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Conclusion: The Legacy ofAfrikanistik The German discourse on African languages and cultures was rooted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the discipline of comparative philology transformed the way scholars thought about origins and ethnicity. The Protestant missionaries who shaped the discipline of African studies were brought up in a pietist tradition, which held that the gospel could only be communicated in one’s mother tongue. The lines dividing academic and missionary rhetoric on language in this period were not rigid; J. G. Herder, whose ideas about language and nationalism were seminal to the construction of concepts like Volk, was likewise raised with pietism, and it had a substantial impact on his belief system.1 Yet Germanspeaking missionaries were mostly preoccupied with the practical effects of language study, and they learned African languages ‹rst and foremost as a pragmatic necessity. Moreover, they were not nationally inclined and worked jointly with Protestants of differing denominations and European nationalities. The main language of their scholarship was English, not German, and it reached a wide audience in Europe, Africa, and North America. Outside of Namibia, Germany did not have a signi‹cant political presence in southern Africa.2 Still, three German missionary societies—the Berlin, Rhenish, and Hermannsburger—had established roots in the region by the mid- to late nineteenth century, and one, the Moravians of Herrnhut, was in South Africa from 1737.3 Other German missionaries, such as Zulu linguist Jakob Döhne, began their work with German societies but switched to English-speaking ones. The German linguist Wilhelm Bleek made his mark in South Africa too, ‹rst as the librarian to Cape Colony governor Sir George Grey, then as the ‹rst to codify Bantu philology and collect Bushman oral literature. Some of the children and later de186 scendants of Bleek, as well as of the German missionaries, also became involved with African studies—both in linguistics and anthropology. Dorothea Bleek followed her father Wilhelm as an expert in Bushman language and culture,4 while Werner Eiselen was a ‹rst-generation South African from a German missionary family; it was his father, Ernst Ludwig Gustav, who arranged for him to study in Hamburg.5 Further, Eiselen was related to Karl Nauhaus, the missionary who had studied East African languages with Meinhof in the 1890s; his mother Friderike was born a Nauhaus. N. J. van Warmelo was of Dutch descent but married into a German missionary family, the Giesekkes, and spoke ›uent German.6 In addition , the liberal philosopher R. F. A. Hoernlé could claim German missionary roots, although his relatives in the Berlin Missionary Society had labored in India, not Africa. While not allied with thinkers such as Eiselen, Hoernlé nevertheless shared a similar background and, as Paul B. Rich has shown, was very concerned with the intellectual development of the German -inspired Afrikaner volkekunde.7 In South Africa and beyond, German Protestant missionaries were active throughout the nineteenth century and, early on, maintained an ecumenical world perspective that included close collaboration with colleagues from other countries. Yet as the century progressed, nationalism became an increasingly pertinent issue for German missionaries. Confronted with a newly uni‹ed country with colonial ambitions, they had to decide whether to embrace German imperialism or remain loyal to their older, ecumenical tradition. Individuals like Rhenish mission inspector Friedrich Fabri and Carl Büttner were especially strong supporters of the colonial cause, insisting that their fellows assist not only the colonial state but also the German businessmen who worked in it.8 There were numerous disagreements about the extent to which missionaries should become involved with colonialism,9 but in the end most German-speaking mission societies did defend German imperialism and turned away from their formerly international attitude.10 Those who were scholars now often wrote in German, too, and various German journals of African philology emerged. From the beginning of their involvement with African studies, missionaries employed a cultural and linguistic approach toward research on ethnicity, not a biological one. Language and culture continued to be the primary factors used in constructions of ethnic hierarchies among later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century linguists like Meinhof and Westermann . At the same time, race in the biological sense entered more frequently into discussions of Africa. Meinhof and his anthropologist colConclusion 187 [54.226.222.183] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:03 GMT) league Luschan were often chastised for con›ating language with race. Con›ation was especially noticeable in Meinhof’s Sprachen der Hamiten...