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1. Before the Fact: The Beginnings of African Studies on the Mission Field, 1814–87
- University of Michigan Press
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members of English missionary societies and labored in the ‹eld beside their English colleagues. Instead of imagining themselves as part of a nation with ‹xed political boundaries, these missionaries identi‹ed with a transnational Protestant community that especially included Britons.41 When they compiled their grammars and dictionaries, they did so in English , and for a mainly English-speaking audience and market.42 African language studies emerged in this expressly international context, and missionaries conducted their research in the service of an ecumenical church rather than a national institution. This is a signi‹cant point, one that suggests that nationalism was not as crucial to the emergence of African studies in Germany as it was for the birth of Orientalism. It also complicates the idea that colonialism as practiced by Germans was necessarily and always “German” colonialism; while German-born and German-speaking missionaries were certainly supportive of colonial expansion, in this early phase it was—perhaps ironically—mainly British imperialism that they were buttressing.43 Through their connections with foreign missionaries, as well as with their congregations in Africa, missionary linguists became enmeshed in global networks of exchange and communication. This “globalization” was critical in shaping their perceptions of colonialism, which, prior to the late nineteenth century, was for them a Protestant, Western enterprise, not a German one. Globalization in the nineteenth century was generally connected to the spread of industrialization, which allowed people to travel much more quickly over greater distances than ever before, enabling the rapid transfer of goods on an international market, as well as of technologies .44 Improvements in the medical ‹eld further allowed for the penetration of areas that were previously deadly to Europeans, since they lacked immunity to tropical diseases. Missionaries were constantly advancing further inland as the possibilities to settle more widely grew, and their movements away from the coast coincided roughly with the rise of Germany’s own empire. The process of globalization did not, however, lead to the acceptance of universality in Germany after its uni‹cation in 1871. On the contrary, the limits of the nation grew ever more sharply de‹ned. Sebastian Conrad has argued that globalization created an exclusionary German national identity that manifested itself in discussions on topics such as passport controls and sanitary regulations. Questions about how to maintain an orderly industrial society sounded very similar whether the subject being addressed was African workers in German East Africa or their German 10 Africa in Translation counterparts in Westphalia; discourses on how to encourage work among “lazy” individuals varied little. At the same time, new understandings of space and territoriality de‹ned African and German workers differently, with the latter being able to participate as members of the German nation, whereas the former were explicitly left out.45 Marcia Klotz has likewise demonstrated that global encounters were critical to German identity; such encounters encouraged dualistic thinking, as Germans divided the world into two halves—one occupied by superior Westerners, the other by primitives whose land was ripe for colonization. As the world grew closer and contact between cultures more common, identity came to be constructed in binary fashion that took “civilized” and “savage” peoples as its two poles.46 In Klotz’s interpretation as well as Conrad’s, German nationalism did not so much predate globalization as it was forged by it. Once Germany had assumed colonial control over territories in Africa, China, and the Paci‹c, debates on “Germanness” and who belonged to the nation certainly increased in metropole and colony alike, as well as beyond. German South West Africa is a case in point. In the metropole , organizations such as the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft de‹ned the parameters of the ideal German colony that would emerge in the South West, one built on agrarian German values and infused with a speci‹cally German morality.47 Meanwhile, as Birthe Kundrus, Daniel Walther, and Robbie Aitken have shown, German settlers in the colony strictly policed the borders of what they called Deutschtum, deciding who would and would not belong in the new German community they were constructing, one that was beset with problems of miscegenation.48 Moreover, the issue of de‹ning who did and did not belong to this broadly conceptualized “Germany,” whose boundaries stretched wherever there was German settlement , was not limited to the overseas colonies; the position of Germans living in Poland, Russia, and elsewhere in the “East” were also central to debates on national identity.49 The march of globalization and simultaneous sharpening...