Robbie Aitken

Looking for Die Besten Boeren: The Normalisation of Afrikaner Settlement in German South West Africa, 1884–1914*

This article explores Afrikaner immigration into German South West Africa during the period of German colonialism, 1884–1914. It focuses on the response of the German colonial authorities in Windhoek and in Berlin to the prospect of large-scale Afrikaner immigration as well as the representation of Afrikaners in German colonial discourse. German justifications of colonial rule were psychologically supported by notions of the imagined cultural and racial differences between the colonisers and the colonised. These underpinned the construction of a polarised self/other, white/black dichotomy and separated the indigenous Africans and Europeans into distinct categories of identification. The presence of settlers whose cultural practices and lifestyle did not match with the norms attributed to the desirable settler threatened to undermine the boundaries of difference between the coloniser and colonised. Some elements of the German government as well as the colonial press envisaged Afrikaner immigrants as a potential threat to continued German control over the colony. Others welcomed the immigration of the Afrikaners as colonial pioneers. The categories of black and white were deployed and reconstructed in order to assess the desirability of Afrikaner groups, leading to their assimilation or exclusion from settler society, and underlining the organising power of the schema. Cultural markers and economic considerations were used to differentiate desirable Afrikaner settlers from those deemed undesirable. Undesirable Afrikaner immigrants were discursively blackened through the use of racial rhetoric as well as being politically excluded from access to resources and land, and even physically excluded from the colony. In contrast, desirable settlers were welcomed and Germanised. Afrikaner immigration was illustrative of the constant negotiation of categories of identification and the utilisation of a notion of whiteness in creating an exclusive settler society.

Surviving in the Metropole: The Struggle for Work and Belonging amongst African Colonial Migrants in Weimar Germany

This paper looks at the fate of the Africans in Germany during the Weimar Republic in terms of their search for belonging and struggle to find work. In doing so it allows for a discussion of the day-to-day experiences and survival strategies of Germanys African Diaspora, their struggle for political recognition and self-definition as well as economic survival. Their presence was tolerated by German officials only as long as it served the purpose of a German colonial propaganda which sought to regain the lost colonies. In the wider context of economic hardship in Germany and rising racial prejudice, particularly in the late 1920s, many of these migrants faced a continual struggle for economic survival. Increasingly, one of the means of carving out an existence remaining for members of the African Diaspora was to turn to the stage. Here they were asked to ‘perform’ their blackness – to take on roles of a constrictive nature, reflecting and reinforcing stereotypes of the Black as primitive or exotic.

A transient presence: black visitors and sojourners in Imperial Germany, 1884–1914

Abstract The onset of German colonial rule in Africa brought increasing numbers of black men and women to Germany. Pre-1914 the vast majority of these Africans can best be described as visitors or sojourners and the black population as a whole was a transient one. This makes recovering their presence in the archival record exceptionally difficult and it is not surprising that the existing historiography is dominated by biographies of well-documented lives. Through utilising a number of recently digitised archival materials, particularly the Hamburg Passenger Lists, this article draws upon a database with information on 1094 individuals from sub-Saharan Africa who spent time in Germany over the period 1884–1914 in order to widen our understanding of the black presence as a whole. It offers new insights and detail into the composition and character of this fluid population – where visitors came from, why they came to Germany, their age on arrival – as well as more accurate information on the temporal and spatial distribution of African visitors.