Deutsche Herrschaft uber Afrikaner: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia (review)

This study is a scrupulously documented account of bureaucratic administration in the German colony of Southwest Africa. After a preliminary chapter (based mostly on secondary sources) on the period from the colony's establishment in 1884 through the genocidal war that ended two revolts in 1907, Jürgen Zimmerer focuses on the subsequent "peacetime" reorganization of the colony until South African and British troops ended German administration in 1915. In those final eight years, Imperial Germany produced a system of regulation "bordering on the totalitarian" (p. 130). This unique experiment in bureaucratic utopia gives these years a historical significance far beyond their short duration.

Using German and Namibian archival sources, Zimmerer provides an in-depth view of the goals, procedures, workings, and contradictions of German colonial bureaucracy. He registers the (large) differences of opinion and interest inside the various levels of government, and resists the temptation to interpret the administration as merely a tool of greedy white settlers and businessmen or to reduce it to the level of its most shockingly radical members. Nonetheless, Zimmerer's main argument is that historians have overlooked the "conceptual continuity" linking the pre- and post-genocide colony (p. 282). He finds a direct link between the policies pursued after 1907 and Governor Theodor Leutwein's administration (1892–1904), with its interest in limiting the political organization and autonomy of the Herero and Nama peoples, and its discussions of potential land expropriation, anti-miscegenation laws, forced labor, and direct taxes. That link is the constant bureaucratic desire to create an economically productive colony with a modern, systematic administration. This "efficient" (a favorite colonial word) economy required an available African work force created either by economic pressure (impoverishment) or outright force. By modern administration, officials meant rule by regulation, not the rule of law. In a rare example of theorization, Zimmerer uses Ernst Huber's term for pre-1848 Prussia, Gesetzesstaat, to distinguish bureaucratic rule from the Rechtsstaat of liberal imagination. The hallmark of the Gesetzesstaat is not freedom, but order, based on information and surveillance.

Zimmerer shows that the post-1907 innovations did indeed have antecedents in pre-1904 bureaucratic discussions, just as there were also continuities in important official personnel. But this emphasis on continuity risks undervaluing the terrific impact of the war (1904–7) and assigning to it a purposiveness it may not have had. Because Lt. Gen. Lothar von Trotha's genocidal methods of warfare threatened to exterminate the entire (future) labor force, most colonial administrators—with some exceptions—opposed his policies. But once Trotha had destroyed the Herero and some clans of the Nama, postwar officials rapidly seized the opportunity to realize the economic and security utopias that now seemed possible.

In a series of ordinances in 1907, black Africans in the former war zone were registered, reduced to abject poverty, and forced to work (for farmers, and railroad and diamond companies). They had to wear tin markers on the outside of their clothing that any official or any white person could monitor, and carry their labor and legal histories neatly summarized in "work books" (Dienstbücher). They could travel beyond their locality only with travel passes, and their communal and individual land and movables were expropriated. In addition, decrees and judicial decisions now forbade marriage and sexual relations between blacks and whites, and retroactively annulled mixed marriages. As Zimmerer and others have shown, the miscegenation issue proves how irresistible biological-racist arguments had already become as justification of state-sponsored repression (pp. 108–9).¹

Zimmerer's detailed empiricism offers readers a clear view of how colonial bureaucracy worked. Policy was overwhelmingly determined by just four people: Dr.Angelo Golinelli, the Colonial Department official in charge of Southwest Africa, and three post-1905 governors and deputy governors, Friedrich von Lindequist, Oskar von Hintrager, and Hans Tecklenburg. The latter two were radical, punitive, and security-obsessed; all four came equipped with the usual complement of contemporary racialist thinking...