Africa in Translation: A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814–1945 by Sara Pugach (review)

In the years leading up to the First World War, the German scholar Carl Meinhof (1857–1944) enjoyed a towering international reputation for his work in African linguistics. This was the heyday of the German colonial project in Africa; yet, even after Germany lost its African colonies in 1918, Meinhof remained known as a great Africanist. His influence persisted, first through his own writings in the 1920s and 1930s, and later through his students, especially those who took up important positions in South Africa. Although he is seldom read today—some of his main ideas about African language families were debunked as racist imaginings by the linguist Joseph Greenberg in the 1950s—those imaginings survived him.

Meinhof’s career is the centerpiece of Sara Pugach’s book. Its first two chapters set the stage, exploring German missionary contributions to African linguistics prior to German unification and colonization, then detailing the institutionalization of Africanist research in metropolitan academic settings. Three chapters focus on Meinhof: his background and early career; his collaboration with the physical anthropologist Felix von Luschan on African language classification; and his laboratory in Hamburg, where he worked with living African informants and conducted phonetic experiments. The African assistants have their own chapter, a fascinating discussion of their efforts to make a life for themselves in Germany. Finally, following a chapter on German influences on South African linguistics and ethnology from 1920–1945, the book concludes with a brief discussion of the legacy of German Afrikanistik after its peak under Meinhof.

The evolving relationship between Africanist scholarship and German ideologies of nationalism and empire is this book’s main theme. German scholars had contributed important linguistic research since the early nineteenth century. Initially those who took an interest in African languages were missionaries, often working for British missionary organizations and producing reports in English. As Pugach points out, the motives of these early fieldworkers had little to do with nationalism. Instead, their efforts stemmed from a pietistic Protestantism, emphasizing the importance of receiving the Gospel in one’s own native tongue. Converting Africans to (Protestant) Christianity thus was seen to require the linguistic work necessary for translating the Bible into African languages. Nationalist orientations came later, after Germany’s unification and the rise of its imperial ambitions.

Although Meinhof had roots in the pietistic tradition, he was deeply committed to nationalist politics and Germany’s role as a colonial power. As Pugach shows, he felt that the most important analytical work could only be done in the metropole. Fieldworkers residing in the colonies, he thought, were too close to their own particular subject matter. Only in the metropole could the necessary analytical distance and scientific objectivity be reached, producing research that would contribute to Germany’s global intellectual prominence. A major goal, moreover, was to compare languages and arrive at a classification of language families that would reveal ethnic relations and cultural history.

Pugach shows how the institutional settings in which Meinhof worked, and which he shaped, accorded with these nationalist and imperialist ideas. He published most of his work in German, and founded a major journal, the Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen. Only occasionally traveling to Africa, he preferred to work with African informants in Germany; in fact, his works on Duala and on comparative Bantu vowel systems were published before he had ever visited the African continent. Based at Hamburg after 1909, he established a laboratory for studying African languages with the latest scientific equipment and analytical techniques. African speakers were necessary to this enterprise, but although some of them assisted in training students, Africans were always positioned (Pugach argues) more as objects of study than as creative agents.

A central chapter takes up Meinhof’s arguments about language families and ethnic relations, arguments that were most fully expressed in his Die Sprache der Hamiten (1912). The “Hamitic hypothesis,” as it has been...