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7. After the Colonial Moment: German Influences on South African Linguistics and Ethnology, 1920–45
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of how many students had sought out-of-class assistance from Amur bin Nasur, the man who succeeded Said as Swahili Lektor, was compiled. Nasur did not have many visitors; he usually had only two to three guests per day, out of ten students.36 Even so, in a smaller, one-on-one environment, Nasur had occasion to shape his pupils’ understanding of Swahili in much the same way that a contemporary graduate student might when teaching undergraduates a foreign language. At the same time, teaching freedom was not entirely open to the African assistants. The Colonial Institute did not allow its assistants to teach unsupervised, and while Lektoren did hold independent language exercises at the seminar in Berlin, they did not have their own courses in the way that Ma’arbes, the Arabic instructor, did. The assistants’ lives were proscribed in other ways that limited their movements in and outside of the classroom. Sexual politics, for example, were governed by the notion that Africans and Germans were not to form intimate relationships. When they did, it was at their own peril. In 1900, the Seminar for Oriental Languages decided to hire Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari, who was discussed in chapter 3, as a Swahili assistant. Bakari, who had been a tax collector in Bagamoyo, took the position in order to provide ‹nancial support for his wife and daughter in East Africa. While the ‹rst few years of his tenure passed without comment, by 1904 Bakari had caused a stir. Despite his wife in Bagamoyo, he had become engaged to a German woman named Bertha Hilske; not only that, another German woman had contacted the seminar to complain that Bakari had been engaged to her, and then left her. Bakari claimed that, as his Swahili wife had been unfaithful, he wanted a divorce and sent her a letter that said as much. Neither Velten nor the other authorities at the seminar believed that Bakari’s proclamation of divorce was legal, however, and they saw him as still married.37 Bakari’s situation deteriorated from this point. Although he had been looked upon favorably and considered an excellent instructor during his ‹rst three years at the seminar, Velten, his supervisor, now contended that this Lektor’s character was “weak,” and that he was being blatantly manipulated by Hilske and her mother, whom Velten believed were only interested in Bakari’s salary. The reasons for which Velten ascribed a weak character to Bakari are left largely unexplained, but there is the sense that, as an African, he was especially prone to being exploited by more intelligent and ingenious Germans, in particular women of “dubious” morals. Velten also contended that Bakari’s work had suffered as a result of the liaison , as “it is well known that the Negro in love is, in his mindlessness Of Conjunctions, Comportment, and Clothing 149 [Stumpfsinn], incapable of any work.” The consequences of Bakari marrying Hilske could prove yet direr. The marriage, Velten intoned, had the potential to throw sexual—and racial—hierarchies into jeopardy in both colony and metropole. Bakari had already “sassed” a student by refusing to answer a question after the end of a class, showing “shocking” disrespect toward a white man.38 Further, if he ended up bringing Hilske to East Africa, Bakari’s actions would be of the greatest disadvantage for the reputation of Europeans in general and the few German women in the colonies in particular. Such a case has still not come to light in any of our African colonies, and hopefully will never come to pass. A German girl who is capable of marrying a black will surely sink even deeper in the colonies and bring shame to all Europeans. Even if the Europeans know just what to think of such a person, in the natives’ eyes she will always remain the white woman, the German woman.39 Here Velten argued for a speci‹c racial order, one that had to be maintained both within and beyond Germany. Fear that Bakari had and would continue to transgress the boundaries of this order led to his removal from the seminar and, although he brie›y resurfaced later at the Colonial Institute , his marriage to Hilske ultimately excluded him from the company of “civilized”Africans who worked in the German academy. Having not complied with the hierarchical, racial order that set Africans apart from Germans , Bakari—and, for that matter, Hilske—lost their social standing and retreated to the margins of...