Sitte complained for weeks about a swelling in his groin (Leistendrüsenschwellung) that stemmed not from overwork but from gonorrhoea.” Further proof of Sitte’s illness Passarge found shortly thereafter when Sitte returned from the hospital to again take up his duties on the plantation: after only three days of his measurement work Sitte once again had to cease his

141 Obergerichtlichen Urteil: Gründe, 6 December 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 125.

59 activities. And this after, Passarge went on, “he himself told me that it wasn’t strenuous for him

[…]”142 At this point Passarge told Sitte in writing that, because of his venereal disease, he should turn over all of the work to another assistant.

Not content simply to embarrass Sitte with accusations of having contracted gonorrhoea and then to fire him from his survey work on the plantation, Passarge turned on Medical

Sergeant Schirpke. He made the further accusation that, under questioning from the district officer, Schirpke maintained that Sitte’s illness was a simple fever and had, “contrary to duty reported to his senior administrative officer the falsehood about Sitte’s sickness,” and thus had,

“intentionally concealed the only important (einzig wesentliche) sickness, namely the venereal disease.”143 The implication was clear: the two men had, for some unknown reason, conspired to hide the true nature of Sitte’s sickness from Passarge and the authorities.

At the original hearing on 7 January 1902 at the Tanga District Court Passarge was found guilty of insulting Medical Sergeant Schirpke but acquitted of the charge of insulting Sitte.

Somewhat surprisingly, the High Court overturned the original verdict and thus Passarge was acquitted on both charges. On one hand, the court pointed out that, on the basis of witness testimony from Chief Staff Physician (Oberstabsarzt) Dr. Steuber, Schirpke, Sitte and the survey assistant Hamm it was clear that Sitte did not suffer from a venereal disease.144 On the other hand, the court sympathized up to a point with Passarge’s concerns regarding the pace and quality of the work being performed on his plantation. As the judgment noted, Sitte had been commissioned by the local government to survey the area of the Agavengesellschaft, the company the employed Passarge; that the company was to shoulder the costs of the survey work

142 Ibid. 143 Ibid. 144 Ibid.

60 meant that Passarge was understandably worried that any prolongation of the work through repeated illness would raise such costs. Furthermore, the court sided with Passarge in arguing that, “It is not to be denied here that it would have been of concern for the assessment of Sitte’s behaviour if it had proven true that he had a venereal disease and had wished to hide this fact.”145

Again, while the judgment was clear in stating that Sitte had not in fact contracted a venereal disease – the testimony to the contrary was overwhelming, in this regard – the court appeared convinced that Passarge believed this was the case. From “various observations,” according to the court, Passarge became convinced that Sitte had a venereal disease. Accordingly, when

Passarge saw Sitte and Schirpke at his plantation shortly before the sickness became apparent and they called out to each other, “See you again,” “it ultimately convinced him that they had made an appointment in order to conceal the venereal disease.”146 For these reasons Judge

Ziegler decided that Passarge’s challenge to Schirpke’s diagnosis did not cross the boundaries of the acceptable safeguarding of his legitimate business interests.

Furthermore, the court could find no solid evidence that Passarge’s complaints, either in their specific form or in the circumstances attendant upon them, constituted an insult to Medical

Sergeant Schirpke specifically. However, the court was none too pleased with Passarge’s actions and felt they reflected poorly on his attitude towards and relations with his fellow Europeans. In general, the reproach was justified that Passarge had “levelled accusations against others based merely on more or less empty conjectures and thereby did not pay sufficient respect to the honour of his fellow men.”147 Furthermore, something of Passarge’s reputation in the local colonial community was acknowledged when the court specifically discounted his well-known

145 Ibid., 126. 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid.

61 temper as evidence that he was acting from something other than concern for his plantation. As the verdict pointed out, evidence for insult “above all can not be taken from the situation alone, that the accused – known to the court – was of an easily excitable nature and it could be expected of him, that with his complaint he had something other than the safeguarding of his legitimate interests in mind.”148 Therefore, while according to the letter of the law (as interpreted by the

High Court, in opposition to the district court) Passarge had not committed an outright punishable insult in his accusations directed at Schirpke, the court could not avoid pointing up his generally disrespectful behaviour toward colonial officials and noting his by now established reputation as a man with a nervous, irritable temperament.

Less than a month later Passarge was again making accusations against a colonial official, this time the acting authority at the District Office in Pangani, Government Secretary

Müller. It appears that by this time working conditions on his plantation in Buschirihof had deteriorated to the point that African labourers were simply running away. Sometime in late

February or early March of 1901 Passarge sent a messenger by the name of Maliyamacho to the district office with a list of names of runaway workers and a request for the authorities to look into the matter and to ask their colleagues in Tanga to do the same. Shortly thereafter the same messenger returned to Buschirihof with a letter from Müller stating that Maliyamacho was travelling to Kikogwe, Tanga and Muheza in order to locate the runaways and that help in this task was requested. To Passarge’s chagrin, the official letter that was delivered to him after his initial request said nothing of any actions that Müller might take on his own behalf. In addition,

Maliyamacho himself, rather than pursue the runaways in the areas demarcated by the letter from the district office had simply returned to the plantation at Buschirihof after speaking with

148 Ibid.

62

Müller.149 Passarge’s response, contained in a letter he sent to the district office on March 4, gives some indication of the difficulties he might have been experiencing on his plantation and the envious eye he turned toward other plantations in the district. Frustrated with what he considered the lack of initiative taken by Müller to pursue his complaint, Passarge wrote that, amongst other things, “It appears that the current representative of the Imperial District Office has an interest in supporting the Kikogwe plantation with runaways (Wegläufer).”150

It is perhaps not surprising that Passarge might come to the conclusion that the nearby

Kikogwe plantation run by the DOAG was receiving some kind of clandestine aid from the local government at the expense of the plantation he managed in Buschirihof for the Deutsche-

Agavengesellschaft. Steadily expanded from agricultural grounds originally established by the

DOAG in 1887, the Kikogwe plantation faced its own difficulties in the 1890s. By 1895 hopes were high that the plantation could serve as a major cotton-growing enterprise, but within a very short period of time steep development costs, declining international cotton prices, and the obstinacy of the soil itself had rendered the operation hopeless and the managers were forced to change the direction of the plantation and diversify the crops.151 At around this time these types of problems were not unique to the Kikogwe plantation as the colonial plantation industry as a whole was only just beginning to turn a profit. However, whatever frustrations and failures the managers faced at the turn of the century, these do not appear to have been caused by shortages of labour. As Juhani Koponen notes, the DOAG’s Kikogwe plantation was one of the very few plantations in the colony that never experienced labour shortages.152 While African contract labourers did not earn as much money there as they could have elsewhere, the lower wages were

149 Ibid., 123. 150 Ibid. 151 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, 205; Tetzlaff, Koloniale Entwicklung, 59. 152 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, 350.

63 offset by the less strenuous workload and the unusually gentle nature of the Danish manager.153

Thus the plantation was not only adept at attracting African labourers but also in retaining these same labourers with relatively humane working conditions. Facing the problem of African workers running away from his own plantation, Passarge suspected that these men were fleeing to plantations like that in Kikogwe where the workers appeared relatively content; that the district authorities did not appear to be going out of their way to aid him in securing labour for the Buschirihof plantation caused Passarge to turn his anger on colonial officials.

For its part, the court found the allegation directed toward the district office to be not only offensive but also ignorant of the actual steps taken by Müller to locate the workers. In reality, immediately upon receiving Passarge’s first letter Müller ordered the local police sergeant to search Pangani and the surrounding area for the runaway workers; furthermore, he instructed the same Maliyamacho – the only person, the court pointed out, who knew the men they were searching for – to continue on to Pangani and to notify the authorities there if he were to find the men so that they might be taken into custody.154

For High Court Judge Ziegler, two important questions were raised by the incident. First, did Müller in fact do enough in his official capacities to aid Passarge in his search for the runaway labourers? Second, was Passarge’s letter to Müller written in the spirit of safeguarding the “justifiable interests” (berechtigte Interessen) of his plantation? To the first question, the court wondered whether Maliyamacho “was up to the independent task given to him by the

District Office,” and whether the instructions were sufficiently clear. There appears to have been some doubt on the part of the court as to whether this African messenger was competent to conduct a semi-official search for runaways; the fact that Maliyamacho thereafter turned back

153 Ibid. 154 Obergerichtlichen Urteil: Gründe, 6 December 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 123-124.

64 and returned to Buschirihof without first having pursued the task given him by Müller demonstrated to the court that, “the district court representative in fact erred in his judgment.”155

In regard to the second question Judge Ziegler felt that the circumstances did indeed indicate that Passarge may have acted in the best interests of his enterprise when he complained to the district office that the authorities had not done their upmost to help him with his search.

The court took into consideration the fact that Maliyamacho simply turned around and returned to Buschirihof after speaking with Müller and arrived with no further information, and raised the possibility that Passarge was convinced by this that the district office was not doing enough to help to locate the runaways. However, the court’s sympathy with Passarge’s dilemma only extended so far. Judge Ziegler pointed out that Passarge himself could not sustain his own claim that the district office was conspiring to support the Kikogwe plantation with Passarge’s runaways. What really damned Passarge in this case, however, were his own words, contained in the letters he sent off to Müller before the full details of the authorities’ actions on his behalf became clear. In the court’s opinion, Passarge’s intentions were abundantly clear:

[…] as the entire letter was composed in a tone of animosity and irony, the court arrived at the conviction that the accused’s rebuke had nothing at all to do with the safeguarding of legitimate interests, but rather with it he wanted merely to air his resentful and hostile disposition toward the representative of the district office.156

Passarge’s anger and frustration toward local officials was clearly a concern of the court, which chastised the plantation manager for representing his personal resentments as concern for the plantation he managed at Buschirihof.

By early 1902, it is clear, Passarge’s “resentful and hostile disposition” was well-known to colonial officials who were forced to deal with him on a day-to-day basis. The plantation

155 Ibid., 124. 156 Ibid.

65 manager had become involved in conflicts with men attached in different ways to the local colonial administration, including Schirpke, part of the local military detachment, and Müller, the acting authority in the district office in Pangani. Passarge’s accusations against these men had eventually landed all three in court. That these trials ended with guilty verdicts against

Passarge shows that, as least in the eyes of local legal authorities, Passarge had no basis for stirring up such trouble with the colonial administration. The judgments further made note of

Passarge’s difficult and disruptive temperament, as well as his personal resentments toward local colonial officials. The behaviour the plantation manager had demonstrated several years earlier in his confrontations with the railway inspector, Bernhard, reappeared in his conflicts with local authorities while he was manager of the plantation at Buschirihof. This pattern of behaviour was to come back to haunt him shortly after this second set of trials for insult, when the targets of his resentments turned their attention to the violence he was committing on the plantation.

This chapter has sought to read the colonial career and trials of the plantation manager

Georg Passarge against a broader analysis of honour and the prosecution of insult in German

East Africa. The preceding examination of trials for insult in East Africa has sought to emphasize the important place of personal honour in German colonial society, as well as the ways in which notions of honour and feelings of insult fuelled social conflicts among individual German colonists. It has also tried to demonstrate the ways in which German colonists sought to regulate matters of personal honour through the colonial courts and the seriousness with which the colonial courts dealt with such matters. Passarge himself was involved in a number of these trials, first in 1894 when he levelled insulting allegations against the railway inspector, Bernhard, and then some years later after he began accusing men associated with the local administration of

66 interfering with his work at Buschirihof. In the context of the white masculine society of East

Africa, these conflicts were considered sufficiently serious to be taken up by the colonial courts.

A central contention, which connects this chapter to the one following, is that Passarge’s behaviour toward his fellow German colonists played a significant role in his eventual prosecution for assault. This chapter has tried to show that Passarge was a difficult and disruptive figure who by early 1902 had become entangled in personal conflicts and legal troubles with his fellow German colonists, including men attached to the military and local colonial administration. The seriousness of these personal conflicts, and the threat they posed to the honour of the men involved, is indicated by the trials that were held as a consequence. However, as will be seen, these attacks on the honour of his fellow German colonists had other repercussions, as well, as the same men he had displayed such animosity toward would play a central role in bringing to light the violent abuses he had committed on the plantation at

Buschirihof.

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Chapter 2

Crossing the Line: Georg Passarge in Court

Introduction

This chapter delves deeper into the immediate circumstances surrounding the trial for assault in 1902 of Georg Passarge, a plantation manager at Buschirihof in the Pangani region of colonial East Africa. In April of that year, the district officer submitted a list of twenty-five charges he felt Passarge should be brought up on, including unlawful detention and grievous assault perpetrated against workers on the plantation; in the end, the plantation manager was charged on eight counts, including assault. The trial itself revealed that Passarge had over the course of several months beaten and injured several workers on the plantation, and in two cases had forcibly bound and beaten two workers he suspected of theft. At his first trial before the

Tanga District Court, Passarge was found guilty on three charges of assault and one charge of coercion. Although the crimes carried stiff penalties if he were to be found guilty, including a potential lengthy incarceration, the court merely sentenced him to a fine. Colonial authorities were unhappy with the verdict of the lower court, however, and on appeal at the High Court in

Dar es Salaam that summer, Passarge was given just over four months jail time for the abuses he had committed on the plantation. Having lost his position as plantation manager as a result of these legal troubles, Passarge left the colony not long after his trials for assault.

Passarge’s initial trial for assault and the punishment handed down by the district court were typical of colonial justice in East Africa, where the courts routinely showed leniency toward white perpetrators of violence against the African population. The lenient sentences

68 handed down to German perpetrators reiterate the fact that white violence was a normalized feature of German colonial rule in East Africa. This was perhaps manifested most clearly in the disciplinary powers granted to non-official German colonists, who were permitted to physically punish their African employees, beyond the official purview of the colonial state. However lenient the courts were toward German settlers, however, the fact that cases of assault involving white perpetrators were brought before the courts at all raises the question as to why, amongst the generalized violence of German East Africa, particular perpetrators were targeted by authorities for prosecution in the first place. In large part, the actions of the perpetrators themselves, whose violence could reach pathological levels, forced the hand of colonial authorities concerned with the maintenance of peace and order in the regions under their administration. Furthermore, the notoriety gained back in Germany by particularly brutal perpetrators, like the East African plantation manager Friedrich Schröder, and the negative attention such cases drew to the colonial administration – particularly when it was revealed that colonial officials had dragged their feet in addressing the violence – would have encouraged officials to at least try to rein in the worst of the perpetrators, if only to protect the image of the colonial administration itself.

This examination of the Passarge trials makes the case that social tensions in the German colonial community also played a significant role in the prosecution of white violence in East

Africa. It seeks to show that in the months leading up to his trial for assault, Passarge made enemies with a number of local colonists, including colonial officials, and alienated himself from the local German community with his temperamental and vindictive behaviour. During this time

Passarge became entangled in bitter confrontations with his fellow colonialists, exchanging accusations and insults and eventually forcing the local courts to intervene. As was shown in the

69 previous chapter, Passarge’s targets included members of the local military detachment and colonial administration, and in the subsequent trials the plantation manager’s hostile attitude toward local German officials was highlighted as a motivating factor behind his insulting behaviour. This chapter seeks to build on this narrative by showing how the accusations Passarge made against these men, and his continued aggressiveness toward his fellow German colonists after these initial trials for insult, intersected with events on the plantation at Buschirihof to convince local officials that he should be tried for the violence he had perpetrated against his

African employees. It shows that the escalating series of accusations Passarge made against his fellow German colonists played an important role in drawing the local district officer’s attention to Passarge’s disruptive and antagonistic behaviour. Amidst these conflicts, the medical sergeant,

Schirpke, one of primary targets of Passarge’s aggression, happened upon an injured supervisor from the Buschirihof plantation, initiating the process that would end in the plantation manager’s trial for assault.

The Passarge trials demonstrate how the German colonial legal system was shaped by, and in turn shaped, the tensions and conflicts within this local colonial community. The pervasiveness of white violence in German East Africa meant that it is almost certain that

Passarge would have been witness to and involved in numerous incidents of violence committed against African and Indian labourers – violence was a mainstay of German colonial rule and the plantation economy in East Africa. However, it was after Passarge came into conflict with his fellow Germans that his behaviour on the planation at Buschirihof began to attract the attention of local authorities. By April 1902, Passarge’s relations with the local German community had soured and he faced or was facing several charges of insult and he had alienated himself from the district office with his behaviour. Having overstepped the boundaries of acceptable behaviour

70 toward his fellow Germans, Passarge was deemed to have crossed the threshold of permissible violence at Buschirihof.

This chapter therefore focuses in on the micro-historical level of colonial law in practice, and in doing so reveals how colonial legal institutions were embedded in these crosscutting tensions in white colonial society. At the local level in German East Africa one can glimpse how racialized violence on plantations was entangled with tensions in white colonial society, as well as how the wide-ranging and arbitrary powers of local officials could be directed at both

Africans and Europeans thought to pose a threat to the colonial social order. In German East

Africa, where official and non-official violence perpetrated against Africans was widespread, the boundaries of acceptable violence were shaped and delimited by officials on the ground, and these officials and the legal institutions they represented in turn were embedded in the social tensions that shaped white colonial society. Colonial officials’ reaction to violence perpetrated by one of their own was influenced both by the assumptions and imperatives of white rule, as well as the conflicts amongst the colonists themselves. In other words, at the local level of colonial legal institutions, personalities mattered.

The chapter first steps back to consider the functioning of colonial law at the local level in East Africa. The personalized nature of German colonial rule outside the colonial capital meant that district officers were invested with broad powers to decide upon legal matters as they saw fit. Living in tiny communities of German colonists, district officials were also privy to all the infighting and conflict that was a feature of colonial society. This is made clear in the case of the Passarge assault trial, as local officials became entangled in conflicts with the temperamental plantation manager who blamed his troubles in part on the local colonial administration. The analysis then moves on to the different accusations levelled by Passarge against the his fellow

71

German colonists following his initial trials for insult in order to piece together the different conflicts in which he was involved in the months before he was charged with assault. The central contention of this section is that the accusations Passarge made against other German colonists, and in particular those levelled against the medical sergeant Schirpke, played an important role in motivating the local district officer to move against the plantation manager after it was discovered he had injured an employee on the plantation at Buschirihof. The final two sections examine Passarge’s trials before the district court in Tanga and later before the High Court in

Dar es Salaam. They seek first to outline the violent abuses for which Passarge was brought up on charges of assault, and then to show the ways in which the two courts interpreted the plantation manager’s crimes. Particularly during his first trial, Passarge was shown leniency by the court for the violence he had committed at Buschirihof, indicating that even difficult and disruptive figures in the settler community were still looked on with some sympathy by legal authorities charged with exercising colonial justice at the local level in German East Africa.

Colonial Law at the Local Level

In German East Africa, colonial law was racially divided between imperial law, to which

Germans and other Europeans were subject, and a set of specifically colonial laws and legal institutions to which Africans were subject. That these two sets of legal orders meant qualitatively different things to those who were subject to their strictures was obvious in the disparity between, on the one hand, the often draconian corporal punishments ordered by colonial authorities and endured by Africans for what would be considered minor offences in the metropole and, conversely, the absurdly lenient fines and jail terms Germans repeatedly received for brutal violence conducted against Africans, Indians, and others. Additionally, non-official

72

Germans, particularly those such as plantation managers with direct involvement with African labour, exercised powers of control and punishment that were considered to fall under a customary “paternal right of discipline” that found strong support amongst the settler population and contributed to a general atmosphere of violence.157 This “right” was uncodified, ambiguous and continuously debated amongst colonial officials and non-official settlers, but remained in place until the end of German rule in Africa.

There was general agreement among German colonists that, because of their lower level of development, so-called natives were in need of a firm hand.158 The phrase “Streng aber gerecht” (“strict but fair”) came to signify both the perceived need for force under the unique circumstances of the colonies, and the more than a little ambiguous limits of this violence within the boundaries of racialized justice. As one colonial administrator was quoted in 1898:

The main principle in contact with the Neger should be: Streng, aber gerecht! Strictness must naturally not develop into brutality; on the other hand, however, the level of punishment must not be so measured, especially with flogging, that one [negatively] affects the feelings of honour with the handing out of only a small number of lashes... Physical pain is a better method of education than the harm of the sense of honour, which is only little developed in the average Neger. That the Neger will feel that five to ten lashes is a punishment will only be the case when he himself is from a high position… otherwise the minimum number of lashes must be fifteen in my opinion.159

In official thinking, then, violence in the colonies was necessary but should not lead to

“brutality.” This attitude allowed for a wide latitude of interpretation of what precisely

“brutality” meant in practice. Corporal punishment itself, for instance, was never considered too

157 Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 197-198. 158 Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Atrocity Concealment in German Political Culture before the First World War,” Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe and Douglas Irvin-Erickson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2014): 59-62. 159 Quoted in Ibid., 61.

73 brutal for African subjects: from 1901 to 1913 the colonial government in German East Africa sentenced nearly 65,000 people to floggings of one form or another.160

Colonial officials were permitted a wide array of legal powers and latitude of action. In

German East Africa the governor and the highest colonial officials in Dar es Salaam decided upon colonial policy, but these decisions were often too broad and unattuned to local conditions to be practically applied by local officials, and for some specific local matters central directives were simply never issued.161 Where there was legal clarity it was predominantly with regard to the types of punishment district officers were permitted to administer, rather than the types of crimes that warranted such punishments.162 Lacking a coherent approach to local administration, colonial authorities in East Africa for the most part were simultaneously left to their own devices and vested with wide-ranging executive and judicial powers.163 According to Koponen, punishments against Africans were administered by officials who also exercised legislative powers, and “were inflicted for deeds which were only later defined as crimes in laws and statutes,” while, “the function of legislation was more to codify established practices than to indicate new mutually agreed norms of justice.”164 In the realm of the colonial legal system, the colonial officials’ isolation and wide array of powers frequently meant that formal colonial law was reactive rather than prescriptive. Ambiguity in law, compounded by poor central oversight over local officials, opened avenues for the exercise of arbitrary power and violence at the local level.

160 Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, 150. 161 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, 112. 162 Iliffe, Modern History of Tanganyika, 119. 163 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, 117. 164 Ibid., 359.

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Of course, district officials did not operate in a vacuum and were forced out of necessity to work with local intermediaries at many levels, including in the colonial legal system. This was perhaps most clear in the hybrid Schauri, or district councils, in which district officers met with African leaders and the local population in order to discuss important local issues, hear disputes, and administer colonial justice. On the one hand, German district officers were required to incorporate local leaders and officials – including Muslim judges, among others – into the deliberation and administration of law, and the Schauri became forums for the participation of locals in a hybrid form of administration that adopted some of what German officials thought were “traditional” forms and symbols of African institutions.165 In a sense, then, as Michael Pesek has argued, the Schauri were a sign of the relative weakness of colonial rule at the local level.166 On the other hand, however, the Schauri served as the most important venue through which a district officer exerted his powers over the local African population, powers that were legally almost unlimited in nature. In a Schauri the district officer was symbolically presented as the central figure of colonial law and rule, and in practice he had the final say in judging disputes and handing down punishments.167 For the majority of African subjects, the district officer was synonymous with colonial law.168

The personalized nature of rule at the local level in East Africa granted German officials extensive authority over the African population, which felt the full brunt of their legal powers.

However, the Passarge case shows that the personalized nature of colonial rule in East Africa

165 Jan-Georg Deutsch, “Celebrating Power in Everyday Life: The Administration of Law and the Public Sphere in Colonial Tanzania, 1890-1914,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 15.1 (2002): 95-96, 99; Michael Pesek, “Cued Speeches: The Emergence of Schauri as Colonial Praxis in German East Africa, 1850-1903,” History in Africa 33.1 (2006): 410-411; Thaddeus Sunseri, “The Colonial Creation of the Criminal in German East Africa,” Crime in Eastern Africa: Past and Present Perspectives, conference sponsored by the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the French Institute for Research in Africa, Naivasha, Kenya, 8-1 July 2002: 3. 166 Pesek, “Cued Speeches,” 406. 167 Deutsch, “Celebrating Power,” 96-99; Pesek, „Cued Speeches,” 409-410; Sunseri, “Creation of the Criminal,” 3. 168 Deutsch, “Celebrating Power” 100.

75 could have serious consequences for the local German population, as well. In the months leading up to his trial for assault at Buschirihof plantation, Passarge ran afoul of the local administration, drawing attention to himself with his agitated behaviour and personal attacks on colonial officials. Offended by the plantation manager’s accusations and attacks on their reputations, local officials decided to move ahead with an investigation of the violence that had occurred at

Buschirihof. As Passarge was to learn, the personalized nature of colonial rule at the local level meant that such conflicts could turn the administration against one of their own.

Buschirihof

After the trial for insult in January 1902 the local colonial administration did not need much excuse to turn against Passarge in a more forceful way. In fact, District Officer Dr.

Neuhaus, for whom Müller was acting representative during the initial trials for insult while the former was away on official business, appears to have harboured a particular antipathy towards

Passarge. By 1902 Dr. Neuhaus had known Passarge for almost a decade, having first conducted business with him when the latter arrived in Pangani district in 1893 as a commercial representative for the DOAG. At least according to later recollections, Neuhaus was already during this early period wary of Passarge and his unpredictable behaviour, which he described as refined on the surface but nervous and easily agitated. Nevertheless, during the year 1901 when

Passarge was running the plantation at Buschirihof, Neuhaus claimed, he treated Passarge

“particularly courteously” as befitted “the representative of a newly founded [and] promising plantation venture,” and indeed the two men even periodically spent time at each other’s

76 houses.169 However, by the end of the year, and particularly after Passarge’s trial for insult in

January 1902, whatever tensions existed between the two men that were buried in the name of the maintenance of cordial business relations and European rule more generally began to burst to the surface.

In particular, during the first half of 1902 Passarge began to submit complaints directed specifically at Neuhaus. Whether these complaints were a direct result of frustration with his convictions for insult in January of that same year, or whether it was simply a continuation of his prior behaviour, is difficult to say; most likely, the answer is both. Whatever the case, on both

March 7 and May 7, 1902 Passarge submitted complaints to the government against Neuhaus – like clockwork, the first complaint came exactly two months after his trial in Tanga, and the second complaint exactly two months after that.170 To complicate matters further, if one is to believe the account of the events provided by Dr. Neuhaus himself months later, in December

1902, then even before these new accusations were submitted – indeed, before Passarge’s first trial for insult – the case for assault against labourers on the Buschirihof plantation was already being built. According to Neuhaus, around the middle of December 1901 Schirpke, the medical sergeant, approached Neuhaus with the news that he had come across a “native” on a road to

Buschirihof whose eye was bandaged. The man – who turned out to be Passarge’s plantation supervisor, Feruzi171 – told Schirpke that his eye had been wounded by one of the ubiquitous hippopotamus-skin whips wielded by many German overseers in the colony; it emerged that this particular German overseer had been Georg Passarge.172

169 Neuhaus to Colonial Section, Foreign Office, 17 December 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 58. 170 Stuhlmann to Colonial Section, Foreign Office, 6 November 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 27. 171 Strafsache gegen den Pflanzer Georg Passarge auf Buschirihof wegen Körperverletzung, n.d., BArch R 1001/4816: 156. 172 Neuhaus to Colonial Section, Foreign Office, 17 December 1902. BArch R 1001/4816: 60.

77

The overlapping nature of the complaints filed by Passarge and the case that was apparently being built against him by Neuhaus at the district office renders it difficult to piece together the precise sequence of events. However, the account provided by Neuhaus provides some insight into how Passarge’s personal attacks on the local administration were received and how they influenced the administration’s decision to investigate the violence taking place at

Buschirihof. As Neuhaus recounted the story, one evening at the beginning of December 1901 – around two weeks before what Neuhaus characterized as revelations of abuse on the Buschirihof plantation emerged – Passarge approached Neuhaus with yet another complaint against Medical

Sergeant Schirpke. Passarge, “in great agitation” (grösser Erregnung), complained that his assistant Körber, formerly a lieutenant in the navy, had been “poisoned” by Schirpke when he was administered a much too strong dose of morphine and now lay unconscious in the hospital.

Neuhaus immediately discussed the matter with Schirpke, who claimed that it was true he had written a prescription for a caster (Rolle) of morphine – for what ailment is unclear – but he had not expected Körber to ingest the entire contents all at once. After this discussion Neuhaus visited Körber in the hospital and found that Passarge’s assistant had regained consciousness; two days later the plantation assistant was back at work in Buschirihof. At this point, Neuhaus noted, he sent a report on his conversation with Schirpke to his government superiors.173

Unimpressed with the steps Neuhaus took, or failed to take, to discipline Schirpke,

Passarge then went to the military authorities to repeat his claim that his plantation assistant had been poisoned by one of their own men. Whoever he spoke with must have been convinced that

Schirpke was at least guilty of negligence, for he was handed eight days imprisonment for his role in the incident. In his recollections a year later, Neuhaus respectfully described Schirpke as

173 Ibid., 59.

78 a “married medical official (Sanitätsbeamte), for many years a member of the Schutztruppe,” who was imprisoned on account of Passarge’s complaint to his superiors.174 At this point at the beginning of December 1901, then, Passarge was already facing charges of insult against

Schirpke and two other men, and had brought complaints against Schirpke to both District

Officer Neuhaus and the military authorities; for his part, Schirpke faced accusations of conspiring with Sitte to hide a venereal disease and the humiliation of being imprisoned for

“poisoning” a local European based on claims made by a man who appeared set on exacting revenge on him. However, events were to take another unexpected turn.

Only a couple of weeks following the confrontation between Passarge and Neuhaus, and prior to the date Schirpke was to begin his eight-day military punishment, Schirpke happened upon the injured Feruzi on the road to Passarge’s plantation. Neuhaus’s recollection of what followed is intriguing. First, he claimed that, as it might appear that he was not a disinterested party in the matter considering the recent conflict between himself and the plantation manager, it would be best if Schirpke were to conduct the initial investigation into the circumstances under which the worker had been injured. According to Neuhaus, Schirpke did so in the early days of

January 1902.175 It almost goes without saying that if Neuhaus thought it possible that he might be accused of partiality in any investigation of Passarge in the matter, a man like Schirpke, who had been accused by Passarge of dereliction of duty on two separate occasions and who faced military custody as a result of the same man’s accusations, was at least as open to the same suspicions. Nevertheless, Neuhaus felt it expedient immediately to begin gathering information about the events that led to the injured worker being discovered on the road to Buschirihof and he decided that Schirpke was the appropriate man to do so. Feruzi was apparently first

174 Ibid., 59-60. 175 Ibid., 60.

79 questioned and then sent to a doctor in Tanga, where it was discovered he had lost 19/20 of his eyesight in the injured eye. At this point, Neuhaus claimed, he ordered the district judge to call

Passarge in for questioning.176

Later Passarge was to claim that Dr. Neuhaus began to collect potentially damning evidence against him on a wider scale after it was made known that Gustav Adolf Graf von

Götzen, the Governor of German East Africa himself, would only be happy when Georg

Passarge was gone from the colony.177 Furthermore, he claimed, the witness testimony gathered against him from workers on his plantation was less than reliable. While Passarge himself was indisposed because of sickness, “Negros, whose predisposition (Neigung) to falsehood,” and whose efforts “to give the interrogator the wished-for answer” were well known, were

“impelled” by Dr. Neuhaus to make statements against him, Passarge claimed. Furthermore, they had also not made sworn statements, as in any case they did not understand the meaning of a legal oath and thus did not have to fear that they might commit perjury if they told lies about

Passarge. Even with these troubling legal inconsistencies, Passarge pointed out, none of his workers voluntarily filed complaints against him.178 Thus, he was more than insinuating,

Neuhaus had gone out of his way to invite or compel the workers to provide exaggerated stories of Passarge’s abuses in order to enact his personal vendetta through colonial legal channels.

For his part, Neuhaus later claimed that he had never known of the governor’s wish to see

Passarge removed, if it had existed.179 The reality, according to Neuhaus, was that when Passarge was first called in to be questioned regarding Feruzi’s injury, “numerous” workers from

Passarge’s plantation, both “native” and “Indian,” suddenly came forward to denounce their boss

176 Ibid. 177 Stuhlmann to Public Prosecutor’s Office, 6 November 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 48-49. 178 Passarge to Reichskanzler, 25 September 1902/4 October 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 195-196. 179 Neuhaus to Colonial Section, Foreign Office, 17 December 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 57.

80 for various acts of assault. With the labourers appearing in numbers on their own accord,

Neuhaus pointed out, he had no need to actively collect material against Passarge – he simply received those who now voluntarily appeared with their accounts of abuse and passed the information to the district judge with the request that legal action be taken against Passarge.180

However, as Feruzi himself would later tell the authorities, he had not reported his mishandling at the hands of Passarge of his own volition, but had been called on by one of Schirpke’s servants and taken to the district office, it can be surmised, to confirm the charges being put together by the medical sergeant and Neuhaus.181

However, there are two important details that must be taken into account when one attempts to reconstruct the precise unfolding of events. First, as the court records show, the several cases of violence and other crimes against workers on the plantation took place over a period of months, from October/November 1901 – the Feruzi case – to 10 March 1902, some three months after Schirpke and Neuhaus found the injured Feruzi walking along the road. In fact, the decision to initiate the legal procedure (Eröffnungsbeschluss) against Passarge was not taken until April 28.182 Thus, while the initial impetus to investigate the plantation manager was a chance meeting on a road in the middle of December 1901, the authorities – whether Neuhaus himself or the district court in Tanga – gathered information for at least three months before proceeding against Passarge. Why the authorities allowed Passarge to continue to run the plantation at Buschirihof when it was known that, on the one hand, workers were running away in significant numbers (as became apparent through Passarge’s complaints from the year before),

180 Ibid., 60-61. 181 Feruzi Testimony, Anhang, zu dem Aktenauszuge, betr. die Strafsache gegen Passarge wegen Körperverletzung, [25 February 1903], BArch R 1001/4816: 164. 182 Auszug, aus den Akten, betr. die Strafsache gegen den Pflanzer Georg Passarge auf Buschirihof wegen Körperverletzung, [25 February 1903], BArch 4816: 156-157.

81 and on the other, there was already evidence in December 1901 that he had violently attacked

Feruzi, is difficult to determine. What is clear is that the authorities took time to build a case, including violent incidents that occurred some three months after the initial revelations.

Second, both Neuhaus and Governor von Götzen later made comments that complicated the circumstances around the decision to prosecute Passarge for his violent crimes. For his part,

Neuhaus continued to claim impartiality in the Passarge case even if he admitted that to some there might appear to be a conflict of interest considering the public grievances between the two men. As Neuhaus wrote following the trials, he could provide a number of witnesses who could attest to the fact that he did not deserve Passarge’s accusations of partiality. Indeed, how could this be so when, “Passarge himself repeatedly utilized my mediation in affairs of honour with other Europeans in Pangani District.” He would hardly have done so, Neuhaus argued, “if he deemed me capable of partiality.”183 However, this defence of his own conduct in the initial stages of the investigation against Passarge, which followed upon his claim that African and

Indian witnesses appeared of their own volition after Passarge was called in for questioning, was immediately preceded by another, incongruous, statement: “The original impetus (den ersten

Anstoß) to intervene against Passarge,” he wrote, “was his own inexcusable (unqualifizierbar) behaviour toward Schirpke.”184

In his later recollections then, District Officer Neuhaus described two different – although not wholly incompatible – initial causes for the launching of an investigation against

Passarge, the first being the discovery of the injured Feruzi on the road to Buschirihof and the second being Passarge’s verbal and written attacks on Medical Sergeant Schirpke. It is perhaps not difficult to imagine that both of these factors converged in a more general atmosphere in

183 Neuhaus to Colonial Section, Foreign Office, 17 December 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 61. 184 Ibid.

82 which it was well known to Indian and African labourers and colonial authorities alike that

Passarge had become a problem – a dangerous, violent threat to his employees and a social nuisance to official and non-official Germans. In retrospect, it was certainly a happy coincidence for Neuhaus and the colonial district administration more generally that Schirpke happened to stumble upon Feruzi almost immediately following the handing down of his punishment for the morphine incident – how the local administration was not aware of Passarge’s violent behaviour before this moment, particularly considering the cases of runaway workers that Passarge himself reported almost a year earlier, is difficult to understand. Unless, of course, Neuhaus used this pretext to punish Passarge for behaviour that went beyond the violent disciplining of his plantation workers and made the lives of the European community uncomfortable in a much more direct and personal way.

Passarge himself partially blamed Governor von Götzen for making it known that he wished for the plantation manager to be somehow removed. It appears that in May 1901 – a few months following Passarge’s formal complaints against Müller, Sitte and Schirpke – the governor travelled to Pangani District and toured some of the plantations there. Sometime during this trip the two men met and, according to Passarge, the governor greeted him amiably,

“like an old friend” (wurde als alter Bekannter freundlich begrüst).185 However Passarge was later baffled to discover that on his trip through the northern areas of the plantation district, when his travels took him by boat into the vicinity of the Buschirihof plantation, Götzen was overheard to remark that, as Passarge wrote, “he would be happy finally to be rid of me” (er wäre froh, wenn er mich erst los wäre).186 The boat captain later mentioned the remarks to a companion and

185 Passarge to Reich Chancellor, 2 September 1902, BArch R 1001/4815: 185. 186 Ibid.

83 the news eventually reached the ears of Dr. Neuhaus who, Passarge claimed, jumped at the chance to begin collecting material in his effort to build a case against his foe.187

Neuhaus himself later claimed that he was unaware of any wish the governor may have had at the time to be rid of Passarge; however, Götzen later admitted that he had “perhaps” made remarks of such a nature during his trip to Pangani. While dismissing Passarge’s accusations as

“completely baseless” (völlig aus die Luft gegriffen) insofar as they imputed from the discussion a “systematic campaign” (einer planmäßigen Hetze) to have him removed, he nevertheless admitted that he had discussed the business position of the Buschirihof operation and had mentioned that the company might be better off with a different plantation manager. Such a change might be needed, he said, so that “the blacks would not fear to come to work.”188 What happened next, Götzen surmised, was that the boat captain, “with pleasure,” had spread an exaggerated version of his words amongst “circles in Pangani hostile to Passarge” (die mit

Passarge verfeindeten Kreise). At that time, he noted, he was unaware of the state of relations between Passarge and the local colonial authorities; he had only heard that there were repeated cases of runaways from the Buschirihof plantation.189 While he made sure to distinguish his own words from the actions taken by Neuhaus and the district administration, and clearly denied connivance in any legal actions that might have led to Passarge being removed from the planation, Götzen nevertheless confirmed the general details of Passarge’s claim that the governor had made it known on his boat trip that Passarge might have to go; both men, for instance, agreed that the boat’s captain, a Herr Bustig, had spread the story in Pangani. It is thus difficult to reconcile the claim made by Neuhaus that he had no knowledge of this discussion for

187 Ibid. 188 Marginal notes by Götzen, 10 January 1903, BArch R 1001/4816: 69-70. 189 Ibid., 70.

84 a period of over six months before the discovery of Feruzi and the subsequent investigation when

Passarge himself was well aware that Governor von Götzen had at the very least made it known that he was unhappy with Passarge running the plantation at Buschirihof.

If the accounts provided by Dr. Neuhaus, Governor Rechenberg and Passarge do not strictly reinforce one another – and in crucial ways contradict one another – nevertheless

Rechenberg’s admission that he made it known he was unhappy with Passarge continuing in his role as plantation manager at Buschirihof and Neuhaus’s admission that he in large part proceeded against Passarge after the latter had attacked Schirpke point toward a growing consensus in the German colonial community that everybody – even the African community, if only secondarily – would be better off if Passarge were to be gone. That the medical sergeant,

Schirpke, wanted rid of the man who had damaged his reputation through accusations of conspiring to hide a venereal disease and poisoning a man through ineptitude there can be no doubt. If Neuhaus is to be believed, a year before the Buschirihof abuses came to light Passarge had made enemies of yet another German official, Post Secretary Schlepps. According to

Neuhaus’s account, during New Year’s celebrations at the government mess hall a “completely sober” (völlig nüchternen Zustand) Passarge “crudely insulted” (grob beschimpfte) Schlepps before a gathering of German revellers. A reconciliation between the two men was quickly spoiled when Passarge filed a complaint against Schlepps with the post office that contained

“unbelievable accusations.”190 By the time Passarge was formally charged for abuses against his

African employees in 1902 the list of enemies was indeed long. According to Neuhaus, the situation was so dire amongst members of the business circle in Pangani by this time that

Passarge was ostracized from the group, and as a result – apparently an indication of having

190 Neuhaus to Colonial Section, Foreign Office, 17 December 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 61.

85 fallen down the colonial social ladder – “consorted with Europeans of the corporal class”

(“verkehrt er mit den Europäern im Unteroffiziersrange”).191

In November 1902 this picture of Passarge as an outcast in colonial German society was reaffirmed by the acting governor, Stuhlmann, in a report he filed shortly before Passarge’s appeal to the High Court against the lower court verdicts of guilt for insult. After listing the various legal proceedings Passarge faced for insult and abuse, Stuhlmann reported another complaint of insult filed by Dr. Neuhaus, this time as a result of a claim Passarge made to the government that the district officer was guilty of dereliction of duty for failing to take legal action against a European by the name of Bernhard who had been accused by a sergeant of raping a young girl at a home for non-commissioned officers. Passarge entered into the picture when he learned that, after investigating and questioning the girl immediately following the incident, Neuhaus declared her to be sexually mature (mannbar) and dismissed her without filing charges. Later, Passarge asserted, the girl’s mother attended a Schauri in order to bring charges against Bernhard; Neuhaus rejected her pleas and threatened to put her in chains for six weeks

(or months, he could not recall) if she were to raise the matter again.192 Passarge claimed the incident was typical of Neuhaus’s “favoured type of justice,” (beliebte Art der Rechtspflege), administered by a man who treated Passarge in the most hostile manner for much less serious offences.193 In other words, Neuhaus was abusing his arbitrary powers, protecting and punishing offenders based on his personal whim.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the version of events presented by Neuhaus was complicated by ill feelings and conflict between Passarge and the perpetrator, Bernhard. According to this

191 Ibid. 192 Passarge to Tanga District Court, 5 June 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 45. 193 Ibid., 46.

86 retelling, the construction supervisor Bernhard was hired by Passarge to oversee the building of a house on the Buschirihof property. Passarge’s reputation was so poor by this point (probably sometime in early 1902) that he could only secure the Indian labourers for the construction work by promising before an official at the district office that they would only have to follow

Bernhard’s instructions, not his own. However, soon after work began Passarge began interfering to such an extent – and, it must be assumed, with the type of physical abuse for which he was apparently becoming notorious – that the Indian labourers fled the construction site and

Bernhard quit the project. While Passarge took on another construction overseer – whom he again soon chased away – Neuhaus helped Bernhard get back on his feet by having him take over the building of the town’s quay wall.194 With no construction manager to oversee the building of the house at the plantation, Neuhaus later claimed, Passarge became vindictive, accusing the district officer of having turned Bernhard against him and the construction manager himself of breaking the construction contract. To make matters worse, Bernhard was named as a witness for the prosecution in the upcoming trial against Passarge. At this point, according to

Neuhaus, furious at the collapse of his building plans at Buschirihof and confronted with the prospect of the man he had hired testifying against him in court, Passarge “searched for another way to deal with Bernhard […].”195 Here another German, Hönicke, a sergeant with whom

Passarge was apparently friendly, entered the picture; according to Neuhaus, as Passarge was searching around for a way to get revenge against the construction manager, Hönicke revealed to him Bernhard’s “indiscretion.”196

194 Neuhaus to Colonial Section, Foreign Office, 17 December 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 62. 195 Ibid., 63. 196 Ibid.

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Whatever the sordid circumstances that preceded and followed this disturbing incident,

Governor Stuhlmann was none too pleased with Passarge’s behaviour. He felt it advisable to proceed against Passarge, he told his superiors in the Colonial Section, partly because

“Passarge’s personality is not known at home like it is here […]”197 Here again the governor himself was weighing in to let it be known that to the German colonial community Passarge had become a social liability. It appears that somebody outside the colonial bureaucracy must have caught wind of this potential scandal as Stuhlmann was clearly angry that Passarge, in sending his “libellous accusations” to “the highest authority and further” (“die beleidigenden Vorwürfe an Allerhöchstem Ort und einem weiteren”), had “revealed local conditions to untrusted circles”

(“mit den hiesigen Verhältnissen nichtvertrauten Personenkreis bekannt wurden”).198 Thus, not only had Passarge alienated what could at times appear to be almost the entire German community in Tanga and Pangani, but he had also broken some tacit agreement amongst German colonialists that whatever nastiness might occur in the colony, it should be dealt with from within the closed circle of the German colonial community. As a result, officials at the highest levels of the colonial administration were now recommending prosecution at least partly based on

Passarge’s personality and his inability to adhere to the social norms of colonial society.

In the midst of all of this, legal proceedings were initiated against Passarge on April 28.

The investigations led by District Officer Neuhaus had resulted in a raft of recommendations for charges to be laid against Passarge, 25 in all: assault (both minor and grievous bodily harm), uttering threats, unlawful detention, coercion and trespassing. In spite of the months of preparation many of the charges were not pursued by the district court because of lack of

197 Stuhlmann to Foreign Office, Colonial Section, 6 November 1902, BArch 4816: 27. 198 Ibid.

88 evidence or errors in the official criminal complaint.199 In the end, Passarge was charged on 8 counts of assault, 2 counts of unlawful detention, as well as coercion and trespassing, or fewer than half the charges called for by the district officer.200 Neuhaus, it would seem, threw everything he could at Passarge.

The various charges of assault and other violent acts arose from several incidents over a number of months, and the testimony and lower court decision paint a picture of Passarge as a quick-tempered, perhaps even unbalanced, plantation manager lording it over his workers. An important witness for the prosecution was a plantation assistant by the name of Krengel, employed at Buschirihof during the crucial months from November 1901 to February 1902.

According to Krengel the relationship between himself and Passarge was fraught with tension, in keeping with Passarge’s interactions with other Germans in the colonial community over the previous year. In his testimony Krengel claimed that at the beginning of his employment in

November the two men were “on good terms,” (in guten Einvernehmen gestanden).201 However, by February Passarge’s behaviour toward him had changed and he was rebuking his assistant for his work, for what reason Krengel claimed not to know. In spite of a good three-year contract on the plantation Krengel quit Buschirihof soon thereafter and moved to Pangani. It was here, he testified, that he met with the district secretary, Werner, and the post secretary, Schlepps – the same man Passarge had quarrelled with at the New Year’s party – and discussed the investigation already underway into Passarge’s behaviour on the plantation; the next day an

Askari arrived to bring Krengel to the district office, apparently to discuss the matter further. As

199 Auszug, aus den Akten, betr. die Strafsache gegen den Pflanzer Georg Passarge auf Buschirihof wegen Körperverletzung, [25 February 1903], BArch 4816: 156. 200 Decision, 10 July 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 30. 201 Krengel Testimony, Anhang, zu dem Aktenauszuge, betr. die Strafsache gegen Passarge wegen Körperverletzung, [25 February 1903], BArch R 1001/4816: 164.

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Krengel put it in his later testimony, he had “no particular reason to be grateful” to Passarge, but he nevertheless did not feel hostile toward him, and would not allow Passarge’s having cast suspicions upon his credibility to influence his testimony.202 Leaving the tensions and violence of the plantation, then, Krengel became almost immediately intertwined in the conflicts within the

German colonial community, a taste of which he experienced first-hand at Buschirihof.

Working as a plantation assistant for three months, Krengel was witness to six of the twelve cases brought against Passarge, and his testimony was used by the court to confirm the testimony of the victims themselves. The first incident occurred sometime in late October or early November 1901203 and involved the labour overseer Feruzi. According to Feruzi’s testimony he had been in charge of 55 workers whose task it was to clear the roots and stumps from land on the plantation that had been recently logged. After only three days of work Feruzi and his workers had cleared half the land, but when Passarge appeared – astride a horse, according to Krengel204 – he chastised the overseer for having only completed half of the work; when Feruzi dared to defend the work Passarge struck him on the back and face with a

Kibokostock (a rod covered in hippopotamus-skin), badly damaging his eye.205

Two months later, in January 1902, while preparing for a trip to Tanga, Passarge became angry with a servant named Abdallah who had apparently damaged a serviette, a mistake that was likewise enough for him to receive a strike over the head from the Kibokostock, leaving a 6 cm wound.206 That same month Passarge returned from the field and – apparently with pride –

202 Ibid. 203 Auszug, aus den Akten, betr. die Strafsache gegen den Pflanzer Georg Passarge auf Buschirihof wegen Körperverletzung, [25 February 1903], R 1001/4816: 156. 204 Krengel Testimony, , Anhang, zu dem Aktenauszuge, betr. Die Strafsache gegen Passarge wegen Körperverletzung, R 1001/4816: 164. 205 Feruzi Testimony, Ibid., 163. 206 Auszug, aus den Akten, betr. die Strafsache gegen den Pflanzer Georg Passarge auf Buschirihof wegen Körperverletzung, [25 February 1903], R 1001/4816: 159.

90 showed Krengel a hunting stick (Jadgstock) that he had broken after beating one of the workers.207 Again in January, Passarge struck a brick-maker named Akida in the head with the butt of a rifle when the man, like Feruzi, stood up to the manager when chastised for his work

(for which he was employed by the building contractor Bernhard, who Passarge would later accuse of sexual assault.) According to Krengel, afterward Passarge told him that the man had bled “like a pig.”208 That very same day Passarge upbraided the worker Kiroboto and then kicked him twice in the backside and once in the face.209 The following Sunday two drunken men,

Mohammadi and Seliman, disturbed Krengel and Bernhard as they lay in wait for lions behind a hunting blind, and when Passarge learned of the incident he went immediately to their rooms,

“terribly excited” (furchtbar erregt), and kicked and beat them with the crop.210

Further attacks on his employees resulted in the charges for unlawful detention, and in addition to the victims themselves, another German, by the name of Warneboldt, acted as a key witness. In the first case, at the beginning of March 1902, Passarge became enraged when a servant named Asmani, having been sent into the kitchen to fill an omelette with jam, failed to fulfill his duty and was in fact caught by Passarge eating the jam himself. Passarge led him into a servants’ room and locked him inside; when Warneboldt warned Passarge that the door to the room was weak and Asmani could easily break out, Passarge bound the servant’s arms behind his back. Furthermore, having paid his 8 rupees in wages the day previous, Passarge forced him,

“after persistent demands” (nach längerem Drängen), to reveal where he had hidden the money, which he took (but later returned). Passarge also told Warneboldt that because of his

207 Ibid. 208 Ibid., 159-160. 209 Tanga District Court Decision, 10 July 1902, BArch 1001/4816: 34. 210 Krengel Testimony, Anhang, zu dem Aktenauszuge, betr. Die Strafsache gegen Passarge wegen Körperverletzung, R 1001/4816: 165.

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“extraordinary insolence” (ausserordentlichen Frechheit), Asmani had to be sent to the district office and administered an exemplary punishment.211 During what must have been a painful ordeal, Asmani, according to Warneboldt, “cried out fearfully” (schrie fürchterlich), to the point that Passarge unbound the servant and gave him water to calm him down.212

The same month, Passarge was involved in an even more vicious encounter with a worker on the plantation. At some point he had made an arrangement with one Alibai Haschim that allowed the latter to open a store at Buschirihof and to hire his own employees. One of these employees, Katembo, had already run afoul of the plantation manager, as he was not only suspected of having encouraged a worker to run away but also let go for “uselessness”

(Unbrauchbarkeit) and forbidden from setting foot on the plantation because Passarge suspected him of having committed a series of thefts, including that of a lion’s skull.213 On March 10, just returned from a hunt, Passarge caught sight of Katembo and chased him into the store – kicking another employee, Kasum Jioray on the way inside – captured him and took him to another building on the plantation. Here Passarge bound Katembo by his neck to a chord (Schnürkette) that hung from the ceiling; while the latter could move about the room and even sit down, he was nevertheless left bound in this way for the entire night. The next morning Passarge returned and lashed Katembo at least a dozen times, interrogated him for what Passarge believed to be his part in the sale of petroleum stolen from the plantation, and then gathered a group to witness

211 Auszug, aus den Akten, betr. die Strafsache gegen den Pflanzer Georg Passarge auf Buschirihof wegen Körperverletzung, Date?, R 1001/4816: 160. 212 Auszug, 160; Warneboldt Testimony, Anhang, zu dem Aktenauszuge, betr. Die Strafsache gegen Passarge wegen Körperverletzung, R 1001/4816: 167. 213 Auszug, 160; Kassum Jivraj Testimony, Anhang, zu dem Aktenauszuge, betr. Die Strafsache gegen Passarge wegen Körperverletzung, R 1001/4816: 169; Passarge Testimony, Anhang, zu dem Aktenauszuge, betr. Die Strafsache gegen Passarge wegen Körperverletzung, R 1001/4816: 172.

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Katembo’s admission of guilt.214 For his part, Katembo claimed to have been first threatened by

Passarge with a rifle and then lashed some 20 times.215 Passarge himself admitted to having lashed Katembo 12 times, adding that he had “counted the strokes precisely,” as the young man was “quite frail.”216

According to the letter of the law, if found guilty of all of charges laid against him

Passarge faced a lengthy sentence in jail; in the spirit of colonial law, however, the story turned out much differently. The five charges of aggravated assault carried a minimum sentence of one year in jail, for instance, and could be punished with up to five years in a penitentiary.217

Passarge was found guilty on one count of aggravated assault (against Akida), two counts of assault (against Abdallah and Kiroboto), and one count of coercion (against Asmani). However, based for the most part on its interpretation of the law and what it found to be mitigating circumstances, the Tanga District Court handed down lenient punishments for some of the charges and acquitted Passarge of some of the most grievous crimes of which he was accused.

The court’s interpretation of colonial law diminished Passarge’s punishments or simply undid the cases altogether. According to German imperial law, in cases of assault a minimum two-month jail term was to be handed down for bodily harm inflicted with a “dangerous tool,” in particular a knife or gun.218 In Passarge’s case the court determined that in most incidents he had not used weapons of this type. The Kibokostock, for instance, which the court described as a tapered stick 80 cm in length, as thick as a little finger at the thickest point, was ruled to be a

214 Auszug, aus den Akten, betr. die Strafsache gegen den Pflanzer Georg Passarge auf Buschirihof wegen Körperverletzung, R 1001/4816: 160-161; Passarge Testimony, Anhang, zu dem Aktenauszuge, betr. Die Strafsache gegen Passarge wegen Körperverletzung, R 1001/4816: 172. 215 Katembo Testimony, Anhang, zu dem Aktenauszuge, betr. Die Strafsache gegen Passarge wegen Körperverletzung, R 1001/4816: 169. 216 Passarge Testimony, Ibid., 172. 217 Lüder, Strafgesetzbuch für das Deutsche Reich vom 15. Mai 1871, S224, 61. 218 Ibid., 223a.

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“light” tool of punishment.219 Similarly, the court declared the kicks Passarge dealt out to have been administered with “light” leather shoes that could likewise not be considered “dangerous” according to the letter of the law.220 Thus, in the cases where Passarge beat his employees with the rod or kicked them – even in the face, as he did Kiroboto – the two-month minimum jail sentence did not apply. More aggravating yet for the victims, perhaps, the court acquitted

Passarge of beating Mohammadi and Seliman because it was required by law that the victims themselves file a formal criminal complaint, which had not been done. This despite the fact that

– as the verdict itself pointed out – testimony from Krengel and Passarge himself had shown the beatings to have in fact taken place.221 And as if to add more drama to the entire conflict between

Passarge and the district administration, the court dismissed the charges against the plantation manager for his having struck the labour overseer Feruzi – whose discovery had set off the entire investigation – because the charge of aggravated assault necessitated that the latter was blinded by the initial assault, which was not the case at the time of the trial. As the law spoke only of blinding, and not of a “significant reduction” in eyesight, Passarge could not be found guilty of aggravated assault; that a criminal complaint of simple assault had not been submitted by the victim – who in the meantime had disappeared – meant that Passarge had to be acquitted.222

The court’s evaluation of the evidence and interpretation of imperial law likewise allowed Passarge to escape serious punishment for the two most violent cases. For tying up

Asmani and forcing him to hand over his wages Passarge was charged with unlawful detention and coercion, the former charge being punishable at minimum with time in jail. The court, however, dismissed the charge of unlawful detention because Passarge suspected Asmani of theft

219 Decision, 10 July 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 31. 220 Ibid., 34. 221 Ibid. 222 Ibid., 31-32.

94 and the latter was caught in the kitchen eating out of the jam jar, “a very suspicious situation”

(einer sehr verdächtigen Situation), according to the judge, and thus his temporary detention was considered by the court as “justified.”223 Additionally, in a tortured line of reasoning – but one that further revealed the deep suspicions running between Passarge and the local colonial authorities – the court supported Passarge’s claim that he originally bound Asmani with the intention of dragging him to the district office. That Passarge released him before bringing him before colonial authorities, however, opened Passarge to charges of having bound Amani simply as punishment. But, as the verdict pointed out, the court was well aware that Passarge, who was described as “nervous, seeing enemies everywhere” (der nervöse, überall Feinde witternde

Angeklagte), was treated with suspicion by officials at the district office in Pangani.224 As a result, the court accepted as believable Passarge’s claim that he released Asmani before even attempting to take him to the district office because every delinquent worker he sent to the district officials in Pangani remained unpunished. Under these circumstances, the court ruled that Asmani’s temporary restraint on suspicion of theft could not be considered unlawful detention – meaning, undertaken strictly as a punishment – and thus Passarge was acquitted and only punished for the lesser crime of coercion.225

Similar reasoning was employed by the court in regard to the Katembo case, in which

Passarge had bound the man to the ceiling by his neck, left him in that condition overnight, and then lashed him the following day. As the court pointed out, Passarge’s own statement before the trial that he had bound Katembo in order to punish him contradicted his testimony in court that he had imprisoned him only as a prelude to transporting him to the district office. However,

223 Ibid., 36 224 Ibid., 36. 225 Ibid.

95 the court concluded that Passarge had lied in his original statement as he believed that, as a plantation manager, he had the right to punish his workers through imprisonment and thus such a statement would work to cease the legal proceedings then taking place against him. In the court’s opinion, Passarge had actually told the truth when he later claimed to have imprisoned

Katembo in order to hand him over to the authorities and then freed him the next morning for the same reason as he had Asmani – that is, Passarge did not trust the authorities to mete out the proper punishment to what he considered an incorrigible criminal trespassing on his plantation.

That Passarge tied up Katembo a second time the court qualified by pointing out that the second imprisonment occurred only after “new fuel” was added to the former’s suspicion of the latter’s involvement in the petroleum theft.226 In spite of the violent beating Katembo received at the hands of Passarge, the court appeared more interested in the purpose of the imprisonment, and in explaining it as a temporary measure before official channels of justice were to be utilized the court felt justified in dismissing the charges of unlawful detention and assault altogether. As in the Asmani case, then, the court reinterpreted Passarge’s violence such that it was not an end in itself – which would have been illegal – but as an unfortunate by-product of his frustrated attempts to obtain justice through the proper, official channels.

If Passarge’s “nervous” agitation had led first to bitter conflicts with other official and non-official Germans in the colonial community, and eventually was a decisive factor in the opening of a legal investigation into his behaviour at Buschirihof, this same nervousness also influenced the court’s final ruling, albeit this time in the plantation manager’s favour. Found guilty on three counts of assault (including one aggravated assault) and one count of coercion – crimes that in total carried a maximum of 10 years in prison, and indeed a minimum of 2 months

226 Ibid., 40-41.

96 jail time – Passarge was fined 635 M. In his verdict, Judge Methner did at least acknowledge that two of the assaults – the striking of the brick-maker Akida in the head with a rifle and the kicking of Kiroboto in the face – were “brutal” (roh), and in fact the fines for these two crimes made up the bulk of the punishment.227 However, Methner also ruled that there was a significant mitigating factor for the sentencing, namely Passarge’s “nervous over-excitability” (nervösen

Überreiztheit). As Methner wrote in the verdict, the plantation manager’s nervous system had

“suffered significantly” because of his “many years of residence in the tropics,” and “excessive use of gin.”228 For the court the fact of this “nervousness” was basis enough to impose fines for all of the crimes of which Passarge was found guilty, as Methner made explicit in his judgment.229 Further, as if qualifying Passarge’s brutality with reference to the adverse effects of the tropical climate on his European constitution were not enough, Methner added that in the

Abdallah and Asmani cases the victims, “through laziness and [an] obstinate nature,” gave occasion for punishment – if not, of course, the type administered by Passarge. As a result, what amounted to token fines of 25 M and 10 M were imposed for hitting Abdallah over the head with a rod and for tying up and coercing Asmani.230

Higher colonial authorities were not pleased with a verdict that amounted to little more than a stern warning. Something of the official perspective on the entire case can be found in

Governor Stuhlmann’s later comments that, “were such gross excesses against the natives, as those in the present case in part are, to receive an all-too-mild judgment, the danger would exist that such excesses would increase in an unpleasant manner.”231 As was clear from Götzen’s

227 Ibid., 41-42. 228 Ibid., 41. 229 Ibid. 230 Ibid., 42. 231 Stuhlmann to Foreign Office, Colonial Section, 25 February 1903, BArch R 1001/4816: 155.

97 indiscreet comments about wishing to see Passarge gone from the plantation at Buschirihof, however, the case had perhaps become too much of a thorn in the colonial authorities’ side to allow this particular plantation manager off with a mere fine. As a result, the state prosecutor appealed soon after the district court trial in July, leading to a trial before the High Court in Dar es Salaam on 19 August 1902.

In the second trial Passarge was found guilty on three counts of aggravated assault, one count of unlawful detention, and one count of coercion, while four cases were deferred to a later date because of new evidence or changes in legal details.232 One reason for the increase in guilty verdicts for aggravated assault – besides the colonial government’s growing interest in seeing

Passarge punished – was the higher court’s interpretation of the Kibokostock as a “dangerous tool,” something that must have been obvious to everyone involved after the first testimonies were collected from the victims. Of course, the lower court’s interpretation of this weapon as only a “light” tool of punishment clearly coloured the proceedings and served as one means by which Judge Methner and the assessors cast Passarge’s actions in such a light that they appeared as merely excessive disciplinary measures, rather than the brutal acts of unchecked violence that they were. The high court, in contrast, treated the Kibokostock as the weapon it clearly was and thus opened Passarge to prosecution for aggravated assault, or assault with a “dangerous tool.”

The court thus re-assessed both the Feruzi and Abdallah incidents and found that assault with a dangerous weapon had occurred – both cases in which Passarge had hit the victim over the head with the Kibokostock – and overturned the acquittal and 25 M fine, respectively, sentencing

Passarge to one month and three days in prison.

232 High Court Decision, 19 August 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 44.

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Passarge was also sentenced to another one month and six days in jail for the Akida,

Asmani and Katembo cases, thus overturning the earlier acquittal and transferring the fines to short jail terms.233 This time the court made no mention of the “lazy” or “obstinate” nature of the victims as a mitigating circumstance that could explain Passarge’s temperamental violence, and in fact took a much harder line in accessing his behaviour and string of violent crimes. On the one hand, the High Court took into consideration Passarge’s “long residence in the tropics,” as well as what were characterized as “many bouts of malaria” (vieler Malariaerkrankungen), arguing that these had caused him to become “nervously excited” (nervös überreitzt).234

However, whatever sympathy Judge Ziegler felt toward his fellow German struggling in a foreign land was undercut by the nature of the crimes themselves and the picture of Passarge revealed by the many witness testimonies that were gathered. The lower court’s subtle re- interpretation of Passarge’s crimes as excessive disciplinary measures – excessive, but in a way understandable – was rejected by Judge Ziegler, the picture he painted of Passarge one of a reckless, nearly uncontrolled violent disposition. The accused, he wrote, with little cause and in violent outbursts of “blind rage,” had beaten his employees with little regard for who he struck or what he beat them with, making no effort to control his temper.235 It was possible, Ziegler allowed, that the bouts of malaria had contributed to Passarge’s violent disposition, but in spite of his supposed serious medical problems he had run affairs on the Buschirihof plantation until his replacement in June 1902, often with “great energy.”236 As a result, Ziegler wrote, the court was convinced that the violence on the plantation was attributable not so much to the “occasional

233 Auszug, aus den Akten, betr. die Strafsache gegen den Pflanzer Georg Passarge auf Buschirihof wegen Körperverletzung, [25 February 1903], BArch R 1001/4816: 161. 234 Ibid., 162. 235 Ibid. 236 Ibid.

99 frailties of a nervously overwrought man,” but rather, “a violent and brutal disposition,” and

Passarge’s “fundamental disregard for the human rights of the black race.”237 In conclusion,

Judge Ziegler pointed out that the colonial government granted disciplinary powers to plantation managers – they could administer up to 15 lashes on the spot – and thus Passarge had stepped beyond even the elastic boundaries of acceptable labour violence then in practice in German East

Africa. Of course, for his “brutal” violence Passarge only received a two-month jail term (in early 1904 he would be fined 150 M for the four outstanding cases deferred in 1902),238 but

Passarge’s prosecution in Dar es Salaam did reveal a particular boundary of permissible violence that could be tolerated by authorities in the colonial capital.

Having been let go by the DOAG two months prior to the beginning of his trials for violence on the plantation and having alienated himself almost completely from the local colonial community, Passarge faced the end of his career in German East Africa after the High

Court verdict. In fact, the former plantation manager had already left the colony and did not attend his second trial. After the lower court verdict the High Court ordered Passarge be held as a flight risk while awaiting the state’s appeal; a day later he was filing more complaints against

Dr. Neuhaus. Before his incarceration he had already spent a month in a hospital in Tanga, his health apparently worsening in tandem with his growing legal problems.239 Not even a week into his captivity Passarge was found to be suffering from black water fever and the High Court changed its position, ordering that he should be released and sent back to Germany on the next ship, which took place on July 29, 1902.240 His troubles had left him with an “afflicted condition” (meinen leidenden Zustand), he later wrote, and shortly following his return to

237 Ibid. 238 High Court Decision, 9 January 1904, BArch R 1001/4816: 61-64. 239 Passarge to Foreign Office, Colonial Section, 7 September 1903, BArch R 1001/4816: 23. 240 Stuhlmann to Foreign Office, Colonial Section, 6 November 1902, BArch R 1001/4816: 28.

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Germany, in the winter of 1902/1903, Passarge visited a curative spa or bath to recover his health.241 In spite of his ill health, however, and in keeping with his general disposition during his final two years in German East Africa, Passarge continued to complain to colonial authorities and contest the various sentences and fines imposed on him by the courts for years afterward, pointing up the mismanagement of his trials and decrying the accumulating costs and stresses that were, he claimed, bringing him to ruin. .

Conclusion

Violence alone did not put an end to Georg Passarge’s career in German East Africa, but rather the confluence of this violence with wider tensions in the German colonial community.

By early 1901, when the investigation into his actions on the plantation was launched, the list of his enemies amongst the white colonists (both official and non-official) was steadily growing, and tensions had reached such a point that the colonial authorities and particularly the colonial courts were regularly called on to intervene. Indeed, individual local administrative and judicial officials were sometimes themselves the object of Passarge’s bitter attacks. Subject to weak oversight from the centre and enjoying extraordinary powers and a wide latitude of action, the men who made up the local colonial administration were also deeply embedded in the small

German community in which they lived. Operating in a climate of generalized violence against

African and Indian labourers, local administrators were often willing to look the other way when labour “discipline” was enforced with the lash. But the personalized nature of local colonial rule

241 Passarge to Foreign Office, Colonial Section, 7 September 1903, BArch R 1001/4816: 24.

101 meant that conflicts within the German community could and did influence the authorities’ willingness to accept violence perpetrated by their fellow colonizers.

In Passarge’s case, violence on the Buschirihof plantation gained more attention parallel to his increasing conflicts with local colonial officials and the German colonial community more broadly. In filing a series of complaints and accusations against the local colonial authorities and others associated with the colonial state, in which he was deemed to have insulted German honour and generally to have made a nuisance of himself, Passarge alienated himself from the small local German community and officials began to question his behaviour as manager of the

Buschirihof plantation. As the district officer, Dr. Neuhaus, later admitted, it was Passarge’s treatment of a fellow German – in conjunction with a fortuitous meeting with a wounded Indian labourer – that served to galvanize the entire investigation into his crimes at Buschirihof. In other words, in a colonial economy where violent coercion was standard practice colonial authorities might generally overlook “energetic” or “nervously overwrought” – or simply violent

– behaviour toward African and Indian labourers, but when Passarge’s abuses spilled over into the German colonial community there was little reason to continue turning a blind eye.

Colonial law and legal institutions were indeed one arm of German colonial domination, and power flowed for the most part outward and downward from Berlin to Dar es Salaam and finally to the distant district outposts, where African and Indian labourers faced the brunt of

European power. Nevertheless, these same colonial institutions, like colonial relations more generally, were fragile, shot through with social tensions, and fluctuated according to the constellation of conflicts that affected the German colonial community. Seen broadly, the colonial legal system was grossly imbalanced, with huge numbers of African labourers punished, often for minor infractions, and relatively few Germans prosecuted (and many of these given

102 only small fines or short stints in jail) for violent behaviour that would have been considered grossly uncivilized back in the metropole. However, even in a colony where labour violence was accepted practice Germans and other Europeans were prosecuted for violent crimes, and the exploration of Passarge’s case reveals that when and why German colonists were prosecuted for such crimes depended in part on the vicissitudes of German social tensions. Colonial law and legal institutions, like the men who served as their representatives, were embedded in the quotidian social conflicts that permeated German society in East Africa.

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Chapter 3

Disciplinary Violence in East Africa: Boundaries, Uncertainties and Contestations

Introduction

This chapter explores disciplinary violence in German East Africa, particularly in the period after the first colonial disciplinary laws were promulgated in April 1896. It specifically focuses on the institution of corporal punishment and the tensions it generated between the colonial administration and the German settler community. Colonial authorities in Berlin and

Dar es Salaam, it shows, granted German settlers license to physically punish their African employees but nevertheless fretted about white violence in the colonies and the potential harm it might do to the image of the colonial service itself. Furthermore, in spite of the permissive attitude of colonial officials toward white disciplinary violence, the settler-friendly colonial press repeatedly raised the issue of corporal punishment in relation to some of the most pressing problems facing the East African settler community, in particular anxieties surrounding the exploitation of African labour and the safety and security of German settlers and their property.

In doing so, the settler-friendly press asserted that the German settler community was uniquely positioned to determine colonial disciplinary policy in opposition to the colonial administration and domestic critics back in Germany.

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The chapter examines disciplinary violence in East Africa as a site of contestation and conflict in the German colonial community. In many ways, however, violence was a constituent part of German colonial rule in East Africa. The German conquest of the East African mainland, initiated in response to the coastal rebellion that broke out in 1888, was achieved through brutal scorched-earth destruction, and similar violence was extended into the interior as the military occupation and imperial control expanded in the 1890s.242 The Schutztruppe visited even more frightening destruction on the southern regions of the colony in response to the Maji Maji rebellion (1905-1908).243

The exceptional violence unleashed by the German military in times of crisis punctuated the more quotidian violence of German rule in Africa. A characteristic feature of German rule in

East Africa was a general enthusiasm among German colonists for corporal punishment and the widespread use of the whip by German officials and non-official German settlers. Each year

German authorities sentenced thousands of African boys and men to corporal punishment, many more than in Germany’s other overseas colonies. As white colonists, German settlers also exercised their own “paternal right of discipline” (väterliche Züchtigungsrecht) a customary right that most colonists claimed granted them the authority to physically punish Africans in their employ. As a consequence of the paternal right to discipline, as the historian Phillippa

Söldenwagner has argued, East African colonial society was pervaded by a “culture of violence” that gave Germans license to beat and whip the empire’s African subjects.244

242 Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995). http://hdl.handle.net.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/2027/heb.02596.0001.001 243 Susanne Kuss, German Colonial Wars, 57-75. Heike Schmidt, “At the Apex of Violence: Maji Maji in ,” Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War, eds. James Giblin and Jamie Monson (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010): 2016-210 244 Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 196-198.

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On the surface, there was a consensus in the German colonial community in East Africa that disciplinary violence – particularly whipping and flogging – was the prerogative of every white colonist. The German settlers’ customary right to discipline African labourers meant that, right up to the First World War and the end of German rule in the region, the authority to dispense disciplinary violence was granted – albeit, not without reservations – to the entire

German community in East Africa. Furthermore, the line between officially-sanctioned corporal punishment and the “moderate” physical discipline granted white employers was in fact blurred.

The colonial disciplinary laws enacted in 1896 targeted not only African criminality, but also made indigenous labour infractions subject to corporal punishment. In practice, the disciplinary laws placed the state disciplinary regime at the service of German employers, who henceforth could bring their African employees to state officials to be flogged. As a consequence of the colonial state’s reliance on corporal punishment and the broad disciplinary powers granted settlers, flogging and whipping were pervasive in East Africa.

Despite appearances, disciplinary violence proved to be a contentious issue in German

East Africa throughout the colonial period, one that fed into broader tensions between the

German settler community and the colonial administration. The ill-defined disciplinary powers granted to white settlers were a thorn in the side of colonial officials in East Africa who were repeatedly faced with the violent excesses committed by settlers emboldened by their membership in the white ruling class. Local officials in East Africa also had to answer to their superiors in Berlin, who during the 1890s and again in the wake of the colonial rebellions in

Africa after the turn of the century, came under intense political pressure to curb the worst of the violence committed by Germans overseas. Faced with these pressures, East African colonial officials, like their colleagues in Berlin, fretted about how to control settler violence but never

106 intervened decisively to curb or prohibit colonists’ claims on corporal punishment. Instead, they focused on refining the disciplinary laws to lend some semblance of rationality to the colonial disciplinary system, relying on the colonial courts to weed out the worst of the violent white offenders among the settler population. For German colonial officials in Africa, the fundamental problem was not so much settler disciplinary violence itself, but its wild and unchecked nature.

The stakes were much higher for the German settler community in East Africa. Living in an unfamiliar land, in isolated communities surrounded by a vastly larger indigenous population,

German settlers faced considerable difficulties in their striving to achieve the success, prosperity and power seemingly promised to them by colonial rule. Like other white settler communities on the continent, many German settlers depended upon African labour to run their farms and plantations, but distrusted and even feared the African population among whom they lived. By the midpoint of the first decade of the twentieth century persistent labour shortages and high turnover on plantations elevated the “labour question” as one of the most important concerns of settler community in East Africa.245

Settler fears about African criminality, and the broader threat posed by the African population to white lives and property, were also manifested in an acute way after the turn of the century, when rebellions broke out first in Southwest Africa in 1904 and then in the southern regions of East Africa the following year. Settler discourse around corporal punishment, as seen in the settler-friendly press, reflected these frustrations and anxieties, and in opposition to the colonial administration and domestic critics asserted that the settler community itself was best positioned to determined disciplinary policy in East Africa.

245 See for example, Koponen, Development for Exploitation, 366-368; Thaddeus Sunseri, Vilimani: Labour Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002): 51-75.

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The chapter is divided into two sections. The first part examines the institution of corporal punishment in East Africa and the methods by which the colonial state sought to rationalize whipping and flogging in the colony. It looks at internal administrative reports and discussions in order to assess how colonial officials addressed settler disciplinary authority and the problems it entailed for the administration of the colony. The Imperial colonial administration’s simultaneous acceptance of settler disciplinary rights in 1896 and the failure of the Colonial Section to define these rights in law meant that the responsibility for addressing settler violence in East Africa was left to local officials and the courts who worked without clear guidance from Berlin.

The second section explores settler discourse around corporal punishment, through an examination of the most widely read of the settler-friendly newspapers, the Deutsch-

Ostafrikanische Zeitung (DOAZ). It examines the DOAZ’s reporting on corporal punishment in relation to issues that were central to the settler experience in Africa, including anxieties about indigenous labour, fears about African crime, and the perceived encroachments and failures of the colonial state. Here it is argued that the DOAZ played an important part in fostering a public discourse around corporal punishment that asserted the settlers’ claim to the whip as integral to the prosperity and survival of the German settler community in East Africa.

The Colonial State and Disciplinary Violence

Settlers who committed what was deemed excessive violence in East Africa presented a problem for German colonial officials in Dar es Salaam and Berlin. Violent figures like the plantation manager Georg Passarge who confined, assaulted, injured and sometimes killed

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African labourers and servants were a headache for colonial officials - and the colonial courts - tasked with maintaining both white rule and social stability in the colony. The historian

Elizabeth Kolsky has argued in relation to British India that violent white colonists constituted something of a “white peril” who posed a double threat, above all to their local victims, but also to the British colonial state itself.246 Kolsky argues that white colonists’ lawless and brutal behaviour in India precipitated official efforts in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to codify imperial law, in no small part as an effort to discipline unruly whites. Her work shows, however, that non-official whites were successful in their attempts to pressure the colonial government to institute a differentiated system of laws based on race that progressively made it less likely violent Britons would be punished for their crimes. This process culminated, she argues, on the tea plantations in Assam, where the colonial state granted planters wide latitude to discipline and punish indentured labourers and, as a consequence, white violence became endemic in the region.247

Violence perpetrated by white colonists overseas similarly precipitated Imperial

Germany’s codification of colonial disciplinary law and official efforts to rein in the worst of the perpetrators. However, it was violence perpetrated by colonial officials more so than white settlers that became the focus of controversy and the subject of debates about the acceptability and limitations of violence in the colonies. One consequence of this situation was that when faced with political pressure over violence perpetrated in the overseas territories, German colonial authorities were always concerned first and foremost with cleaning up the colonial service itself. On the other hand, from the very beginning of the institution of colonial

246 Kolsky, Colonial Justice, 29. 247 Ibid., in particular 27-107, 142-184.

109 disciplinary laws in the late nineteenth century, colonial lawmakers in Berlin granted German settlers the authority to whip and flog Africans beyond the scope of written law – albeit, in terms of the codified colonial disciplinary laws, only implicitly.

The first laws governing corporal punishment in the German colonies were issued in the spring of 1896 under a cloud of scandal and growing crisis surrounding the imperial project, and the conditions under which they were issued shaped their final form. In the years prior to the issuing of the Imperial ordinance a stir had been caused in Germany by a number of disturbing incidents of violence perpetrated by Germans in the African colonies. In 1894 the brutal behaviour of the acting governor of Cameroon, Heinrich Leist, became the subject of heated debate in the Reichstag and the focus of scandalous stories in the press. Leist had ill-treated colonial soldiers under his command and forced their wives to perform menial labour, even prostituting the women out to visitors; when the soldiers intervened, he had the women stripped and whipped in front of their husbands, precipitating a revolt among the soldiers that the acting governor met with hangings and forced labour.

Leist’s subordinate, Karl Wehlan, was similarly accused in the press and the Reichstag of brutal excesses, including the sexual abuse and killing of women and children. Both were brought before disciplinary courts in 1894.248 East Africa featured prominently in the scandals, as well. In March 1896, the colonial pioneer and imperial hero was accused in the

Reichstag of having hanged two Africans in a jealous rage during his time as an Imperial

Commissioner at the Kilimanjaro station in the early 1890s. Peters’ prominent public image as a colonial explorer turned the affair into a particularly damaging scandal, one that implicated the

248 Martin Schröder, Prügelstrafe und Züchtigungsrecht, 35-38; David Simo, “Colonization and Modernization: The Legal Foundation of the Colonial Enterprise; A Case Study of German Colonization in Cameroon,” Germany’s Colonial Pasts, ed. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005): 104-105.

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Colonial Office when it became known officials had failed to prosecute Peters after learning of his actions years earlier.249

The colonial scandals of the 1890s threatened to undermine the image of the colonial project with the wider German public, who were privy to the lurid details of the affairs as they were published in the press. They put intense political pressure on the Colonial Section to clean up its own house, particularly when colonial authorities were found to have dragged their feet after reports of violent excesses reached Berlin.250 In large part, the 1896 colonial disciplinary laws were issued to calm political and public pressures on the Colonial Section by reining in the worst excesses of a colonial administration mired in scandal and colonial officials who appeared little capable of checking their own violent impulses.251 However, as Rebekka Habermas has argued, even the Colonial Office’s critics in the Reichstag took for granted the differential treatment of colonial subjects, including the use of physical punishments, and as a consequence the debate about corporal punishment in the colonies tended to focus on the brutal excesses of individual perpetrators, rather than the systemic violence that was part and parcel of German imperial rule.252 The Colonial Office therefore came under pressure during the 1890s to rationalize and regulate the state’s use of corporal punishment in the overseas colonies, rather than to place significant curbs on the institution, let alone ban the practice outright.

In response to the political pressure generated by the colonial scandals, the Colonial Office issued an imperial decree on April 22, 1896 outlining the laws governing the colonial

249 Frank Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse: Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien 1880- 1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009): 275-288; Arne Perras, Carl Peters and German Imperialism, 1856-1918: A Political Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004): 214-230. 250 See for example, Frank Bösch, “‘Are we a cruel nation?’ Colonial Practices, Perceptions, and Scandals,” Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain: Essays on Cultural Affinity, ed. Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwarth (London: German Historical Institute, 2008): 115-142. 251 Schröder, Prügelstrafe und Züchtigungsrecht, 50-51. 252 Rebekka Habermas, “Peitschen im Reichstag oder über den Zusammenhang von materieller und politischer Kultur: Koloniale Debatten um 1900,” Historische Anthropologie 23.3 (2015): 399-403.

111 disciplinary system. The decree made whipping and flogging official colonial policy, recognizing corporal punishment as a criminal punishment alongside fines, forced labour, imprisonment in chains and the death penalty, but placed rules on its administration. Caning and whipping were restricted to African boys and men; flogging women of any age, as well as Arabs and Indians who lived in the colony, was prohibited. African boys under the age of 16 were to be whipped, with “a light rod or switch,” and men caned with a government-approved instrument.

The decree restricted flogging sentences to a maximum of 50 lashes, to be carried out in two sessions of 25 each (or 20 for boys). Colonial officials who exercised criminal jurisdiction were to administer corporal punishments in all cases, according to the laws, and where available a doctor was to be on hand at the execution of punishments and could halt a flogging if the prisoner’s health necessitated it.253 The new disciplinary laws, however, did not specify which types of behaviour were subject to corporal punishment, leaving local officials wide latitude to dispense whippings and floggings as they saw fit.

That the rather broad disciplinary regulations might not be enough to rein in colonial officials’ excessive violence became clear by the turn of the century. In early 1900, the State

Secretary of the Colonial Section, Gerhard von Buchka, warned the colonial governors that sentences of corporal punishment were being passed in such “an exceedingly large number of cases,” it was to be feared that “the Reichstag and public opinion will draw unfavourable conclusions about the success of German cultural work in our colonies.”254

Buchka’s worries were proved to be justified some five years later, in the wake of the wars

Germany fought in Southwest and East Africa, when public attention was once again drawn to

253 Deutsche Kolonial-Gesetzgebung, 216. 254 Buchka to Colonial Governors, 12 January 1900, R 1001/5378: 4-6; also reprinted in Müller, Kolonien unter der Peitsche, 54-56.

112 the behaviour of German officials overseas. The destructive and expensive wars exacerbated domestic criticism of the Colonial Office and its management of Germany’s overseas possessions and attracted increasing scrutiny from opposition politicians keen to extend

Reichstag control over colonial affairs. As they had a decade earlier, opposition deputies, most notably Matthias Erzberger and August Bebel, stood before the Reichstag and accused German officials of brutality in the colonies and their accusations were eagerly taken up by the domestic press.255 They implicated high-ranking colonial officials in Africa in scandalous episodes of sexual misconduct and violence overseas, including the governor of Cameroon, Jesco von

Puttkammer, whose brutal behaviour had led local Duala leaders to petition the Reichstag; the

Governor of Togo, Waldemer Horn, revealed to have had an African man flogged and left to die in the sun; and the Commissioner for the Marshall Islands, Eugene Brandis, who flogged prisoners despite the prohibition of corporal punishment there.256 East African officials were again among those denounced for their cruel behaviour overseas, including a station chief at

Mpapua, Karl Kannenberg, who had two Africans flogged with 150 lashes each, crippling one victim and killing the other.257

On July 12, 1907, Bernhard Dernburg, recently appointed colonial director, issued new corporal punishment regulations in response to the pressure put on the colonial service by the second wave of colonial scandals. Dernburg acknowledged that recent publicity around corporal punishment in the colonies, and particularly criticism in the Reichstag, had prompted him to issue new corporal punishment regulations. “The criticism offered in part cannot be denied,” he

255 Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse, 83-85; Klaus Epstein, “Erzberger and the German Colonial Scandals, 1905- 1910,” The English Historical Review 74.293 (1959): 637-663; Schröder, Prügelstrafe und Züchtigungsrecht, 83-87. 256 Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse, 293-294, 297-298; John S. Lowry, Big Swords, Jesuits, and Bondelswars: Wilhelmine Imperialism, Overseas Resistance, and German Political Catholicism, 1897-1906 (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 290-291. 257 Lowry, Big Swords, 297.

113 informed the governors in his explanation to the decree, noting that reports showed that corporal punishment was “still being imposed frequently and obviously to too high a degree” in the colonies. Twenty-five strokes, the highest allowable punishment, was the rule.258

The new regulations prohibited colonial administrators from personally carrying out physical punishments; a colonial official or doctor, however, was to observe each flogging. The regulations also required district officers to keep detailed records of all sentences of corporal punishment, using forms provided by Berlin. In cases where 15 or more lashes of the whip were handed down (or 10 strokes of a rod), colonial officials were to provide a detailed justification for each sentence, copies of which were then to be forwarded to the governor.259 Dernburg noted that the regulations were meant to extend central oversight over the administration of corporal punishment in the colonies and as a consequence reduce the overall number of sentences.260 As was the case with the original 1896 disciplinary laws, the Dernburg reforms were concerned only with the execution of floggings and whippings, not the types of behaviour that might be subject to physical punishment in the colonies.

The limited records detailing sentences handed down by the colonial administration against the local population show that officials in East Africa interpreted the colonial disciplinary laws broadly. In a study of the records Thaddeus Sunseri has noted that, particularly prior to Maji

Maji, colonial officials in East Africa used corporal punishment most often in response to what the administration considered “disorderly behaviour,” or disobedience to German authority, and

258 Verfügung des Staatssekretärs des Reichs-Kolonialamts, betreffend die Anwendung körperlicher Züchtigung als Strafmittel gegen Eingeborene der afrikanischen Schutzgebiete, 12 July 1907, Die deutsche Kolonial-Gesetzgebung (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1908): 323. 259 Ibid., 320-321. 260 Ibid., 323-324.

114 as a tool to discipline African labour.261 German officials sentenced male Africans to whippings and floggings for a broad range of behaviours that was criminalized by the colonial state. In

1896, for example, residents of the Kilwa district were sentenced to floggings or whippings for several different infractions. A man named Hassam was sentenced to 10 strokes for negligence at the workplace. A young man under the age of 16, Mabruk, was sentenced to 25 lashes for the dual infractions of drunkenness and negligence on the job. Two other men, Muhamed bin Umari and Hamadi bin Said, were sentenced on the same day to 15 lashes each for fighting.262 In the same year in Dar-es-Salaam residents were similarly sentenced to floggings or whippings for a range of alleged crimes. Abdallah bin Mando received 50 strokes for extortion, Mohando 50 strokes for assault, and Ladalla 15 for theft.263 In the same quarter in the district of Lindi, residents were sentenced to whippings for theft, drunkenness, assault, fighting, and failure to heed a summons.264 In the first three months of 1897 in Dar-es-Salaam 63 people were sentenced to between 25 and 50 lashes for a variety of infractions, from assault and fighting to slander.265

What was described in the records as “persistent laziness” was enough to earn one 25 lashes, as was the similarly obscure “laziness and carelessness.”266 It was also not uncommon for sentences of floggings or whippings to be accompanied by imprisonment in chains.267 As Sunseri points

261 Thaddeus Sunseri, “The Colonial Creation of the Criminal in German East Africa,” Crime in Eastern Africa: Past and Present Perspectives, conference sponsored by the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the French Institute for Research in Africa, Naivasha, Kenya, 8-11 July, 2002: 5. 262 Strafverzeichnisse aus dem ostafrikanische Schutzgebiet, Kilwa, July 1-September 30, 1896, R 1001/5075: 32. 263 Ibid., Dar-es-Salaam, October 1-December 31, 1896: 75. 264 Ibid., Lindi, 90-91. 265 Ibid., Dar-es-Salaam, 125-127. 266 Auszug aus den Strafverzeichnissen des ostafrikanischen Schutzgebietes, reprinted in Müller, Kolonien under der Peitsche, 84-88. 267 See for example, Strafverzeichnisse aus dem ostafrikanische Schutzgebiet, Tanga, July 1-September 30, 1896, R 1001/5075: 5-6; Pangani, January 1-March 31, 1897, R 1001: 5075: 113; Langenburg, January 1-March 31, 1897, R 1001/5075: 146.

115 out, the colonial state in fact sentenced more people to forced labour in chains than it sent to prison, in order to employ prisoners on public works and even on privately owned plantations.268

The few available statistical records on the use of corporal punishment in the colonies reinforce the image of East Africa as a colony ruled with the whip and rod. The colonial courts in

East Africa sentenced a high number of people to corporal punishment relative to Germany’s other African colonies. In 1901/02, the first year statistics were recorded, the administration sentenced 3,467 people to corporal punishment, or approximately 1 of every 2,000 African residents of the colony. That same year Cameroon, Togo and Southwest Africa together sentenced just over 700 people to corporal punishment.269 In 1913 colonial authorities sentenced more than 8,000 African boys and men to corporal punishment, more than the sentences of the other African colonies combined.270 The general attitude toward corporal punishment on the part of the East African colonial administration was summed up in a report from a station chief in

Tabora, who noted that, “here whipping is a decidedly expedient and effective means of punishment.”271

Official discussions concerning the tools to be used to conduct corporal punishments in the colonies point to the fact that floggings in East Africa were of a particularly painful order. The

1896 disciplinary laws stipulated only that a “governor-approved corrective instrument” was to

268 Sunseri, Vilimani, 55-56. 269 Die Prügelstrafe in den afrikanischen Schützgebieten im Verhältnis zu den insgesamt gegen Eingeboroene erkennten Strafen, R 1001/5380: 7-9. See also, Prügel- und Rutenstrafen in den afrikanischen Kolonien Deutschlands, reprinted in Müller, Kolonien unter der Peitsche, 114. 270 Schröder, Prügelstrafe und Züchtigungsrecht, 94. In 1901/02 Cameroon sentenced 315 people to corporal punishment, or around 1 of every 12,000 Africans under German rule. It was not until 1908/09 that corporal punishments in Cameroon crossed the threshold of 1,000 per year and 1910/1911 in German Southwest Africa, while Togo never sentenced more than a thousand people to physical punishment in any one year. It should be noted that, following the crushing of the rebellion in Southwest Africa, officials there turned ever more regularly to corporal punishment. See Nils Ole Oermann, “The Law and the Colonial State: Legal Codification versus Practice in a German Colony,” Wilhelminism and Its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890-1930, ed. Geoff Eley and James Retallack (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003): 171-184. 271 Zusammenstellung der im Berichtsjahre 1899/1900 seitens der Station gegen Eingeborene verhängten gerichtlichen Strafen, October 12, 1900, R 1001/5075: 194.

116 be used for physical punishments, leaving local administrations to work out the details.272 In East

Africa, colonial officials settled on the Kiboko, a whip made of hippopotamus-hide. In a report submitted in June 1907, Rechenberg described how corporal punishments were conducted in the colony. Indigenous Askari, he wrote, conducted corporal punishments, in accordance with regulations set down by Berlin.273 Prisoners were made to lay face-down on the ground before the execution of a punishment. Their head and feet were “occasionally” held fast by another person, he explained, but “usually the prisoner lies free.” The Askari charged with executing the punishment stood at the prisoner’s knee and administered lashes on the buttocks, allowing only the end of the whip to hit skin; precautions were taken to make sure the strokes were evenly distributed.274 When the regulations were followed, Rechenberg claimed, no permanent damage was done to the prisoner (let alone injuries that might cause a fatality), except for “occasional abrasions” to the outer skin that were unavoidable. He assured Berlin that, even before the new regulations, serious injuries had not occurred in East Africa. “Quite regularly the delinquent is able to take up work or service immediately upon completion of the sentence,” he claimed.275

Other officials painted a much different picture of the effects of the Kiboko for those unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end. Officials in Togo and Cameroon made clear their opposition to on the grounds that it was a particularly vicious instrument of punishment. In April

1906, for example, Franz Müller, the governor of Cameroon, wrote to the Colonial Office that

272 Verfügung des Reichskanzlers wegen Ausübung der Strafgerichtsbarkeit und der Disziplinargewalt gegenüber den Eingeborenen in den deutschen Schutzgebieten von Ostafrika, Kamerun und Togo, 22 April 1896, Die Deutsche Kolonial-Gesetzgebung (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1898): 216. 273 See Michelle Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2014): 108-109; Schröder, 63-64. African Askari were more often than not tasked with executing punishments, in part because German colonial officials and military officers felt that their position would be sullied by personally conducting floggings. 274 Rechenberg to Colonial Office, 8 June 1907, R 1001/5379: 97-98. 275 Ibid., 98.

117 the Kiboko was regarded as a “torture instrument” (Marterinstrument) in the colony.276 Colonial authorities in Cameroon in fact were sent six whips by the government in East Africa that they experimented with in corporal punishments there. In a report to the Colonial Office in 1908 a district official described the effects of the whip on victims’ bodies, noting that when punishments were administered from a distance, the end of the hippopotamus-hide whip left lashes on the skin the thickness of a baby finger; punishments executed closer to the victim left deep bruises (tiefergehende Blutunterlaufungen) on the body. The latter, the official noted, were extremely painful.277 Officials in Togo experimented with the whips, as well. “While as a supporter of corporal punishment I am well aware that a vigorous flogging appears desirable as a deterrent punishment,” a station head in Togo wrote that August, “in the four months in which the hippopotamus-whip has been used I have come to the conclusion that this type of punishment instrument represents a cruelty that was not intended.”278

Experience in East Africa bore out these claims. In April 1906 the governor of East

Africa, Graf von Götzen, submitted a draft decree to the Colonial Section outlining additional corporal punishment regulations for the colony. The draft regulations prohibited flogging for those over the age of 35. They also made refinements to the execution of punishments, stipulating that the upper body of the prisoner was to be covered and protected during floggings and punishments were not to be artificially prolonged by pausing between strokes. At the sight of blood a flogging had to be broken off and if the prisoner’s health necessitated it, ceased

276 Müller to Colonial Section, April 30 1906, reprinted in Müller, Kolonien Unter der Peitsche, 104. 277 Colonial Government of Cameroon to State Secretary of the Colonial Office, 21 September 1908, R 1001/5379: 177. 278 Bericht der Station Atakpame, Togo, August 9, 1906, reprinted in Müller, Kolonien Unter der Peitsche, 105. “Wenn ich auch als Freund der Prügelstrafe mir wohl bewußt bin, daß ja gerade ein kräftige Züchtigung als abschreckende Strafe erwünscht erscheint, so bin ich in den 4 Monate, in denen nunmehr mit der Flüßpferdpeitsche gezüchtigt wird, doch zu der Überzeugung gekommen, daß diese Art der Züchtigung eine Grausamkeit darstellt, die wohl nicht beabsichtigt worden ist.”

118 completely; a whip that drew blood had to be cleaned and disinfected before it was used again.

The decree even included instructions regarding the properties of the whip to be used: 80-100 cm long and 1 cm thick at the striking end, “round” and “smooth,” not “edged” or “twisted.”279

In his accompanying letter, Götzen made clear to the Colonial Office that practical experience had prompted the new corporal punishment provisions, noting that the regulations were based on observations made in recent years of the administration of native justice in the colony.280 Above all, he wrote, it was necessary to prohibit corporal punishment for Africans above the age of 35. Here the governor admitted that there had been cases in which corporal punishment, “at least in part,” had later led to the death of an older prisoner. According to medical reports, he wrote, such prisoners did not possess “sufficient resilience,” and injuries inflicted on older bodies could later lead to sickness. In other words, colonial officials in East

Africa had flogged a number of prisoners to death. That the governor’s response to such brutal excesses on the part of his subordinates was further refinements to the practice of corporal punishment in the colony speaks to the general acceptance among colonial officials in East

Africa that a certain measure of brutality was normal and acceptable, as long as it generally fell within guidelines issued from Dar es Salaam and Berlin. It was the scandal of wild and unregulated violence that, more so than anything else, colonial officials wished to avoid.

Beyond the excesses committed by those in their own ranks, colonial authorities in East

Africa also had to contend with the violence perpetrated by non-official white colonists who exercised disciplinary violence on their own authority. In Germany’s African colonies, it was generally accepted by the time the first disciplinary regulations were issued in 1896 that settlers possessed a “paternal right of discipline” (väterliche Züchtigungsrecht) toward African workers

279 Verfügung betreffend die Ausübung der Strafgerichtsbarkeit gegen Eingeborene, R 1001/5379: 19-20. 280 Götzen to Colonial Section, 7 April 1906, R 1001/5379: 17-18.

119 and servants. From the early years of settlement in East Africa white settlers claimed the right to administer whippings and floggings at the workplace, on farms and plantations, and in white households, beyond the oversight of the colonial state.281 A touchstone for such thinking was the

Prussian law of domestics (Gesinderecht), remnants of which remained in force in Germany until the end of the Imperial period.282 The colonial administration in Berlin, however, never acted to codify settler disciplinary powers in law, and officials on the ground in the colonies and the colonial courts treated them rather as customary rights accorded to settlers as members of the white ruling class.283

Colonial Director Paul Kayser made it clear that the April 1896 disciplinary laws were meant only to regulate whippings and floggings conducted by the colonial state. In his letter accompanying the decree, he stated explicitly that the law did not affect the “right of modest punishment” enjoyed by “masters” over their employees.284 The 1896 disciplinary laws in fact extended the state’s disciplinary regime into the workplace by making workplace infractions subject to corporal punishment. Section 17 mandated that Africans under contract or in the service of a white employer could be flogged for a number of workplace transgressions, including “repeated indolence and dereliction of duty,” “insubordination,” or breaking a contract without sufficient reason.285 The disciplinary powers of the colonial state were, in essence, put at

281 Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 197. 282 Harry Schwirck, “Violence, Race, and the Law in German South West Africa, 1884-1914,” PhD diss., Cornell University, 1998: 254-262. 283 Harry Schwirck, “Law’s Violence and the Boundary Between Corporal Discipline and Physical Abuse in German South West Africa,” Akron Law Review 36.1 (2002): 101-102, 105-108. 284 Begleitschreiben des Kolonialdirektors Kayser an den Reichskanzler zum Entwurf einer Reichskanzlerverordnung wegen Ausübung der Strafgerichtsbarkeit und Disziplinargewalt gegenüber den Eingeborenen der deutschen Schutzgebiete, 23 April 1896, reprinted in Müller, Kolonien Unter der Peitsche, 135. 285 Verfügung des Reichskanzlers wegen Ausübung der Strafgerichtsbarkeit und der Disziplinargewalt gegenüber den Eingeborenen in den deutschen Schutzgebieten von Ostafrika, Kamerun und Togo, 22 April 1896,” Die Deutsche Kolonial-Gesetzgebung, ed. Dr. Alfred Zimmerman (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1898): 217.

120 the disposal of white employers, who could henceforth bring difficult African employees to local colonial officials to be flogged.286

Following Kayser’s example, succeeding imperial colonial administrations refrained from codifying colonists’ customary disciplinary rights, instead leaving it to local officials and the colonial courts to define the boundary between disciplinary violence and excess. As a consequence, a certain ambiguity surrounded the nature and extent of the settlers’ paternal right to discipline, and it remained a controversial issue among colonial officials throughout the colonial period.287

German officials in East Africa had reason to worry about the legal ambiguity that surrounded settlers’ customary rights and the broad latitude they were granted to commit violence beyond the purview of the colonial state. Particularly during the two waves of colonial scandals, the behaviour of especially brutal white colonists threatened to undermine the image of the colonial administration in East Africa and Berlin. The East African planter Friedrich

Schröder, for example, made headlines in 1896 when he was sentenced to fifteen years in jail for rape and murder. The grisly details of Schröder’s brutal tenure as head of the DOAG plantation in Lewa – where locals nicknamed him “bludgeons” – came out within months of the Carl Peters affair. Worse still for the Colonial Office, it soon became clear that the colonial administration had known of Schröder’s brutal behaviour for years and had failed to act. This included the colonial director, Paul Kayser, who faced widespread criticism over the Schröder affair and in his resignation speech that year admitted that Governor Julius von Soden had informed him as early as 1892 that he wished to remove the planter from the colony.288

286 Koponen, Development for Exploitation, 364. 287 Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 197. 288 Christian S. Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012): 133-134, 174-176, 175 n.165; Koponen, 361-363.

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While there were clear reasons for colonial officials in East African to be concerned about violence perpetrated by white colonists, most did not fundamentally question the settler’s right to inflict at least a modest amount of disciplinary violence. Colonial administrators’ thinking on corporal punishment was furthermore shaped by other overriding concerns specific to the colonies, in particular white colonists’ struggles to secure and maintain African labour. Indeed, some government officials expressed sympathy with the settler community on this front and tried to justify corporal punishment on the basis of the labour question. In January 1903, Stuhlmann, an official in the governor’s office in Dar es Salaam, submitted a report in which he urged caution with regard to settler disciplinary rights. He acknowledged that “isolated excesses” had occurred – he included here, notably, the recent Passarge case – but worried that legal cases would only increase if the government were to take away from employers their legal means to earn “respect” from African workers. Removing the employer’s right to discipline African labour, he argued, would constitute an “economically unjustifiable intervention” in the labour question which, he assured his superiors, was progressing positively. 289

Even Freiherr von Rechenberg, the reform-minded governor who in many ways was no friend to European settlers in East Africa, seems to have accepted settlers’ disciplinary rights as a given. At times Rechenberg considered prosecuting Europeans who physically punished their workers on the basis of the paternal authority.290 However, he was hesitant to act decisively against colonists. In September 1909 he sent a report to the Colonial Office in Berlin outlining the difficulties he faced in dealing with the employer’s customary right of punishment in East

Africa.291 Abuses, he admitted, had already occurred. However, he was not willing to discredit

289 Stuhlmann to Colonial Office, January 18, 1903. Reprinted in Müller, Kolonien Unter der Peitsche, 68. 290 Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 197. 291 Rechenberg to Colonial Office, September 2, 1909, R 1001/5380: 48.

122 customary punishment altogether: the problem was not that employers “habitually transgressed” their right to dispense corporal punishment, but that there was legal uncertainty surrounding this right.292

The governor complained that it was an unacceptable situation that, as the highest ranking official in the colony, he was unable to respond to inquiries from the planter community regarding the “substance and scope” of their disciplinary rights, and would have to refer them to the judiciary (Rechtsprechung) where they might open themselves up to prosecution.293

Rechenberg’s central concern in 1909 was not settler disciplinary violence per se – the extent of which he appeared keen to downplay – but establishing clear legal guidelines about how that violence should be exercised. That some form of settler disciplinary rights should exist appears to have been taken for granted by even the least settler-friendly of East Africa’s governors.

One factor colonial officials had to take into account when addressing settler disciplinary rights was the mood of the settler population itself. German colonists were always a small and dispersed community in East Africa but they could wield political influence beyond their modest numbers. In the German colonies unofficial representatives drawn from the mostly German settler community sat on the advisory Governor’s council, a forum that provided settlers direct access to the governor. At the local level, colonists served alongside colonial officials on district councils responsible for local colonial development projects and routine administration. Non- official German settlers eventually secured majorities on both the Governor’s council and in local administrative councils, from which non-whites were eventually banned completely.294

292 Ibid. 293 Ibid. 294 John Iliffe, Tanganyika Under German Rule, 1905-1912 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969): 86-88, 111-115, 203-204; Koponen, Development for Exploitation, 287-289.

123

An active and articulate group of German planters and businessmen also worked diligently to organize settler economic and political associations in East Africa, particularly as the settler population expanded after the turn of the century. Settler associations like the Northern League, formed in 1907, and its successor umbrella organization, the Territorial Business League of

German East Africa, petitioned the colonial government and the Reichstag on behalf of settlers and pushed for more settler representation on the colonial councils. In Germany, organizations like the German Colonial Society agitated on behalf of white settlers, and colonists enjoyed strong support in the Reichstag. The Reichstag election of 1907 strengthened the influence of nationalist and right-wing members, some of whom had connections to the plantation industry or were colonial veterans themselves, who firmly supported the settlers’ cause.295

There is some disagreement about how much political influence settlers in fact wielded in

East Africa,296 but at least with regard to its approach to settler disciplinary rights, the administration showed itself willing to back down in the face of settler resistance and pro-settler political pressure in Berlin. That such was the case during Rechenberg’s tenure is indicated in a

December 1907 letter sent to the governor from his assistant, Winterfeld. Rechenberg was in

Germany at that time to lend support to Bernhard Dernburg’s reform plans, following the colonial director’s three-month trip to the colony. The previous July, Dernburg had issued the first major reforms to the corporal punishment regulations since 1896. In the letter, Winterfeld outlined the potential problems the administration faced as it instituted the reforms in East

Africa.297 He informed the governor that Dernburg’s visit to the Usambara region had only exacerbated settler anxieties around corporal punishment after a rumour had spread that the

295 Iliffe, Tanganyika Under German Rule, 83-88; Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 215-221. 296 See Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 221-222. 297 Winterfeld to Rechenberg, December 14, 1907, R 1001/5379: 150-152.

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Colonial Office planned to prohibit the plantation managers’ right to physically punish African workers. Dissatisfaction with new regulations governing corporal punishment among the planters, he warned, was “universal.”298

In bringing Rechenberg’s attention to the general dissatisfaction among settlers in Usambara to the new regulations, Winterfeld for all intents and purposes reiterated the settlers’ own positions on the matter. Plantation managers, he wrote, feared the removal of their customary right to discipline Africans would undermine their authority over African workers. They had made it clear that they could not make do without the whip, particularly when dealing with

“especially serious misconduct” on the part of their employees, including “repeated indolence, insubordination or disobedience.”299 Winterfeld noted that, when it came to Africans, a punishment should follow immediately upon the misconduct, and fines could only be exacted once a month. African labourers prone to distrust Europeans would simply flee the workplace or refuse to return when their contract was up if they knew that a manager was withholding part of their pay, and plantations would earn a bad reputation as a result. In contrast, he claimed,

Africans took a caning or whipping without complaint and would not think of fleeing after receiving such a punishment.300

Winterfeld’s proposed solution was in line with the indecisiveness that characterized

Rechenberg’s administration toward settler disciplinary rights. He suggested that in light of colonists’ concerns about the economy, Europeans should be allowed a restricted right to punish

Africans, which would be withdrawn in the case of abuse. However, he assured Rechenberg that

298 Ibid., 150. 299 Ibid. 300 Ibid.

125 his fundamental belief was the government should eventually prohibit settlers from conducting corporal punishments on their own authority.301

The Settler Press and Corporal Punishment

The settler-friendly press played a significant role in amplifying settler concerns around the issue of corporal punishment which colonial officials like Winterfeld had to take seriously, even during the reform period in the wake of Maji Maji. That the settler press was taken seriously by the colonial administration was made most clear during the Rechenberg administration, when the governor came into direct conflict with the paper’s owner and even felt the need to found his own paper to defend his administration against attacks from the settler press. The files also show that articles published on the issue of corporal punishment in the settler press ended up in the

Colonial Office in Berlin, indicating that Imperial Officials were at the very least made aware of settler opinions on disciplinary policy in the colonies. The increasing politicization of the colonial press and the ties it formed with settler politics also points to the central role the settler- friendly press played in communicating settler grievances and demands to the colonial administration.

The first German-language paper for East Africa, the weekly Deutsch Ostafrikanische

Zeitung (DOAZ), was founded by Willy von Roy in 1899 with government support, but quickly distanced itself from colonial authorities. A second settler-friendly paper, the Usambara Post

(UP), which began publication in 1903 under the ownership of Hermann Wilder, aimed mostly at colonists living in the north. The DOAZ (and the UP) catered to the German settler population of

301 Ibid.

126 farmers, planters, and businessmen, providing economic reports and practical trade and business advice, alongside local stories of interest from Dar es Salaam and its surroundings as well as news from the colony and the wider world. The paper also frequently published letters sent in by its settler readership, providing a forum for colonists to air their own opinions and grievances.302

The DOAZ furthermore lobbied the administration repeatedly on the most pressing issues facing the settler community, most prominently among them the labour question, as well as issues the editors felt were crucial to the well-being of the colony, perhaps above all the building of railroads in East Africa, particularly from Dar es Salaam to points farther inland.303 The DOAZ’s popularity is indicated by the fact that by 1902, three years after its founding, the paper had a circulation of around 1,000 copies.304

The DOAZ became more politicized over time, but in particular after Rechenberg became governor in April 1906. His arrival and the lack of sympathy he showed towards settlers’ demands marked the beginning of a period of deep conflict between the settler population and the colonial administration, one that spilled over into the pages of the colonial press. During this period the DOAZ and the UP both ran into serious trouble with the authorities as the papers became more brazen in their attacks on government officials. The UP’s attacks on the governor himself were so vociferous that Rechenberg briefly forced the paper’s closure in 1906.305

302 Andreas Osterhaus, Europäischer Terraingewinn in Schwarzafrika: Das Verhältnis von Presse und Verwaltung in sechs Kolonien Deutschlands, Frankreichs und Groβbritanniens von 1894 bis 1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990):46-50; Ida Pipping-van Hulten, An Episode of Colonial History: The German Press in Tanzania, 1901- 1914 (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1974): 9; Martin Sturmer, The Media , revised online edition (2008, originally Ndanda: Ndanda Mission Press, 1998): 9-10. https://sturmer.at/pdf/themediahistoryoftanzania.pdf 303 Osterhaus, Europäischer Terraingewinn, 170-172, 356-367; Pipping-van Hulten, German Press in Tanzania, 9; Corinna Schäfer, “Discursive Colonialism: German Settler Communities, Their Media and Infrastructure in Africa, 1898-1914,” Representing Communities: Discourse and Contexts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 83-84. 304 Sturmer, Media History of Tanzania, 33. 305 Osterhaus, Europäischer Terraingewinn, 48.

127

By 1907 the owner and editor of the DOAZ, Willy von Roy, was in open conflict with colonial authorities. He accused Rechenberg of “negrophilia” and the tenor of his accusations against government officials, including the commander of the Schutztruppe, eventually landed him in the courts.306 In 1910 von Roy precipitated a local scandal when he published an article in the DOAZ accusing colonial officials around Rechenberg of homosexuality, and he was eventually run out of the colony.307

In response to the persistent attacks on the administration and his own character, Rechenberg himself founded another paper in 1908, the Deutsch Ostafrikanische Rundschau (DOAR); not surprisingly, German settlers were never convinced the paper was anything other than a government mouthpiece.308 The politicization of the DOAZ became obvious in 1909 when the editors made the paper the mouthpiece for the Wirtschaftliche Vereinigung von Daressalam und

Hinterland (Economic Association of Dar es Salaam and its Hinterland), one of several regional settler organizations that formed at the time; the newspaper’s editors were also directly involved in the management of the political associations.309

Settler-friendly papers like the DOAZ actively sought to protect the institution of corporal punishment and its place in settler life in East Africa. The paper repeatedly and forcefully made the case that corporal punishment was a tool ideally suited to the colonial world and integral to the well-being and success of the German settler community. In part, the DOAZ tried to justify the use of corporal punishment in Africa by making the case that flogging had been common in precolonial Africa and remained a common practice in the colonial world.

306 Sturmer, Media History of Tanzania, 34. 307 Heike Schmidt, “Colonial Intimacy: The Rechenberg Scandal and Homosexuality in German East Africa,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17.1 (2008): 25-59. 308 Osterhaus, Europäischer Terraingewinn, 46-48. 309 Osterhaus, Europäischer Terraingewinn, 50; Söldenwagner, Spaces of Negotiation, 217.

128

Precolonial African and Arab rulers had dealt with their people’s transgressions with severity, the paper claimed. “We have repeatedly pointed out,” the paper reminded readers, “that in earlier decades, when Arabs or black chiefs ruled and tried the crimes of their wards and tribesmen, there were far more severe punishments than there are today.” African criminals had not been put up for months and made to do light work on a full stomach; rather, the criminal had had a finger or hand cut off, or was starved, or simply killed.310

A certain ruefulness characterized the paper’s portrayal of precolonial African and Arab violence, although it attempted to distance German colonial rule from its local predecessors. It was obvious that, “in our age and under our Christian-German administration,” Africans could not be subjected to such “inhumane punishments,” the paper noted in 1904. However, it would be clear to anyone familiar with the native population that, “much, much more severe and above all tangible punishments,” were necessary.311 The paper suggested that precolonial African and

Arab rulers were severe, “not from some feeling of brute and unrestricted violence (dem Gefühl roher und unumschränkter Gewalttätigkeit), but rather because the rulers of the time knew their people better and therefore knew better how to treat them.”312 Not surprisingly, the paper did not question whether or not such violence on the part of precolonial rulers was viewed as legitimate by their own people, preferring to focus on the attitudes of those who wielded the whip.

The paper maintained that there was continuity in such attitudes from the precolonial period to the era of German rule. An article published at the turn of the century, for instance,

310 “Wird unser Eingeborener zweckmäßig bestraft?” DOAZ, 1 October 1904, 1. “Zu wiederholten Malen haben wir bereits darauf hingewiesen, dass in früheren Jahrzehnten, als noch die Araber oder schwarzen Häuptlinge das Scepter führten und über die Verbrechen ihrer Schutzbefohlenen und eigenen Stammesgenossen zu Gericht faßen, bei weitem Strengere Strafen vor allem auf Diebstahl standen, wie heutzutage.” 311 “Wird unser Eingeborener zweckmäßig bestraft?” DOAZ, 1 October 1904, 1. 312 Ibid.

129 suggested that the colonial government and German planters should seek the advice of their

African officials and plantation managers on the issue of corporal punishment. The author imagined them answering in alarm: “By Allah, you Europeans are otherwise so clever: and you are considering an abolition of corporal punishment? Do you want to destroy the land?”313 In this way the author suggested that figures of authority among Germany’s colonial subjects continued to believe that corporal punishment was necessary to rule over Africans.

The fact that corporal punishment remained a prevalent practice in the imperial world provided the DOAZ with a further justification for its support of flogging in East Africa.

Corporal punishment, one history of the practice notes, proved to be a resilient institution in

Europe even in the face of broader legal reforms during the 18th and 19th centuries. This was perhaps most clear in the overseas colonies, where even nominally democratic powers like Great

Britain showed themselves eager to export corporal punishment to shore up imperial rule.314

A front-page article published in the DOAZ in 1907, from “one of our most proven old- hands,” the colonial soldier and writer Heinrich Fonck, pointed to the fact that the whip was used to rule over colonized peoples in many places around the world. Corporal punishment was

“generally indispensable” for ruling over native people, Fonck argued. Flogging was still used against Indians in Brazil as well as in , India, Russia, and elsewhere. “It must also be retained in our colonies,” Fonck concluded. “In the first place it fully corresponds to colonial people’s sense of right and wrong, and secondly it fulfills the punitive aims under the prevailing conditions.”315 The article included a list of punishments that supposedly represented “legal

313 “Noch ist es Zeit!” DOAZ, 21 April 1900, 1. 314 G. Geltner, Flogging Others: Corporal Punishment and Cultural Identity from Antiquity to the Present (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014): 68-76. 315 “Eine wiederholte Warnung und Mahnung.” DOAZ, 23 March 1907: 1.

130 norms” for colonized people around the world that purportedly showed that corporal punishment was used to punish transgressions ranging from stealing fruit from a plantation to poisoning wells and injuring white colonists. In “truly oriented circles,” the article concluded, “there is only one opinion with regards to this method of punishment.”316 The fact that corporal punishment still flourished in the imperial world clearly delighted the author.

More so than the global or historical precedents for corporal punishment, the DOAZ based its defence of flogging and whipping on the practical experience of the settlers themselves and the supposed knowledge colonists had gained of the African character as a consequence. Corinna

Schäfer has observed that the colonial press played an important role in defining a distinct settler identity in Africa, one based on a narrow interpretation of Germany’s supposed cultural mission on the continent as the exploitation of its resources for the benefit of white settlers. Schäfer argues that, in staking out the settlers’ “radical supremacist” position, one that was often in opposition to the broader outlook and aims of the colonial administration, the colonial press positioned settlers as experts in colonial matters and hence more qualified than government administrators to decide on colonial policy.317 Such was the case with the DOAZ’s coverage of corporal punishment, which marked out the settler community as uniquely positioned to decide on the appropriate disciplinary policy for East Africa on the basis of settlers’ hard-won colonial experience and intimate knowledge of the African population, in opposition to naïve colonial officials and domestic critics far away in Germany.

The DOAZ interpreted government regulation of corporal punishment as the consequence of the creeping influence of colonial reformers back in Germany and attacked government

316 Ibid. 317 Corinna Schäfer, “Discursive Colonialism: German Settler Communities, Their Media and Infrastructure in Africa, 1898-1914,” Representing Communities: Discourse and Contexts, ed. Ruth Sanz Sabido (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 81-82.

131 intervention as the product of the undue influence of domestic politics and public opinion on colonial policy. The paper chastised East African colonial officials for bending before domestic political pressures and lamented the reformist impulses that colonial authorities appeared incapable or unwilling to challenge. Already by the turn of the century the DOAZ worried that abolition of corporal punishment had become a real possibility because of the influence domestic critics exerted over the colonial administration. The colonial administration’s “years-long struggle” against the influence of liberal “humanitarianism” had been in vain, the paper lamented. As a result, nothing stood to prevent “domestic public opinion” from influencing colonial policy.318

Two years later the DOAZ returned to the subject, warning settlers that a “humanitarian daze” was spreading among officials in East Africa that increasingly threatened native disciplinary policy.319 Addressing unrest in neighbouring British East Africa in 1905, the paper informed readers that energetic demands had to be made for a more severe handling of the natives than the “humanitarian daze from Europe” would permit.320 In 1906 the DOAZ drew an explicit connection for its readers between domestic reformers and colonial policy, arguing that

“domestic humanists” (heimischen Humanisten) and “the cries of the Social Democrats about the poor treatment of their black brothers” had compelled colonial authorities to issue new corporal punishment regulations that summer.321 A settler-penned letter published in 1911 fumed at colonists’ inability to deal rigorously with the “idleness, insolence, and maliciousness” of the native population. “These dear black brothers are the genuine Social Democrats,” the author wrote sarcastically, noting that “the famous native politics of the highest officials” had left

318 “Noch ist es Zeit!” DOAZ, 21 April 1900, 1. 319 “Schärfere Maßnahmen gegen die Eingeborenen!”, DOAZ, 15 February 1902, 1. 320 “Die Aufstände in British-Ostafrika und die Behandlung der Schwarzen, DOAZ, 14 January 1905, 1. 321 “Farbigen-Behandlung und Polizei,” DOAZ, 14 July 1906, 1.

132 colonists powerless in the face of African obstinacy and insubordination.322 “Above all it should once again be said that the manner of corporal punishment and sentencing in this regard must never be regulated from Europe,” the paper concluded in 1907.323 That the Colonial Office in fact instituted reforms to corporal punishment only under intense political pressure from domestic opposition from the Social Democrats, among others, would only have appeared in the eyes of German settlers to legitimate accusations that colonial officials were under the influence of domestic reformists.

The DOAZ insisted that government officials and domestic critics failed to grasp the particular conditions that prevailed on the ground in East Africa. Readers were told they had to defend corporal punishment against a “European opposition” that could not understand the issues, “from an African standpoint,” as colonists did.324 The paper also insisted that government officials possessed little of the knowledge necessary to rule in Africa:

Our African colonies, and not least German East Africa, suffer from the fact that the authoritative lawmakers in the Motherland as well as in the colony have often not understood the character of the natives, and therefore could not know the most correct and most appropriate behaviour and conduct of the European masters toward the natives.325

Such sentiments were reiterated the following year in an article on the “native question”: “Often it is hardly comprehensible,” the author complained, “how little understanding authorities are able to show for these issues that are at once large but also simple.”326 Following the 1907 corporal punishment reforms, the paper chided Dernburg for his lack of colonial experience and

322 “Die guten Neger und die bösen Weißen,” DOAZ, 27 May 1911, 1. 323 “Eine wiederholte Warnung und Mahnung.” DOAZ, 23 March 1907, 1. 324 “Regulirung und Verschärfung der Prügelstrafe,” DOAZ, 8 July 1905, 1. 325 “Eingeborenengesetze,” DOAZ, 19 January 1907, 1. “Unsere afrikanische Kolonien und nicht zum Mindesten Deutsch-Ostafrika leiden darunter, daß die maßgebenden beziehungsweise Gesetze schaffenden Persönlichkeiten im Mutterlande sowohl wie in der Kolonie den Charakter der Eingeborenen vielfach nicht erkannt haben und deshalb auch nicht wissen können, welches Verhalten und welche Handlungsweise dem Eingeborenen gegenüber von seiten seiner europäischen Herren die richtigste und zweckentsprechendste ist.” 326 “Die Eingebroenenfrage und der Fall K.” DOAZ, 16 January 1908.

133 failure to understand the settler position. “The assertion appears undoubtedly true,” the paper warned of his trip to East Africa in the summer of 1907, “that a sojourn of only two months in the colony only makes it possible to reach a judgement based on consultations with residents, but never from their own perspective.”327 Another article took a more sarcastic tone toward the corporal punishment regulations issued immediately before the colonial director had set sail for

Africa. Dernburg, the author noted, had “now become an ‘old-hand’ (Afrikaner)” after his trip to the colony: “Therefore perhaps it is still possible that he finds his way to the deepest wastepaper basket, where this ordinance belongs.”328

The DOAZ portrayed domestic criticism of corporal punishment as unattuned to the tough realities of colonial life. Domestic calls for reforms to corporal punishment in the colonies, it claimed, were characterized by a naivety about the fundamental differences between civilized

Europe and the colonial world. The paper acknowledged that German sensibilities around corporal punishment were changing, but dismissed reformist attitudes as inappropriate to the conditions in Africa. An article published in 1902 noted that Germany, “with its two-thousand- year-old culture,” had found it possible during the 19th century to institute major reforms to corporal punishment; however, “that the same standard as seems justified in an old land of

Kultur should be applied to the natives of a young colony is at the very least unwise,” it warned.329 The paper treated it as common knowledge in the settler community that conditions on the ground in Africa precluded reformist demands for more humane treatment of the native population.

It would be superfluous to refute here all the reasons put forward in Europe for abolition by highlighting the particular African conditions and practical experiences that contradict them in detail. Every plantation

327 “Von ungelösten Fragen.” DOAZ, 16 October 1907, 1. 328 “Ein Akt gegen Gerechtigkeit?” DOAZ, 21 September 1907, 1. 329 “Schärfere Maßnahmen gegen die Eingeborenen!”, DOAZ, 15 February 1902, 1.

134 manager, every industrialist, every businessman who employs coloured workers, every lord, every housewife who has coloured servants, knows what is involved (was es sich handelt).330

Settlers, the paper claimed, were clear-eyed in their assessment of colonized Africans and therefore understood the necessity of corporal punishment. “The most important ‘old hands’ and those who have had the opportunity to get to know or study the Negro’s individuality have consistently advocated in word and writing for the retention of this punishment,” an article claimed in 1907.331 Another article insisted that practical experience had unified settlers around certain basic facts about Africans and the necessity of force. “For all of us, even the poorest among us, the well-worn truth has become second nature that without firm guidance the Negro will amount to nothing. There is no one among us who would disagree with this naked truth.”332

The paper maintained that practical colonial experience would dispel the naïve reformist ideas espoused by domestic critics. An article published in 1908 suggested that domestic “apostles of humanity” should make a “study trip” to the colonies, where they would learn that force was an absolute necessity when dealing with Africans.333

Securing African labour was clearly the impetus for much of the paper’s agitation on the issue of corporal punishment. As an article from 1907 warned readers, “Any mitigation or abolition of customary means of coercion that were considered appropriate for centuries also makes finding a solution to the general labour question ever more insurmountable.”334 The paper, however, did make some effort to frame its support of corporal punishment in terms of the

330 “Noch ist es Zeit!” DOAZ, 21 April 1900, 1. 331 “Eine wiederholte Warnung und Mahnung,” DOAZ, 23 March 1907. “Die bedeutendsten Afrikaner und zwar diejenigen, welche die Individualität des Negers kennen zu lernen Gelegenheit hatten, bezeihungsweise studierten, sind durchweg in Wort und Schrift fur die Beibehaltung dieser Strafart eingetreten.” 332 “Die Eingeborenenfrage und der Fall K.” DOAZ, 16 January 1908. 333 “Etwas über Kolonialpolitik,” DOAZ, 22 February 1908, 1. 334 “Allgemeines und Aktuelles.” DOAZ, 28 September 1907. “Jede Milderung oder Abschaffung irgend eines der bisher üblichen und meistens durch Jahrhunderte als zweckmäßig erkannten Zwangsmittels macht auch die Wege zur Lösung der allgemeinen Arbeiterfrage immer unuberbrückbarer.”

135 cultural mission to raise up the African population. An article published in the autumn of 1907 quoted at length from Paul Rohrbach, a German colonial propagandist who also served on a settlement commission for Southwest Africa, who argued that forced labour was necessary,

“where the cultural level (Kulturstand) and needs of the indigenous people are so poorly developed that the goods to be acquired through regular activity do not appear to them to be sufficient incentive for the voluntary taking-up of labour.”335 “Who wishes to try to withstand the elemental force of this lapidary truth with well-founded counterevidence?” the article’s author wondered.336

The paper returned to the issue four years later, again linking compulsion with the supposed raising up of the African population:

[W]ork is the school on which culture must be achieved, and just as the majority of us as children only attended school with a more or less gentle compulsion, so too only after a certain compulsion will the Negro attend his cultural school, labour.337 Such language did little to disguise the fact that, in settler circles, “educating” the African population to work meant merely compelling Africans to labour for German enterprises. At other times the DOAZ dropped the pretense altogether that labour would raise up colonial subjects.

“The proper education (Erziehung) of our natives and the solution to the labour question in our colony go hand-in-hand,” one author argued in an article published in late 1906.338

Beyond any pretense of a cultural mission, the paper pointed to a number of supposed characteristics of the African character and constitution that it maintained justified the continued use of corporal punishment in the colony. It claimed that anyone familiar with Africans knew

335 “Allgemeines und Aktuelles,” DOAZ, 28 September 1907, 1. Um diesen Zwang handelt es sich überall dort, wo der Kulturstand und die Bedürfnisse der Eingeborenen so niedrig entwickelt sind, dass ihnen die durch geregelte Tätigkeit zu erwerbenden Güter als gar kein genügender Anreiz für freiwillige Uebernahme von Arbeit erscheinen. 336 Ibid. 337 “.” DOAZ, 25 November 1911, 1. 338 “Zur Erziehung unseres Negers und zur Arbeiterfrage.” DOAZ, 10 November 1906, 1. See also Schäfer, “Discursive Colonialism,” 78-79.

136 that there was a native “disposition” that had to be measured according to different standards than those in Europe.339 In its most crude form, Africans were described as nothing more than

“lazy.” “The blacks are simply lazy” declared an article published in 1899 - summarizing a report by an anonymous traveller who had visited famine-hit areas west of Dar es Salaam.340 A decade later the paper reported that a number of leading colonial figures, including Carl Peters, had been questioned about “the Negro’s inclination to work.” The first question – “Is the Negro lazy?” – had been answered in the affirmative: “The Negro generally does not enjoy work in and of itself, as one finds in civilized nations. He will not do it readily for its own sake.”341 The paper insisted that force was necessary to make Africans work for the benefit of white colonists, describing Africans’ will to work as limited to obtaining their immediate needs. It complained that payment in money was effective only when Africans worked directly under Europeans; to encourage Africans “to work independently in our interest,” the paper noted, a certain amount of

“compulsion” would be necessary.342

The DOAZ insisted that normal European standards of labour discipline and criminal punishment were ill-suited to the African constitution and temperament. The African character, for example, was ill-suited to imprisonment, which only brought out the worst in the native prisoner. Imprisonment meant little to Africans accustomed to slavery, readers were told; even imprisonment in chains – a common punishment in East Africa – was a welcome break from their ordinary lives: “Six months in chains are a kind of holiday, during which he does not have to worry about his sustenance, has to work a little, to his chagrin, but in the end departs the

339 “Wird unser Eingeborener zweckmäßig bestraft?” DOAZ, 1 October 1904, 1. 340 “Die Schwarzen sind eben faul.” DOAZ, 30 March 1899, 1. 341 “Die Arbeitslust des Negers.” DOAZ, 24 June 1908. 342 “Zur Erziehung unseres Negers und zur Arbeiterfrage.” DOAZ, 10 November 1906, 1.

137 friendly prison well-fed.”343 An article published in 1905 asked readers, “What then does the chain prisoner suffer from?”344 According to the author the punishment was quite agreeable: “He is among his own kind, works – under the supervision of black – a laughably small amount, and receives rice and meat daily. How many of the free have that?”345

The African’s supposed inborn laziness was encouraged by imprisonment, readers were told.

The native rested easy knowing that he would be taken care of by his jailors:

He lets the iron chain hang around his neck and knows from that moment on that, having worked as little as possible, his table in the prison will be amply covered by the naive white, until after a period of time the chain is taken off and he needs to find his own bread again.346

The fact that imprisonment in chains meant forced labour for most of the prisoners was conveniently forgotten in such articles.

The paper insisted that prisoners who did not receive some form of corporal punishment during their sentences looked upon imprisonment fondly. “When one has seen coloured inmates, in spite of forced labour, cry bitterly when they were released from the prison they had become fond of and have to take care of themselves again,” the paper noted in 1907, “then one does not believe in the atoning and improving effect of the prison sentence on many coloured people.”347

In the end, prison “only encourages the Negro in his laziness and costs the government unnecessary money,” the paper claimed.348 The paper insisted that punishments had to be more severe if they were to get through to the native population, particularly African criminals; prisons were simply ill-suited to discipline natives already averse to strenuous exertion: “Therefore more blows!”349

343 “Schärfere Maβnahmen gegen die Eingeborenen!” DOAZ, 15 February 1902, 1 344 “Schon wieder ein schwerer Diebstahl!” DOAZ, 22 July 1905: 3. 345 Ibid. 346 “Regulierung und Verschärfung der Prügelstrafe.” DOAZ, 8 July 1905: 1. 347 “Eine wiederholte Warnung und Mahnung.” DOAZ, 23 March 1907: 1. 348 “Die Aufstände in British-Ostafrika und die Behandlung der Schwarzen.” DOAZ, 14 January 1905: 1-2. 349 “Schon wieder ein schwerer Diebstahl!” DOAZ, 22 July 1905: 3.

138

The DOAZ also infantilized the African population, depicting Africans as existing in a state of arrested development, akin to that of children. As was the case with the image of the

“lazy” African, the DOAZ’s depictions of Africans as children were informed by settler frustrations and anxieties about African labour. This was made clear by one author in 1910 who argued, “[c]ulture is only a result of continual work; in relation to culture, the Negro is still in its infancy,” although, “in many other ways, we would not advise representing and treating the

Negro as the popular ‘big child’ […]350 In fact, a decade earlier the paper had made it abundantly clear that settlers should treat Africans as children. “The negro is a big kid,” a front-page article proclaimed in 1902. “From the primitiveness of an uncritical enjoyment of life, to the natural propensity to idleness, to jesting and playing and the mostly unconscious cruelty,” the author wrote, there was not much to distinguish Africans from children.351 The author urged readers to approach Africans as they would an unruly child: “Not for nothing the old adage reminds one,

‘spare the rod and spoil the child.’”352

The same article assured readers that the childlike native was still receptive to new ideas, but violence would be necessary to break the hold of local traditions:

The Negro has a fairly sharp, deeply-rooted sense of right and wrong. Although this sensation (Empfindung) is usually based in tradition, this does not exclude the possibility that he can adapt to newly-appearing legal orders (neu erscheinenden Rechtsanschauungen), as long they approach him and act upon him in a consistent manner. “Strict, but fair!” is the key to the rational treatment of the black.353

In other words, Africans would resign themselves to the imposed, racialized legal order if only the government – and by extension settlers themselves – would take a firm hand. While an old

350 “Morogoro.” DOAZ, 25 November 1911, 1. 351 “Schärfere Maßnahmen gegen die Eingeborenen!”, DOAZ, 15 February 1902, 1. 352 Ibid. 353 Ibid.

139 land of culture like Germany might be in a position to use more modern forms of punishment, the paper suggested, the childlike natives of a young colony required strict discipline.

The paternalistic tone the DOAZ adopted in its depiction of Africans as children reflected sentiments shared by many German colonists. A survey of German colonists published in 1897 revealed that a majority of colonial officials and settlers looked upon colonized Africans as “big children.” Africans, they believed, should be handled as children were: with strict discipline.354 It has been pointed out in the case of East Africa that a significant number of German settlers were former soldiers who had been brutalized by their experiences in the military academy and, as a consequence, had learned to treat subordinates with severity and violence. The DOAZ made these connections explicit, reminding East African settlers that physical punishment had made them the men they had become. “Many an older German man who has made something of his life remembers the rod fondly, saying, ‘A pity every blow that has passed by.’”

Such attitudes were common among white colonists in other colonial settings, as well, as scholarship on the British Empire has shown. In Australia, British colonists compared the development of an Aboriginal adult to that of a white child, and a consensus developed among anthropologists, missionaries and settlers alike that violence was ideally suited to the peculiarities of the “native mind.”355 Settlers in Natal adopted a similar “racist paternalism” toward the African population and considered physical discipline a necessity for the supposedly childlike natives.356 Colonists in Kenya viewed Africans as childlike and impervious to reason,

354 Frank Oliver Sobich, “Schwarze Bestien, rote Gefahr: Rassismus und Antisozialismus im deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2006): 125. 355 Ben Silverstein, “The ‘Proper Settler’ and the ‘Native Mind’: Flogging Scandals in the Northern Territory, 1919 and 1932,” Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 98-101. 356 Stephen Peté and Annie Devenish, “Flogging, Fear and Food: Punishment and Race in Colonial Natal,” Journal of Southern African Studies 31.1 (2005): 7-8.

140 and settlers there called on the colonial government to intervene with “fatherly advice” to encourage Africans to work for white employers. As was in the case in East Africa, “spare the rod, spoil the child” was a popular refrain among white settlers.357

The DOAZ furthermore described Africans as physically different from Europeans, portraying their bodies as particularly resilient under the whip. An article published in the summer of 1905, for example, noted that an outsider would not be so surprised at the beating an

African could take,

[…] if he believed the fact, for example, that once in Dar es Salaam a coconut broke on a black’s head, and not the other way around, that the most powerful slap in the face doesn’t hurt the black, but rather the European’s hand or fist, and that many blacks, after receiving the always deserved punishment of 25 lashes of the hippopotamus-whip, which would knock a European unconscious, depart the place of the deed with a cheerful, “Thank-you, master!”358

The author insisted that there were “black skins” that could take four floggings in a month without serious repercussions.359

Even when an African was sentenced to imprisonment in chains, the paper insisted, only the twenty-five lashes he received at the beginning and end of his sentenced bothered him:

However, this also doesn’t bother him much. The first twenty-five are quickly gotten over and the second at the end [of the prison sentence] – my god, the black is like an animal that only finds the knife unpleasant when it is at his throat. He never spends days and weeks like a European worrying about a future punishment – even the death penalty.360

Floggings and whippings might be severe, the paper contended, but the African mind was incapable of prolonged suffering. In part, the paper claimed, the severity of precolonial African

357 Brett Shadle, “Settlers, Africans, and Inter-Personal Violence in Kenya, ca. 1900-1920s,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, 45.1 (2012): 67-69. 358 “Regulirung und Verschärfung der Prügelstrafe.” DOAZ, 8 July 1905, 1. 359 Ibid. 360 “Regulierung und Verschärfung der Prügelstrafe.” DOAZ, 8 July 1905, 1. “Jedoch auch dies kümmert ihn wenig. Die ersten fünfundzwanzig sind schnell verschmerzt und die zweiten am Schluß - mein Gott, der Schwarze ist darin wie ein Tier, der das Messer erst dann unangenehm empfindet, wenn es ihm an der Kehle ist. Nie wird er sich wie ein Europäer tagelang und wochenlang über eine in der Zukunft liegende Strafe den Kopf zerbrechen - und wenn es die Todestrafe ist.”

141 and Arab rule had conditioned Africans to violence. “To someone unfamiliar with the black race it must be incomprehensible the flogging an African constitution can tolerate,” an article mused in the summer of 1905. However, if they first considered “the historical, centuries-long inhuman and cruel treatment of the Arab slave traders,” the African’s surprising resilience would become clear.361

In this way the DOAZ sought to normalize corporal punishment as a local practice, at the same time that it attempted to erase or reinterpret the suffering caused to the African body by whipping and flogging.362 The paper’s strategies in this regard, like its claims about the

“childlike” and “lazy,” whether they were convincing or not were always aimed at the imposition of a more severe disciplinary system that would supposedly be in tune with the African mind and body. In this regard, the paper complained that the colonial administration’s handling of native criminals was “too mild”; punishments had to be “much, much more severe,” and, above all,

“tangible” to the African.363 According the paper, corporal punishment was “the only punishment that the black perceives as unpleasant, once it is administered to a degree commensurate with his constitution.”364

In addition to its justification of flogging and whipping on the basis of the supposed particularities of the African constitution, the DOAZ defended corporal punishment as crucial to defending the white community against threats from the African population. The DOAZ amplified settler anxieties about the potential threats Africans posed to colonists’ security. Settler

361 “Regulirung und Verschärfung der Prügelstrafe,” DOAZ, 8 July 1905, 1. 362 For the ways in which colonial writing erased or reconfigured African suffering in the context of German Southwest Africa see John Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa, 1884- 1915 (Chur, Switzerland; Philadelphia: Hardwood Academic Publishers, 1992): 242-252. 363 “Schärfere Maβnahmen gegen die Eingeborenen!” DOAZ, 15 February 1902, 1; “Wird unser Eingeborener zweckmäßig bestraft?” DOAZ, 1 October 1904, 1. 364 “Regulierung und Verschärfung der Prügelstrafe.” DOAZ, 8 July 1905, 1.

142 concerns about African criminality and the potential of indigenous revolt were reflected in the pages of the DOAZ, which pointed to incidents of crime and unrest as examples of the consequences of a too-lenient colonial justice system that was not attuned to the native character.

At times the paper portrayed Dar es Salaam as a town overrun by bands of native thieves and criminal Indian middle-men, and described the town as a place where moral decay had set in:

“Mushrooms only thrive in decayed earth, and that the colonial capital’s Volksboden cannot be called healthy is demonstrated by the abundantly germinating mushroom of apparently organized thefts,” the paper warned in early 1902.365

The message was reinforced repeatedly by the paper’s coverage of African crime, a topic that clearly occupied the minds of the DOAZ’s editors. Local news stories highlighted thefts and break-ins, particularly in urban centres like Dar es Salaam, which had supposedly been committed by members of the African population, with titles like, “Thefts and more thefts,” and,

“Again an aggravated theft!”366

From reports about alleged African thefts and break-ins at European homes the paper drew unflattering conclusions about the African character. To the paper’s editors African criminality seemed to confirm their suspicions about the native population. The paper cautioned readers that “the concepts of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ may not be firmly established with an uncivilized people, as for example with us Europeans,” as an article noted 1902, in response to a number of “outrageously brazen” thefts in Dar es Salaam.367 Two years later the editors were fed up with the “ever recurring, major, and brazen thefts committed by blacks,” and warned that the

African population was not to be trusted:

365 “Schärfere Maßnahmen gegen die Eingeborenen!” DOAZ, 15 February 1902: 1. 366 “Diebstähle und wieder Diebstähle.” DOAZ, 1 October 1904: 3; “Schon wieder ein schwerer Diebstahl!” DOAZ, 22 July 1905: 3. 367 “Schärfere Maßnahmen gegen die Eingeborenen!” DOAZ, 15 February 1902: 1.

143

The Negro is generally not a harmless character, as is unfortunately often asserted, and even by the most well-known Negro experts; on the contrary, he is bad, wicked, cunning, and knows well how to exploit to the weaknesses of his masters to their harm and to his advantage.368 The paper criticized domestic reformers for misrepresenting the colonized as innocent children of nature and pointed to the many incidents of theft and break-ins as evidence that the native population was more sinister than it might appear.

In the summer of 1912, for example, the paper reported on the sentencing of the “native”

Mohamadi bin Salim to 50 lashes and 3 years imprisonment for theft and attempted murder. The report claimed that the DOAZ was highlighting the case, “to once again bring before the eyes of obstinate people at home, who only wish to see in the native the ‘harmless’ child of nature, one of the many examples from daily local life.”369 A break-in at a coconut plantation by “five blacks” led the editors to draw a similar conclusion. The men had reportedly broken into a house on the property but were caught in the act by a plantation overseer; the men had eluded physical capture, however. “They are naturally to be found among the plantation workers,” the report noted in frustration. “Yet another commentary on the innocence of the children of nature

(Naturkind).”370

The paper expressed particular anger toward thefts allegedly committed by servants employed in settler homes because they involved supposedly trusted members of the household.

These crimes gave the impression that even the most trusted African servant might one day betray the paternalistic trust of his white employer. In 1912, for example, the paper reported about a break-in at a colonist’s home that turned out to have been committed by an African cook

368 “Wird unser Eingeborener zweckmäßig bestraft?” DOAZ, 1 October 1904, 1. “Der Neger ist im allgemeinen keine harmlose Natur, wie leider noch vielfach und selbst von den berufensten Neger-Erziehern behauptet wird, er ist vielmehr im Durchschnitt arg, niederträchtig, durchtrieben und weiβ die Schwächen seiner Herren sehr gut zu deren Schaden und zu seinem Vortheil auszunutzen.” 369 “Lokales: Der Eingeborene Mohamadi bin Salim…,” DOAZ, 31 July 1912: 3. 370 “Aus Daresalam und Umgegend.” DOAZ, 16 April 1908: 3.

144 employed in the household. That the cook had committed the crime, “a trustworthy boy,” as the article described him, confirmed the paper’s suspicions about Africans more generally: “Only in rare cases does this race understand trustworthiness and true loyalty.”371

The paper chided the colonial authorities on the issue of native crime and suggested colonial security forces were incapable of ensuring the security of white property and, by extension, their own persons. “For months,” an article published in 1906 noted, “hardly a week has gone by in which several outrageously brazen thefts, mostly targeting European houses or offices, have not come to public attention. And as we have noted: in a large number of cases the offender is not apprehended.”372 The DOAZ portrayed such crime as a direct threat to white lives and property. The paper described white settler homes, and particularly isolated farms, as practically in a state of siege. If residents had earlier made do with one African servant, an article noted in 1902, it was now necessary to taken on another to watch over their home and belongings, day and night. A “state of war” had besieged the homes of white colonists, the article contended.373 The same language was used in an article published four years later: “In many

German homes that are isolated or where burglars have it easy, there is an outright state of war.”374 The fears such language expressed only increased when reports of unrest and then rebellion reached the capital in the summer of 1905.

The publishers at the DOAZ interpreted African criminality as a sign that the colonial justice system was inadequate to the task of disciplining Africans and protecting white settlers from the predations of natives. The paper highlighted stories about property theft and break-ins at European homes in order to bring attention to the consequences of a colonial legal system that

371 “Lokales: Ein vertrauenswürdiger Boy.” DOAZ, 3 February 1912: 3. 372 “Farbigen-Behandlung und Polizei.” DOAZ, 14 July 1906: 1. 373 “Schärfere Maßnahmen gegen die Eingeborenen!” DOAZ, 15 February 1902: 1. 374 “Farbigen-Behandlung und Polizei,” DOAZ, 14 July 1906, 1.

145 was portrayed as much too gentle in its approach to the native population. “In our opinion native thefts and break-ins here are punished far too mildly,” the paper noted in the spring of 1900 in response to a spate of thefts in Dar es Salaam.375 In 1905 the paper reported on a theft that had taken place in a lawyer’s residence, allegedly carried out by former servants employed in the household. “This case again confirms the opinion often expressed in this paper that the punishments for black offenders are usually not at all perceived as such,” the report noted.376

The paper was up in arms a year later about another series of break-ins in the capital. For months hardly a week had gone by without news of another break-in, a front page article claimed. Thefts were being conducted with “unbelievable brazenness.”377 The editors singled out the supposed leniency of the colonial justice system as the main cause of native crime and the growing sense of insecurity gripping the white settler community: “In the first place, in our opinion the still too-lenient treatment of coloured offenders convicted of a crime is to blame for the fact that the execution of crimes does not diminish, but on the contrary increase more and more.”378

Another report concerned an African cook who stole several hundred Rupees’ worth of money, jewellery and fabric from his employer at a hotel. A trusted member of the hotel staff, he had for years organized thefts that had involved some of his fellow African servants. Such a crime reached “the limits of impudence,” the author noted in shock. The thief and his accomplices were supposed to have enjoyed their master’s “total confidence,” especially the cook, who confessed to stealing from his employer because the man was elderly. The cook, “in

375 “Lokales,” DOAZ, 21 April 1900: 3. 376 “Schon wieder ein schwerer Diebstahl!” DOAZ, 22 July 1905: 3. 377 “Farbigen-Behandlung und Polizei.” 14 July 1906: 1. 378 Ibid.

146 his honest and upright appearance and his otherwise time-proven ‘loyalty’ did not give the slightest cause for suspicion that any thefts had taken place.”379 The author was livid with the thieves for betraying their employer’s trust, and wrote that he hoped the perpetrators received “a really tangible punishment, the Kiboko [whip] cannot operate enough in this regard!”380

The DOAZ beseeched colonial officials to sentence native criminals to more severe punishments and suggested ways the African body could be made to suffer for endangering the

German community. Reports about thefts at white households prompted the paper to call for

“exemplary” punishments for thieves and fences.381 A front-page story that raised the spectre of criminality in Dar es Salaam left no question as to the editors’ preferred solution: “Sharper measures against the natives!”382 For some months “outrageously brazen” thefts had become almost a weekly occurrence in Dar es Salaam, the article claimed, and a feeling of insecurity had gripped the white community. It placed the blame for the disorder squarely on what the paper described as the “too-mild treatment of the natives, when they have been convicted of a crime.”383 Imprisonment did not produce “a feeling of shame or some moral impression” in

Africans, so the paper called for the imposition of “more severe punishments” for native thieves and fences.384 An article published in 1904 contended that the legal limitations placed on floggings administered by state officials rendered the punishment ineffective:

The 25 or 2 times 25 blows that the indigenous person - except in exceptional cases when the death penalty is imposed for murder – may only receive legally despite the worst and most inhumane crimes, despite the most sophisticated and aggravated thefts, appears as a much too lenient punishment, as the

379 “Diebstähle und wieder Diebstähle.” DOAZ, 1 October 1904: 3. 380 Ibid. “Hoffentlich trifft die Uebeltäter, von denen der dritte auch bereits gefaßt ist, eine wirklich fühlbare Strafe, der Kiboko kann hierbei nicht genug in Tätigkeit treten!” 381 For example, “Aus Daressalam und Umgegend: Einer der gefürchteten Einbruchsdiebe Daressalams…” DOAZ, 12 January 1901: 3; “Lokales: Diebstähle durch eingeborene Diener.” DOAZ, 27 March 1912: 3. 382 “Schärfere Maßnahmen gegen die Eigenborenen!” DOAZ, 15 February 1902, 1. 383 Ibid. 384 Ibid.

147 accompanying prison sentence is often not at all perceived as a punishment and is not enough of a deterrent.385 The author fantasized about a more severe punishment regime for thieves that included withholding food and water from prisoners and subjecting them to repeated floggings “over a certain period of time” in order to leave a tangible impression and discourage repeat offenders.

“[A] thorough improvement is not to be expected through exhortations and chains, but only with the power of physical pain,” the author concluded.386

Such attitudes were only hardened by fears of Africa rebellion against German rule in

East Africa, fears which were manifested in 1904 when news of the rebellion in Southwest

Africa reached the colony. The DOAZ referred to the uprising as a tragedy, and held up the

“atrocities” committed by the Herero as a lesson for domestic critics, particularly “those most deeply sunken in a humanitarian daze,” about the true nature of the native population.387 It proclaimed that the rebellion had decided “the long dispute about half-humanity and full- humanity, about equality and inequality to whites, to the detriment of the wild coloured race.”388

Another article published at the end of the year noted that the rebellion in Southwest

Africa and unrest in Cameroon had raised the issue of the “black threat,” warning readers that

East Africa might appear peaceful but things could change. “Everything has been done here unfortunately to curtail or otherwise discredit the European’s authority, this most elementary means of power,” that author warned readers.389 Like the rest of the white settler population, the

385 “Wird unser Eingeborener zweckmäßig bestraft?” DOAZ, 1 October 1904, 1. “Die 25 oder 2 Mal 25 Hiebe, welche der Eingeborene - falls nicht in Ausnahmefällen wegen Mordes die Todesstrafe verhängt wird - trotz der größten und unmenschlichsten Verbrechen, trotz der raffiniertesten und schwersten Diebstähle gesetzlich nur erhalten darf, erscheinen als eine viel zu milde Strafe, da die begleitende Gefängnistrafe vielfach garnicht als Strafe empfunden und auch nicht abschreckend genug wirkt.” 386 Ibid. 387 “Unsere Schwarzen.” DOAZ, 28 May 1904: 1. 388 Ibid. 389 “Eine strafe Regierung ist die beste Sicherheit.” DOAZ, 3 December 1904: 1.

148 editors were deeply unsettled by the unrest in the southern regions of East Africa that began in

1905. In mid-August the paper worried that the coastal towns remained unprotected and called for the establishment of a white militia; by the end of the month it was questioning whether the indigenous Askari posed a threat to the colony.390 In November the paper reiterated its concern that European authority appeared to be diminishing more and more as unrest in the colony grew.

“The European does not all appear to the native as he once did,” an article published that month warned. “Insubordination, impudence and all kinds of black attacks on Europeans multiply day- to-day, and the question appears justified as to how this will end.”391

In its coverage of the unrest inside and outside East Africa the paper suggested that a harsher disciplinary regime was the best way to secure German authority in the colony and protect against future unrest. “A strict government is the best security,” proclaimed one article, in response to the disturbances in Cameroon and Southwest Africa. The author bemoaned the fact that the “proven” institution of flogging was being replaced by legal measures that were incomprehensible to Africans. To shield the colony from unrest, however, it would be necessary to conduct a “strict and ruthless” policy toward the African population.392 In response to the unrest in British East Africa that following January, the paper argued that events there again raised “the question of treatment of the treatment of natives”:

[M]ore and more vigorously the demand will have to be made that the natives be treated more strictly than the humanitarian daze from Europe prescribes. Do not imagine that we speak of the value of expanding imprisonment, it only reinforces the Negro in his laziness and costs the government unnecessary money; no, corporal punishment must be applied on a broader scale.393

390 “Ein Vorschlag für unvorhergesehene Fälle.” DOAZ, 19 August 1905: 1; “Sind die entlassenen Askari eine Gefahr für die Kolonie?” DOAZ, 26 August 1905, 1. 391 “Mehr Schärfe, aber auch mehr Rücksicht gegen unsere Eingebroenen!” DOAZ, 4 November 1905, 1. 392 “Eine strafe Regierung ist die beste Sicherheit.” DOAZ, 3 December 1904: 1. 393 “Die Aufstände in British-Ostafrika und die Behandlung der Schwarzen,” DOAZ, 14 January 1905, 1. “[…] und immer energischer wird die Forderung erhoben werden müssen, daß die Eingeborenen strenger zu behandlen sein werden als es die heutige Humanitätsdusel von Europa aus vorschreibt. Man glaube nicht, daß wir einer Ausdehnung der Freiheitsstrafen das Wert reden, das bestärkt den Neger nur in seiner Faulheit und kostet der Regierung unnötig Geld; nein, die Prügelstrafe muß in weiterem Maßtabe Anwendung finden.”

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When rebellion erupted in East Africa, the paper again emphasized the need for a harsher disciplinary regime. “Years prior,” the paper reminded readers at the end of 1905, “we already advocated for stricter measures against the natives and have always energetically opposed a kind of humanitarian daze that threatened to spread not only at home, but also among inexperienced people in the colony.”394

A month later the paper was demanding that the rebel areas be severely punished for daring to rise up against German rule:

The most important thing should no longer be the establishment of peace, but rather the punishment of the rebels and above all a quick and sound punishment that removes forever the desire to dare to rebel against German rule.395 Several months later, in August 1906, an article noted that the fighting in the south was practically over and declared that the rebels should “atone” for their actions. The author argued that it would be dangerous for the legal system to grant any concessions or show leniency toward the rebels. Alongside additional taxes, fines, and forced labour, “severe criminal penalties”

(scharfen Strafbestimmungen) were necessary, for then the African would get to know and fear

“his strict master” and no longer contemplate the possibility of rebellion.396 That whipping and flogging were envisioned as part of the harsh punishments rebellious Africans should face was made clear in the article’s criticism of the government for passing laws, in particular the corporal punishment regulations issued the previous month, that according the paper did not correspond all to the “experiences” of dealing with natives in the colony. Such laws, the paper maintained,

394 “Mehr Schärfe, aber auch mehr Rücksicht gegen unsere Eingebroenen!” DOAZ, 4 November 1905, 1. 395 “Keine Milde und kein Parlamentieren,” DOAZ, 2 December 1905: 1. “Nicht mehr auf die Errichung des Friedens sollte es jetz in erster Linie ankommen, sondern auf die Bestrafung der Rebellen und zwar vor allem auf eine schnelle und gründliche Bestrafung, die den Leuten für immer die Lust benimmt, noch einmal eine Auflehmung gegen die deutsch Herrschaft zu wagen.” 396 “Wo steuern wir hin?” DOAZ, 18 August 1906, 1.

150 could only have been inspired by “foolish humanists” or a Social Democratic press that acted like a “lawyer” for “their poor black brothers in Africa,” as the author put it.397

As it often did in its criticism of the colonial officials’ approach to corporal punishment, the paper positioned the settler community in opposition to the colonial administration and domestic critics back in Germany, whom the paper portrayed as out of touch with the tough realities on the ground in East Africa. The Maji Maji rebellion appears to have only confirmed in the minds of the editors of the DOAZ that disciplinary policy should be based on the needs and interests of the settler community, rather than the broader aims of the colonial administration in

East Africa or any domestic concern for the welfare of the African population. That this disciplinary policy should be based on the infliction of physical pain with the rod and the whip was a consistent theme in the paper’s coverage of corporal punishment, both before and after the rebellion in East Africa.

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to show that the issue of white violence in East Africa was a source of tension in the German colonial community. In this context, it bears repeating that

German East Africa was a colony in many ways ruled through violence perpetrated by white colonists. From the era of conquest of the East African mainland that began in earnest in 1888,

German military commanders showed a propensity for scorched-earth violence that culminated in the frightening destruction visited on the southern regions of the colony in response to the

397 Ibid. “Gerade jene Verfügung, abgeshen davon, daß sie in ihren einzelnen Bestimmungen praktisch sehr schwer durchführbar ist, entspricht so garnicht den hier in der Kolonie in bezug auf Eingeborenen-Behandlung gemachten Erfahrungen und kann nur auf törichter Humanisten oder gar einer socialdemokratischen Presse, die sich ja gern als Anwalt ihrer armen schwarzen Brüder in Afrika aufspielt, geboren sein.”

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Maji Maji rebellion. German officials furthermore relied heavily on corporal punishment in their day-to-day administration of East Africa. The colonial disciplinary laws issued in 1896 defined the parameters of corporal punishment in practice but left open the question of what types of behaviour were subject to physical punishment, providing colonial officials wide latitude to use whipping and flogging as they fit. German officials in East Africa interpreted such laws broadly, sentencing more African boys and men to whippings and floggings each year than their colleagues in Germany’s other colonies on the continent. Beyond the colonial state, non-official

German settlers were also invested with their own authority to physically punish Africans in their employ, on plantations and in their households, beyond the strict oversight of the colonial state.

The 1896 disciplinary laws in fact made workplace infractions subject to state-administered corporal punishment, putting the state disciplinary system at the service of German settlers and blurring the boundaries between state-sanctioned and privately-administered corporal punishment in the colony.

However, below the surface of a general enthusiasm for the whip among German colonists, white violence generated tensions in the German community. On the part of the colonial state, the scandals of the 1890s and early 1900s, which brought to light incidents of brutal abuse and violence perpetrated by prominent German officials in the colonies, put intense political pressure on the colonial administration in Berlin and Dar es Salaam to more carefully regulate the violence of overseas colonial rule. Issued in order to protect the image of the colonial service, the 1896 disciplinary laws and the reforms to corporal punishment instituted by

Bernhard Dernburg in 1907 set some limitations on the practice of corporal punishment and extended a modicum of central oversight of floggings and whippings in the colonies, while they

152 also preserved local colonial officials’ authority to decide which types of behaviour were subject to the lash.

More troublesome perhaps for the colonial administration in Dar es Salaam was the wild and unchecked violence of German settlers who exercised disciplinary authority beyond the purview of the colonial state. Throughout the colonial period, the colonial administration in

Berlin opted not to intervene in the issue of settlers’ “paternal right to discipline,” leaving it to colonial officials and the colonial courts to police the boundaries of acceptable non-official violence in the colonies. For their part, colonial officials in East Africa fretted about the violence perpetrated by German settlers but refused to intervene decisively to curb settler disciplinary authority, instead seeking legal guidelines from Berlin that were in the end never issued. The administration instead relied on the colonial courts to rein in the worst of the white perpetrators who overstepped their customary right to inflict physical punishments on Africans. As the case of Georg Passarge has shown, even if they were found guilty of assaulting African workers, white perpetrators faced little in the way of serious legal penalties for such behaviour.

In spite of the colonial administration’s generally permissive attitude toward settlers’ authority to discipline African employees, the settler discourse around the issue of corporal punishment reveals that it was the focus of tensions within the white colonial community, and in particular the focus of settler discontent toward the colonial administration. The settler-friendly press created a narrative around corporal punishment that situated settlers as uniquely positioned to decide on matters of colonial disciplinary policy, in opposition to the colonial administration and domestic critics back in Germany it criticized as inexperienced and naïve. It held that corporal punishment was uniquely suited to the African’s personality and constitution and argued that flogging and whipping served as the settler’s best guarantee of safety and security in the

153 colony. The reporting on corporal punishment in the settler-friendly press reinforced the arrogant attitudes and racist assumptions of the white minority community of German colonists in East

Africa, at the same time that it revealed deep-seated anxieties about the safety and security of this same community.

The alarm with which the settler-friendly press greeted any government regulation that concerned corporal punishment, in spite of the fact that settler disciplinary authority continued to remain practically unregulated by law, points to the importance with which the German settler community in East Africa viewed the issue of corporal punishment. The reporting on corporal punishment also reiterates that below the surface of the general enthusiasm among German colonists for disciplinary violence, the question of who ultimately decided the boundaries of acceptable white violence remained open during the colonial period and was a source of conflict in the German community itself.

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Chapter 4

Visible Violence Framing, Unease, and the Boundaries of Acceptability

Introduction

The central aim of this chapter is to consider the visual record of disciplinary violence in

East Africa. It does so through an examination of photographs of chain gangs and floggings taken by German scientists and soldiers in East Africa, particularly in the period of the Maji Maji rebellion and its suppression by the German Schutztruppe. In doing so, the analysis also broadens out to include images from the war in Southwest Africa, in order to consider the range of strategies by which German photographers sought to frame and interpret both the quotidian violence of the colonial disciplinary regime and the more exceptional violence of a genocidal war. The chapter’s main contention is that such images, while they depicted and displayed the brutalities of colonial rule, were framed in ways that distanced the German colonizers from the violence of which they were the ultimate source.

The images examined in this chapter show that violence – for all of its ubiquity in the colonies – could still be a source of unease for Germans, particularly colonial officials concerned with protecting the image and reputation of the colonial service from accusations of brutality.

Although German colonists generally considered violence necessary and unavoidable in the colonial context, particularly at times of rebellion and war, the actual boundaries of acceptable white violence in the colonies were always ambiguous. Like colonial trial records and settler

155 newspapers, the visual record of German colonial violence reveals that white violence was a source of unease and tension in the German community itself.

The photographs taken by German anthropologists and soldiers in East and Southwest

Africa examined in this chapter captured in direct and indirect ways the violence of colonial rule.

Most of the photographs were taken in the period 1904-1908, in the midst of rebellion and war in

Germany’s African colonies, or in the period following the pacification of rebel territory by colonial forces. The images depict both the quotidian violence that attended German rule in

Africa, including African chain-gangs and floggings, as well as the exceptional, genocidal violence wrought by the German Schutztruppe in Southwest Africa. The images are considered as documents embedded in the German imperial project, attached to which were denigrating and racist assumptions about the empire’s African subjects that informed the attitudes of German photographers. They are also viewed against the background of the colonial rebellions and their suppression by the Schutztruppe. Images of African prisoners and chain gangs taken during this time reveal in particularly striking ways the power wielded by the German colonial state against its African subjects, power in which the photographers themselves shared as white colonists.

Photographs depicting colonial disciplinary practices and violent scenes from the colonial wars were collected in private albums, sent home as postcards to friends and loved ones, published in domestic newspapers and military memoirs, and stored in the archives of German museums. The photographs considered in this chapter include images that were published in newspapers and anthropological monographs, as well as images kept private or stored away in collections, only reaching an audience later, under circumstances that were fundamentally different than when the photographs were first taken. Elizabeth Edwards, among other scholars of anthropological photography, has underlined the importance of a photograph’s materiality

156 when considering how a photograph’s image content is received and understood by an audience.398 Thinking about the form in which photographic images of violence reached an audience points toward contemporary interpretations of the images and the meanings that adhered to photographs of violence in the contemporary settings in which they were viewed.

Edwards has also emphasized the instability of the meanings attached to photographic images. Photographs capture a moment in time, she argues, while simultaneously decontextualize that moment, removing it from the regular passage of time. As a consequence, meaning adheres to photographs only tenuously, opening images up to continuous re- engagement by viewers in different social contexts.399 The photograph of a hanging taken by a soldier in Southwest Africa examined in this chapter, which later ended up serving as evidence in the British Blue Book condemning German rule in the colony, shows how meanings attached to particular images could change dramatically over time as they were re-appropriated for different purposes and reproduced in different forms.

Scholars who have looked at photographs produced by Germans in the colonial context have noted that they visually reinforced imperial attitudes and colonial structures, but have also emphasized that such images cannot be wholly reduced to photographers’ particular worldviews.

Jens Jäger, for instance, has noted that the African presence in colonial imagery opens up the possibility for alternative readings of photographs that in other ways serve as visual representations and reiterations of German imperial ideology and colonial structures.400 Claudia

398 See for instance, Elizabeth Edwards, “Object of Affect: Photography beyond the Image,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 221-234; Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, “Introduction: Photographs as Objects,” Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (London and New York: Routledge, 2004): 1-15. 399 Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001): 14-15. 400 Jens Jäger, “Bilder aus Afrika vor 1918: Zur visuellen Konstruktion Afrikas im europäischen Kolonialismus,” Visual History: Ein Studienbuch, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006): 134-148.

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Siebrecht has further argued that photographers in Southwest Africa could not exert total control over their subjects – particularly the African men and women who appeared in their photographs

– and therefore could not always impose their own perspective on images they produced, opening up the possibility for alternative interpretations beyond the photographer’s personal intentions.401 In another context, Frances Guerin has argued with regard to photographs taken by

Wehrmacht soldiers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War that such images should not be read only or principally through the lens of the photographer’s identity or a regime’s ideology, but as glimpses of a history that might otherwise have been hidden or lost.402 These images, she argues, captured hidden aspects of war, conquest and annihilation, “extraordinary events that might otherwise have remained invisible,” as she writes.403 The complex reality reflected in the image content of these photographs, scholars remind us, was often in tension with the broader cultural and ideological currents in which the images were produced.

This chapter, in particular, considers photographs of chain gangs and floggings in East

Africa as visual representations of the tensions surrounding white violence in the colony. The first section considers images of flogging and chain-gangs from German East Africa taken by

German natural scientists and soldiers who travelled to the colony in the wake of the Maji Maji rebellion. Such images, it is argued, visualized what many Germans imagined was the just punishment of ungrateful and treacherous African subjects and symbolized the re-imposition of imperial control when the entire colonial project had been shaken by rebellion and scandal. At the same time, the photographs effaced German involvement in the colonial disciplinary system

401 Claudia Siebrecht, “Seeing the ‘Savage’ and the Suspension of Time: Photography, War and Concentration Camps in German Southwest Africa, 1904-1908,” 37-56. 402 Frances Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes: Film and photography in (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): 51. 403 Frances Guerin, “The Ambiguity of Amateur Photography in Modern Warfare,” New Literary History 48.1 (2017): 56.

158 and displaced colonial violence on to African functionaries. Photographs of floggings were more sensitive, and it appears that those who had the opportunity to photograph the punishment chose not to publish the images, not only effacing German complicity in colonial violence, but also the violence itself and the suffering of its victims. In other words, photographs of African chain- gangs and floggings visualized the violence of colonial rule at the same time as they held it at a distance and displaced its origins.

The second section looks at photographs taken by a German soldier in Southwest Africa during the genocidal war fought against the Herero and Nama. In Southwest Africa, photographs celebrated the defeat of supposed racial inferiors and contributed to a discourse about the

German colonial project of civilizing savagery in Africa. However, the African subjects of these wartime photographs disrupt the images, refusing to be fully enmeshed in the visual discourses imposed on them by German photographers. Furthermore, like the photographs of floggings and chain-gangs in East Africa, the images from Southwest Africa show signs of deliberate framing that obscured the origins and nature of the violence and only hinted at the extent of the destruction wrought by the Schutztruppe.

Flogging in East Africa and the Press

In October 1906 the recently appointed governor of East Africa, Albrecht von

Rechenberg, sent a report to the Colonial Section in Berlin in order to draw his superiors’ attention to a photograph that had been published the previous month in the Weltspiegel, an illustrated biweekly of the liberal newspaper, Berliner Tageblatt. Rechenberg included with his report a clipping from the newspaper showing the photograph, which took up the bottom third of

159 the page. “Execution of a punishment in East Africa,” as the Weltspiegel caption described the image, purported to depict a flogging in the colony: “A native receives his twenty-five for theft.”404 The photograph showed a man, naked from the waist and face-down across a barrel, held outstretched by three other men who sat or knelt on the ground holding the prisoner’s hands and feet. A fourth man in a white uniform and dark sash stood over the prisoner with his arm aloft, holding a rod in his hand and ready to strike.

Rechenberg was unhappy with the Weltspiegel for publishing the image, which he suspected was faked. “The picture is arbitrarily composed or reproduced from a photograph taken elsewhere,” he wrote to Berlin.405 He pointed out that it had never been common practice in the colony to lay a criminal over a barrel for a flogging. Furthermore, the hats seen in the photograph were all wrong, particularly the one worn by the supposed colonial soldier, “as anyone familiar with German East Africa can confirm.” Rechenberg worried that such “false representations” circulating in the press could be harmful for the colonial administration and he suggested the Colonial Office should publish its own statement in the Berliner Tageblatt to counter the publication of the photograph.406 Two years later the governor was again alerting the

Colonial Office to the same photograph, which he was dismayed to come across in an

“Illustrated German Colonial Calendar” for 1909. He again insisted that the photograph was an inaccurate depiction of a flogging in the colony: “An official punishment that corresponds to the one depicted has not taken place in East Africa, as far as I know, at least during the last 15 years.”407 At least one official in Berlin agreed with Rechenberg that the image was some cause

404 BArch R 1001/5379, 48. Der Weltspiegel, 13 September 1906: 4. 405 BArch, R 1001/5379, 47. 406 Ibid. 407 Rechenberg to Colonial Office, 23 December 1908, R 1001/5380: 3.

160 for concern, noting on the report that the accurate representation of colonial punishments was a

“not insignificant” issue for the German public.408

Image 1: “Execution of a Punishment in East Africa,” Der Weltspiegel, September 13, 1906, p.4. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. http://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/kalender/auswahl/date/1906-09- 13/27646518/

408 Ibid.

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The governor’s alarm at the Weltspiegel photograph has to be understood against the background of the increasingly important role played by visual culture in shaping German attitudes toward the colonial project. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Imperial

Germany was awash in colonial imagery, and a growing proportion of this imagery was made up of photographs. Imperial expansion coincided with major technological breakthroughs in camera technology. The unification of Germany and its entry onto the world stage as a major power in

1871 occurred at the same time as the dry plate process was developed. The process allowed photographers the freedom to prepare and develop plates when they chose and to dispense with portable darkrooms, lifting some of the technological burden from photographers’ shoulders and allowing for photographic mobility. 409 By the late 1880s further technological developments – including the replacement of dry plates with celluloid film – led to the first true hand-held cameras, exemplified by George Eastman’s Kodak box camera, introduced in 1888.410

Innovations in publishing technology kept pace with camera improvements over the nineteenth century. The invention in 1842 of the halftone process and its improvement over the next three decades, for example, made it possible to publish photographs and text simultaneously on a page and opened the way for photography to enter into the mainstream press and publishing industries. Perfected by the last decade of the nineteenth century, the halftone process transformed press journalism and by 1910 there were hundreds of illustrated newspapers that brought photographs to a mass readership.411 In Germany, by the beginning of the twentieth

409 Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A Social & Aesthetic History of Photography, 3rd ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2017): 71-72, 172. 410 Ibid., 172-174. 411 Hirsch, 331-333; Ulrich Keller, “Photojournalism Around 1900: The Institutionalization of a Mass Medium,” Shadow and Substance: Essays on the History of Photography, ed. Kathleen Collins (Bloomfield Hills: The Amorphous Institute Press, 1990): 287-288.

162 century photographs began to appear more frequently alongside traditional illustrations and engravings in the rapidly expanding illustrated press.412

Imperial expansion and technological innovation provided German explorers, missionaries, soldiers and scientists the opportunity to photograph unfamiliar overseas lands, including Africa, where German imperial control was steadily extended over the last decades of the nineteenth century. Explorers took photographs during their travels in Africa, as did the

German explorer Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs during an expedition through the Libyan desert in

1873-1874, for example.413 The German anthropologist Gustav Fritsch was an early adapter to photographic technology, producing over one hundred portrait photographs of African “racial types” during his travels through Southern Africa from 1863-1866.414 Rhenish missionaries from Germany took many pictures in what would become the colony of German Southwest

Africa.415 German soldiers took pictures while on duty, too, as did German officers while stationed with the navy in East Africa in 1890.416

As Imperial Germany entrenched colonial rule in Africa, German missionaries, scientists and other travellers took cameras with them to the colonies. Amateur photography in the colonies intensified as demand from publishing houses and museums for colonial imagery grew back in Germany.417 German colonists, too, took their cameras with them as they settled in the

412 David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011): 14, 125-126. 413 David Killingray and Andrew Roberts, “An Outline History of Photography in Africa to ca. 1940,” History in Africa 16 (1989): 199. 414 Andrew Bank, “Anthropology and Portrait Photography: Gustav Fritsch’s ‘Natives of South Africa’, 1863-1872,” Kronos 27 (2001): 43-76. 415 Jeremy Silvester, Patricia Hayes and Wolfram Hartmann, “‘This ideal conquest’: Photography and Colonialism in Namibian History,” The Colonizing Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History, ed. Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999): 12. 416 Killingray and Roberts, 200-201. 417 Christraud M. Geary, Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya, Cameroon, West Africa, 1902-1915 (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1988): 26-31.

163 colonies, producing images that domesticated foreign, unfamiliar colonial spaces for German viewers.418 The Colonial Office in Berlin at first attempted to control the flow of photographs from the colonies, particularly those taken by colonial soldiers and officials. Imperial authorities, for example, prohibited colonial administrators from distributing photographs of sites of strategic importance to the press. They eventually changed course after it became clear that photographs could influence public opinion and in fact requested that colonial governments like the one in

Cameroon distribute photographs of buildings, transportation networks and other signs of colonial development. Imperial authorities, however, were to be kept abreast of all such exchanges and sent their own copies of the images.419

Images of Africa and Africans played an increasingly important role in documenting the imperial experience, which by the second decade of colonial rule shaped German visual culture in significant ways. The expanding commercial advertising industry in particular reoriented

German culture around the visual and brought colonial imagery before the eyes of millions of

Germans.420 By 1900 images depicting Africans and German colonial dominion in Africa were frequently used in commercial advertisements for colonial products like cocoa and coffee, as well as many other products not usually associated with the empire, such as accordions.421

Photographs taken in Africa of colonial settlements, soldiers’ uniforms and ethnic “types” were included in packages of cigarettes to be collected in specially designed albums.422 Colonial pressure groups like the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society) were early adapters of photography and in 1891 began collecting a wide variety of photographs from the

418 See for example, Chris Conte, “Power, Production, and Land Use in German East Africa through the Photographs of Walther Dobbertin, c. 1910,” Journal of East African Studies 12.4 (2018): 632-654; Jens 419 Geary, Images of Bamum, 31. 420 David Ciarlo, “Advertising and the Optics of Colonial Power at the Fin de Siècle,” German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker M. Langbehn (New York: Routledge, 2010): 37-40. 421 Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, 173-192. 422 Silvester, et al., “This ideal conquest,” 13.

164 colonies, both official and private images, documenting the activities of imperial adventurers and colonial economic developments.423

The Colonial Society’s most important publication, the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, began publishing photographs as far back as 1896.424 The huge collection of photographs the Society amassed from photographers who visited the German colonies and taken from publications carrying colonial stories, eventually totaling some 50,000 images, were made available for use in pamphlets and slide shows for the purpose of spreading popular colonial propaganda.425

Postcards, which were an important form of communication at the turn of the century and mass produced by some 250 German companies at the time of the First World War, were transformed by photography. By the turn of the century nine out of every ten postcards featured photographs.426 Photographs and picture postcards also played an important role in the teaching of colonial topics in German schools, where colonial education became standard in most classrooms by 1908, because they were thought to be particularly reliable documents that enriched students’ imaginations.427 Whether in advertisements for soap or lessons in schoolbooks, by the early 20th century visual culture in Germany and other European metropoles was being shaped by colonial imagery, increasing numbers of which were photographs taken in the colonies, reproduced in the illustrated press, and collected as postcards or in photo albums.

423 Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Imperial Projections: Screening the German Colonies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015): 35-36; Silvester, et al., 12. 424 See for example, Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, September 5, 1896: 282. http://sammlungen.ub.uni- frankfurt.de/kolonialbibliothek/periodical/pageview/7800360 425 The quality of the printed photographs however left something to be desired and a relatively small number of photographs were published repeatedly in different colonial publications. Ciralo, Advertising Empire, 141-142. 426 Elizabeth Otto, “Real Men Wear Uniforms: Photomontage, Postcards, and Military Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Europe,” Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture 2.1 (2012): 30, note 21; Andrés Mario Zervigón, Photography and Germany (London: Reaktion Books, 2017): 65. 427 Jens Jaeger, “Colony as Heimat? The Formation of Colonial Identity in Germany around 1900,” German History 27.4 (2009): 483-486.

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As much as German visual culture, and photography more specifically, supported the colonial project and shaped positive images of the overseas colonies back home, images from the colonies also exposed the brutal underside of European rule overseas. By the time of the second wave of German colonial scandals, photography had become a powerful tool in the hands of those seeking to expose the abuses committed in the overseas colonies. As photography became more practical and mobile, cameras began to capture images in the colonies that exposed the violence and suffering that was the consequence of imperial rule. Such images challenged the

European powers’ civilizational rhetoric and colonial propaganda.

Images of European brutality began to appear in the illustrated press of rival powers, where they were held up as visual evidence of a colonial competitor’s unfitness to rule. The

French illustrated press, for instance, raised questions about Great Britain’s fitness to rule by drawing attention to widespread famine in India and the construction of concentration camps in

South Africa. Presented with a photograph of a pile of corpses, readers of the French magazine

L’Illustration were informed that the image did not depict Boer victims in South Africa, as one might expect, but rather Indians who had starved to death as a result of famine. Such reporting was meant to raise doubts about Britain’s claims to moral superiority over its imperial subjects.428

Photography played a critical role in European humanitarian movements that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Already in the 1870s, photographs of victims of the Indian Famine (1876-1877) made their way through networks and other unofficial channels back to Great Britain, where domestic humanitarian committees displayed

428 H. Hazel Hahn, “Heroism, Exoticism, and Violence: Representing the Self, “the Other,” and Rival Empires in the English and French Illustrated Press, 1880-1905,” Historical Reflections 38.3 (2012):

166 the images at committee meetings and sold copies to raise funds for famine relief.429

Photography played an even more influential role in the humanitarian movement that developed in response to the rubber terror in King Leopold’s . Already by the early 1890s accounts had reached the outside world of the widespread violence and murder taking place in the Congolese jungles, where agents working on behalf of the Belgian King Leopold II terrorized the local population into harvesting rubber. In 1903 the British Consul to the Congo, Roger

Casement, visited the private colony to investigate; he was so moved by what he witnessed in

Africa that upon his return he helped to found, with the journalist E. D. Morel, the Congo

Reform Association.

Casement brought back with him to Great Britain photographs he had gathered from

European missionaries in the region, which he included in his official report to the British government. The shocking images depicted local workers who had posed for the missionaries’ cameras to display their amputated limbs, victims of Leopold’s agents who forced local Africans to harvest labour with imprisonment, hostage-taking, floggings and amputations. The photographs were later published in support of the reform movement, most importantly Morel’s

1904 work, King Leopold’s Rule in Africa, and appeared prominently in the Reform

Association’s pamphlets, which sometimes sold by the thousands.430 Growing public support for the campaign for reform in the Congo had the effect of encouraging missionaries on the ground to take more photographs of maimed and mutilated African bodies, which were sent back to

429 Christina Twomey, “Framing Atrocity: Photography and Humanitarianism,” History of Photography 36.3 (2012): 258-261. 430 Nancy Rose Hunt, Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in the Colonial Congo (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016): 28; John Peffer, “Snap of the Whip/Crossroads of Shame: Flogging, Photography, and the Representation of Atrocity in the Congo Reform Campaign,” Visual Anthropology Review 24.1 (2008): 60- 63; Sharon Sliwinski, “The Childhood of Human Rights: The Kodak on the Congo,” Journal of Visual Culture 5.3 (2006): 337-342.

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Europe for the reform movement’s growing archive of visual materials.431 The Congo atrocity photographs became part of numerous lantern slide-shows the Congo Reform Association held all over Great Britain and the United States for large audiences who were often deeply moved by the photographs. The slide-shows and the revelatory missionary photographs that they projected as part of their programs played a key role in rallying a mass public to the cause of reform in the

Congo.432 “The Kodak has been a sore calamity to us,” the satirical King Leopold lamented in

Mark Twain’s pamphlet published in 1905. “The most powerful enemy that has confronted us, indeed.”433

This same period saw a second wave of colonial scandals in Germany that, like their predecessors in the 1890s, put intense political pressure on the Colonial Office to clean up its image. As part of their opposition to the government’s handling of the brutal and costly wars in

Southwest and East Africa, opposition deputies once again aired disturbing stories in the

Reichstag about German officials who had sexually abused, beaten and killed indigenous people and faced little if any criminal repercussions, or even setbacks to their careers in the colonial administration.434 The German press eagerly published these sensational stories of colonial excess and violence and stirred up public interest and indignation with reports containing lurid details about colonial officials’ overseas transgressions.435 Domestic newspapers printed

431 Christina Twomey, “Severed Hands: Authenticating Atrocity in the Congo, 1904-13,” Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, ed. Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2012): 41-43. 432 Peffer, 63-64, 66-67. 433 Mark Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy (Boston: P.R. Warren, 1905): 37. 434 Klaus Epstein, “Erzberger and the German Colonial Scandals, 1905-1910,” The English Historical Review 74.293 (1959): 637-663; John Lowry, “African Resistance and Centre Party Recalcitrance in the Reichstag Colonial Debates of 1905/06,” Central European History 39 (2006): 244-269; Martin Schröder, Prügelstrafe und Züchtigungsrecht in den Deutschen Schutzgebieten Schwarzafrikas (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1997): 83-85. 435 Frank Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse: Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien 1880- 1914 (München: Oldenbourg, 2009): 288-310; Rebekka Habermas, “Lost in Translation: Transfer and Nontransfer in the Atakpame Colonial Scandal,” The Journal of Modern History 86.1 (2014): 52-53.

168 dramatic descriptions of the brutal behaviour of officials like Geo Schmidt, a district officer in

Togo who had arbitrarily flogged Africans with particularly viciousness and was accused of sexually abusing African girls. Newspaper coverage of the Reichstag revelations turned the

Schmidt case into a public scandal, as Rebekka Habermas has argued, propelled by lurid details printed in the newspapers about Schmidt’s sexual crimes and detailed descriptions of the instruments he had used when flogging African prisoners and their effects on the body.436 The prominent Centre Party delegate Matthias Erzberger, in particular, received enthusiastic coverage in the opposition press, including left-liberal and Social Democratic papers, for his combative criticism of colonial mismanagement and for exposing colonial officials’ abuses to the public.437

The reporting in the press on misdeeds perpetrated in the colonies clearly concerned members of the German government and colonial administration, who kept a wary eye on the papers. In November 1906, a frustrated Chancellor von Bulow told the Reichstag:

“For months a section of our press has considered its task to deal exhaustively with colonial affairs and in particular with the so-called colonial scandals. They have not confined themselves to reporting true facts, they have been guilty of outrageous exaggerations, generalizations and distortions.”438 German colonists in East Africa were also caught up in the sensational stories of violence in the colonies at this time. In April 1906, for example, a draft letter from the Colonial Section director’s office to the governor of East Africa noted that the trial of an East African planter by the name of Mismahl on charges of assault necessitated a review of employer’s disciplinary

436 Habermas, “Lost in Translation,” 49-54. 437 Frank Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse: Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien 1880- 1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009): 294-296. 438 Reichstag, November 28, 1906, Dep. Bülow, StBR 3959. Partially quoted in Habermas, “Lost in Translation,” 52. “Seit Monaten hat ein Teil unserer Presse seine Aufgabe darin gesehen, sich bis zur Erschöpfung mit den Kolonialangelegenheiten und insbesondere mit den sogenannten Kolonialskandalen zu beschäftigen. Man hat sich nicht darauf beschränkt, wahre Tatsachen wiederzugeben, man hat sich ungeheuerlicher Übertreibungen, Verallgemeinerungen und Entstellungen schuldig gemacht.”

169 rights. Attached to the report was a clipping from the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten of a story about the trial, entitled, “The mistreatment of Negroes in German East Africa.”439

When viewed against this background, Rechenberg’s alarm at the publication of a photograph purporting to show a flogging in East Africa is not surprising, considering the possible repercussions it might have on the public opinion at a time of heightened sensitivity about violence perpetrated against Germany’s colonial subjects. The Weltspiegel photograph in fact bore some resemblance to another photograph of a flogging taken in the Congo, one that featured prominently in the Association’s humanitarian lectures and publications. That image showed an African sentry, his arm held aloft and holding a whip in his hand, standing above a naked man lying face-down on the ground, his wrists and ankles seemingly bound to two wooden poles. Another man stands just behind the other two, his hands held behind him as though he were another prisoner awaiting punishment.440

The art historian John Peffer has argued that the scene – perhaps the only published photograph of a flogging in the Congo Free State – was probably staged for the camera to provide the reform movement with visual evidence of flogging in the Congo.441 That Rechenberg also claimed the Weltspiegel image might have been staged is striking, if only as a marker of the governor’s concern that such an image might “misrepresent” the colony in the domestic press and cause damage to its image among the public, something the flogging image from the Congo had certainly done for King Leopold’s colony as part of the lantern slide shows put on by Congo

Reform Association.

439 Letter to Rechenberg, 29 April 1906, BArch R 1001/5379: 14-15. 440 The image is reproduced in Sliwinski, “Kodak on the Congo,” 349. 441 John Peffer, “Flogging Photographs from the Congo Free State,” Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture, ed. Maria Pia Di Bella and James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2013): 126-133.

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Although Rechenberg’s concerns were warranted under the circumstances, it was not a given at the time that images of abuse and violence would have a detrimental effect on public opinion toward the colonial project. The Congo reform movement demonstrated the powerful influence images of atrocity could have on domestic public opinion, but the meaning and impact of such images could nevertheless be ambiguous. In 1904, at the same time that the Congo photographs were reaching the British public, a British administrator named Walter Edmund

Roth filed a report that brought to light the violence being perpetrated by white settlers in

Australia. The report documented settlers’ abuse and terrorization of Aboriginal people in

Western Australia, including the pervasive practice of chaining indigenous people by the neck.

Roth included in the report photographs that had been taken of indigenous chain-gangs in prisons and labour camps, alongside graphic testimony from indigenous witnesses to white violence; similar images of groups of Aboriginal prisoners were later published in Australian newspapers.

Roth’s report caused a stir in Australia and Great Britain when it was debated in the

British parliament in early 1905 and received coverage in the Australian press, and the British press followed the story for some years thereafter. However, as the historian Jane Lydon has noted, the images failed to elicit the kind of sustained public outrage then being focused on the atrocities committed in the Congo Free State. Lydon argues that local officials and the pastoralist-friendly press in Australia in part succeeded in downplaying and obscuring white violence in Western Australia by shaping the narrative around the photographs, which were interpreted as images depicting the humane and just treatment of people who were portrayed as lawless savages.442 At least for most Australians, the photographs did not reveal unequivocally

442 Jane Lydon, “‘Behold the Tears: Photography as Colonial Witness,” History of Photography 34.3 (2010): 234- 250; Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016): 98-108.

171 the error of white violence, but were bound up in discourses of civilization and savagery, reinforcing rather than upending widespread prejudices about the colonized.

Photographs played an ambivalent role in exposing abuses committed by Germans in the

African colonies, as well. At times photographs of violence perpetrated overseas were widely available in Germany, perhaps never more so than during the genocidal war waged by the

Schutztruppe against the Herero and Nama (1904-1907). Colonial authorities in Southwest

Africa refrained from imposing any censorship on photography during the war and as a result images of violence perpetrated by the German army circulated widely in the colony and back in

Germany. German soldiers stationed in Southwest Africa sent hundreds of thousands of postcards from the front to friends and family back in Germany and not infrequently they bore brutal images from the war, including chained women and children and executions by hanging.

Similar images appeared in the numerous military memoirs published about the conflict, written by German soldiers celebrating their wartime experience.443 Even the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, the mouthpiece of the German Colonial society, did not shy away from publishing photographs of female Herero prisoners of war engaged in forced labour.444 The now notorious photograph of nine emaciated Herero surrendering to the Germans after surviving the Omaheke Desert was published in a coffee table book in 1907.445 At the same time that the Congo Reform Association was turning public opinion against King Leopold II’s colonial depredations in Africa with its

443 Felix Axster, “‘… will try to send you the best views from here’: Postcards from the Colonial War in Namibia (1904-1908), German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker M. Langbehn (New York: Routledge, 2010): 55-70; Joachim Zeller, “Orlog in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Fotografien aus dem Kolonialkrieg 1904 bis 1907,” Fotogeschichte 85/86 (2002): 31-44; Joachim Zeller, “‘Images of the South West African War’: Reflections of the 1904-1907 Colonial War in Contemporary Reportage and Book Illustration,” Hues Between Black and White: Historical Photography from Colonial Namibia: 1860s to 1915 (Windhoek: Out of Africa Publishers, 2004): 309-323. 444 See for instance, “Lüderitzbucht-Kubub,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, 15 September 1906. 445 Zeller, “Images,” 318 n.19, 319 n. 22.

172 moving lantern slide-shows in Great Britain and the United States, a steady stream of violent images from Southwest Africa were being published in Germany.

The photographs from Southwest Africa appear not to have significantly altered most

Germans’ perception of the war or the colonial project more generally. The shock many

Germans felt at the outbreak of rebellion in Southwest Africa – only deepened the next year when conflict broke out in East Africa – inspired calls for revenge in the colony and back home.

Early reports from the front in Southwest Africa claimed that the Herero had committed atrocities against Germans and that men, women and children had been murdered and their bodies mutilated by the rebel fighters. In this atmosphere a general consensus formed around the necessity of “exemplary” punishment for Africans guilty of everything from murder to vandalizing farms.446 While the Social Democrats and the other opposition parties took the government and colonial army to task in the Reichstag for the brutal and costly war, politicians across the political spectrum showed themselves to be unsympathetic toward the rebels, who were thought to be using barbarous methods to fight an illegitimate war.

The language used in the Reichstag debates revealed that racist assumptions about the

Herero, and particularly an unwillingness to accord them a shared humanity, connected men of vastly different ideological positions, as Helmut Walser Smith has argued.447 Commercial advertising that capitalized on exotic colonial imagery and the feelings of imperial power such depictions aroused in the German public became increasingly racialized during the war and some advertisements even flirted with imagery that evoked the genocidal violence perpetrated by the

446 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005): 10-11, 18. 447 Helmut Walser Smith, “The Talk of Genocide, the Rhetoric of Miscegenation: Notes on the Debates in the German Reichstag, 1904-14,” The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998): 107-116.

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Schutztruppe in Southwest Africa.448 In this atmosphere even the most shocking photographs from the front appear to have elicited little sympathy for the victims from the German public, as

Joachim Zeller has argued, and in fact only served to convince many that the German military was justified in punishing Imperial Germany’s ungrateful African subjects.449 So although there were reasons in late 1906 for the governor to be worried about the flogging photograph and the adverse consequences it might have, such images were not wholly unwelcome to the German public.

The permissive attitude toward violence aimed at punishing Germany’s African subjects is reflected in the Weltspiegel article, although there are signs that the paper’s editors sought to place some distance between its readers and the violence depicted in the flogging photograph.

Looking more closely at the Weltspiegel photograph, one sees that the paper presented the flogging image in a way that diminished the impact of its startling content. The photograph was tucked away in the “This and That” section of the weekly, surrounded by stories of a much more benign nature, including a meeting of the German Federation of Hunters to discuss the protection of songbirds, a discussion of the plumage that was part of the Prince of Wale’s crown, and the construction of a clay church in Chicago.

The editors provided little context for the photograph beyond the title attached to the image, “Execution of a punishment in East Africa.” “A thief receives his ‘twenty-five’ for theft,” the caption explained to readers, using colonial jargon for twenty-five lashes of the hippopotamus-whip, a common punishment in the German colonies. “The punishment is not particularly barbaric to blacks, as it is customary in the region,” the caption explained, in case the

448 David Ciarlo, “Picturing Genocide in German Consumer Culture, 1904-10,” German Colonialism and National Identity, ed. Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer (New and London: Routledge, 2011): 69-89. 449 Zeller, “Orlog in Deutsch-Südwestafrika,” 38.

174 paper’s liberal-minded readers might think this harsh for simple theft.450 The caption also noted that it was a member of the “native Schutztruppe” who was about to execute the flogging, underlining the conspicuous absence of the German officials who were supposed to oversee corporal punishments. In this way the paper more than implied that flogging, while it might appear barbaric, in fact aligned with local African practices, the photograph serving as something like a visual representation of the “strict, but fair” policy toward the empire’s African subjects that was a common refrain among German colonists. Furthermore, the photograph’s narrow view of colonial corporal punishment, one that depicted only African functionaries engaged in its practice, subtly shifted responsibility for the violence away from the German officials who were its ultimate source.

For comparison’s sake, it is instructive to look at another corporal punishment photograph the Weltspiegel published two years earlier, to which it attached much different meanings. In September 1904 the paper published two photographs side-by-side, above the title

“American criminal justice”: on the left, an image of a white adolescent boy in a pillory, on the right an image of an African American man, shirtless and tied to a post, about to be flogged.451

The photographs contrast sharply with the one from East Africa published two years later. The

1904 images show white men in suits conducting public punishments, watched by crowds of onlookers. On the right, a bearded man in a hat is holding a rod ready to strike, and behind him a crowd of men has gathered to watch the execution of the punishment. The spectators are standing only a few feet from the pole to which the prisoner is tied and fill the top two-thirds of the image, spilling out of the frame. Some of the men are standing casually with their hands in their pockets as they look on, and an African American boy can be seen on the left side of the image, standing

450 “Die Strafe hat für die Schwarzen nichts besonders Barbarisches an sich, da sie die Heimatsübliche ist.” 451 Der Weltspiegel, 11 September 1904: 3.

175 wide-eyed at the front of the crowd. Whereas the photograph from East Africa depicted an isolated flogging conducted by colonial functionaries, the images published two years earlier showed public spectacles of violence taking place among curious crowds.

Image 2: “American Criminal Justice,” Der Weltspiegel, September 11, 1904, p.3. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. http://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/kalender/auswahl/date/1904-09-11/27646518/

In its September 1904 piece, the Weltspiegel framed the photographs as an indictment of the United States’ self-image as a land of free and equal citizens. “America the free, the land of

‘unlimited possibilities’, still exhibits quite barbarous forms in its administration of justice, in spite of all progress that the Americans so often and gladly boast,” readers were told. In the western states, punishments were carried out in public, “as was common in the marketplaces of

German cities in the 17th and 18th centuries.” The paper described the pillory seen in the left photograph as a “torture instrument” akin to neck-irons used during the Middle Ages, “more than

176 two hundred years ago,” emphasizing the backward nature of the punishment and by extension

American justice more generally.

If the images and their placement side-by-side in the paper implied to readers that punishments in the United States were equally brutal for white and black prisoners, the caption emphasized that African American prisoners were treated differently, as they were whipped before being thrown in the pillory. In the United States, where lynching was “the order of the day,” according to the paper, Americans might go on about full equality but African Americans were an “exception.” The paper interpreted the photographs as visual evidence of the hypocrisy of American rhetoric about human equality, implying that they were signs of a regression in

American justice: “Once the whole Union was outraged by the treatment of the Negroes in the southern states. Today in the United States they lynch and flog and consider Negroes to be people of the lowest order– in spite of all the tirades about equality before the law.”452

The ways in which the Weltspiegel appropriated images of floggings points to the contradictory role the violence of colonial rule played in the visual representation of the German colonial project. The paper’s use of a flogging image in 1904 was clearly meant as a striking visual critique of American hypocrisy, and the paper placed emphasis on the fact that the photograph served as evidence that the United States continued to use a “barbarous” practice against its African American citizens. Two years later, the paper acknowledged that the flogging photograph from East Africa might appear barbaric, but assured readers that it was a practice in

452 “Einst empörte sich die ganze Union über die Behandlung der Neger in den Südstaaten. Heute lyncht und peitscht man in den Vereinigten Staaten und hält der Neger für Menschen allerletzter Ordnung - trotz aller Tiraden über Gleichheit vor dem Gesetz.”

177 line with local customs, while emphasising the role played by Africans in the execution of the punishment. In this way the paper attempted to normalize colonial disciplinary violence and placed distance between its German readers and the flogging image, which depicted violence for which German colonial rule was the ultimate source.

The paper’s rather casual publication of the flogging photograph from East Africa in

October 1906 can be seen in part as the consequence of the generally permissive attitude toward the visual representation of colonial violence that came in the wake of the colonial rebellions. At the same time, Rechenberg’s concern about the photograph’s publication points to the potential problems such images could present colonial officials who were concerned with protecting the image of the colonial service after a second string of scandals had forced them on the defensive.

In such an atmosphere, the publication of flogging photographs that might depict something more excessive than a “strict, but fair” treatment of the empire’s African subjects would have been a concern to officials like Rechenberg, tasked as they were with bringing reform to the colonies, including instituting stricter oversight in the realm of colonial disciplinary policy.

Some of the most striking images of floggings were photographed on scientific expeditions to East Africa in the wake of the Maji Maji rebellion. By this time photography had become an established practice for German anthropologists, ethnologists, and other natural scientists. Early proponents of photography like Gustav Fritsch saw in the camera a technology that might overcome the imprecision and unreliability of free-hand drawing and artistic renderings of scientific subjects.453 Even before formal German rule on the continent Fritsch travelled to southern Africa in the early 1860s to photograph indigenous peoples and their

453 Andrew Zimmerman, “Looking Beyond History: The Optics of German Anthropology and the Critique of Humanism,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences32.3 (2001): 398.

178 customs, taking dozens of portraits documenting racial “types” that were reproduced as engravings in an anthropological study published in 1872.454

From early after its founding in 1869 the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and

Prehistory collected images from overseas travelers and colonial officials that were published in its Journal of Ethnology. In 1874 the Society published Carl Dammann’s anthropological photograph album, Ethnological Photographic Gallery of the Various Races of Man, that documented the various racial “types” in hundreds photographs, including images of Asian,

African and other non-European visitors to Germany.455 Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century German natural scientists worked to standardize photographic techniques for anthropological and ethnographic photographs so that anthropologists and ethnographers might draw the most scientific information from the growing body of images.456 After 1884 many of the images came from the German colonies, where anthropologists and other natural scientists collected photographs alongside indigenous artifacts, often on behalf of museums in Germany.

The cultural anthropologist and director of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, Bernhard

Ankermann, for example took hundreds of photographs in colonial Cameroon that became part of the museum’s collection.457

German natural scientists took a number of photographs of chain-gangs and floggings in

East Africa while on scientific expeditions through the colony. The anthropologist Karl Weule, a protégée of Hans Meyer, took photographs of such scenes while on a research expedition

454 Andrew Bank, “Anthropology and Portrait Photography: Gustav Fritsch’s ‘Natives of South Africa’, 1863-1872,” Kronos 27 (2001): 43-76; 455 Elizabeth Edwards, “The Image as Anthropological Document,” Visual Anthropology 3 (1990): 249-254; Udo Krautwurst, “The Joy of Looking: Early German Anthropology, Photography and Audience Formation,” Visual Anthropology Review 1-2 (2002): 67-68. 456 Zimmerman, “Looking Beyond History,” 399. 457 Geary, Images from Bamum, 32-34.

179 through the southeastern regions of the colony in 1906. Like previous scientific expeditions to

East Africa, the anthropological work Weule conducted was backed by force. Scientific expeditions to East Africa in the nineteenth century, Michelle Moyd has noted, were more often than not militarized columns, employing colonial Schutztruppe as protection and capable of horrific violence.458 The was even involved in the collection of an immense number of indigenous artifacts from the colonies, organizing expeditions and using its military might to take objects inaccessible to regular collectors.459 The Weule expedition was a similarly armed formation as it set out from Lindi in the summer of 1906, travelling in a long loop to the southeastern border of the colony through regions only recently brought back under

German control.

Weule’s expedition was deeply intertwined with the German Schutztruppe’s ongoing counter-insurgency campaign that dragged on into 1907, as the historian Andrew Zimmerman has argued.460 At least in its initial stages the expedition looked something like a military patrol.

The colonial government provided twelve armed African police for the duration of the six-month trip, as well as an Imperial German flag that announced the official nature of the expedition.

During the first week of the trip a district official by the name of Ewerbeck, as well as several

African soldiers, provided an official escort. As the expedition progressed through former rebel territory the government escort gathered together local villagers and handed down punishments,

458 Michelle Moyd, “‘From a hurt sense of honour’: Violence Work and the Limits of Soldierly Obedience on a Scientific Expedition in German East Africa, 1896-1897,” Slavery & Abolition 39.3 (2018): 580-581. 459 Andrew Zimmermann, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001): 154-156. 460 Andrew Zimmerman, “‘What Do You Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?’ Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48.2 (2006): 446-449.

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Image 3: A flogging in German East Africa, Karl Weule, 1906-1907. © GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. NegOAf 521. Digitized by Deutsche Fotothek. http://www.deutschefotothek.de/documents/obj/71646055 including floggings and hangings. As Zimmerman notes, the military escort provided Weule with unique opportunities to photograph the local people by gathering together villagers to dispense colonial justice.461 “Wherever we appeared,” Weule later wrote, “at every encampment, but also on marches through the sprawling settlements, everywhere the entire population of the district in question were assembled into large groups” by the local African officials. “Indeed, the hundreds of men, women and children from all tribes of the region offered photographic subjects that

461 Ibid., 448.

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Image 4: A flogging in German East Africa, Karl Weule, 1906-1907. © GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. NegOAf 540. Digitized by Deutsche Fotothek. http://www.deutschefotothek.de/documents/obj/71646074

would never come before the camera of a private researcher on his own.”462 The continuing repression of the Maji Maji uprising in the south therefore made Weule’s photographic work easier by forcing local people to appear before the camera as part of an active counter-insurgency campaign.

462 Karl Weule, Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse meiner ethnographischen Forschungsreise in den Südosten Deutsch- Ostafrikas (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1908): 5. Partially quoted in Zimmerman, “Herr Professor,” 448. “In der Tat boten die Hunderte, all Stämmen jenes Gebiets angehörenden Männer, Frauen und Kinder ein photographisches Material, wie es dem auf eigene Faust marschierenden Privatforscher nun und nimmer vor die Kamera kommen konnte.”

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From very early in the expedition Weule was confronted with the brutal campaign waged by the colonial Schutztruppe in the south of the colony. Soon upon his arrival in Lindi he noticed signs of the war still being waged in parts of the south. “Presently two elements predominate in the streets: the Askari and the chain-gangs; both are intimately related to the recently ended uprising,” he wrote, noting that he saw “long chains” of prisoners being led around the town by

African soldiers.463 The sight of the chain gangs does not seem to have bothered Weule, who later wrote that critics of the punishment back in Germany were simply naïve. “Much has been said about the barbarity of this form of punishment in the Reichstag back home, and how superficially the majority of the speakers have been informed about the Negro’s psyche and sense of justice!”464

In one sense, Weule’s photographs were a candid look at disciplinary violence in East

Africa, as unflinching as Weule himself was in his assessment of the fact that the German administration was chaining Africans by the neck in the colony. The flogging photographs in particular, which capture the moment the rod is about to strike the prisoner held fast by African

Askari, have a visceral quality that contrasts, for example, with the seemingly staged image published by the Weltspiegel that so upset Governor Rechenberg.465 However, like that photograph, the images subtly framed out the German role in the disciplinary regime, focusing instead on African prisoners and the African Askari who guarded and punished them. Such was the case with a number of other photographs of the disciplinary regime in East Africa, as well.

463 Karl Weule, Negerleben in Ostafrika (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1908): 44. 464 Ibid. “Was ist bei uns daheim im Reichstag über die Barbarei dieser Art von Strafvollzug alles geredet worden, und wie oberflächlich ist die Mehrzahl der Redner sicher über die Psyche und das Rechtsgefühl des Negers unterrichtet gewesen!” 465 See also a photograph of a flogging in East Africa held by the Deutsches Historisches Museum, “Vollstreckung der Prügelstrafe durch einen afrikanischen Unteroffizier,” 1990/36.17. https://www.dhm.de/datenbank/dhm.php?seite=5&fld_0=BA166706

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Image 5: Mwera prisoners in chains, Karle Weule, Mtama, German East Africa, 1906-1907. © GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. NegOAf 1066. Digitized by Deutsche Fotothek. http://www.deutschefotothek.de/documents/obj/71646431

German colonial officials were frequently absent from images that depicted chain-gangs and floggings in East Africa, while African Askari frequently appeared in photographs from the colony, as guards watching over chained prisoners or wielding the whip as administrators of corporal punishment. Other photographers, including the colonial police official Kurt von

Schleinitz, photographed chained prisoners in isolation, their African guards framed out along with any Germans that might have been present at the scene.466

466 See also photographs of chain gangs in East Africa held in the Bundesarchiv Picture Database: “Bezirksamt Kilwa, in Ketten gelegte Afrikaner, Bewachung durch einen Askari,” Bild 183-R0120-0500; “Askari bewacht Frauen als Kettengefangene,” Bild 105-DOA0885; “Askari bewacht Kettengefangene an einem Brunnen,” Bild 105-

184

Image 6: “Prisoners in chains in Kilimatinde,” Kurt von Schleinitz, German East Africa, 1907/1915. Bildarchiv der Deutschen Kolonial Gesellschaft, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, 002-1003-06.

Image 7: “Prisoners in chains in Kilimatinde,” Kurt von Schleinitz, German East Africa, 1907/1914. Bildarchiv der Deutschen Kolonial Gesellschaft, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, 002-1003-03.

DOA0347; “Askari bewacht Kettengefangene,” Bild 105-DOA6174; “Kettengefangene in Tabora,” Bild 146-1984- 063-36A.

185

These images of men and women chained by the neck and floggings of prone prisoners were candid glimpses into the tough disciplinary measures the colonial administration was taking to discipline African labour and punish African rebels, but the subtle framing out of the German presence suggested there was little direct German involvement in the colonial disciplinary system.467 The photographs at once acknowledged disciplinary violence and distanced German officials from the colonial disciplinary regime’s more unsavoury practices.

Image 8: Flogging, Schirati (Shirati), German East Africa. SLUB / Deutsche Fotothek, unknown photographer. http://www.deutschefotothek.de/documents/obj/71792198

467 This is not to suggest that German officials always avoided having their picture taken with chained prisoners in East Africa. German officials appear, for example, in two of the photographs of prisoners among the Hans Meyer collection digitized by the Deutsche Fotothek. See “Gefangene in Ketten, 1886/1911,” http://www.deutschefotothek.de/documents/obj/71792158/df_a_0065275; http://www.deutschefotothek.de/documents/obj/71792159/df_a_0065276

186

The above photograph was taken in the course of a German scientific expedition led by

Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg that crossed central Africa from 1907-1908. The expedition, as Mecklenburg later wrote, was aimed at “a systematic investigation of the German

East African Protectorate, the Central African rift-valley, in its expansion from Lake Kiwu to

Lake Albert, and finally the north-eastern confines of the Congo State.”468 The photograph is one of many from the expedition that ended up in the collection of the geographer and colonial traveller Hans Meyer, who himself was one of two Europeans to first summit Mount

Kilimanjaro, then in German East Africa, in 1889. At the time of the 1907 expedition Meyer was a member of the advisory Colonial Council and chairman of the Commission for the Geographic

Exploration of the German , which sponsored overseas scientific expeditions and sought to produce knowledge about Germany’s colonies in the service of imperial rule.469 Meyer later said of Mecklenburg’s trip that it was the “largest and most fruitful” of the expeditions sponsored by the Commission.470 Mecklenburg credited Meyer as being instrumental in getting the scientific expedition off the ground, explaining why the image later ended up in his sponsor’s collection.471

The flogging image was one of some 5,000 photographs that were taken over the course of the expedition. One photograph, in particular, from among these thousands of images – of a

Tutsi high-jumper leaping over Mecklenburg and a German Schutztruppe officer – became well-

468 Adolf Frederick Mecklenburg, In the Heart of Africa, trans. G.E. Maberly-Oppler (London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1910): IX. 469 Rainer Buschmann, Anthropology’s Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in , 1870- 1935 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2009): 74-75; Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Imperial Projections: Screening the German Colonies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015): 137-139. 470 Hans Meyer, “Übersicht über die Ergebnisse der Expedition der Landeskundlichen Kommission des Reichskolonialamtes,” Verhandlungen des Deutscher Kolonialkongresses 1910 (Berlin: Verlag Dietrich Reimer (Ernst Vohsen), 1910): 9. 471 Mecklenburg, 3.

187 known after its publication in National Geographic in 1912.472 Such images were produced under trying conditions. Camera equipment was still cumbersome in the first decade of the twentieth century and the year-and-a-half-long trek across central Africa made photography particularly difficult. “Though some of them may not possibly pass muster before very critical eyes,” Mecklenburg later wrote, “it must be remembered that many of them had to be developed in our tents.” The African climate, too, caused problems. “The troublesome dust blown up by gusts of wind adhered at times to the coated sided of the plates, and did not, of course, improve them,” he noted. Even when the photographic plates were left undeveloped they still had to be shipped back to Germany: “Those of the undeveloped plates sent on the long route from the centre of Africa to Germany, despite most careful packing and hermetical sealing, were subjected to the greatest changes of temperature, which have often worked injuriously.” In spite of all the difficulties, many of the photographs survived the expedition, much to Mecklenburg’s relief: “It is mainly due to the skill and pains bestowed upon them by those who developed them that many plates which were feared to be hopelessly spoilt were saved.”473 Like the famous image of a Tutsi high-jumper, the flogging photograph survived through all of these difficulties, eventually ending up in Meyer’s collection back in Germany.

The photograph offers a glimpse into German colonial disciplinary practices as they were apparently rarely visualized at the time. The image shows a public flogging of caravan carriers near Schirati (Shirati), located east of , near the border with British East Africa.

The photograph captures at least two (and perhaps three) separate floggings; the prisoners can be

472 See John Bale, “Capturing ‘The African’ Body? Visual Images and ‘Imaginative Sports’,” Journal of Sports History 25.2 (1998): 234-251; John Bale, “Partial Knowledge: Photographic Mystifications and Constructions of ‘The African Athlete’,” Deconstructing Sport History: A Postmodern Analysis, ed. Murray Phillips (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006): 95-116. 473 Ibid., IX.

188 distinguished by the two men kneeling down at their head and feet to hold them in place for the punishment. Presumably, the punishments are being conducted by local caravan leaders hired for the expedition; an African Schutztruppe soldier can be seen standing a short distance away from the floggings, next to the building on the left side of the image, perhaps supervising the punishments. Just behind the first prisoner, held face-down in the centre-left of the frame, a man wearing a fez and dressed in white has his arm raised, the Kiboko rod held straight up against the sky and ready to strike.

Nearly all of the carriers sitting on the ground in the foreground have their backs turned and are watching the execution of the punishments, as do the men standing in a group around the flogging the scene, which they were no doubt forced to witness. However, one man crouched down in the foreground and holding a walking stick has turned toward the camera to watch the

German dressed in all white as he walks away from the group, his hands behind his back, which is turned to the floggings taking place only a few metres away. From the camera’s perspective the long wooden rod the German police officer is holding in his clasped hands almost touches the

African man’s face, a symbolic threat and a visual reminder that German rule in East Africa was the ultimate source of the disciplinary violence depicted in the photograph.

The image depicts colonial power structures in a more direct manner than a number of other contemporary photographs that captured the colonial disciplinary regime in East Africa.

The presence of the German official in the frame, for one, marks the image out from other photographs from the colony, including those discussed in this chapter. In contrast to those and other images from the colony, the Mecklenburg expedition photograph shows a German official at the scene of a flogging, suggesting a clear connection between the colonial administration and disciplinary violence. While the official may have turned away from the punishments, there is a

189 clear visual connection from him along the pathway between the carriers crouched on the ground to the floggings taking placing in the clearing. The German official’s casual bearing as he walks away from the scene of the floggings suggests his complete assurance that colonial functionaries lower down the social hierarchy were doing the dirty work of enacting German disciplinary authority, whether it was the Askari supervising the punishments or the men actually administering the floggings. The German’s presence in the photograph points to the likelihood, too, that the scene was photographed as it unfolded, and there is a visceral quality to the image that suggests the floggings were a spontaneous event that the photographer captured on film.

Other images of the colonial disciplinary regime in East Africa show more signs of having been composed by a photographer, whether it be men and women in chain-gangs forced to stand before the camera, their Askari guards standing at attention nearby, or flogging punishments performed and re-enacted for the photographer’s benefit. The Mecklenburg expedition photograph, in contrast, appears to show a flogging as it actually happened in East Africa under

German rule.

German Southwest Africa

Individual photographs taken during the genocide in Southwest Africa reveal the complex meanings that adhere to images produced in these contexts. Of these images, individual and group portraits of German soldiers with captive Herero offer insights into the photographer’s motivations, as well as those of the men seen in the photograph. Group photographs from the time show German soldiers intentionally arranged within the frame, fully cognizant of the moment to be memorialized and projecting an image of themselves as they wished to be seen: strong and masculine, relaxed in victory over the colonized. At the same time, the African

190 victims in these same photographs fail to conform to the photograph’s imposed meanings, thereby destabilizing the framework within which they are confined. The tensions generated by the misalignment of composed image and spontaneous reality generate unintended meanings that complicate interpretations of each image.

Photographs taken by a German colonial soldier, Jean Bantz, demonstrate how alternative meanings may be embedded within individual images. Deployed to Southwest Africa in 1904,

Bantz took dozens of photographs that documented all aspects of his time in the colony, from prosaic images of his comrades relaxing in the shade to deportations and hangings of Herero captives. Visible in some of the images is an unstable relationship between the formal composition of the photograph and the content of its image, creating tensions between the photographer’s intentions and the multiple meanings that can be read in the images. Because of these tensions the photographs can be read as documents of German domination over subjugated, colonized Africans, but they also reveal uncertainties and weaknesses on the part of the Germans and the refusal of the colonized to conform the visual representation of the colonizer’s gaze.

A photograph Bantz took of German soldiers with a captured Herero man reveals some of these tensions. The image shows eight uniformed Schutztruppe standing behind a Herero man squatting down before them. One’s eye is drawn in particular to the two figures in the centre of the image. A German soldier with a pipe between his teeth is leaning back in a cocky pose, his left leg relaxed and bent at the knee. In his left hand he is holding a rifle upright by the barrel and his right hand looks to be resting on the captive’s shoulder, as though holding the Herero prisoner in place, unarmed and squatting before him. The other soldiers, most of whom are holding their weapons, are posed around these two figures facing the camera; Bantz can also be

191 seen in the photograph with his comrades, standing with both hands on the barrel of his gun to the left of the photograph.

Image 9: “Our Herero prisoner in Ekupa,” Jean Bantz, German East Africa, 1904/1905. Bildarchiv der Deutschen Kolonial Gesellschaft, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main. 082-2990-405. Arranged with their weapons around the subdued Herero man the Germans give the impression of European hunters celebrating a successful catch. Indeed, Claudia Siebrecht has noted about this very image that it is composed like a big game hunting photograph, “in which the hunting party assembles around their prey to create a lasting testament to their skill, superiority and conquest.”474 Trophy photographs became a phenomenon with the introduction of cameras to the battlefield. Such images, it has been argued, are a celebration of victory that

474 Siebrecht, “Seeing the ‘Savage,’ 44.

192 affirm group identity through “commemorative violence” and objectify the defeated enemy’s body, rendering it “a conquerable, inanimate object.”475 The soldiers’ victory over the Herero man and the subjugation and possession of his body is extended then to the possession of the image in which their collective violence was commemorated. Bantz noted in the photograph’s caption that the man was “our captured Herero in Ekupa,” underscoring how the image celebrated the soldiers’ defeat and possession of the defeated Herero body.476

Viewed a century after the events the tensions embedded in the photograph become apparent. The photograph clearly captures the soldiers’ violent subjugation of the Herero prisoner, particularly in the striking contrast between the uniformed, armed, and more numerous soldiers standing over their unarmed, squatting prisoner. The visual connections that might be drawn between the German soldiers and martial qualities of organization and professionalism, however, are disrupted by the tilted frame and overexposure of the image, which lend the photograph an amateurish quality. Furthermore, seen with hindsight the imbalance between the eight German soldiers and the single captive Herero might signify more than just superiority of arms. It is unclear, for instance, why eight armed soldiers were needed to subdue a single Herero man. There is no indication in the photograph or caption that there were other captives outside the frame, or that the prisoner was a Herero leader whose capture was an occasion to celebrate.

Further, despite being unarmed, outnumbered, and photographed in a humbled position at the

Germans’ feet, the Herero man appears unbowed and unafraid: he is resting his arms casually against his knees. He stares directly into the camera, in contrast the soldier sitting to his left with his head bowed apparently unprepared for the photograph; whereas his face is fully visible, two

475 Joey Brooke Jakob, “Beyond Abu Ghraib: War Trophy Photography and Commemorative Violence,” Media, War & Conflict 10.1 (2017): 95-96. 476 As Siebrecht writes, “the use of the possessive in the caption is notable, indicating a sense of triumph, ownership and authority.” Siebrecht, “Seeing the Savage,” 45.

193 of the soldiers’ faces are deep in shadow from the wide hats shielding them against the sun.

Although certainly at the mercy of the German soldiers the Herero man’s appearance and bearing indicate he is at home in the surroundings; in comparison, there is a quality of artifice in the cocky posturing of the soldier standing behind him.

This celebratory image of soldiers with their captive enemy appears in retrospect a much small victory than it is framed to be. In the course of the war against the Herero and Nama,

Imperial Germany poured huge amounts of money and material into the colony to maintain thousands of German soldiers who struggled to achieve an absolute victory against their rebellious subjects. The image reveals something of the hardships the Germans experienced and resources they devoted to defeating an enemy materially unequipped to fight the type of war the

Germans desired. The Herero captive’s defiant subjectivity, as well, disrupts the composition, refusing to conform to the image’s composition as a trophy photograph. The meanings that might be attached to the photograph’s framing and content are in tension and unstable.

Another group photograph taken by Bantz is shot through with similar tensions. In the image a group of German soldiers are photographed together with three African men and a woman sitting on the ground near a pile of covered goods. According to the caption the photograph was taken during a “camp clean-up at the Black Cliffs,” presumably near Walvis Bay on the colony’s coast. Most of the soldiers are standing in a row on the right side of the photograph and another is standing on the left, his arm draped over the covered goods. Sitting on the ground beside the African woman is another soldier, his hand resting on the woman’s shoulder. The eye is drawn to these two figures whose appearance and posture are so different: the uniformed German soldier with a slight smile holding the woman by the arm and the woman herself, wearing a rough dress that she is pulling down with her right hand, her body turned away

194 from the soldier and her face turned away from the camera. The tension between these two figures – one relaxed and smiling, the other an uneasy, reluctant subject for the camera – is at odds with the framing and composition of the photograph as a group portrait.

Looking at the image it is clear that the staging of the photograph held a different meaning for the African subjects than it did for the German soldiers. There is a benign quality to the manner in which the image is composed. The caption is innocuous, for instance, stating simply that the image shows a camp clean-up. The African subjects in the photograph are not differentiated from the Germans and identified as “Herero” – along with the connotations that label held during the war – or described as the Germans’ “prisoners,” like the man in the trophy photograph. It appears as though the soldiers have gathered around the African labourers, rather than drag them before the camera. The soldiers standing on the right side of the image, in particular, are crowded together in order to fit into the vertical frame: the third soldier from the right is even leaning in over the shoulder of the man ahead of him in order to be visible to the camera and the face of the fifth soldier is only partially visible at the rear. Neither the African men nor woman are in chains, and the soldiers are unarmed and relaxed, even congenial: the soldier on the left is smoking a pipe and casually resting his arm on the canvas and the soldier sitting on the ground is smiling with his right hand on the woman’s shoulder. An overall impression of congeniality is conveyed by the manner in which the German photographer constructed the photograph and the German subjects presented themselves before the camera.

Again, the African presence in the photograph does not conform to the image’s constructed message. There is a marked contrast in appearance and posture between the African labourers and German soldiers, for instance. Whereas the Germans appear relaxed and at ease the

African men look worn out. Two of the labourers are shirtless, as if they had done most of the

195

Image 10: “Camp cleaning at the Black Cliffs,” Jean Bantz, German Southwest Africa, 1904. Bildarchiv der Deutschen Kolonial Gesellschaft, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main. 082-2990-222.

196 work clearing out the camp under the hot sun. The man sitting on the ground holds a hat limply in his lap and leans back against another man sitting close in behind him, only part of his face and arm visible over the first man’s shoulder.

The two men look as if they might be supporting one another as they sit there waiting to be photographed; their heads are close enough together that the second man’s features are indiscernible in the shadow. One’s eye is also drawn to the differences in appearance between the men sitting on the left side of the photograph and the German soldier and African woman sitting to the right. The man on the left has a strained, worn out expression and has taken his hat off as though to rest his head, in contrast to the smiling countenance of the German whose helmet is still perched atop his head.

The unaffected, fatigued intimacy of the two men on the left also draws attention to the forced intimacy between the German soldier and the woman on the right. The smiling soldier is sitting close to the woman and holding her by the shoulder, appearing relaxed with his uniform open at the neck. The woman is wearing a rough dress, torn at the shoulder, and with her left hand she is adjusting it as if to cover her legs. Whereas the soldier is smiling into the camera, the woman is looking toward the ground (her eyes may even be closed), her face turned away from the soldier and away from the camera. Out of modesty, shame, or revulsion (perhaps all three) she refuses to look at the camera and thereby rejects the intimacy imposed on her by the German soldier and the image of congenial cooperation imposed by the photograph’s composition.

The appearance and demeanour of the African subjects in the photograph draw attention to the colonial dynamics elided in the composition of the image. The visual contrast between the exhausted African men and the casual, relaxed postures of the German soldiers standing around them makes visible the system of forced labour that came in the wake of the rebellion.

197

Imprisoned by the colonial army, African captives were subject to forced labour and loaned or rented out for work on public and private projects.477 Visible in the image then is the exhaustion of a new labouring class created in large part by a war waged by the colonial army, seen here standing at ease and victorious. The striking incongruity between the young woman’s uneasiness and the soldier’s easy familiarity points to the exploitation and abuse of African women’s bodies by German soldiers during the war. Sexual abuse and rape were widespread in Southwest Africa after the arrival of thousands of German soldiers who wielded enormous powers over the African population, and female prisoners in concentration camps were particularly susceptible to sexual exploitation.478 Of all the figures in the photograph, perhaps, the woman’s presence is most disquieting and disturbs the photograph’s more benign characteristics. The very presence of the colonized in the photograph, then, disrupts its framing as a portrait of congenial cooperation between the colonizers and their subjects; their visibility in the photograph, even though forced upon them, makes visible the underlying exploitation of African bodies upon which the relationship between colonizer and colonized was fundamentally based.

A photograph Bantz took in 1905 “at a waterhole in Onganyira” shows German soldiers watching over two Herero women kneeling to drink from a small waterhole in a sandy clearing.

The dog lying in the water between the women is named “Pontok,” the caption notes, indicating the animal may have been a unit pet. Two German soldiers watch the women from horseback, accompanied by a young African boy standing with a mule and another soldier holding the reins

477 Jürgen Zimmerer, “War, Concentration Camps, and Genocide in South-West Africa: The First German Genocide,” Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War (1904-1908) in Namibia and its Aftermath, ed. Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, trans. Edward Neather (Monmouth: The Merlin Press Ltd., 2008): 53. 478 Casper Wulff Erichsen, “Forced Labour in the Concentration Camp on Shark Island,” in Ibid., 88-90; Gesine Krüger, “Beasts and Victims: Women in the Colonial War,” in Ibid., 182-183.

198 of his horse. The photograph only hints at the violence and suffering endured by the Herero at the hands of the German Schutztruppe.

Image 11: Two Herero women drink from a watering hole, Jean Bantz, Onganjira, German Southwest Africa, 1905. Bildarchiv der Deutschen Kolonial Gesellschaft, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main. 082-2990-337.

By 1905 the German military had resorted to chasing the Herero population into the desert and blocking off waterholes that were necessary for survival. Captured survivors were rounded up and sent to one of the concentration camps erected in the colony.479 The women then were probably prisoners, perhaps in the midst of being transported to a concentration camp. The soldiers appear to be transporting them on foot through the cold: the woman on the right appears

479 See Zimmerer, “War, Concentration Camps, and Genocide,” 41-63.

199 particularly worn out from travelling and is covered with a blanket against the air. The dog sitting idly in the water between the two women adds an odd domestic quality to the image, as though the group were out for a walk. However, its intrusive presence close by the women is representative of the broader German intrusion into their lives and their loss of privacy and freedom, and can be read as symbolic of the insidious ways German soldiers waged their war against the Herero and Nama, including the closing off and even poisoning of watering holes.480

Broadly speaking, the contrasting images of uniformed German soldiers atop their horses looking down upon female Herero prisoners kneeling by the waterhole are representative of the broader historical tragedy within which the photograph was taken: a powerful military watching as its African subjects slowly die in the desert.

The photograph also draws attention to the spectacle of violence by gesturing to the role of the audience in its creation. In particular, the image is marked by a fractured or ambivalent gaze. The camera’s perspective is not identical to that of the soldiers: the camera is positioned across the pool and farther back from the scene. The camera’s wider frame encompasses not only the women by the water but the German gaze taking in their suffering, as well. In stepping away from his comrades and shooting from a distance the photographer brought the spectators themselves into focus. Further, the soldier on the far right of the image is staring directly into the camera, perhaps caught unaware that a photograph was about to be taken. His stare disrupts the audience’s gaze and turns it back on itself. In a sense no spectator is left unobserved: the camera watches the soldiers, and the soldier watches the audience. The photograph thereby brings into frame a consideration of the nature of the photographic gaze and the role played by the spectator

480 Jon Bridgman and Leslie J. Worley, “Genocide of the Hereros,” Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 2nd ed., ed. Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons and Israel W. Charny (London and New York: Routledge, 2004): 25-26; Zimmerer, “War, Concentration Camps, and Genocide,” 48-49.

200 in the creation of spectacles of violence. Suffering and spectatorship are brought together inside the frame, and the soldier’s look serves to implicate the audience in the scene unfolding before the camera.

The photographs Germans took of the abuses and killings they committed in Southwest

Africa came back to haunt them after the First World War. Following the invasion and occupation of the colony by South Africa, British and South African authorities organized the publication of a governmental Blue Book documenting Germany’s ill-treatment of the indigenous population.481 Meant to strengthen their case that the colony should not be returned to its former rulers, the book featured powerful eyewitness testimony of wanton German violence and photographs gathered from captured local German files that showed horrific injuries caused by corporal punishment and hanged bodies of executed Africans. Ironically, some of the gruesome evidence had originally been collected on instructions from Berlin in the course of an investigation into the system of punishments in the colonies.482 It was not until after the First

World War, however, that such images had a serious impact on German colonial practices, when the war’s victors wielded them in order to discredit German imperialism altogether.

A photograph from the Bantz collection was included in the Blue Book as visual evidence testifying to the genocidal violence the Germans perpetrated against the Herero. The photograph shows three African bodies hanging by ropes from a tree.483 It is a strange, carefully composed image of summary brutality. There is a deliberate quality to the positioning of the

481 For a full account of how the report was compiled see Jeremy Silvester and Jan-Bart Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003): XIII-XXXVII. 482 Jan-Bart Gewald, “Mirror Images? Photographs of Herero Commemorations in the 1920s and 1930s,” The Colonizing Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History, ed. Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester, and Patricia Hayes (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998): 119; Silvester and Gewald, XVII. 483 Reprinted in Silvester and Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found, 118.

201 camera and the framing of the bodies, shot from a middle distance as though the photographer consciously distanced himself from the scene of violence. This careful composition is in tension with the brutality and apparent haste of the execution, conducted on a makeshift gallows created simply by tying ropes around the trunk of the tree. No caption is attached to the image in the

Bantz collection specifying the location, victims, or circumstances of the execution or that might indicate the meaning of the photograph, as though the photographer thought the image spoke for itself.

For Bantz and his fellow colonial soldiers the photograph may have denoted justified revenge against treacherous colonial subjects. In the Blue Book the photograph appeared in a section titled, “How the Hereros Were Exterminated.” Most of the section of the report was devoted to African eyewitness testimony of shocking German violence, including summary hangings, soldiers killing women and children with bayonets and burning people alive, and in general the German military’s indiscriminate destruction of the Herero people.484 The caption for the photograph provided very little context, noting simply that the image depicted an “Execution of natives by hanging from a tree.” Removed from the specificities of the circumstances in which it was produced and placed alongside the multiple testimonies of systematic German violence, the image became representative of a whole campaign of “extermination.” In the wake of military defeat on the European continent photographs of violence committed abroad, like the image of the hanging in the Bantz collection, became powerful visual shorthand for a broader abandonment of colonial norms. Viewed alongside the testimony, the photograph was “a picture of merciless inhumanity and calculated ferocity which is well-nigh unbelievable.”485

484 Ibid., 113-121. 485 Ibid., 111.

202

Image 12: A hanging, Jean Bantz, German Southwest Africa, 1904/1905. Bildarchiv der Deutschen Kolonial Gesellschaft, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main. 082-2990-454.

Infuriated by the publication of the Blue Book, the postwar German government issued its own White Book in 1919 alleging the report was hypocritical and based on lies, but to no avail. The crimes documented in the Blue Book were an important factor mitigating against a return of Southwest Africa to its former rulers, and the colony was transferred to South Africa as a mandate territory.486 In the transformed postwar geopolitical context, photographs of mutilated and hanged African bodies had become unambiguous and powerful evidence of Germany’s pariah status in colonial affairs.

486 Silvester and Gewald, XIX-XX.

203

Conclusion

This chapter sought to explore some of the tensions in the visual record of German colonial violence. It examined photographs taken in East Africa depicting African prisoners in chains and the execution of floggings, as well as images from the genocidal war in Southwest

Africa, in order to tease out what the images reveal and conceal about the German colonial violence in Africa. In doing so, the chapter argued that, while violence perpetrated against the colonized was generally acceptable in the colonial context, above all at times of rebellion and crisis, the visual representation of violence was nevertheless a source of unease and tension. This was especially the case for colonial officials who were concerned with protecting the image of the colonial service. In practice, officials on the ground in East Africa tended to distance themselves from the dirty work of corporal punishment, leaving it to African Askari to execute whippings and floggings. The second wave of colonial scandals that gripped Germany in the wake of the wars in Southwest and East Africa, which once again made headlines of the brutalities committed by German officials overseas, made colonial officials even more wary of being too closely associated with the disciplinary violence that was a daily reality of German colonial rule. Rechenberg’s alarm at the publication of a flogging photograph in a domestic

German newspaper was indicative of German officials’ concern to shield the image of colonial

East Africa from too close an association with the brutal realities of colonial rule, even when the violence was framed for German readers as flowing from the colonized, rather than the German colonizers.

This chapter has argued that this process of distancing Germans from the actual violence of colonial rule was visualized in the photographic record of German colonial rule in Africa. In

204 part, this was achieved through careful textual framing of flogging images, as the comparison between two flogging photographs in the Weltspiegel newspaper has shown. In 1904 the paper presented a flogging image from the United States as visual evidence of the hypocrisy of

American rhetoric about the equality of its citizens, while two years later it took a much difference stance toward a photograph of a flogging purportedly taken in East Africa, informing readers that the punishment was in line with local customs. In both cases, the paper acknowledged that the images depicted a brutal punishment, but attempted to emphasize or diminish what it referred to as the barbarity of flogging through the captions it attached to the images. The differences between the two images were visual, as well, because unlike the image from the United States, which showed a white man holding the whip, the photograph from East

Africa showed only Africans involved in the execution of the punishment. This visual incongruity made it easier for the Weltspiegel to distance Germans from involvement in colonial disciplinary violence, which the paper pointed out was conducted by African functionaries.

The visual distancing of German authorities from colonial disciplinary violence can be seen in other photographs depicting African chain gangs and the flogging of African prisoners in

East Africa. German officials were conspicuously absent from such images, while African Askari appeared prominently in their stead, visually implying that colonial disciplinary violence ultimately flowed not from the German administration itself but from its African functionaries.

Colonial officials’ tendency to distance themselves from the dirty work of whipping and flogging, leaving it to their African subordinates to conduct punishments on their behalf, was therefore replicated in the visual record, whether consciously on the part of the photographers or as a consequence of German officials’ careful avoidance of the camera. The image of a German official at a flogging scene examined in this chapter still visually distances him from the violence

205 itself, showing him with his back turned to the floggings, walking away from the scene of punishment. Such images, while they do depict German officials’ tendency to avoid the dirty work of disciplinary violence, nevertheless contributed to a visual narrative about colonial violence that displaced responsibility onto African functionaries of the colonial state.

The visual record of disciplinary violence in East Africa is inflected by the tensions surrounding white violence in the African colonies, where the boundaries of acceptable white violence were never fully settled. While whipping and flogging were widespread in East Africa, strategies were nevertheless deployed to distance Germans themselves from too close an association with their practice. At times rebellion and crisis, images of violence from the colonies, including those that depicted Germans involved in that violence, were more acceptable to German audiences. However, even photographs that celebrated the defeat of supposed racial inferiors and contributed to a discourse about the German colonial project of civilizing savagery in Africa show signs of tension. The African subjects of these wartime photographs, in particular, disrupt the images, refusing to be fully enmeshed in the visual discourses imposed on them by German photographers. Furthermore, like the photographs of floggings and chained

African prisoners in East Africa, the images from Southwest Africa show signs of deliberate framing that obscured the origins and nature of the violence and only hinted at the extent of the destruction wrought by the Schutztruppe. Like the other images discussed in this chapter, these photograph both reveal and conceal the brutal reality of colonial violence, as well as the role played by the Germans themselves in perpetrating such violence in Africa.

206

Conclusion

In one sense, the unknown cameraman who photographed a flogging of caravan labourers at Schirati during the Mecklenburg expedition of 1907-1908 captured a candid image of disciplinary violence in East Africa. Taken in the midst of multiple public floggings, apparently executed before the entire caravan, the photograph reveals in a visceral manner the tough, violent measures the German administration was willing to take to discipline African labour in the colony. At the same time, the photograph reinforced a particular image of the colonial disciplinary system and the German official’s place within it. The floggings depicted in the image are being administered not by the German official himself – or even closely supervised by him, for that matter – but rather by African subordinates, whose white clothing serves as a visual mark of their association with the white-uniformed German striding away toward the edge of the frame on the right. In the background, on the left side of the image, an African Askari can be seen standing next to a building and observing the floggings, perhaps ordered by the German to supervise the punishments. Dressed in white, his hands clasped behind his back and his back turned to the floggings, the German official adhered to an image of the German district official who stood at a distance from the disciplinary regime, an image that since the 1890s had become increasingly necessary for the Colonial Office to promote. The photograph clearly associated the

German official with the violence of a tough colonial disciplinary regime, but suggested that the system functioned under his supervision, rather than by his own hand. The long wooden rod held in the official’s clasped hands, however, hints at the central role the German colonial administrator played in the brutal disciplinary regime in colonial East Africa.

207

Beginning in the mid-1890s, German colonial officials’ brutal behaviour while stationed abroad attracted to the German colonial service scathing criticism from Reichstag deputies and notoriety in the German press. Even major German colonial figures like the hero of colonial East

Africa, Carl Peters, were swept up in public scandals surrounding sexual impropriety and excessive violence they had committed overseas, which not only ruined individual careers in the colonial administration but did damage to the image of the colonial service itself in the minds of the German public. The 1896 disciplinary laws regulating state-administered corporal punishment in the colonies were meant in no small part to dampen down the political disturbance caused by the scandals and demonstrate to the German public and its political representatives that the Colonial Office was taking care of its own problems. A similar scenario played out a decade later, when the reformist colonial director Bernhard Dernburg issued new corporal punishment regulations at a time the colonial service again found itself under a cloud of scandal that threatened the colonial service’s reputation.

The colonial disciplinary laws reflected the outlook and concerns of colonial authorities who faced intense criticism for the brutal and violent behaviour of colonial officials overseas.

The violent “excesses” committed by German officials operating seemingly unchecked in the colonies had been at the forefront of the colonial scandals of the 1890s, and the 1896 colonial disciplinary laws responded to these accusations of excess by circumscribing some of the disciplinary authority wielded by colonial officials on the ground. The laws placed restrictions on who could be flogged and how many lashes they might receive during a single punishment, with the aim of preventing individual excesses in the use of corporal punishment in the colonies.

In part, the corporal punishment regulations issued in 1907 similarly aimed at curbing excesses by requiring colonial officials to more carefully report on and justify sentences of corporal

208 punishment to central authorities. The laws, however, left it to colonial officials to determine what types of behaviour were subject to corporal punishment in the first place, granting them substantial personal authority to administer whippings and floggings as they saw fit. The corporal punishment laws targeted not so much German officials’ widespread use of corporal punishment in the colonies, but were rather aimed at preventing them from committing excesses by limiting their potential targets and reducing the cruelty of individual floggings.

The scandals that came in the wake of the rebellions in Southwest Africa and East Africa, however, placed significantly more pressure on the Colonial Office to distance German officials from the actual practices of disciplinary violence. Dernburg’s 1907 reforms, in addition to extending central oversight of the administration of corporal punishment in the colonies, went so far as to prohibit colonial officials from administering flogging punishments with their own hands. The 1896 disciplinary laws had been somewhat ambivalent on the role of colonial officials in the administration of floggings, stipulating broadly that a European designated by an official with judicial powers had to be present at the execution of each corporal punishment.

Dernburg’s 1907 regulations, however, were clear on the matter: “Floggings and birchings must never be carried out by the official exercising criminal jurisdiction themselves. However, enforcement is to be supervised by him personally or a doctor.”487 While again leaving unchecked the broad authority colonial officials enjoyed to use corporal punishment for a wide range of supposed offences, the 1907 regulations sought to more explicitly distance colonial officials from the messy realities of disciplinary violence that, despite two strings of scandals, most officials continued to accept as a given in the colonial world. In response to a second public

487 Verfügung des Staatssekretärs des Reichs-Kolonialamts, betreffend die Anwendung körperlicher Züchtigung als Strafmittel gegen Eingeborene der afrikanischen Schutzgebiete, 12 July 1907, Die deutsche Kolonial-Gesetzgebung (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1908): 320.

209 outcry over the excessive use of violence in the German colonies, colonial authorities sought to distance colonial officials from its application while preserving corporal punishment as an institution of colonial rule.

The political fallout from the colonial scandals made German officials in Berlin and East

Africa sensitive to the dangers posed by excessive violence to the reputation of the colonial service. Wilhelm Methner, who served in the colonial administration in East Africa for over a decade after the turn of the century, defended the use of corporal punishment in the colony but acknowledged that excessive violence did damage to the colonial service. Methner claimed that corporal punishment was conducted in a “humane manner,” but acknowledged that individual officials had caused problems. “Naturally there were times in German East Africa when corporal punishment was used excessively or illegally,” he later wrote in his memoirs:

The guilty parties were mostly unstable young men who were in a completely undeserved position of authority, which had gone to their heads. They were often failed creatures of many kinds, who had not obtained any real employment in the home country, through lack of diligence and serious purpose; but in Africa they considered themselves called to play the roles of boss and master.488

Methner pointed out that the brutal behaviour of this “riff raff,” as he referred to them, posed a particular problem for the colonial service when it landed the perpetrators in the courts, because colonial authorities “did not appreciate it at all when such matters were dealt with publicly.”489

Domestic opposition parties, he wrote, sought political gain by exposing the individual outrages that did occur, so it was necessary to deal vigorously with individual perpetrators: “Any attempt

488 Wilhelm Methner, Under Three Governors: The Memoirs of a German Colonial Official in Tanzania, 1902- 1917, trans. John East, (2018, published online): 28. https://www.academia.edu/36939603/Under_Three_Governors_Unter_drei_Gouverneuren_The_Memoirs_of_a_Ger man_Colonial_Official_in_Tanzania_1902- 1917_by_Wilhelm_Methner_translated_into_English_with_an_introduction 489 Ibid.

210 at a cover-up, and every delay in publicly punishing illegal behaviour, will inevitably be paid for sooner or later, and cannot be excused as esprit de corps.”490 In the end, Methner maintained, such cases “were a repeated warning to the administration not to send failures to the colonies, but only men with a serious, mature attitude to life and a genuine ability, who were fully conscious of the high responsibility which authority imposes.”491

Beyond the intermittent domestic political pressure put on the colonial administration to reform the disciplinary system, officials on the ground in the colonies had also to consider the colonized African population. Martin Schröder has noted that many civilian and military officials thought it inappropriate for men in their positions to administer physical punishments with their own hands, and instead delegated the responsibility of executing floggings to African Askari.492

In East Africa, as Michelle Moyd has shown, German Schutztruppe officers tried to distance themselves from disciplinary violence and appear “above the fray” by delegating floggings to higher-ranking African solders.493 German officials also made African Askari responsible for guarding and putting to work the chain gangs of forced labourers that were so prevalent in East

Africa, particularly in the wake of Maji Maji.494 The intense fear and enmity the Askari inspired among local people in East Africa was in large part due to their central place in the colonial disciplinary system and their role in the administration of disciplinary violence.495 By assigning

Askari the more unseemly disciplinary tasks like guarding chain gangs and administering floggings, German officials could rule with the strictness and fear they thought necessary to deal

490 Ibid., 251. 491 Ibid., 28. 492 Schröder, Prügelstrafe und Züchtigungsrecht, 63-64. 493 Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, 108-109. 494 Moyd, “Making the Household, Making the State,” 63. 495 Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, 185-191; Schröder, Prügelstrafe und Züchtigungsrecht 63-64.

211 with Germany’s African subjects, while re-directing the anger and loathing the disciplinary system inspired among local people on to the administration’s African functionaries.

The photographic record from East Africa reinforced the image of the German official who stood at arms’ length from the colonial disciplinary system. A number of German soldiers, visiting scientists and others who travelled through East Africa with cameras photographed startling images of disciplinary violence, including groups of forced labourers in chains and

African Askari administering floggings, which captured on film something of the brutal reality of disciplinary violence in the colony. However, colonial officials were conspicuous by their absence from such photographs, rarely appearing alongside African forced labourers in chains or at the site of a flogging. Photographs of chain gangs typically showed forced labourers watched over by an African Askari guard, the German presence reduced to the camera’s observing and distanced gaze. German officials were similarly absent from the rare photographs of floggings in the colony, which like images of chain gangs, depicted the hands-on role of the Askari in administering corporal punishment in the colony. The candid photograph of a German official at a flogging at Schirati showed him walking away from a flogging, his back literally turned on the disciplinary violence unleashed by his African subordinates. Such images subtly obscured the

German role in disciplinary violence by decentering officials’ presence at sites of punishment and accentuating the image of the African Askari as the watchmen of the disciplinary system and the executors of the more brutal aspects of disciplinary violence. They contrast markedly with images of the colonial Schauri, discussed by Jan-Georg Deutsch, which visually emphasized the central and elevated position of the district official within the local colonial legal system.496

496 Jan-Georg Deutsch, “Celebrating Power in Everyday Life,” 96-100.

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In contrast to the Colonial Office’s domestic critics, who put pressure on the administration to distance themselves from the excesses of the disciplinary regime, local critics in East Africa excoriated colonial authorities for being too soft. The settler-friendly press repeatedly derided Dar es Salaam for the supposedly rigid and burdensome corporal punishment laws and accused officials of being under the sway of domestic reformers. German settlers’ growing numerical strength and political support back home meant that colonial officials had to take note of such reporting, excerpts from which ended up in the files in Berlin as part of the administration’s internal deliberations about how best to regulate corporal punishment in the colonies. Settlers themselves also complained bitterly about the colonial state’s regulation of corporal punishment and accused colonial officials of not doing enough to discipline African labour. Those who felt particularly aggrieved, like the plantation manager Georg Passarge, placed continuous pressure on local officials to help them keep their African employees in line by filing frequent complaints and accusing officials of dereliction of their professional duties. In contrast to domestic political criticism, which put pressure on the colonial administration to more carefully regulate disciplinary violence, settler criticism agitated for a more “strict” colonial disciplinary regime and more widespread use of corporal punishment by both colonial officials and the settler population.

The settler community’s persistent criticism of the state disciplinary regime in East

Africa had contradictory effects. On one hand, settler pressure helped to scuttle any discussion among colonial authorities about restricting settler disciplinary rights. Even during the

Rechenberg reform period, colonial officials urged caution with regard to settler disciplinary rights in the face of the settler community’s vocal rejection of any further state interference in the disciplinary system. The settlers’ domestic political support and increasing presence in the

213 colony made it difficult for the administration to ignore their demands completely, particularly as the Colonial Office in Berlin appeared little interested in curbing settler disciplinary rights. As a consequence, the colonial state’s tolerance of “moderate” settler violence perpetrated against the

African population remained built into the structures of colonial rule in East Africa until the end.

At the same time, the particular vehemence and persistence with which some settlers pursued their criticism of the colonial administration sometimes hardened the attitude of colonial officials toward their cause. Criticism from those in the settler community who felt especially aggrieved toward the colonial administration periodically shaded over into attacks on the character and integrity of colonial officials thought to be working against settlers’ interests. Like other German colonists, colonial officials took seriously such accusations because they threatened to damage their personal and professional reputations in the insular world of white colonial society. The trial and expulsion of the newspaper publisher Willy von Roy for spreading scurrilous rumours about the Rechenberg administration in the settler-friendly press, albeit an extreme case, was indicative of the seriousness with which colonial authorities were willing to pursue matters of honour in the courts. The assault case against the plantation manager

Georg Passarge, as this dissertation has argued, similarly revolved in a significant ways around his verbal and written attacks on local officials’ professional reputations. In no small part, officials intervened in the Passarge case not only to end the abuses on the Buschirihof plantation but also in response to the attacks on their reputations as figures of colonial authority. In this case, Passarge’s incessant criticism and complaints about local officials’ supposedly soft line on

African labour discipline earned the enmity of the officials concerned, corroding whatever toleration they had for the plantation violence that was almost surely the main cause of the labour difficulties to begin with.

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The analysis of the Georg Passarge case was motivated in large part by the question of why colonial authorities in East Africa, who oversaw a colony pervaded by everyday white violence, came to consider particular violent episodes or particular white perpetrators as having overstepped the boundaries of acceptable white violence. In a way, this was a question of visibility, or the circumstances under which local officials suddenly “saw” particular perpetrators or particular acts of violence as excessive. The analysis suggested Passarge’s own aggressive behaviour toward local authorities, who were in the end personally responsible for determining the boundary between acceptable and excessive violence, made it more likely that the violence he had committed on the Buschirihof plantation would be seen by local authorities as having crossed the ambiguous line between the two. The local administration took notice of the

Buschirihof violence at the same point that the perpetrator became a nuisance to local officials whose professional reputations he had threatened with his emotional accusations. Crucially, this violence was also made literally visible to colonial authorities by the appearance of the victims themselves, who testified to the obscene nature of the events that had unfolded at Buschirihof and whose bodies bore the scars of Passarge’s violence.

Visibility also played an important role in shaping the administration’s stance toward disciplinary violence in the colonies. The two colonial scandals exposed to the German public the violent underside of the colonial project’s supposed cultural work in Africa, making visible to a domestic audience – as well as an international public, including Germany’s colonial rivals – the abuses committed by individual colonial officials, as well as the administration’s own lethargy in the face of abuses committed by officials in its own ranks. The political storm that ensued as a consequence of this exposure of excessive state violence to the German public made colonial administrators nervous and keen to rehabilitate the image of the colonial service and

215 insulate it against future public relations damage, while also preserving the fundamental character of a colonial disciplinary system most thought necessary to rule in Africa. The corporal punishment laws issued in 1896 and 1907, which delineated a clear boundary between acceptable and excessive state violence, at the same time that they further entrenched whipping and flogging in the colonial disciplinary system, reflected the administration’s desire to shore up its image without abandoning the coercive apparatus in the colonies. The photographic record of disciplinary violence in East Africa, such as it is, bears traces of this official attitude toward disciplinary violence. It made visible the coercion and violence of a strict colonial disciplinary system, but one that was insinuated to operate only under the supervision of the white colonial official, not directly by his own hand. In the end, the colonial administration was more concerned with protecting this image of the German colonial administrator at an arm’s length from disciplinary violence than making any fundamental changes to the colonial disciplinary system as a whole.

The German colonial administration’s concern about the visibility of white violence in the colonies appears to have extended only as far as those excesses committed in peacetime. If colonial authorities were willing to compromise on the issue of corporal punishment in order to shore up the administration’s reputation at home, such was not the case when indigenous rebellion threatened German rule in Africa. From the late 1880s, German authorities responded to African military threats in East Africa with massive violence that early on escalated to all-out destruction of civilian property and lives. Such violence culminated in 1904 and 1905, when colonial forces visited terrifying genocidal violence on the Herero and Nama in Southwest Africa and the southern regions of East Africa in the course of putting down the largest rebellions to challenge German colonial rule on the continent. The criticism and political pressure the colonial

216 administration had faced during the 1890s for its role in white violence in the colonies, which were catalysts in bringing about reforms to corporal punishment in the German colonies, appear to have had little impact on its subsequent approach to warfare in Africa, which was marked above all by the rapid slide toward unrestricted violence and destruction. German forces who fought African rebels operated in something like a state of exception, where few rules applied.

One reason for the colonial administration’s inflexible attitude toward indigenous rebellion was the fact that domestic German public opinion did not turn against military violence in the colonies the same way it did violence committed during peacetime. Many Germans who were shocked by the outbreak of major rebellions in Southwest Africa and East Africa after the turn of the century thought it justified that indigenous rebels be punished for such perceived ingratitude, and reports that German colonists had been killed and even mutilated by rebel fighters convinced many that such transgressions deserved an exemplary retribution. Social

Democrats in the Reichstag did call out the German government and colonial administration for their ruthless conduct of the war in Southwest Africa, and even worried about the impact on

German society of the return of brutalized soldiers. Outside such criticism, however, Reichstag deputies justified the military’s exceptional methods, arguing that they were appropriate to conflicts with supposedly uncivilized natives. The Socialists’ concerns similarly failed to stir the broadly nationalist German public, particularly as nationalist sentiment was whipped up in the run up to the 1907 elections and the party was accused of unpatriotic behaviour for criticizing the government’s conduct of the war.497

497 Kuss, German Colonial Wars, 238-241.

217

Something of this broadly permissive political and public attitude toward unbridled military violence in Germany’s African colonies can be discerned in the photographic record.

German authorities showed little concern to censor photography in Southwest Africa during the war, and as a consequence innumerable violent images flowed back to Germany from the colony.

Pictorial postcards sent home from the front that depicted brutal violence helped to normalize such scenes, as did photographic illustrations in soldiers’ memoirs published during and after the war. In the midst of the German military’s genocidal war, soldiers like Jean Bantz casually took photographs of hanged bodies and Herero women forced into camps. Scientists like Karl Weule gladly took the opportunity provided by the crackdown on the indigenous population in East

Africa to photograph prisoners put to forced labour in chains as punishment for their part in the rebellion. Many of the images of chain gangs in East Africa were taken in the wake of Maji Maji, when prisoners were readily available to be photographed and such images were in tune with the domestic desire for the punishment of the rebellious African population.

In the aftermath of the rebellions, colonial authorities in Southwest Africa and East

Africa steered the two colonies on to strikingly different paths of development. Having crossed the threshold of the radical destruction of much of the indigenous population in Southwest

Africa, colonial officials there dispossessed and extended state control over the survivors, who were reduced to serving as a labour supply for German colonists.498 In East Africa, in contrast, the idiosyncratic and reformist governor Rechenberg attempted to map a new course that sought to rein in the violent coercion of the African population and harness their economic production for the benefit of the colony. The promulgation of new indigenous labour laws and extension of

498 Jürgen Zimmerer, “The Model Colony? Racial Segregation, Forced Labour and Total Control in German South- West Africa,” Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War (1904-1908) in Namibia and its Aftermath, ed. Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, trans. Edward Neather (Monmouth: The Merlin Press Ltd., 2008): 27-28.

218 central oversight of corporal punishment reflected this more conciliatory approach toward the colonized population. As in Southwest Africa, violence remained a constitutive part of colonial rule in East Africa after the rebellion, but the tenor of Rechenberg’s administration and its more nuanced approach to the African population and colonial economy contrasted markedly with developments in that colony. In the wake of the rebellion, Rechenberg’s desire to reform the coercive apparatus in the colony, with the aim of reorienting the colonial economy, aligned with the impulse coming from Berlin to rein in disciplinary violence in order to shore up the image of the colonial administration damaged during the colonial scandals. As a consequence, annual whippings and floggings in East Africa actually dropped, indicative of the relative seriousness with which the Rechenberg administration approached the issue of disciplinary violence, at least during the initial years of his governorship.499

As much as it was a departure in tone and practice for German rule in East Africa, the

Rechenberg reform period was halting and short-lived. Like the colonial disciplinary laws issued a decade earlier, Dernburg’s corporal punishment reforms only targeted the state disciplinary system, leaving untouched settlers’ customary rights to administer physical punishments.

German settlers therefore continued to enjoy disciplinary rights over their African employees throughout the period of reform in spite of Rechenberg’s desire to better protect African labour against the abuses of white employers and his general disdain for settler demands. Whatever attempts were made to draw down state-administered corporal punishments, the persistence of the “paternal right to discipline” meant that white violence would remain pervasive in East

Africa up until the end of German rule in the region. Furthermore, already by the latter half of

Rechenberg’s governorship in East Africa the number of annual state-administered corporal

499 Schröder, Prügelstrafe und Züchtigungsrecht, 94.

219 punishments was again on the rise, indicative of the whip’s continued importance to the colonial disciplinary system. Under , who took over as governor in 1912, whippings and floggings jumped dramatically, signalling the abandonment of any pretense that colonial authorities in East Africa were working in the spirit of Dernburg’s reforms.500

German East Africa was a violent colony from the moment of its founding in the late 19th century to the end of German rule in the region brought about by the First World War.

Throughout the colony’s existence, the German administration relied on disciplinary violence to entrench white rule in the colony and discipline African labour to the colonial economy.

Flogging, whipping, imprisonment in chains and forced labour were constants of minority rule in

East Africa, their necessity taken for granted by many officials who saw Africans as uncivilized children in need of a firm hand. Disciplinary violence was deeply embedded in the structures of

German rule in East Africa, and except for the initial years of Rechenberg’s administration there appears to have been little serious effort made to fundamentally transform the colonial state’s reliance on violent coercion to discipline and punish the African population. The colonial administration’s concern to protect its image from too close an association with excessive violence at times acted as a moderating influence on the colonial state’s generally permissive attitude toward white violence in the colonies, but the strength of this influence was halting and limited. The transformations brought about in the colonial state’s coercive apparatus in East

Africa were always ones of degree, rather than of kind.

Returning to the photograph of the flogging punishment of caravan labourers near

Schirati, one is again struck by the manner in which the German official has turned his back on

500 Ibid.

220 the floggings administered by his African subordinates, apparently unwilling to bear witness to the scene of violence for which he was ultimately responsible. While it certainly acknowledged the existence of a strict colonial disciplinary system in East Africa, the photograph still depicted the German official as the colonial administration increasingly found it necessary for him to be seen, at a distinct distance from disciplinary violence in the colonies. Outside of its original setting this image of a German colonial official with his back turned to disciplinary violence might also be seen as representative of the manner in which German colonists and the colonial administration disavowed and silenced African suffering during the colonial period, reflected in the contemporary German record of the period. In the same image, however, a lone African caravan labourer, crouched on the ground, has turned to watch the white-clad German official as he walks away from the scene. The man’s posture contrasts with that of most of the other labourers, who are watching the floggings with their backs turned toward the camera. This small gesture draws the viewer’s attention away from the departing German official, back toward the

African caravan carriers in the image and the violence and suffering that are the photograph’s central subject matter. His gaze seems to imply that, as much as the colonial administration wished to distance its officers from the grisly practices of disciplinary violence, German officials could not wholly deny their central role in the disciplinary regime in the eyes of its African victims. The image is furthermore a pertinent reminder that German colonists in East Africa, despite their efforts, were unable to fully silence the voices of the African people who suffered and struggled under colonial rule.

221

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