Colonial Intimacy: The Rechenberg Scandal and Homosexuality in German East Africa

Colonial Intimacy:

The Rechenberg Scandal and Homosexuality in German East Africa

On the eve of world war I the Rechenberg scandal captivated colonial society in Dar es Salaam, the capital of German East Africa. Georg Albrecht Freiherr von Rechenberg (1861–1935), governor of the colony from September 1906 to October 1912, was accused of having maintained sexual relations with one of his male servants. The judges did their best to contain the scandal and the spread of rumors deriving from the prosecution of a series of court cases on charges of defamation, perjury, homosexuality, and "enticing natives to make statements on the alleged homosexual encounters between Governor Rechenberg, high-ranking government officials, and other Europeans with each other and with non-Europeans."¹ What transpired was vicious competition and envy among the civil servants and officers that led to attacks directed against each other's honor. The accusation of same-sex desire constituted a particularly serious affront.²

The courts were mostly concerned with maintaining European authority in the eyes of the colonized African population. The judges argued that this was particularly important for colonial officials, who represented German civilization and the empire, and thus for the stability of colonial rule. This article argues that allegations and rumors of homosexuality by German men against each other served as weapons in a field of conflict that brought two opposing lines of the colonial experience face to face: first, class tensions and a crisis of masculinity within colonial society and, second, the very frailty of the colonial project as evident in the colonizers' nervous condition. The latter is most visible and crucial in the encounter between colonizer and colonial subject in the colonial household.

The growing body of literature on the colonial encounter has contributed much to our knowledge of colonial societies of the past fifty years. Much of it has focused on violence. Homi Bhabha, for instance, in his seminal essay on colonial mimicry, explores the dualism between menace and mimicry, the former referring to the colonial state's constant threat to resort to brute force, the latter the colonial subjects' creative accommodation with and subversion of colonial domination. Mimicry thus poses a threat to—and stands for the potential rupture of—colonial authority.³ In the earliest days of the debate, the Caribbean psychiatrist and political thinker Frantz Fanon theorized the sexualized relationship between colonizer and colonized and postulated the unbearable sexual tension of the latter, who sought release in violence. In the preface to Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre summarized the book's argument as the colonial subjects' "nervous condition."⁴ Achille Mbembe in On the Postcolony has recently been celebrated as Fanon's successor. He characterizes colonial violence as a phallic gesture, a sexualized othering that relegated colonial subjects to "things." According to him, violence is omnipresent in the colonial experience, part of administrative practice, inscribed in bodies, and "it pursues the colonized even in sleep and dream."⁵ Here the argument is that the inscription of the power differential into bodies, habit, place, practice, and institutions affected colonial society, too, and that, in fact, a "nervous condition" also afflicted the colonizer.⁶

Robert Aldrich in his investigation of homosexuality under British and French colonialism juxtaposes the ideology of the civilizing mission with de facto sexual license in the colonies.⁷ German colonialism, in contrast, wrote domination and economic exploitation more candidly on its banner. At the turn of the century same-sex desire was prevalent in upper-class culture in the metropole. Homosexuality was also common among the German emperor's closest confidants and political allies, and there were even—unsuccessful—demands in Germany to decriminalize the practice.⁸ At the same time, German officials and settlers in the colony expressed great concern over what they perceived to...