German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies: Architecture, Art, Urbanism, and Visual Culture 9781350326163, 9781350326194, 9781350326170

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German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies

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German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies Architecture, Art, Urbanism, and Visual Culture Edited by Itohan Osayimwese

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Selection and editorial matter copyright © Itohan Osayimwese, 2023 Individual chapters copyright © their authors, 2023 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: District Office in Kilwa in German East Africa, 1905. © Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Osayimwese, Itohan, editor, author. Title: German colonialism in Africa and its legacies : architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture / Itohan Osayimwese. Identifiers: LCCN 2022035428 (print) | LCCN 2022035429 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350326163 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350326200 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350326170 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350326187 (epub) | ISBN 9781350326194 Subjects: LCSH: Architecture–Africa, Sub-Saharan–Colonial influence. | Land use–Namibia–Planning. | Colonies in art. | Art–Namibia–Colonial influence. | Art, German–African influences. | Namibia–Colonial influence. | Germany–Colonies–Africa. Classification: LCC NA2543.I47 G47 2023 (print) | LCC NA2543.I47 (ebook) | DDC 720.967–dc23/eng/20220727 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035428 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035429 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-2616-3 ePDF: 978-1-3503-2617-0 eBook: 978-1-3503-2618-7 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Plates vii List of Figures  ix Acknowledgments  xiii Introduction: Seeing and building German colonialism  1 Itohan Osayimwese 1 From travel to colonialism: Art and the German colonies  37 Itohan Osayimwese 2 Water: Its presence and absence in settlements and placemaking in colonial Namibia  69 Walter Peters 3 A spatial writing of the earth: The design of colonial territory in South-West Africa  89 Hollyamber Kennedy 4 The Palace of King Njoya: Responding to colonial architecture  121 Mark Dike DeLancey 5 Namibia’s anti-colonial hero Hendrik Witbooi: Reflections from the visual arts  163 Fabian Lehmann

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CONTENTS

6 On Mwangi Hutter’s postcolonialism(s): From Static Drift to One Ground  189 Brett M. Van Hoesen Bibliography  200 List of Contributors  226 Index  228

PLATES

1

Wilhelm Kuhnert (German, 1865–1926), African Lions, c. 1911. Oil on canvas. 64 × 50 inches. JKM Collection®, National Museum of Wildlife Art

2

Swakopmund, c. 1914. Source: Scientific Society Swakopmund. Tree-lined boardwalks on Kaiser Wilhelm Street, today Sam Nujoma Avenue

3

Entrance façade of the Palace of King Njoya, 1959, Foumban, Cameroon. Photo: Robert Ritzenthaler. Milwaukee Public Museum, Milwaukee, WI, Ritzenthaler Slide Collection, L-24

4

The White House, Azi Palace, 2009, Fontem, Cameroon. Photo: James Achanyi-Fontem

5

Leutwein, 2012, Hentie van der Merwe. Film still

6

Witbooi, 2012, Hentie van der Merwe. Film still

7 and 8 Static Drift, 2001, Mwangi Hutter. 2 C-prints, each 75 cm × 110 cm. Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter 9

Canvas of (Un)ritualized Movement, 2015, Mwangi Hutter. Performance. Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter

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PLATES

Proximity of Imperfect Figures, 2015, Mwangi Hutter. Aluminum, wax. Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter

11 and 12 From the Other Side of Daylight, 2017, Mwangi Hutter. 2 C-prints, each 65 cm × 59 cm. Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter

FIGURES

1.1 Songhay Village, August 1853, Johann Martin Bernatz  40 1.2 Richthofen Falls, Hans Martin Lemme  41 1.3 Lobe Waterfall, on the Batanga coast, Ernst Heims  45 1.4 German East Africa Exhibition, Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, St. Louis, 1904  47 1.5 Kilimanjaro seen from Moshi, Rudolf Hellgrewe  50 1.6 House of the Chief of the Pende People, Rudolf Hellgrewe  52 1.7 The Palace of the King of Bamum, Ernst Vollbehr  55 2.1 Map of pre-colonial Namibia, 1876  71 2.2 Church alongside the substantial well at Berseba, c. 1930  73 2.3 Windhoek, 1892  77 2.4 Windhoek as seen from the west, c. 1914  79 2.5 Lüderitzbucht, c. 1914  81 3.1 Walter Rathenau in conversation with Bernhard Dernburg, on board the Kenilworth Castle, 1908  93 3.2 Village colony along Bülowstraẞe, Windhoek, c. 1914  94

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FIGURES

3.3 Shark Island concentration camp (Konzentrationslager), c. 1905  95 3.4 Postcard of Lüderitzbucht, 1912  98 3.5 Samuel Maharero, the insurrectionary leader of the Ovaherero. Postcard stamped June 14, 1906  102 3.6 Left to right: Samuel Isaak, Captain Hendrik Witbooi, Governor Theodor Leutwein, Major Joachim Friedrich von Heydebreck, and District Officer Duft, adjudicator, 1896  103 3.7 Interior courtyard of Alte Feste, September 2017  107 3.8 Prisoner of war camp at the foot of Alte Feste, Windhoek, c. 1905  108 3.9 Fort Warmbad, c. 1908  109 3.10 Postcard of Fort Gochas, c. 1906  111 3.11 Exercise on quick-firing gun, c. 1903  111 4.1 The Palace of King Njoya, front façade, 2012, Foumban, Cameroon  122 4.2 The governor’s residence, c. 1901–06, Buea, Cameroon  122 4.3 Renovation of the palace inherited by King Njoya from his father, c. 1906–07, Foumban, Cameroon  124 4.4 Replacement of the plain veranda supports with sculpted versions at the palace inherited by King Njoya from his father, c. 1908, Foumban, Cameroon  125 4.5 King Njoya’s first brick palace below the palace inherited from his father, c. 1908–09, Foumban, Cameroon  127

FIGURES

4.6 King Njoya’s first brick palace, c. 1908–09, Foumban, Cameroon  127 4.7 District Office in Douala, c. 1895–1912, Douala, Cameroon  129 4.8 Saddleback building with earthen pillars, c. 1908–09, Foumban, Cameroon  130 4.9 The Palace of King Auguste Ndumbe Manga Bell in 1996, Douala, Cameroon  131 4.10 Fon’s residence at the Palace of Bafut, 2012, Bafut, Cameroon  134 4.11 “Great House” of the Bobe Aboh in the Kingdom of Kom, 1963, Aboh, Cameroon  135 4.12 Nachtigal Hospital, Douala, c. 1900–1903, Douala, Cameroon  137 4.13 King Njoya in the audience courtyard of the palace inherited from his father, c. 1912, Foumban, Cameroon  139 4.14 Sultan al-Haji Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya seated in the entrance of the Palace of King Njoya, 1996, Foumban, Cameroon  140 4.15 Throne room of the Palace of King Njoya, 2012, Foumban, Cameroon  141 4.16 King Njiké II before his brick palace, c. 1920–30, Bangangté, Cameroon  148 4.17 The Guest House at Bafut Palace, 2014, Bafut, Cameroon  149

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FIGURES

5.1 Reverend Dr Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi 1830–1905, 2017, Petrus Amuthenu  165 5.2 Hendrik Witbooi (detail), 2015, Inatu Indongo  166 5.3 Historical photograph of Hendrik Witbooi, c. 1900, Rehoboth  167 5.4 Quotes of War (von Schlieffen) and Quotes of War (Witbooi), 2016, Moholi Ndikung  172 5.5 Advertising at Nampost office, Independence Avenue, Windhoek, March 2018  175 5.6 20 dollar note with portrait of Sam Nujoma, 2012 design  179 5.7 50 dollar note with portrait of Hendrik Witbooi, 2012 design  180 5.8 Untitled (Witbooi), 2018, Petrus Amuthenu  181 6.1 If, 2003, Mwangi Hutter  195 6.2 Aesthetic of Uprising II, 2011, Mwangi Hutter  196 6.3 Tireless Embrace In View Of Not Knowing, 2017, Mwangi Hutter  196 6.4 One Ground, 2018, Mwangi Hutter  197

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grants from Brown University’s Humanities Research Fund and DePaul University’s Vincentian Endowment Fund helped support the publication of this book.

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Introduction: Seeing and building German colonialism Itohan Osayimwese

Today, Germany’s colonial past is prominent in academic and public debates about the repatriation of African material cultural heritage from Europe and North America. Newspaper headlines such as “How Often Will Germany Insult Nigeria When Demands Are Made For Restitution Of Looted Artefacts?”1 “Berlin’s plan to return Benin Bronzes Piles Pressure on UK Museums,”2 and “Die Deutschen wissen, wie es sich anfühlt, wenn einem das Erbe genommen wird” (Germans know what it feels like when one’s heritage is taken away),3 have brought Germany’s complicity in a phenomenon that was most closely associated with Britain and France into public consciousness. This increased presence of German colonial legacies in the news media has been accompanied by a heightened visibility in museum exhibitions, film, fiction, websites, and other cultural venues.4 But what exactly were the spatial, material, and visual contexts of the extractive colonial regime that brought tens of thousands of African objects to Germany’s museums? Scholars have been writing about German colonial history since at least the 1970s, and they have written largely from economic, political, and more recently, cultural history perspectives. Nevertheless, very little has been done to show what the physical and material environments contributed to the colonial project. If the debate today asks what should be done about African heritage languishing in the basements of museums from Berlin to Wiesbaden and Hamburg to Stuttgart; street names and monuments commemorating perpetrators of colonial violence in Windhoek, Swakopmund, Dar es Salaam, and across Germany’s cities and towns; and

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persistent landlessness and spatial segregation in Namibia, then it is more pressing than ever before to understand the origins and development of the policies and practices that produced these material and structural conditions and outcomes and to comprehend them in relation to each other and to their contemporary forms. To do so is to radically re-suture African nations to their global interlocutors, reconnect history to heritage and the present to the past.5 German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings together, for the first time, historians of art, the built environment, and visual culture to reflect on the indelibly material nature of German colonialism’s past and present. To achieve this end, the book centers the former German colonies and decenters Germany. While the chapters invariably engage with the voices of colonial thinkers, administrators, settlers, missionaries, traders, soldiers, and others who carried out the colonial mission, the authors here carefully excavate the agency of Africans as they engaged actively with the powerful foe that appeared in their midst. These chapters therefore not only document anti-colonial resistance in the past but also bridge the hidden gap between historical anti-colonialism and present-day postcolonialism and decoloniality through the intentional scholarly practices, intellectual framing, and editorial choices of their authors.6

The German colonial empire Let us start with the large colonial empire that Germany built between 1884 and 1920. Spanning parts of the west coast of Africa to its east coast and including several islands in the Pacific as well as a small peninsula on the east coast of China, this history of colonialism was suppressed in Germany for many years even as the former colonies dealt with the structural and material legacies of colonization daily. Germany joined the modern European scramble for Africa in 1884 when the Bremen-based tobacco merchant, Adolf Lüderitz, ran into difficulties as a result of his questionable dealings in gold and diamonds in southwestern Africa. To rescue Lüderitz, the Prussian navy finally sent three warships to the coast. Soon thereafter, and following a similar course, Cameroon became a “protectorate” of Germany.7 Then, between 1884 and 1897, Togo, German East Africa (present-day Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi) in Africa; New Guinea, Caroline, Marianas, Marshall Islands, and Samoa in East Asia; and Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong Province in northern China were added to the colonial empire.8 Though the German colonial empire included these regions in East Asia and the Pacific, it was predominantly an African empire. The annexation of German South-West Africa broke with the German government’s long-standing resistance to pressure from political interest groups, merchants, missionaries, and scientists advocating for German overseas expansion. Germany’s most influential statesman of the period,

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Chancellor Bismarck, was opposed to the financial and diplomatic risks that colonialism entailed but acquiesced to a colonial model in which private enterprise bore the burden of investment and governance.9 However, this approach did not last long. The German government had to launch a significant number of military expeditions to secure power against strong local resistance, and it established larger and larger bureaucracies in the protectorates to maintain order and promote development. The degree of state control varied by protectorate. Nevertheless, the increasing intervention of the German state flattened distinctions between German and other European models of overseas occupation.10 The lateness and brevity of the German colonial empire is often understood as a distinguishing factor, as is its original conception as a group of protectorates rather than a territorial extension of Germany. German colonialism was also unique in terms of its demographics. Despite various campaigns to organize and fund overseas settlement, very few Germans actually became colonial settlers. Prior to 1914, the population of Germans in all the colonies combined did not surpass 24,000.11 By comparison, there were around 23,740 Europeans in just one of Britain’s African settler colonies, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), in 1911.12 In the German colonial empire, only one colony—South-West Africa—was considered suitable for European inhabitation in terms of climate and size. In 1914, 12,000 Germans lived in South-West Africa.13 This was a small percentage of the total population of around 78,810 in 1913 (compared with 200,000 before the genocide of 1904–08).14 Arguably then, German colonialism had a marginal demographic impact in the metropole, and it failed to serve as an outlet for excess German population as some colonial agitators had hoped it would.15 By contrast, the data shows that this brief period of colonial occupation transformed the demographics of the colonies. Germany was also determined to avoid the economic mistakes earlier colonial powers such as Portugal, France, and Britain had made. For this reason, the German government intended to invest little in the colonies. As in all colonial situations, the goal was to extract as much value as possible. Few efforts were made, for example, to industrialize the colonies. Instead, the focus was often on agriculture. However, military and administrative costs mounted, and it was necessary to invest in railway and marine infrastructure to export raw materials from and import German goods into the colonies. In the end, Germany largely failed to establish financially independent colonies.16 In terms of continuities between German and other modern European colonialisms, violence was the primary technology of colonial rule across the African continent. As Sebastian Conrad explains, in the German colonies, “everyday” violence such as public execution, corporal punishment, imprisonment, and sexual assault escalated into calculated mass murder in response to anti-colonial resistance.17 Two major wars took place in the African colonies: the genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama ethnic

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groups in South-West Africa in 1904–07, and the Maji-Maji War in German East Africa in 1905–08. These events were largely stimulated by the expropriation of Indigenous land. At least 75,000 Africans were killed in the South-West Africa war and about 300,000 died in the German East Africa case.18 Observers during the colonial era and scholars today continue to debate the extent to which German colonial violence was unique. Germany also pursued and arguably expanded on systems of racial segregation commonplace in other colonialisms. As George Steinmetz has demonstrated in detail for South-West Africa, policing the constructed boundaries of race to justify colonization and anti-Black violence became increasingly important.19 Here and across the German colonies, an earlier, more lax attitude transformed over time into strict legal mechanisms to deter interracial mixing. An important goal was to avoid extending German citizenship to the children of interracial unions and thus maintain white privilege. In 1905, South-West Africa controversially issued the first legal ban on mixed marriage in any European colonial empire. Similar bans were implemented in German East Africa and Samoa, though colonial administrations did not uniformly enforce these laws.20 By 1914, when the First World War broke out, the German colonial empire was well established. The African colonies became theaters of war where intra-European enmity played out at the cost of Indigenous lives. With the exception of German East Africa, which, with the help of its African recruits held off British forces until the last days of the war, Germany’s small colonial military forces were rapidly overrun.21 After Germany’s defeat, its colonial empire was dismantled as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1920. Togo and Cameroon were each split and shared by Britain and France. East Africa became British, and South-West Africa was given to South Africa. Samoa was placed under the mandate of New Zealand, New Guinea under Australia, and the South Seas islands and Jiaozhou were placed under Japan. This was the formal end of Germany’s colonial empire, but its footprint has been long and enduring.

Telling the history of German colonialism What vantage points have historians of German colonialism taken, and what narratives have they created? It is now widely accepted that knowledge production itself was crucial to all colonialisms. Thus, it should come as no surprise that German and other Western scholars invested large amounts of time and resources in studying all facets of colonial ideology and practice during the colonial period itself. Since then, approaches to studying German colonialism have changed in parallel with shifting political, economic, and sociocultural conditions in Germany, in the former colonies, and worldwide. In Germany, a period of colonial revisionism occurred after the Treaty of Versailles. Britain and France had justified expropriating Germany’s

INTRODUCTION

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colonies by arguing disingenuously that Germany was an unfit colonial power because it had employed extraordinary brutality against its colonial subjects. In response, former colonial administrators and other German colonial supporters accused the Allied powers of fabricating a “colonial guilt lie” that unfairly victimized Germany and stripped it of its right to own colonies.22 Films, fiction, academic publications, and legal tracts were produced in Germany after the First World War to celebrate the now-lost colonies and to support efforts to reclaim them. Calls for restoring the colonies continued through the interwar years and gained further impetus under the National Socialist regime.23 Thus, the first major genre of scholarly work after the colonial era can be characterized as revisionist. Following partition in 1945, divergent political philosophies in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany shaped distinct attitudes toward the colonial past and historiographies of colonialism. Until recently, scholars believed that the memory of German colonialism had all but disappeared in West Germany after 1945. They argued that the memory of the Holocaust had superseded all other concerns. Recent research rejects this claim of “colonial amnesia.”24 As Britta Schilling explains, “a colonial memory can be traced back to the colonial period itself, not only in the public but also in the private sphere of former colonial families.”25 In fact, positive references toward colonialism prevailed in West Germany even as some critical voices existed that contributed to efforts to work through this past, while East Germany’s anti-capitalist position provoked a strong anticolonial stance that led to the disavowal of postcolonial responsibility.26 In fact, East German historians formulated an influential critique of imperialism and its consort, colonialism, starting in the 1960s. This critique was also in response to decolonial processes underway in the formerly colonized world and shaped by the broader and more damning charge that historiography in Germany had been deeply implicated in German nationalism and imperialism.27 Within the postwar scholarship, some scholars wondered if Germany followed an exceptional path or Sonderweg in its colonial project, as it was thought to have done in its path toward modernity.28 The Sonderweg thesis thus forms the first major organizing theme for German colonial studies. German and American research on German colonialism in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s focused on foreign policy, military conflict, and social and economic history, and centered domestic causes of colonialism such as the desire to avoid social unrest by creating colonies as outlets for Germany’s disenfranchised working class. This changed in the 1990s with the cultural turn in history and the increasing authority of critical theory. Analyzing the role of discourse and knowledge production, these studies have been particularly productive in deconstructing colonial violence, gender, medicine, and the repercussions of colonialism in Germany itself. Perhaps most seminal was Susanne Zantop’s 1997 argument that German colonialism had a significant pre-history in the form of colonial fantasies within eighteenth-

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century German literature on Latin America. Zantop provided a framework for many subsequent analyses of German colonialism.29 Arguably, the expansion of cultural history-based scholarship in the 1990s influenced the second major organizing topic in German colonial studies: continuities between colonial history and the Holocaust.30 Several previous intellectuals had argued that Germany’s history of totalitarianism was linked to colonialism, but it is historian Jürgen Zimmerer who has developed this argument in detail through his research on the 1904–07 war against the Ovaherero and Nama in South-West Africa, which he frames as the first genocide of the twentieth century.31 Following their defeat at the hands of a German military bent on intentionally exterminating these two ethnic groups, the Ovaherero and Nama people were forced into camps where they were maintained at the cusp of life and used as forced labor. Eugenic racial constructs were combined with spatial strategies in South-West Africa in ways that prefigured tactics used in the Holocaust. This thesis of continuity in state-organized violence is further supported by overlaps in the ideologies and discourses that underpinned formal German colonialism in Africa and Prussia’s eastward expansion within Europe from the late eighteenth century onward. Zimmerer’s hypothesis has provoked significant debate since it challenged the singularity of the Holocaust in German history. Another important thread in German colonial studies developed out of the activism of African-descended women in Germany in the 1980s. Based on oral histories and extensive research, May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz published the first comprehensive history of “AfroGermans”—a term they coined to embrace the full range of Black identity in Germany, from colonial subjects living in nineteenth-century Germany, to the children of Second World War African American soldiers and German mothers, and recent African immigrants.32 Subsequent research expanded on this foundation to reconstruct German involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, write the suppressed stories of Africans in German cities, and theorize the Black feminist movement in Germany.33 This research offered important perspectives on continuities between the German colonial experience, National Socialism, and broader anti-immigrant cultural practices and legislation in contemporary Germany.34 Most recently, Tiffany Florvil has written a deep history of the “Afrodeutsch” movement that sheds light on the relationships between Black German activism, citizenship, anti-racism, and feminism in the 1970s, and reveals how the movement built community and networks in the United States and the Global South.35 In the 2000s, historian Sebastian Conrad inaugurated a shift toward a global and transnational perspective in studies of German colonialism. He showed that German colonialism was more intelligible when placed into the context of nineteenth-century global politics, the global economy, migration, and cultural exchange.36 Global links multiplied throughout the century, and colonialism both shaped and was shaped by these links. Thus, though

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Germany’s formal colonial empire was short-lived, it was accompanied by various informal colonial schemes, neocolonial and imperial relationships, other expansionist initiatives, as well as other global interlinkages that advanced German cultural, economic, and political influence abroad. Examples include the establishment of German communities in South America, and the intentional export of German technical and intellectual expertise to Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt.37 The most rapidly growing area of scholarship in German colonial studies today deals with questions of memory and heritage. Thomas Thiemeyer argues that Zimmerer’s labeling of the 1904 war against the Ovaherero and Nama as a genocide initiated a new and more cosmopolitan turn in the German culture of remembrance, which created the conditions necessary for current public debates about colonial history in Germany.38 Furthermore, starting in 2002, Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller published a series of edited volumes that presented research on German colonialism through the framework of its material heritage, to a lay audience.39 Together, these and other publications, along with the activities of an ever-increasing set of new organizations dedicated to probing racism as a historical construct in contemporary German life, have laid the foundation for the current phase of scholar-informed public discourse.40 It is no surprise that the study of German colonialism has followed a different trajectory within the former colonies themselves. In the immediate aftermath of Germany’s departure, the legacies of German colonialism had to be negotiated in relation to new colonial regimes or occupations. For example, in Cameroon, some elites perpetuated a romanticized memory of the German period to contest French and British policies after 1918.41 Following independence in the 1960s, African intellectuals and novelists have analyzed German colonialism, but their work was not read outside the African continent.42 Their work started to find a broader audience in the 1990s, especially when pursued in collaboration with German institutions and scholars. One example is the establishment of the German Studies Department at the University of Dschang, Cameroon in 1994 and its associated journal Mont Cameroun, which aims to disseminate scholarship on the “intercultural dimension of German-African studies.”43 Arguably, it is in the arena of literary fiction and film that Cameroonians have debated the German colonial period and its lingering legacies.44 A 2013 publication on German colonialism in West Africa with contributions primarily from scholars based in that region, frames the topic in terms of entangled histories that necessitate collaborative research and in relation to transforming contemporary material conditions through social projects including heritage tourism at colonial sites.45 Heritage has played an even more important role in postindependence engagement with German colonialism in Tanzania and Namibia. Shared memories of the Maji-Maji War in German East Africa were leveraged by nationalists as they sought to unify diverse ethnic groups into a modern nation in the independence era.46 In Namibia, practices of

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commemoration of deceased Ovaherero and Nama leaders have been held annually since the mid-1920s. As Reinhart Kössler explains, these memory politics in Namibia developed in inverse relation to assertions of still extant settler colonial dominance and are a public expression of communal resilience and a symbolic reappropriation of occupied space and place.47 A rich scholarly literature dealing with Namibia’s tragic history of colonial genocide and its materialization in commemorative practices, street names, memorials to colonists, colonial buildings, and segregated urban space has emerged.48 At the same time, the small but economically powerful Germanspeaking minority living in Namibia today is advancing a counter-project that commemorates German military victories, denies the genocide, and promotes a sanitized version of the past that justifies an uncritical celebration of German language and culture.49 Their cause was strengthened when several lawsuits for reparations filed since 2001 by Ovaherero groups in US courts against the German state and German companies that profited from colonial war crimes were dismissed.50 However, the German government has offered a nonbinding apology for atrocities committed during the genocide, and since 2011, has slowly been returning human remains and cultural objects to Namibia.51 Today, as a result of a confluence of domestic, pan-European, and global pressures, debates rage in Germany, Cameroon, and elsewhere about the status of the colonial past in relation to the vast quantity of African, Asian, Oceanic, and other non-Western cultural heritage housed in the country’s museums. According to experts, 90–95  percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s cultural heritage—much of it looted or otherwise illegally obtained—resides in major museums outside the continent today, with the majority held by institutions in France, Germany, and Great Britain.52 Shockingly, neither the federal authorities nor the German states who have jurisdiction over most museums know exactly how many African objects are present in Germany.53 It is estimated that the largest of these collections in Berlin alone consists of about 75,000 African objects.54 African nations have been asking for their cultural heritage to be returned since at least the 1970s.55 But these requests mostly fell on deaf ears until the 2000s. Since then, and alongside contentious discussions in France about the place of colonial objects in museums, the presence of African cultural heritage in Germany has been questioned.56 The debate has coalesced around the Humboldt Forum—a new museum on Berlin’s Museum Island, in planning since the 1980s and completed in 2019. The Humboldt Forum was controversial from the very beginning because it was to be housed in a reconstruction of the baroque Prussian palace that was torn down to build the East German Parliament. For many observers, this decision was problematic from an architectural point of view, but it also raised important questions about national identity and the politics of the past.57 While the proposal to unite Berlin’s dispersed nonEuropean collections in the proposed the Humboldt Forum seemed to quell

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early critics, it was met with outrage by German, Africa-based, and other international activist groups and academics. In several public protests, published statements, and media interviews, these groups articulated their opposition to the project, which they saw as an expansion of long-standing European commercial exploitation of non-European resources even as these cultures and the descendants of the original owners continue to be othered within Germany; and a project lacking any critical engagement with colonial and global history especially as they relate to the history of Western museums and the problematic idea of science as a neutral production of knowledge.58 Though Berlin is at the center of the debate, it has affected all the major ethnological museums in the country, and it is being discussed by diverse constituencies across Germany as well as in the former German colonies and other parts of Africa.59 The 2018 publication of a groundbreaking report by Germany-based art historian Bénédicte Savoy and Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr proposing a legal framework and process for restituting African objects in French national collections, stimulated additional debate in Germany.60 In response, the culture ministers of Germany’s sixteen states have pledged “to establish conditions for the repatriation of artifacts from public German collections.”61 The German Museums Association has published guidelines for approaching colonial heritage, and some federal and state funding has been made available for provenance research. However, critics see the focus on provenance research as a stalling tactic and a continuation of colonial-era tactics.62 They call for immediate and unlimited access to collections and existing museum inventories. As of April 2021, the Director of the Humboldt Forum made a somewhat ambiguous announcement that 440 of the most symbolically important colonial booty, the Benin Bronzes originally looted by the British during its massacre of the people of the Benin Kingdom in 1897, will no longer be displayed in Berlin.63 Similarly, Germany’s Foreign Ministry committed to restituting the Benin Bronzes and sent representatives to Nigeria to finalize ongoing deliberations.64 Interested parties on both sides of the Atlantic wait with bated breath for these initial promises, and the largescale and unconditional repatriation of Africa’s heritage, to be fulfilled.

Seeing and building German colonialism Then I arrived in Iringa and saw on the walls of the old fort what I had experienced. But it was more beautiful, more noble and at the same time more genuine than it had presented itself to me. It was seen through the eyes of a very great artist, captured with the deepest soul, and presented with incredible skill. The artist who had been at work here was Wilhelm Kuhnert. One has to see his works—they cannot be fully described. Paul v. Lettow-Vorbeck (Commander of German forces in East Africa in 1914)65

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Colonialism was predicated on a certain way of visualizing the world and on transforming it, inch by inch and brick by brick, to support this vision. What was this vision for German colonialism? How was it created and sustained? Studies of architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture aim to address these questions. Paul v. Lettow-Vorbeck, quoted above, recognized a painting of the forests and mountains of German East Africa on the walls of a German-occupied fort as even more “genuine” than his experience of marching through the very same landscape. Art as embodied in a colonial painting, and architecture in the form and embodied experience of the German fort, made colonialism concrete and legible for Lettow-Vorbeck. The scholarship on architecture and German colonialism has been limited primarily due to the assumption that German colonialism was so shortlived that it could only have had a minimal impact on architecture. What this assumption fails to consider is that the concept of architecture that is so widely accepted today is a construct whose limits have been defined in relation to non-architecture or building (understood as equivalent to non-European forms and practices) since the European age of exploration and colonialism.66 Scholars of colonial architecture often challenge this foundational myth, and thus broaden the category of architecture to include structures created by lay designers and builders, spatial ensembles and designed landscapes, as well as the discourses associated with the built environment. As in other European colonialisms, buildings, transportation and utility infrastructure, and city plans were indispensable tools of German colonialism. Yet, scholarship on the topic did not emerge until the 1980s. The first indepth scholarly work was published in Namibia by South African architect, Walter Peters, as his dissertation at the University of Hannover.67 This book was followed by two edited volumes with contributions by German and West African researchers, written in a technical style to document German structures in Cameroon and Togo to facilitate preservation.68 These texts offered brief histories of individual German-designed and primarily government-owned buildings, and described planning for the largest cities in each colony. They laid the foundation for a genre of scholarship that still persists today—the colonial architecture guide. These guides are organized as chronological catalog entries supplemented by illustrations from the large archive of photographs and postcards depicting the German colonies.69 Though useful to scholars for their documentary value, these texts do not discuss the political and social context of colonial building, and thus have the potential to feed into the inaccurate idea that colonialism was benign. More recently, entries on buildings and urban spaces associated with important colonial figures or activities have also been included in general texts on colonial heritage within Germany.70 These publications are responding to growing public interest in the material heritage of German colonialism. Scholarly interest in the topic has also grown within architectural history and urban history since the 2000s, with the completion

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of a few dissertations and associated monographs in German and English.71 In addition, important contributions have been made by scholars in other disciplines. For example, the literary scholar John Noyes investigates how abstract Western concepts of space facilitated colonial occupation.72 And urban planning scholars Ambe Njoh and Liora Bignon show that German colonial administrators used planning expertise to bolster power beyond the sphere of the built environment.73 A number of themes—expected and unexpected—are evident in the existing scholarship. Most prominent is a focus on analyzing the construction of buildings, infrastructure, and cities designed by representatives of the German colonial state. Scholars have attempted to characterize buildings stylistically, describe material and technical features, and identify relevant architects and their backgrounds and professional practices.74 For example, Walter Peters concluded that German architects in South-West Africa designed primarily in medieval revival, Rundbogenstil, Renaissance revival, and to a lesser degree, in Jugendstil and English Arts and Crafts styles.75 In my own work, I have begun to explore the difficulties that colonists encountered with obtaining the kinds of building materials they desired and the financial implications of importing materials from Europe.76 Similarly, we are still learning about how construction labor, which was primarily provided by Africans, was obtained and organized.77 One expanding area of research is the discourse and rhetoric of German colonial architecture and urbanism: what were the intended purposes and actual effects of design choices in individual structures and city plans? Were they understood as advancing colonial ideologies such as the idea that race was a marker of incommensurable difference? How did German colonists understand local and Indigenous architectural practices? Building on larger trends in German colonial studies and using a combination of discourse analysis and formal analysis, some scholars have argued that structures designed by Germans are more productively understood as hybrid cultural forms that combined local materials and expertise with imported ideas.78 Expanding on this argument, the category of “colonial architecture” should arguably be reconceptualized to include structures designed by Africans in dialogue with colonial power and its claims.79 Paying attention to the discourse on colonial architecture offers other insights as well. Though German colonialism occurred during the same time frame as some of the most intense architectural debates and developments in Germany—notably the development of modern architecture—most of the scholarly work approaches the topic as if it were entirely separate from developments in German architecture. By contrast, I have argued that although self-consciously modernist architectural forms were not present in large numbers in the German colonies, discussions in professional journals and in the technical correspondence moving between Berlin and the colonies indicates deep engagement with modernist concerns.80 Another theme in the scholarship on the architecture of German colonialism is domestic space and domesticity. Importantly, this research

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shifts the focus away from government-owned buildings to the homes of settlers, and engages with the construction of gender in German colonial Africa. While architectural historians have completed most of the scholarship described previously, historians and scholars from other disciplines have been at the forefront of thinking about domestic space and gender.81 Germany’s unique history presents two historiographical opportunities for scholars of German colonial architecture and urbanism. Though Germany only formally occupied colonial territory from 1884 until 1919, Zantop, Conrad, and others have offered compelling arguments for understanding German colonialism as a phenomenon that transcended this brief period to include, for example, post-Second World War East and West German development aid in sub-Saharan Africa.82 Architecture and urbanism offer tangible ways to track Germany’s neocolonial and imperial interventions and geopolitical influence. Notable examples are the German production of the railways of the Ottoman Empire, the work of the Berlin architect Carl von Diebitsch (1819–69) in Egypt, and architecture and planning as objects of negotiation in socialist bilateral relations between East Germany and Tanzania in the 1960s.83 Related to this expanded view of German colonialism, the short duration of formal German colonialism presents both a challenge and an opportunity in scholarly work. While thirty-five years was barely long enough for coherent colonial ideologies and policies to develop, the transfer of German colonies to other colonial regimes presents a rare opportunity for comparative colonial analyses.84 For instance, a recent study of racial segregation in German city planning in Cameroon, South-West Africa, Tanzania, and Togo investigates continuities between German and subsequent British and French mandate approaches as well as consequences after African independence.85 Relationships between new nineteenth-century disciplines such as geography and urban planning, the tools that they developed including cartography and demography, and state colonial policies are another area of research.86 German colonial mapping was largely an imaginative process that relied on inaccurate knowledge that was then used to make geopolitical decisions whose impacts are still felt today.87 Likewise, these techniques were instrumental in the European appropriation of Indigenous land in SouthWest Africa and German East Africa, which current land reform efforts are still grappling with.88 Finally, German efforts to expropriate local land led to the development of some of the earliest modern environmental conservation laws in SouthWest Africa, German East Africa, and Cameroon at the end of the nineteenth century.89 These efforts were part of the larger Heimatschutz (Homeland Preservation) movement in Germany that encompassed policies curtailing urban development and discussions about the preservation of vernacular building practices.90 Investment in conservation and preservation during the colonial period has created opportunities for current scholarship on these topics. Botanical gardens in German cities and across the former

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German colonies offer another avenue for research. The botanical garden was a quintessential colonial form born from the European desire to collect seemingly exotic tropical plants and cultivate them in temperate European environments.91 These gardens are of particular interest because they merged landscape design, colonial botany, environmental conservation, and land expropriation.92 And, because of their lasting presence, botanical gardens offer a unique opportunity for research on the history and current impact of colonialism. Most recently, a body of scholarship that analyzes colonial toponymy, urban design, and monument and memorial design is emerging.93 Research on the evolution of entire cities, their component parts, and important public spaces in relation to ideologies of racial and cultural difference, systems of governance inherited from colonialism that privilege elites, and exportoriented economies and infrastructures, provides the missing context for these debates.94 German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies seeks to fill this gap. Despite this wide array of research topics, only a handful of scholars have paid attention to architecture and urbanism and German colonialism. Future scholarship might include diachronic ethnographies of African- or European-designed or constructed colonial buildings that offer insight on these structures and the lives they have framed. In-depth studies of the organization of labor and materials-sourcing might reveal trans-imperial networks of expertise and supply that complicate the notion that colonial power and economies were organized strictly along metropole-colony axes.95 Likewise, the pressing issue of contemporary land reform in SouthWest Africa and Tanzania—broached in Chapter 3 of this book—suggests opportunities for research on urban planning, geography, and environmental history. Strangely, the scholarship on art and German colonialism has been largely independent of studies of architecture and urbanism. Like architecture, art can be defined broadly or narrowly. A distinction can be drawn, for instance, between the fine arts, the applied arts, and visual culture. While very little research has been completed on the fine and the applied arts, a significant number of books and articles have been published on visual culture and German colonialism over the last two decades. But these three categories are especially unstable in the context of colonialism where cultures and societies with divergent understandings of art came into contact. If we take the fine arts to be works produced in accordance with specific aesthetic principles and intended to be appreciated exclusively for their creative or intellectual substance, the following questions arise: Should the category of “German colonial art” be limited to art produced by German artists in or about the colonies? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, German artists traveled to parts of the African continent that were not under German control, such as South Africa and Kenya, do we include their works in a discussion of art and German colonialism? Should amateur as well as professionally trained

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artists be included? How about art created by other European settlers and art created by Africans in the German colonies, during the colonial period, or art that engaged with the colonial experience in some way? What about works created by Africans prior to or during colonialism, which did not directly engage with colonialism but were collected and valued by Germans and other Europeans first as ethnographica and later as art? Rather than exploring these questions, many scholars have assumed a self-evident and shared understanding of art, and have thus closed off productive avenues for discussion. In perhaps the most direct interpretation of the topic, several scholars have researched the lives and work of professional German artists depicting German and other European colonies in Africa. Writing largely in a biographical tradition, Sabine Wilke, Joachim Zeller, and others have explored how the paintings and sculpture of artists such as Fritz Behn, Wilhelm Kuhnert, and others contributed to the German colonial imagination of Africa, and served colonial ideology and policy.96 Until recently, historians rather than art historians have engaged with this topic. Additionally, amateur historians and descendants of German artists active in the colonies have written in this biographical tradition and sometimes participated in a problematic colonial nostalgia.97 By contrast, art historians have dealt indirectly with German colonialism in studies of artistic movements such as Orientalism and Romanticism that framed European artistic encounters with peoples and places outside Europe.98 These scholars analyze the depiction of African figures and landscapes for continuities with existing motifs and techniques in European art. Indeed, as Sander Gilman and others have shown, “the black” has been a constant presence in the iconography of German art since at least the eighteenth century when Black figures were brought to bear in constituting Western ideals of beauty.99 But these academic art historical expositions have only recently engaged critically with the problem of colonialism as theorized, for instance, in postcolonial theory.100 Continuity and difference are dominant themes in the scholarship that considers the relationship between German colonialism and modern art. In 1992, art historian Jill Lloyd memorably argued that the new and compelling category of the primitive that transformed German art in the twentieth century was deeply indebted to ethnography, ethnographic collections at German museums, colonial patterns of thought, and German colonial aspirations in particular.101 Some scholars responded to Lloyd’s challenge by examining artists such as Emil Nolde and Ernst Kirchner and their participation in the German colonial project.102 This approach has been extended more recently to encompass later artistic movements, such as Dada in interwar Berlin.103 Related to the coincidence of avant-garde artistic movements and colonialism, the establishment of African art as a distinct category and subject of study in nineteenth-century Germany and Europe more broadly forms an important but underexplored theme. Though ethnographic

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museums in Germany had developed significant collections of African objects by the 1880s, “African art” was only named as such in the twentieth century, through the gradual movement of these objects into art galleries, avant-garde artists’ valorization of these objects, and as a result of scholarly exegesis by German art historians Carl Einstein and Wilhelm Worringer.104 While scholars such as Everlyn Nicodemus, Andreas Michel, and Zoe Strother have specifically placed their research on Worringer and Einstein within the larger political, economic, social, and cultural context of the panEuropean colonial project, others have maintained the position that these artists and their works should be understood in terms of more conventional art historical considerations of form and aesthetics.105 However, it is important to emphasize that the invention of African art was deeply tied to German anthropology’s late nineteenth-century project of developing a world-spanning theory of human culture.106 For this reason, African art collected during the colonial period forms a significant part of collections in ethnographic museums in Germany today, and the ethics of these museums’ continued ownership of these objects is rightly a new object of focus in art historical research.107 Whereas scholarly treatments of the art of other European colonialisms have critically challenged the notion that “colonial art” is by definition created by European actors, this remains a lacuna in German colonial studies. Studies of the nineteenth-century Yoruba sculptor, Ọlό ̣we of Ise’s carved door depicting a British colonial administrator being carried by local porters; and of the sixteenth- and nineteenth-century Afro-Portuguese ivories from today’s Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone that include recognizably Western motifs, offer helpful models for scholars looking at German colonial contexts.108 Within the German colonial sphere, the leadership and artists of the Bamum Kingdom of western Cameroon are now understood to have engaged directly and deliberately with the experience of colonialism. As Christraud Geary and Jonathan Fine have argued, for instance, Bamum royal artists produced objects specifically for export to Europe and were fully aware of European preferences for works that embodied preconceived European definitions of African authenticity. This was especially the case in the period immediately following Germany’s occupation, when works sold to European collectors emphasized historical Bamum motifs and forms such as double-headed snakes on sculpted stools and tables. Here, engagement with colonialism took the form of a “strategic historicism.”109 However, beyond the western Cameroon case, African artistic engagements with German colonialism remain underexplored in the scholarly literature.110 Poised at the intersection between the fine arts and visual culture, German colonial photography has been the subject of considerable study—especially in relation to Cameroon and South-West Africa.111 The camera was a technology of colonization because its panoramic eye often gave European users the ability to surveil, know, and control large areas,

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and supported efforts to pathologize Africa and Africans as primitive and premodern.112 Photography was put into service as an overlapping scientific, administrative, and aesthetic practice. Ethnographic portraiture is, perhaps, the best-known scientific and administrative function of German colonial photography. Guidelines from museums and anthropologists in Germany helped photographers create portraits for use in comparative racializing taxonomies of people and objects.113 In fact, the German colonial administration made early and extensive use of photography, and these images constitute an archive of great value for contemporary scholars. In terms of photography as aesthetic practice, Christraud Geary argues that while many colonial photographers did not consider themselves artists, some were trained as artists, and for others, their work can be considered a distinctive art form that relied on specific visual choices.114 Furthermore, colonial photography used established artistic categories, such as the picturesque or romantic landscapes, to render African space as a tabula rasa devoid of people and history.115 Photographs became a de facto medium of expression for German colonialism, and they appear in almost every conceivable colonial context. Like other artistic practices though, photography was not exclusively the province of European protagonists. Colonized Africans appropriated the camera and photography to claim agency. King Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom, his wives, and children, for instance, produced self-portraits in collaboration with a Swiss-German missionary photographer in the 1910s and 1920s. Njoya also took photographs himself, and commissioned his scribe to create photographs. These examples of Indigenous photography serve as important historical documents today.116 Such agentive acts also took place in Germany itself during the colonial period and after, when Africans and their descendants used photography to create “forms of identification and community” and, against the odds, a Black European subjectivity.117 Not surprisingly, photographs taken by Africans are located in family archives and other repositories external to the archives of the colonial state, and a number of scholars emphasize the need to deconstruct the very category of the archive on the basis of which German and other colonial histories are written. Finally, photographs, because of their reality effect, offer an increasingly important subject for research on the continuity of colonial violence as well as the possibility of repair in today’s Namibia, for instance.118 German colonial studies has been one of the areas in which visual culture studies has flourished. Visual culture studies emerged in the 1990s based on the insight that vision has become a privileged domain in Western thought. As such, visual culture studies embraces in its purview “all manifestations of optical experience, all variants of visual practice.”119 It is concerned with contextualizing the history of images, how they are made and how they create meaning in relation to the politics of everyday life.120 Scholars have suggested that Germany’s colonial project was intricately tied to its

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active nineteenth-century technological developments and visual regimes. Specifically, they argue that it was through visual culture that German ideas about race and difference were shaped in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—ideas that both informed and transcended formal state-led engagement with non-Western peoples and regions.121 Though not originally conceptualized as such, some of the earliest work on visual culture and German colonialism focused on nineteenth-century panoramas. These massive paintings-in-the-round were created in a newly invented and patented cylindrical building type, and for many Germans, they offered an opportunity to visually experience military victories over colonized peoples or explore distant cities and landscapes in lieu of actual travel.122 Entrepreneurs experimented with techniques for creating more and more immersive experiences for audiences by integrating painted backdrops of tropical landscapes with ethnographic objects, live plantings, and agricultural products from the colonies, to create another genre— the diorama. Panoramas and dioramas overlap with several other media that visualized the colonies. The most widely studied is the Völkerschau or “foreign peoples show”—Germany’s unique version of the “living ethnological displays” seen at universal expositions in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century.123 In Germany, the Völkerschau developed to unprecedented levels and was seen by large numbers of people in the form of stand-alone events or within larger trade fairs or colonial exhibitions hosted by organizations, city governments, or individual businessmen. The animal trainer and dealer, Carl Hagenbeck, famously combined elements of the panorama and diorama with living animals, non-European people, faux terrain, amusement park rides, and other entertainments, leading to what Eric Ames has described as a predecessor genre to contemporary theme space.124 Scholars have debated the overlapping functions of Völkerschauen, which were sometimes intended to instruct the public about the nature and benefits of colonialism, but also served as laboratories for often unethical medical and anthropological research on non-Western people, and as lucrative business ventures.125 Originating prior to panoramas and Völkerschauen, lantern-slide lectures offered the German public access to the colonies in the late nineteenth century. In an effort to broaden the appeal of colonialism, colonial advocacy groups funded lantern-slide lectures for both urban and rural, elite and workingclass audiences. But, independent, itinerant lecturers and other groups also disseminated colonial imagery using this visual technology.126 Early lantern slides were made using hand-painted illustrations. But, by the 1880s when the German colonies were established, colored, photographic transparencies had replaced painted scenes on these slides. Another visual media—the picture postcard—arrived long after the lantern slide. At the end of the nineteenth century, the German Empire was a leader in the production and distribution of picture postcards, large numbers of which moved between Germany and its colonies. Sent

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by a variety of protagonists including German soldiers in the colonies and colonized subjects in Africa, postcards brought stereotypical images of non-Western peoples, peaceful and violent views of the colonies into everyday communication and the domestic sphere.127 Illustrated weekly newspapers, advertisements, illustrated calendars, collectible trading cards, penny dreadfuls, youth textbooks, toys, games, films, and other visual media also helped shape and publicize the colonial effort.128 Almost all of these forms of visual culture genres relied on skilled artists whose paintings, photographs, and graphics formed the foundation for multimedial genres. In their efforts to uncover the diverse range and functioning of visual culture in German colonialism, however, scholars have omitted analyzing art itself and leveraging art historical approaches. These approaches would intersect with and deepen existing visual culture studies of German colonialism by analyzing the aesthetic and material properties of artworks, their iconography and function, and their social history as evidenced through analyses of art education, art production, the art market, and professional practice. German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies: Architecture, Art, Urbanism, and Visual Culture takes a first step toward filling this gap. The applied arts—where functional objects are aesthetically endowed— constitute a third overlapping subject of research in the scholarship on German colonialism and art. The bead-covered, sculpted throne that King Njoya of Bamum commissioned before 1908 as a replica of his father’s throne and a gift for Kaiser Wilhelm II fits into this category, as do other Bamum objects produced in response to colonialism during the German period.129 But few scholars have taken on colonial applied arts themselves as a focus of analysis. There are tantalizing hints that this would be a productive avenue of research. For instance, archival documents list decorated elephant foot wastepaper baskets as characteristic items in settlers’ homes in German East Africa.130 Were these works of applied art uniquely colonial inventions or were they based on existing local typologies in German East Africa? Who crafted the new objects? Were other hunting trophies also transformed into decorative but functional vessels or furniture? Archival sources also show that East African musical instruments and basketry were also used to decorate settlers’ homes. Were these created in response to European demand, and did their form and ornamentation consequently change? Did colonized Africans apply this colonial mode of interior decoration in their homes? Did the characteristic appearance of the “Bombay table” in these homes index a trans-imperial exchange with British India through the applied arts or was this more of a reflection of East Africa’s diverse ethnic population? Was the repurposed beer crate furniture commissioned from applied art designer Gertrud Cläre Holstein for the model colonial house at the 1914 Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne an isolated case or were German settlers in South-West Africa creating similar works?131 Questions like these signal the need for further research on applied arts and German colonialism.

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As this overview indicates, art and architecture were intertwined in German colonialism. A painting could appear in a diorama within an exhibition in Germany, on the pages of a paperback, on a picture postcard, and on the wall of a living room in Cameroon. Or a memorial to a German colonial officer could be sculpted in Germany, shipped to Dar es Salaam to form a constitutive element of its urban space, reproduced in the colonial press and picture postcards, relocated to a plaza in Hamburg following British occupation of East Africa, and later recontextualized in decolonial museum displays in Germany.132 Reconnecting art, architecture, urbanism, and visual culture will bring new insight to German colonial studies.

Architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture today Colonialism in its many forms continues to be powerful in part because it fundamentally transformed colonizing and colonized societies, cultures, and environments in ways that are not only still visible today but also in many ways constitutive of contemporary experience. Because of their materiality, architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture offer some of the most direct and lasting registers of these transformations. German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings together the work of art and architectural historians working in these fields. Six chapters, which range chronologically from the build-up to formal colonialism in the early nineteenth century to the present, and span from Cameroon to Namibia to Germany, explore three central questions. First, who were the protagonists of architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture during German colonialism, what strategies did they employ, and how did these tactics intersect with politics and economics? Second, what were the effects of these ideas and practices? Lastly, what are the legacies of these phenomena today? The chapters combine formal analyses of painting, photography, performance art, buildings, landscapes, and space with examinations of social contexts and discourses. At the core of the volume are several chapters on South-West Africa. In Chapter 2, Walter Peters shows that Indigenous practices of using groundwater had a direct bearing on colonial settlement and placemaking, and provided the basis for the spatial distribution of urban centers and towns in Namibia today. Hollyamber Kennedy considers, in Chapter 3, the entangled role of the landscape, the built environment, and a series of legal mechanisms for land partitioning in the construction of colonial territoriality in South-West Africa in the years leading up to the 1904–07 genocide. Fabian Lehmann’s contribution (Chapter 5) examines the current mythology surrounding the Namibian anti-colonial hero, Hendrik Witbooi, by analyzing contemporary Namibian visual art that takes an iconic colonial-era photograph of Hendrik Witbooi as a point of departure. Lehmann concludes that these artworks

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offer insight on the workings of collective and national memory. Given the importance of South-West Africa as the largest German colony in terms of land area and the scale of German settlement, it is not surprising that Namibia commands scholars’ interest in this and other publications. Despite significant effort to recruit contributors based on the African continent and those writing about Togo and German East Africa, this volume was not able to disrupt the post- and neocolonial status quo of an academic culture dominated by Europe- and US-based scholars.133 This core group of chapters is preceded by a chapter that reverberates between Germany and the colonies: in Chapter  1, Itohan Osayimwese reconstructs the transformation of German travel narrative art into the neologism “colonial painting” over the course of the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth. She argues that although only a relatively small number of artists pursued it, colonial painting was the backbone for the proliferation of a visual and material culture that promulgated colonialism especially in Cameroon, German East Africa, and Germany itself. In Chapter 4, Mark Dike DeLancey’s contribution exemplifies the rich insights to be found when we train our lens on Cameroon. Through a case study of King Ibrahim Njoya’s 1917 palace in Foumban, he contends that enterprising rulers in the Cameroon Grassfields engaged with modernity through architectural dialogues with the emerging German colonial idiom as well as with a variety of local and regional forms. Brett van Hoesen’s photo essay (Chapter 6) on the work of the contemporary global artist, Mwangi Hutter, which references the wider orbit of postcolonial East Africa, closes the book. Van Hoesen suggests that the unique one artist/two body practice of Mwangi Hutter assumes political meaning particularly in the context of the afterlife of German colonialism because it questions the limits of the original colonial binaries Black/White, as well as established social binaries such as female/male and mother/father.134 The chapters collected in this book can be read independently, but they are also in dialogue with each other—specifically in relation to the question of agency in colonial contexts. In Chapter 1, the Palace of King Njoya of Bamum appears as an object of fascination for the German painter Ernst Vollbehr. In fact, German colonial officials and observers commented extensively on Njoya’s architectural projects, and the buildings he commissioned contributed to what Christraud Geary has described as the German myth of Bamum authenticity.135 In part in direct response to the prominent place the palace held in the colonial imagination and colonial archive and in part in response to the sense that Njoya’s palaces are of significant architectural and historical value, contemporary scholars have often focused on these buildings. Hence, Mike Dike DeLancey takes the 1917 palace as the object of his inquiry in Chapter  4. Rather than reiterating the standard colonial-era narrative that emphasizes German influence on Njoya’s project, however, DeLancey focuses squarely on Njoya’s own agency.

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In Chapter 3, Hollyamber Kennedy reconstructs in unprecedented detail the appropriation of Indigenous land and suppression of local regimes of ownership and use of land in the German colony of South-West Africa through the frameworks of jurisprudence, planning, and architecture. Walter Peters’s approach complements Kennedy’s (Chapter 2) with an arguably decolonial reading of the sources that reveals how Indigenous Ovaherero, Nama, and Oorlam settlement planning was based on expert knowledge of water resources. Likewise, Kennedy’s chapter uncovers the specific mechanisms that enabled German colonial atrocities including the murder of the Nama leader, Hendrik Witbooi, by German forces. While Fabian Lehmann, in Chapter 5, argues for Indigenous agency during the colonial period and thereafter precisely through the historical figure of Witbooi and his artistic representation. Chapters  1 and 5 are similarly linked. The colonial photographs of Witbooi and portraits created based on these photographs in the postcolonial period (discussed in Chapter 5) belong to a longer history of German colonial art that originated with ethnographic “type” portraits but also includes self-portraits by Africans that resisted the interpretations imposed by colonialism (referenced in Chapter 1).136 Lehmann, for his part, argues that Witbooi’s portraits have been leveraged by contemporary artists in Namibia to intervene in the production of national memory. Lehmann thus offers a compelling counter perspective to the narrative of colonial art as a tool of oppression. Together, the chapters in German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies synthesize existing insights and ask new questions about German colonial art, architecture, urbanism, and visual culture.

Notes 1 Kwame Opoku, “How Often Will Germany Insult Nigeria when Demands Are Made for Restitution of Looted Artefacts?” Modern Ghana, December 31, 2020, https://www.modernghana.com/news/1052752/how-often-will-germanyinsult-nigeria-when-demands.html (accessed August 3, 2022). 2 Philip Oltermann, “Berlin’s Plan to Return Benin Bronzes Piles Pressure on UK Museums,” The Guardian, March 23, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2021/mar/23/berlins-plan-to-return-benin-bronzes-piles-pressureon-uk-museums (accessed March 23, 2021). 3 Ulrike Knöfel, “Die Deutschen wissen, wie es sich anfühlt, wenn einem das Erbe genommen wird,” Der Spiegel, July 17, 2018, https://www.spiegel. de/kultur/kunsthistorikerin-benedicte-savoy-das-goldene-das-dunklea-00000000-0002-0001-0000-000158383303 (accessed March 23, 2021). 4 See, for example, “LATITUDE: Rethinking Power Relations for a Decolonised and Non-racial World,” Goethe Institut, https://www.goethe.de/ins/ng/en/ kul/dos/lat.html (accessed August 4, 2022); Berlin Postkolonial, https:// www.berlin-postkolonial.de/ (accessed May 10, 2022); Goethe Institut Kamerun (ed.), German Colonial Heritage in Africa: Artistic and Cultural

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Perspectives, https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/pdf173/german-colonialheritage_artistic-and-cultural-perspectives.pdf (accessed May 10, 2022); The Colonial Misunderstanding [Flim], directed by Jean-Marie Teno, Cameroon, 2004; Patrice Nganang, Mont-Plaisant: A Novel (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2011); Revolution: Respect A L’afrique Ces Enfant D’afrique, produced by Ndayizeye Ezéchiel Compagnie, 2011; Wazi Apoh, “Sankofatization and Decolonization: The Rapprochement of German Museums and Government with Colonial Objects and Postcolonialism,” Museum Anthropology 43 (March 2020): 23–44, https://doi.org/10.1111/muan.12218. 5 Tomá Berlanda, “De-colonising Architectural Education: Thoughts from Cape Town,” Built Heritage 1 (2017): 69–72. 6 On anti-colonialism, postcolonialism, and decoloniality, see J. Daniel Elam, “Anticolonialism,”Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with The Global South, December 27, 2017, https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/ articles/pdf/386 (accessed January 6, 2022); Saloni Mathur, “A Questionnaire on Decolonization,” October 174 (2020): 79–80; Itohan Osayimwese, “From Postcolonial to Decolonial Architectural History: A Method,” kritische berichte 3 (2021): 16–38. 7 The German government designated these territories as “protectorates” rather than “colonies” to disavow state involvement and territorial expansion (Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 23). 8 Much of the account of the evolution of the German colonial empire provided in this chapter is drawn from Sebastian Conrad’s overview in Conrad, German Colonialism. 9 Conrad, German Colonialism, 23. 10 For this reason and because colonial administrators and supporters at the time sometimes referred to the protectorates as colonies, I will use “colony” for the remainder of this chapter. 11 Conrad, German Colonialism, 105. This number differs significantly from the figure provided in the colonial revisionist text Heinrich Schnee (ed.), Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1920). 12 Alois Mlambo, “A History of Zimbabwean Migration to 1990,” in Zimbabwe’s Exodus: Crisis, Migration, Survival, ed. Jonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera (Kingston: Southern African Migration Programme, 2010), 59. 13 Conrad, German Colonialism, 39. 14 Schnee, Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon, vol 1, 312–13. 15 Woodruff Smith, “The Ideology of German Colonialism, 1840-1906,” The Journal of Modern History 46, no. 4 (1974): 641–62. 16 Conrad, German Colonialism, 88–99; Friedrich Fabri, Bedarf Deutschland der Colonien? Eine politischökonomische Betrachtung (Gotha: F.A. Perthes, 1879); Erik Grimmer-Solem, “The Professors’ Africa: Economists, the Elections of 1907, and the Legitimation of German Imperialism,” German History 25 (2007): 313–46; Juhani Koponen, Development for Exploitation: German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884–1914 (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1995).

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17 Violence was a self-consciously applied tool of colonialism and it was as an outcome of this that violence became naturalized as part of everyday life. See Conrad, German Colonialism, 80; Daniel J. Walther, “Sex, Race and Empire: White Male Sexuality and the ‘Other’ in Germany’s Colonies, 1894–1914,” German Studies Review 33, no. 1 (2010): 45–71; Mads Bomholt Nielsen, “Delegitimating Empire: German and British Representations of Colonial Violence, 1918–19,” The International History Review 42, no. 4 (2020): 833–50; Michelle Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014). 18 Conrad, German Colonialism, 86–7. 19 George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and South-West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 20 Conrad, German Colonialism, 118–21; Walther, “Sex, Race and Empire,” 57. 21 Moyd, Violent Intermediaries; Michael Pesek, “Trägerarbeit und Widerstand im Ersten Weltkrieg in Ostafrika, 1914–1918,” Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 3 (2014): 27–53. 22 Nielsen, “Delegitimating Empire,” 842. 23 Sabine Wilke, “‘Verrottet, verkommen, von fremder Rasse durchsetzt’: The Colonial Trope as Subtext of the Nazi ‘Kulturfilm’ Ewiger Wald (1936),” German Studies Review 24, no. 2 (2001): 353–76. 24 Britta Schilling, “German Postcolonialism in Four Dimensions: A Historical Perspective,” Postcolonial Studies 18, no. 4 (2015): 427–39; Monika Albrecht, “(Post-) Colonial Amnesia? German Debates on Colonialism and Decolonization in the Post-War Era,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, ed. Michael Perraudin, Jürgen Zimmerer, and Katy Heady (New York: Routledge, 2011), 187–96. 25 Schilling, “German Postcolonialism in Four Dimensions,” 434. Also see Britta Schilling, Postcolonial Germany: Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 26 Schilling, “German Postcolonialism in Four Dimensions,” 429. 27 Conrad, German Colonialism, 8. 28 Marcia Klotz, “Introduction: German Colonialism: Another Sonderweg?” European Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2000): i–xv. 29 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 30 Ben Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005): 429–64; Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 31 Schilling, “German Postcolonialism in Four Dimensions,” 430; Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner. Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001).

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32 Katharina Oguntoye, May Ayim, and Dagmar Schultz (eds.), Farbe bekennen: afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: Orlanda, 1986); May Opitz, May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz, Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). 33 Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, The African-German Experience: Critical Essays (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996); Peggy Piesche, Euer Schweigen schützt Euch nicht. Audre Lorde und die Schwarze Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (Berlin: Orlanda, 2012); Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (eds.), Kolonialmetropole Berlin: eine Spurensuche (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2003); Oumar Diallo and Joachim Zeller, Black Berlin: die deutsche Metropole und ihre afrikanische Diaspora in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin: Metropol, 2014); Jean-Pierre Felix-Eyoum, Stefanie Michels, and Joachim Zeller (eds.), Duala und Deutschland-verflochtene Geschichte: die Familie Manga Bell und koloniale Beutekunst (Cologne: Schmidt von Schwind, 2011). 34 Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, Anton Kaes, and Andreas Langenohl, eds., Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (Paderborn: Konstanz University Press, 2011). 35 Tiffany Florvil, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020). 36 Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006). 37 Conrad, German Colonialism, 177; Dirk van Laak, Imperiale Infrastruktur deutsche Planungen für eine Erschließung Afrikas 1880 bis 1960 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004); Peter Christensen, Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). For a contrasting argument, see Edward Ross Dickinson, “The German Empire: An Empire?” History Workshop Journal 66 (2008): 129–62. 38 Thomas Thiemeyer, “Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 4 (2019): 967–90. 39 van der Heyden and Zeller, Kolonialmetropole; Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (eds.), Macht und Anteil an der Weltherrschaft. Berlin und der deutsche Kolonialismus (Münster: Unrast, 2005). Also see Marianne BechhausGerst and Joachim Zeller (eds.), Deutschland Postkolonial? Die Gegenwart der imperialen Vergangenheit (Berlin: Metropol, 2021). 40 See, for example, Dekoloniale x Berlin, https://www.dekoloniale.de/ (accessed April 15, 2021); Köln Postkolonial, http://www.kopfwelten.org/kp/ (accessed April 15, 2021); Hamburg Postkolonial, http://www.hamburg-postkolonial. de/ (accessed April 15, 2021); Freiburg Postkolonial, http://www.freiburgpostkolonial.de/ (accessed April 15, 2021). 41 Victor Julius Ngoh, “The Political Evolution of Cameroon, 1884–1961” (MA thesis, Portland State University, 1979), 26; Léonard Sah, “Activités allemandes et Germanophilia au Cameroun (1936–1939),” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 69, no.255, 2e trimestre (1982): 129–44. 42 Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang (eds.), German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor: University

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of Michigan, 2014), 7; “Preservation and Transmission of Africa’s Collective Memory. African Testimonies and Oral Literature in Early Colonial History, Taking Cameroon as an Example,” Gerda Henkel Stiftung, March 2016, https://www.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/en/preservation-and-transmission-ofafrica-s-collective-memory-african-testimonies-and-oral-literature-in-earlycolonial-histor?page_id=93378 (accessed January 6, 2021); see also AfricAvenir International, “Projet: Africa’s Collective Memory,” https://douala.africavenirinternational.org/index.php/en/collective-memory/africa-s-collective-memory/ projet (accessed August 5, 2022). 43 Mont Cameroun, “About Us,” https://mont-cameroun.com/about-us/ (accessed April 15, 2021); Albert Gouaffo, “Zehn Jahre Deutschstudium an der Universität Dschang: Eine Bestandaufnahme,” Mont Cameroun: Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Studien zum deutschsprachigen Raum 1 (2004): 89–99; M. Loimeier, “Review of [GOUAFFO, Albert, TRAORÉ, Salifou (éd.), MontCameroun. Afrikanische Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Studien im deutschsprachigen Raum / Revue africaine d’études interculturelles sur l’espace germanophone, Université de Dschang, N° 1, septembre 2004, 166 p. -ISSN 1812-7142; N° 2, novembre 2005, 204 p. - ISSN 1812-7142,” Études littéraires africaines 21 (2006): 56–7. Also see Arnd Witte, “Suspended between Worlds: The Discipline of Germanistik in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, ed. Michael Perraudin, Jürgen Zimmerer, and Katy Heady (New York: Routledge, 2011), 292–304; Uazuvara Ewald Kapombo Katjivena, Mama Penee: Transcending the Genocide (Windhoek: University of Namibia Press, 2020). 44 Romuald Valentin Nkouda Sopgui, “Deutsche Kolonialerinnerung aus kamerunischer Sicht: zwischen Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Beziehungsverflechtung,” Pandaemonium Germanicum 22, no. 36 (2019): 207–22, https://www.revistas.usp.br/pg/article/view/151437 (accessed April 15, 2021); Le Malentendu Colonial [Film], directed by Jean-Marie Teno, Les films du Raphia, Bärbel Mauch Film, 2004; Patrice Nganang, “Writing under Colonial Rule,” in The Cultural Legacy of German Colonial Rule, ed. Klaus Mühlhahn (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 73–96; Goethe Institut Kamerun, German Colonial Heritage in Africa. 45 Wazi Apoh and Bea Lundt (eds.), Germany and its West African Colonies: “Excavations” of German Colonialism in Post-Colonial times (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2013); Wazi Apoh, “Sankofatization and Decolonization: The Rapprochement of German Museums and Government with Colonial Objects and Postcolonialism,” Museum Anthropology 43, no. 1 (2020): 29–44; “Redesign of the Kandt House in Kigali (Rwanda),” culturalheritage.news, October 16, 2019, https://www.culthernews.de/redesign-of-the-kandt-house-inkigali-rwanda/ (accessed January 6, 2022). 46 Conrad, German Colonialism, 199. Also see Nancy Rushohora, “Graves, Houses of Pain and Execution: Memories of the German Prisons,” Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 47, no. 2 (2019): 275–99. 47 Reinhart Kössler, “Facing Postcolonial Entanglement and the Challenge of Responsibility: Actor Constellations between Namibia and Germany,” in Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory: Transnational

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Initiatives in the 20th and 21st Century, ed. Birgit Schwelling (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012), 277–312. Also see Molly McCullers, “The ‘Truppenspieler Show’: Herero Masculinity and the German Colonial Military Aesthetic,” in German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences, ed. Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2014), 226–40; Lehmann, Chapter 5, this volume. 48 George Steinmetz and Julia Hell, “The Visual Archive of Colonialism: Germany and Namibia,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 147–83; Christiane Steckenbiller, “Berlin’s Colonial Legacies and New Minority Histories: The Case of the Humboldt Forum and Colonial Street Names in the German Capital,” Monatshefte 111, no. 1 (2019): 99–116; Helvi Inotila Elago, “Colonial Monuments in a Postcolonial Era: A Case Study of the Equestrian Monument,” in Re-Viewing Resistance in Namibian History, ed. Jeremy Silvester (Windhoek: University of Namibia Press, 2015), 276–97; Memory Biwa, “Afterlives of Genocide: Return of Bodies from Berlin to Windhoek,” in Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation, ed. Fazil Moradi, Ralph Buchenhorts, and Maria SixHohenbalken (London: Routledge, 2017), 91–106; Kennedy, Chapter 3, this volume. 49 Kössler, “Facing Postcolonial Entanglement”; Andreas Vogt, “To Move or Not to Move: On the Relocation of the Equestrian Monument in Windhoek,” The Namibian Newspaper, July 18, 2008, https://www.namibian.com.na/44210/ archive-read/To-move-or-not-to-move—On-the-relocation-of (accessed April 2, 2021). 50 Jonathan Stempel, “Lawsuit against Germany over Namibian Genocide is Dismissed in New York,” Reuters, March 6, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/ article/us-namibia-genocide-germany/lawsuit-against-germany-over-namibiangenocide-is-dismissed-in-new-york-idUSKCN1QN2SQ (accessed April 2, 2021). 51 Kössler, “Facing Postcolonial Entanglement”; Thiemeyer, “Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories.” 52 Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics,” November 3, 2018, http:// restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf (accessed April 2, 2021). 53 Paul Starzmann, “Wie viel Raubkunst besitzen die Deutschen?” October 25, 2018, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/kolonialismus-wie-viel-raubkunstbesitzen-die-deutschen/23225654.html (accessed April 2, 2021). 54 Sarr and Savoy, “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage,” 15; Steckenbiller, “Berlin’s Colonial Legacies and New Minority Histories,” 104. Stuttgart’s Linden Museum holds 23,000 objects from Namibia, Cameroon, and the Pacific Ocean colonies (see Ulrike Prinz, “Umstrittene Sammlungen,” Goethe Institut, https://www.goethe.de/prj/lat/de/spu/21652951.html [accessed April 16, 2021]). 55 Sarr and Savoy, “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage,” 17–22. For a discussion of some requests and efforts to repatriate African objects from Germany, see Anne Splettstößer, Umstrittene Sammlungen: Vom Umgang mit kolonialem Erbe aus Kamerun in ethnologischen Museen (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag, 2019).

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56 See, for example, H. Glenn Penny, Im Schatten Humboldts: Eine tragische Geschichte der deutschen Ethnologie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2019); Bénédicte Savoy, Afrikas Kampf um seine Kunst: Geschichte der postkolonialen Niederlage (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2021); Joachim Zeller, Kolonialdenkmäler und Geschichtsbewußtsein. Eine Untersuchung der kolonialdeutschen Erinnerungskultur (Frankfurt: IKO – Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 2000); Jürgen Zimmerer (ed.), Kein Platz an der Sonne: Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte (New York: Campus, 2013); Volker Harms, “Ethnographische Kunstobjekte als Beute des europäischen Kolonialismus,” kritische berichte 23, no. 2 (1995): 15–31. 57 Friedrich von Bose, “The Making of Berlin’s Humboldt-Forum: Negotiating History and the Cultural Politics of Place,” Darkmatter, November 18, 2013, www.darkmatter101.org/site/2013/11/18/the-making-of-berlin%E2%80%99shumboldt-forum-negotiating-history-and-the-cultural-politics-of-place (accessed April 16, 2021). 58 Steckenbiller, “Berlin’s Colonial Legacies and New Minority Histories;” Thiemeyer, “Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories.” 59 Wazi Apoh and Andreas Mehler, “Mainstreaming the Discourse on Restitution and Repatriation within African History, Heritage Studies and Political Science,” Contemporary Journal of African Studies 7, no. 1 (2020): 1–16; Museums Association of Namibia, “‘The Past, Present and Future of Namibian Heritage’ Conference,” August 28–30, 2018, Windhoek, Namibia, https:// www.museums.com.na/images/Past_Present_and_Future_Final_for_Email. pdf (accessed January 6, 2022); Ndanki Kahiurika, “Germany to Return Stone Cross,” Namibian, May 17, 2019, https://www.namibian.com. na/188614/archive-read/Germany-to-return-Stone-Cross (accessed January 6, 2022); Lena Reuter, “Dealing with Contested History Requires Inclusion of Affected Communities: Interview with Curator Flower Manase on Dodgy Collections in European Museums,” April 15, 2021, https://lisa.gerda-henkelstiftung.de/contested_histories (accessed April 13, 2022); Boubacar Diallo, “#FutureMuseum Project: Looking to the Future of Museums, National Museum of Guinea,” Museum-iD, no. 25, August 2021, https://museum-id. com/the-futuremuseum-project-what-will-museums-be-like-in-the-future-essaycollection/ (accessed January 6, 2021). 60 Kwame Opoku, “Humboldt Forum and Selective Amnesia: Research Instead of Restitution of African Artefacts,” Modern Ghana, December 21, 2017, https:// www.modernghana.com/news/824314/humboldt-forum-and-selective-amnesiaresearch.html (accessed April 16, 2021). 61 Kate Brown, “In a Landmark Resolution, German Culture Ministers Pledge to Lay the Groundwork to Return Colonial-Era Art,” Artnet, March 14, 2019, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/germany-declaration-on-restitution-1488250 (accessed April 16, 2021). 62 Kate Brown, “More Than 100 Academics Have Signed a Letter Demanding that Germany Immediately Open its Colonial-Era Collections to Researchers,” Artnet, October 17, 2019, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/open-lettergerman-museums-colonialism-1681432 (accessed April 16, 2021); Savoy, Afrikas Kampf um seine Kunst.

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63 Kwame Opoku, “Traces of Colonialism in Humboldt Forum? Reading Humboldt Forum Short Guide,” Modern Ghana, February 8, 2021, https:// www.modernghana.com/news/1060230/traces-of-colonialism-in-humboldtforum-reading.html (accessed April 16, 2021). 64 Heike Mund, “Neue Diskussion um Benin-Bronzen: Frage der Gerechtigkeit,” DW, March 25, 2021, https://p.dw.com/p/3rC3l (accessed April 16, 2021); Catherine Hickley, “‘The movement is unstoppable’: African Scholars and Activists Hail German Plan to Return Benin Bronzes,” The Art Newspaper, March 24, 2021, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/african-scholars-andactivists-hail-german-plan-to-return-benin-bronzes (accessed April 16, 2021). 65 Wilhelm Kuhnert, http://www.wilhelm-kuhnert.de/ (accessed April 16, 2021). 66 Gulsum Baydar Nalbantoglu, “Towards Postcolonial Openings: Re-reading Sir Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture,” Assemblage 35 (1998): 6–17. 67 Walter Peters, Baukunst in Südwestafrika, 1884–1914 (Windhoek: SWA Wissenschaflichen Gesellschaft, 1981). 68 Wolfgang Lauber, Deutsche Architektur in Kamerun 1884–1914 (Stuttgart: K. Krämer, 1988); Wolfgang Lauber, Deutsche Architektur in Togo, 1884–1914: ein Vorbild für ökologisches Bauen in den Tropen (Stuttgart: K. Krämer, 1993); Andreas Vogt, National Monuments in Namibia: an Inventory of Proclaimed National Monuments in the Republic of Namibia (Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan, 2004). 69 Torsten Warner, Deutsche Architektur in China: Architekturtransfer (Berlin: Ernst, 1994); Michael Hofmann, Deutsche Kolonialarchitektur und Siedlungen in Afrika (Petersberg: Imhof, 2013); Rolf Hasse, Tansania: das koloniale Erbe (Augsburg: self-pub., 2005); Rolf Hasse, “Die Entwicklung der Kolonialarchitektur im ehemaligen Deutsch-Ostafrika,” Europäische Überseegeschichte 12 (2012): 105–36. 70 For example, Joachim Zeller, “Das Deutsche Kolonialhaus in der Lützowstraße,” in Kolonialmetropole Berlin: eine Spurensuche, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2003), 84–92. 71 Itohan Osayimwese, “Colonialism at the Center: German Colonial Architecture and the Design Reform Movement, 1828–1914,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2008); Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2017); Hollyamber Kennedy, “Settlement Colonialism and Migrant Mobility in the German Empire, from Prussian Poland to German Namibia, 1884–1918” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2019); Ariane Komeda, “Werden, Wandel und Wirkungskraft eines Architekturtransfers in Swakopmund: Deutsche Kolonialarchitektur in Namibia 1884–1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of Bern, 2018); Ariane Komeda, Kontaktarchitektur: Kolonialarchitektur in Namibia zwischen Norm und Übersetzung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020). 72 John Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa, 1884–1915 (London: Routledge, 1992). 73 Ambe Njoh and Liora Bignon, “Germany and the Deployment of Urban Planning to Create, Reinforce and Maintain Power in Colonial Cameroon,” Habitat International 49 (2015): 10–20.

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74 Komeda, Kontaktarchitektur; Lauber, Deutsche Architektur in Kamerun; Lauber, Deutsche Architektur in Togo; Warner, Deutsche Architektur in China. 75 Peters, Baukunst, 325. 76 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 147. Cf. Jane Parpart and Marianne Rostgaard, The Practical Imperialist: Letters from a Danish Planter in German East Africa 1888–1906 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 110–13. 77 Parpart and Rostgaard, The Practical Imperialist. 78 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture; Komeda, Kontaktarchitektur. 79 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture; Komeda, Kontaktarchitektur; Hasse, Tansania; J. M. Lusugga Kironde, “Some Aspects of Land Acquisition for the Purpose of Planning the City of Dar es Salaam during the German Colonial Era (1884–1917),” in Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus in Afrika: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Peter Sebald, ed. Peter Heine and Ulrich van der Heyden (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995), 331–41; Itohan Osayimwese, “Architecture with a Mission: Bamum Autoethnography during the Period of German Colonialism,” in German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences, ed. Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2014), 18–38; DeLancey, Chapter 4, this volume. 80 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture. 81 Britta Schilling, “The House as a Contact Zone? Colonial Domestic Architecture in East Africa and the History of Everyday Life,” paper presented at “Crossing Boundaries: Rethinking European Architecture beyond Europe,” Palermo, April 13–16, 2014; Nancy Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Exceptions include Osayimwese, “Colonialism at the Center,” 83–8; Komeda, Kontaktarchitektur, 303–15; and Britta Schilling, “Furniture and Furnishings: Transnational Production and Consumption Networks in British and German East Africa,” in A Cultural History of the Home in the Age of Empire, ed. Jane Hamlett (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 82 Brigitte Schulz and William Hansen, “Aid or Imperialism? West Germany in Sub-Saharan Africa,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 22, no. 2 (1984): 287–313; Jason Verber, “The Conundrum of Colonialism in Postwar Germany” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2010); Daniel Bendix, Global Development and Colonial Power – German Development Policy at Home and Abroad (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018). 83 Christensen, Germany and the Ottoman Railways; Christian Hedrick, “Modernism with Style: History, Culture and the Origins of Modern Architecture in Berlin, 1780–1870” (Ph.D. diss., MIT, 2014); Ludger Wimmelbücker, “Architecture and City Planning Projects of the German Democratic Republic in Zanzibar,” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 3 (2012): 407–32; Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

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University Press, 2020); Kai K. Gutschow, “Das neue Afrika: Ernst May’s 1947 Kampala Plan as Cultural Program” in Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contested Histories, ed. Fassil Demissie (London: Ashgate, 2009), 236–86; Luce Beeckmans, “The Architecture of NationBuilding in Africa as a Development Aid Project: Designing the Capital Cities of Kinshasa (Congo) and Dodoma (Tanzania) in the Post-Independence Years,” Progress in Planning 122 (2018): 1–28; A. M. Hayuma, “Dodoma: The Planning and Building of the New Capital City of Tanzania,” Habitat International 5, no. 5–6 (1980): 653–80. 84 See, for example, Victor B. Amazee, “The British vs. Pro-Germanism in the British Southern Cameroons,” Transafrican Journal of History 22 (1993): 55–73. 85 Patrick C. Hege, “The German Variation: A Sketch of Colonial Städte-Bau in Afrika: 1884–1919,” in Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial and Post-colonial Planning Cultures, ed. Carlos Nunes Silva (New York: Routledge, 2015), 165–79. 86 Oliver Simons, “Ein Postbeamter macht Aussenpolitik – Heinrich von Stephan und die koloniale Expansion Deutschlands,” Freiburg Postkolonial, June 2006, https://www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/HeinrichvonStephan.pdf (accessed April 21, 2021). 87 Oliver Simons, “Persuasive Maps and a Suggestive Novel: Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum and German Cartography in South-West Africa,” in German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker Langbehn (New York: Routledge, 2010), 165–81; Elke Harnisch, “Die progressive Etablierung kolonialen Wissens im Aus- und Weiterbildungssektor des Deutschen Reiches zwischen, 1884–1914” (Ph.D. diss., Universität zu Köln, 2015); Christensen, Germany and the Ottoman Railways; Kennedy, Chapter 3, this volume. 88 Tapiwa V. Warikandwa and Artwell Nhemachena, “Colonial Land Dispossession and Restorative Justice After Genocide: An Appraisal of the Practicality of the Nama and Herero Reparation,” in Transnational Land Grabs and Restitution in an Age of the (De-)militarised New Scramble for Africa: A Pan African Socio-Legal Perspective, ed. Tapiwa V. Warikandwa, Artwell Nhemachena, and Oliver Mtapuri (Bamenda: Langaa Research & Publishing CIG, [2017]), 327–60; Paul Bjerk, “The Allocation of Land as a Historical Discourse of Political Authority in Tanzania,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 46, no. 2 (2013): 255–82. 89 William H. Rollins, “Imperial Shades of Green: Conservation and Environmental Chauvinism in the German Colonial Project,” German Studies Review 22, no. 2 (1999): 187–213; Lars Kreye, “Deutscher Wald” in Afrika: Koloniale Konflikte um regenerative Ressourcen, Tansania 1892–1916 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021). 90 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 105–52; Itohan Osayimwese, “Writing and Building History: African Architecture between Germany and its Colonies,” in Picturesque Modernities: Architectural Regionalism as a Global Process (1890–1950), ed. Michael Falser (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, forthcoming); Thaddeus Sunseri, “A ‘Moral Ecology’ of Afrikaner Settlement in German East Africa, 1902–1914,” in Moral

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Ecologies: Histories of Conservation, Dispossession and Resistance, Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History, ed. Carl Griffin, Roy Jones, and Iain Robertson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 265–88; Thaddeus Sunseri, “Exploiting the Urwald: German Post-Colonial Forestry in Poland and Central Africa 1900–1960,” Past & Present 214 (2012): 305–42. 91 See, for example, the research on the Victoria regia lily and greenhouse design. David Nielsen, “Victoria regia’s Bequest to Modern Architecture,” WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment 138 (2010): 65–76; Tatiana Holoway, The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, the Quest to Make it Bloom, and the World it Created (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 92 Friedrich Karl Timler and Bernhard Zepernick, “German Colonial Botany,” Berichte der Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft 100 (1987): 143–68; Katja Kaiser, “Exploration and Exploitation: German Colonial Botany at the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin,” in Sites of Imperial Memory: Commemorating Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Dominik Geppert and Frank Lorenz Müller (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 225–42; Naomie Gramlich and Lydia Kray, “(Post-) Kolonialismus und der botanische Garten in Potsdam,” poco.lit, July 13, 2020, https://pocolit.com/2020/07/13/post-kolonialismus-und-der-botanische-gartenin-potsdam/ (accessed April 16, 2021). 93 Heike Becker, “Changing Urbanscapes: Colonial and Postcolonial Monuments in Windhoek,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 27, no. 1 (2018), https://doi. org/10.53228/njas.v27i1.266; Helvi Inotila Elago, “Colonial Monuments in a Postcolonial Era: A Case Study of the Equestrian Monument,” in Re-Viewing Resistance in Namibian History, ed. Jeremy Silvester (Windhoek: University of Namibia Press, 2015), 276–97; Steckenbiller, “Berlin’s Colonial Legacies and New Minority Histories”; Christel Stern and Brigitte Lau, Zoo Park. A History: Documentation of the former Zoo Park (1887–1958) in the Center of Windhoek (Windhoek: Archives Service Division of the Department of National Education, SWA/Namibia, 1989). 94 French language scholarship is an important lacuna in this overview of German colonialism. Since France ruled Cameroon and Togo after the German period, it is likely that French scholarship on colonial architecture in this region offers insight on the German colonial period and its legacies. Mark DeLancey’s contribution in this volume (Chapter 4) draws on some French sources and discusses both the German and French periods in Cameroon. 95 The diary of Danish planter Christian Lautherborn in German East Africa, for instance, suggests the presence of non-German settlers intricately involved in everyday life in the colonies including the design and construction of government and private buildings (Rostgaard and Parpart, The Practical Imperialist). Though it deals with a much later period, Stanek’s Architecture in Global Socialism offers a model for analyses of supplier and expertise networks. 96 Sabine Wilke, “Romantic Images of Africa: Paradigms of German Colonial Paintings,” German Studies Review 29, no. 2 (2006): 285–98; Joachim Zeller, Wilde Moderne: Der Bildhauer Fritz Behn (1878–1970) (Berlin: Nicolai, 2016); Philipp Demandt and Ilka Voermann (eds.), King of the Animals Wilhelm Kuhnert and the Image of Africa (Frankfurt: Hirmer, 2019).

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97 See, for instance, Arne Schöfert, Rudolf Hellgrewe: Leben und Werk (Wolfsburg: self-pub., 2018); Korbinian Böck, “Rezension von Arne Schöfert, Der Reichskolonialbund und seine kolonialrevisionistische Propagandatätigkeit zwischen 1933 und 1943,” Freiburg Postkolonial, 2013, https://www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/Rez-2013-SchoefertReichskolonialbund.htm (accessed April 27, 2021); Konrad Schuberth, Ernst Vollbehr: Maler zwischen Hölle und Paradies (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2017); “Ernst Vollbehr (1876–1960): Maler zwischen Hölle und Paradies. Mit Pinsel und Palette rund um die Welt,” Ernst Vollbehr, http:// www.ernst-vollbehr.de/ (accessed April 27, 2021); Angelika GrettmannWerner, “Wer war Wilhelm Kuhnert: der große deutsche Tiermaler,” Wilhelm Kuhnert, http://www.wilhelm-kuhnert.de/ (accessed April 27, 2021); Angelika Grettmann-Werner, Wilhelm Kuhnert (1865–1926): Tierdarstellung zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst (Hamburg: Toro-Verl., 1981). 98 Karin Rhein, Deutsche Orientmalerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts Entwicklung und Charakteristika (Berlin: TENEA, 2003). 99 Sander Gilman, “The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8, no. 4 (1975): 373–91; Iris Wigger und Katrin Klein, “‘Bruder Mohr’: Angelo Soliman und der Rassismus der Aufklärung,” in Entfremdete Körper: Rassismus als Leichenschändung, ed. Wulf D. Hund (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 81–115; Klaus von Beyme, Die Faszination des Exotischen. Exotismus, Rassismus und Sexismus in der Kunst (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008). 100 Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, “Kunst und kulturelle Differenz oder: Warum hat die kritische Kunstgeschichte in Deutschland den postcolonial turn ausgelassen?” Postkolonialismus, Jahrbuch Kunst und Politik der GuernicaGesellschaft 4 (2002): 7–16; Anna Greve, Farbe - Macht – Körper: kritische Weissseinsforschung in der europäischen Kunstgeschichte (Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing, 2013). 101 Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism, Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1992). 102 Dorthe Aagesen, Anna Vestergaard Jørgensen, and Beatrice von Bormann (eds.), Kirchner und Nolde Expressionismus. Kolonialismus (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2021); Hermann, Gerlinger, Christian Philipsen, and Thomas Bauer-Friedrich (eds.), Inspiration des Fremden: Die Brücke-Maler und die außereuropäische Kunst (Dresden: Sandstein Kommunikation, 2016); Kea Wienand, Nach dem Primitivismus? Künstlerische Verhandlungen kultureller Differenz in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1960–1990: Eine postkoloniale Relektüre (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015), 37–64. 103 Denise Toussaint, Dem kolonialen Blick begegnen: Identität, Alterität und Postkolonialität in den Fotomontagen von Hannah Höch (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015); Brett van Hoesen, “Re-Visioning Germany’s Colonial Past: Tactics of Weimar Photomontage and Documentary Photography,” in German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker Langbehn (New York: Routledge, 2010), 197–219; Brett van Hoesen, “Weimar Re-Visions of Germany’s Colonial Past: Max Pechstein,

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Hannah Höch, and László Moholy-Nagy” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2009); Christian Kravagna, “Konserven des Kolonialismus: Die Welt im Museum,” in Das Unbehagen im Museum: Postkoloniale Museologien, ed. Belinda Kazeem, Charlotte Martinz-Turek, and Nora Sternfeld (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2009), 131–42. 104 Zoe Strother, “Looking for Africa in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” African Arts 46, no. 4 (2013): 8–21. On the production of authenticity in pre-colonial African art as a factor in its increased aesthetic value in the twentieth century, see Christopher Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Enid Schildkrout and Curtis Keim (eds.), The Scramble for Art in Central Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 105 See Everlyn Nicodemus, “Meeting Carl Einstein,” Third Text 7, no. 23 (1993): 31–8; Andreas Michel, “‘Our European Arrogance’: Wilhelm Worringer and Carl Einstein on Non-European Art,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik 56, no. 1 (2004): 145–46; Strother, “Looking for Africa,” 8–21; Joyce Cheng, “Immanence out of Sight: Formal Rigor and Ritual Function in Carl Einstein’s ‘Negerplastik’,” RES 55–56 (2009): 87–101. Sebastian Zeidler, for example, argues that Carl Einstein deliberately isolated the African works whose photographs he collected from their social contexts, and Zeidler’s own analysis seems to further this approach. See Sebastian Zeidler, Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 65. 106 H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Seth Quartey, “Rewriting African Art: Viktor Leo Frobenius and his ‘Ologun’,” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 4, no. 1 (2010): 5–15. 107 Savoy, Afrikas Kampf um seine Kunst; Christine Stelzig, “Felix von Luschan: Ein kunstsinniger Manager am Königlichen Museen für Völkerkunde zu Berlin,” in Macht und Anteil an der Weltherrschaft. Berlin und der deutsche Kolonialismus, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (Münster: Unrast, 2005), 131–35; Splettstößer, Umstrittene Sammlungen. 108 Suzanne Preston Blier, “Imaging Otherness in Ivory: African Portrayals of the Portuguese ca. 1492,” The Art Bulletin 75, no. 3 (1993): 375–96; Ezio Bassani and William Fagg, African and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory, Exh. cat. (New York: Center for African Art, 1988); Mário Varela Gomes, Tánia Manuel Casimiro, and Claudia Rodrigues Manso, “Afro-Portuguese Ivories from Sierra Leone and Nigeria (Yoruba and Benin Kingdoms) in Archaeological Contexts from Southern Portugal,” African Arts 53, no. 4 (2020): 24–37; Roslyn Adele Walker, “Ọlό ̣we of Ise: ‘Anonymous’ Has a Name,” African Arts 31, no. 4 (1998): 38–47+90; Nii Quarcoopome and Veit Arlt, Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 2009). 109 Jonathan Fine, “Selling Authenticity in the: Bamum Kingdom in 1929–1930,” African Arts 49, no. 2 (2016): 54–67; Christraud Geary, Visions of Africa: Bamum (Milan: Five Continents, 2011), 56.

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110 A recent example in Namibia that attempts to bridge this gap is “Visual History of the Colonial Genocide.” See “A Creative Approach to Colonial History: The General Interview with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Zimmerer (Episode 3),” L.I.S.A. Wissenschaftsportal, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, September 19, 2019, https://lisa.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/das_generalinterview_mit_prof._dr._ juergen_zimmerer?nav_id=7778?focus_comments=1&language=en (accessed January 6, 2022); Editor, “Herero and Nama Genocide: German-Namibian Photo Project Wants to Foster Reconciliation – Hamburgs (post-)koloniales Erbe teilen,” press release, University of Hamburg, https://kolonialismus. blogs.uni-hamburg.de/2018/01/23/press-statement-herero-and-namagenocide-german-namibian-photo-project-wants-to-foster-reconciliation/ (accessed January 6, 2022); “From Where Do We Speak?” https:// fromwheredowespeak.com/ (accessed January 6, 2022). 111 Albert Gouaffo, “Topographieren, malen, photographieren und erzählen: Das Grasland von Kamerun und seine kulturgeographische Mediatisierung im Rheinland – and back,” in Koloniale Verbindungen - transkulturelle Erinnerungstopografien: Das Rheinland in Deutschland und das Grasland Kameruns, ed. Albert Gouaffo and Stefanie Michels (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2019), 51–69. 112 Patricia Hayes, Jeremy Silvester, and Wolfram Hartmann, “‘Picturing the Past’ in Namibia: The Visual Archive and its Energies,” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 103–33. 113 Hayes, Silvester, and Hartmann, “‘Picturing the Past’ in Namibia”; Christraud Geary, “‘On the Savannah’: Marie Pauline Thorbecke’s Images from Cameroon, West Africa (1911–12),” Art Journal 49, no. 2 (1990): 150–58. 114 Geary, “‘On the Savannah’.” 115 Hayes, Silvester, and Hartmann, “‘Picturing the Past’ in Namibia.” Also see, Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson (eds.), Colonialist Photography: Imag(in) ing Race and Place (New York: Routledge, 2004). 116 Simon Dell, The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary: Photography Between France and Africa, 1900–1939 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020), 147; Christraud Geary, “The Past in the Present: Photographic Portraiture and the Evocation of Multiple Histories in the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon,” in Portraiture and Photography in Africa, ed. John Peffer and Elisabeth L. Cameron, African Expressive Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 224; Christraud Geary, “Portraiture, Authorship, and the Inscription of History: Photographic Practice in the Bamum Kingdom, Cameroon (1902–1980),” in Getting Pictures Right: Context and Interpretation, ed. Michael Albrecht, Veit Arlt, Barbara Müller, and Jürg Schneider (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2004), 149. 117 Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 118 Stefanie Michels, “Herrschaftspose, Hetzbild, Anklage: Streit um eine Kolonialfotografie,” in Macht und Anteil an der Weltherrschaft. Berlin und der deutsche Kolonialismus, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim

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Zeller (Münster: Unrast, 2005), 185–90; Hayes, Silvester, and Hartmann, “‘Picturing the Past’ in Namibia.” 119 Martin Jay, “Visual Culture and Its Vicissitudes,” October 77 (1996): 42. 120 Marquard Smith and Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visual Culture, Everyday Life, Difference, and Visual Literacy,” in Visual Culture Studies, ed. Marquard Smith (London: SAGE, 2008), 17–32. 121 Volker Langbehn (ed.), German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory (New York: Routledge, 2010), 1–36. 122 Dietrich Neumann, “Instead of the Grand Tour: Travel Replacements in the Nineteenth Century,” Perspecta 41 (2008): 47–53; Joachim Zeller, “Das Berliner Kolonialpanorama,” in Kolonialmetropole Berlin: eine Spurensuche, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2003), 154–58; Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Imperial Projections: Screening the German Colonies (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 29. 123 Saloni Mathur, “Living Ethnological Exhibits: The Case of 1886,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 4 (2000): 492–524. 124 Eric Ames, Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 144–97; David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Cordula Grewe (ed.), Die Schau des Fremden: Ausstellungskonzepte zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007); Bernhard Wörrle, “Ein Diorama und sein kolonialer Hintergrund,” Der Blog des Deutschen Museums, August 14, 2020, https:// www.deutsches-museum.de/blog/blog-post/2020/08/14/ein-diorama-und-seinkolonialer-hintergrund/ (accessed April 30, 2021); Andrea Zittlau, “Dreamlands of Culture: Ethnographic Dioramas and their Prospects,” in Embodiments of Cultural Encounters, ed. Sebastian Jobs and Gesa Mackenthum (Münster: Waxmann, 2011), 161–80; Anja Laukötter, Von der “Kultur” zur “Rasse” – vom Objekt zum Körper? Völkerkundemuseen und ihre Wissenschaften zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007). 125 Anne Dreesbach, “Colonial Exhibitions, ‘Völkerschauen’ and the Display of the ‘Other’,” in European History Online (EGO) (Mainz: Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), 2012), http://www.ieg-ego.eu/dreesbacha-2012-en (accessed April 30, 2021). 126 John Short, Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 54. 127 Felix Aster, “‘… will try to send you the best views from here’: Postcards from the Colonial War in Namibia (1904–1908),” in German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker Langbehn (New York: Routledge, 2010), 55–70; Volker Langbehn, “The Visual Representation of Blackness during German Imperialism around 1900,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, ed. Michael Perraudin, Jürgen Zimmerer, and Katy Heady (New York: Routledge, 2011), 69–89. 128 Albert Gouaffo, Wissens- und Kulturtransfer im kolonialen Kontext: Wissens- und Kulturtransfer im kolonialen Kontext (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007); Jeff Bowersox, Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and

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Colonial Culture, 1871–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Birthe Kundrus, Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2003); Manuel Menrath (ed.), Afrika im Blick: Afrikabilder im deutschsprachigen Europa, 1870–1970 (Zürich: Chronos, 2012); Manuel Aßner, Jessica Breidbach, Abdel Amine Mohammed, David Schommer, and Katja Voss (eds.), AfrikaBilder im Wandel? Quellen, Kontinuitäten, Wirkungen und Brüche (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012); David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire. 129 Christraud Geary, “Bamum Thrones and Stools,” African Arts 14, no. 4 (1981): 32–43 and 87–8. 130 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 161; Christian Carstensen and Andrea Dörfel, “Andenken und Trophäen: wie Ethnographica und Großwildtrophäen in Museen gelangten,” in Andenken an den Kolonialismus: eine Ausstellung des Völkerkundlichen Instituts der Universität Tübingen, ed. Volker Harms (Tübingen: ATTEMPTO, 1984), 95–113. 131 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 163. 132 Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum, German Colonialism: Fragments Past and Present (Berlin, 2016); Winfried Speitkamp, “Der Totenkult um die Kolonialheroen des Deutschen Kaiserreichs,” Zeitenblicke 3, no. 1 (2004), http://zeitenblicke.historicum.net/2004/01/speitkamp/index.htm (accessed April 13, 2022); Joachim Zeller, “Decolonization of the Public Space? (Post) Colonial Culture of Remembrance in Germany,” in Hybrid Cultures – Nervous States Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World, ed. Maren Möhring, Mark Stein, Silke Stroh, and Ulrike Lindner (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 65–88. 133 On the unbalanced North–South “political economy of knowledge,” see Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “‘Ch’ixinakax utxiwa’: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 1 (2012): 95–109. The distribution of chapters was also affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which hindered some scholarly contributions. 134 For one articulation of the long-term legacies of German colonialism in East Africa, see Nina Berman, “Schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue: German Entrepreneurs and Settlers on the Kenyan Coast since the 1960s,” in The Cultural Legacy of German Colonial Rule, ed. Klaus Mühlhahn (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017). 135 Christraud Geary, “Impressions of the African Past: Interpreting Ethnographic Photographs from Cameroon,” Visual Anthropology 3, no. 2–3 (1990): 289–315 (300). 136 See also Geary, “‘On the Savannah’.”

1 From travel to colonialism: Art and the German colonies Itohan Osayimwese

When Germans pictured the colonies in Africa, they saw majestic peaks rising in the midst of undulating landscapes, powerful animals prowling in the savannah, and thatched buildings dwarfed by magnificent trees and surrounded by tiny human figures. But they also saw massive ships with belching smoke stacks docked in busy harbors, and neat white bungalows with red tile roofs nestled together in seemingly desolate spaces. These were some of the subjects of the paintings produced by three of the most prolific German colonial artists: Wilhelm Kuhnert, Rudolf Hellgrewe, and Ernst Vollbehr. Indeed, paintings were the most common visual representations of the German colonies. They served as illustrations in colonial news reports, travel narratives, children’s textbooks, and public lantern-slide lectures meant to explain and popularize colonialism. They were exhibited at professional art exhibitions, and also found their way into colonial displays at trade fairs, ethnographic, missionary, and other exhibitions. They even graced the walls of museums, department stores, and private homes.1 Colonial paintings circulated widely across Germany, between German cities and towns and the German colonies, and between Germany and other European states. This chapter posits the popularization of the “colonial idea” in the German public imagination through colonial paintings. These paintings helped to disseminate colonial enthusiasts’ belief that the “possession of overseas colonies was vital to Germany’s political, diplomatic, military, and economic interests.”2 Colonial artists saw themselves as experts, and colonial supporters and the wider public saw them in this way as well. A comment in a 1909 issue of the premier colonial newspaper, Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, confirms this point: “If we want to devote ourselves further to the art of

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our colonies, then that would be greeted with joy since art has the strongest advertising power next to the Press.”3 Art, in this statement, is seen as closely linked to ideology and capital. While the scholarship on German colonialism and visual culture has experienced a remarkable efflorescence, scholars have paid little attention to the art work that itself formed the foundation for the expanded field of the visual that characterized the colonial period. This chapter confirms claims made by other scholars about the importance of visual cultures in a variety of European colonial projects.4

German artists and African travel Any discussion about German colonial art or the art produced in association with the official German colonial project must start with the art of exploration. As Susanne Zantop compellingly argued in the 1990s, official German colonialism of the late nineteenth century should be understood as an expansion of an early modern tradition of territorial expansion by the German states.5 Furthermore, there is extensive evidence that German scholars and adventurers played a significant role in pan-European exploration of the non-European world in the nineteenth century. For instance, the Gotha-based journal, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, was the primary clearinghouse for geographic information about Africa and other regions outside Europe, and for informing a broad European public about the expeditions and discoveries as well as developments across the European colonies.6 Sander Gilman acknowledged the role of Germans and hypothesized that this travel literature contributed to a European association between blackness, ugliness, and darkness, and shaped Western perception of the African continent.7 Additionally, Tracey Reimann-Dawe has shown that travel narratives document inter-European rivalries played out on African soil, and thus capture the increasing importance of nationalism in German self-identity following unification in 1871.8 What has not been investigated is the importance of art in these nineteenth-century German contributions. Though not formally trained in art, explorers such as Heinrich Barth and Georg Schweinfurth used sketching and measured drawing as tools for learning about the places and peoples they encountered.9 These foundational art skills were, of course, crucial for the cartographic documentation that many explorers were invested in. But the ability to translate material reality into two-dimensional form was also important for European ethnographic documentation of the cultural practices and forms of various African ethnic groups. Upon returning to Germany, explorers submitted their field sketches to publishers who used them as the foundation for much of the graphic art produced to illustrate travel narratives. Scholars have dismissed these illustrations for multiple reasons.10 First, they do not see them as authentic works of art because they were created after the fact by artists who were not directly involved in the expeditions. For example, the foreword of Barth’s

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Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa notes that the artist Johann Martin Bernatz prepared illustrations “under the leadership and based on the sketches” of Barth.11 Bernatz, we are told, took liberties in his artistic representation because he had not been part of the expedition team. In fact, the critique that travel narrative art is derivative rather than original represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the artistic process in nineteenth-century Central Europe. Artistic education at the art academies and professional artistic practice involved mastery of mechanical techniques, including drawing, sketching, mixing pigments, and so on. Producing art involved (and, today, continues to involve) an iterative production of sketches and drafts prior to a final masterpiece. Given this fact, what does it matter that some artists produced new works for travelogues based on explorers’ sketches? As I explain below, even artists who undertook expeditions in person created initial sketches in the field, which they transformed into larger works when they returned to Germany. Second, this travel narrative art is derided as mere description. Johannes Fabian, one of few researchers to discuss the phenomenon, asserted that though some of the illustrations in travel narratives of Central Africa display craftsmanship, “most of them can hardly count as examples of art if we reserve that term to creations that transform, intensify, exalt, or degrade rather than simply reproduce objects and events.”12 An analysis of this claim from the perspective of the biographies of the artists, organization of the art world, and the form and context of the work suggests otherwise. Bernatz illustrated Barth’s narrative in the 1850s. Barth was critical of Bernatz’s illustrations (Figure 1.1), and noted that, had Bernatz had access to firsthand knowledge, he would have left out many of the “lively little details” he had included.13 Barth’s comment reveals that the critique of travel narrative art for its disengagement with actual expedition experience was alive and well as early as the 1850s. And, contrary to Johannes Fabian’s claim, it also shows that some of the art created for travel narratives was indeed transformed or intensified relative to original field sketches, and was perceived by some nineteenth-century observers as existing in the realm of art. Furthermore, Bernatz was not a novice when it came to exploration and art. After training as an architectural painter in the 1820s, he participated in multiple European expeditions to the Near East, Egypt, Ethiopia, and India from the 1830s to the 1850s. Thereafter he created landscape paintings based on his travels, and became a specialist in illustrating travelogues. Furthermore, Bernatz’s professional trajectory (including his “study tours” and associated publications), and the techniques and motifs in his art, were part of the much larger tradition of nineteenth-century German orientalist painting.14 As art historian Bernard Wiese asserts, leading explorers developed a close relationship with prominent artists, and travel art served both scientific and artistic functions.15 German travel writing shifted in the 1880s when Germany became an official colonial power. Travel and travel reportage were central to

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FIGURE  1.1 Songhay Village, August 1853, Johann Martin Bernatz. Source: ­Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa (New York, 1858).

colonization, but, as Matthew Unangst explains for German East Africa, the experience of exploration and associated style of publication changed.16 Rather than the earlier model of the lone hero overcoming obstacles in pursuit of a higher scientific or religious purpose, colonial travel writing was more bureaucratic and less individualistic. Yet, it is in this period that we see the proliferation of specialized travel artists, some of whom accompanied researchers on expeditions. On one hand, artists possessed a range of skills that could be useful on an expedition. From the point of view of the artist, on the other hand, joining an expedition offered the benefit of steady, albeit short-term, employment; official and private opportunities for publication upon return to Germany; and professional development in terms of obtaining a stockpile of raw material for the creation of new works. For instance, a self-portrait of the well-known German travel artist, Rudolf Hellgrewe, illustrates the coincidence of exploration, military conquest, and colonization. Hellgrewe depicts himself in the course of his travels in German East Africa in the 1880s.17 He is clothed standing in the ubiquitous white travel clothing of Europeans, with his easel in the foreground of a towering, wild, ominous landscape. A partly clothed unnamed African person crouches at his feet, holding a rifle that somewhat perversely points in Hellgrewe’s direction. The contrast between black and white, clothed and unclothed, crouching and standing, and armed and unarmed bodies points to the overlap between colonial art, exploration, and military activity. Indeed,

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Hellgrewe’s specialization in colonial art developed in precisely the same time frame that Unangst notes as a turning point in travel art—the 1880s. Perhaps the best-known German travel artist after the 1880s is Hans Martin Lemme. Born in 1871, Lemme attended the art academies in Dresden and Berlin in the 1890s. He also taught at the Applied Arts School in Charlottenburg. Like Bernatz and others in the earlier period of travel art, Lemme was deeply engaged in the art world. He is recognized for both his landscape paintings and figurative art.18 Lemme’s name became known in ethnographic circles when he participated in ethnologist Leo Frobenius’s 1904–06 ethnographic expedition to Central Africa, and his work appeared in Frobenius’s publications. Frobenius had specifically advertised for a draftsman and Lemme applied and was hired. However, Frobenius was not entirely satisfied with Lemme’s work. Fabian has remarked on Frobenius’s response to what he perceived as Lemme’s exaggeration of reality in artwork he produced after their expedition. Frobenius compared his own photographs of Richthofen Falls (Lulua River, Democratic Republic of Congo) to Lemme’s preliminary sketches and subsequent oil painting (Figure 1.2), and argued that no matter the artistic value of Lemme’s work, his transformative illustrations of existing conditions were not suitable for a scientific publication. In fact, Frobenius noted, this tendency toward embellishment was already evident in Lemme’s original sketch created on

FIGURE  1.2 Richthofen Falls, oil painting, Hans Martin Lemme. Source: Leo Frobenius, Im Schatten des Kongostaates (Berlin, 1907).

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site during the expedition, which overestimated the height of the waterfall. Frobenius’s comments suggest a disjunction between explorers’ expectations and the training and professional goals of travel artists. His reference to Lemme as a “draftsman” indicates that he expected the artist to simply replicate reality as a supplement to scientific writing. Elsewhere, Frobenius did express satisfaction specifically with Lemme’s drawings (as opposed to his paintings), which he found to be “true to nature” and of “meaningful scientific value.”19 For Frobenius then, his own photographs offered an objective counterpoint to Lemme’s paintings—an interpretation of the role of photography that has been challenged in subsequent scholarship.20 By 1936, however, Frobenius had changed his mind and come to see sketches as capable of capturing an object’s “essence” and photographs as “endlessly deceptive.”21 For his part, Lemme may have been more interested in appealing to the readers of travel narratives using the tools of his trade, and building his professional portfolio to expand his clientele and gain the respect of his peers. In his rendition of Richthofen Falls, Lemme accomplished these goals by using some of the tried-and-true tropes of sublime orientalist landscape painting—the terrifying power of the frothy water falling from a great height, framed by massive dark rocks on each side and dark, ominous clouds above.22 But when Frobenius criticized Lemme and Fabian and Barth disparaged Bernatz for exaggerating reality, they were missing the point: sublime and picturesque art was less concerned with what was actually there and more concerned with what the artist created and what the observer was being trained to see.23 In terms of effect, this tradition of landscape painting, when applied to African contexts in the colonial period, substantiated existing European stereotypes of untamed, empty African landscapes produced in the prose of earlier travel narratives and consolidated in later discourses.24 As numerous scholars have shown, the idea of empty African space justified European capitalist expansion. And, the case of the infamous Carl Peters, who was responsible for Germany annexing East Africa, illustrates, a direct link can be postulated between textual and visual images constructed in travel narratives and individual participation in German colonization—Peters memorably read and was inspired by explorers’ accounts.25 The tension between science and art in travelogue illustrations revealed in Frobenius’s critique of Lemme’s “Richthofen Falls” appears over and over again—from Barth’s critique of Bernatz in the 1850s, to German traveler Paul Güssfeldt’s positive assessment of photography over drawing in the report on his 1870s expedition to Angola, and Leo Frobenius’s about face in the 1930s.26 In 1990, Curator of African Art, Christraud Geary commented on the artistic sleight of hand that took place when German photographer Marie Pauline Thorbecke transformed an expedition photograph of a man from the Wute ethnic group in Cameroon into a watercolor painting in 1912. Thorbecke decontextualized her subject and dramatized his physical features to confirm now-debunked theories about a noble “Hamitic” race

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who migrated to Africa from the Caucasus in ancient times.27 Here, Geary also takes the photograph as a representation of something closer to truth or reality against which the watercolor’s aesthetic constructs can be assessed. At the end of the nineteenth century, explorers continued to take professionally trained studio artists on expeditions. Lay artists also played a role in this history—in the form of colonial settlers as well as military officers with artistic inclinations, such as Senior Lieutenant Smend, who published an illustrated report in Globus magazine in 1907.28 However, overall, the same professionally trained artists appear again and again on the title pages of travelogues from the 1870s through the 1930s.29 Notable names include Hans Martin Lemme, Rudolf Hellgrewe, Wilhelm Kuhnert, Carl Arriens, and Ernst Heims. As I will illustrate below, these artists straddle the field of German travel art and colonial art, and their activities suggest that travel art should be understood as the pre-history of German colonial art.

German colonial art emerges Formal German colonialism began in 1884 when the German government, under pressure to help its citizens who had developed trading relationships, established protectorates in South-West Africa, Cameroon, Togo, and East Africa. Kiaochow was added to the empire in 1897, and New Guinea and Samoa annexed in 1899. Leading up to this moment, a broad coalition of private individuals and institutions had been agitating for the nation to take its rightful place among European colonial powers. Among them were explorers, scholars, missionaries, and merchants. Though they had an outsized influence on public perception and subsequent scholarly assessments of German colonialism, these groups were not a majority and there was no consensus on the need for colonies, the meaning of colonialism, or the efficacy of colonial policy once colonization was underway.30 This lack of consensus meant that it was very important for colonial supporters to communicate the ideology and practices of colonialism to the public. Colonial art was a crucial tool for this project. Through art and its power to affect perception, colonialism could be implanted in hearts and minds across Germany and in the colonies themselves. This philosophy was sometimes voiced outright by the colonial administration and leading voices in the colonial movement. In 1907, Germany’s leading colonial administrator, Colonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg, lamented a perceived shortage of German colonial art even as he advocated art as an important tool in imperialism: “Art has a mission there [in the colonies] to heighten the sense for the noble and the beautiful in a free and untouched world.”31 The 1909 Deutsche Kolonialzeitung article cited earlier also illustrates this view.32 But even when not articulated as such, colonial supporters’ actions in either facilitating or not actively opposing the presence of art in every conceivable space in which colonialism was discussed, promoted,

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implemented, and represented, is remarkable and indicates a shared belief in art’s ability to aid their cause. Artists trained at art academies and applied arts schools were contributing to travelogues or participating in expeditions at the cusp of formal colonialism in the 1870s and early 1880s. It was to the same group that the colonial movement turned when it needed to image the colonies. A distinct practice called “colonial art” and a unique profession named “colonial painter,” “tropical painter,” or more often, “Africa painter” emerged.33 As I demonstrate below, Africa painters were characterized by their reliance on travel to Africa and their intermedial practice since their works leveraged multiple media during production, were then reproduced in a variety of media, which were themselves frequently integrated into immersive exhibitions.34 A preliminary survey identifies more than thirty such artists working between the 1880s and 1930s.35 Several of the same names appear in this group that appeared in the late phase of travel art: Heims, Kuhnert, Arriens, Hellgrewe, and Vollbehr. Other artists who specialized in visualizing German colonial Africa, but who did not develop robust travel art careers include Hermann Frobenius, Ernst Heims, Marie Pauline Thorbecke, Fritz Behn, Heinrich Mosterz, Hede Berber-Credner, and Walter von Ruckteschell. Others such as Hans Martin Lemme and—in an earlier period—Wilhelm Langschmidt portrayed themes associated with other European colonies.36 Interestingly, with few exceptions such as Hermann Frobenius, most of these artists did not engage with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century avant-garde experimentation such as Jugendstil or expressionism.37 Colonial art was shown in panoramas, large exhibitions such as the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition and smaller fairs like the 1910 Colonial Exhibition in Allenstein, museums, Kolonialwaren (colonial wares) stores, and the interiors of passenger ships. It was reproduced in book-length travel narratives, essays published in illustrated weekly newspapers and popular magazines, advertisement posters, political pamphlets, children’s textbooks, picture postcards, on the covers of dime novels such as Schwarzes Elfenbein aus Kamerun (Black Ivory from Cameroon), public lantern-slide lectures on colonialism, collectible trading cards such as a 1904 card from the Aecht Frank Coffee Company showing German soldiers capturing Ovaherero people, packaging for toys and games, packaging for food products such as Stollwerck Chocolate, and wall hangings for private homes.38 The common denominator among these examples was colonial painting, which was the foundation for mass-produced imagery. Established motifs in colonial painting leaned heavily on the predecessor mode of orientalist painting.39 Thus, landscape views of the continent were common though colonial landscapes of Africa differed from orientalist landscapes in their refusal to acknowledge local histories and peoples. But, like orientalist landscapes, they created atmosphere and dramatic effect through light and color. Ernst Heims’s 1913 watercolor, “Lobe Waterfall on Batanga Coast [Cameroon]” (Figure 1.3) illustrates this genre. Another motif

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FIGURE  1.3 Lobe Waterfall, on the Batanga coast, watercolor, Ernst Heims. Source: Adolf Friedrich, From the Congo to the Niger (London, 1913).

was the panoramic city view, which contrasted small but orderly European colonial settlements with seemingly untamed African nature. Genre paintings depicted scenes from everyday life, especially family groups in front of their houses (with a special emphasis on the material and structural otherness of this architecture). Portraiture was also an important category. Two kinds of portraits dominated—ethnographic portraits attempting to define African ethnic “types” and animal portraits.40 Here, again, I want to point to the intermediality of German colonial artistic production and consumption. For instance, Geary explains that Thorbecke used a photograph that she took in the field as the model for her watercolor painting of a Wute man. Geary finds this movement back and forth between photography and painting notable because it raises the issue of authenticity and because it sheds light on what transforms a work into art.41 But, I argue that this alternation between photograph and painting is indicative of something else as well— the interrelation between media in (colonial) art. Photographic studies were part of the arsenal of European travel and colonial artists. And these studies were themselves visual and/or art objects. In general, painters worked with multiple motifs and themes within their oeuvres. And they disseminated their art widely by serving as graphic artists, illustrators, authors, exhibit designers, architects, museum staff, poster artists, and photographers. It was as a result of this activity in multiple spheres and the proliferation of imagery that resulted from it that colonial

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painters were able to shape public perception. As Germanist Sabine Wilke put it, these artists portrayed the African continent as a tropical romantic landscape awaiting European penetration. When they depicted Africans at all, they portrayed them in serving positions and thus “prestructured the modern [European] gaze onto colonial sujets.”42 In the rest of this chapter, I will discuss the careers and work of three prominent painters, Wilhelm Kuhnert, Rudolf Hellgrewe, and Ernst Vollbehr, to better grasp the production, content, and significance of colonial painting.

The greatest colonial artist: Wilhelm Kuhnert, Rudolf Hellgrewe, Ernst Vollbehr Recently, the case of Wilhelm Kuhnert has been intensely debated in Germany following the first major retrospective on the artist at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt in 2018. Kuhnert (1865–1926) was educated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. During his student years, he became interested in animal portraits and, like his peers, visited the Berlin Zoo to sketch them. These animals were acquired from Africa, Asia, and South America, and the European colonies were especially profitable sources for the zoo’s collections.43 Having enjoyed his trips to the zoo, Kuhnert undertook his first trip to German East Africa in 1891 and completed two more expeditions to the continent by 1912. Travel helped Kuhnert consolidate his specialty in animal and landscape art, especially lions, tigers, and elephants. His ink drawings and monumental oil paintings were shown at the annual Great Berlin Art Exhibition and the colonial section of the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition, and published in travel narratives such as Franz Stuhlmann’s Mit Emin Pascha ins Herz von Afrika (1894), zoological texts including Wilhelm Haacke’s Das Thierleben der Erde (1901), classroom wall charts, advertising, packaging for “colonial goods,” for instance chocolate and coffee, and Kuhnert’s own publications such as Im Land meiner Modelle (1918).44 Kuhnert has often been described as the best-known German colonial painter. He exhibited internationally, including at the Fine Art Society in London and in the German East Africa exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Today, two of the largest collections of his work are in museums in the United States.45 Kuhnert’s paintings at the 1904 St. Louis exhibition illustrate the role art played within colonial exhibitions (Figure 1.4). His paintings were arranged along the entire length of two walls in the German East Africa exhibit in the exposition’s Agriculture Hall.46 Famous for depicting animals, he displayed paintings of elephants, zebras, and a variety of antelope such as sable, kudu, and roan. Above each painting hung a trophy of the relevant animal. But he also showed more conventional landscapes, ethnographic portraits, and genre paintings. On the wall and the floor beneath these works, the

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FIGURE  1.4  German East Africa Exhibition, Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, St. Louis, 1904. Source: Missouri History Museum.

organizers placed ethnographic artifacts such as figurative wood sculptures, a fly whisk, three-legged wood stools, as well as samples of various types of woods found in East Africa. This exhibition was unique in the relatively low number of artifacts and clear typological logic of the display, but it followed the convention seen in earlier German colonial exhibitions of combining two- and three-dimensional media. Among these media, I am particularly interested in the ways in which visual art, photography, looted ethnographic objects, architecture, and other media were placed in dialogue with each other. By way of illustration, visitors to the 1896 German Colonial Exhibition or to the 1907 Berlin Army, Marine, and Colonial Exhibition, on seeing the imitation African villages, living people,47 and ethnographica (now part of museum collections in Germany) that typically formed the centerpieces of these events, mirrored in the landscapes and portraits that decked the walls of exhibition buildings, would have experienced a reality effect. As Timothy Mitchell memorably theorized, colonial exhibitions engaged in a remarkable modern Western neologism: the production of an artificial construct (radically realistic or authentic exhibition space and displays) as objective truth or of representation as reality.48 Art was a crucial aspect of the realism that was so important to colonial exhibitions and their promotion of colonial ideology.

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Debate about Kuhnert ignited during the 2018 exhibition in Frankfurt because it did not engage adequately with current critiques of colonialism. The exhibition emphasized the seemingly neutral scientific nature of Kuhnert’s animal portraits and the fact that well-known zoologists embraced his work. It praised Kuhnert’s innovative techniques, including some of the earliest modern European plein-air painting on the African continent, integration of natural animal habitat and behavior into his compositions, and anatomic rendition of animals. His positive evaluation of Africa as closer to nature than corrupt civilized Europe, his adventurous desire to expand his personal horizons through travel, and his stories of courageously confronting wild animals, were all presented in a positive light. As art historian Ellen Spickernagel maintains, however, this celebratory rendition of Kuhnert actually perpetuates long-standing colonial tropes. Instead, she offers a compelling analysis of the colonial implications of Kuhnert’s art.49 In paintings such as African Lions (1911) (Plate 1), which shows a brightly lit muscular lion pair in the short savanna grass in front of distant, ethereal mountain peaks, Spickernagel argues, Kuhnert self-identifies with the violence of big game hunting. Furthermore, his insistence on painting animals and landscapes devoid of past and present human activity obscures the degree to which his own painting relied on local African guides and logistical support from the colonial administration in German East Africa. Indeed, rather than painting animals in their habitats, Kuhnert shot them, arranged them in desirable poses, and then created studies based on close observation of their carcasses. Like his travel art predecessors, Kuhnert later transformed these studies into massive paintings in his studio in Berlin. While he did not show the paraphernalia of big game hunting in his paintings, it was very much present in the ethnographica and hunting trophies that decorated his studio. But even without visible signs of violence in his works, his viewers understood the measure of power implicit in being close enough to paint them: trophy hunting was part of the subjugation of the continent, and, in painting and sculpture, the fallen animal stood symbolically for the conquered continent. In fact, Kuhnert participated directly in massacring Africans during a punitive campaign led by Carl Peters, and he fought alongside colonial forces in the Maji-Maji War of resistance (1905–08) in German East Africa. And through his art, he contributed to the theft of Africa’s natural resources and the production of the erroneous narrative of unspoiled African nature that is still present today in the Western practice of “African safari.”50 Kuhnert’s work may not have been particularly well received within art circles in Germany, but the sheer number of references to his work implies that it had wider resonance than much conventional art. Colonial agitators in Germany leveraged Kuhnert’s art not only to convince the public of the legitimacy of colonial ideology but also in the very difficult and mostly unsuccessful attempt to convince working-class Germans to migrate to the colonies: his books were available in the reading rooms of various colonial

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organizations.51 But, his “lion art” also found purchase among German settlers in the colonies themselves. A list of typical elements used to outfit the interior of a model East African colonial home at the 1914 Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne included Maasai shields, mosquito nets for the bedroom, and “a lion painting by Wilhelm Kuhnert.”52 Like Kuhnert, Rudolf Hellgrewe is often honored with the title “greatest German colonial artist.”53 He was born in 1860 in western Prussia, and attended the premier arts institution of the period, the Berlin Academy of Art. There, he studied under the respected architectural painter Christian Wilberg and the landscape and orientalist painter Eugen Bracht between 1879 and 1883. He took his first trip to the German colonies in 1885 when he was sent to German East Africa to conduct preliminary studies for the Kaiser Diorama at the Jubilee Exhibition at the Berlin Academy of the Arts in 1886. Interestingly, he was not invited to participate in the final painting though his teacher, Bracht, painted the landscape for an elephant hunt scene.54 The Kaiser Diorama was a notable work of art since it was one of the first instances in which the orientalist genre was conjoined with patriotic themes in Germany—colonialism was used as the linchpin between them.55 Hellgrewe then made his debut on the Berlin art scene, showing his work in many of the important exhibitions of the period, including the Berlin Academy Exhibition of 1887 and the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1893. His early work included German landscapes in the tradition of his teachers. Like Bracht and Wilberg, he found the panorama and diorama genres particularly suitable for his subjects.56 Conversely, as Hellgrewe’s career demonstrates, the panorama and diorama in Germany, as in other parts of the nineteenth-century European world, were deeply imbricated in imperialist ideology and colonial expansion.57 But Hellgrewe’s oeuvre was not limited to panoramic works; he also created smaller pieces in both watercolor and oil.58 Hellgrewe’s paintings followed orientalist norms in some ways but broke free from them in others. The painting Kilimandscharo von Moschi aus (Figure  1.5), published in Das Buch von unseren Kolonien in 1908, depicts the famous mountain from the small railway town and government district station of Moshi in German East Africa. As the title indicates, the mountain is the intended subject of the painting. Yet Hellgrewe includes a grouping of three buildings around a clearing in the foreground. These vernacular buildings are dominated by conical thatched roofs that dwarf the round, dark walls below. Despite their foreground placement, the structures appear diminished and unimportant, and their lines merge with each other and the landscape. The complete absence of people, whose presence is only discernible in traces on the landscape, mimics the trope of displacement that literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt has analyzed in European travel writing.59 Following Pratt’s argument, the only useful objects included as markers of human civilization in this painting are a barely visible palisade fence and the buildings themselves. The conical roofs and pyramidal massing

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FIGURE  1.5 Kilimanjaro seen from Moshi, Rudolf Hellgrewe. Source: Rudolf Hellgrewe, Das Buch von unseren Kolonien (Leipzig, 1908).

of the three buildings echo the two peaks of Kilimanjaro, beneath which they appear. With sunlight glowing on snow-packed peaks surrounded by puffy white clouds and a blue sky, the mountain appears otherworldly in the upper half of the frame. Conversely, the lower half is filled with dense dark green foliage counterbalanced by bare patches of red earth whose color and texture mimics the roofs and walls of the buildings. The painting projects the vastness and magnitude associated with the aesthetic category of the sublime, but it also includes picturesque compositional elements—the rough texture of the tree canopy, and the irregular outlines of Kilimanjaro’s peaks. Overall, the composition suggests a nature/human hierarchy in which the colonized East African, with her humble man-made objects, ranks far below the spectacle of nature, of which she is a subset. These motifs appeared frequently in Hellgrewe’s work, and their use arguably played a role in the positive reception of his work in colonial circles. The fact that his name was connected with so many colonial activities, books, exhibitions, and institutions between 1880 and 1910 gives an indication of Hellgrewe’s high level of productivity during this period. He authored and published several texts on his own, including an account of his expedition to German East Africa in 1888. Matthew Unangst has described this travelogue as similar to earlier travel writing in its introductory description of the journey from Germany to Zanzibar, but different in its inversion of the ratio between image and text—with pictures serving “not so much as illustrations of the text, but as a substitute for it.”60 Here, art has almost completely replaced text, and travel art has been transformed

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into stand-alone colonial art. Hellgrewe illustrated at least thirty-three texts with colonial themes including Paul Pogge and Hermann Wissmann’s expedition narrative, Unter deutscher Flagge (1890), Carl Peters’s Die deutsche Emin-Pascha Expedition (1891), and a ten-book children’s fiction series, Jungdeutschland in Afrika.61 Exhibitions were an important outlet for Hellgrewe. Leaders of the colonial movement posited a low level of knowledge about colonialism among the German public, and they saw colonial exhibitions as one solution to this problem. Colonial art, along with “living exhibits” of colonized people in ersatz Indigenous villages, illustrated narratives of cultural authenticity and degeneracy, and curated seemingly objective information for the consumption of audiences in places such as London, Paris, and Berlin.62 Soon after publishing his travelogue and illustrating Wissmann’s, Hellgrewe made his first foray into this rapidly growing field with a “powerful” oil painting of Cameroon and “tranquil” cityscape of Zanzibar in the Africa wing of the North German Trade and Industrial Exhibition in Bremen in 1890.63 He received a major commission in 1896 when he became Artistic Director for the colonial section of the Berlin Trade and Industrial Exhibition. It was specifically because of his “manifold” visits to East Africa that Hellgrewe was chosen for this task.64 In this capacity, he led the design of the Colonial Exhibition, which was essentially a semi-independent exhibition within the larger exhibition. It consisted of two sections: the “Exhibition of the Indigenous” and the “Scientific-Commercial Section.”65 It is no surprise that he found room for some of his own paintings, which were on view along with “Africa paintings” by other travel and colonial artists such as Themistokles von Eckenbrecher and Wilhem Kuhnert in the ScientificCommercial Section.66 And these paintings were not viewed alone but in spaces overflowing with ethnographic objects including Maasai shields from East Africa, wood chairs created by the Bali ethnic group in Cameroon, bows and arrows from Togo, as well as zoological specimens such as finches, cuckoos, and hummingbirds.67 Several exhibition commissions followed Hellgrewe’s 1896 breakthrough. In 1907, he served as Artistic Director for the colonial section of the German Army, Marine, and Colonial Exhibition in Berlin. And in 1910, he completed a diorama of German South-West Africa at the 1910 Colonial Exhibition in Allenstein.68 Exhibitions offered Hellgrewe the opportunity for broad exposure especially within the colonial establishment, but also among the viewing public. In fact, Hellgrewe’s colonial activity was at its highest level between 1896 and 1899, when he was artistic advisor to the 1896 German Colonial Exhibition, a member of the board of the German Colonial Society’s economic committee, and Artistic Director of the Colonial Museum in Berlin.69 Hellgrewe’s colonial expertise extended beyond two-dimensional media— and his work arguably had a significant impact in the realm of architecture— both in terms of German interpretations of African architecture and in relation to the architecture built to support colonialism in Germany. In line

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with the characteristics of the travel narrative genre, Hellgrewe’s illustrations in Unter deutscher Flagge depict the unfamiliar forms and materials of Central African buildings. For instance, his “House of the Chief of the Pende People” (Figure 1.6) shows a square building with walls built from wood posts with bark infill, a projecting vestibule entrance, and a curved gable roof made from “fine thatch.”70 A “fantastical” two-tiered anthropomorphic sculpture with three projecting horn-like elements crowns the roof while a sculpted animal crouches above the entrance. Centered in the foreground and framed by a semicircular decorative frame enclosing a lush landscape of towering trees, this house is the only subject of the woodcut. It was created, in support of the written text, primarily to teach readers about the architecture of the Pende ethnic group (now in the Democratic Republic of Congo). As depicted, the Pende building appears squat. No human figures are present to provide readers with a sense of scale (though they are present in some of Hellgrewe’s other images in this book). The fantastical sculpture is devoid of much detail and would simply have appeared bizarre to a German audience familiar with Christian and neoclassical architectural sculpture. At the same

FIGURE  1.6  House of the Chief of the Pende People, Rudolf Hellgrewe. Source: Hermann Wissmann, Unter deutscher Flagge (Berlin, 1889).

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time, the trope of the unfamiliarity of Africa, and of Africans as grotesque or monstrous, would have been familiar to audiences who had read previous explorers’ narratives and been exposed to the long tradition of depicting Black figures in Western art.71 Today, we know that these rooftop statuettes or kishikishi continue to appear on chiefs’ houses among the Eastern Pende people in rural Democratic Republic of Congo where they function as political messages.72 That Hellgrewe’s Pende building achieved its goal of teaching German audiences is demonstrated by the appearance of this image on the cover of a German survey of African architecture published four years later.73 Hellgrewe’s experience illustrating African buildings in travel narratives must have served him well when he collaborated with the architect Fritz Wolff to design the layout, landscape, and individual ersatz African buildings comprising the “Exhibition of the Indigenous” at the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition.74 Likewise, as Artistic Director of the Colonial Museum in 1897, he collaborated with an architect to retrofit the former Marine Panorama Building in Berlin into the Colonial Museum. This included conceptualizing the museum’s innovative Schaugruppe exhibits that combined the proven panorama and diorama genres with threedimensional objects such as buildings and furnishings as well as sculpted figures.75 According to John Phillip Short, Hellgrewe “brought the techniques of monumental illusionism to his design for the museum.”76 The fact that Hellgrewe did not paint the panoramas and dioramas in the museum but rather conceived them and hired another artist to execute them suggests that he was functioning in a reimagined role—as a colonial expert rather than a mere painter. Hellgrewe’s interpretations of African architecture within these exhibits shaped the perspectives of the museum’s many visitors. In his role as designer of the interior of the Colonial Museum and in other roles, Hellgrewe was active in crafting colonial architecture in Germany. He designed the evocative façade of the colonial superstore Deutsche Kolonialhaus in Berlin in 1903.77 The building is notable for its orientalist dome, towers, and polychromatic façade, as well as its sculptural program that included “African warriors” on mounted elephants. This was his second commission for the company since he had painted the ceiling of the salesroom at their previous location. Even earlier, his murals had decorated the new clubhouse of the German Colonial Society built in 1897, and were likely conceived as part of the original design for the building. By contributing to the design of colonial buildings, Hellgrewe was able to shape the German public’s perception of colonialism and colonial Africa. His name became closely associated with the colonial project, which makes it all the more confounding that he stopped painting colonial themes and limited himself only to conventional landscapes after circa 1907.78 He died in 1935, having earned a place in Thieme and Becker’s famous lexicon of artists through history.79 Where Kuhnert’s and Hellgrewe’s careers were built around colonial art, Ernst Vollbehr (1876–1960) gained renown both within and outside of the

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“tropical painting” genre. Born in Kiel in northern Germany, he studied art under the court theater painter Hermann Wilbrandt in neighboring Schwerin. He then worked independently as a restorer of frescoes in Mecklenburg churches, but he also continued his studies in the 1890s under Max Seliger at the art academy in Berlin, Carl Bantzer at the academy in Dresden, and with René Ménard in Paris. Vollbehr secured his financial situation by designing tapestries for the weaving school in Scherrebek (contemporary Ljubljana, Slovenia). His first trip abroad was a “painting tour” in Albania in 1904. After his return, he worked as an author and illustrator and then went on a second painting tour to Brazil in 1906–08.80 Unlike Kuhnert and Hellgrewe, Vollbehr’s work on the German colonies started later in his career when he accompanied the jurist Hermann Thomsen on an expedition through German East Africa and South-West Africa in 1909–10. He later illustrated Thomsen’s travelogue and wrote and illustrated his own travel narrative for younger readers and school children. In 1911, he took another trip to the colonies—to the hinterlands of Cameroon and Togo. This expedition was specifically a painting tour, and Vollbehr published numerous ink drawings and tempera paintings in Mit Pinsel und Palette durch Kamerun (1912). The changes in the travelogue genre that Unangst observed in Hellgrewe’s Aus Deutsch-Ost-Afrika (1888) are evident in Vollbehr’s book as well. Vollbehr reduced the amount of text in the book relative to the art work, bringing it closer to an art book.81 The Palace of the King of Bamum hails from Vollbehr’s time in Cameroon (Figure  1.7). The landscape painting shows the projecting colonnaded portico of the entrance hall of the main structure. The roof of the entrance hall, which is strongly vertical and built of thatch in a conical-pyramidal form, dominates the upper part of the composition. A polychromatic frieze, described as a primordial lizard motif by another German colonial observer, links the colonnade to the eaves of the roof.82 Figures swathed in blue caftans walk around the open plaza in front of the palace. However, the figures are so small that they are almost inconsequential in relation to the painting as a whole. Several smaller structures (likely the homes of the king’s wives) built in the same style are shown on the periphery of the palace. Notably, a red and white flagpole (possibly a German flag) located beside the palace towers above even the highest roof of the palace. A grove of trees on a small hillock on the periphery frames the painting on one side. What dominates this painting, however, is the signal drum in the foreground. Shaped in the form of a cylinder with a sculpted figure on one end, one end of the drum rests on the ground, while the other awkwardly floats in mid-air. Vollbehr’s portrayal of the drum endows it with an exotic, alien character. Despite its elaborate carving, it appears more like a product of nature than a human artifact. Anna Wuhrmann, a German missionary living in the area in the same period, photographed a similar Bamum “war drum.”83 And Christraud Geary notes that these drums were objects of desire for German ethnographers and collectors. Arguably, Vollbehr’s image

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FIGURE  1.7  The Palace of the King of Bamum, Ernst Vollbehr. Source: Vollbehr, Bunte leuchtende Welt (Berlin, 1935).

of a Bamum drum, which was reproduced in several of his books and likely read by thousands of people, helped to nourish this German market. Several Bamum drums collected during this period are housed in German museums today.84 Vollbehr’s painting illustrates that the artist was steeped in what Geary calls the myth of Bamum authenticity—the notion perpetuated by German travelers that they had discovered the fabled old African kingdom peopled by noble savages in the interior of Africa in the orderly politics, economy, and advanced culture of the Bamum Kingdom.85 The Bamum Palace had already gained some notoriety among European visitors by the time Vollbehr visited in the 1910s. Most reports by previous German visitors to the Kingdom of Bamum emphasized the high level of architectural achievement visible in the king’s palace.86 Today, the building and its 1917 replacement continue to be a subject of local pride and foreign scholarly interest.87 Vollbehr’s own caption for the painting emphasized the architecture of the palace. He was impressed by the 150-meter-long façade (492 feet), said to rise to great heights in its interior. In contrast to this popular view disseminated via photographs and written descriptions, and to Vollbehr’s own text, however, I would argue that the painting did little to convince viewers of the grandeur of King Njoya’s palace. Even though the palace is close to the geometric center of the painting, it reads as though it is in the background. Vegetation and the drum compete with the palace for attention, and the flag pole that represents German power in the region dominates the much admired palace. Rather than reading as a product

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of artistic and engineering achievement, the palace appears as part of the natural landscape. Biographers of Vollbehr have only noted in passing his collaborations with the German colonial government at home and abroad. He was not as closely connected to the colonial establishment in Berlin as either Hellgrewe or Kuhnert. But correspondence from 1912 and 1913 shows that Vollbehr received support from the Imperial Colonial Office to restage an exhibition of colonial art in Berlin that he had shown in Munich.88 Vollbehr himself attributed his subsequent success as a “colonial painter” to the positive reception of his work at this Berlin exhibition. In 1914, the artist also contributed paintings to the “Germans Abroad and in the Colonies” pavilion at the Internationale Ausstellung für Buchgewerbe und Graphik in Leipzig, which was organized in part by the Imperial Colonial Office.89 From this evidence, it seems that Vollbehr had just started to gain acceptance in the colonial establishment when the First World War erupted and Germany’s colonial empire was disassembled. Abroad, Vollbehr built and valued relationships with the German colonial administration. In South-West Africa, he and Thomsen were escorted by colonial soldiers when they visited the Great Karas Mountains, and he was accompanied by “numerous” African porters and several colonial soldiers as he explored Cameroon.90 He also collected many artifacts, which are now part of museum collections in Germany. In his autobiography of 1935 titled Bunte leuchtende Welt (Colorful, Luminous World), Vollbehr explained that the German governor of Togo saw his Cameroon paintings and then invited him to extend his Cameroon trip to include Togo. In Togo, he was able to devote himself to painting through the labor of the nine unnamed African porters, one African cook, one African servant, and several soldiers that made up his expedition caravan. Vollbehr found accommodation at various outposts of the colonial administration and even accompanied the colony’s Finance Director on one of his inspection tours to the still unconquered northern region.91 As Spickernagel pointed out for Wilhelm Kuhnert, these connections to the everyday life of colonialism are not superfluous details. Rather, they represent cracks in the established heroic mythologies of these artists, and offer insight on the significance of colonial art. Vollbehr’s penchant for militaristic activity was further developed during the First World War when he worked as a war artist on the Western Front. Hundreds of paintings in his oeuvre stem from his war experiences. He participated in a state-sponsored exhibition at the Zeughaus in Berlin during this period. But Vollbehr’s significance to military history reaches beyond his art—he claimed to have invented the steel helmet that replaced the Pickelhaube (hood) in the German military in 1916. He is also said to have influenced the decision to replace the German military uniform with “field gray” in an attempt to better blend into the terrain. Significantly, Vollbehr claimed that his contributions to German military history were based on his own experiences in the colonies.92

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Ernst Vollbehr undertook several journeys to East Asia, one to North Africa, and one to the United States in the 1930s, which expanded his artistic influences and subjects. Between 1933 and 1935, the artist worked for the National Socialist government. Vollbehr became well known for his paintings of the construction of the autobahn system, for which he was recognized by Adolf Hitler. He again worked as a war painter in the Second World War, traveling to most of the important fronts, including Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. Many of his war paintings were published in books and magazines, making him one of the most popular artists of the National Socialist period. His works were shown at several exhibitions at the Zeughaus in Berlin between 1934 and 1940. In 1941, he was awarded the Goethe medal and a war service medal, at the suggestion of Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda for the National Socialist regime. Poor health forced the artist to withdraw from active participation in the war in 1942. He sold most of his oeuvre to the Geographical Institute in Leipzig three years before his death in Austria in 1960. Indeed, because he seems to have transitioned easily between colonial art in the Wilhelmine period through the Weimar era to political art in the service of the National Socialist party, Vollbehr’s case supports theories that posit a teleology of German fascism and imperialism.93 He was one of several colonial artists who worked along with the National Socialist regime and former colonial administrators and settlers to revive the heroic memory of German colonialism by “recording the beauty of the lost colonies” through art.94 Overall, the influence of impressionism, in which Vollbehr was steeped during his sojourn in Paris, is visible in his use of bright splashes of color, rendition of light, layered painting, and abstract depictions of objects. Vollbehr primarily painted rural and semi-urban landscapes, but he also produced some ethnographic portraits. In general, he conformed to the tradition of landscape painting in works such as “Windhoek at sunset.” Here, all signs of colonized Africans and their material lives are absent. Like many colonial travelers, Vollbehr believed that some African ethnic groups were on the brink of extinction, and the arrival of Europeans was only hastening the inevitable. In contrast to his views of colonial settlements, Vollbehr allowed himself more artistic license in works that depicted the racial and cultural Other. His portraits of individual Africans are often ethnographic in character because he composed them as representations of specific ethnic stereotypes: the West African chief, the African Moslem, the innocent African girl, etc. Even when his subjects are named rather than anonymous, he presents them as representative ethnographic types by highlighting allegedly characteristic physiognomic features and details of dress.95 But tropical landscapes constitute the largest part of Vollbehr’s oeuvre. Unlike his paintings of colonial cities, there are African figures in some of these paintings. But these figures are not rendered in detail—they are part of the scenery rather than individuals. He applied the same principle to his depiction of vernacular

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material culture. His insistence on including African figures and buildings, but refusal to develop them in detail, suggests that their importance lay not in what they actually comprised but in what they signified. While Vollbehr’s paintings of German colonial cities show few signs of the colonized, few of his paintings of scenes outside of these cities show evidence of a European presence. Unlike some of his contemporaries, and unlike some colonial photography of the period, Vollbehr did not show Germans and the colonized in the same context.96 German buildings and other cultural products suggestive of European contact are also missing from these paintings of tropical colonial landscapes, making them representations of an imagined African present unsullied by modernity and its trappings. But this fiction is undermined by the invisible but implied gaze and hand of the artist who represents European presence. Colonial painters such as Wilhelm Kuhnert, Rudolf Hellgrewe, and Ernst Vollbehr contributed significantly to a discourse that posited African space as uninhabited and culturally and politically underdeveloped. They elaborated and sustained the image of the colonies as infinite space, with the promise of escape and economic success for German adventurers and entrepreneurs. Their involvement in a range of colonial projects enabled them to transfer tropes of representation amenable to this prevailing view of the colonies from one area of metropolitan material and discursive production (painting) to others (book illustration, exhibit design, graphic design, product design, exhibition design, architectural design, etc.). Vollbehr, Kuhnert, and Hellgrewe were all honored with the superlative title, “Germany’s greatest colonial artist,” during the colonial period and in the years since. This ongoing competition among lay aficionados and art historians in Germany alike to celebrate the “greatest” of this genre is part of a long-standing colonial nostalgia.97 Today, there is a thriving niche market for their paintings in Germany, other parts of Europe, and the United States. Paintings are owned by major museums as well as small galleries and private collectors. Antiquarians and collectors trade beautifully illustrated books and collectible cards. Arguably, this nostalgia functions, like the thousands of African objects wrongly imprisoned in Germany’s museums, to support neo-imperial fantasies and unequal global relations.98 However, German colonial paintings are not as present in postcolonial African contexts. In 1997 and 2005, some of Ernst Vollbehr’s paintings from the Leibniz-Institutes für Länderkunde in Leipzig were sent to Lome, Togo, and Swakopmund, South-West Africa for an exhibition. In Swakopmund, the center of Namibia’s small but economically powerful German-speaking minority today, the paintings were shown in the Woermann House. This was a homecoming of sorts for the paintings. Much was made of the fact that Vollbehr had displayed his work in the very same building at the end of his South-West Africa expedition in 1910. The exhibition was organized by the Swakopmund Art Association in honor of the 100-year anniversary of one of the earliest German buildings in the city named after

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the Hamburg merchant and shipping company magnate Adolf Woermann.99 A 2011 photograph of Art Association members includes only Caucasianpresenting individuals and suggests that this organization may be part of a wider contentious postcolonial identity politics in Namibia in which some German descendants seek to preserve their history by resisting critique of the colonial past.100 Supporters of this project instead actively uncover and fetishize the material remnants of that past. The Vollbehr exhibition was part of this ongoing project. By contrast, African-descended contemporary artists in Burundi, Cameroon, Namibia, Tanzania, and Togo, are leveraging the visual and material archives of German colonialism to stimulate debates about geopolitical power in the past and the present, economic development, climate change, and other pressing issues. Much of this work, as Fabian Lehmann illustrates in Chapter  5, responds to colonial photographs. Namibian scholar-artist Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja and artist Vitjitua Ndjiharine, for instance, have used the colonial photography collection of Hamburg’s Museum am Rothenbaum–Kulturen und Künste der Welt to create new works that disentangle the complexities of Namibian-German histories.101 But other media are playing a role as well. In 2021, Ndjiharine was awarded a residency to work with a collection of objects that was acquired from her great-great-great-grandfather, Chief Ndjiharine of Omburo, in the late 1800s and is now held at the Ethnological Museum in Zurich. Her collages and paintings in this and other contexts aim to deconstruct and recontextualize “the pedagogical function of images and texts found within colonial archives.”102 And a 2012 painting by the Burundian artist Clovis Ngoy, La bataille de Ndago, depicts the Mwezi Gisabo of Burundi’s resistance against the German army.103 Ngoy appropriates elements of the colonial landscape and portrait genres. His martial depictions of the German military leader Captain Friedrich Robert von Beringe and portrayal of the faceless Burundian soldiers are in accord with colonial art and may have been borrowed directly from paintings or photographs. But Ngoy’s placement of a portrait of King Gisabo almost level with Beringe is unusual, as is the arrow shown on target to kill the German leader. And while the otherworldly lighting of the battle scene is familiar, the artist’s placement of his figures around the edges of the painting creates a novel empty center that reads as a riposte to German colonial art. In an indication of other channels available for re-evaluation of colonial art, an entrepreneur in Tanzania recently reused Hellgrewe’s work in a line of T-shirts appropriately called the “Safari” line.104 Nevertheless, in the end, Africa, its actual cultures, histories, and peoples are largely absent from this chapter. It is difficult to uncover the effects that transient but violent colonial artists had on the communities they journeyed through and places and individuals they painted. Did local people see themselves differently having been subjected to this experience? What was the effect on flora and fauna? Did colonial painting have any discernible

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effects on local artistic practices during the colonial period itself?105 Did they infiltrate African households and experience in other ways? These questions await future research. But colonial paintings also have the potential to function on a different register in postcolonial African contexts. I have argued elsewhere that colonial art and its predecessor travel art can offer insights into some African material cultural forms such as architecture that have left few traces.106 The intermedial nature of German colonial art makes this possible. These paintings are valuable not because they “document” an ethnographic or geographic reality—this chapter argues that art does not document—but because they are a multilayered translation of some experience and knowledge to which we may have no other access.107

Notes 1 Paintings and other two-dimensional media were the foundation for many of the advertisements analyzed in David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 43–4, 69, 73. See also H. Glenn Penny, Im Schatten Humboldts: Eine tragische Geschichte der deutschen Ethnologie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2019); Sabine Wilke, “Romantic Images of Africa: Paradigms of German Colonial Paintings,” German Studies Review 29, no. 2 (2006): 285–98; Joachim Zeller, “Harmless ‘Kolonialbiedermeier’? Colonial and Exotic Trading Cards,” in German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker Langbehn (New York, Routledge, 2010), 71–86, 72; Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 41, 45, 51, 71, 73, 161. 2 Christian Rogowski, “The ‘Colonial Idea’ in Weimar Cinema,” in German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker Langbehn (New York: Routledge, 2012), 220. 3 Joachim Zeller, “Berliner Maler und Bildhauer im Dienste der Kolonialidee,” in Kolonialmetropole Berlin: eine Spurensuche, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2003), 164. 4 Rebecca Peabody, Steven Nelson, and Dominic Thomas (eds.), Visualizing Empire: Africa, Europe, and the Politics of Representation (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2021); Victoria Rovine, “African Visual Cultures and Colonial Histories: An Expanding Field,” African Arts 52, no. 4 (2019): 12–17; Sarah Monks, “Visual Culture and British India,” Visual Culture in Britain 12, no. 3 (2011): 269–75. 5 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 6 Adam Jones and Isabel Voigt, “‘Just a First Sketchy Makeshift’: German Travelers and Their Cartographic Encounters in Africa, 1850–1914,” History in Africa 39 (2012): 9–39; Jan Smits, Petermann’s Maps: Cartobibliography of the Maps in “Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen” 1855–1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

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7 Sander Gilman, On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982). It is important to note that German-speaking populations did not have a monopoly on discourses associating blackness and inhumanity. See, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 166–203; Paula Patton, “Blackness, Whiteness, and the Idea of Race in Medieval European Art,” in Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, ed. Andrew Albin, Mary C. Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas L. Paul, and Nina Rowe (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 154–65. 8 Tracey Reimann-Dawe, “Time, Identity and Colonialism in German Travel Writing on Africa, 1848–1914,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, ed. Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer, with Katy Heady (New York: Routledge, 2011), 221–32. 9 Heinrich Barth, Reisen und Entdeckungen in Nord- und Central-Afrika in den Jahren 1849 bis 1855, 1 (Gotha: J. Perthes, 1857); Georg Schweinfurth, Artes Africanae: Illustrations and Description of the Productions of the Industrial Arts of Central African Tribes (London: Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1875). 10 See, for instance, Zeller, “Harmless ‘Kolonialbiedermeier’?” 72. 11 Barth, Reisen und Entdeckungen, xviii; Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 261. 12 Fabian, Out of Our Minds, 261. 13 Barth, Reisen und Entdeckungen, xviii. 14 Karin Rhein, Deutsche Orientmalerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts Entwicklung und Charakteristika (Berlin: TENEA, 2003), 66, 223. 15 Bernd Wiese, Welt Ansichten: Illustrationen von Forschungsreisen deutscher Geographen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Schriften der Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln, 2011). 16 Matthew Unangst, “Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa, 1884–1891,” Colloquia Germanica 46, no. 3 (2013): 266–83. 17 This version of the portrait was published in the now difficult to find first edition of Hellgrewe’s travel narrative. Subsequent editions depict the African figure fully clothed. See Rudolf Hellgrewe, Aus Deutsch-Ostafrika. Wanderbilder (Berlin: J. Zenker, 1888). 18 Wolfgang Singer, Allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon: Leben und Werke der berühmtesten bildenden Künstler, 3rd edn., vol. 5 (Vialle-Zyrlein, Nachträge und Berichtigungen) (Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening, 1901). 19 Leo Frobenius, Im Schatten des Kongostaates: Bericht über den Verlauf der ersten Reisen der D.I.A.F.E. von 1904–1906 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1907). 20 Beatrix Heintze, “In Pursuit of a Chameleon: Early Ethnographic Photography from Angola in Context,” History in Africa 17 (1990): 131–56; Stefanie Michels, “Re-framing Photography – Some Thoughts,” in Global Photographies: Memory – History – Archives, ed. Sissy Helff and Stefanie Michels (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2018), 9–18.

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21 Richard Kuba, “Portraits of Distant Worlds: Frobenius’ Pictorial Archive and its Legacy,” in Global Photographies: Memory – History – Archives, ed. Sissy Helff and Stefanie Michels (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2018), 115. 22 John E. Crowley, Imperial Landscapes: Britain’s Global Visual Culture, 1745–1820 (New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre, 2011). 23 William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (London: printed for R. Blamire, 1792). 24 Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 119–43; John Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884–1915 (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992). 25 Unangst, “Changes in German Travel Writing.” 26 Kuba, “Portraits of Distant Worlds.” 27 Christraud Geary, “‘On the Savannah’: Marie Pauline Thorbecke’s Images from Cameroon, West Africa (1911–12),” Art Journal 49, no. 2 (1990): 150–58. 28 Smend, “Eine Reise durch die Nordstrecke von Togo,” Globus 92 (1907): 245–50 and 265–69. 29 Wilke, “Romantic Images of Africa.” 30 Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 31 John Short, Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 106. 32 Joachim Zeller, “Berliner Maler und Bildhauer im Dienste der Kolonialidee,” in Kolonialmetropole Berlin: eine Spurensuche, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2003), 164. 33 “Afrikamaler Ernst Vollbehr,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, 49, no. 1 (1937): 13; Ernst Vollbehr, “Wie ich Kolonialmaler würde,” Westermanns Monatshefte 57, no. 114, part 3 (June–August 1913): 877–90. 34 On intermediality, see Klaus Bruhn Jensen, “Intermediality,” in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, ed. Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Robert T. Craig, Jefferson D. Pooley, and Eric W. Rothenbuhler (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016). On intermediality in the context of art histories of the African diaspora, see “Across the Divide: Intermediality and American Art, Archives,” Bowdoin College, Department of Art History, October 1, 2016. 35 Itohan Osayimwese, “Colonialism at the Center: German Colonial Architecture and the Design Reform Movement, 1828–1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2008), 485. 36 Alfred Gordon-Brown, Pictorial Africana: A Survey of Old South African Paintings, Drawings, and Prints to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975). 37 Ilse Frobenius, Ein Maler namens Hermann Frobenius: Abriss seines künstlerischen Lebens und Werdens (self-pub., 1979); Wilke, “Romantic Images of Africa”; Brett van Hoesen, “Weimar Re-visions of Germany’s

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Colonial Past: Max Pechstein, Hannah Höch and László Moholy-Nagy” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2009). 38 Jeff Bowersox, Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Short, Magic Lantern Empire; Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, 92, 104; “Kolonialausstellung in Allenstein,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 27, no. 35 (1910); BArch, R 1001/6358, Allgemeine Ausstellungen: Deutsche Armee-, Marine und Kolonialausstellung in Berlin, 1907, p. 36. 39 Here, I disagree with the argument made in Rhein, Deutsche Orientmalerei, 14, 163. 40 Osayimwese, “Colonialism at the Center,” 224. On ethnographic type photography, see Geary, “‘On the Savannah’,” 152–55. 41 Geary, “‘On the Savannah’,” 155–56. 42 Wilke, “Romantic Images of Africa,” 287. 43 Clemens Maier-Wolthausen, Hauptstadt der Tiere: Die Geschichte des ältesten deutschen Zoos (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2019), 212. 44 Much of my information on Wilhelm Kuhnert is drawn from Philipp Demandt and Ilka Voermann (eds.), King of the Animals Wilhelm Kuhnert and the Image of Africa (Frankfurt: Hirmer, 2019) and Ellen Spickernagel, “Wilhelm Kühnerts koloniales Tierbild,” Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft 21 (2019): 173–80. 45 They are at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, Wyoming, and Fort Worth Zoo, Texas. There is also a collection at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe. See Ilka Voermann, “Searching for the King of the Animals,” Schirn Mag, June 6, 2019, https://www.schirn.de/en/magazine/context/koenig_der_tiere/column_ ilka_voermann/ (accessed January 11, 2022). 46 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 48. 47 I have argued elsewhere that lifelike scale models of colonized people could replace living people after their display was more or less banned in the context of municipal and trade exhibitions in Germany. Likewise, a single building or two could stand in for an entire reconstructed African village in a colonial exhibition. See Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 53, 116. 48 Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 6, 11.On the related production of authenticity by merging visual art, built environments, living people, animals, motion, lighting, and other theatrical effects in Germany’s Völkerschauen (living ethnological exhibits) and modern zoos in Germany, see Eric Ames, Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). 49 Spickernagel, “Wilhelm Kühnerts koloniales Tierbild.” 50 Edward M. Bruner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Maasai on the Lawn: Tourist Realism in East Africa,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 4 (1994): 435–70. 51 See, for instance, Irmtraud Wolcke-Renk, Katalog der Bibliothek der deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft in der Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek (Frankfurt: Alphabetische Gliederung, 2004).

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52 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 161. 53 This phrase is used, for instance, on the nostalgic website, “Rudolf Hellgrewe – Leben und Werk,” http://www.rudolf-hellgrewe.de/ (accessed April 13, 2021). 54 Alexander Gall, “Auf dem langen Weg ins Museum: Dioramen als kommerzielle Spektakel und Medien der Wissensvermittlung im langen 19. Jahrhundert,” in Szenerien und Illusion: Geschichte, Varianten und Potenziale von Museumsdioramen, ed. Alexander Gall and Helmuth Trischler (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016), 46. 55 Dolf Sternberger, “Panorama of the 19th Century,” trans. Joachim Neugroschel, October 4 (1977): 15. 56 Hermann Julius Meyer, Meyers Konversationslexikon, 4th edn., vol. 3. (Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts, 1885–92). 57 Denise Blake Oleksijczuk, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 58 For Hellgrewe’s biography, see Gustav Meinecke, Deutschland und seine Kolonien im Jahre 1896: Amtlicher Bericht über die erste Deutsche KolonialAusstellung (Berlin: Verlag von Dietrich Reimer, 1897), 9; Friedrich von Boetticher, Malerwerke des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts: Beitrag zur Kunstgeschichte, vol. 1 (Dresden: Fr. v. Boetticher Verlag, 1891), 489; Friedrich von Boetticher, Malerwerke des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. 2 (Dresden: Fr. v. Boetticher Verlag, 1898), 244; Hans A. Vollmer (ed.), Thieme/Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, vols. 15/16 (Gresse bis Heubach) (Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 1923), 338–39. 59 Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country,” 121, 126. 60 Unangst, “Changes in German Travel Writing,” 277. 61 Arne Schöfert, Rudolf Hellgrewe: Leben und Werk (Wolfsburg: self-pub., 2018). 62 Saloni Mathur, “Living Ethnological Exhibits: The Case of 1886,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 4 (2000): 492–524. A large body of scholarship exists on colonialism and exhibitions. Important texts include Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, 2004), 117–29, among others. On colonialism and exhibitions in the German context, see Sierra Ann Bruckner, “The TingleTangle of Modernity: Popular Anthropology and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Imperial Germany” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1999); Eric Ames, “From the Exotic to the Everyday: The Ethnographic Exhibition in Germany,” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, 2004), 313–27; Sibylle Benninghoff-lühl, “Die Ausstellung der Koloniersierten: Völkerschauen von 1874–1932,” in Andenken an den Kolonialismus: Eine Ausstellung des Völkerkundlichen Instituts der Universität Tübingen, ed. Volker Harms (Tübingen: ATTEMPTO Verlag, 1984), 52–66. 63 Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, 43.

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64 Paul Lindenberg, Pracht-Album photographischer Aufnahmen der Berliner Gewerbe-Ausstellung 1896: und der sehenswürdigkeiten Berlins und des Treptower Parks (Berlin: Werner, 1896), 52. 65 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 34. 66 Meinecke, Deutschland und seine Kolonien, 58. 67 Meinecke, Deutschland und seine Kolonien, 58, 250, 252, 267. 68 Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 5 (August 27, 1910): 583. 69 Franz Göttlicher, Koloniale Gesellschaften und Verbände, Bestände: Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, Kolonialwirtschaftliches Komitee, DeutschOstafrikanische Gesellschaft, Neu-Guinea Compagnie, Berlin, Findbücher zu Beständen des Bundesarchivs, vol. 102 (Koblenz: Bundesarchiv, 2003). 70 Hermann von Wissmann, Unter deutscher Flagge quer durch Afrika von West nach Ost (Berlin: Walther & Apolant, 1890), 61. 71 David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates (eds.), The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 72 Zoe Strother, “A Terrifying Mimesis: Problems of Portraiture and Representation in African Sculpture (Congo-Kinshasa),” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 65/66 (2015): 128–47. 73 Hermann Frobenius, Afrikanische Bautypen: Eine etnographischarchitektonische Studie (Dachau: Mondrion, 1894). 74 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 34. 75 Bruckner, “The Tingle-Tangle,” 124–26. 76 Short, Magic Lantern Empire, 103. 77 Joachim Zeller, “‘Stätte des deutschen kolonialen Wollens’ – Das Afrika-Haus der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft (DKG),” in Kolonialmetropole Berlin: eine Spurensuche, ed. Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2003), 45–9. 78 “Rudolf Hellgrewe – Leben und Werk,” http://www.rudolf-hellgrewe.de/ (accessed April 13, 2021). 79 Vollmer, Thieme/Becker, 338–39. 80 Vollbehr, “Wie ich Kolonialmaler,” 877–90; Robert Thoms, “Ernst Vollbehr 1876–1960”; Deutsches Historisches Museum, https://www.dhm.de/lemo/ biografie/biografie-ernst-vollbehr.html (accessed January 5, 2021). 81 Unangst, “Changes in German Travel Writing.” 82 Christraud Geary, Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya, Cameroon, West Africa, 1902–1915 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1988). 83 (Ms) Anna Wuhrmann, “Kriegstrommel in Bamum,” BMArchives, https://www. bmarchives.org/items/show/60030 (accessed May 30, 2021). 84 Geary, Images from Bamum, 36; Gesa Grimme, “Discomforting Heritage: Dealing with Colonial-Era Objects in Ethnological Museums: Final Report,”

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Linden-Museum Stuttgart, October 2016–March 2018, pp. 37, 43, https:// www.lindenmuseum.de/fileadmin/Dokumente/Final_Report_Provenance_ Research_in_the_Project_Discomforting_Heritage.pdf (accessed August 5, 2022). The Berlin Ethnological Museum holds two cylinder drums from Bamum that were collected by Hans Caspar Gans Edler Herr zu Putlitz and Franz Thorbecke in 1908 and 1911, Ident.Nr. III C 20634 and Ident.Nr. III C 28993, http://www.smb-digital.de/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterfac e&module=collection&objectId=816541&viewType=detailView, http://www. smb-digital.de/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&o bjectId=793964&viewType=detailView (all accessed January 10, 2022). 85 Geary, Images from Bamum, 38. 86 Itohan Osayimwese, “Architecture with a Mission: Bamum Autoethnography during the Period of German Colonialism,” in German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences, ed. Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 18–38. 87 Mark Dike DeLancey discusses the 1917 palace in Chapter 4 of this book. On local heritage and preservation of the Bamum Palace(s) and its museum, see Palais des Rois Bamoun, http://palaisdesroisbamoun.com/ (accessed January 10, 2022). 88 Bundesarchiv, R 1001 (Akten des Reichskolonialamtes)/6348/1, 220-224; Ernst Vollbehr, Bunte leuchtende Welt: die Lebensfahrt des Malers (Berlin: Ullstein, 1935), 103. 89 Osayimwese, “Colonialism at the Center,” 230. 90 Konrad Schuberth, “Ernst Vollbehr (1876–1960),” https://ernst-vollbehr.de/ (accessed January 5, 2021). 91 Ernst Vollbehr, Bunte leuchtende Welt (Berlin: Ullstein, 1935), 118. 92 Schuberth, “Ernst Vollbehr (1876–1960).” 93 See, for instance, Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 94 Wilke “Romantic Images of Africa,” 285. 95 Cf. Geary, “‘On the Savannah’,” 152. 96 See, for example, various chapters in Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester, and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The Colonizing Camera: Photographs in Namibian History (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1999). 97 On colonial nostalgia, see Britta Schilling, “German Postcolonialism in Four Dimensions: A Historical Perspective,” Postcolonial Studies 18, no. 4 (2015): 427–39 (428); Britta Schilling, “Material Memories of Empire: Coming to Terms with German Colonialism,” in The Cultural Legacy of German Colonial Rule, ed. Klaus Mühlhahn (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2017), 23–50 (30); Monika Albrecht, “Negotiating Memories of German Colonialism: Reflections on Current Forms of Non-governmental Memory Politics,” Journal of European Studies 47, no. 2 (2017): 203–18. 98 Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Zurückgeben: Über die Restitution afrikanischer Kulturgüter (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 2019).

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99 Schuberth, “Ernst Vollbehr (1876–1960)”; “Swakopmunder Kunstvereinigung,” Namibiana, August 15, 2011, https://www.namibiana. de/namibia-information/who-is-who/organisationen/infos-zur-organisation/ swakopmunder-kunstvereinigung.html (accessed December 12, 2020). 100 Werner Hillebrecht, “Monuments – and What Else? The Controversial Legacy of German Colonialism in Namibia,” in The Cultural Legacy of German Colonial Rule, ed. Klaus Mühlhahn (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2017), 113–26; Reinhart Kössler, Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past (Windhoek: University of Namibia Press, 2015); Elke Zuern, “Memorial Politics: Challenging the Dominant Party’s Narrative in Namibia,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 50, no. 3 (2012): 493–518. 101 Myriam Gröpl, “Eine visuelle Geschichte des kolonialen Völkermords in Namibia – Professor Jürgen Zimmerer über Ausstellung und Projekt der Forschungsstelle,” Kolonialismus blog, March 12, 2018, https://kolonialismus. blogs.uni-hamburg.de/2018/12/03/eine-visuelle-geschichte-des-kolonialenvoelkermords-in-namibia-professor-juergen-zimmerer-ueber-ausstellung-undprojekt-der-forschungsstelle/ (accessed January 11, 2022); “Ovizire • Somgu: From Where Do We Speak?” Markk, December 5, 2018–April 14, 2019, https://markk-hamburg.de/en/ausstellungen/ovizire-%E2%80%A2-somgu-en/ (accessed January 11, 2022). 102 “Vitjitua Ndjiharine | Residency,” Swiss Art Council, Pro Helvetia, https:// johannesburg.prohelvetia.org/en/artist/vitjitua-ndjiharine-residency/ (accessed January 11, 2022). 103 Freddy Sabimbona, “German Colonial Heritage in Burundi: From a Cultural Production Perspective,” in Goethe Institut Kamerun, German Colonial Heritage in Africa: Artistic and Cultural Perspectives, p. 10, https://www.goethe.de/ resources/files/pdf173/german-colonial-heritage_artistic-and-cultural-perspectives. pdf (accessed January 11, 2022); Timothy Stapleton, A History of Genocide in Africa (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017), 65; Michael Pesek, “Mwezi IV Gisabo of Burundi (Meyer 1916),” A Visual History of the Great Lakes of Africa [blog], January 25, 2015, http://interlacustrine.blogspot.com/2015/01/mwezi-iv-gisaboof-burundi-meyer-1916.html (accessed January 10, 2022). 104 “atelieresvani,” Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/atelieresvani/ (accessed December 12, 2020). 105 We know, for instance, that colonial architecture and photography were selectively appropriated and transformed by King Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom in German colonial Cameroon. Christraud Geary, “The Past in the Present: Photographic Portraiture and the Evocation of Multiple Histories in the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon,” in Portraiture and Photography in Africa, ed. John Peffer and Elisabeth L. Cameron (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 213–52. 106 Itohan Osayimwese and Ilze Mueller (eds.), Rewriting Hermann Frobenius’ Survey of African Architecture (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 107 Ingrid Hönsch, https://ernst-vollbehr.de/ (accessed January 10, 2021).

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2 Water: Its presence and absence in settlements and placemaking in colonial Namibia Walter Peters

Larger settlements and urbanization were historically only possible where fresh surface water was abundantly available, such as along rivers or at river mouths. Namibia is the driest country in sub-Saharan Africa with the least rainfall and the most arid in southern Africa, with water a key resource. The only perennial rivers are those found on the national borders, the Okavango to Angola in the north and the Orange to South Africa in the south. The name Namibia is derived from the Namib Desert, which in the language of the Indigenous Nama means “vast place.” This desert stretches as a wide belt along the 977-mile-long Atlantic coast (1,572 kilometers), varying in width from 30 to 100 miles (50 to 160 kilometers), with the dunes forming a formidable barrier between coast and interior. Across the immensity of this country, surface water is available only in the summer months and then only after exceptional rainfalls, when the ephemeral or episodic rivers are in flood. However, rainfall is erratic, and the country is regularly afflicted by droughts, which can be long and devastating. The overall climate description of Namibia is arid, with the north experiencing the greatest precipitation at 16 inches (41 centimeters). The semi-arid central plateau running from north to south receives 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters), while the hyper-arid coastal plain receives less than 4 inches (10 centimeters) per year. Because of the aridity, the country

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depends largely on groundwater, that is, water from beneath the earth’s surface, stored in aquifers, from which natural springs are formed when the pressure causes water to flow out at the surface. In Namibia, groundwater is sometimes referred to as “hidden treasure”1 because it is out of sight and naturally protected from evaporation. Nevertheless, only where sufficient groundwater is available can a settlement be sustained, which renders Namibia one of the lowest population densities in the world. It is, however, interesting to note that many place names derive from traditional wells, waterholes, springs, or fountains on which the population depends or on vegetation growing there, which too has a bearing on the architecture. Although previous works on German architecture of South-West Africa2 and town planning3 have been published, this chapter interrogates aspects of pre-colonial and colonial settlement history specifically through the lens of water availability. A source by Carl Schmidt dating from 1922 on the geography of European settlements was helpful and much was gleaned from a more recent publication by Christel Stern and Brigitte Lau from 1990. While building on these sources, the research question was approached by re-examining historical material on German colonialism and searching for buildings, places, and environments that depended on water, its presence or absence. Coverage is chronological but excludes the Ovambo people in the north who remained outside the German sphere of influence throughout the era of colonial Namibia. Thus, solely central and southern Namibia are addressed, and this investigation makes no claim at being comprehensive.

Pre-colonial attitude to settlement by Europeans According to historians, nineteenth-century South-West Africa was characterized by constant struggles between the Ovaherero and Nama peoples, both of whom were nomadic and neither engaged in crop raising.4 The conflicts over the use of scarce natural resources such as waterholes and pastures were long and bitter, and cattle-raiding was a traditional feature of their existence.5 Based on these social circumstances, and the climatic conditions described already, the country seemed a “worthless acquisition” except to some European nations and Boers in what is today South Africa.6 Following a report by William Coates Palgrave (Figure  2.1), who was first sent in 1876 by the British government of the Cape Colony as “Special Commissioner to Damaraland and Great Namaland” (as central and southern Namibia, respectively, were then known, although the former is more correctly Hereroland) to enquire “into the resources of the country, and the disposition of the various [Indigenous communities] towards colonial rule,”7 the British government concluded that this was hostile territory and of no significant value. But, that did not deter British annexation of Walvis

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FIGURE  2.1  Map of pre-colonial Namibia, 1876, from Palgrave Report. The ­Cunene River marks the northern boundary to Mossamedes (Angola) and the Orange River the southern to the Cape Colony. Walwich (Walvis) Bay lies at midpoint along the Atlantic Coast, and Windhoek in the interior at right thereof. Between these two settlements can be seen Rooibank, both the Kuisib and Zwarhaub (Swakop) Rivers, Otjimbingwe midway, Okahandja, and Barmen. In the south, on the Atlantic Coast, Angra Pequena Bay (renamed Lüderitzbucht), inland thereof Bethany, ­Berseba, G ­ ibeon, and Zwart Morast (later Keetmanshoop). In the extreme south Nisbett Bath (previously and subsequently named Warmbad).

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Bay two years later in 1878, the only natural deep-water harbor on the Atlantic coastline together with its “surroundings.”8 It should be noted that the definition of “surroundings” came to include Rooibank, 20 miles (32 kilometers) southeast of Walvis Bay, where water was available in the riverbed of the Kuisib. Three decades earlier, in 1845, the Rhenish Mission Society (RMS) had established a station there among Nama Topnaar people and named it Scheppmannsdorf after the founder missionary. This station now found itself located on British territory and was thus protected. Visiting in 1850, the British traveler and scientist Francis Galton noted that the station was “near a clump of fine trees somewhat resembling elms” and that a “small streamlet rises from the ground and runs through the place, watering about three acres of garden and fields and losing itself half a mile off in a reedy pond full of wild fowl.”9 Such conditions provided a basis for settlement, and missionaries believed not only that the stations should produce food to sustain the local community but also that the “spread of Christianity required the permanent settlement of nomadic peoples in an agricultural rather than a cattle-breeding economy.”10

Mission stations to the Nama Besides explorers, hunters, and traders, missionaries were the first whites or Europeans, almost all of them German, to attempt settling and wrestling a living in what is today Namibia when they extended their field of activity from north of the Cape Colony across the Orange in the early 1800s. The missionaries ventured there to evangelize and advance literacy, education, and health. Typically, a missionary would reach an arrangement with the traditional leader for the right to use a portion of communal land, usually near springs or fountains from which groundwater naturally seeped. Because of this, all mission stations became established within existing, relatively settled communities and consequently lay at the best water courses in the country (Figure 2.2).11 A “mission house” or parsonage on a rectangular plan form would be built of whatever materials could be sourced for building in the immediate surrounds to establish the nucleus of the mission station. Before contemplating a building to function as both church and school, it was necessary to establish a vegetable garden, which required irrigation. Water could be sourced from a well sunk into a riverbed, a practice native to South-West Africa and implemented long before colonial occupation,12 or it could be sourced from dam storage, the construction of which is linked to missionary settlement.13 It was a difficult life, and most missionaries felt that they were alone in the immense and little settled country with its hot, arid climate, totally opposite to the environment from which they originated, the Heimat of the missionary. And, despite their well-intentioned objectives, missionaries found themselves opening or reoccupying stations,

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FIGURE  2.2  Church alongside the substantial well at Berseba, c. 1930. Source: Koloniales Bildarchiv der Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt-am-Main.

the depredation of which included being regularly attacked, plundered, set alight and destroyed, subjected to drought, or expelled.14 The inaugural mission station at Warmbad, established 1806, was located in the extreme south on the main wagon route connecting the Cape Colony with Namaland. Due to the presence of thermal springs and most likely because Dutch or Afrikaans was a lingua franca of many Nama, the site was known as Warmbad (warm bath). Here two German missionaries in the service of the London Missionary Society (LMS) built a church and a stone dwelling, but both buildings were destroyed only five years later.15 When it was later reopened, the station was briefly known as Nisbett Bath in honor of a supporter or sponsor. Despite the experience of 1811, the LMS founded a station at Klipfontein in southern Namaland in 1814, which became known by the biblical name, Bethany, and where, again, numerous springs provided the basis for the establishment of a mission station. The Schmelenhaus (named after the founding missionary) was built simultaneously, and although rebuilt after a fire with clay bricks atop a stone plinth, today, this is generally considered the oldest surviving example of European masonry construction in SouthWest Africa.16 By contrast the local community opted for rush buildings, since reeds were locally available, and structures built from this material were considerably cooler in summer. Reed buildings were also transportable, which was an important characteristic for semi-nomadic people.

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After a lapse of missionary activity for about two and a half decades prompted by concerns of safety, in 1842 the Rhenish Mission Society (RMS) commenced operations. Following Berseba, 1850, and Gibeon, 1862, a station was begun in the center of the wide plains of southern Namaland, at a place known as Zwart Morast or Swartmodder (black morass or mud), a name that indicated the presence of artesian wells.17 The first missionary arrived in 1866 and built himself an abode of mud covered with reeds following the example of the Indigenous people. Water was stored in a cistern for general use and for the irrigation of numerous gardens for which leads were dug and distribution managed by way of simple sluice gates. With the hope demonstrated in sponsoring the construction of the first church and, probably, the investment in water management, after only three years, the settlement was renamed Keetmanshoop (Keetman’s hope) in acknowledgment of the donation by the late banker and chairman of the RMS. Given the particularly advantageous position geographically, and the abundance of groundwater, all roads in the south converged on the settlement, which was gradually elevated into the capital of southern South-West Africa.

Jonker Afrikaner, Windhoek, and transport infrastructure During 1820 to 1830, the Oorlam people, a group with close ties to the Nama, moved northward from the Cape Colony across the Orange River. Their leader Jonker Afrikaner (c. 1785–1861) came to play a dominant political role in much of southern and central South-West Africa and created a “powerful if rudimentary” state.18 In about 1840, Jonker chose as a permanent settlement a place with an abundant presence of groundwater with as many as twelve active thermal springs. Galton recorded its name as Eikhams,19 meaning “fire water” in Nama, but Jonker renamed it Windhoek, perhaps after the Winterhoek Mountains at Tulbagh in the Cape Colony, his place of origin.20 Because of the abundance of water, which could be used for agriculture, Windhoek developed into a flourishing commercial center for almost a decade,21 attracting large numbers of people, some 2,000 including those in the surrounding area. For the use of the Christian congregation Jonker built a substantial church of stone in what subsequently became known as KleinWindhoek, and in 1842 invited missionaries of the RMS to join him. Jonker had two major roads built from Windhoek to each of the natural harbors of the country. The southern Bay road crossed the Auas Mountains and continued from Berseba to Bethanie to reach Angra Pequena (Lüderitzbucht, today Lüderitz) while the northern followed the Swakop and Kuisib riverbeds to Walvis Bay.22 These roads were built for the conveyance of wagons, and the northern enabled traders and missionaries to import supplies through

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Walvis Bay instead of overland from Cape Town. It was built 25–35 feet (7.5–10.5 meters) wide and meandered across extremely difficult terrain. Oorlam relations with the Ovaherero deteriorated and war broke out in 1864, so that by 1873, a decade after Jonker’s death, Windhoek was described as a “pitiful plight”23 before being destroyed a few years later in 1880.24 Thus by 1885, Windhoek was reported to be lying fallow; there was no sign of human life and the mission house had fallen into ruin.25 This is the deserted settlement Germans would occupy five years later in 1890, and, like a palimpsest, overwrite its history.

Mission stations to the Ovaherero In 1844, the RMS established its first mission station to the Ovaherero at Otjikango, which, significantly, translates as “large fountain.” The station was soon renamed Barmen, after the town of the mission headquarters in Germany, and the resident missionary had a dam built replete with irrigation channels26 for watering vegetable gardens. The original mission stations to the Ovaherero were all located in the catchment of the ephemeral Swakop River and along the newly built northern Bay road. Another station, Okahandja, was also established in 1844 but because of drought closed soon after, and Otjimbingwe closed in 1849.27 Otjimbingwe lies at the cusp between the belt of the Namib Desert and the beginning of the ascent to the central plateau, which made it an ideal stopover along the northern Bay road.28 The name is of Ovaherero origin and, appropriately, means “place of refreshment.”29 However, the settlement also lay at the crossing of trade routes radiating into Hereroland, for which reason it had already attracted traders and wainwrights. Most importantly Otjimbingwe was water-abundant and had significant grazing lands at the confluence of the Omusema and Swakop River.30 Although these were dry riverbeds, they provided for good grazing, which elevated the possibility for permanent settlement. The RMS used this central location for its South-West African mission base, but the settlement of mainly Ovaherero people was attacked and plundered several times in conflicts with Oorlam when the resident community fled for its safety. While churches had in medieval Europe also served as armories, and Windhoek and Gibeon had functioned similarly in pre-colonial South-West Africa,31 the Pulverturm (armory tower) was especially built at Otjimbingwe in 1872 for the safety and protection of the mission community, and consisted of a circa 33-foot-high (10 meter) cylindrical tower, built of stone.32 This building type, not usually associated with a mission station, was double-storied, crenelated, and included a basement, and was also used for the storage of arms and ammunition, hence the name. But, unlike church buildings serving as armories, the Pulverturm was supplied with piped water and was thus prepared as a place of refuge in

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times of siege, which could extend to a few days.33 In 1888 German colonial troops selected Otjimbingwe as their initial headquarters. Yet, despite the aforementioned natural advantages, and its location on the northern Bay road, Otjimbingwe lies in a valley, has an unhealthy climate, is subjected to temperature inversion, and is difficult to defend.

Windhoek and the establishment of the German colony What began with a series of land purchases in Angra Pequena, renamed Lüderitzbucht, led in 1884 to a cautious and wavering period of colonization. The minuscule German presence trod carefully in the vast, hot and dry territory and concluded various “Protection Treaties.” As Wallace explains, this was the term used by British, German, and African leaders to describe initial arrangements between colonial powers and African polities.34 In effect, African leaders would be protected and the jurisdiction over their own people respected, provided they did not enter into relations with other European powers and guaranteed the security of Germans and their right to trade freely.35 However, Windhoek lay in a buffer between the warring Ovaherero and Nama peoples, in no-man’s land. Thus, on continuing the hesitant approach and exploring the setting of Windhoek on several occasions, only in the sixth year of official colonization (in 1890) did the territorial commander occupy the place, which by now, astonishingly, had been deserted for most of the preceding two decades. A garrison was deployed there, and material from the derelict structures was used for the construction of a shed for the storage of arms and provisions.36 Not only could Windhoek be appropriated effortlessly but also, as the water-abundant Swakop and Kuisib river beds coincided with the border between Namaland and Hereroland,37 the line of supply between Walvis Bay and central South-West Africa could be put under surveillance by a small contingent of colonial troops and smuggling of arms and ammunition to Indigenous people curtailed. As Windhoek was particularly well endowed with water, trees were in abundance and even clay was available. Bricks could thus be produced, both fired and air-dried, and construction of a substantial rectangular fort, known since as the Alte Feste, commenced without delay. For this a foreman, thirtytwo soldiers, thirty Indigenous men, and interestingly, seventy Indigenous women were engaged.38 While construction took some two years, 1890 to 1892, with this fort and a water supply line that fed into a cistern in its center, the settlement could be secured from attack. The fort was strategically located on a ridge between two sections of the deserted settlement, which to distinguish between them, were given prefixes by German toponymy, namely, Groβ-Windhoek for government purposes

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and Klein-Windhoek for the colonial settler (Figure 2.3). With the abundance of water immediately accessible, two gardens could be laid out in GroβWindhoek to provide the troops with potatoes, maize, and other vegetables, a task probably undertaken by the same nine soldiers who had been assigned the rehabilitation of the deserted mission garden in Klein-Windhoek.39 Windhoek was in an “extraordinarily favorable” position,40 not only because of the abundant natural resources, which included an annual rainfall of 15 inches (38 centimeters), but also because of its central location at the healthy, high-lying altitude of 5,600 feet (1,700 meters) above sea level and particularly because it lay in a buffer between warring Indigenous peoples that stretched inland from the coast, a foundation well laid for colonial rule.

FIGURE  2.3  Windhoek, 1892, from Deutsches Kolonialblatt. The colonial government reserved for itself Groβ-Windhoek, the portion with the numerous ­ natural springs, which reached to the historical north–south route through the ­ ­country, at left, with Klein-Windhoek, at right, reserved for settlers who were to establish small holdings along the riverbed.

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The springs in Klein-Windhoek were not nearly as copious, but water was available for the cultivation of produce and grains, which the colonial settler society promoted despite the reality of a somewhat limited capacity. In fact, settlers had to rely on wells,41 which led the imperial German government in 1913 to approve the design of a dam at Avis, that had already been proposed in 1898, but to which the First World War put paid.42 Consequently, the anticipated settlement of smallholdings failed due to the vexed water issue resulting in Klein-Windhoek becoming the residential suburb of today.43

“The country is so deficient in water … We would be defeated not by the people, but by nature …” German policymakers sought to promote South-West Africa as a settlement colony, centered on water management, for establishing an economy “selfsufficient in food and fodder production.” But, as the inaugural governor, Theodor Leutwein, concluded: “The country is so deficient in water and pastureland that a force of 100 men would pose an almost insoluble supply problem. We would be defeated not by the people, but by nature.”44 Consequently, hydrological engineers were dispatched to identify and implement groundwater management measures. Among these was the Indigenous practice of sinking wells in riverbeds. Although found to be labor-intensive, this tapped into a renewable supply, which on filtering with river sand, would produce good quality drinking water.45 In addition, an experimental plant was established, and two borehole drilling squads consisting of geologists and water engineers traversed the country, advising settler farmers of possibilities for groundwater management, harnessing springs and fountains, and monitoring known water sources. Sites were surveyed and approved, and guidelines for the building of storage dams disseminated, as these were deemed key resources for irrigation purposes and put the colony on the road to development.46 Although the colonial government was only interested in areas suitable for European settlement, concern about the spread of erosion along the banks of the ephemeral rivers saw trees being planted, of which policy vestiges of palm plantations are still identifiable today along the Swakop River.47

Windhoek: Zoo Park As has already been mentioned, the colonial government had reserved for itself Groβ-Windhoek with the numerous natural springs and trees. This portion stretched downhill from the fort to the historical north–south route through the country, referred to colloquially as Store Street because of the

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many trading stores then lining its western side. When in 1897 an appropriate setting was needed for the erection of a monument to commemorate fallen soldiers in the colonists’ battle against Hendrik Witbooi, a site endowed with a particularly strong fountain was chosen.48 But the colonial government was painting on a larger canvas; it aimed at creating a public park for the capital. Only a year later its horticulturist was dispatched to Cape Town to study precedents for the design49 of Windhoek’s Troop Garden, as the park was originally known (Figure 2.4). For this, numerous fruit and forest tree species were selected, in as far as climate permitted to create a veritable arboretum to which flower beds were added with borders and espaliers in geometrical layouts. The trees grew to become dense, with water readily available for fountains and ponds. On transferring the property to the town council in 1911, it was expanded as a minor zoological park, hence the name, Zoo Park, perhaps also in alignment with the similarly named garden in the German capital. But, the legend of Zoo Park stems from its period as a pleasure garden during the interwar years when besides the kiosk, begun 1916, an arts center flourished, concerts were staged on a bandstand, and alfresco dining at Café Zoo was available until late at night.50 Zoo Park is the only urban public park in Namibia, a veritable “Central Park” in the heart of downtown Windhoek, where it marks a quadrant in the crossing of the already mentioned northsouth thoroughfare, known today as Independence Avenue, and the main

FIGURE  2.4  Windhoek as seen from the west, c. 1914. Source: Oskar Hintrager, Südwestafrika in der deutschen Zeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1955). The dense greenery in the center of the photograph designates the numerous natural springs and trees, and Zoo Park.

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east-west arterial linking commerce and governance, now Fidel Castro Street. The park survives in an altered form, it is more open in its landscaping than it was historically, features a serpentine path that crosses lawned areas, and has a large pond instead of the strong fountain, palms and drought-resistant trees. The memorial to the fallen remains integrated, perhaps because “as a rarity” it includes the names of Indigenous troopers who fought on the side of the Germans,51 and Café Zoo, which emerged from the kiosk of 1916, is again in operation.

Swakopmund: Planting palms in the desert With Walvis Bay in British territory, and the Cape government resenting its use and threatening closure of the harbor, a facility on German territory was an indispensable requisite for the future of the colony.52 After considering a location south of Walvis Bay, the focus of the search soon fell on a position just north of the Swakop River mouth, hence the name Swakopmund, where a troop station was established in 1892. This was a well-chosen position as there was no dune belt to cross to the interior, and although the coast is virtually devoid of groundwater, potable water could be sourced from four watering points, the closest being at Nonidas, 4 miles up the Swakop River. Originally water was brought in barrels but after the spread of infectious diseases in 1897, a pipeline was built and a reservoir constructed in the settlement.53 However, due to the lingering uncertainty of the site, the earliest buildings were of prefabricated timber imported in kit form and placed on the ridge above sea level, along wide streets, soon uniquely furnished with boardwalks for traversing the sand. Uncertainty ceased when in 1897 the Rinderpest epidemic lamed draft animals and prompted the need for the building of a railway line across the desert to the interior, which reached Windhoek five years later.54 With that, Swakopmund became confirmed as the gateway to the colony and buildings became permanent, with none larger than the terminal railway station. Shipping between the fatherland and the colony commenced in 1893, and once the timetable became regular, a decision was made to build a mole or mooring place as a base for lighters, begun 1899, to serve the ocean going steamships, as well as an associated lighthouse. But the mole sanded up, which necessitated a jetty to be built. Observing such determination in the desolate environment, a skeptical reporter of the Cape Times in 1901 concluded that Swakopmund indeed lay in the “land of the modern martyrs.”55 However, given the water abundance, trees could literally be “planted in the desert” and with that possibility, in 1911, the boardwalks became lined with cypress trees and Cape Willows (Plate 2), species both evergreen and drought resistant, probably imported from the Cape Colony.56 This emphasis on beautification followed the proclamation of 1909 that gave Swakopmund municipal self-governance, which also saw the town begin to promote itself

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as a destination for providing relief from the hot interior in the summer.57 That promotion laid the basis for an effortless rebranding as a coastal resort when on capitulation during the First World War, the port function was terminated in favor of Walvis Bay. In addition, the obsolete mole was turned into a safe bathing enclosure and the jetty put to recreational use, as is still the case today. Later the Arnold Schad Promenade, named after the mayor who served immediately before and after German forces capitulated, was added along the beachfront, copiously lined with palms. Although the main street has long lost its distinguishing features, the parallel Post Street, today Daniel Tjongarero Avenue, conserves its character with a line of trees planted mainly on the island in the center of the street.

Lüderitzbucht: A tribute to water While Lüderitzbucht was the original point of German colonization in 1884, the rocky outcrop on the Atlantic coast on which the settlement was established lies on one of the least hospitable and hyper-arid coasts in Africa (Figure 2.5). Indeed, Lüderitzbucht can boast of being the only other natural harbor of Namibia, and, while it is protected from sanding up, it is shallow. Additionally, it is exposed and always windy, there is no vegetation except for isolated shrubs, and it experiences virtually no rainfall. In consequence, Lüderitz stagnated as a trading station with potable water being shipped from Cape Town, some 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) distant and requiring a few days at sea. As an initial resort, the colonial authorities erected a distillation plant for producing fresh water from sea water in 1898. Significantly, this plant was solar powered, but it was replaced by a steam condenser, probably coalfired, which proved unreliable.58 But desalination was so expensive that, for example, draft animals had to proceed from Aus, the last opportunity for watering before crossing the dunes to Lüderitzbucht and return the 186-

FIGURE  2.5  Lüderitzbucht, c. 1914. The town developed on the rocky outcrop that allowed no vegetation. Source: Scientific Society Swakopmund.

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mile (300-kilometer) round trip without additional water!59 Things began to change when in desperation to replenish the troops fighting in the south during the Indigenous wars of resistance against German colonization (1904– 08), the Reichstag in Berlin approved the building of a railway line inland from Lüderitz across the 89-mile-wide (143-kilometer) belt of dunes to the 93-mile-distant (150-kilometer) settlement of Aus (1905–06). Every drop of water for workers, animals, and machines had to be shipped from Cape Town or condensed in Lüderitzbucht before being forwarded by rail.60 The steam locomotives were fueled by burning combustible material to produce steam in a boiler, and both coal and water were carried with the locomotive. However, while the railway line was under construction, plentiful water was discovered after sinking a well in a riverbed at Garub, 65 miles (105 kilometers) inland or two-thirds of the way to the destination. This was a godsend, for only a year later, in 1907, a laborer responsible for clearing the railway line of wandering dunes was struck by an object identified as a diamond. The industry that developed at Kolmanskop, 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) inland from Lüderitzbucht, and the associated settlement could now be supplied with water from Garub. Potable water was transported on railway trucks, offloaded at the depot, and pumped into a reservoir on the crest of the sand-dune hill at Kolmanskop from where it was reticulated. It provided the mining plant with water for washing and treatment operations, and the reservoir was also used as a swimming pool for residents.61 Due to the occurrence of alluvial diamonds the entire area along the shore of the Atlantic Ocean was in 1908 proclaimed a Sperrgebiet (prohibited area) and restricted. The mine at Elizabeth Bay was served by boreholes at far off Grillenthal from where pipes were laid across the desert, but other mines had no option and had to have water brought in barrels across the desert from Lüderitzbucht.62 With the diamond rush, the town of Lüderitzbucht could develop. The authorities insisted on masonry construction and the building of access roads across the rocky outcrop at the expense of house owners, two decrees much maligned. Due to the exposed rock face the piping lay largely exposed, which in the absence of vegetation was difficult to conceal. Besides the prize legacy of Jugendstil architecture, which could now be afforded in distant South-West Africa, the scarcity of water prompted the use of greywater, which in the opening decade of the twentieth century was a novel means indeed.63 Potable water is today piped from Koichab, a source arising from accumulated groundwater 40 miles (64 kilometers) into the Namib Desert.64 As the German administration had become aware of this huge aquifer located beneath a pan, funds were allocated in 1915, but as the First World War intervened, Lüderitzbucht had to wait for over half a century before water from this source eventually became available in 1968.65 But the quality is said to rate among the best in the country, and a monument was erected in commemoration of the arrival of piped water consisting of a pile of selected large rocks assembled prominently on an island at the foot of the main road.

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Though no water was included in the design, the memorial is a cenotaph of a kind and originally held the status that a fountain on a medieval European square denoted. Having water on tap eighty-five years after the founding of the town is indeed something to mark and to create a place for.

Choosing to colonize the most arid country in southern Africa Unlike past studies, this chapter has attempted to address settlement and placemaking history driven from the point of view of water availability. This might have been a pragmatic consideration, but it was an inevitable one that the Germans had to confront in choosing to colonize the most arid country in southern Africa, and should shed new light on rewriting the history of the Namibian built environment. German colonists were aware of groundwater as a key resource and they built on the foundations laid by missionaries, whose stations had been established on the best available water sources known to Indigenous peoples. Some stations were established on riverbeds, indeed dry, but nevertheless rivers, like the original mission stations to the Ovaherero which were all located in the catchment of the ephemeral Swakop. In these ways, Indigenous practices had a direct bearing on colonial settlement, which also provided the basis for the spatial distribution of urban areas and towns. Windhoek and Keetmanshoop, whose Indigenous names derived from particularly strong fountains but were changed in the early colonial era, effectively became the inland centers of central and southern South-West Africa, respectively, because of these natural resources. Other place names were substituted in the process of missionary or colonial settlement, but the legacy of water survives in urban centers and towns such as Otjimbingwe and Okahandja. Independent Namibia (since 1990) has changed many urban road names of the colonial period, but thus far it appears to have little appetite for changing place names.66 Swakopmund is the only colonial town constructed from scratch and could develop because groundwater was available nearby. It was due to the good supply that, perhaps uniquely, trees could be planted to shade the boardwalks astride the roads on the sand dunes of this port town. Its counterpart in the south, Lüderitzbucht, had little choice but to survive from an artificial supply imported or gained by desalination, which the diamond find perpetuated. But when piped water arrived, the barren landscape became marked with a celebration in the form of a monument of commemoration, erected on a prominent central square, which until then had vouched for no more than a traffic island. German rule in South-West Africa lasted for three decades until 1915, a period that has been equated as being “long enough to leave a permanent imprint.”67 While struggles and conflicts between the Ovaherero and Nama

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peoples in the nineteenth century have been mentioned, as have Indigenous wars of resistance against the colonizing power, in which Germany committed genocide against these peoples, engaging with the repercussions of these wars is outside the ambit of this chapter.68 It was, however, within the period of colonial domination that the major towns of today were developed as was the laying of infrastructure such as ports and road and railway networks. Following surrender to South African forces representing Britain in the First World War, half the German population was deported. South-West Africa effectively passed into South African hands when, in 1921, the mandate granted to Britain became administered by South Africa, and this takeover came to condition the history of the country for the rest of the twentieth century. Windhoek continued as the seat of governance; Walvis Bay assumed the role of principal harbor of South-West Africa leaving Swakopmund to rebrand itself as a vacation resort. The diamond mines were taken over and effectively became South African, and activity gradually moved from Kolmanskop or Lüderitzbucht to Oranjemund, the new mining town founded in 1936. Unlike all others, this town can boast of having surface water, and in abundance, as it lies on the north bank of the Orange River mouth, from which its name derives.

Concluding thoughts The work by Christel Stern and Brigitte Lau of 1990, which expounds on Indigenous practices for managing water, concluded that Namibia’s “existing rain- and groundwater resources including water stored in wells and cisterns” were insufficient to “support the development of a countrywide [colonial] settler economy.” It also found that the earliest colonial studies on water management cautioned against relying exclusively on groundwater.69 This rebuke was not taken seriously, as until the late 1950s groundwater provided the only source of supply for Windhoek. Realizing, eventually, that water was indeed a finite and vulnerable resource, the capital began experimenting with unconventional means such as supplementing natural water with recycled municipal wastewater. Thus when, in 1968, Windhoek’s fountains, the raison d’être for settlement, ran dry, the municipality additionally pioneered the treatment of sewerage effluent for potable uses. In this, Windhoek led the way and alone held the world record until 2011. But the city lives under a constant threat of water shortage, and today the use of treated water is practiced in most urban centers of Namibia.70 Namibia is, however, also said to be one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. The greatest effect is likely to be on rainfall, with more prolonged and more severe droughts. Already surface air temperature has warmed significantly; farms in southern Namibia have had no rainfall for a few years, and despite the huge costs, boreholes are being sunk ever deeper to tap groundwater. To boot, recharge may suffer a substantial reduction as

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there will not be the rainfall to seep into the soil and refill the groundwater that supplies the boreholes. With more intense droughts the situation will be aggravated by population growth and, in response to advancing global warming, increasing water demands for irrigation and urban centers. If the past was a challenge, the future will have to squarely face the conclusion that had already been reached in the sixth century BCE by Thales of Miletus: “The principle of all things is water.” While this holds true, for organic life on earth that must be sustained by water or perish, compatriot Aristotle might have added “Out of Africa always something new.”

Acknowledgment This work is based upon research supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF), South Africa. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto.

Notes 1 Greg Christelis and Wilhelm Struckmeier (eds.), Groundwater in Namibia (Windhoek: Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Rural Development, 2001), 6. 2 Walter Peters, Baukunst in Südwestafrika 1884–1914: Die Rezeption deutscher Architektur in der Zeit von 1884 bis 1914 im ehemaligen DeutschSüdwestafrika (Namibia) (Windhoek: SWA Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, 1981). 3 Walter Peters, “Grundlagen des Städtebaus in Namibia,” in Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus in Afrika, ed. Peter Heine and Ulrich Van der Heyden (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995), 429–52. 4 Horst Drechsler, “Let us die fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism, 1884–1915 (Berlin: Akademie, 1966), 18. 5 Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa, 1884–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977), 122. 6 Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa, 173. 7 Cited in E. L. P. Stals (ed.), The Commissions of WC Palgrave: Special Emissary to South West Africa 1876–1885 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, second series No. 21, 1991), xviii. 8 Stals, The Commissions of WC Palgrave, xxv. 9 Francis Galton, The Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (London: Murray, 1853), 29. 10 Christel Stern and Brigitte Lau, Zoo Park. A History: Documentation of the Former Zoo Park (1887–1958) in the Center of Windhoek (Windhoek: Archives

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Service Division of the Department of National Education, SWA/ Namibia, 1989), 26. 11 Drechsler, “Let us die fighting,” 111; Carl Schmidt, Geographie der Europäersiedlungen im deutschen Südwestafrika (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1922), 48–9. 12 Christel Stern and Brigitte Lau, Namibian Water Resources and Their Management: A Preliminary History, Archeia, no. 15 (Windhoek: National Archives of Namibia, 1990), 6. 13 Stern and Lau, Namibian Water Resources, 26. 14 Brigitte Lau, Namibia in Jonker Afrikaner’s Time, Archeia, no. 8. (Windhoek: Archives of Namibia, 1987), 26–27. 15 Tilman Dedering, Hate the Old and Follow the New: Khoekhoe and Missionaries in Early Nineteenth-century Namibia (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997), 9. 16 Andreas Vogt, Bethanien in the South: A Place Well Worth Visiting, Newsletter of the Namibia Scientific Society (April–June, 39, 1998): 4–6 and 23–30. 17 Cited in Schmidt, Geographie der Europäersiedlungen, 88. 18 Stals, The Commissions of WC Palgrave, xii; Lau, Namibia in Jonker Afrikaner’s Time, 28. 19 Galton, The Narrative, 142. 20 For a critical analysis of colonial naming practices and postcolonial renaming in German South-West Africa, see Petrus Angula Mbenzi, “Renaming of Places in Namibia in the Pre-colonial, Colonial and Post-colonial Era: Colonising and Decolonising Place Names,” Journal of Namibian Studies 25 (2019): 71–99. 21 Lau, Namibia in Jonker Afrikaner’s Time, 33. 22 Klaus Dierks, Chronology of Namibian History: From Pre-historical Times to Independent Namibia (Windhoek: Namibia Scientific Society, 1999), 9; J. J. J. Wilken and G. J. Fox, The History of the Port and Settlement of Walvis Bay, 1878–1978 (Johannesburg: Perskor, 1978), 73. 23 Hahn cited in N. Mossolow, This Was Old Windhoek (Windhoek: self-pub., 1976), 62. 24 Wilken and Fox, The History of the Port, 28; Dierks, Chronology of Namibian History, 29. 25 Schinz cited in Mossolow, This Was Old Windhoek, 66. 26 Stern and Lau, Namibian Water, 26. 27 Schmidt, Geographie der Europäersiedlungen, 15. 28 Schmidt, Geographie der Europäersiedlungen, 47. 29 Peter E. Raper, Lucie A. Moller, and Theodorus Plessis, Dictionary of Southern African Place Names (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2014). 30 Schmidt, Geographie der Europäersiedlungen, 47. 31 Lau, Namibia in Jonker Afrikaner’s Time, 77. 32 Vogt, Bethanien, 37. 33 Vogt, Bethanien, 37.

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34 Marion Wallace, A History of Namibia (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2016), 103. 35 Wallace, A History of Namibia, 119. 36 Mossolow, This Was Old Windhoek, 68. 37 Lau, Namibia in Jonker Afrikaner’s Time, 29. 38 Mossolow, This Was Old Windhoek, 69. 39 Mossolow, This Was Old Windhoek, 69. 40 Mossolow, This Was Old Windhoek, 68. 41 Mossolow, This Was Old Windhoek, 76. 42 Mossolow, This Was Old Windhoek, 86. 43 Cited in Schmidt, Geographie der Europäersiedlungen, 58. 44 Cited in Drechsler, “Let us die fighting,” 83. 45 Stern and Lau, Zoo Park, 6. 46 Stern and Lau, Zoo Park, 50, 26. 47 Harri Siiskonen, “The Concept of Climate Improvement: Colonialism and Environment in German South West Africa,” Environment and History 21, no. 2 (2015): 292–95. 48 On Witbooi, see Fabian Lehmann, Chapter 5, this volume. 49 Mossolow, This Was Old Windhoek, 80. 50 Stern and Lau, Zoo Park, 3–6. 51 George Steinmetz and Julia Hell, “The Visual Archive of Colonialism: Germany and Namibia,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 177. 52 Wilken and Fox, The History of the Port, 28. 53 Schmidt, Geographie der Europäersiedlungen, 106; Hulda Rautenberg, Das alte Swakopmund 1892–1919 (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz, 1967), 61. 54 Ursula Massmann, Swakopmund: A Chronicle of the Town’s People, Places and Progress (Swakopmund: Society for Scientific Development and Museum, 1983), 19. 55 Peters, Baukunst in Südwestafrika, 80. 56 Peters, Baukunst in Südwestafrika, 199. 57 Rautenberg, Das alte Swakopmund, 206. 58 Schmidt, Geographie der Europäersiedlungen, 56, 96; Stern and Lau, Zoo Park, 68; Edda Schoedder, Antje Otto, and Walter Rusch, Lüderitzbucht, damals und gestern (Windhoek: Scientific Society, 1983), [2]. 59 Schmidt, Geographie der Europäersiedlungen, 94. 60 H. Berthold, “Eine Fahrt auf der Eisenbahn Lüderitzbucht-Keetmanshoop,” Kolonie und Heimat (May 23, 1908): 2. 61 Olga Levinson, Diamonds in the Desert (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1983), 76. 62 Christelis and Struckmeier, Groundwater in Namibia, 99. 63 See Peters, Baukunst in Südwestafrika. 64 Stern and Lau, Zoo Park, 68. 65 Schoedder, Otto, and Rusch, Lüderitzbucht, 104.

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66 See Mbenzi, “Renaming of Places in Namibia.” 67 Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa. 68 The now-classic text on this topic is Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) und seine Folgen (Berlin: Links, 2003). 69 Stern and Lau, Zoo Park, 6. 70 Sipho Kings, “Windhoek Shows the World How to Recycle Sewage Water,” Mail & Guardian, March 10, 2016, p. 2, https://mg.co.za/article/2016-03-10windhoek-shows-the-world-how-to-treat-water/ (accessed January 10, 2021).

3 A spatial writing of the earth: The design of colonial territory in South-West Africa Hollyamber Kennedy

Narrative dissonance, an entry point In 1920, five years after Germany conceded its colony in South-West Africa in the midst of the First World War, Quelle & Meyer, the Leipzig publishing house, which since 1906 had specialized in works from the fields of the natural sciences, issued a three-volume compendium, the Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon.1 Its editor, Heinrich Schnee, the former governor of German East Africa, envisioned it as a documentary monument to the triumphs of German colonial rule. Its many contributors, who ranged from veterans of the colonial service to notable frontier settlers, treated its creation as essential to their collaborative effort toward the recovery of Germany’s “lost” colonies. In addition to the Lexikon, Schnee authored a number of similarly revisionist texts; counterarguments against widely circulating claims of colonial mismanagement. Both were sharply contoured by the dramatic geopolitical reconfigurations brought about by the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June of 1919. A year earlier, the British government had published an indicting investigative report that provided stark evidence for such claims of gross negligence. The published summary, of which Schnee would have been acutely aware, was entitled “Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany” (it is colloquially referred to as the so-called “Blue Book”).2 As Peter Katjavivi has argued, the dossier, authored by the British Major T. L. O’Reilly, military magistrate of

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the Omaruru province, and A. J. Waters, a crown prosecutor for the SouthWest African protectorate, served as a key component in a coordinated bid by the Union of South Africa and the British Crown to prevent the postwar restoration of Namibian territory to Germany.3 The report is a remarkable artifact in that its narrative is largely composed of firsthand, albeit often nameless, accounts given by Black South-West African subjects, many of them survivors of the 1904–08 genocide, the first of the twentieth century. It should be stressed that they were asked to enter the archive for the benefit of the British and South African governments, whose attachés chronicled these accounts to strengthen their mutual geographical argument for continued military annexation. Clearly, the dossier provided a strategic platform for British and South African interests, but nevertheless, through resilient African voices the report broadcast the full brutality of German colonialism in South-West Africa. In a striking admission, South Africa’s Minister of the Interior noted, in a letter sent to the Prime Minister that accompanied the report, that the British investigators who had so diligently compiled this archive of colonial atrocities in the end strategically omitted the customary violence of their own colonial regimes in the region, and the application of “chains and the liberal use of the sjambok [leather whip] by the Police.”4 Like those witness accounts, refusing the ephemerality of their compulsory anonymity to give name to the cruelties they experienced, this private revelation by the Minister of the Interior, kept for posterity by government archivists, is illustrative of what Achille Mbembe, in his analysis of colonial sovereignty, has described as a founding violence that actively created the space over which it was then exercised, “one might say,” he writes, “that it presupposed its own existence,” an ambient violence that crystallized, “through a gradual accumulation of numerous acts and rituals,” in which an imaginary capacity was translated into an authorizing authority.5 The space of colonialism, Mbembe argues, was shaped relationally by violence, physical and epistemic, an operation in which the abstract space of power was converted into a material landscape distinguished, I will suggest, by the creation and maintenance of radical discrepancies, spatialized rules of difference. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the accounts detailed in the lexicon’s volumes bear little in common with the South-West African report. That Schnee, at the time a member of the Reichstag representing the German People’s Party (which had absorbed the right wing of the dissolved National Liberal Party), used the medium of the lexicon, a scientific inventory of terms belonging to a language or distinct body of knowledge, to provide an “objective” description of Germany’s colonial endeavors is significant and speaks to the formative role of the sciences, a narrative-enforcing feature of modern colonial power structures, in helping to produce and provide legitimacy for prevailing notions of colonial rule. Schnee leaves little room for doubt that the Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon was conceived of as contributing in a central way to the social scientific and “liberal humanist” discourses of colonialism.

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Indeed, its epigraph testifies to the fact: “To the German people,” Schnee wrote in dedication, “with the ardent wish that our fatherland may soon return to renewed greatness and resume its cultural work (Kulturarbeit), begun with such success, overseas.”6 Placing these artifacts side by side, the report and the lexicon, generates a striking and unsettling dissonance, the kind of dissonance powerfully articulated by Mbembe in his meditation on “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” an argument recently revived by Teju Cole in his description of the paradox of mournability.7 The following chapter takes up this question of dissonance—the omissions, disavowals, elisions, and enclosures common to the maintenance of the colonial domain, as a theoretical entry point for an exploration of the multivalent creation of colonial territory in German South-West Africa in the years leading up to the genocide, with a focus on two forms of spatialization to be thought alongside one another. The first is juridical, involving the introduction of an international border regime that introduced the status of rightlessness, reinforced locally by asymmetric treaty agreements premised upon the severing of African sovereignties and mediated by the conceptual, cartographic, and material demarcations of the land. The second concerns the deputizing of the landscape through the construction of a network of military fortresses across the territory, and the specular control they transmitted over the terrain. These spatial strategies helped shape an urbanism that in racial and ethnic terms anticipated and in some sense prefigured the apartheid policies of the South African regime, which, after the First World War, governed South-West Africa as a League of Nations mandate, and later as a United Nations trust territory, until 1990. The aim is to map the dissemination of these practices as they spread across and demarcated the landscape and to understand how they shaped the broader territorial project of German colonial South-West Africa in the years leading up to the founding of the Settlement Commission in 1903, and the declaration of martial law in 1904, at the outset of the colonial war. As we know from Itohan Osayimwese’s important study Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, architecture and planning were key channels of exchange in the colonial endeavor.8 This had a marked influence on the trajectories of architectural culture in German-speaking Europe and beyond after the turn of the twentieth century, as a new set of instruments, a new disciplinary vocabulary, and new ways of seeing and approaching the built environment, understood in its relationship to the land, developed from within an ever-widening network of expertise shared among architects, planners, geographers, economists, financiers, and policymakers central to Germany’s imperial project. The landscape of colonial South-West Africa, a space of contested occupation introduced on the register of the imperial imagination as a “settler frontier,” may be understood as a test center in the development of the state’s territorial imagination, a scenario in which German national self-understanding as a spatial project on the scale of the world emerged from its engagements with colonialism. Significantly, those

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entanglements were strongly marked by networks of Indigenous resistance.9 The following chapter will consider this exchange and the ways in which it produced new material and epistemological rubrics for governance, which had wide-reaching implications. It will also speculate on the relation between the colonial administration’s braiding of epistemic and physical control through the twinned practices of dislocation and boundary marking, common to settler colonialism, and the creation of a new system of European land entitlements to African territories in the late nineteenth century that together introduced a spatially oriented form of power that prefigured the apartheid aesthetics of South-West Africa’s post-1907 urbanization.

Entangled histories Between 1907 and 1908, the prominent AEG industrialist and international financier Walther Rathenau twice toured German protectorates in Africa. Traveling in the capacity of economic advisor, Rathenau accompanied the newly elected secretary for colonial affairs and director of the Imperial Colonial Office Bernhard Dernburg on inspection trips of German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika, which included present-day Burundi, Rwanda, the Tanzanian mainland, and Mozambique) and German South-West Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika, present-day Namibia) (Figure  3.1). Dernburg, a leading banker and National Liberal Party member, had been elected in the final months of the genocidal war in the German colony of South-West Africa with a mandate to reform the government’s approach to colonial policy, to reimagine its goals, and to modernize its practices. Upon his return to Berlin, Rathenau published a lengthy essay reporting on the state of the colonies. In the essay, he unfavorably compared Germany’s imperial project to what he saw as the more “successful” model offered by British endeavors in neighboring regions. It was during this time that Rathenau commissioned the German architect Peter Behrens, a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund, to design several AEG industrial centers in Berlin. Behrens’s work for Rathenau, which extended to the design of products manufactured by the company, helped pattern the languages of German Modernism, aided by the powerful platform of the Deutscher Werkbund, with which both Behrens and Rathenau were centrally involved, both of them influencing the Werkbund’s historical role in the development of typebased design.10 Their collaboration marks but one point of connection in a history of transnational entanglements between the architectural avantgarde of pre-First World War Germany and its globalizing empire that has in recent years become the focus of a growing body of critical scholarship. In his essay of September 10, 1908, written on his return to Berlin, Rathenau reflected at length on the war that had ravaged the Ovaherero and Nama nations. He observed, somewhat remarkably, that the urban fabric of the colony seemed to have absorbed and normalized the administration’s

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FIGURE  3.1  Walter Rathenau in conversation with Bernhard Dernburg, on board the Kenilworth Castle, 1908. Source: National Archives of Namibia, NAN, ­Windhoek, no. 27570.

wartime technologies, illustrated most prominently in the capital city of Windhoek. The camp typology, present in South-West Africa if somewhat abstractly since the time of the arrival of the military commander Curt von François in 1889, to which I will turn below, and certainly since the 1898 proclamation that established the native reservations, had regenerated itself in a variety of enclosures, in different forms and on different scales. Despite the fact, he argued, that the “wartime captivity” of the African communities had been abolished, the conditions of their current confinement was nevertheless reminiscent “of the imperial slave camps of antiquity.”11 The “situation of the natives today,” Rathenau wrote, “cannot yet be regarded as normal, but must rather be described as that of a forced proletarianization which in places borders on slavery.”12 In a recent essay, Patrick Hege has suggested that Rathenau’s observations established an important link between the war and its spaces of containment, which included collection camps, deportation centers, and private and state Werften—prison-like worker’s colonies that were situated on Windhoek’s periphery near its industrial sites, a legacy of German Heimat planning, much like the war itself.13 Rathenau’s comments hint at a sublimated awareness of an emergent apartheid urbanism, evident in the examples of the colony’s developing urban centers, ringed by Werften. This

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urbanism was later rearticulated, after 1915, through forced relocations and the spread of strategically located “native townships,” reservoirs of controlled labor overseen by the government of South Africa and the British Crown. This model, it should be noted, continues to mark the space of postindependence Namibia. Fatima Müller Friedman, writing of presentday Windhoek, describes it as an “archipelago urbanism” distinguished by heavily securitized islands of elite and largely white wealth (historical precedent, Figure 3.2).14 Their impoverished and largely Black counterparts, groups of densely packed “informal settlements”of temporary shacks (sanctioned by Windhoek’s municipal government in 2009, along with the SDFN, the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia), can be found, like the Werften once did, ringing the city’s edge.15 In this context, these continued spatial discrepancies point to the persistence of colonial practices and to the endurance of coloniality. The spatializing interventions catalyzed by the European presence in the region, including that of missionaries, merchants, settlers, soldiers, and colonial officials, created a complex and conflict-ridden field of tension to which multiple agents and practices contributed, as the Ovaherero and Nama sought in various organized ways to disrupt further German incursion after 1883. This tension culminated with the declaration of martial law and the infamous annihilation order issued by Lothar von Trotha in 1904. In

FIGURE  3.2  Village colony along Bülowstraẞe, Windhoek, c. 1914. Hofman notes that each of the buildings in this settlement, following a pattern established in ­Garden City planning, was given an individual ground plan and its own roof form and fachwerk detailing. Source: Michael Hofmann, Deutsche Kolonialarchitektur und Siedlungen in Afrika (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2013), 116.

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FIGURE  3.3  Shark Island concentration camp (Konzentrationslager), c. 1905. Source: National Archives of Namibia, NAN, Windhoek, no. 9780.

the genocidal war that followed, fought on two fronts, nearly 80  percent of the Ovaherero population was killed. Most who had survived were then incarcerated in the camps, where many died. Roughly 50  percent of the Nama had been killed, and like the Ovaherero those Nama who survived were deported to concentration camps organized by the military’s construction units, where many perished (Figure 3.3). Contrast these facts to Dernburg’s declaration, as the war against anti-colonial resistance drew to its close in 1907, that whereas “colonization was once carried out by means of destruction, today, we are able to colonize by means of preservation. This includes the missionary and the doctor, the railway and the machine, that is to say, the advanced theoretical and applied sciences in all fields.”16

Mapping empire, silencing sovereignty On May 19, 1884, to forestall a “feared annexation by England,” the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck issued an order for consul-general Gustav Nachtigal to place certain coastal areas of South-West Africa, occupied at the time by established communities of German settlers and merchants, and numerous African communities, under the protection of the government: “For our purposes,” he claimed, “the conclusion of treaties of friendship, trade, and protection (Schutzverträge) are sufficient; through these the necessary means to protect German subjects will be acquired.”17 Not long after, on November 15, 1884, Bismarck convened the first of a series of negotiations

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in Berlin with representatives of fourteen imperial states. The purpose of the convention was to design policy regulating European colonial expansion and trade in Africa. In histories of late nineteenth-century European imperialism, the conference has come to occupy an important position. For many legal scholars, it points to the colonial origins of modern international law.18 The subsequent contract agreed upon by the delegates, known as the General Act of the Berlin Conference, effectively brought an end to self-governance in the remaining autonomous territories of the African continent, with few exceptions. The General Act modernized the practice and juridical discourse of global land grabs, as classical understandings of conquest gave way to the contested concept of “effective occupation.”19 The near complete partitioning of the continent by international treaty, and the free trade zones it established, played a decisive role in rendering irrelevant the notion, traded among missionary, ethnographic, and commercial European accounts, of sub-Saharan Africa as terra incognita.20 Both the contract and the land map that accompanied it—“My map of Africa,” as Bismarck famously called it—both visualized and legislated the notion of African land as a “natural supplement” to the limited reserves of the European commons. These media, the contract and the land map, mark a critical turning point in the development of a new political grammar, noted in 1950 by Carl Schmitt in his analysis of the conference, away from the sovereignty of the nation-state and toward a new legal order, or nomos—a Nomos of the Earth embodied in the General Act’s “free trade” agreements, which mapped the new “international community” onto the resource-rich territory of the African continent.21 Europe came in part to understand itself anew at this conference, through the drafting of international legislation, in direct relation to its annexation of continental Africa, forecasting a transference of territorial signification: “Your map of Africa is really quite nice,” Bismarck stated to the explorer Eugen Wolf, “but my map of Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia, and here … is France, and we’re in the middle. That’s my map of Africa.”22 As a window onto the colonial moment of the late nineteenth century, the contract and its land map indicate a shift in the evolution of the spatial order of empire, its division and distribution of the earth. This shift, as Dirk van Laak has shown, was embodied in a pivot toward infrastructural development, on the opening and cultivation of foreign territories for their material and human resources, or biological capital, through investments in infrastructure.23 As Bismarck’s statement to Wolf reveals, this turning point was reflected in the silencing power of its representational mediums. The partitioning undertaken in these negotiations represents a pivotal moment in the history of Afro-European entanglements, embodied in the system of land entitlements that prevailed at the conference, where zones on the map were reimagined as “spheres of influence,” for which claims to sovereign European rights were asserted. Before any physical presence could be established in certain territories, even before there could be talk

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of precise exploration, geographical prerogatives were declared and the continent divided.24 Though few borders could be drawn in precise detail due to the lack of cartographic data, those that were delimited, however provisionally, mediated two opposing tendencies, namely, division and transnationalization: “The colonial borders thus had both a national and an international character. Unity in general, division in particular.” Both, writes Frank Thomas Gatter, “were European reactions to the resistance of Africa.”25 Thus these borders, while marking a set of shared imperial and political-economic logics, also implicitly registered in their provisionality the power of anti-colonial insurrection that was at the time spreading across continental Africa, a suppressed catalyst for this mapping of empire in Berlin.26 As the legal historian Antony Anghie has shown, one of the least discussed effects of the Berlin Africa Conference was its introduction of an easily translatable logic of colonial rule that “transformed Africa into a conceptual terra nullius.”27 From terra incognita to terra nullius, from land “unknown” to land “uninhabited,” this reconceptualization was at least in part an attempt to silence increasingly troublesome forms of dissent through the subordination of African claims to sovereignty. The lack of accurate cartographic representation that characterized the map used at the conference, in which, as Oliver Simons has noted, the “proverbial white spaces had not been filled,” aided such a silencing.28 If, as Simons argues, maps are figures of spatial imagination, the ambiguous, empty zones on Bismarck’s map mirror colonialism’s desire for effacement; they can also be understood, as Anghie seems to suggest, as the medial site of its juridical creation, the partially blind map a more telling imaginary than the contract for its omissions. In the summer of 1885, Bismarck appointed Heinrich Ernst Göring (father of Hermann Göring, the Nazi War Minister) to the post of Imperial Commissioner of German South-West Africa. A jurist with a doctorate in law, a diplomat in the Foreign Office, and a veteran of the FrancoPrussian War, Göring was dispatched in August of that year with a small company of officers to the protectorate. They landed in Angra Pequena, which had recently been renamed Lüderitzbucht (Lüderitz Bay) after the Bremen-born merchant Adolf Lüderitz, who had settled in the coastal region in 1883 and heavily invested in its development as a trading station. A photographic postcard from 1912 illustrates the aesthetic, material, and urban legacies of Lüderitz’s investments (Figure 3.4), which captures the state of development of the port of Lüderitz Bay, as it existed by that time. What we see is not an indeterminate and vague approach to settlement, as is often claimed of the colony under German administration, but rather, despite the uneven terrain and its rocky outcropping, that this sweep of coastal land had in fact been molded into a rich template of German architectural vernacular, a meeting of Heimatstil, Wilhelmine, and Jugendstil building elements.

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FIGURE 3.4  Postcard of Lüderitzbucht, 1912. Source: Michael Hofmann, Deutsche Kolonialarchitektur und Siedlungen in Afrika (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2013), 163.

If not for the Atlantic landscape, the images might be portraits of any industrializing town in German-speaking Central Europe. Discrete multistory buildings dominate the picture plane, replete with high-pitched, hip-gabled roofs, flared eaves, sloping eyelid dormers of clay tile, ubiquitous white plastered cement-brick walls, fachwerk detailing, quoining corner treatments, and the occasional tower and turret. A similar architectural vocabulary likewise distinguished the colonial port city of Swakopmund, north of Lüdertiz Bay, if with stronger inflections of the neobaroque style. On July 10, 1909, a German émigré penned a letter to the German Colonial Women’s League, describing her arrival at this port in South-West Africa. “On March 22, 1908,” she wrote, “the ‘Admiral’ put into Swakopmund harbor on schedule. My first impression was that it wasn’t as barren and hopeless a place as I had expected. I was met at the ship by the husband of my friend. After a tour through Swakopmund we retired to the Hotel Kaiserhof where everything was well appointed and very European.”29 What she thought of the architectural remnants of the town’s concentration camp, erected in 1905, is not known. In his recent study Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany, John Philip Short argues that the approach to settlement planning in South-West Africa was “marked by failure and delusion.”30 In his text, Short underscores the lack of any sustainable results on the part of the German colonial administration. “The brief history of settlement in South-

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West Africa in particular,” he writes, “was mired in scandal and failure … A nearly indiscernible trickle of settlement in the Windhoek area began, only to end,” he concludes, “in a string of failures and lawsuits and a dire tale of proletarianization.”31 The reader, however, is left with little sense of the influence of the colonial administration and its European commercial affiliates on the landscape and urban environment of modern Namibia, as upon the cultural, political-economic, and kinship structures of Namibia’s numerous pre-colonial polities. Geraróid Ó Tuathail, in his seminal study Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space, describes the early efforts in the technical creation of colonial territory, in the form of land surveys and other cartographic representations, as an “active writing of the earth” by a colonizing state, in which the imprints left by these regimes endure in the land.32

Lines of demarcation: The land treaty Through abstract diplomacy, uneven trading, and on the ground border marking, the most distant and diverse regions of Germany’s protectorates were sites of concentrated and extractive activity. In South-West Africa, the initial process of delimiting the colony as German territory, the partitioning of the landscape, evolved over a number of years through a variety of treaties. Some of these were negotiated with African leaders, often after a show of violent military force by the German Schutztruppe, and others in the form of diplomatic agreements between neighboring European sovereignties. Both of these practices enclosed a terrain that for thousands of years had been home to the pastoralist Nama, Damara, and San peoples. After the fourteenth century, immigrating Bantu groups began to populate the region, and during the eighteenth century the Oorlam arrived, including the Ovaherero driven out by European expansion across the Cape Colony. In December of 1886, a treaty was signed with the Portuguese government demarcating the northern boundary of the German colony. The agreement enclosed the northern regions by drawing a line between the two sovereign territories that followed the Kunene River, from its estuary to the top of the Ruacana Falls. The boundary then stretched eastward in a straight line that ran from the Ruacana Falls to the middle of the Kubango-Okavango region, then eastward to Andara, then to the Katima Mulilo rapids on the Zambezi, not far from Victoria Falls.33 It is the same border that today separates Namibia from Angola. Effa Okupa, a historian of African customary law, has argued that discussions in Berlin regarding the protectorate’s borders were partly motivated by the interests of the Foreign Office to forge a route that would have linked South-West Africa, on the South Atlantic Coast, to German East Africa, on the Indian Ocean.34 To cross from one territory to the other meant traversing Central Africa, and crossing the Zambezi. In the hope of a route being laid, Germans had begun to concentrate their settlement

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activities in the northeastern regions of the colony. In 1884, C. G. Büttner, an associate of Göring’s, articulated these ambitions in an article for the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung. “The significance of the colony,” he wrote, “will only become fully manifest if one does not take a narrow look at the situation, but instead looks upon it as a way of accessing Africa’s interior.”35 The settlement scheme as infrastructural link was frustrated, however, when Britain annexed Bechuanaland (present-day Botswana), thus ruling out any substantial eastward expansion of German colonial territory.36 The southern and eastern borders were later fixed by treaty with the signing of the Anglo-German agreement of July 1, 1890. The lines drawn with this protocol created the border that today separates Namibia from Botswana and South Africa. Enduring imprints, indeed. Upon their arrival in the protectorate in 1885, Göring and his fellow soldiers were originally housed at the mission station at Otjimbingwe. Göring was the first to engage Maharero kaTjamuaha, an important Ovaherero leader, in discussions over land contracts. For colonial parliamentarians in Berlin, it was seen as a great achievement when Maharero agreed to a protection treaty that ceded large tracts of land to the Germans. It was one of many such Schutzverträge that served to apportion the territory into crown, settler, commercial, concession, and missionary districts.37 The colonial administration initially established its presence in the colony through such treaty arrangements, which claimed to supply protection for its South-West African signatories. What the Schutzverträge meant by protection, however, often took the form of a wildly uneven exchange of malfunctioning and outdated arms for land and cattle. In most cases, the treaties were written in German and English, and occasionally in Afrikaans, and often without the consultation of group leaders, whose designated interpreters and negotiators at the signings were in most instances missionaries. Many of the region’s missions functioned in this capacity as the mediators of colonial expropriation, helping to cultivate the resignification of the territory. As interlocutors, the missions were a key part of the machinery of this process, and helped to introduce a property regime and a concept of land ownership built paradoxically upon dispossession and permanent debt. As Okupa notes, African signatories were typically not given copies of the texts, except in rare ceremonial cases, and few were made fully aware of the debts imposed by the agreements: in all cases, the treaties created obligations for their Namibian signatories yet conferred no rights upon them.38 Many of the later treaties also included clauses that required the conscription of select young men to the lower ranks of the Schutztruppe. As an aesthetic, these colonial strategies of resignification targeted multiple sites, sets of practices, and bodies. The two main forces that facilitated these arrangements, the mission and the state, were brought into further alignment in Bismarck’s use of the term Schutzgebiete (protectorates), in place of the more common term colony; a motif linguistically reinforced in the words used to denote the

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contracts (Schutzverträge) and the military troops (Schutztruppe). The term Schutz carries a dual resonance: it means protection, conservation, shelter, prevention, and security, yet its origins derive from military usage; at its root rests the violence that is its corollary. As I have argued elsewhere, this dually resonant and tacitly violent concept was closely linked within the colonial dispositif to the notion of Kulturarbeit or cultural labor—a loosely defined concept of cultivation closely tied to practices of territorial pacification, the ethnic cleansing of the land.39 In his preface to Horst Drechsler’s seminal 1984 study Let Us Die Fighting, Sam Nujoma, the first President of the Republic of Namibia and a prominent anti-apartheid activist, argued that these treaties and the ruthless land and cattle appropriations they entailed, which reduced the pastoralist communities to economic ruin, destroyed their cultural practices, and forced them onto reservations and into indentured service, were accompanied by the relegation of Africans in German South-West Africa “to a status of political rightlessness.”40 The colonial Governor Theodor Leutwein’s term for this multivalent strategy was “tribal dissolution,” of which the “transfer of all African land slowly but entirely to the ownership of German settlers” was an essential feature.41 Seen from the perspective of African customary law, the Schutzverträge, which set the stage for the administration’s later policies, were built upon a curious paradox: the land was not the property of the traditional leaders to convey, their duty by and large was only to see that it was properly shepherded.42 For many of the region’s pre-colonial polities, there was no concept of private ownership, neither of the land nor of ownership over what one had not produced with one’s own hands. They had rights, Okupa notes, only in the products cultivated through their own labor, which included their dwellings and their cattle, which were taken, along with the rich grazing lands so crucial for their economies, in mass numbers by the Germans. What the pre-colonial communities in South-West Africa had in common “was that land was owned by the community as a whole. Land utilization in pastoral regions was communal, whereas permanent usufruct was granted to arable plots in the north. This, very broadly, was the political and economic matrix into which German colonialism inserted itself.”43 Administratively, what became its formal system of land alienation began in 1883, when Lüderitz obtained tracts of land from Joseph Fredericks in the south of the territory. This strategy of land appropriation, together with the techniques that shaped its practice, ultimately led to a widespread, multipositional war of resistance to German rule by the Nama and Ovaherero nations, which had disastrous consequences. At the time of Lüderitz’s arrival, South-West Africa’s pre-colonial populations were primarily settled across the vast desert lands of the interior, along the grass steppe of the savannah east of the great Namib Desert, which runs along the Atlantic coast the entire length of present-day Namibia. The Ovaherero nations and the Damara were settled in the central and northwestern regions of the territory, while the Ovambo communities, who were mostly cultivators

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and agriculturalists, settled the north, extending into what is now Angola. The Ovaherero who belong to the Bantu ethnic group, had migrated to SouthWest Africa from central and eastern Africa after the fifteenth century and eventually came to occupy large swaths of central South-West Africa, from what is now Windhoek to Otavi. They were semi-nomadic pastoralists whose economy, before colonization, was based on the rearing of large cattle herds. The political structures of the Ovaherero shifted markedly at the end of the nineteenth century, under pressure from German intervention and internal wars with the Ovambo. This period saw the rise of a central Ovaherero captaincy (in Otjiherero the word is omuhona, meaning “big man”) under Maharero kaTjamuaha and his son, the iconic Samuel Maharero, who later consolidated his position by collaborating with the Germans in suppressing the 1896 Nama rebellion against German rule (Figure 3.5).

FIGURE  3.5  Samuel Maharero, the insurrectionary leader of the Ovaherero. Postcard­stamped June 14, 1906. Printed by Franz Spender, Hamburg. © Deutsches Historisches Museum / S. Ahlers PK 2015/1068.

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Numerous Namaqua groups, who belong to the Khoisan ethnic group, many from the Nama and Witbooi subgroups, populated southern SouthWest Africa with the Orlams, who had migrated from the Cape Dutch province of South Africa in the early nineteenth century, driven out by European expansion. In the middle of that century, a multi-decade conflict broke out between the Ovaherero and the Orlam and Nama groups, over land, cattle, and water rights.44 This period witnessed the emergence of Hendrik Witbooi as a Nama leader, who initially established his position through raids on other Nama groups and on Ovaherero settlements (Figure  3.6). The Rehobothers, a Europeanized group originally from the Cape, settled in the central region, establishing their community south of Windhoek in the 1870s. There were also five groups of Kovango, a subgroup of the Bantu— the Kangwali, Mbunza, Sambyu, Mbukushu, and Geiriku—in the north. The territory’s oldest inhabitants, the nomadic San, lived along the edges of the Omaheke and Kalahari deserts. As Katjavivi notes, these were separate societies with distinct cultures and areas of settlement, but who interacted with one another considerably, primarily through trade. On August 25, 1883, Lüderitz purchased the site that would become Lüderitzbucht, a region of Namaqualand, from Josef Frederiks II (whose Nama name was !Khorebeb-llNaixab), a leader of the !Aman, a subgroup

FIGURE  3.6  Left to right: Samuel Isaak, Captain Hendrik Witbooi, Governor ­Theodor Leutwein, Major Joachim Friedrich von Heydebreck, and District Officer Duft, adjudicator, 1896. Source: Bundesarchiv, image 146-2006-0317 / o. Ang.

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of the Oorlam, for sixty rifles and five-hundred pounds in gold. Little more than one year later, owing to financial difficulties, Lüderitz solicited the German government for an exchange of his investments. After negotiations led by Göring’s predecessor, Gustav Nachtigal, the “Treaty of Protection and Friendship between the German Empire and the Rulers of Bethany, South West Africa” was signed in October of 1884.45 The treaty brought the land acquisition previously made by Lüderitz under government control in exchange for the assurance of imperial protection for Josef Frederiks and the !Aman communities he represented. “As the external symbol of this protective friendship,” the treaty stated, “the German flag will be raised” at Lüderitz Bay.46 Less than three weeks later, Bismarck convened the first meeting of the Berlin Africa Conference at his residence on Wilhelmstrasse. These treaties, the borders they drew, the myriad disputes they generated, and the agents whose interlocutory role provoked what over time would become a nearly complete transfer of sovereignty, prepared the ground, both figuratively and literally, for the juridical and administrative policies that catalyzed the multifront, anti-colonial uprising of the Ovaherero and Nama nations, and shaped the urban development of the colony in the ensuing years. This began in earnest after the arrival of the Schutztruppe, which played an equally vital role marking the space of South-West Africa. The military architecture that their building units established across the territory, ring-fenced by garrisons and watchtowers before the declaration of war, provided the colonial state with a spatial template upon which to model its administrative and planning practices. Architecture, as Itohan Osayimwese has argued, “was part of the field of representation that, together with actual colonial institutions, reproduced and naturalized structures of power.”47 It also helped to construct the territory upon which those structures of power embedded themselves.

No refuge: Fortification and the militarycartographic gaze In 1888, in an effort to resist further land expropriations, Maharero broke off the treaty he had signed with Göring, who, under pressure from Ovaherero raids, was forced to retreat to Walvis Bay. It was on this occasion, due to the Ovaherero’s sustained and tactically organized resistance, that the first contingent of the Schutztruppe, the colonial military force, was dispatched by Berlin to the southwestern coast of Africa to “stabilize” the territory, under the supervision of General Curt von François. Already by this time, as Adam Blackler notes, ongoing struggles with Ovaherero and Nama forces had catalyzed policymakers in Berlin “to seek immediate solutions to the instability” of the colony, as a result, Germany’s military presence in the region, inaugurated by the arrival of François, “began to grow exponentially

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after 1889.”48 Although a variety of factors informed German imperial strategy in South-West Africa before the turn of the century, including investment constraints, regional and international trade agreements, interEuropean colonial competition, and German domestic politics, the growth of anti-colonial movements in the 1890s, distinguished by the influence of Hendrik Witbooi, a Nama leader, also strongly shaped imperial strategy and the modalities of settlement that emerged with it. Blackler’s recent scholarship, which charts Witbooi’s influence on the evolution of German policy in the region, has made important inroads on this subject.49 Witbooi’s variegated forms of anti-colonial engagement, which included highly organized “irregular” warfare, letters to European diplomats and newspapers, attacks on rival African communities that cooperated with the colonial administration, the disruption of popular trade routes, and seeking common ground with missionaries, “not only exposed the inaccuracies of European pre-colonial beliefs, but also pressed German administrators to centralize and expand their occupation” of the region.50 The appearance of a small contingent of the Schutztruppe under the command of François in 1889 was the first sign of such an expansion. A decorated veteran of the FrancoPrussian War and a military cartographer, François had spent the previous several years surveying the German colonies of Togo and Cameroon on behalf of the Foreign Office. He formally served as Schutztruppe commander and governor of the colony from 1890 until 1894. Major Theodor Leutwein replaced him, serving as governor until 1905. Revealingly, the troops that were dispatched with François at the end of the 1880s consisted mainly of officers from the Engineer Corps (Ingenieur-Korps) and Fortress Construction units (Festungsbau-Offiziere), who had volunteered for service in the colony, and who remained in large numbers after active duty as settlers and reservists.51 After 1907, many of them were gifted deeds to considerable tracts of Indigenous land in Windhoek, to commemorate the soldiers’ service in the war. In 1903, the colonial publicist Paul Rohrbach, a fellow pastor with Friedrich Naumann at Germany’s Inner Mission, was appointed Settlement Commissioner (Siedlungskommissar) in the South-West African protectorate. It was through this relation that Naumann, a co-founder of Deutscher Werkbund, helped introduce the land tactics of the German colonial administration in South-West Africa, Germany’s “true” settler colony, to the cultural and design reform movements of Central Europe. Notably, many of Rohrbach’s publications reveal a robust concern with notions of racial and cultural difference, seen from the Weberian standpoint that I have discussed elsewhere. Rohrbach’s contribution to the project of colonial settlement stands out in this regard for its model of the use of land policy as an instrument of control, to shape and police space according to racial distinctions. The transfer of deeds to German veterans aligned seamlessly with Rohrbach’s positions. In 1907, Naumann’s liberal-leaning press Hilfe, which also ran a popular magazine (die Hilfe), commissioned a study of the colonial economy by Rohrbach. In this study, the director of settlement

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planning, speaking of the mass land transfers that occurred in the aftermath of the war, argued that “the native tribes” of the colony: Must withdraw from the lands on which they have pastured their cattle and so let the white man pasture his cattle on these same lands. If the moral right of this position is questioned, my answer is that for people of the cultural standard of the natives, the loss of their unrestrained barbarism and their development into a class of workers in the service of and dependence upon the whites is primarily a law of existence to the highest degree.52 Rohrbach’s language bore much in common with General von Trotha’s and that of his predecessor François. The early contingent of troops that accompanied François were dispatched to the protectorate with several interlocking tasks: the first, to subdue the Ovaherero uprising in Otjimbingwe; the second, to survey and map the territory; and the third, to establish a system of fortresses across the territory, to bring its various zones of German settlement into networked communication. Their first military fort was sited at Tsaobis, renamed Wilhelmfeste by François, a trading station located along a cattle track that had once been an important ancient trade and migration route, expanded as a gravel road by the troop’s engineers. The construction of Fort François followed that of Wilhelmfeste. In an effort to draw firm, policeable borders around Ovaherero and Nama land, François, supported by a second contingent of Schutztruppe, moved the force inland to Otjomuise, then to Windhoek, to create a strategic centerpoint, and symbolic barrier, between the Nama, largely located in the south, and the Ovaherero settled primarily in the central and northern regions. The Orlam leader Jonker Afrikaner had established Windhoek as an urban settlement fifty years earlier, and had given the town its Cape Dutch name.53 François’s tactical movement into the area, which sought to segregate the two most populous South-West African polities from one another, introduced military-driven urbanization as a tool to gain control over freedom of movement. This practice would sharply contour administrative policy in the years that followed. Not long after the military’s relocation, Fort Windhoek (later renamed the Alte Feste, as it is known today), was constructed on the site (Figure 3.7). The garrison’s first stone was laid on October 18, 1890, around which South-West Africa’s capital city developed. The Alte Feste— the architectural centerpiece of François’s strategy—was completed in 1893. Later, during the war years, the fort’s militarized perimeter served as the site of a concentration camp, a densely packed and easily surveillable system of pontoks (beehive shaped dwellings typically constructed by women), likely built by those incarcerated in the camp, laid out on a grid established by the fort’s engineering unit (Figure 3.8). To further secure Germany’s land captures (Landnahme), François and his successor Leutwein oversaw the construction of numerous military

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FIGURE 3.7  Interior courtyard of Alte Feste, September 2017. Photo: author.

garrisons, spread by the engineering and construction units across the occupied territory. Many of these garrisons, which signified and served to consolidate German rule, were constructed to enable colonial surveillance (the gathering and policing of cartographic data) and to enhance the military’s tactical advance. Revealing in their manifold functionality, they often also housed district administration offices and, after 1905, police headquarters for each district. The forts were typically equipped with hospital wings; bakeries; abattoirs; refectories; and ammunition, uniform, and medical reserve depots, and most were large enough to accommodate officers and soldiers of differing ranks.54 Architecturally, the garrisons constructed under François’s and Leutwein’s tenures generally reflected small-scale adaptations of the ancient Roman fort typology or castra, a fortified military camp.

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FIGURE  3.8  Prisoner of war camp at the foot of Alte Feste, Windhoek, c. 1905. Source: National Archives of Namibia, NAN, Windhoek, no. 2270.

Most featured linear ground plans, marked at intervals with gates and corner firing towers or specula (from the Latin specere, to look).55 Like their cartographic corollary, these specula helped figure a paradigm of vision and spatial knowledge coded by colonialism. This paradigm was materialized in the forts’ multifunctional and specular modalities. The fort at Grootfontein, begun in 1896, was completed in 1905 when a firing tower was added to its long and low defense walls. Considered a heritage site, the garrison is indexed on the List of National Monuments of Namibia. Fort Naiams, between Lüderitz and Keetmanshoop, was erected in 1898. Construction on Fort Warmbad, which played a prominent role in subduing Nama resistance in the southern regions of the colony, began several years later, and was complete by 1905, on ground occupied by missionaries since the early 1800s (Figure  3.9).56 The Warmbad barracks, situated in the Southern Kalahari close to the border with South Africa, enabled exchange between the two regimes and was established as a key part of the ring of military posts along the border. It likewise provided protection and surveillance for the concession companies that had partitioned this region. By 1893, almost the entire territory along the eastern slopes of the Karasberge, which had been occupied by numerous pastoralist communities, had been acquired by eight concession companies.57 The Warmbad garrison served to anchor and centralize this particular nexus of occupation. With its starkly austere façade and imposing watchtower, the fort loomed over the arid landscape, augmenting the garrison’s administration of space, both symbolic and material, with its specular reach and its concentration of the colonial field of vision.

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FIGURE 3.9  Fort Warmbad, c. 1908. Warmbad featured a main observation tower, with several small basic buildings completing the military complex. Source: ­Michael Hofmann, Deutsche Kolonialarchitektur und Siedlungen in Afrika (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2013), 106.

The construction of mission houses often accompanied the building of the garrisons, and towns developed between these two points of state and church oversight. The architectural aesthetics of the mission houses, I should note, point in material ways to the role of the missionaries in the creation of a colonized landscape. Many of them had preceded colonial occupation and could thus offer examples of building practices that were suited to the climate and the capacity of local materials, and provided models for later German settlement. Osayimwese shows how these figures—missionaries, settlers, scientific attachés—contributed to the colonial designed environment and between them added to the discourse on how it best might function; in doing so, she argues, they helped shape local systems of colonial power.58 In 1881, the director of the Berlin Mission Society, Hermann Theodor Wangemann, provided a clear example of this process when he proudly noted that the missionaries of South-West Africa “reported freely on the intentions and movements of the Indigenous enemy which no one else could have done.”59 Wangemann’s statement illustrates the way in which the Lutheran mission, built on a rejection of “heathen” cultures, was mobilized to help legitimize “an active battle” against Africans.60 His observation brings the military’s watchtowers and their police function into direct dialogue with the “pastoral” occupation of the mission house, pointing to the spatial character of what Foucault, in his late lectures, would call the “pastoral function” of modern

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power, an approach to governing based on the principle of subordination and the promise of salvation.61 If we think of the shared practices enabled by these two architectural typologies of the mission house and the military fort, practices that deputized the landscape, light is shed anew on the interlocking concepts of refuge, conversion, and cultivation common both to colonial discourse and the missionary enterprise, and new links established between the two. Not long before his death, Witbooi, who was killed in a raid on German forces, described in a letter to a local district officer his resolve to take up arms against the Germans: “Thus I now sit in your hand and peace will be at one and the same my death and the death of my nation,” he wrote. “For I know that there is no refuge for me under you.”62 Six decades later, in 1968, Frantz Fanon addressed this brutal absence of refuge at the center of colonial power. “Colonialism,” he wrote, “is not a thinking machine, nor a body with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state and it will only yield when confronted with an even greater violence.”63 For Witbooi, the mission and the colonial state, both of which had penetrated African territory under the promise of refuge and protection, were equally culpable for the shift to rightlessness that the African communities found themselves in—a rightlessness structured, in part, not through expulsion but rather through increasingly surveilled enclosure. The experience was a radical severing of sovereignty that was signified both in their forced relocation to reservations (a policy initiated by the missions and enacted by the administration in 1898) and in the ambient violence embodied in the fort typology that policed the landscape—or, rather, imbued the landscape with police functions—and which signified the foreclosure of their previously free mobility. Fort Namutoni, an important node in this system of surveillance and landscape partitioning, was completed in 1902; this fort marked the northernmost point of the colonial territory. Fort Tsumeb, located near the site of ancient copper mines, protected the northern region and its mineral riches against the uprising Ovambo. Fort Sesfontein, in Damaraland, was completed in 1902.64 There were also forts at Okahandja and Omaruru, highdensity regions with long-established pre-colonial settlements. The military station at Gochas, built between 1895 and 1911, positioned at the edge of the Kalahari, marked the border zone with South Africa and served as a critical border control station for the colonial administration (Figure 3.10). These forts, which often included artillery sighting and ranging instruments, laid an imposing military grid across the land and were linked by a coordinated system of heliographs, which operationalized the elements and further intensified the environmental effect of the grid. These, along with the heliographs, ensured that each of the fortresses that spanned the contested Ovaherero Nama, and Ovambo territories were joined to one another through a series of communicating media, creating a network of enclosures and perspectival oversight (Figure 3.11). This military-technical apparatus was dually resonant of the violence, at once epistemic and

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FIGURE  3.10  Postcard of Fort Gochas, c. 1906. The fort was originally planned as a four-wing complex with four corner firing and observation towers, but only one was erected, along with the troupe’s quarters. The building was constructed primarily­of air-dried bricks. Source: Michael Hofmann, Deutsche Kolonialarchitekturund Siedlungen in Afrika (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2013), 77.

FIGURE  3.11  Exercise on quick-firing gun, c. 1903. Source: Paul Rohrbach, ­Bundesarchiv, image 137-003182 / Rohrbach.

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physical, of the territorial imperative seeded within German colonialism. “That the natives were owners of their land,” François once remarked, “free to do as they pleased, could not be disputed by words, but only by armed might.”65 Through a process of representation by the visual-military technologies of the Schutztruppe’s interventions, both the landscape— conceptually reproduced by the troop’s mapping and artillery sighting equipment as a field of objective visibility—and colonial sight became panoramic, “with an eye,” as John Noyes writes, that could “focus at will on the smallest detail.”66 The terrain, indexed by scientific practices military in character and reproduced by these techné, was transformed into a richly “signifying space” for the European gaze. Friedrich Ratzel, the Leipzig University geographer and colonial propagandist, who introduced the term Lebensraum into geographical thought, understood “the multidimensional nature of such description as proper to scientific discourse,” and, it can be added, as shaped by the colonial field.67 Although the aesthetics and ground plans of the fort typology varied, often depending on the intended use of the station, certain precedents were set by the Alte Feste, including the requirement that each station be ringed by 400 feet (120 meters) of cleared land around its perimeter, with several firing posts on all sides. The forts at Namutoni, Omaruru, Okahandja, Gobabis, and Gibeon belonged to what was perhaps the most elemental Urform of the typology, built as large rectangular structures enclosing a single courtyard, with corner firing towers.68 The Alte Feste in Windhoek, modeled on an early Roman military garrison, was sited atop a hill overlooking what would become South-West Africa’s capital city—Jonker Afrikaner’s site of settlement reconceived by François as a kind of cordon sanitaire to divide the Ovaherero from the Nama and to restrict what had been until then the free movement of the local African populations. The fort was supplemented with an infrastructure of watchtowers; the first of which was built on what is now called Eros Mountain. It was one of several major observation posts that after 1893 would ring the area. Incidentally, that same year also marked the battle of Hornkranz, near Windhoek, where the Witbooi encampment was situated, which François had sought to destroy. In interviews given after the battle, the military commander portrayed the Schutztruppe as the only barrier that lay between “civilization and savagery.”69 It is through this image of the barrier that we might better understand the later urban effect of the Alte Feste. This spatial analytic of raciality, as a form of colonial territoriality, is constitutive of these fort architectures and the racialized urban morphologies, such as the white center and the Black periphery, that followed in their wake. While Windhoek’s emergent colonial urbanism owed much to the financial investments that came only during and after the war of 1904– 07, its urban morphology, as a model of spatial segregation and apartheid settlement planning whose effects persist to this day, was first etched into

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the landscape by François, in a move to foreclose a potential anti-colonial alliance, as he imagined a barricade of white settlement anchored by the Alte Fest and its allied watchtowers. As James Corner has written, space “becomes territory through acts of bounding and making visible.”70 The partitioning of the land overseen by Göring, François, and Leutwein, facilitated first by treaty and then by fort, introduced a set of spatial strategies that would come to define German rule in South-West Africa, and would, I suggest, form the basis, both conceptually and materially, for the subsequent urban and architectural development of the territory. Within the framework of colonial settlement, these strategies worked space in prismatic ways. Take for example the heliograph. It enabled communication across the territories, from one garrison to another, but it also mapped space according to Western epistemologies, and in this way reinforced the panoramic effect of the colonial survey. These techné, like the museum, enhanced what Tony Bennett has called “the perspectival mobility of the modern observer.”71 Yet, the regime of visibility they helped shape also conjured specific spatial and material counterpoints in South-West Africa: the reservations of 1898, the camps of 1904–08, and the postwar Werften—enclosures that, once recognized as belonging to this movement in perspective, provincialize Bennett’s “modern observer.” This enterprise, the enclosing of the territory with defensive infrastructure, was a military-architectural response to the resistance of the Ovaherero and Nama peoples to colonial occupation. Leutwein, François’s successor, followed his approach and covered the landscape of southern South-West Africa with a second network of military garrisons, erected to subdue the increasingly skillful raids organized by Witbooi on German settlements and supply convoys. After a large-scale attack by Leutwein in 1894 against a contingent of Nama combatants in the Naukluft Mountains, Witbooi was compelled to sign a treaty of “protection” with the colonial government. This agreement reinforced what the urban development of Windhoek, beginning in 1890, had been tasked with achieving—it served to isolate the southern Nama from the central Ovaherero preventing a coordinated resistance that might have averted the genocidal war that followed. What began with a set of vague borderlines drawn in Berlin and further delimited by the early treaties and diplomatic agreements became, after François’s arrival with the Schutztruppe, a near complete partitioning of the land. This transition, which occurred in the 1890s, underscores a shift toward the “totalizing concept of displacement” that later became central to German policy in the region.72 Anticipated by asymmetrical treaty agreements, this drift was mediated through architectural and infrastructural channels. First were the forts and their watchtowers, and the network of expertise their construction required in the manufacture of territory. Rohrbach’s corollaries in eastern Prussia, directors of the board of the Royal Prussian Settlement Commission (RPSC), described their own efforts of

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territorial pacification and internal colonization, on historically Polish lands, as having been achieved through settlement technics (Ansiedlungstechnik), an aggregation of practices focused on the reform and rationalization of the rural domain and the legislated exclusion of its Slavic inhabitants, both of which, the land and the people who resided on it, were characterized in racialized terms, as wild, ill-managed, and primitive. A similar understanding of cultivation through settlement circulated throughout Rohrbach’s numerous publications. “The two basic questions of the colonial economy,” he argued in 1907, “are that of land use on the one hand, and indigenous use on the other.”73 However, he reasoned, to establish and maintain a productive colony of “white settlement” in South-West Africa, on land occupied by an “uncultured and predatory native tribe, it is possible that actual eradication may become necessary under certain conditions.”74 The territorial imagery and imaginings that were produced and reproduced by the treaty regime at the Berlin Africa Conference, and the military grid and its territorial marking of inside and outside, much like the model villages designed by Fischer for the Prussian Settlement Commission, encoded state violences in ways that were citational, performative, and material, they reproduced norms and practices that were later rearticulated in the region’s segregated urban and hinterland development. The inscription of a domesticated and “salvaged” frontier, an imagined frontier that spanned geographies and racial projects, was integral to this process. A lesson from Achille Mbembe seems relevant here, to end where we began. In South-West Africa, the civil administration and its planners “had attempted to transform the original relationship of violence,” the perpetual state of dispossession that is colonialism, “this first relationship of confrontation, into a permanent social relationship and an inescapable foundation for all colonial institutions of power.”75 In such a system, territorial planning became a “function of the maintenance of violence,” part of a network of encounters between multiple and cumulative forms of extraction and exclusion. However, the property regimes that characterized the administration’s early approach to settlement planning in the region, as illustrated by Rohrbach, were partly structured by the insurrectionist replies to its interventions, as was the partitioning of continental Africa at the Berlin Conference.

Acknowledgments This research has been supported by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, the Social Science Research Council, and the gta, the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the ETH Zurich. A very special thanks to my research assistant, Carolina Contreras Alvarez. I would like to express my profound gratitude to Itohan Osayimwese, for the guiding example of her scholarship and for her enduring support.

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Notes 1 Heinrich Schnee (ed.), Deutsches Kolonial-Lexicon, 3 vols. [1920] (Wiesbaden: WWA Bernd Suppes, reprint 1996). 2 T. L. O’Reilly and A. J. Waters, for the South African Government, “Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany [1918],” Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book, 2nd edn., ed. Jeremy Silvester and Jan-Bart Gewald (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 3 Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (London: J. Currey; Addis Ababa: OAU, Inter-Africa Cultural Fund; Paris: UNESCO Press, 1988). 4 E. H. L. Gorges, in a cover letter sent with the Blue Book to the South African Prime Minister, quoted in Reinhart Kössler, “From Reserve to Homeland: South African ‘Native’ Policy in Southern Namibia,” Working Paper no. 12 (Windhoek: The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit, November 1997), 4. 5 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 25. 6 Heinrich Schnee, dedication in Deutsches Kolonial-Lexicon, 1, [1]. 7 Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, Razia Saleh, and Jane Taylor (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 19–26; Teju Cole, “Unmournable Bodies,” New Yorker, January 29, 2005, https://www.newyorker.com/cultural-comment/unmournable-bodies (accessed May 10, 2022). 8 Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). 9 See Phillip Prein, “Guns and Top Hats: African Resistance in German South West Africa, 1907–1915,” Journal of African Studies 20, no. 1 (March 1994): 99–121; Adam Blackler, “From Boondoggle to Settlement Colony: Hendrik Witbooi and the Evolution of Germany’s Imperial Project in Southwest Africa, 1884–1894,” Central European History 50 (2017): 449–70; Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999). 10 For more on this subject, see Frederic Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Work Culture before the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 11 Walther Rathenau, “Denkschrift über den Stand des südwestafrikanischen Schutzgebietes,” in Walther Rathenau, Nachgelassene Schriften, vol. 2 (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1928), 103. 12 Rathenau, “Denkschrift über den Stand des südwestafrikanischen Schutzgebietes,” 103. 13 Patrick C. Hege argues a similar line in his recent essay “The German Variation: A Sketch of Colonial Städtebau in Africa, 1884–1919,” in Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Carlos Nunes Silva (London: Routledge, 2015), 165–79.

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14 Fatima Müller-Friedman, “Toward a (Post)apartheid Architecture? A View from Namibia,” Planning Perspectives 23, no. 1 (2008): 40. 15 For more on this, see Fatima Müller-Friedman, “‘Just Build it Modern’: PostApartheid Spaces on Namibia’s Urban Frontier,” in African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective, ed. Steven J. Salm and Toyin Falola (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005): 48–70; Julia C. Obert, “Architectural Space in Windhoek, Namibia: Fortification, Monumentalization, Subversion,” Postmodern Culture 26, no. 1 (September 2015), https://doi.org/10.1353/ pmc.2015.0022; Philip Lühl, “The Production of Inequality: From Colonial Planning to Neoliberal Urbanization in Windhoek,” Digest of Namibian Architecture 10 (2012): 26–31. 16 Bernhard Dernburg, quoted in Wilfried Westphal, Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1984), 252. 17 Otto von Bismarck, cited in Das Staatsarchiv: Sammlung der officiellen Actenstücke zur Geschichte der Gegenwart, ed. Hans Delbrück, vol. 43, no. 8274 (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1884), 248. 18 Matthew Craven, “Between Law and History: The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 and the Logic of Free Trade,” London Review of International Law 3, no.no. 1 (2015): 31. 19 Andrew Zimmerman, “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and its Aftermath,” in German Colonialism in a Global Age, ed. Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 93. 20 Jean Suret-Canale, “Einleitung,” in Protokolle und Generalakte der Berliner Afrika-Konferenz 1884–1885, ed. Frank Thomas Gatter (Bremen: Bremer Afrika Archiv, Übersee-Museum Bremen, 1984), 12. See also Gregor Dobler, “Boundary Drawing and the Notion of Territoriality in Pre-Colonial and Early Colonial Ovamboland,” Journal of Namibian Studies 3 (2008): 7–30. For contemporary accounts of the conference, see John Scott Keltie, The Partition of Africa (London: Edward Stanford, 1893); Arthur Keith, The Belgian Congo and the Berlin Act (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919). For more recent accounts, see also R. J. Gavin and J. A. Bentley (eds./trans.), The Scramble for Africa: Documents on the Berlin West Africa Conference and Related Subjects 1884/5 (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1973); John MacKenzie, The Partition of Africa and European Imperialism 1880–1900 (London: Routledge, 1983); Stig Förster, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Ronald Robinson (eds.), Bismarck, Europe, and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884–1885 and the Onset of Partition (London: The German Historical Institute; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). For an interesting contemporary account of shifts in concepts of land ownership and the practice of land confiscation in the law of continental Europe, see William D. McNulty, “Eminent Domain in Continental Europe,” Yale Law Journal 7, no. 21 (1912): 555–70. 21 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europeaum [1950], trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2003). On his observations in relation to German colonial history, see Andrew Zimmerman, “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and its Aftermath,” in German Colonialism in a Global Age, ed.

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Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), and Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Julia Hell, “Katechon: Carl Schmitt’s Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 84 (2009): 283–326. 22 Bismarck to Eugen Wolf, December 5, 1888. Quoted in Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 123. 23 Dirk van Laak, “Detours Around Africa: The Connection between Developing Colonies and Integrating Europe,” in Materializing Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Project of Europe, ed. Alexander Badenoch and Andreas Fickers (New York: Springer, 2010), 29. Cf. Dirk van Laak, Imperiale Infrastruktur: deutsche Planungen für eine Erschliessung Afrikas 1880 bis 1960 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004). 24 On this process see, Suret-Canale, “Einleitung,” 12–15. 25 Frank Thomas Gatter, Protokolle und Generalakte der Berliner AfrikaKonferenz 1884–1885, ed. Frank Thomas Gatter (Bremen: Bremer Afrika Archiv, Übersee-Museum Bremen, 1984), 70–1. 26 Abdul Rahmann Mohammad Babu also made this point in his 1983 article, “A More Sinister Form of Colonisation,” Africa Now (November 1983): 31–3. 27 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 91; See also Craven, “Between Law and History,” 33. 28 For an excellent discussion of the role of cartography in shaping the colonial spatial imaginary, see Oliver Simons, “Persuasive Maps and a Suggestive Novel: Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum and German Cartography in South-West Africa,” in German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker Langbehn (New York: Routledge, 2010), 165–81. 29 The name on the letter is given only as Frau N., excerpted in Knoll & Hiery, p. 395. 30 John Short, Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 71. 31 Short, Magic Lantern Empire, 71. 32 Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 2. 33 Effa Okupa, Carrying the Sun on Our Backs: Unfolding German Colonialism in Namibia, from Caprivi to Kasikili (Berlin: Lit; London: International African Institute, 2006), 45. 34 Okupa, Carrying the Sun on Our Backs, 63–4. 35 C. G. Büttner, “Deutschland und Angra Pequeña,” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, vol. 15 (1884): 300–303. 36 Horst Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (1884–1915), 3rd edn., pref. Sam Nujoma (Berlin: Akadamie-Verlag, 1986), 31–2.

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37 On the subject of the colonial treaty in the context of modern international law, see Taslim Olawale Elias, Africa and the Development of International Law (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1972), Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), and Henry Jones, “Property, Territory, and Colonialism: An International Legal History of Enclosure,” Legal Studies 39, no. 2 (2019): 187–203. 38 Okupa, Carrying the Sun on Our Backs, 44. 39 Hollyamber Kennedy, “Infrastructures of ‘Legitimate Violence’: The Prussian Settlement Commission, Internal Colonization, and the Migrant Remainder,” Grey Room 76 (Summer 2019): 58–97. 40 Sam Nujoma, “Preface,” in Horst Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, x. 41 Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, 115. 42 Okupa, Carrying the Sun on Our Backs, 85. As Gregor Dobler points out, while colonial and modern borders and notions of territory have received extensive coverage in the literature of African Studies, pre-colonial notions of territoriality and territorial borders have only received scant attention. See Gregor Dobler, “Boundary-Drawing and the Notion of Territoriality in PreColonial and Early Ovamboland,” Journal of Namibian Studies 3 (2008): 9. 43 Wolfgang Werner, “A Brief History of Land Dispossession in Namibia,” Journal of African Studies 19, no. 1 (March 1993): 137. 44 Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia, 1–4. 45 Among its signatories were Nachtigal, Imperial General Consul; Josef Fredericks; four members of the !Aman (or Bethany ethnic group); Heinrich Vogelsang, corporate partner and advisor to Lüderitz; and two missionary interpreters, Johannes Hendrick Bam and J. Christian Goliath. 46 Gustav Nachtigal, “Treaty of Protection and Friendship between the German Empire and the Rulers of Bethany, Southwest Africa,” reproduced in Deutsche Kolonialpolitik in Dokumenten, Gedanken und Gestalten aus den letzten fünfzig Jahren, ed. Ernst Gerhard Jacob (Leipzig: Rengersche Buchhandlung, 1885), 62. 47 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 10. 48 Blackler, “From Boondoggle to Settlement Colony,” 460. 49 On Witbooi, also see Fabian Lehmann, Chapter 5, this volume. 50 See Fabian Lehmann, Chapter 5, this volume. 51 Okupa, Carrying the Sun on Our Backs, 27. 52 Paul Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft: Südwest Afrika (Berlin: Der “Hilfe” Verlage, 1907), 286. 53 Werner Hillebrecht, “Monuments—and What Else? The Controversial Legacy of German Colonialism in Namibia,” in The Cultural Legacy of German Colonial Rule, ed. Klaus Mühlhahn (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 115. 54 Okupa, Carrying the Sun on Our Backs, 104. 55 See Richard Muir, Castles and Strongholds (New York: Macmillan, 1990); Quentin Hughes, Military Architecture (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1974); Paul

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Hirst, “The Defence of Places: Fortification as Architecture,” in Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005), 179–97. 56 See J. R. Masson, “A Fragment of Colonial History: The Killing of Jakob Marengo,” Journal of Southern African Studies 21, no. 2 (June 1995): 247–56. 57 Werner, “A Brief History of Land Dispossession,” 138. 58 Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 12. 59 Hermann Theodor Wangemann, Südafrika und seine Bewohner nach den Beziehungen der Geschichte, Geographie, Ethnologie, Staaten- und KirchenBildung, Mission und des Racen-Kampfes (Berlin: Selbstverlag der Verfassung, 1881), 46; quoted in Ulrich van der Heyden, “Christian Missionary Societies in the German Colonies, 1884/85–1914/15,” in German Colonialism: Race, The Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, ed. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 216. 60 Van der Heyden, “Christian Missionary Societies,” 216. 61 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 103. 62 Fredrick Witbooi, cit. Okupa, Carrying the Sun on Our Backs, 206. 63 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pref. Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 39. 64 Okupa, Carrying the Sun on Our Backs, 30–2. 65 Curt von François, cited in Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, 43. 66 John K. Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884–1915 (Chur: Harwood Publishers, 1992), 215. 67 Noyes, Colonial Space, 217. 68 Michel Hofmann, Deutsche Kolonialarchitektur und Siedlungen in Afrika (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2013), 67. 69 See Blackler, “From Boondoggle to Settlement Colony,” 465. 70 James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 213–52 [222]. 71 Tony Bennett, “Metropolis, Colony, Primitive: Evolution and the Politics of Vision,” in Die “Großstadt” und das “Primitive”: Text-Politik-Repräsentation, ed. Kristin Kopp and Klaus Müller-Richter (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004): 69. 72 Matthew Fitzpatrick, Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 96. 73 Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft, 12. 74 Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft, 288. 75 In this passage, Mbembe is drawing on Frantz Fanon’s argument in “Pourquoi nous employons la violence,” in Œuvres, ed. M. Bessone and A. Mbembe (Paris: La Découverte), 414; Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. L. Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 105–06.

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4 The Palace of King Njoya: Responding to colonial architecture Mark Dike DeLancey

The Palace of King Ibrahim Njoya (r. c. 1887–1933) in Foumban, Cameroon, is well-known to historians of African art and architecture (Figure  4.1).1 Designed and constructed from 1917 to 1922 under the guidance of his advisor, the polymath Ibrahim Njoya, King Njoya’s palace introduced a novel and unique style of architecture to the Grasslands region of western Cameroon. This immediately recognizable building is a must-see for every tourist to the country and was restored by UNESCO in 1981, yet surprisingly little scholarly attention has been devoted to it. Its status as a museum has certainly been considered by Christraud Geary, Steven Nelson, and others.2 Likewise, the written archive maintained there has been explored by Konrad Tuchscherer and before him, more superficially, by Emmanuel Ghomsi, Aboubakar Njiasse Njoya, and Martin Njimotapon Njikam.3 The palaces that preceded King Njoya’s have been studied by Claude Tardits, Henri Labouret, and Christraud Geary.4 But other than a few references here and there, UNESCO reports, and a short pamphlet by Amadou Ndam Njoya, little has been published about the palace.5 Those few who have cast a scholarly glance at the palace of King Njoya have often noted its indebtedness to German colonial architecture, and a myth has grown that it is a direct imitation of the German governor’s residence, commonly referred to as the Schloss, that King Njoya visited in the southwestern city of Buea in 1907 (Figure 4.2). In essence, the story goes that he was so astonished by the Schloss, that upon his return to Foumban

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FIGURE 4.1  The Palace of King Njoya, front façade, 2012, Foumban, Cameroon. Photo: author.

FIGURE 4.2  The governor’s residence, c. 1901–06, Buea, Cameroon. Photo: Otto Schkölziger. Basel Mission Archives, Basel, Switzerland, ref. no. QE-30.016.0005 “Governor’s house in Buea.”

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he ordered a likeness of it built for himself.6 The characterization of the palace’s construction on such a whim may be a more or less distant echo of French perceptions of Njoya as an Oriental despot. In effect, this account continues to place Europeans at the center of the story, with King Njoya and Ibrahim Njoya simply as na(t)ive imitators. It is perhaps this perception of King Njoya’s palace as a second-rate imitation of the colonial exemplar that has led scholars to largely ignore it.7 Jean Gabus stated in a report for UNESCO that, “Externally, this old palace, which is nothing more than a copy of the old German governor’s palace, presents only a secondary interest in appearance.”8 Likewise, Claude Tardits proclaims in his important study le Royaume Bamoum that, “Njoya constructed, beginning in 1917, a residence whose architecture was inspired by that of the seat of the German government in Buea which he admired during his trip to the south in 1907.”9 He then notes that, “its examination will be of little interest for this study.”10 In fact, few authors find the palace worth more than a nod of acknowledgment. As has been argued for modern art in Africa more broadly, the air of inauthenticity disqualified this feat for serious scholarly consideration. Only that which preceded the colonial, or which seemingly denied the colonial, was worthy of attention. I wish to consider this palace explicitly as a politically astute and carefully considered response by King Njoya to the colonial situation. In some sense, this article has been prefigured by Itohan Osayimwese’s shorter publications in which she explores King Njoya’s engagement with German mythologizing through a form of “autoethnography” that includes the construction of stylistically hybrid palaces.11 There has been increasing interest in recent years in postcolonial architecture, as in the recent publication by Manuel Herz, privileging the study of those Europeans who constructed cities and monuments for the newly independent countries of Africa beginning in the 1960s.12 There has also been some interest in colonial architecture in Africa, with Osayimwese’s new publication a welcome addition to that literature.13 There has, however, been little published on architectural responses by Africans in the colonial era, or for that matter the postcolonial, leading to the impression that twentieth-century architecture on that continent is for the most part a European story. Exceptions to this rule do exist, most notably for this study Dominique Malaquais’s study of palace architecture in Bandjoun in the Cameroon Grassfields.14 Yet even then, the isolation of one work from the broader practice throughout the region produces the sense of a unique incident. I instead show that King Njoya’s architectural feat is in fact one of many responses, though I argue a central one, in which Grassfield rulers grappled with modernity and the colonial idiom. King Njoya’s response is unique in its particular expression, but it is far from isolated in its approach as a broader concept.

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King Njoya’s first palace Contrary to the common myth, the current palace was not King Njoya’s first foray into European-style architecture. Indeed, even prior to building in brick, the sixteenth ruler of the Bamum Kingdom in today’s West Region of Cameroon, began to introduce innovations in the palace, constructed from raffia palm ribs and grass thatching with wood supports for the eaves, that he had inherited from his father King Nsangu (d. c. 1887). For instance, in 1906–07 he refurbished the palace with arched portals (Figure 4.3). Such arches were in clear contradiction to the generally rectangular entrances employed both in Foumban and elsewhere in the Grassfields. They were also contrary to the general properties of the materials employed. To craft them, the standard vertical members were cut in a keyhole shape, then concealed behind a façade of flexible raffia palm timbers bent into an arch. These arches reportedly emulated forms seen in an illustrated magazine, most likely in the possession of the Basel Missionaries in Foumban.15 They also resembled the arcades on the first floor of many government buildings in the colonial capital of Douala, though King Njoya had not yet seen them himself (Figures 4.7 and 4.12).

FIGURE  4.3  Renovation of the palace inherited by King Njoya from his f­ather, c. 1906–07, Foumban, Cameroon. Photo: Adolf Diehl. GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Foto Erhard ­Schwerin, Leipzig, Germany, Inv. No. PhMAf1525.

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In 1907, King Njoya traveled to the coast to the economic capital of Douala, then known as Kamerunstadt, and to the political capital Buea. The primary purpose of the trip was to deliver his father’s throne to the German governor as a gift for the Kaiser, honoring an agreement that he had made with a respected German officer, Captain Hans Glauning.16 Upon his return to Foumban, he began replacing the formerly smooth veranda posts of his father’s palace with carved examples, similar to those of other Grassfields palaces, and most notably those of Bamum’s neighbor Bandjoun (Figure 4.4). Christraud Geary suggests that King Njoya would have seen the latter, as his journey to the coast took him through Bandjoun. She furthermore points out that: Palace architecture and decoration reflected the influence and wealth of a kingdom, and the competition for recognition and fame among Grassfields rulers was fierce. Many of them engaged in ambitious building programmes, copying their neighbors’ styles and ideas.17 Thus, King Njoya willingly borrowed from a variety of sources for his architectural innovations, in a process that might be characterized as innovation through appropriation.

FIGURE 4.4  Replacement of the plain veranda supports with sculpted versions at the palace inherited by King Njoya from his father, c. 1908, Foumban, ­Cameroon. Photo: Anna Wuhrmann. Basel Mission Archives, Basel, Switzerland, ref. no. E-30.31.061 “Parade in front of the old palace, which later burned down.”

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In effect, this approach was little different from practices of aesthetic appropriation extending at least as far back as Njoya’s great-grandfather King Mbuembue, who reigned at the turn of the nineteenth century. Geary remarks that in the course of spectacular military conquests over forty-eight neighboring polities, he engaged in “what one might call the appropriation of the ‘means of production,’ when King Mbuembue resettled near the palace artists who were members of subjugated groups famous for their artistry.”18 Similarly, to create the newly carved pillars of his palace, King Njoya is reported to have employed wood carvers from elsewhere in the Grassfields.19 This was not unique to Bamum. Indeed the degree to which artists moved across the Grassfields, working for a variety of patrons, led to the broad dissemination of localized styles, meaning that the possibility of identifying specific styles with specific production centers is nigh futile and often misleading.20 Spurring this artistic mobility was the particularly competitive nature of kingship throughout the region. Replacing the posts on the palace he had inherited from his father, however, was not the only architectural project undertaken by King Njoya after returning from the coast. In 1908, he also constructed a new brick palace just below the steep cliff behind his father’s palace. This building unfortunately no longer exists, but it may be studied by virtue of a few contemporaneous photographs (Figures  4.5 and 4.6). This multistory structure was apparently constructed in one dry season using sun-dried formed mud bricks. It appears to have a three-story central block flanked by two-story wings on three sides. The ground floor sits on a plinth and is completely surrounded by a peristyle with thin cushions at two-thirds of the height of the square-section pillars. Uprights, presumably sawn wood planks, were raised one or two stories above the pillars, carrying the broad eaves of the multiple corrugated metal hipped roofs. There are no apparent railings on any of the floors. The broad eaves and peristyle cast deep shadows on the central core of the building, which would have helped to keep it cool. King Njoya himself described this brick palace in his book, History and Customs of the Bamum, as “more beautiful than all others that have existed,” and that it “resembled a house of the whites; yet he had not yet seen one of their houses when he constructed it. He himself imagined how to build it.”21 This latter statement is clearly untrue as he had recently returned from his journey to Douala and Buea, and had the local examples of the Basel Mission in any case. King Njoya had welcomed the Basel Mission to Foumban in 1904, befriending the missionaries and encouraging them to establish schools in his kingdom. The upper floors of the palace were the king’s living quarters. He described the walls as covered with fabrics, the floors with mats, and the foyer coated with varnish. Njoya likewise boasted of two metal conduits that extended from his private chambers on the upper floors to the ground floor. In one, he would pour water each morning for the servants to bathe. In the second, he poured palm wine when he wished to honor them by filling their cups. King

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FIGURE  4.5  King Njoya’s first brick palace below the palace inherited from his father, c. 1908–09, Foumban, Cameroon. Photo: Eugen Schwarz. Basel Mission ­Archives, Basel, Switzerland, ref. no. E-30.31.072 “Fumban: panorama.”

FIGURE  4.6  King Njoya’s first brick palace, c. 1908–09, Foumban, Cameroon. Photo: Martin Göhring. Basel Mission Archives, Basel, Switzerland, ref. no. ­ E-30.31.074 “New Palace in Fumban.”

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Njoya’s clearly identified aim in building such an extraordinary structure was that “All, great and small, would say, ‘King Njoya surpasses all men in intelligence.’”22 The architect of King Njoya’s remarkable building is unknown, and indeed, as noted above, King Njoya himself took credit for the genius of its creation. Osayimwese perceives this as evidence of Njoya’s awareness “of the peculiarities of Western epistemologies that emphasized independent intellectual achievement.”23 Such claims are, however, commonplace with regard to African royal art and architecture. Art historian Susan Vogel, in particular, has discussed the broader difficulty that Africanists face in ascribing artists to artworks, which tend to become associated with their owners rather than their creators, further complicating the already problematic colonial tendency to discredit local expertise.24 That said, the missionary Eugen Schwarz recorded that the king personally supervised the work, which progressed to completion at a breakneck pace within a mere three months.25 The construction materials employed necessitated new technologies, most notably sun-dried mud brick and sawed wooden planks. It was necessary to establish a sawpit for the latter and a brickworks for the former. The corrugated metal roofing was purchased from the Germans in Douala. Knowledge of building in these materials was acquired locally from the Basel missionaries, who made use of them in building their own structures.26 In constructing this residence in the European style, King Njoya’s workforce ran into difficulties working with the new materials, in particular with how to apply the corrugated metal roofing. King Njoya appealed to his friend, the missionary Schwarz, for technical assistance, which was willingly provided.27 The specific model was almost certainly not the governor’s palace in Buea, as popular myth would have it, but rather the earlier governor’s residence in Douala, built in 1898–1900 to replace a still earlier residence dating from 1893 (Figure 4.7).28 This remained the governor’s residence for only one year, after which the governor relocated to Buea in 1901. The formal similarities of King Njoya’s mud-brick palace and the former governor’s residence in Douala are numerous. Both were surrounded by galleries on multiple levels, and were constructed of brick with hipped roofs. That this palace exceeded the height of the former governor’s residence implies a comparison that favors King Njoya over the German governor. Both buildings featured a heavy peristyle on the first floor with cushions projecting at two-thirds of the height of the pillars, while the roofs were carried on much more slender supports on the upper levels. Central blocks projected from the main bodies of both, though this appears to have been at the back of Njoya’s Palace as opposed to the front of the former governor’s residence. In 1909, soon after King Njoya’s coastal visit, the governor returned to the former residence in Douala after an eruption of the active volcano Mount Cameroon, on the slopes of which stands the Schloss in Buea. In considering

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FIGURE  4.7  District Office in Douala, c. 1895–1912, Douala, Cameroon. ­Photo: Unknown. Basel Mission Archives, Basel, Switzerland, ref. no. E-30.02.010 ­“Governor’s building Duala.”

why King Njoya might have chosen to emulate the former governor’s residence in Douala, rather than the more imposing contemporaneous one, it is instructive to recall that Buea, despite being the political capital, was a sleepy backwater. It was Douala that remained the beating heart of the colony as its economic capital. Indeed, as noted above, the capital of Kamerun only remained at Buea for a short period of eight years, from 1901–09, after which it returned to Douala before eventually becoming fixed at Yaoundé, where it has remained until today.29 Thus, rather than simply being awed by what he had seen in the capital, we may perceive the construction of King Njoya’s brick palace as shrewdly usurping the style long associated with wealth and the public display of power in the colony of Kamerun. The broader model then, was administrative architecture, consisting of a more practical style stripped of ornament and developed for the tropics with wrap-around verandas to protect against the sun and rain.30 It is a heavy and monumental style, quite distinct from the baroque pretensions of the later Schloss in Buea. It is also quite distinct from the prefab wood and iron kits created by several German companies and largely employed for residential structures, although also on occasion for some administrative buildings. Instead, the former governor’s residence in Douala was built of brick covered in plaster expressing a sense of heavy solidity.

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Differing in style, building technique, and materials is another structure built in Foumban at approximately the same time and documented in photographs taken by ethnologist Bernard Ankermann from 1908 to 1909 (Figure 4.8). The exact relationship of this structure to King Njoya’s “house of the whites” is difficult to determine, but it may possibly be identified as the thatched saddleback-roofed building behind the three-story palace (Figure 4.5). As Jonathan Fine has put it, “Governor Seitz described these buildings in December 1909 as a ‘new palace built in a rectangle around a wide clean square. The buildings are built with walls of air-dried clay bricks a few feet thick, covered with thatched roofs’.”31 Other photographs in the series capturing walls under construction indicate that at least this building was not built with rectangular bricks in the European style, but rather appears to use unshaped clods of earth set in a thick mud matrix. This corresponds more closely to construction techniques in northern Cameroon, or those employed in constructing the ramparts that once surrounded the city of Foumban. Stylistically, the long line of earthen pillars covered by a thatched saddleback roof represents nothing more than the transformation of the palace inherited from King Njoya’s father into a new adobe construction method (compare Figure 4.8 with Figure 4.4). In effect, we are witnessing the development of a series of responses to the novelty of European architecture, from interventions in the old palace, to its translation into new materials,

FIGURE  4.8  Saddleback building with earthen pillars, c. 1908–09, Foumban, ­Cameroon. Photo: Bernhard Ankermann. Ethnologisches Museum der Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany, VIII A 5435.

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and finally the construction of a truly European-inspired brick palace. But one must ask if King Njoya’s first brick palace was anything more than just an imitation of the former governor’s residence in Douala?32

The Pagoda King Njoya’s construction of a European-style brick palace seems extraordinary when seen as a unique example, but it was not in fact without precedent. King Njoya may have been further influenced by the 1905 palace, or Pagoda as frequently referenced, of the British-educated Douala ruler Auguste Ndumbe Manga Bell (r. 1897–1908) (Figure 4.9).33 Constructed in 1905, this building set the precedent for a Cameroonian ruler incorporating European formal elements and materials. It employed multilevel construction, heavy piers with thin cushions surmounted by thinner columns, and contracting forms built largely in imported German baked brick covered with white plaster.34 Although the massing is distinct from that of King Njoya’s mud-brick palace, constructed a mere three years later, the two certainly share much the same vocabulary of constituent elements. The Bell lineage was one of several leading families in the area of Douala, which gained ascendancy over its peers, though not without conflict, by virtue of its relations with the Germans, and the British before them, by serving as middlemen in the trade with the interior. During

FIGURE  4.9  The Palace of King Auguste Ndumbe Manga Bell in 1996, Douala, Cameroon. Photo: Virginia Helen DeLancey.

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Auguste Ndumbe Manga Bell’s reign, the Germans reneged on their initial treaty signed with his father by which they agreed not to encroach on Douala trade networks in the interior.35 In particular, it was under the heavy-handed Jesko von Puttkamer, who served as governor from 1896 to 1907, that German expeditions were sent into the Grassfields to make direct contact, including with King Njoya. It was also under von Puttkamer that the capital was shifted to Buea in 1901.36 As with King Njoya’s later 1908 palace, Auguste Ndumbe Manga Bell built the Pagoda behind his father’s palace, both of which may be considered cases of oneupmanship on the past.37 Its use of German-inspired features also recalls the prefabricated structure given as a residence to his father Ndumbe Lobe Bell by the Germans.38 Even before colonization, the Bell family and their main competitors for power, the Akwa family, had been building in the European style. The English surgeon Richard Mather Jackson noted as early as 1826 that King Bell lived in a two-story timber building with glass windows in the English style. King Akwa also lived in a two-story house with windows. The interiors of both were hung with oil paintings, mirrors, and other exotica obtained by trade with Europeans.39 Jacques Soulillou suggests that this style was adopted after examples that existed at Old Calabar since the eighteenth century. Likewise, Soulillou points out that an 1883 French agreement with the ruler of Malimba at the mouth of the Sanaga River included clauses promising the construction of a house with zinc walls and roof, as well as a French pavilion with the king’s name written upon it.40 Auguste Ndumbe Manga Bell’s new building, which both fascinated and horrified German observers, would almost certainly have been seen by King Njoya only two years later during his 1907 visit to the coast.41 We should also consider the construction of the Pagoda and Njoya’s impressions of Douala in light of the large-scale investment in infrastructure and urbanization projects brought to bear under E. von Brauchitsch, installed in the Besirksamt in Douala from 1899 to 1908. Von Brauchitsch was responsible for establishing the origins of the modern city, uniting the previous settlements, expanding the port, constructing broad avenues, draining swamps, and introducing running water.42 The city had clearly benefited as a whole from German economic and political interests, and King Auguste Ndumbe Manga Bell had just as clearly profited personally. By 1910, the German administration proposed removing the Douala population from their proximity to the urban core of the city and its European population, ostensibly for hygienic purposes, and relocating them farther inland beyond a sanitary cordon.43 These expropriations of land were to be accomplished first by purchase from Indigenous owners, and subsequently by forbidding sales to Indigenous clients of lands within the designated area.44 When the Germans attempted to implement these new policies beginning in 1912, however, they faced stiff opposition from the

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Douala, most particularly from Auguste’s German-educated son Rudolf Douala Manga Bell (r. 1908–14). In this endeavor, the Douala were able to stave off relocation until 1914 through direct responses to German demands. Rudolf Douala Manga Bell even wrote a protest by telegram and subsequent petitions to the Reichstag, with the intervention of lawyers.45 Ultimately, Rudolf Douala Manga Bell was incarcerated and executed in 1914 for his intransigence. The exact charge was treason, for he had sent an envoy to encourage King Njoya to revolt against the Germans in favor of the British and French at the commencement of the First World War. Instead of joining with Rudolf Douala Manga Bell, King Njoya turned the messenger over to the Germans.46

Bafut While one may recognize the construction of this first brick palace in Foumban as an extraordinary innovation, even considering its Douala precedent, it did not happen in a vacuum. Rather, King Njoya’s construction was part of the broader architectural shifts occurring in the Grassfields, particularly with respect to royal buildings. One of the earliest of these was the reconstruction of the palace of Bafut by the Germans between 1908 and 1910. The town of Bafut lies some 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of Foumban. In 1907, the Germans, supported by troops from Bali, attacked Bafut, burning the palace to the ground and exiling the Fon, or ruler, to Douala for one year. The historic residence of the ruler, the Achum, is often claimed to be the only building to survive this conflagration, but in fact it appears to have been built as the residence of Fon Abumbi I after the palace was later reconstructed.47 Peace and cooperation were re-established and sealed by the German reconstruction of what they had so recently destroyed, at approximately the same time that King Njoya was building his “house of the whites.” The Germans constructed a series of long, low-slung buildings with porches surrounded by crenelated walls. It is these structures that architectural historian Wolfgang Lauber identifies as “German colonial in style, some reminiscent of nether-Austrian farmers’ houses.”48 A residence for the Fon was constructed next to the Achum at the heart of the palace as a long, low building on a stone and cement base. Stairs at the center of the long side lead up to the porch, which is formed of broad eaves supported by regularly spaced brick pillars (Figure 4.10).49 The German reconstruction of the Fon of Bafut’s palace stimulated the popularity of a new elite building type in the Grassfields. The long buildings with verandas of the Bafut palace were subsequently emulated in more traditional materials just to the north in the kingdom of Kom during the last years of Fon Yuh’s reign (r. c. 1865–1912). An example of this new style of palace structure can be seen in a 1963 photograph of the Bobe Aboh’s palace

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FIGURE  4.10  Fon’s residence at the Palace of Bafut, 2012, Bafut, Cameroon. ­Photo: author.

by anthropologist Elizabeth Chilver (Figure 4.11). Anthropologist Eugenia Shanklin explains that the title Bobe Aboh, or “‘father’ of the Fon at Aboh,” was in fact created by Fon Yuh and that it was his actual father who built the compound, though this later became merely a titular rather than literal father.50 She furthermore indicates that the first of these rectangular “Great Houses” was “built by a prince, Foenchang Toenyih, a son of Fon Yuh. The great house was quickly imitated by the heirs-apparent and such houses were built at Mbam, Anyajua, Fuli, Njinikijem, and Aboh.”51 The similarities between the German-built palace structures at Bafut and the rectangular great house at Aboh, and at other Kom palaces, are many. Both are raised rectangular-plan buildings with a hipped roof and a portico on the long side, in the middle of which is the entrance approached by stairs. The stone and cement plinth of the Bafut building is replaced by basalt slabs at Aboh, as also seen in Bafut’s Achum, and the brick pillars of the portico by timber columns. The whitewashed brick walls of Bafut are rendered in lashed raffia palm timbers packed with swish at Aboh, while the roofing tiles are replaced with grass thatching. Thus, we must assume that Kom elites were emulating the recently rebuilt palace of Bafut, albeit using more traditional materials. The German-built Bafut palace seems to have set a precedent for modern palace architecture in the region. It is significant that King Njoya began building his first brick palace in the same year as the Germans began rebuilding the palace of Bafut and at approximately the same time that the great house appears as a new building

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FIGURE  4.11  “Great House” of the Bobe Aboh in the Kingdom of Kom, 1963, Aboh, Cameroon. Photo: Elizabeth Millicent “Sally” Chilver. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, Oxford, England, PRM 1998.195.70.

type in Kom. It may be that King Njoya was reacting to these immediate visual challenges to his regional preeminence, as much as to administrative buildings or King Manga Bell’s Pagoda in Douala. Building in the new style would have implied that he, just as much as these other rulers, was tied to the new colonial source of power, as Christraud Geary has argued was also Njoya’s intention in clothing his personal guard in German military-style garb.52 What we can begin to understand from all of this, is that circa 1908 was an extraordinarily important time for architectural innovation in the Grassfields. King Njoya’s construction of a new palace in the European style was not only a reaction to his visit to the coast, or even to be seen as a

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direct emulation of the buildings he saw there, but rather is more properly understood in the competitive context of the moment. As he had borrowed from Bandjoun by introducing carved posts into his former palace, so too he built his 1908 mud-brick palace to compete with what was going on at Bafut, Laikom, and perhaps elsewhere. In each of these cases, the clearly colonial idiom has blinded scholars to the central role played by local actors in producing these works.

King Njoya’s second brick palace On July 8, 1913, King Njoya’s wood and thatch palace, inherited from his father, accidentally burned to the ground after a spark from a cooking fire landed in its grass thatching.53 Two years later, he began construction of his second brick palace on the same plot. Once again, this second brick palace must not be seen as blind emulation of the colonial exemplar, but rather as the result of a careful decisionmaking process, one that folded the contemporary colonial context into the broader needs of King Njoya and the larger Bamum population. Perhaps in part a reaction to the burning of the old palace inherited from his father, or perhaps simply out of a desire for the novel, King Njoya commissioned the new palace to be constructed in baked brick. Working in this new material, however, required the establishment of a new industry—brick and roofing tile kilns—just as the previous project had required the establishment of a sawpit to provide lumber for building. The brickworks was established at Mamarom, a town close to Foumban that was already known for its ceramic production, under the direction of a confidant of King Njoya, named Messuidali Youkou. Likewise, two sawpits provided the required lumber at Mambouo, under the direction of Njianga Mbiepla, and at Mfessang, under Messi.54 It is in fact this palace that most authors compare to the Schloss. Elements of the Palace of King Njoya that suggest a relationship with the governor’s residence in Buea include the use of baked brick and roofing tile; bilateral symmetry; fenestration, especially the use of attic windows; the use of towers as central organizing masses; and multistory construction without internal courtyards. Already, however, the degree of similarity must seem suspect, for clearly an element of bilateral symmetry was present in the palace of King Njoya, inherited from his father and founded prior to the European presence in this area of Cameroon (Figure 4.3). Furthermore, the Schloss in fact has a lantern at the center of its composition, rather than a tower on the front façade. Responsibility for the design of the new palace is once again unclear. Records kept by King Njoya in the Bamum language list the names and wages of workmen at the palace, though little else. It is generally assumed that the palace was designed primarily by the artist Ibrahim Njoya. In 1908,

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Ibrahim Njoya graduated from King Njoya’s school, which was modeled on those set up by the Basel Mission. In addition to learning an early version of the Bamum alphabet created by the king and his advisors, Ibrahim Njoya may have received his earliest instruction in drawing in this milieu. He is renowned for his numerous ink and colored pencil drawings and his role in helping to develop later iterations of the Bamum alphabet, as well as directing construction of the new brick palace. Isaac Paré’s brief biography of Ibrahim Njoya notes only that he was charged with directing the construction of the palace, but it gives no sense of what role he had in its design.55 It is possible that King Njoya was as intimately engaged in the design and construction process as he had been with his first brick palace of 1908. Bearing in mind Ibrahim Njoya’s considerable talents, however, it is more probable that he was largely responsible for the design, with King Njoya perhaps reduced to the role of a highly involved patron. While the governor’s palace in Buea has often been proposed as a model, in fact, it seems that once again the source may be found in Douala, though this time in the imperial hospital (Figure 4.12). Douala became the capital of Kamerun once again in 1909, and completion of the Douala-Nkongsamba rail line in 1911 redoubled the important role of that city in connecting the Grassfields to the coast and beyond.56 The Nachtigal Hospital, named after the German explorer and first Kommissar of Kamerun, Gustav Nachtigal,

FIGURE  4.12  Nachtigal Hospital, Douala, c. 1900–1903, Douala, Cameroon. ­Photo: Johannes Immanuel Leimenstoll. Basel Mission Archives, Basel, Switzerland, ref. no. QE-30.009.0013 “Imperial Hospital in Duala.”

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was designed by Henri Drees and built under the direction of Dr. Albrecht Plehn from 1891 to 1896 in a style similar to the District Office.57 The stylistic uniformity of these two buildings in Douala was perhaps a result of both having been designed in Berlin. The massive hospital remained one of the most imposing marks on colonial Douala’s cityscape for a long time. The fact that access was restricted only to European patients might provide a further political undertone to King Njoya’s choice to emulate its central octagonal tower flanked by arcades on two levels. Soulillou suggests that the same workforce may have been responsible for using their skills learned in building the hospital to create the Douala residence of Mandessi Bell in 1910.58 The arcade at ground level, surmounted by a peristyle, certainly gives a formal nod toward its much larger predecessor. Indeed, he argues that the use of pillars placed over arches in the hospital’s façade influenced numerous local buildings thereafter, and certainly the Pagoda of August Ndumbe Manga Bell borrowed its arches from that source.59 Once again, however, we should see King Njoya’s appropriation of the hospital’s style as overlaid with other significations. In the case of the palace, the semicircular form projecting from the façade emulates a similar form in the audience courtyard of the previous palace (Figure 4.13). Located at the heart, or perhaps more appropriately the navel, of the palace inherited from his father, it was here that King Njoya, and King Nsangu before him, held court. Just as King Njoya had once held audiences under these semicircular eaves in the former palace, he and his descendants do so now at the front of the brick palace (Figure 4.14). In the European-style plan, which is devoid of internal courtyards, the forecourt became the audience chamber as signaled by the tower; we may see this as an exteriorization of what had formerly been an internal feature. Likewise, the tripartite arrangement of the façade recalls the organization of the former palace’s plan into a royal central axis, with flanking suites for the royal family members and non-royal members of the court. As with architectural form, so too we may understand the exterior skin of the building as a combination of the new with the old. UNESCO renovations in 1981 stripped the façade of another element that recalled past architectural practices. While the 1981 restoration of the palace left the red brick exposed, older photographs show that in fact the brick was hidden behind a skin of white plaster incised with geometric designs (Plate 3). This plaster, on the one hand, emulated the white surfaces of colonial buildings such as the Schloss in Buea, or the Nachtigal Hospital and former governor’s residence in Douala. On the other hand, the pre-colonial fortifications that once surrounded the city had been similarly covered in a white plaster, formulated of ashes, palm oil, and tree resin that protected the unbaked earth beneath from erosion. It was, in fact, this historic recipe that was used to cover the walls of King Njoya’s new palace.60 The white surface of the palace furthermore was not smooth, but rather incised with geometric

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FIGURE  4.13  King Njoya in the audience courtyard of the palace inherited from his father, c. 1912, Foumban, Cameroon. Photo: Rudolf Oldenburg. KHMMuseumsverband, Weltmuseum, Vienna, Austria, MVK VF_49878.

patterns that recall some of the designs produced by the palace architect Ibrahim Njoya. They also recall the crisscrossing patterns produced by interwoven palm timbers on the exterior of elite Bamum architecture. As these simple comparisons suggest, the idea that King Njoya was simply imitating the colonizer does not pay justice to his attempts to integrate the German style with the Bamum architectural heritage and royal ritual. Upon entering the interior, however, the impression differs considerably. The throne room that lies behind this German-influenced façade speaks a

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FIGURE 4.14  Sultan al-Haji Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya seated in the entrance of the Palace of King Njoya, 1996, Foumban, Cameroon. Photo: author.

different language altogether. Four massive pillars lead the eye up through two stories, branching into heavy arches that connect the pillars, then connect the pillars to confining walls (Figure 4.15). The pillars and arches define nine rectangular bays, which are filled with a wood raftered ceiling. It is almost certainly these pillars and arches that inspired French architect Armand Salomon to suggest that in this palace one could encounter “the purest tradition of Romanesque constructions of the Mediterranean world”

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FIGURE  4.15  Throne room of the Palace of King Njoya, 2012, Foumban, ­Cameroon. Photo: author.

and that they “recall the strange fascination of the pillars of the basilica of Tournous.”61 Indeed, it is possible that such a reference was intentional on King Njoya’s part. As noted earlier, King Njoya had already introduced rounded arches at the entrance to his old palace, as opposed to more typical rectangular entrances commonly employed in the Grassfields region. He may have become familiar with the neo-Romanesque style, which proved popular in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Europe and the United States, from illustrated journals.

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King Njoya’s palace as the Islamic prototype No single interpretation ever seems sufficient, however, when considering King Njoya’s palace. The pillars and arches can also be perceived as a monumental version of the architectural type known as the sooro, a type gaining popularity in the Islamic architecture of northern Cameroon at about the same time that King Njoya’s palace was constructed. Several authors have briefly mentioned an Islamic influence on the architecture of the palace. Christraud Geary, for example, directs attention to the geometric designs carved in the doors and windows of the palace, and Suzanne Blier briefly notes connections with Islamic architecture.62 To my knowledge, however, there are no prolonged studies that tie the extraordinary innovations of King Njoya’s palace to the shifts in architectural tradition occurring in northern Cameroon at that time. Most of contemporary Adamawa, North, and Far North Regions of Cameroon were incorporated by formerly semi-nomadic Fulbe conquerors into a massive Islamic empire, with its capital at Sokoto in what is now northwestern Nigeria, in the early nineteenth century. The largest emirate in the Sokoto Empire was Fombina, or Adamawa, for the most part constituting the three regions of contemporary northern Cameroon. Fombina was ruled by an emir, subordinate to the sultan, who resided at Yola in northeastern Nigeria. Therefore, all of the local rulers in Fombina owed allegiance, and annual tribute, to the Emir at Yola and ultimately the Sultan at Sokoto. The sooro, or soorowal, is a form that originates in the architecture of northern Nigeria. It refers to a monumental earthen structure, of either rectilinear or circulinear plan, with a ceiling and a flat, earthen roof.63 The ceiling is usually supported from within by one or more earthen pillars. The structural system for this ceiling may be either of two varieties. The most common by far employs wooden beams laid between the pillars and the walls as the framework for a coffered ceiling. The less common uses a series of arches bridging the pillars and walls as the framework for either a coffered ceiling, as in the first case, or a shallow dome. It is the second structural system of arches that is used in King Njoya’s palace. The coffered ceiling is created by laying beams across the bays. The spaces between these beams are filled in with slender sticks laid in intricate herringbone patterns. Woven grass mats are then laid over the coffered wood structures thus created. Finally, earth is laid on top to create the roof. A conical or hipped thatched roof is usually placed above the flat ceiling in Adamawa Region, although this may be omitted in the drier climate of the North and Far North Regions. Sooros serve as the entrance, audience hall, and throne room of nearly every palace now existing in northern Cameroon. The use of this structure, however, was very rare until the early twentieth century. As a primary signifier of rulership in the Sokoto Empire, it was the prerogative of only the

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most important rulers, namely, the sultan and his emirs. The Fulbe rulers of northern Cameroon, being merely sub-emirs under the Emir of Fombina at Yola, Nigeria were not of high enough status to employ the sooro and its political symbolism.64 It is only after the Germans subjugated northern Cameroon in 1900– 1901 that the sooro began to be widely employed in palace architecture in this region. Somewhat ironically, although colonialism usurped much of the political and military power of the Fulbe sub-emirs of northern Cameroon, it simultaneously allowed the proliferation of the symbols of rulership due to the political separation of these sub-emirates from the rest of the empire. The earliest sooro to be constructed in northern Cameroon appears to have been at the palace of Rey. Historian Eldridge Mohammadou records that the ruler Bouba Ndjidda (r. 1798–1866) built a large sooro as the entrance to his palace when he established the city of Rey in the early nineteenth century.65 Rey was the only Fulbe state founded in northern Cameroon to initially reject incorporation within the Sokoto Empire and, indeed, came into military conflict with the Emir of Yola. The construction of a large and majestic sooro at the entrance to the palace at Rey was tantamount to a declaration of independence. Rey’s independence was maintained into the colonial era when the ruler struck a bargain with the French whereby he would nominally submit to their authority in exchange for an extraordinary degree of autonomy. At Ngaoundéré, originally founded in approximately 1835, the current palace was built in the late nineteenth century during the reign of Mohammadou Abbo (r. 1887–1901). The previous palace, located a short distance to the west, continued to stand until replaced by the French with a central market in 1938. Mohammadou Abbo built his new palace on a much grander scale with higher walls and multiple sooros. When a new local ruler was enthroned, he normally traveled to Yola to receive the official confirmation of his appointment from the emir. Mohammadou Abbo was the first of Ngaoundéré’s rulers to refuse to make the trip, only sending tribute instead. In effect, Abbo was merely paying lip service to the sovereignty of the Emir of Yola.66 The construction of a new palace at this time, complete with multiple sooros and high earthen walls, further reinforces this interpretation. It is significant that the first sooros in northern Cameroon appear at these particular palaces. As noted above, the sooro at Rey can be interpreted as a declaration of independence. Rey was situated at the absolute eastern-most limits of the Fulbe diaspora at the time. Similarly, Ngaoundéré lay at the southeastern limits of the Fulbe expansion. Thanks to their distances from the centers of power and their extraordinary wealth, primarily from slave raiding into southern Cameroon and east into the Central African Republic, both were able to act with great autonomy and to adopt the symbols of royalty with relative impunity.

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Other sub-emirates only followed suit after the German conquest in 1901 severed northern Cameroon from the rest of the Sokoto Empire. In this new political environment, the sub-emirs ironically acquired a de facto independence, in terms of the Sokoto Empire, despite having lost much of their real political and military power to the Germans. It is during the colonial period that we see the emergence of the sooro as a widespread architectural type in Cameroon, representing the independence of these “states.” Likewise, the sub-emirs of northern Cameroon now began to adopt the title of emir, once again indicating their newfound status in the colonial era vis-à-vis their former overlords in Nigeria. The palace of Banyo was rebuilt in the twentieth century, probably in the early 1920s, during the second reign of Modibbo Yahya (r. 1904–11 and 1917–34).67 It was at this time that all of the major buildings of the palace of Banyo were built by the architect Mohamadou Maiguini, who learned his trade in Kano, Nigeria. This architect was particularly known for his mastery of the construction of the sooro, of which he built several at Banyo, including the entrance. He quickly became renowned throughout the region and was later hired to construct the palace of Kontcha with multiple sooros after its separation from Banyo by the Germans.68 Other Fulbe rulers at Tignère and Boundang-Touroua followed suit soon after. It is perhaps most significant that the palace of Banyo was reconstructed with its entrance, audience hall, and throne room built as sooro-style structures at approximately the same time as Ibrahim Njoya rebuilt the Palace of King Njoya. Of all the northern polities, it is with Banyo that King Njoya maintained the closest ties. In 1895, at the beginning of his reign, King Njoya faced an attempted coup d’état by Gbetenkom Ndombu, a former counselor to his mother, the formidable Queen Mother Ndjapdunke, when she served as regent during King Njoya’s early years on the throne.69 In desperation, King Njoya requested assistance from his Muslim neighbor to the north the ruler Umaru of Banyo (r. 1893–1902). Umaru sent his formidable cavalry to the rescue, defeating the rebels within a mere three days. In exchange for this support, King Njoya provided Umaru with a multitude of gifts and converted, at least nominally at the time, to Islam. He later flirted with Christianity, before creating his own religion that ingeniously combined aspects of Islam with traditional Bamum beliefs.70 While we may understand that King Njoya, in employing the form of the sooro in his new palace, was participating in contemporaneous architectural developments in northern Cameroon, it is still unclear why exactly he would do so. In 1918, one year after he began the construction of his new palace, King Njoya returned much more substantially to Islam, sending an envoy to the Emir of Yola who in return sent gifts and a Fulbe scholar to convert the king and formally introduce Islam in the Bamum Kingdom.71 He did so soon after his German allies, as well as the missionaries of the Basel Mission, had been replaced by more suspicious French colonial forces who would

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ultimately depose Njoya in 1923. The exterior of his palace, on the one hand, cast Foumban as a modern kingdom allied with the German colonial administration, and more specifically the economic powerhouse of Douala. One wonders if perhaps at this early point in the French relationship he could not divine the potential difficulties that allying himself visually with the former German regime would create. The interior, on the other hand, cast his reign in the guise of a ruler of the Sokoto Empire under the guidance of the Islamic scholar sent by the Emir of Yola. It is likely that he saw in this employment of northern imagery and the adoption of Islam a means of maintaining the integrity of his kingdom under French rule. Refashioning himself as an Islamic ruler would have appealed to European, and especially French, racist assumptions that Muslims, as monotheists, were more culturally and intellectually advanced than other African populations and therefore privileged to rule.72 As early as 1909, in response to German restrictions on the use of German military uniforms and firearms, Njoya began to present himself exclusively in Islamic dress. Geary notes that in Bamum eyes, such sartorial changes were “a deliberate statement of new political alliances.”73 I suggest, however, that rather than purely a shift in alliances, the adoption of Islamic garb constituted an argument before the Germans. By stressing Islam and his intellect, Geary glosses this as the trope of “Njoya, the creative thinker, the inventor, and the educator of his people,” King Njoya hoped to associate himself with his northern peers, garnering their relatively laissez-faire relationship with the colonial administration.74 Like many of the other artistic developments recognized under the reign of King Njoya, the incorporation of the form of the sooro also signifies his readiness to absorb the novel and the foreign to his own purposes. In fact, it would appear that he adopted this architectural type even before his Muslim peers in northern Cameroon. When first approaching this material, I had assumed that Njoya had followed the lead of Banyo to the north in incorporating the form of the sooro along with its pretensions to status. After considering the dates of construction, however, it would seem that the reverse is true, and that Njoya actually was the first to make use of the sooro. Modibbo Yahya, after all, only mounted the throne of Banyo in 1917, the same year in which King Njoya began construction of his palace. As with the adoption of the German colonial style to imply a high status relationship with the colonial regime, the adoption of the sooro for a throne room should be considered a direct emulation of Yola and a suggestion of alliance with that ruler. In this model of events, Banyo must be seen as playing catch up to the recently converted upstart to the south. The adoption of an architectural form previously prohibited from the rulers of northern Cameroon was perhaps facilitated by the fact that Foumban lay outside the cultural bedrock of the empire and its historical modes of architecturally signifying status. One must, therefore, consider the proliferation of the sooro, an architectural type that eventually came to characterize nearly

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every palace in northern Cameroon, a result of the political machinations and aesthetic ingenuity of King Njoya. Unfortunately for King Njoya, he had seriously misjudged the French. His grandiose building and Islamic overtures did not impress them, as they were already predisposed to see a loyal ally of the Germans in a negative light. Rather than the enlightened African king, the French viewed Njoya through another prejudiced lens, that of the Oriental despot. The French were already forming this impression when on December 27, 1919 the Battalion Chief Martin wrote to the Lieutenant-Colonel in command of the Occupying Army that: We are in the presence of an indigenous potentate who has enjoyed an absolute power, without control, who the Germans left largely independent, with whom the English have brought the same political principles that they applied to the Sultans of Nigeria.75 A subsequent letter from the District Chief of Dschang Ripert to the Subdivision Chief of Foumban on October 22, 1923 describes Njoya as “reigning in the fashion of a black tyrant, making immediately disappear those who anger him or who even seem not to completely approve of his actions.” The same letter points to the construction of the new palace as evidence of his tyranny: Under the benevolent eyes of the French officers who succeeded in Foumban until 1920, he pursued the realization of ideas that the Germans devised for him, above all his insane dream of constructing a palace unique in Africa. It is impossible to know how much this construction cost the Bamum in pain, abuses, violence, and wealth.76 By 1923 the French had sidelined King Njoya, who was later deposed and died in exile in the capital Yaoundé ten years later. The remarkable architectural achievements of King Njoya’s patronage, nonetheless, provide a window into broader royal concerns in Cameroon in the colonial period. Rather than a dichotomy between tradition and colonial innovation, a more nuanced image of building practices in this period suggests the extent to which the works of Cameroonian patrons in communication over the breadth of the colony and beyond provided the impetus for innovation.

Grassfields successors to King Njoya’s palace After King Njoya completed his palace, it appears that the released workforce marketed its new skills in the service of projects in neighboring kingdoms in the Grassfields. One of these, a structure that no longer exists, was built at Banounga, approximately 54 miles (87 kilometers) south-

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southwest of Foumban. J. C. Barbier records that this palace was built for the Banounga ruler Dzantu by Bamum craftsmen, reflecting the strong trade relationship between the two kingdoms during this period.77 Robert Fontecave describes it as, “an enormous residence of multiple floors, with very thick walls of stone … that resembles the old palace of the Sultan of Foumban. It was constructed in 1926 by Bamoun.”78 Barbier suggests that it was built between 1920 and 1925, but in any case both authors point to a period immediately following completion of the Palace of King Njoya. This palace, somewhat off the beaten track, was poorly documented, and I have not found a single photograph of it thus far. The Banounga palace was unfortunately destroyed by UPC rebels in 1960 in the conflagrations surrounding the moment of Cameroonian independence.79 The time of construction may be taken as indicative of the strong impact that the Palace of King Njoya must have had on other regional rulers, spurring the desire for similar monuments. Banounga is approximately 17 miles (27 kilometers) southeast of the divisional capital of Bangangté where another contemporaneous two-story brick palace was constructed. It is possible that the Palace of Bangangté was built at the same historical moment, perhaps even by the same craftsmen migrating from one project to the next. Indeed Barbier notes that King Dzantu was a nephew of the King of Bangangté by his mother.80 Bangangté’s royal family, in turn, espouses a historical relationship to the royal family of Bamum.81 Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg records that the now-dilapidated brick building is referred to as Bwo pa’ or “beautiful house.”82 It was already built when Frank Christol, a French missionary stationed in Cameroon from 1917 to 1928, took a photograph of King Njiké II (r. 1910–43) standing before it (Figure 4.16) and by 1938 was apparently in poor condition when visited by F. Clement C. Egerton.83 The current Fon of Bangangté, Nji Monluh Seidou Pokam, was uncertain, but suggested it must have been constructed around 1910 by Germans when they built a road through town. However, oddities in the construction and floor plan, such as the extraordinarily steep and unreliable stairs to the second floor (in reality more of a series of wood planks with grips nailed to them), the almost inaccessible placement of a doorway behind one set of stairs on the ground floor, and the off-center arches on the exterior façade, suggest that it was created by local builders working in relatively new materials and style. A recent history by Thomas Tchatchoua records that this palace was in fact constructed in 1922 and named N’kongsamba by its patron King Njiké II.84 It was apparently named in admiration of the city of the same name, burgeoning at the time as a French administrative center, after King Njiké II visited it. Tchatchoua sees in it a strong resemblance to the Palace of King Njoya and suggests that it must have been built by a Bamum architect, though proof of such is lacking. In point of fact, the two only vaguely resemble each other in their use of brick material, multiple floors,

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FIGURE  4.16  King Njiké II before his brick palace, c. 1920–30, Bangangté, ­Cameroon. Photo: Frank Christol. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of ­Oxford, Oxford, England, PRM 1998.110.44.

and arcades, but I propose that the perceived connection was nevertheless the desired effect. A visitor to Bangangté in 1918, missionary Eli Allégret, in fact noted King Njiké II’s admiration for and desire to emulate the conduct of King Njoya.85 In this category we can also place a brick building constructed within the Palace of Bandjoun by the ruler Fotso II (r. c. 1900–25). Nothing remains of this building aside from its stone foundations, so it is impossible to compare its resemblance to King Njoya’s palace or any of the others created thereafter. We can only state that it was built of brick. According to Malaquais, this brick structure was built toward the end of Fotso II’s reign, at the end or immediately following completion of King Njoya’s palace.86 It is significant also that Bandjoun was a major trading partner of Foumban, particularly for the lucrative nineteenth-century trade in kola nuts. The two had long been connected, and indeed Njoya had borrowed from Bandjoun the idea of installing figural posts in his palace in 1908, ostensibly after passing through there on his way to or from Douala. Thus, we may comprehend Fotso II’s new palace as integral to this long-standing conversation cum architectural rivalry. This is further substantiated by

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Malaquais’s observation that Fotso II never actually resided in his new palace; its role was purely symbolic. One final example of the powerful impact that the Palace of King Njoya had on regional palace architecture is provided by the so-called White House, or Fphia Ndia, in the capital of the kingdom of Lebang at Azi.87 This building, with its multistory construction, arcades on two levels, and a central polygonal tower, is at once obviously modeled on the Nachtigal Hospital in Douala and also participates in a common architectural vocabulary of royal power with King Njoya’s palace (Plate 4). Sir Ajua Alemanji records that the redoubtable ruler Fuantem Asonganyi (c. 1870–1951) imported the cement for its construction by headload from Nkongsamba, some 75 miles (120 kilometers) away, while baked bricks were fabricated locally. He points to German architecture in Garoua as the model, with which Fuantem Asonganyi would have become familiar during his exile there by the German administration from 1911 to 1916. The building was reputedly designed by a German architect but constructed by Marcus Asong, a local man who Fuantem Asonganyi sent to Calabar, Nigeria for training in working with the new materials. Sir Alemanji furthermore dates the completion of this new palace to 1922, the same year that King Njoya’s palace was finished.88 This dating seems difficult to reconcile with a report of a visit to Azi on December 19, 1922 filed by the British District Officer Henry Cadman. In his report, Cadman makes no

FIGURE  4.17  The Guest House at Bafut Palace, 2014, Bafut, Cameroon. Photo: author.

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reference to the White House, though he does speak with admiration of Fuantem Asonganyi’s meeting house: 231. The meeting house of the Clan Chief FONTEM, where cases were tried, is an amazing structure. The internal dimensions are forty-two by forty-five feet, and a height of twenty-five feet. The walls and ceiling are completely paneled with bamboos. Special recesses are provided to seat the Hamlet Heads, and the building is covered by a dome shaped roof.89 This clearly does not describe the White House. It seems hard to believe that Cadman would have ignored the White House if it had existed at this point in time, particularly given his interest in Fuantem Asonganyi’s meeting house. It is important to recognize also that visits by colonial officials to Azi were quite rare as it was an out-of-the-way location. I suspect that Cadman’s visit to Azi coupled with his interest in the meeting house may have impressed upon Fuantem Asonganyi the potential that extraordinary architecture might have in garnering attention from the colonial administration. This would have only been reinforced by the renown of King Njoya’s palace and the construction of new brick palaces at Bangangté, Banounga, and Bandjoun. While the White House may not have existed at the time of Cadman’s visit, I suspect that it did soon thereafter.

Bafut guest house Malaquais identifies a series of palaces—Bamendjou, Baleng, Bafoussam, Banyangam, and Baham—that were built in the late 1920s to mid-1930s based upon the architecture of Bandjoun, due to its supposed resemblance to the Palace of King Njoya.90 The importance of this architectural competition between rulers is illustrated in the later years of the colonial period with the construction of a new palace building in Bafut in the 1940s (Figure 4.17). Its two-story construction, tripartite façade, and ceramic-tiled hipped roof only vaguely recall the previous monuments discussed in terms of employing a European idiom. The central turret is reminiscent of the similar use of a lantern in the Schloss at Buea as well as atop the Pagoda in Douala.91 The plan, however, shows a central core of three rooms on each level surrounded by a hallway and curtain wall that is clearly derived from German tropical architecture that one might encounter in Douala. This building is perhaps best known abroad as the guest house in which Gerald Durrell and his wife stayed while collecting animals in 1949, notably recounted in his novel The Bafut Beagles.92 It has been described by Lauber as reminiscent of the early works of the early twentieth-century German architect Paul Schmitthenner, a proponent of the Heimatschutzstil, which came into vogue in the early twentieth century and particularly under the Third Reich as an attempt to isolate a specifically Germanic character in

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architecture.93 A German-funded restoration of the guest house transformed it into a museum in 2006, following the example of various French and Italian funded projects of the late 1990s and early 2000s in the Grassfields.94 From 2006 to 2009, a four-phase project was carried out under the auspices of the World Monument Fund, with funding from the Annenberg Program, to train local workers how to restore the damaged roofs of a number of wives’ quarters.95 The wives’ quarters are composed of two groups of square-plan buildings, each aligned in two rows, flanking the central area of the palace on the north and southeast sides. They are popularly understood to also have been part of the German building campaign of 1908 to 1910; indeed, both restorations and their foreign financing, it would seem, were predicated on the understanding that the original work had been German in authorship. In fact, the guest house was commissioned by King Achirimbi II of Bafut (r. 1932–68) and was constructed entirely by local builders, though according to Pat Ritzenthaler it was designed by a Swiss architect.96 That it was constructed in the early 1940s is proven by the field notes of anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry who visited the palace in 1946. Her field notes also prove that the wives’ quarters were constructed immediately after the guest house. According to Kaberry, the Fon bemoaned that after creating such a residence for one wife, all his other wives demanded the same for themselves. Kaberry recorded that the women themselves were mixing the mud and carrying the bricks. The kiln for firing the bricks and the roofing tiles, operated entirely by local artisans, was located next to the Fon’s palace. Because they were his subjects, the workforce was paid little more than a pittance in addition to daily food and palm wine.97 On the one hand, the construction of the wives’ quarters and the guest house at Bafut illustrates that elements of German colonial architecture had become fully ingrained in Cameroon, taking on a life of their own as the vocabulary of modern Indigenous authority. On the other hand, they, like Njoya’s palace long before and all of its subsequent permutations, likely constituted an argument for primacy on the part of the King of Bafut before the British colonial regime. Beginning in the 1920s, numerous kingdoms across the Grassfields region began to claim Tikari origins. The Tikar constitute a group of kingdoms in the southwestern Adamawa Region of Cameroon characterized by strong political centralization and sacred kingship with few checks on the ruler’s power. Both the Bamum Kingdom and Nso to its north claim origins from princes who left the Tikar kingdom of Rifum in the seventeenth century in search of domains to rule. Ritual practices dating at least as early as the late nineteenth century attest to the political ties between these two and the Tikar. Whether these ritual ties indeed point to a genealogical link between their ruling elites remains open to debate. The tendency in contemporary scholarship is to understand stories of princely peregrinations more as political myths of legitimation.98

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Less open to debate is the clear spread of the Tikari myth amongst political elites beyond Bamum and Nso in the 1920s, just as we see the construction of brick palaces following the example of King Njoya. Reasons for the spread of this myth may be multiple, including to acquire more absolute power for the ruler in the fashion of Tikari kingdoms or to associate themselves with the Bamum as powerful and important kingdoms in the eyes of both colonial officials and potential subjects.99 In the case of rulers in what had become the Southern Cameroons, such as Bafut and Lebang, they may have additionally desired to distinguish themselves from Nigerians after becoming a neglected backwater of that British colony.

Conclusion By situating the construction of King Njoya’s palace with respect both to contemporaneous events as well as to a history of palace architecture, we may begin to perceive some of the carefully considered decisions involved in its creation. Rather than being a simple copy of the German governor’s palace by an awe-struck Indigenous ruler, the impression is rather one of a ruler seeking to express the changing role of the monarch in unstable times. Such aesthetic innovation was fundamental to the expectations of royal patrons extending back at least as far as the turn of the nineteenth century when King Mbuembue resettled artists from conquered kingdoms in the capital of Foumban. It may furthermore be understood as an aspect of a symbolic competition between regional rulers, one that certainly predated the colonial presence. Ultimately, these are conclusions that serve to decenter the colonizer from the history of architectural construction and creativity in the Cameroon Grassfields. Defining the historical context enables us to more accurately appreciate the ways in which Bamum’s ruler and his advisors selectively appropriated elements from a variety of sources, including the colonizer, neighboring Grassfields kingdoms, and Islamic polities to the north, and combined these with pre-established forms in an ever-evolving expression of kingship. As such, King Njoya’s palace was the touchstone for the production of a new visual idiom of kingship in the Cameroon Grassfields. His ingenuity thereafter spurred the spread of this modern style across the Grassfields, seemingly in tandem with the spread of, and as physical reification of, the Tikari myth. The degree to which other rulers looked directly to King Njoya’s palace for formal inspiration, rather than to German-built structures in Douala, is often difficult to determine. Banounga, Bangangté, and possibly Bandjoun may have made use of actual Bamoum workforces who brought their expertise directly from the construction of King Njoya’s palace. Azi and Bafut may instead have been inspired by King Njoya’s example, but looked directly to Douala for formal inspiration. But it seems clear that, directly or indirectly, King Njoya’s palace inspired emulation. In turn, recognizing the connections

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between all of these rulers across a broad area enables us to begin the process of constructing a broader architectural history of Cameroon, combating the lingering historical damage of the colonial era and reminding of the ties that bind in the current era of agitation for dismantling the country.

Acknowledgment All translations are the work of the author, including any errors. Appreciation is due to the many individuals who have helped in bringing this work to fruition. In Cameroon, I would like to thank the following: Professor Hamadou Adama and Faouziatou Dandi at University of Ngaoundéré; Fon Abumbi II, Ma Mirabel, Ma Constance, Nixon, and Lamont Ivory in Bafut; Fon Nji Monluh Seidou Pokam of Bangangté; Director of Palace Affairs Nji Oumarou Nchare, Nsangou Oumarou, and Idrissou Njoya (aka Majesté) in Foumban; Sir Ajua Alemanji in Lebang; Joe Danjie, Seraphin Blaise Menzepoh, and the UCLA Research and Training Center in Yaoundé. Outside of Cameroon, I would also like to thank: my research assistant Michael Ortolano, Christraud Geary, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, Konrad Tuchscherer, Julius Amin, Jonathan Fine, Robert Brain, Fiona Bowie, Evan Schneider, Gilbert Mbeng, Vincent Lockhart, and Chief Fonkem Achangkeng I. This project was supported by University Research Council, Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Faculty Research, and Vincentian Endowment Fund Grants at DePaul University, and a Franklin Research Grant through the American Philosophical Society.

Notes 1 King Njoya is at various times referred to as King, Chief, Mfon, and Sultan. These reflect at various times who was providing the label as well as the audience he was addressing. I have chosen to use the term King for the sake of simplicity throughout. One should not, however, assume that the English term properly conveys a clear understanding of Njoya’s role. One should also be careful of assuming that Njoya’s role was consistent throughout his own reign. 2 Christraud Geary, Things of the Palace: A Catalogue of the Bamum Palace Museum in Foumban (Cameroon), Studien zur Kulturkunde 60 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983); Steven Nelson, “Collection and Context in a Cameroonian Village,” Museum International 59, no. 3 (2007): 22–30; Jean Bosserdet, Au palais des sultans à Foumban (Paris: UNESCO, 1985). 3 Konrad Tuscherer, Bamum Script and Archives Project: Saving Africa’s Written Heritage (EAP051), British Library Endangered Archives Programme, https:// doi.org/10.15130/EAP051; Emmanuel Ghomsi, Aboubakar Njiasse Njoya, and Martin Njimotapon Njikam, Catalogue trilingue du Fonds documentaire du palais de “Mfon-M,” à Foumban, Travaux et documents de l’institut des sciences humaines, Collection études bibliographiques et recherches en

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bibliothéconomie 7 (Yaoundé: Ministère de l’enseignement supérieur de la recherche scientifique, 1984); Martin Njimotapon Njikam, Repertoire du fonds documentaire du palais de “Nfon-Mom” à Foumban, Travaux et documents de l’Institut des sciences humaines, Collection études bibliographiques et recherches en bibliothéconomie 5 (Yaoundé: Délégation générale à la recherche scientifique et technique, 1983). 4 Henri Labouret, “L’ancien palais royal de Foumban,” Togo-Cameroun (April– July 1935): 121–26; Claude Tardits, “Le palais royal de Foumban,” Paideuma 31 (1985): 65–83; Claude Tardits, Le royaume Bamoum, Publications de la Sorbonne, N.S. Recherches 37 (Paris: A. Colin, 1980), 572–601; Christraud Geary and Adamou Ndam Njoya, Photographies du pays Bamoum, royaume ouest-africain 1902–1915 (Munich: Trickster Verlag, 1985), 45–75; Christraud M. Geary, Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya, Cameroon, West Africa, 1902–1915 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 63–83. 5 J. Crozet, Etude de la restauration et de la mise en valeur du Palais de Foumban (Paris: UNESCO, 1968); Jean Gabus, Rapport de la Mission Jean Gabus: 21 mars au 11 avril 1964 (Paris: UNESCO, 1964); Marc Robert, La restauration du palais des Sultans de Bamoum à Foumban (Paris: UNESCO, 1980); Adamou Ndam Njoya, Le palais de Foumban: Chef d’œuvre d’art et d’architecture, Collection art et culture africains (Yaoundé: Editions Ndam et Raynier, 1975). 6 Njoya, Le palais de Foumban, 10; Robert, La restauration, 4–5; Geary, Things of the Palace, 14; Tardits, Royaume Bamum, 573; Claude Tardits, L’histoire singulière de l’art bamoum (Paris: Afredit/Maisonneuve & Larose, 2004), 49, 53. One rare exception to the rule is a brief note by Paul Dubié who writes that it was, “of composite style, inspired by German constructions of Buea and Victoria [e.g., Limbe] and by prints and photographs of European monuments: it represented a veritable tour de force.” Paul Dubié, “Christianisme, Islam, et animism chez les Bamoum (Cameroun),” Bulletin de l’IFAN, series B, 19 (July– October 1957): 348. Similarly, Geary later states that King Njoya, “synthesized elements of German colonial architecture that he had seen on the Cameroon coast, Islamic architecture, and Bamum art in a grand and unique design” (Geary, Images from Bamum, 73–4). 7 A recent example of this perception is provided by Till Förster’s contribution to African Modernism in which he characterizes King Njoya as a ruler who “tried to copy” European buildings constructed in permanent materials, though in this case he references the German district commander’s headquarters in Bamenda with its crenelated walls. Till Förster, “Land and Social Order in Middle Africa,” in African Modernism, ed. Manuel Herz, Ingrid Schröder, Hans Focketyn, and Julia Jamrozik (Zurich: Park Books, 2015), 619, 623 n.12. 8 Gabus, Rapport de la Mission Jean Gabus, 2. 9 Tardits, Le royaume Bamoum, 573. 10 Tardits, Le royaume Bamoum, 574. 11 Itohan I. Osayimwese, “Architecture and the Myth of Authenticity during the German Colonial Period,” TDSR: Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 24, no. 2 (2013): 11–22; Itohan I. Osayimwese “Architecture with a

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Mission: Bamum Autoethnography during the Period of German Colonialism,” in German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences ed. Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 31–49. 12 Manuel Herz, Ingrid Schröder, Hans Focketyn, and Julia Jamrozik (eds.), African Modernism (Zurich: Park Books, 2015). 13 Itohan I. Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). 14 Dominique Malaquais, Architecture, pouvoir et dissidence au Cameroun (Paris: Karthala, 2002). For an example of a similarly oriented study of colonial-era architecture by African patrons in Ghana, see Courtnay Micots, “Status and Mimicry: African Colonial Period Architecture in Coastal Ghana,” JSAH: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 1 (March 2015): 41–62. 15 Geary, Images from Bamum, 69; Osayimwese, “Architecture with a Mission,” 35. Bernard Ankermann recorded as much during his visit to Foumban in 1908–09. “In Njoya’s Häusern sind auch gewölbte Türen, die er sich nach einem Bilde in einer illustrierten Zeitschrift hat Machen lassen. Früher waren solche Türen unbekannt.” H. Baumann and L. Vajda, “Bernard Ankermanns Völkerkundliche aufzeichnungen im Grasland von Kamerun 1907–1909,” Baessler-Archiv N. F. 7, no. 2 (1959): 281. It is possible that Eugen Schwarz, who Geary and Ndam Njoya characterize as “l’architecte de la mission,” may have possessed journals or other architectural materials that King Njoya saw. Christraud Geary and Adamou Ndam Njoya, Photographies du pays Bamoum, royaume ouest-africain 1902–1915 (Munich: Trickster Verlag, 1985), 30. It is certainly clear from Schwarz’s own testimony that Njoya held a strong personal interest in architecture (Geary and Ndam Njoya, Photographies du pays Bamoum, 70–4). 16 Christraud Geary describes this event and addresses the controversy over whether or not the throne in Berlin is King Njoya’s in a pair of articles. Christraud Geary, “Bamum Thrones and Stools,” African Arts 14, no. 4 (August 1981): 32–43, 87–8; “Bamum Two-Figure Thrones: Additional Evidence,” African Arts 16, no. 4 (August 1983): 46–53, 86–7. Also see Jonathan David MacLachlan Fine, “The Throne from the Grassfields: History, Gifts, and Authenticity in the Bamum Kingdom, 1880–1929” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2020). 17 Christraud Geary, “Bamum and Tikar: Inspiration and Innovation,” in Cameroon: Art and Kings, ed. Lorenz Homberger (Zurich: Museum Rietberg, 2008), 39. 18 Geary, “Bamum and Tikar,” 32. 19 Geary, Images from Bamum, 70. 20 Ian Fowler, “Tribal and Palatine Arts of the Cameroon Grassfields: Elements for a ‘Traditional’ Regional Identity,” in Contesting Art: Art, Politics and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Jeremy MacClancy (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 63–84; Hans-Joachim Koloss and Lorenz Homberger, “The Cameroon Grassfields: A History of Research,” in Cameroon: Art and Kings, ed. Lorenz Homberger (Zurich: Museum Rietberg, 2008), 16–17.

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21 Sultan Njoya, Histoire et coutumes des Bamum, trans. Pasteur Henri Martin, Populations 5 (Douala: Mémoires de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, 1952), 65. 22 Njoya, Histoire et coutumes des Bamum, 66. 23 Osayimwese, “Architecture with a Mission,” 36. 24 Susan Mullin Vogel, “Known Artists but Anonymous Works: Fieldwork and Art History,” African Arts 32, no. 1, Special Issue: Authorship in African Art, Part 2 (Spring 1999): 40–55, 93–4. 25 Christraud M. Geary and Adamou Ndam Njoya, Mandu Yenu: Bilder aus Bamun, einem westafrikanischen Königreich (Munich: Trickster Verlag, 1985), 70. 26 Geary and Ndam Njoya, Mandu Yenu, 70–1; Tardits, L’histoire singulière, 51. 27 Geary and Ndam Njoya, Mandu Yenu, 71. Schwarz soon thereafter, in 1909, helped Njoya build a school with mud-brick blocks, providing sixteen window frames and two sets of double doors. Unfortunately, the school burned to the ground a mere two years later. Geary and Ndam Njoya, Mandu Yenu, 74. 28 Jean Houvounsadi and Marc Pabois, Douala, capitale économique: l’architecture (Douala: Communauté urbain de Douala, 2011), 14–15. 29 Houvounsadi and Pabois, Douala, 3. 30 For a more extensive study of German colonial architecture developed for the tropics, see Osayimwese’s Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany. 31 Fine, “Throne from the Grassfields,” 247, quoting Theodor Seitz, Report No. 1320 (December 21, 1909), BArch 1001/4293, Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde. 32 King Njoya also commissioned a villa in 1912–13 at Mantoum on the River Mbam and at the eastern edge of the expansive botanical gardens that he established there, most likely in emulation of those created at Limbe by the Germans. It is difficult from the few remaining photographs to make out much of the design of the Mantoum villa, other than that it appears to rest on a stone plinth, with hipped corrugated metal roofing over what must be brick walls covered with plaster. The Mantoum villa was replaced later by a more modern construction, perhaps in the 1980s, which still exists, though it seems to be rarely visited. The botanical gardens also persist, and indeed there was a popular request during the Nguon festival in 2012 that the reigning sultan should revitalize them. 33 Houvounsadi and Pabois, Douala, 42; Jacques Soulillou, “Le Cameroun,” in Rives coloniales: Architectures, de Saint-Louis à Douala, ed. Jacques Soulillou, Collection architectures traditionelles (Marseilles: Editions parenthèses, 1993), 300. This date and attributions contradict Itohan Osayimwese who associates the palace with Auguste Ndumbe Manga Bell’s successor Rudolf Douala Manga Bell (r. 1908–14) (Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 119, 170). In fact, Rudolf Manga Bell’s palace was built behind the Pagoda in a style more clearly reflecting German colonial architecture (Jacques Soulillou, Douala: un siècle en images [Bondy, France: Abexpress, 1982], 44–5). 34 Wolfgang Lauber (ed.), Deutsche Architektur in Kamerun, 1884–1914 (Stuttgart: Karl Krämer, 1988), 44.

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35 Harry R. Rudin, Germans in the Cameroons, 1884–1914: A Case Study in Modern Imperialism (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1968), 40, 107. 36 Rudin, Germans in the Cameroons, 190; René Gouellain, Douala: Ville et histoire, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Mémoires de l’institut d’ethnologie 11 (Paris: Institut d’ethnologie, Musée de l’homme, 1975), 125–26. 37 His son and successor, Rudolf Douala Manga Bell, would ultimately do the same with a German prefabricated wood house. Jacques Soulillou (ed.), Rives coloniales: Architectures, de Saint-Louis à Douala, Collection architectures traditionelles (Marseilles: Editions parenthèses, 1993), 297, 300. 38 Soulillou, “Le Cameroun,” 296–97. 39 J. Bouchaud, La côte du Cameroun dans l’histoire et la cartographie, Mémoires de l’IFAN 5 (Paris: Editions Le Charles Louis, 1952), 119–20. Bouchaud paraphrases the earlier publication of R. M. Jackson, Journal of a Voyage to Bonny River on the West Coast of Africa in the Ship Kingston from Liverpool, Peter Jackson, Commander (Letchworth: The Garden City Press, 1934), 108, 111, and 113. A possible photograph of King Akwa’s residences appears in Soulillou, Douala, 20. 40 Soulillou, “Le Cameroun,” 291–92; AGEFOM 799, Dossier 1855, Archives national d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France. 41 Osayimwese notes that not only were German observers ambivalent toward this building but also that the contemporaneous art historian Adolf von Oechelhäuser, “had invoked Manga Bell’s architecture as proof of the low quality of architecture in the colonies. Oechelhäuser’s critique resonated with racist undertones: style architecture becomes all the more tragic in the hands of the uncivilized hordes” (Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, 170). European observers displayed similar ambivalence regarding King Njoya’s brick palaces (Osayimwese, “Architecture with a Mission,” 40–1). 42 Gouellain, Douala, 127. 43 Gouellain, Douala, 130–33. Ralph A. Austen, “Duala versus Germans in Cameroon: Dimensions of a Political Conflict,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 64, no. 237 (4th trimester 1977), 481–82. 44 Gouellain, Douala, 136. 45 Gouellain, Douala, 137–41. 46 Gouellain, Douala, 142. 47 Robert Ritzenthaler and Pat Ritzenthaler, Cameroons Village: An Ethnography of the Bafut, Milwaukee Public Museum Publications in Anthropology 8 (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Public Museum, 1962), 31. 48 Wolfgang Lauber, Paläste und Gehöfte im Grasland von Kamerun (Stuttgart: Karl Krämer, 1990), 52. 49 Pat Ritzenthaler, in her biography of Fon Achirimbi II, recalls that this building was in fact designed in the 1930s by a Swiss architect who visited the Basel mission in Bafut; she claims he is the same architect who later built the guest house. If this is so, the building is little different from the rest of the low-slung

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buildings in the compound built by the Germans. Pat Ritzenthaler, The Fon of Bafut (London: Cassell, 1966), 182. 50 Eugenia Shanklin, “The Path to Laikom: Kom Royal Court Architecture,” Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 31 (1985): 115, 128–29. 51 Shanklin, “The Path to Laikom,” 120. 52 Christraud Geary, “Political Dress: German-Style Military Attire and Colonial Politics in Bamum,” in African Crossroads, ed. Ian Fowler and David Zeitlyn (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), 165–92. That said, a photograph in the Basel Mission Archives from 1905 shows Rudolf Manga Bell and a group of other Douala in German military uniform gathered in front of the Pagoda. An inscription on the photograph notes, “This nonsense has been put a stop to.” Basel Mission Archives, Basel, Switzerland, ref. no. E-30.48.039. 53 Geary, Images from Bamum, 73. 54 Njoya, Le palais de Foumban, 12. It is unclear if these same sources were also used for the construction of King Njoya’s first brick palace. The first significant baked-brick industry was established at Douala beginning in 1888 at a significant cost saving over the previously imported bricks (Soulillou, Rives coloniales, 298; Lauber, Deutsche Architektur, 44–5). That said, the British missionary Alfred Saker produced bricks in Douala in the 1860s in sufficient quantity to construct a church, a school, and a residence (Soulillou, Douala, 16). Likewise, the Jamaican pastors Merrick and Fuller, founders of the Native Baptist Church in Douala in 1843, built their houses out of brick after teaching locals how to make it (Houvounsadi and Pabois, Douala, 5). For an in-depth study of ceramic production at Mamarom, see Christine Preuß, Mbanké und Messi: Die Töpferei der Bamum im Wandel: Eine Studie im Grasland Kameruns, Kulturanthropologische Studien 26 (Grindelberg: LIT, 1997). 55 Isaac Paré, “Un artiste camerounais peu connu: Ibrahim Njoya,” Abbia 6 (August 1964): 175. Paré records that Ibrahim Njoya was also involved in the decoration of the Mantoum villa in 1929, though in what way is not fully explained. 56 Houvounsadi and Pabois, Douala, 8. 57 Soulillou, Rives colonials, 299–300; Lauber, Deutsche Architektur, 45; Houvounsadi and Pabois, Douala, 23–4. 58 Soulillou, Rives coloniales, 299. See also Houvounsadi and Pabois, Douala, 10, 42–4. 59 Soulillou, Rives coloniales, 300. 60 Njoya, Le palais de Foumban, 15. Robert, La restauration, 5. 61 Njoya, Le palais de Foumban, 15. 62 Geary, Things of the Palace, 14; Suzanne Preston Blier, The Royal Arts of Africa: The Majesty of Form (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 168. Other brief notes of an Islamic influence include Njoya, Le palais de Foumban, 15; Robert, La restauration, 5. 63 For a more in-depth study of the sooro in the northern Cameroonian context, see Mark Dike DeLancey, Conquest and Construction: Palace Architecture in Northern Cameroon, African History 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 65–107.

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64 A ruler in northern Cameroon is normally called a Lamido (pl. Lamibe). The term is derived from the verb lamugo meaning “to rule.” Thus, Lamido would literally be “a ruler.” It has been glossed as emir and is used in that sense in northern Cameroon. The terms are, however, distinct in etymology. While Lamido is derived directly from Fulfulde, the language of the Fulbe, emir is of Arabic origin. 65 Eldridge Mohammadou (ed.), Ray ou Rey-Bouba: Tradition transmisé par Alhadji Hamadjoda Abdoullaye, Traditions Historiques des Foulbé de l’Adamâwa, Les Yillaga de la Bénoué (Garoua: Musée Dynamique du NordCameroun, ONAREST; Paris: Editions du Center National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1979), 158, 278n.63. 66 L. Mizon, “Explorations en Afrique Centrale: 1890–1893,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 3 (1895): 69. Of course, as soon as Emir Zubayr of Adamawa threatened to use his authority to replace Mohammadou Abbo with his brother, Mohammadou Abbo found the means to make the journey to Yola to pay allegiance in person. 67 Although the Germans never destroyed the palace, they apparently did not allow any new construction within its confines. It was only with the reaccession of Lamido Yahya, deposed by the Germans in 1911, under the French colonial regime that any construction occurred. Lamido Mohamman Gabdo Yaya, interview with author, Banyo, October 9, 2000. 68 Kaouzad, “Itinéraire peu commun d’un viellard extraordinaire,” GICPAC Magazine: Organe d’expression du groupe d’initiative commune pour la promotion de l’art et de la culture du Mayo-Banyo 3 (July–September 1997), 17. 69 Tardits, Royaume Bamum, 204–09; Dubié, “Christianisme,” 340–44. She remained powerful thereafter, serving as almost a co-ruler until her death in 1913. 70 Tardits, Royaume Bamum, 230–32, 240–41; Dubié, “Christianisme,” 349–50, 374–81. 71 Dubié, “Christianisme,” 350–51. Geary follows Dubié in dating this event. Geary, Things of the Palace, 15. Ibrahim Mouiche, however, prefers the date 1917, and Tardits dates it to 1916–17. Ibrahim Mouiche, “Islam, mondialisation et crise identitaire dans le royaume bamoum, Cameroun,” Africa 74, no. 3 (2005): 390–91; Tardits, Royaume Bamum, 244; Tardits, L’histoire singulière, 54. Regardless of these minor variations of dating, for which none of the scholars provides definitive support, the relevance to the timing of the palace construction remains consistent. 72 Anthropologist Yoshihito Shimada, for example, explains that the Germans, and the French after them, were fascinated by the cavalry of the Muslim Fulbe in northern Cameroon. Even more so, their state structures could be easily coopted and the literate learned figures amongst them employed for purposes of record-keeping and communication with the colonial regime. Yoshihito Shimada, “Dynamique politique des états traditionnels sous l’indirect rule: Du pouvoir à l’autorité - Etude de cas du Lamidat de Rey-Bouba,” in Africa 3, ed. Shohei Wada and Paul K. Eguchi, Senri Ethnological Studies 15 (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1984), 304. The British argued similarly for northern

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Nigeria as outlined in Charles Lindsay Temple, Native Races and Their Rulers: Sketches and Studies of Official Life and Administrative Problems in Nigeria (Cape Town: Argus, 1918). 73 Geary, “Political Dress,” 187–88; Geary, Images from Bamum, 59. 74 Geary, Images from Baumum, 59. 75 Tardits, Royaume Bamoum, 986. 76 Chef de Circonscription de Dschang Ripert, “Instructions à Monsieur le Chef de la Subdivision de Foumban,” Dschang, October 22, 1923. APA11919/A, Cameroon National Archives, Yaounde. 77 J. C. Barbier. “Le peuplement de la partie méridionale du plateau bamiléké,” in Contribution de la recherche ethnologique à l’histoire des civilisations du Cameroun/The Contribution of Ethnological Research to the History of Cameroon Cultures, vol. 2, ed. Claude Tardits, Colloques internationaux du centre national de la recherche scientifique 551 (Paris: Editions du centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1981), 352. 78 Robert Fontecave, Le chef coutumier en pays Bamileke (Mémoire, École nationale de la France d’outre-mer, 1953–54), 37. Archives nationales d’outremer, Aix-en-Provence, 3 ECOL 118 D 2. 79 Dominique Malaquais discusses the destruction of palaces in the Grassfields at this time. Dominique Malaquais, “Faut-il brûler les chefferies bamiléké ?” Architecture, pouvoir et dissidence au Cameroun (Paris: Karthala, 2002), 297–342. 80 Barbier, “Le peuplement,” 352. 81 A recent royal genealogy displayed in the palace makes this claim, though Joseph Nkwenga’s history states only that the original population of Bangangté moved from Bamoun territories to their current location. According to this account, the royal family originates later from a hunter named Ngami (or Nganté) who came from a village named Fékô located near Banka. Rather than related to the Bamum, this account records several conflicts between the two kingdoms that were only resolved sometime around the turn of the twentieth century under Mfen Tsha’tshua, the father of Mfen Njiké II. Joseph Nkwenga, “Histoire de la chefferie de Bangangté,” Abbia 9-10 (July–August 1965): 94–5, 101. Tchatchoua, however, clearly states that the Bangangté royal house originates from the Bamum Dynasty as descendants of the eighth king of Bamum Ngapna (r. 1498–1519). The veracity of this account is difficult to ascertain. It does, however, fit well into a larger emerging narrative in early twentieth-century Cameroon Grassfields of identifying with Tikar kingdoms. 82 Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, “Notes on Photographs from Christol Albaums, ca. 1920” (Unpublished manuscript, Pitt Rivers Museum photographic archives, University of Oxford, PRM 1998.110), 2. 83 F. Clement C. Egerton, African Majesty: A Record of Refuge at the Court of the King of Bangangté in the French Cameroons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 69, 151. There is little written explicitly about art or architecture in Bangangté. Bettina von Lintig discusses the sculptor Kwayep of Bamena, who worked in the early twentieth century and produced sculptures on commission for King Njiké II. Bettina von Lintig, “Chance Encounter: Kwayep

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of Bamana,” Tribal Art 18–1, no. 70 (Winter 2013): 90–101. Louis Perrois and Jean-Paul Notué discuss the sculpture of Bangangté and its neighbors in their more general review of eastern, central, and southern Bamileke styles. Louis Perrois and Jean-Paul Notué, La panthère et la mygale: Rois et sculpteurs de l’Ouest-Cameroun (Paris: Karthala/ORSTOM, 1997), 159–84. 84 The construction of N’kongsamba followed the earlier construction of a building in wood with murals, still standing though terribly dilapidated, called Douala. Thomas Tchatchoua, Les Bangangté de l’ouest-Cameroun: histoire et ethnologie d’un royaume africain (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), 193–94, 208. 85 Alexandra Loumpet-Galitzine, Njoya et le royaume bamoun: Les archives de la Société des Missions Évangéliques de Paris (Paris: Karthala, 2006), 215. 86 Malaquais, Architecture, 72. 87 Azi is normally labeled Fontem on maps and in the scholarly literature, though this is in fact a misnomer. The name Fontem was applied by the Germans and their colonial successors. The term in fact is simply the name of the ruler first encountered by the Germans. Likewise, the kingdom is properly referred to as Lebang, one of seven closely related in Lebialem Division of Southwest Region. In the literature it is often referred to as Bangwa. This produces some confusion as there is a kingdom in the West Region that is in fact properly called Bangoua. The palace of Azi was damaged by government troops, known as the Bataillon d’Intervention Rapide (BIR), during operations related to the recent uprising in the two Anglophone regions. BBC footage and investigative reporting captured BIR troops setting fire to buildings on the roundabout just below the palace in Azi. “Burning Cameroon: Images You’re Not Meant to See,” BBC News, June 25, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/worldafrica-44561929 (accessed July 6, 2019). 88 Sir Ajua Alemanji, In Defence of a Tradition; The Legacy of Mafua Nkengafac Fuantem Asonganyi (Pinetown: Pinetown Printers, 2006), 62, 70. 89 Henry Cadman, “An Assessment Report on the Bangwa Tribal Area in the Mamfe Division of the Cameroon Province,” December 19, 1922. Af 13, Buea Archives, Buea, Cameroon available online in transcription at http://www. lebialem.info/page/ (accessed March 13, 2020). 90 Malaquais, Architecture, 170–71n.30. 91 Older photographs of the Pagoda show that its lantern was originally surmounted by a domical roof with a pointed finial, rather than the current pyramidal roof. 92 Gerald M. Durrell, The Bafut Beagles (New York: Viking Press, 1954). Pat Ritzenthaler notes that she and her husband stayed in the resthouse while in Bafut, by then a “favorite stopover for tourists,” and that it lacked electricity (Ritzenthaler, The Fon of Bafut, 55). 93 Lauber, Paläste und Gehöfte, 52. 94 Erica Perlmutter Jones, “The Multiple Lives of Objects: Museum, Memory, and Modernity in the Cameroon Grassfields” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 2014), 12. In the current conflagrations afflicting the Anglophone regions of Cameroon, the palace of Bafut, included on the tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage Site status since 2006, was damaged in an attack by government BIR troops

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and items were stolen from the museum on September 24, 2019. A statement protesting this destruction was issued by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) on November 20, 2019, https://www.acasaonline. org/3461-2/ (accessed May 19, 2020). 95 World Monument Fund, Exterior Restoration of Bafut Palace Complex, Cameroon – Final Report (New York: World Monument Fund, 2009). 96 Its local authorship is even confirmed by Durrell, who is told by a District Officer at the beginning of his novel that the Fon has, “A wonderful villa there, which he built in case he had any European visitors” (Durrell, Bafut Beagles, 5; Ritzenthaler, The Fon of Bafut, 182). 97 London School of Economics Archives, Kaberry Box 13, Folder 4/20A, Items 1-6. 98 The basic parameters of this debate can be found in an online article in Mark Dike DeLancey, “The Cameroon Grassfield States in the Broader History of Nigeria and Cameroon,” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 99 Jean-Pierre Warnier, Échanges, développement et hiérarchies dans le Bamenda pré-colonial (Cameroun), Studien zur Kulturkunde 76 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), 264–66.

5 Namibia’s anti-colonial hero Hendrik Witbooi: Reflections from the visual arts Fabian Lehmann

Everyone in Namibia knows the national, anti-colonial hero Hendrik Witbooi. People might not be familiar with details of his biography, but they certainly know what he looked like. This is because Witbooi’s portrait not only appears on Namibian banknotes but also on shirts, flags, and advertising posters. In this chapter I will discuss contemporary visual artworks that refer to the iconic portrait of Hendrik Witbooi. As I will show, these artworks are especially informative when it comes to the collective memory on Witbooi in Namibia. The discussion of the artworks is divided into three sections. The first section, “Portraying Hendrik Witbooi,” is on artistic appropriations of the Witbooi portrait. Here, I introduce the portrait’s characteristic features that make it easy to recognize and also trace the image’s historical origin. In the second section “Witbooi in dialogue,” I will introduce artworks that recontextualize Witbooi as a historical figure who was in constant exchange not only with his own people but also with the officers of the German troops that he fought against. In the third section, “The commercialization of the Witbooi portrait,” which discusses artworks that particularly address the Witbooi portrait on the dollar note, I provide some theoretical background to explain why the portrait of Witbooi must be called an iconic image. Hendrik Witbooi (c. 1830–1905) was among the fiercest opponents to German military forces in Namibia (then known as German SouthWest Africa) under German colonization (1884–1915). As Kaptein of the

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Witbooi-Nama he succeeded in winning other Nama groups to jointly fight against the Germans. It was his charisma and his rhetorical skills, but also his achievements as a military strategist, that gained him respect even from his enemies. Nevertheless, Witbooi was no reckless patriot who would have rather died than compromise with German colonial power. When fighting the Germans became more and more futile in 1894, Witbooi changed to a Realpolitik and signed a peace treaty with the Germans that lasted for ten years. After the infamous Battle of Waterberg in August 1904 and the flight of the Ovaherero into the Omaheke savannah, which led to the extermination of the majority of the Ovaherero under Samuel Maharero, Witbooi ended the peace treaty and fought once more against the Germans. He died as an old man during a battle in October 1905. To this day Witbooi remains an essential point of reference for the collective memory of the Nama population. Each year in October, at the date of Witbooi’s death, “Heroes Day” is celebrated in the town of Gibeon in Namibia’s south. Seeing the re-enactment of scenes from Witbooi’s life and fights is an established cornerstone of Nama memory practices. The first Heroes Day goes back as far as 1930, when Witboois’ son, Kaptein Isaak Witbooi, was buried next to his father. In this year, Nama from all over South-West Africa gathered for the funeral service and to honor both Kapteins of the same lineage. The graves of Hendrik and Isaak Witbooi remain a central point for the celebration of Heroes Day.1 However, Witbooi is an important point of reference not only for the Nama population but also for the memory of Namibia’s colonial past. In fact, Witbooi has become the most important of nine official heroes and a central figure of identification for the official self-image of the entire Namibian nation. This chapter is not so much about the historical figure of Hendrik Witbooi as about how he is remembered today in Namibia and which parts of his biography are forgotten. It is about how this historical personality is constructed in the present. As I will argue, iconic portraits of Witbooi in popular culture and in the arts are key when it comes to the memory of the Nama leader. To be sure, Witbooi’s prominence in presentday Namibia cannot be explained by his visual appearance alone. These visual representations are instead part of a more comprehensive memory culture that stages Witbooi as a resistance fighter and liberator of SouthWest Africa both textually and performatively. In this chapter, however, I will focus on visual artworks. To interpret and understand these artworks, it will be necessary to also refer to popular visualizations of Witbooi, which are often used by artists as an important source and point of reference. Interestingly, nearly all of the artworks in this chapter refer to the same iconic image of Hendrik Witbooi. Nevertheless, they all use different approaches and artistic means, and therefore reveal a lot about Witbooi as a multifaceted historical figure and how he is remembered.

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Portraying Hendrik Witbooi The first artwork I would like to introduce is a print by Petrus Amuthenu, titled Reverend Dr Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi 1830–1905 from 2017 (Figure 5.1). It is a cardboard print of 25 × 20 inches (65 × 52 centimeters) in an edition of three prints. The work shows Hendrik Witbooi in full-face pose dressed in a jacket with collar and buttons, wearing a white hat with a brim. The face of the Nama Kaptein is pronounced and shows clear signs of aging like a hanging eyelid and a full gray beard. Underneath the hat, Witbooi wears a cloth that covers his temples and the upper half of his ears. Apart from the image’s blue background, black is the dominant color extensively applied on the hat, face, and jacket. Particularly on the face, the contrast between black and white is moderated by shades of blue and purple. These tones create soft nuances that give depth and contour to the face and create a detailed, corporal entity. The innumerable variations of lines and color fields create a dynamic, restless impression as if light and shadow of sun and clouds are reflected on Witbooi’s face.

FIGURE  5.1 Reverend Dr Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi 1830–1905, 2017, Petrus Amuthenu, cardboard print, 65 × 52 centimeters. Photo: author.

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FIGURE 5.2  Hendrik Witbooi (detail), 2015, Inatu Indongo. Photo: Helen Harris.

When it comes to the artwork’s title, it has to be stressed that Reverend Dr Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi 1830–1905 is a merging of two individuals that are in fact separated by two generations. The given years clearly refer to the historical Hendrik Witbooi who died in 1905. The academic and church title, on the contrary, point to the great-grandson of Hendrik Witbooi who carried the same name but lived between 1934 and 2009.2 As I will show later on, this confusion or merging of Hendrik Witbooi and his descendants is not a singular occurrence. There is another portrait that shows a closeup painting of the historical Kaptein. In Hendrik Witbooi (2015) by Inatu Indongo, various tones of blue are the dominant color (Figure 5.2). The portrait resembles the artwork by Amuthenu in all major characteristics. Just like in Amuthenu’s print, the old, severe looking man with the tightly closed lips focuses on his spectators. Only after more careful observation does one indeed notice differences between the two portraits, like the hat that is put on in a more sloping manner in Indongo’s painting. Both depictions of Witbooi are based on historical photographs. But Indongo’s painting is atypical, as it is based on a historical photograph

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rarely referred to. Likely taken in the early 1890s in Gibeon in Southern South-West Africa, the photograph used by Indongo is about ten years older than the much more prominent photograph used as a reference by Amuthenu. Amuthenu’s famous photograph was taken around 1900 in Rehoboth, 55 miles (90 kilometers) south of South-West Africa’s capital Windhoek, and nearly all visual representations of Witbooi refer to this single visual source (Figure 5.3). It shows the Nama Kaptein sitting upright on a stool, holding a rifle in his right hand. In this photograph, Witbooi is well dressed. His trousers and his gray uniform jacket are flawless. For the Nama around 1900, it was nothing unusual to equip themselves with German uniforms often captured from German soldiers during battles. Both rifle and stool in the photograph can be read as insignias of Witbooi’s authority as a Kaptein. Another notable feature is the hat with the white ribbon that sits straight on his head. This is an identification mark of the Witbooi-Nama. Already in photographs from the 1870s one sees Nama wearing a white cloth around the hat—a sign

FIGURE  5.3  Historical photograph of Hendrik Witbooi, c. 1900, Rehoboth. Source: Deutsches Historisches Museum.

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representing not only ethnic belonging but also the readiness to fight.3 To this day such hats work as a sign of solidarity among the male members of the Witbooi-Nama.4 In the photograph the upright posture of Witbooi’s body is reflected in his face with his alert eyes focusing on the camera and, therefore, the observer. The beard and the narrow face with prominent cheekbones give him the dignity of an elderly man. This is no wonder since Witbooi was already around seventy years old when the photograph was taken. The calm sobriety and severity of Witbooi in his self-presentation in front of the camera is found in most of the preserved photographs taken of him. His posture and his face seem to be as neutral as possible, but I argue that they are not neutral. The impression is rather one of a confident and proud, but at the same time unpretentious and critical man dispensing with any coquetry, holding his gun in his hand and being ready to stand up for his convictions. The historical situation of the Rehoboth photograph has to be taken into account in its interpretation. It was a colonial context, in which the Germans and the Witbooi-Nama had been, nevertheless, coexisting peacefully. This was after Witbooi had been defeated during a battle in the Naukluft Mountains in 1894 and therefore accepted a peace treaty with the Germans. In those years the production of photographs was still laborious and expensive and in the hands of a European elite.5 That means the photographs from that time present a European gaze and therefore represent the power relations between the colonizing Germans and the allied Witbooi-Nama. According to Hayes et al. visualization of the colonial process by means of photography was especially important for the German administration that opened a darkroom already in 1892.6 “Colonization and visualization of the other” went hand in hand, as Hayes et al. argue.7 Even more than painting and drawing, from the 1870s on, photography became part of colonial expansion. Photography was a tool that helped to document the settling process, a medium of propaganda that was meant to transmit images of a “successful conquest” of African territory and African people to Europe.8 However, that does not mean the photographed Hendrik Witbooi was a pure victim of colonial propaganda. He does not show a fearful face speaking of coercion as other “objects” in front of the colonial camera sometimes did.9 As Christraud Geary writes about photographs taken of King Njoya and the Kingdom of Bamum in colonial Cameroon, the interaction between the photographer and the photographed was not of a one-dimensional character.10 In the case of Witbooi, it is obvious that he was actively involved in the image creation. In the photographs he did not become a “specimen who was stripped of individuality and dignity,” as it was true for standardized photographs taken by anthropologists interested in racial types.11 As mentioned above, Witbooi’s attributes like the hat and the uniform are objects of importance for the self-identification of the Witbooi-Nama, the stool and the rifle

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are insignias of authority. These elements resemble a nineteenth-century European iconography of dress and therefore should have been readable for a South-West African as well as a German audience, but the extent to which Witbooi’s self-presentation referred to Nama versus European iconography cannot be determined. We cannot know which particular audience—what “future viewer,” as Geary calls it—Witbooi addressed in his self-presentation—his own people, the colonizers, the Germans in the German Empire, or each of these groups.12 But just as King Njoya around the same time in Cameroon, Witbooi knew how to use the new medium to present himself and to express status and political hierarchy.13 Today, reproductions of the widely distributed photograph that are popular among the Nama who identify with Witbooi represent the way people are willing to remember the historical Nama Kaptein. As a sign of identification and memory, the photograph is printed on shirts, patches, or flags proudly presented on occasions such as the Heroes Day of the Nama, held annually at the end of October.14 In its cross-media distribution inside and outside of Namibia, the photograph from Rehoboth has now become increasingly emancipated from its original colonial context and, today, it is the most common image of Witbooi worldwide. It is found in a large mural painting in Namibia’s Independence Museum in Windhoek but also on book covers such as the Dutch novel Ik ben Hendrik Witbooi written by Conny Braams in 2016 or the German collection of Witbooi’s writings by Gustav Menzel, Widerstand und Gottesfurcht, from 2000. In accordance with the already introduced artworks, the image is usually not printed in its original format but cut to a closeup portrait focusing on Witbooi’s face. Interestingly, as a closeup, the photograph from Rehoboth works just as well as the original full-figure portrait. Both images represent the inviolable dignity of the portrayed character. I have started this analysis with the artworks by Amuthenu and Indongo because they are informative when it comes to the iconic role of Witbooi in Namibian history and memory. Although both works are based on historical photographs taken in different years and at different places, they are almost congruent when it comes to the presentation of Witbooi. This leads to an important observation regarding the visual afterlife of Witbooi: the iconic status of Witbooi’s portrait in Namibia today is to a large part the result of Witbooi’s strikingly constant self-presentation in front of a camera that allows viewers to recognize him easily—another parallel to the equally careful policy of self-presentations by King Njoya in Bamum.15

Witbooi in dialogue The main attribute that distinguishes the historical figure of Hendrik Witbooi from other South-West African community and military leaders of that time is not the fact that he successfully opposed the colonizing

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power for a certain time. Others such as Samuel Maharero, Jacob Morenga (also called Marengo), or Cornelius Fredericks did the same. But what is distinctive about Witbooi’s fight are the written records that are still available. Because of his attempt to carefully document his conversation with the German commanders and other African leaders, we are still able to learn about Hendrik Witbooi’s thoughts and views firsthand. The fact that Witbooi ordered that all incoming and outgoing letters be copied and archived allows for detailed insights into his political thoughts even a century after his death. This is unique in Namibia’s colonial history and of global relevance. An artistic production that directly refers to the correspondence between Witbooi and the commanding officer of the German troops, Theodor Leutwein, is the subject of the musical 1894. Hentie van der Merwe, a visual artist living in South Africa, together with author Henning Pieterse, director Marthinus Basson, music composer Philip Miller, and filmmaker Amanda Evans worked on the piece between 2007 and 2013. Van der Merwe wrote the concept and a draft for the libretto as the piece was meant to use songs, live music, digital sound collages, dance, and video projections.16 The final libretto contains the figures of a hare as a recurring character in Nama stories, the German emperor Wilhelm II and his mother Victoria, as well as Hendrik Witbooi and Theodor Leutwein.17 In 2012, van der Merwe together with other actors and director Jaco Bouwer realized a workshop to produce footage and film stills of the individual characters in the play as sketches and preliminary work for the planned 1894 musical. In 2016, these film stills were shown as 12 × 16.5 inch (30 × 42 centimeter) prints in the group exhibition, “1884–1915, An Artistic Position,” at the National Art Gallery in Windhoek. They present the play’s characters in elaborate costumes, well illuminated in front of a black monochrome background. When it comes to the characters of Witbooi and Leutwein, these two differ from the others, as they are performed by the same actor wearing the same costume. It is the “colored” professional actor Dann-Jacques Mouton from South Africa who plays both figures.18 The only difference between the two is the perspective of the photograph that creates two individual impressions for both characters. The double character Witbooi/Leutwein from the exhibition therefore only partly corresponds with the libretto that presents both characters as separate figures. In the two film stills Witbooi and Leutwein wear a beige uniform, an oversized gray hat, as worn by the German colonial troops, and a single brown knee-high boot on the left leg (Plate 5 and Plate 6). Furthermore, the actor wears a dark chin beard and mustache and stands in a small heap of sand that covers his feet. A dust cloud floats waist-high and is illuminated by the spotlight. The costume features more asymmetrical elements, allowing the actor to show either the Leutwein or the Witbooi-side. The film still that presents Leutwein covers the left side of the costume with its variety of colorful,

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pseudo-military badges. The hat, the medals, the epaulet, and the collar are all oversized and shine in bright colors of yellow, blue, red, and gold. The other film still showing the right Witbooi-side of the figure shows the actor in an equivalently proud pose with the raised head and the determined look. This side of the costume, however, is much more plain and presents a simple military uniform. The right side of the actor’s face in addition is made up in an earthy tone. With the closed fist and without the colorful badges, the Witbooi side appears noticeably stiffer compared with the triumphantly decorated Leutwein, which again supports the impression of the serious character of Witbooi. The merging of Hendrik Witbooi and Theodor Leutwein into a single stage character with two sides is a skillful combination that uses visual similarities to speak about biographical analogies. Both historical figures had fought against Indigenous groups in South-West Africa and tried to win them over to support their interests as military leaders. Both had visions of controlling the entire country and were willing to accept the necessary material expenditures and human losses. The respectful letters that the two men exchanged suggest that they were leaders of equal importance, who in the end concluded a peace agreement after Witbooi’s defeat in 1894. Similar to van der Merwe, the artist Moholi Ndikung presents Witbooi and his opponent. This time, however, it is not Leutwein that is depicted, but another German officer Alfred von Schlieffen. For the two paintings Quotes of War (Witbooi) and Quotes of War (von Schlieffen) from 2016, Ndikung uses two large unframed canvases of 67 × 41 inches (170 × 105 centimeters) each (Figure  5.4). Below the actual portraits, the canvases are equipped with text written in black capital letters on a white background. These texts are short quotes that work as a motto for the portrayed individuals and pithily illustrate their positions in the colonial war. Under the portrait of von Schlieffen, a German sentence reads: “Der entbrannte Rassenkampf ist nur durch die Vernichtung einer Partei abzuschließen” (The fight of the races that has erupted can only end with the extermination of one party). The Witbooi portrait, on the other hand, presents the following words: “I don’t want to possess a part of our country – I want to have the whole Namibia.” The raw and plain letters support the straightforwardness of the political statements that do not allow any room for interpretation. The image and text remain horizontally separated: they do not touch or even overlap with each other. The arrangement thus suggests a linear reading of the image-text montages—both visually and also regarding their interpretation. Unlike the Witbooi portraits by Amuthenu and Indongo that are open to interpretation, the text here limits the viewer to a single reading: of the two men as enemies in war. The format of the paintings, the combination of image and text as well as the use of a frameless hanging remind one of political posters and preempt Namibia’s subsequent visual history. As separate but symmetrically arranged paintings both portraits share many details, which are underlined by the images hanging next to each

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FIGURE 5.4  Quotes of War (von Schlieffen) and Quotes of War (Witbooi), 2016, Moholi Ndikung. Paintings on canvas, 170 × 105 centimeters each. Photo: Helen Harris.

other. The positioning of the heads in the portrait, the partitioning into image and text, and the coloring are congruent. The figures wear dark brown uniforms in front of a white background. Even the men’s beards look similar. Only the darker skin of Witbooi, his scarf around his forehead, his hat, and the frontal perspective differ from von Schlieffen who looks slightly to the side. Although Witbooi looks much older in the painting, both individuals were born around the same time. In fact von Schlieffen was born three years after Witbooi’s suspected year of birth in 1830.19 The comparison of the two individuals therefore also makes sense from a biographical point of view. In a thorough examination of the quotes from the images, however, one realizes that the words do not stem from Hendrik Witbooi himself, but from his grandson, Hendrik Samuel Witbooi, who became Kaptein of the Witbooi-Nama in 1955.20 Here again, the historical Hendrik Witbooi is credited with a quote that belongs to a descendant. Because of the merging of the different generations of Witbooi Kapteins, the already prominent figure of Hendrik Witbooi becomes even more loaded. This larger-thanlife figure surpasses the historical character and becomes an intersection of

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different Witbooi authorities whereby statements, symbols, and narratives meet and reinforce each other. The sentence under the second portrait in contrast is taken from a letter by von Schlieffen from 1904 to German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow.21 Von Schlieffen gave political backing to general Lothar von Trotha and his extermination order against the Ovaherero on October 2, 1904 and the Nama on April 22, 1905. Like von Trotha, von Schlieffen aimed at the complete subjugation if not extermination of the enemy. Even if von Schlieffen never set foot in the German colonies and never faced Hendrik Witbooi in person, he was still an important protagonist in the military command within the German Empire and a supporter of von Trotha’s savage methods.22 On the whole, the comparison of Witbooi and von Schlieffen, however, is not entirely convincing, as von Schlieffen in the quoted sentence referred to von Trotha’s actions against the Ovaherero, while it was another commander, Berthold Deimling, who fought against Witbooi and his Nama people.23 Before the war between the Germans and Nama broke out again in 1904, both nations cooperated for a phase of ten years. Between Witbooi’s defeat in the Naukluft Mountains in 1894 and the Battle of Waterberg in 1904, Hendrik Witbooi was a partner to the Germans and even supported them with his own troops.24 Only after the infamous battle between the Ovaherero and Germans at Waterberg did Witbooi terminate the peace treaty and join the remaining Ovaherero to fight against the Germans again. Contrary to what one would expect, Witbooi’s reputation among his own people was not affected by the ten years of cooperation with the Germans. Quite the reverse, he stayed Kaptein of the Nama in Gibeon and was celebrated as a bringer of peace.25 Even within the German Empire, Witbooi became famously known as a partner of the Germans in Africa and received postcards asking for his celebrity signature.26 It has to be stressed that Hendrik Witbooi was a singular personality in the wider context of German colonialism in Africa. His position and the one of his soldiers within colonial society has to be distinguished from the role of the East African askari or other unnamed African soldiers and police forces, for example in colonial Togo, working for the Germans. The Witbooi-Nama stayed autonomous and had no reason to aim for a more prestigious social status connected to the position of askari within the colonial administration.27 Indeed, in 1894, Hendrik Witbooi had finally signed a so-called “protection treaty,” but this allowed his Nama followers to remain independent and to keep their weapons. Hendrik Witbooi himself subsequently received an annual payment from the German government. A further treaty from 1895 included the obligation to support German forces and a German military station was set up in the Nama settlement of Gibeon.28 During this time the Nama were given a chance to become familiar with German military methods.29 The latter would become especially helpful after war broke out

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again in 1904. Nama and Ovaherero now implemented a guerrilla tactic that could only be answered by the Germans with a sheer bulk of soldiers steadily reinforced by troops from the empire.30 So in contrast to African military and police forces recruited by German colonial administration, the Witbooi-Nama were equivalent partners. Their cooperation with the Germans was not so much based on political or economic dependence, but on strategic agreements to the benefit of both contracting parties. Having said this, when it comes to the perception of Witbooi among the German public, the European myth of the loyal askari would have had an impact. The image of the askari often depicted in photographs with the flag of the German Empire was widely distributed and helped to support the idea of German officers and their devoted entourage.31 Such images later also became means of propaganda against other European powers who denied that Germany were a responsible and able colonial power.32 But in contrast to images of one-dimensional, even heroic askari, Witbooi was described as a more ambiguous character. He was not suitable for a narrative of the loyal soldier fighting for the German colonial cause—a myth used by the Germans to glorify their recruitment of askari and their administration of the colonies.33 The front side of a postcard that uses a photograph of Hendrik Witbooi from 1894 instead speaks of the “verwegen” (venturous) Kaptein—an ambivalent term that expresses admiration for audacity, but also disdain for recklessness.34 When war between the Nama and Germans broke out again, this time the fighting did not last long. Merely a year after the fighting had started, Witbooi, now over seventy years of age, died from a German rifle’s bullet on October 29, 1905. In an obituary, Governor Theodor Leutwein expressed his respect for a modest, confident, ambitious, and disciplined opponent, who he described as a natural-born leader.35 Leutwein’s respectful words did not only address Witbooi’s military skills but also resulted from his experience corresponding with Witbooi. In fact, when writing letters, Witbooi was just as eloquent and demanding as he was polite. Because of his preserved letters and notes, Hendrik Witbooi remains an unprecedented figure in Namibia’s colonial history. His pride, argumentation skills, and the belief in his own abilities create a strong potential for identification, even in present-day Namibia. With his aim of uniting the different Nama groups to fight side by side with the Ovaherero against the Germans, Witbooi represents the Indigenous will for Namibian national unity. He therefore has become an archetype for the process of nationbuilding in the still young postcolonial and post-apartheid state. Written and visual references are of crucial importance in efforts to praise and remember Witbooi in his role as a resistance fighter. The fact of fighting for ten years side by side with the Germans did not harm his reputation as a powerful Nama leader—as I discuss below.

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The popular icon Anyone who walked along Independence Avenue in Windhoek in early 2018 and passed the central post office saw a poster with a three meter tall portrait of a laughing Hendrik Witbooi (Figure 5.5). It was an advertisement by the Nampost Savings Bank glued to the branch’s window. In this largescale version, however, the portrait has been cropped and limited to the right half of Witbooi’s face. At first glance, it looked as if the image again originated from the canonical Rehoboth photograph. But on taking a closer look, several divergences became visible. The pale orange coloring and the graphic’s hatched nature referred to another context: Witbooi’s portrait on the Namibian dollar notes. The poster’s orange color clearly drew a connection to the common 20-dollar note. Even closer inspection reveals that this was no simple copy of the bank note. Overemphasizing the

FIGURE  5.5  Advertising at Nampost office, Independence Avenue, Windhoek, March 2018. Photo: author.

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note’s graphic technique, the hatching on the poster was done in an even bolder and more exhaustive way than on the actual notes. Most flashy of all, however, was Witbooi’s unusual facial expression. The origin of the portrait on the dollar note is indeed the historical photograph from Rehoboth. In its manipulated version in the advertising poster, however, Witbooi is not the fearless leader commanding his troops to fight the Germans. In this poster, his mouth is opened wide in a smile showing shiny, white teeth. The advertisement therefore presents a relaxed, friendly, and much younger-looking man, whose needs have been met by the bank. Just like the poster’s text promises: “Visit any of our branches today, and see how we can put a smile on your face and do more for you and your money.” The reason for the manipulation of course is just as simple as the written message: to raise the passersby’s awareness, the advertising poster makes use of the fact that the historical Witbooi was never seen with a smile in any historical photographs. It therefore plays with the contrast of the combination of familiar and unexpected features in Witbooi’s face. Indeed, what is important for the iconic potential of an image is a balance between well-known image patterns and elements that are unknown and raise the public’s awareness.36 It is the equilibrium between familiar pattern and singular expression that enables an image to become an icon.37 In addition to the cultural canonization of the Witbooi poster on shirts or book covers, the advertising poster demonstrates what historian Gerhard Paul calls an “economic canonization.”38 The advertisement therefore makes use of the original photograph’s popularity and, at the same time, refers to the dollar note to emphasize the bank service context of the message. When it comes to the impact of particular images, this can be judged by their spatial and temporal dissemination. Images with this kind of iconic status “are sacred images for a secular society,” as Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites write regarding iconic photographs.39 Such images are usually conventionally constructed and therefore easy to consume.40 They have already been integrated into communication, as one can assume these images and their meaning to be known. They thus allow for the reduction of information within the complex environment of modernity and create collective points of orientation, as Kathrin Fahlenbrach explains.41 Iconic images objectify and sometimes personify historical turning points or political developments and make them graspable.42 As a consequence such images become more and more self-referential and part of a collective memory.43 The advertising poster at the Nampost office illustrates that a variety of protagonists are necessary for the popularization and appropriation of an image as a precondition for its incorporation into cultural memory. Protagonists include public institutions, publishing houses, or marketing strategists.44 In accordance with these protagonists, the same iconic images appear in various contexts, dimensions, and qualities, be it on stamps, as black-and-white copies in history books, or in highly polished advertising

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posters.45 Through everyday use by different protagonists, the images remain a lively part of the collective memory. But still, a permanent conservation of such images for more than one generation cannot be expected, as Paul reminds us. The “canon of images within cultural memory” (Bilderkanon des kulturellen Gedächtnisses) is not permanently codified, but stems from the image’s popularity that is based on its use.46 With the cropping of the original photograph of Hendrik Witbooi sitting on a stool and holding a rifle in his hand, the image on the bank note was reduced to a portrait of Witbooi’s face and therefore made use of a well-established European pattern of presenting prominent persons. The portrait of the relaxed and satisfied Witbooi on the advertising poster thus exemplifies what Paul describes as a general feature of media icons: the detachment of an image from its original context. Hendrik Witbooi as an advertising figure has lost all of its historical and political meaning. The image’s use to promote the opening of a Nampost Bank account has no relation to Witbooi’s biography and cannot be brought in line with his selfpresentation as a military and political leader. The poster from Nampost Savings Bank is an enlarged, cropped, and manipulated copy of the Witbooi portrait on the Namibian dollar note. The image on the note is based on the historical photograph, but it has crossed the boundaries of this visual medium and appears on a poster in a completely different context. In this way, the portrait of Witbooi as a media icon has developed a transmedial life of its own. The advertisement therefore does not present the popular historical figure of resistance against German colonization. Instead the portrait is already detached from the persona and relates to the image of Witbooi as found on the dollar note. The image on the note has become a reference itself that, because of its popularity and distribution, works without any reference to its historical context of origin. Initially used by the government on the dollar note as a political symbol of the fight for independence, Witbooi’s portrait has since experienced an economic canonization and become an advertising figure in a commercial environment.

The commercialization of the Witbooi portrait An earlier artwork that puts Witbooi’s portrait into the thematic context of money is the cardboard print, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going to? (2005) by Andrew van Wyk. The portrait is placed at the center of the print of 24 × 18 inches (62 × 45 centimeters). Around Witbooi’s head, black figurative and abstract elements are placed that give the print a largely dark impression. Free, unprinted areas are rare in the graphic—it is only above Witbooi’s hat that we find a mottled, orange sky.

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Besides the dominant black, orange is the only other color and it is used as a tint to accentuate figures and patterns. When it comes to the color application and also the layout of the line, this print differs strongly from the work by Petrus Amuthenu because van Wyk forgoes any extensive application of paint except for the bottom side of the hat’s brim. Also, his lines are more blurred and much less defined than in Amuthenu’s print. Apart from these differences, van Wyk’s Witbooi portrait shows the previously discussed characteristic elements. Viewed closely, the face of the national hero is hard to recognize because of the many rough lines and notches, whereas from the distance, the portrait becomes the main identifiable object. A circle around Witbooi’s head directs the view to the portrait and presents it like in a medallion. The circle itself is a composition of smaller individual figurative depictions in a row as if they would be part of a filmstrip. These small depictions show buildings in a village, cooking utensils, and other small portraits of people. In two of these images, we can identify the first president of Namibia, Sam Nujoma. The medallion with the portrait of Witbooi is lifted upward by two hands that come from the lower edge of the image and emerge from an abstract, concentric form that develops into an elaborate pattern to the left and the right. Like a precious good, the Witbooi portrait is embedded in the palms of the hands, enclosed by the fingers, as it might be presented to an adoring audience. Arranged around the head of Witbooi are rifles, horse’s heads with huge nostrils that make them look aggressive, and white crosses that mark graves. In combination with the title, the rifles, horses, and crosses recall the violent past of Namibia during the period of German colonialism, but they also speak about a greater historical and cultural context. In chronological order, starting with the provenance and ending with an unknown future, the image’s title raises three questions about group self-identity: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going to?” The round shapes within the image create a flow that supports the questions of group identity that are inseparably connected to the dynamics of time. The circle around the medallion together with a basket-work pattern in the upper right corner indicates an entanglement of the visual elements within a cultural meshwork and the circularity of daily and annual routines. Also notable is the fact that the circle is broken on its left side, which points to gaps and breaks within the conception of a group identity. According to Andrew van Wyk, he has applied the orange coloring to the graphic to imitate the color of the Namibian 20 dollar note (Figure 5.6).47 Furthermore the form of the medallion that carries the portrait could also be read as a coin with an engraved Witbooi relief. In referring to Witbooi’s portrait on the dollar note, van Wyk’s print reflects the role of the national hero for the identity of the youthful Namibian state. This symbolic meaning of the nation’s currency is supported by a statement by Hifikepunye Pohamba, Namibia’s President from 2005 to 2015. On the occasion of the

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FIGURE  5.6  20 dollar note with portrait of Sam Nujoma, 2012 design. Photo: author.

second edition of the dollar notes in 2012 he was quoted in a newspaper, stating that, “our banknotes convey and express our identity as a nation.”48 Andrew van Wyk’s print asks where exactly this identity is rooted. Rural scenes that point to the past have become mixed up in a mythological vortex that connects the past to recent events. The work of van Wyk thus contrasts the decontextualized portrait on the dollar note with a framing that provides context, gives insight, and raises questions concerning Hendrik Witbooi the historical protagonist and his legacy. Money is not only a medium for exchange and payment but also a visual medium that is used by states to convey condensed information about their history, culture, important persons, politics, or ecology. This symbolic quality of money goes back to as far as Greek antiquity. Already in the seventh century BCE money had an intimate relation with political power. This is because the new idea of coins as a means of exchange had to be based on a secular authority, as Christoph Türcke explains. One way to attach value to coins was the use of noble metals such as silver and gold for their production. But to be used in the whole polis the coins had also to be based on a state power, and this was done by coinage. Coins initially showed the heads of Greek gods and goddesses worshipped in the polis.49 But soon they were replaced by the portraits of secular rulers as the new divine figures.50 Today, money is still a symbol of national sovereignty and a representation of a country’s natural and cultural resources, history, and values. To the inhabitants of a country, money is a carrier of signs that provides guidance for identifying with a national identity. Thus, money is not only a means of communication in the abstract sense of movement and exchange of goods but also a concrete means of expression, offering information about the self-

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image of the society that uses the respective currency. It is this function that is addressed in van Wyk’s printed portrait of Witbooi. The number given on a note or coin representing its value and the depicted person next to it reinforce each other. Because usually the value printed on the note is in proportion to the significance of the depicted personality. In the second edition of the Namibian notes from 2012, Hendrik Witbooi appears on the 50, 100, and 200 dollar notes, while Sam Nujoma “only” appears on the 10 and 20 dollar notes (Figure 5.7). This can be interpreted as an indicator of the relevance of both figures in Namibia where Witbooi as a nearly mythological figure is still of higher “value” than Namibia’s first president. Before their second edition, Witbooi was actually on all notes— from 10 to 200 dollars. Before 2012, there was no other person printed on the notes. These older notes are still in circulation. It is therefore no wonder that in Namibia money is colloquially called “Witboois,” as visual artist Petrus Amuthenu explains.51 There is another work by Amuthenu that relies on the canonical portrait of Hendrik Witbooi, this time, however, not in the form of a cardboard print but of a stenciled graffiti. Untitled (Witbooi) from 2018 shows the portrait on a colorful advertising circular for the South African Supermarket Pick n Pay (Figure 5.8). Already in its material the thin, gray newsprint paper of 23 × 16 inches (58 × 40 centimeters) illustrates the price-oriented character of offering cheap consumer goods to the customers. Indeed, on the upper and lower edge of the paper, wines, Scottish whiskeys, and beers with yellow, white, and red price tags attached can still be identified. Like the work by van Wyk, this portrait of Witbooi is presented in a circular frame similar to a medallion. Here, the round edging of the stencil contrasts with the color created by the highly dynamic movements of the

FIGURE 5.7  50 dollar note with portrait of Hendrik Witbooi, 2012 design. Photo: author.

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FIGURE  5.8 Untitled (Witbooi), 2018, Petrus Amuthenu. Spray paint on paper, 58 × 40 centimeters. Photo: Johanna Kufner, collection of Iwalewahaus.

spray can outside the stencil. The sprayed lines of black, white, red, and green cover large parts of the page’s background, which highlights the encircled portrait even further. Even more than in van Wyk’s print, the stencil imposes the association of a coin, especially as the reduced contrast of black and white in the portrait is reminiscent of the relief embossing of a coin. The portrait itself is primed in white, the color, however, does not cover the background fully but maintains a degree of transparency. Particularly on Witbooi’s hat, the colorful price tags clearly shine through. Only the black color that traces the features of the face covers the background completely. The advertisement shining through the portrait has the effect of a camouflage that blurs and merges the portrait with its background. In Untitled (Witbooi) the depiction of Witbooi’s portrait on the dollar note can easily be identified as a point of reference. What appears white in the graffiti corresponds with the lighter parts of the bank note portrait, such as the upper cheekbones and the parts around the mouth. Compared with the

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original photograph the reduced information on the more abstract depiction of Witbooi on the note makes the portrait look even more edgy and distinctive. The stenciled graphic expands on the composition of light and shadow on the dollar note and reduces the portrait’s attributes even more to a mere contrast of black and white. In this way the portrait on the note works as an intermediate step in the process of the reduction and abstraction of the original photograph toward Amuthenu’s artwork. Thus, the Witbooi portrait reveals its transmedial potential and ability to be as easily readable and immediately recognizable in the form of an advertising poster, a depiction on a bank note, or a stenciled graffiti. The abstraction cannot harm the image, on the contrary it demonstrates the iconic potential of the original photography. In confronting the Witbooi portrait with consumer goods, Amuthenu’s Untitled (Witbooi) exaggerates the commercialization of the Witbooi portrait and visualizes the profane function the icon has today. In this way the artwork makes the process of iconization itself a topic. The portrait of Witbooi and the Namibian dollar have become synonyms and are exchanged for cheap consumer goods. This demonstrates the paradoxical relation between money and the pictured prominent figures: to appear on a bank note is one of the highest national honors, but, at the same time, money is an everyday item that gets dirty, damaged, or alienated. This indissoluble ambivalence is part of the cultural and economic canonization of the iconic Hendrik Witbooi.

The Witbooi portrait in its artistic reflection Iconic images that help to shape cultural memory are substitutes for a lack of personal experience, writes Gerhard Paul. They allow for the connection of historical events with visual information that henceforth represents these historical events. Especially during the last one hundred years, collective memory has been attached to visual information, and, for this reason, iconic images became the raw material that allowed history to be told in the present.52 The portrait of Hendrik Witbooi is such an iconic image. It reminds viewers of a historical figure that, despite or just because of the rich source material, is hard to grasp. As an icon, however, its meaning is limited to an image of the African resistance against colonial rule. The artistic works discussed in this chapter demonstrate different ways to approach the iconic image of Witbooi, but they all have something in common: the majority of these works refer to the canonical Rehoboth photograph, not in its original format showing the sitting Kaptein, but in a cropped form that focuses on Witbooi’s head. Only Inatu Indongo’s painting and also Hentie van der Merwe’s film stills are not directly linked to the famous photograph from around 1900. The first artworks discussed in this chapter, namely Petrus Amuthenu’s Reverend Dr Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi 1830–1905 and Inatu Indongo’s

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Hendrik Witbooi, can be read as appropriations of an ever-present image. In the individual artistic appropriation the iconic image regains a profoundness that is lost in the portrait’s abstraction on the dollar note. This is further heightened by the fact that Indongo also chose a portrait of Witbooi as a template that resembles the photograph from Rehoboth but differs from it in details. In this way both artworks encourage viewers to look differently at a well-known motif. They provoke questions: Does the reinterpretation come close to the original? Which kind of atmosphere does the interpretation provoke? Which characteristics of the original are singled out and what new elements are added? In breaking up the familiar, the artistic appropriations enable new access to the Witbooi portrait and a fresh view behind the façade of the icon. To the surface of collective memory thus comes again a historical personality that has been hidden by its iconic image for so long. Hentie van der Merwes film stills Witbooi and Leutwein and Moholi Ndikung’s paintings Quotes of War (von Schlieffen) and Quotes of War (Witbooi) are more than appropriations of the single portrait and instead put Witbooi into a context in which he becomes supplemented with an opponent. Here Witbooi is no longer presented as detached from time and space but as a protagonist involved in a political and military conflict. In both double-artworks Witbooi is confronted with an opponent, which enables the presentation of adversaries as equals. This is important in terms of reflecting on Witbooi’s role in collective memory, since it was specifically his correspondence with Leutwein and other German and South-West African protagonists that transformed him into a prominent historic figure. This is also stressed by the texts added to the two portraits painted by Ndikung. By contrast, van der Merwe’s merger of Witbooi and Leutwein shows that Witbooi’s glory cannot be separated from his opponent’s. The two artworks Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going to? by Andrew van Wyk and Untitled (Witbooi) by Petrus Amuthenu clearly aim at the appearance of the Witbooi portrait on the dollar notes. In van Wyk’s work, this is bound to questions about a common identity in a Namibian present that celebrates Hendrik Witbooi as a national hero, and uses him as a focal point within a national narrative that illuminates the present with the light of a heroic past. But, lifted into the center of a circle of time, the Witbooi portrayed in these works cannot answer questions regarding the origin and future of a national identity. Instead, the Witbooi portrait in this work is an invitation to reflect on these questions. Amuthenu’s Untitled (Witbooi) reproduces the abstracted form of the Witbooi portrait on the dollar note and places the contrasting image against the background of consumer goods that shine through the portrait. Where Witbooi’s portrait becomes one with the colorful world of consumption in the capitalist present, the critical analysis of the icon meets its climax. The artwork illustrates the fact that in the massive dissemination of the portrait together with its use for advertising, the icon itself has become an object of consumption. Released from all temporal and spatial markers that the

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original photograph entailed, the iconic Witbooi portrait has become a selfreferential image; not so much a carrier of information as the information itself. What has happened to it is the fate that sooner or later befalls each and every political-personal icon: the liquidation of the political poignancy that was once part of the image. Amuthenu’s work exhibits this final stage of iconization in all its evidence. To sum up, the artworks discussed in this chapter reflect the Witbooi portrait as an iconic image in various ways. This visual reflection does justice to the omnipresence of Witbooi’s portrait and therefore to a collective memory that is largely based on public visual markers and symbols of the (overcome) colonial past—be it Windhoek’s distinctive Independence Museum or the remaining memorials from the German period in Windhoek and Swakopmund. The discussed artworks appropriate Witbooi’s image productively and unsettle the viewers familiarity with the image to evoke a new look for it. They contextualize or better yet re-contextualize the abstract and timeless iconic image and instead reveal the historical protagonist and his political aspirations. They encourage viewers to not just take the iconic image for granted, but to question the commercialization of role models and to formulate their own concepts of a cooperative future. Because of the omnipresence of the Witbooi portrait on the banknote, it is subject to inflation, much more than the actual currency itself. What is part of everyday life becomes invisible over time and hides behind a veil of routines and habits. It takes effort to make the common appear again and make it visible. These artworks make an effort by presenting the portrait of Hendrik Witbooi in a modified way and putting it up for discussion again. The artworks’ role, however, necessarily remains contradictory. They can bring up fundamental questions regarding the use and function of national heroes. At the same time the artworks are inevitably involved in reproducing the iconic image. When it comes to artistic artworks referring to an iconic image, a distanced, strictly reflecting approach is unthinkable.

Notes 1 Reinhart Kößler, “‘A Luta Continua’: Strategische Orientierung und Erinnerungspolitik am Beispiel des ‘Heroes Day’ der Witbooi in Gibeon,” in Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen, ed. Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2016), 184–85. 2 Mwaka Liswaniso, “Hendrik Witbooi – Pastor, Chief, Freedom Fighter and Politician (1934 – 2009),” New Era, August 8, 2014, https://neweralive.na/ posts/hendrik-witbooi-pastor-chief-freedom-fighter-and-politician-1934-2009 (accessed August 7, 2022). 3 Memory Biwa, “‘Weaving the Past with Threads of Memory’: Narratives and Commemorations of the Colonial War in Southern Namibia” (Ph.D. diss.,

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2012), p. 184, http://etd.uwc.ac.za/xmlui/handle/11394/2991?show=full (accessed August 7, 2022). 4 Biwa, “‘Weaving the Past,” 186. 5 Kathrin Fahlenbrach, “Ikonen in der Geschichte der technisch-apparativen Massenmedien: Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten medienhistorischer Ikonisierungsprozesse,” in Randgänge der Mediengeschichte, ed. M. Buck, F. Hartling and S. Pfau (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010), 62. 6 Patricia Hayes, Jeremey Silvester, and Wolfram Hartmann, “‘Picturing the Past’ in Namibia: The Visual Archive and its Energies,” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), 107. 7 Hayes, Silvester, and Hartmann, “‘Picturing the Past’,” 106. 8 Lorena Rizzo, “Faszination Landschaft – Landschaftsphotographie in Namibia,” BAB Working Paper 1 (2014): 7–8, https://baslerafrika.ch (accessed March 16, 2019). 9 Christraud Geary, Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya, Cameroon, West Africa, 1902–1915 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1988), 35. 10 Geary, Images from Bamum, 11. 11 Geary, Images from Bamum, 35. 12 Geary, Images from Bamum, 11. 13 Geary, Images from Bamum, 42. 14 Biwa, “Weaving the Past,” 187–88. 15 Geary, Images from Bamum, 61. 16 Jo-Maré Duddy, “Nama History, Folklore on Opera Stage,” The Namibian, September 10, 2009, https://www.namibian.com.na (accessed December 20, 2019). 17 Hentie van der Merwe, “The Archive in Don’t Call Me a Rebel: A Practice of Critical Reciprocity,” in On Making, ed. L. Farber (Johannesburg: University of Johannesburg, 2010), 277. 18 In southern Africa, “colored” is widely used to designate people of mixed African, European, and/or South Asian identity. In the United States, the term is considered derogatory, and has been replaced by other more inclusive words since the second half of the twentieth century. More recently, the term has been challenged for similar reasons in southern Africa. See Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, “‘Able to identify with anything’: Racial Identity Choices among ‘coloureds’ as Shaped by the South African Racial State,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2021.2005919; Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, “People of Color,” in Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Society, ed. Richard T. Schaefer (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2008), 1037–039. 19 Dominik Schaller, “‘Ich glaube, dass die Nation als solche vernichtet werden muss’: Kolonialkrieg und Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1904–1907,” Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 3 (2004): 395–430.

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20 Klaus Dierks, “Witbooi, Hendrik,” Biographies of Namibian Personalities, 2004, http://www.klausdierks.com/Biographies/Biographies_W.htm (accessed March 16, 2019). 21 Schaller, “Ich glaube,” 422. 22 Schaller, “Ich glaube,” 399. 23 Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, “Deimling, Berthold Karl Adolf von (seit 1905),” Deutsche Biographie, https:// www.deutsche-biographie.de (accessed March 16, 2019). 24 Günther Reeh, Hendrik Witbooi – Ein Leben für die Freiheit: Zwischen Glaube und Zweifel (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2000), 49; Werner Hillebrecht, “Hendrik Witbooi: Ikone und Inspiration des antikolonialen Widerstands und des unabhängigen Namibia,” in Namibia – Deutschland: Eine geteilte Geschichte: Widerstand – Gewalt – Erinnerung, ed. Larissa Förster, Dag Henrichsen, and Michael Bollig (Wolfratshausen: Edition Minerva Hermann Farnung, 2004), 148. 25 Reeh, Hendrik Witbooi, 50. 26 Hillebrecht, “Hendrik Witbooi,” 148. 27 Stefanie Michels, “Der Askari,” in Kein Platz an der Sonne: Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte, ed. Jürgen Zimmerer (Frankfurt: Campus, 2013), 302; Michelle Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 46. 28 Ludwig Helbig and Werner Hillebrecht, The Witbooi (Windhoek: Longman Namibia, 1992), 39–40. 29 Helbig and Hillebrecht, The Witbooi, 43. 30 Helbig and Hillebrecht, The Witbooi, 46. 31 Michels, “Der Askari,” 297. 32 Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, 8. 33 Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, 209. 34 Werner Hillebrecht, “Die Nama und der Krieg im Süden,” in Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen, ed. Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2016), 123. 35 Helbig and Hillebrecht, The Witbooi, 47. 36 Gerhard Paul, “Das Jahrhundert der Bilder: Die visuelle Geschichte und der Bildkanon des kulturellen Gedächtnisses,” in Das Jahrhundert der Bilder: 1900 bis 1949, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 29. 37 Alfred Czech, “Bildkanon im Spannungsfeld zwischen individuellem und kollektivem Bildgedächtnis,” in Bilder, die die Welt bedeuten: “Ikonen” des Bildgedächtnisses und ihre Vermittlung über Datenbanken, ed. Johannes Kirschenmann and Ernst Wagner (Munich: kopead, 2006), 28. 38 Gerhard Paul, “Der Bildatlas – Ein Streifzug durch unser kulturelles Gedächtnis,” in Das Jahrhundert der Bilder: 1900 bis 1949, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 10.

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39 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2. 40 Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 30. 41 Fahlenbrach, “Ikonen in der Geschichte der technisch-apparativen Massenmedien,” 72–3. 42 Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 11. 43 Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 12. 44 Paul, “Das Jahrhundert der Bilder,” 34. 45 Czech, “Bildkanon,” 28. 46 Paul, “Das Jahrhundert der Bilder,” 35. 47 Interview with Andrew van Wyk by Fabian Lehmann [digital recording], Rehoboth, Namibia, February 14, 2018. 48 Catherine Sasman, “Nujoma Notes Unveiled,” The Namibian, March 22, 2012, https://www.namibian.com.na (accessed December 20, 2019). 49 Christoph Türcke, Mehr!: Philosophie des Geldes (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2015), 100–102. 50 Michael Hutter, “Signum non olet: Grundzüge einer Zeichentheorie des Geldes,” in Rätsel Geld: Annäherungen aus ökonomischer, soziologischer und historischer Sicht, ed. Waltraud Schelkle and Manfred Nitsch (Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag, 1995), 340. 51 Interview with Petrus Amuthenu by Fabian Lehmann [digital recording], February 24, 2018, Windhoek, Namibia. 52 Paul, “Das Jahrhundert der Bilder,” 27.

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6 On Mwangi Hutter’s postcolonialism(s): From Static Drift to One Ground Brett M. Van Hoesen

In 2005, the contemporary artists Ingrid Mwangi (born in Nairobi, Kenya) and Robert Hutter (born in Ludwigshafen, Germany) merged names and biographies to become one artist, Mwangi Hutter, despite differences of gender, race, age, cultural backgrounds, and countries of origin. The artist duo, based in Berlin and Ludwigshafen, Germany, and Nairobi, Kenya, function like many global artists today working across continents, exhibiting their work in a wide range of geographic locations. As I have written elsewhere, the poetics and politics of the one artist/two body construct of Mwangi Hutter creates a shared persona as a way to move beyond the finite biographical history of either artist and interrogates prefixed notions of Africanness and Europeanness.1 This merged identity also confers new political status on Ingrid Mwangi’s earlier solo work, which often explicitly addressed topics of entrenched racism and the lingering legacy of colonialist discourses in Germany and modern Europe. As a two-bodied artist, Mwangi Hutter draws upon the strength of “two bodies, two minds, two creative trajectories” and diffuses the limits of the binary: Black/White, female/male, Kenyan/German, wife/husband, mother/father. The artist is all of the above.2 In June 2020, the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, opened “Close By Between Us,” a largescale retrospective exhibition of Mwangi Hutter’s work dating from 1993 to 2020.3 Organized by the renowned writer and curator Simon Njami, the exhibit celebrated the long-established multidisciplinary practice of Mwangi Hutter. According to Njami, “the work of this artist couple is inscribed in

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the heart of the time in which living together is the only option possible. A living together that does not concern exclusively to our humanity, but to all that surrounding us, visible and invisible.”4 While Mwangi Hutter certainly celebrates the concept of “living together,” this action takes on political meaning when we consider their work as a postcolonial response to the legacy of German colonialism in Africa and the continued impact of this history in modern-day Europe. Mwangi Hutter’s 2001 photo diptych, Static Drift (see Plates 7 and 8), established an early critique of Germany, as a former imperial power, and its impact on and misperception of the continent of Africa. Notably, this work was created at a time when the history of Germany’s colonial past was nearly non-existent in German popular discourse. Indeed, Mwangi Hutter’s foundational work, dating to the late 1990s and early 2000s, was extremely innovative for its time. Along these lines, this chapter has three core objectives: the first, to reinforce that the seminal, early work by Mwangi Hutter serves as an important postcolonial critique of German colonialism in Africa and its historical impact on constructs of African-diasporic identity in Europe. Second, this chapter proposes to move beyond Mwangi Hutter’s earlier work and to consider the artist’s more recent, nuanced version of postcolonialism in works that explore themes of human connectedness. In the 2021 exhibition “It’s a Thin Line” hosted by the galerie burster in Berlin, Mwangi Hutter took inspiration from the 1971 song, “It’s a Thin Line Between Love and Hate” by the New York City-based R&B band, The Persuaders.5 In this range of multimedia work including painting, sculpture, sound art, video, and installation, Mwangi Hutter “explore themes of resilience, longing for touch, closeness, and distance.” The artist’s newest work presents a revised postcolonial stance, one that firmly asserts the philosophy of growing from and realizing anew in the midst of continuing to question binary constructs, the thin lines between love/hate, me/you, happiness/suffering, hell/heaven, permanent/impermanent, singular/multiple, war/peace, and beyond.6 Lastly, this chapter presents a curated, chronological sampling of Mwangi Hutter’s work, with the permission of the artist, to encourage readers to experience the artwork, not merely as illustration. In this way, a curated selection of Mwangi Hutter’s impactful projects over the past two decades functions as a photo essay of sorts, a tribute to the artist’s powerful visual mode of communication.

Early work: The postcolonial significance of Static Drift Mwangi Hutter trained in the program of New Media Arts (Neue künstlerische Medien) at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künst Saar in Saarbrücken, Germany, with noted professor of performance and video art,

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Ulrike Rosenbach, who notably studied under Joseph Beuys. Echoing this significant artistic heritage, Mwangi Hutter often uses the body to “deal with the subjects of border-crossing and finding identity, which both can be understood in a political, as well as a very personal, intimate sense oscillating between violence, nature, dualism, individuality, and love.”7 At the core of the artist’s work, throughout an already prolific career, Mwangi Hutter “use themselves as the sounding board to reflect on changing societal realities, creating an aesthetics of self-knowledge and interrelationship.”8 This consistent conceptual approach creates a strong foundation for work across a wide range of media that inherently address discourses of postcolonialism(s). Early projects such as Static Drift (Plates 7 and 8), 2001, a double C-print, gained notoriety for its inclusion in popular international exhibitions such as “Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora” organized by the Museum of African Art in New York in 2004, and the Brooklyn Museum’s 2007 “Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art,” curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin. At the time Static Drift and related work from this period was attributed solely to Ingrid Mwangi, but later it was reattributed to Mwangi Hutter. During the early part of her career, Mwangi’s work was examined through the lens of her dual Kenyan and German heritage. Indeed the construct of personal biography, particularly as someone born in Kenya, who moved to Germany with her mother and sister at the age of fifteen, functioned as a primary means to analyze her work. Despite the fact that Germany was not a colonial ruler of Kenya, and that English was the artist’s primary language, Mwangi Hutter’s identity in Germany, like many artists of color, was perceived in terms of otherness. The artist’s videos, installations, and performances from the late 1990s to early 2000s, pointedly questioned these markers of “belonging” by drawing attention to topics and tropes connected to language, accent, skin tone, hair style, and modes of cultural conditioning. In Static Drift the politics of place and postcolonial critique is physically inscribed on Mwangi’s own body.9 For the series, her torso is altered by the addition of sun-exposed stenciled silhouettes of Germany and Africa. Playing with the loaded symbolism of light and dark, the words “Burn Out Country” run across the darkened map of Germany that symbolically contrasts to Mwangi’s lighter skin tone. The reverse colorization is used for the silhouette of Africa; the text reads, “Bright Dark Continent.”10 Many scholars since have rightly identified this work and others such as Neger (1999, single channel video) and Neger Don’t Call Me (2000, video installation) as critical postcolonial readings of Germany’s troubled relationship to its colonial past in Africa. This type of work fits what Senegalese writer and curator N’Goné Fall refers to as “the colonial legacy” in contemporary feminist art.11 In addition to colonial histories, Static Drift also refers to related discourses of multiculturalism, globalization, and African Diaspora studies in Europe. The increased attention to Black European Studies and the foundation of

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communities such as the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) in tandem with contemporary movements in Germany supporting Black Lives Matter, provide an important contemporary context for re-examining the postcolonial interventions symbolized by Mwangi Hutter’s early work.12 Mwangi Hutter is conscious of the historic intervention their work and artistic persona represents, particularly in Germany. Perhaps no other project better exemplifies this than the C-print If (2003). The image purposefully points to discourses of the oppressive, racial politics of the National Socialists by appropriating a historic photograph by German photographer Hugo Jaeger of Adolf Hitler seated amongst a group of adoring young Austrian women in 1939.13 Mwangi Hutter’s seemingly playful, but purposefully unsettling re-authorship of Jaeger’s photograph involves replacing Mwangi’s face with those of the eager white female admirers and, more disturbingly, morphing Hitler’s face with Hutter’s. The work speaks to the tensions of togetherness that Mwangi Hutter represents in light of Germany’s racist, colonial past. It also scrutinizes the use of dangerous linguistic labels such as “Mischling” (German, “mixed race”), a term used in Nazi racial legislation to justify forced sterilization of biracial children, who were perceived as a so-called “racial danger” to the German nation.14 Scholar Fatimah El-Tayeb notes that these constructs problematically persist today in “dividing the German population into two (holistic) camps: ‘Germans,’ who belong here (even though their families might have left Germany centuries ago), and ‘foreigners,’ who don’t (even if Germany is their home country).”15

The current work: Moving beyond Static Drift The notion that Mwangi Hutter redefines ideas around identity based solely upon race or nationality, and embodies both Europe and Africa, runs counter to the pejorative, fixed idea of “Africans” as non-European. This revisionist stance is essential to Mwangi Hutter’s philosophy and extends well beyond postcolonial critique, especially for projects that involve their four children, who represent a new generation living in Germany with a transcontinental cultural heritage. Video installations such as Time Zone (2017) and Equinox (2017), or double C-prints such as From the Other Side of Daylight (2017) (Plates 11 and 12) and On the Other Side of Midnight (2017), present Mwangi Hutter’s daughters’ and sons’ torsos painted with black and white dots. “Fingerprint after fingerprint, we leave our trace as a symbol of our inner map,” reads the beginning of a short poetic text that accompanies this body of work.16 In these works, the personal intertwines with the universal. While some of Mwangi Hutter’s projects overtly confront the long history of stereotypes in Europe involving Blackness, discourses that pre- and postdate German colonialist practices

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in Africa, Mwangi Hutter is also devoted to exploring concepts of human existence, connectedness, and transcendence. Fingerprints, the touch of others, personalized gestures, movement, masks, vocal timber—their work operates through poetics. Moving performances such as Canvas of (Un) ritualized Movement (2015; Plate 9), where black ink from one dancer permeates the light-colored canvas costume of her partner, commissioned for the 12th Havana Biennial in Cuba, and their Union paintings reinforce the legacy and intimacy of human-to-human contact. Committed to posing difficult questions, Mwangi Hutter’s more recent work has taken on the topic of unity. Mwangi Hutter’s resistance to discrete attributions of authorship and their exploration of a blurred identity and method of anonymous mark-making challenge the way we often inscribe the author function. This has implications as well for critiquing the legacy of German colonialism in Africa. The work presents a new way of thinking, a timely critique of tropes of otherness in contemporary German society. One Ground, an ongoing series from 2018, features a black-and-white thumbprint on a gold leaf background inserted into the center of a book composed of text-laden pages of black and white paper. Presented with an audio component, a voice recites: “A feeling of loneliness has brought me here, or why have I come to this place? To be near. My voice in your ear, your meaning in my expression; there is a deep longing to commune.” The work questions the borders that separate us and offers the alternative of unification. Strategically, Mwangi Hutter presents poetic and sociopolitical ideas on how to operate in a postcolonial, transnational world, where togetherness and existence serve as a pointed critique of the construct of division. Exploring “an unfolding vision of oneness,” Mwangi Hutter’s projects from the last three years or so, have emphasized our connectedness, what the artist keenly observes as the “thin line between.”17 In a recent interview, Mwangi Hutter noted that the meaning of the artist’s work transcends national and continental borders, acting on a more human level to conjoin people and transnational histories. All these are occasions in which the work comes alive, when matter meets mind and vibrates there to emanate meaning, whether we are speaking with members of an audience in Nairobi about the depiction of the body and peeling away a certain postcolonial disinclination towards nakedness or honing in on the commonalities of German and Japanese war history while in Tokyo—whether speaking of erotic love in Paris or of the politicized Black body with an audience in New York.18 Postcolonialism is not solely relegated to the culture of critique and writing wrongs, it also allows for and prompts the second part of the question, what does it mean to live together? This query was indeed the core thesis of the

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artist’s recent retrospective exhibition, realized in partnership with writer and curator Simon Njami. Over the course of two decades, Mwangi Hutter’s work has embodied, and will likely continue to investigate, multiple sides of postcolonial practice, redefining what it means to live in a world where postcolonial histories mark land, bodies, objects, languages, social policies, and much more.

Photo essay: Mwangi Hutter’s postcolonialism(s) as a visual experience Art history, criticism, journalism, and other modes of art writing rely heavily on the practice of analyzing and contextualizing a work of art, translating an object, installation, performance, or experience into words. This methodology of translation, from visual content to written word, while certainly valuable, does run the risk of positioning a work of art solely in relationship to written language. The allure of photo essays, photo books, zines, exhibitions, and richly illustrated journals or exhibition catalogs is connected to empowering the language of the visual. While the aforementioned modes of presentation often include text, they also trust and celebrate the work of art’s visual power and autonomy. Over the years, academic scholarship that is well illustrated has grown more expensive, a shift that has come, perhaps inadvertently, to privilege written text over images. In my own scholarship, I have frequently focused on the inverse, case studies of the interwar period in Europe or the global contemporary over the last two decades, where “the visual” strategically replaces or at least challenges the dominance of the written word. Editors of illustrated magazines and newspapers of the Weimar Republic, for instance, purposefully set out to replace text with photographs, playing, sometimes problematically, to the allure and exoticism of the visual.19 I first learned about Mwangi Hutter’s work thanks to well-illustrated exhibition catalogs for exhibits in 2004 and 2007 that I did not have the opportunity to see in-person. Looking back at these resources today, they exemplify an interesting one-to-one relationship, where text and image play equally. In some cases, the text was written by curators and scholars, in other instances, the text was written by Ingrid Mwangi or IngridMwangiRobertHutter, an earlier iteration of the artist.20 As both a visual thinker and writer originally trained in dance, I continue to be drawn to the multidisciplinary aspect of Mwangi Hutter’s projects, especially to their use of the body. While my own access to the artist’s work has increased over the years, including opportunities to visit studio locations in Germany and to conduct in-person interviews, I still benefit immensely from the experience of Mwangi Hutter’s work delivered through a range of other media, including illustrated books, videos, and websites.

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When it comes to assessing Mwangi Hutter’s work in relationship to postcolonialism, in my experience, editors have consistently privileged text over image, often hesitant to allow for the inclusion of illustrated works of art by the artist unless they were thoroughly analyzed and discussed in the text. It poses two interesting questions: Do postcolonial artistic interventions require constant translation? Are we still too “local” to fully understand the implications of postcolonial cues that often require a background in global studies? Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi’s edited volume, Unpacking Europe, now over two decades old, diagnosed many of the topics that underscore the work of artists such as Mwangi Hutter, who embody the cultural heritage, knowledge, and experience of multiple continents.21 From Static Drift (2001) to One Ground (2018), to the artist’s present work, Mwangi Hutter’s nuanced engagement with postcolonial discourses, including ideas of othering and belonging, philosophies of connectedness, and the exploration of “thin lines between” us, invites the viewer to experience the world differently—in both critical and loving ways.22 With this concluding photo essay (Plates 7 to 12, Figures 6.1 to 6.4), I encourage you to see and experience these ideas for yourself.

FIGURE  6.1 If, 2003, Mwangi Hutter. C-print, 125 × 168 centimeters. Source: Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter.

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FIGURE  6.2  Aesthetic of Uprising II, 2011, Mwangi Hutter. Print on roll, paint, cleaning rags with text, 400 × 250 centimeters. Source: Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter.

FIGURE  6.3 Tireless Embrace In View Of Not Knowing, 2017, Mwangi Hutter. Acrylic on canvas, 250 × 200 centimeters. Source: Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter.

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FIGURE 6.4  One Ground, 2018, Mwangi Hutter. Gold leaf, oil paint, variable size. Source: Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter.

Notes 1 See Brett M. Van Hoesen, “The Politics and Poetics of Mwangi Hutter’s One Artist/Two Body Construct,” Nka – Journal of Contemporary African Art, 44 (May 2019), 108–19. Republished in English and Spanish in Mwangi Hutter: Close by between Us, exhibition catalog (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 2020), 39–61. 2 Ingrid Mwangi, “Creating a Myth: Conversation with IngridMwangiRobertHutter,” interview by Aneta Glinkowska, Tokyo Art Beat, January 29, 2008. http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2008/01/ creating-a-myth-conversation-with-ingridmwangiroberthutter.html (accessed February 3, 2022).

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3 “Mwangi Hutter: Close by between Us,” Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, June 12–November 8, 2020, organized by Simon Njami. 4 Simon Njami, curatorial statement, “Mwangi Hutter: Close by between Us.” https://www.caam.net/en/expos_int.php?n=4114 (accessed February 3, 2022). 5 See “Mwangi Hutter, It’s A Thin Line, 16.9. – 9.10.2021, Berlin,” galerie burster, 2021, Press release, https://www.galerieburster.com/exhibitions/its-athin-line/ (accessed August 7, 2022). 6 See introductory video to “Mwangi Hutter: It’s a Thin Line Between,” galerie burster, 2021, https://www.galerieburster.com/exhibitions/its-a-thin-line/ (accessed August 7, 2022). 7 Text from “Mwangi Hutter – Living in Your Heart,” galerie burster, Berlin, 2017. Translated by the author: https://www.galerieburster.com/portfolio/ mwangi-hutter-en/ (accessed February 3, 2022). 8 Mwangi Hutter, “About,” http://www.mwangi-hutter.de/art/biography.html (accessed February 3, 2022). 9 For more discussion on Mwangi Hutter’s Static Drift and postcolonial critique, see Brett M. Van Hoesen, “The Rhineland Controversy and Weimar Postcolonialism,” in German Colonialism in a Global Age, ed. Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 302–29. 10 According to N’Goné Fall, “Even today, Africa, dubbed ‘the Dark Continent’ by early explorers, still carries all the negative connotations of that adjective: obscurity (and obscurantism), night, the unknown, the menacing. By adding the word ‘bright’ on the light-colored shape, the two overturn that perception of the continent by evoking the idea of vitality, hope and inspiration,” see Fall’s essay, “Today, and always, I embrace your pain.” in Ingrid Mwangi Robert Hutter: Intruders (Nürnberg: Verlag für modern Kunst, 2012), 66. 11 See N’Goné Fall, “Providing a Space of Freedom: Women Artists from Africa,” in Global Feminisms, edited by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin (London and New York: Merrell in association with the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2007), 74. According to Mwangi, “using the example of the German word ‘Neger’ … a word in which the history of a racist ideology still echoes, I explain the feeling of wrongness I sensed when faced with the use of discriminating words or ignorant action. With this piece, I wish to show the constant dialogue which occurs between self and society, in this case especially dealing with the continuing problem of being judged and categorized due to skin-color,” in Ingrid Mwangi: Your Own Soul (Saarbrücken: Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, 2003), 9. 12 For the renewed interest in historical significance of Afro-German activist organizations today, see Tiffany Florvil, “From ADEFRA to Black Lives Matter: Black Women’s Activism in Germany,” Black Perspectives, July 5, 2017, https://www.aaihs.org/from-adefra-to-black-lives-matter-black-womensactivism-in-germany/ (accessed January 11, 2022). See also Florvil’s new book, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020). 13 See Louise Boyle, “The Fuehrer and his Frauleins: Extraordinary Colour Photographs Emerge of Nazi Leader Celebrating his 50th Birthday (with lots

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of Brunettes),” Daily Mail, January 12, 2012, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-2085509/Hitler-schoolgirls-Colour-photos-emerge-Nazi-leadercelebrating-50th-birthday.html (accessed February 3, 2022). 14 See Tina M. Campt, “Confronting Racial Danger, Neutralizing Racial Pollution: Afro Germans and the National Socialist Sterilization Program,” in Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 63–80. 15 Fatima El-Tayeb, “Foreigners, Germans, and German Foreigners: Constructions of National Identity in Early Twentieth Century Germany,” in Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading, ed. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen with NAi Publishers, 2001), 72–85. 16 Text from “Mwangi Hutter – Living in Your Heart.” 17 A phrase from Mwangi Hutter’s newest artist statement, see Mwangi Hutter, https://mwangihutter.art (accessed February 25, 2022). 18 Interview with Mwangi Hutter by Leonie Döpper and Theresa Sigmund, “Auf Deutsch: The Artist Mwangi Hutter Reflects on the Human Condition,” C&, October 29, 2021, https://contemporaryand.com/magazines/the-artist-mwangihutter-reflects-on-the-human-condition/ (accessed February 25, 2022). 19 See Brett M. Van Hoesen, “Re-Visioning Germany’s Colonial Past: Tactics of Weimar Photomontage and Documentary Photography,” in German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker Langbehn (London: Routledge, 2010). 20 The significance of scholarship and/or different modes of art writing is often dependent upon the match between the writer and artist. Simon Njami, for instance, presents an autobiographical case of “multiple beings” that aligns well with the life experiences of Mwangi Hutter. In his essay “Mozart and Me” for the exhibition catalog, Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora (New York: Museum of African Art, 2004), he writes: “I was born in Lausanne, to Cameroonian parents. I live in Paris, where I have spent more than half my life. In Lausanne I was considered Cameroonian. Later, in Paris, I was Swiss. When I returned to Cameroon, I became European, and, finally, in the United States, where I taught on occasion, I was surprised to discover that I was French. This multiple being, with different identities, was nevertheless all the same person: me, in Lausanne as in Douala, in Paris as in San Diego” (15). 21 See Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (eds.), Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001). 22 For analysis of Mwangi Hutter’s work and its relationship to love, see Diana Padrón, “The Loving Turn” in Mwangi Hutter: Close by between Us, exhibition catalog (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 2020), 65–80.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Dike DeLancey (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2004) is Professor and Chair of History of Art and Architecture at DePaul University. He has served on the boards of DePaul’s African and Black Diaspora Studies Program and the Center for Black Diaspora since 2008 and 2009, respectively. His research has two main emphases under the broader rubric of Islamic art and architecture of West Africa: palace architecture in Cameroon, and more recently calligraphy, manuscripts, and contemporary art in Mauritania. He is the author of Conquest and Construction: Palace Architecture in Northern Cameroon (2016), and he has published his work in Cahiers d’études africaines, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, African Arts, and Islamic Africa. He is cofounder and former president of the North American Association of Scholars on Cameroon (NAASC) and President Elect of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA). Hollyamber Kennedy (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2019) is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta). Dr. Kennedy previously held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, as part of a four-year project on Migration and the Humanities. Her research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the DAAD, SAH, and CAA. Her writing has been published by Grey Room, the University of Chicago Press, Avery Review, MIT Press, and Whitechapel Gallery, among others. She has an essay forthcoming with Aggregate that is a part of the Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration series. She is currently working on a long-term collaborative project with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi provisionally titled “Concept Histories of Settlement.” Fabian Lehmann is a Ph.D. student at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS). His research focuses on contemporary visual artworks that speak about remembrance and oblivion in regard to the German colonial period in Namibia. In 2018 Lehmann compiled an overview on artistic productions addressing the topic of colonialism in Germany that became part of the Goethe-Institut publication, German Colonial Heritage in Africa – Artistic and Cultural Perspectives. In 2017, as a research fellow

CONTRIBUTORS

227

at Iwalewahaus at the University of Bayreuth, Lehmann, together with Nadine Siegert and Ulf Vierke, edited the volume Art of Wagnis: Christoph Schlingensief’s Crossing of Wagner and Africa. Itohan Osayimwese (Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2008) is Associate Professor of the History of Art & Architecture, and affiliate faculty in Africana Studies, Urban Studies, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, at Brown University. Her research engages with theories of modernity, postcolonialism, and globalization to analyze built and designed environments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century East and West Africa, the Anglo-Caribbean, and Germany. She is the author of Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany (2017). Her work has been published in the Journal of Architecture, African Arts, Architectural Theory Review, Perspecta, and Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review. Her current research explores migration and the built environment in the AngloCaribbean, and translation in the historiography of African architecture. She serves on the board of directors of the European Architectural History Network, and Thresholds. Walter Peters (Ph.D., Leibniz Universität Hannover, 1981) is an emeritus Professor of Architecture and a Research Fellow of the University of the Free State, South Africa. His published doctoral thesis, enabled with a DAAD scholarship, covered the architecture of the colony German SouthWest Africa (1981), and a subsequent scholarship by the same organization enabled the publication of a book chapter on the principles of concomitant town planning (1995). Brett M. Van Hoesen (Ph.D., University of Iowa, 2009) is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, Area Head of the Department of Art History, and a Faculty Associate in the Gender, Race, and Identity (GRI) Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Theory and Criticism, Contemporary Art, Gender and Art History, Dada, and Sound Art. Dr. Van Hoesen is currently completing a book manuscript on the legacy of Germany’s colonial history in the arts and visual culture of the Weimar Republic. Topics of her recent publications include: Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum photomontage series and its legacy in contemporary art, postcolonial readings of the Weimar New Woman, Max Ernst’s collages and colonial botany, and several exhibition reviews of contemporary African art.

INDEX

Abbo, Mohammadou (palace construction) 143 Aboh, Bobe (palace) 133–4, 135 Achirimbi II, King (guest house commission) 151 Achum, residence construction 133 adobe construction method 130–1 advertisements, paintings/twodimensional media (foundations) 60n1 Aesthetic of Uprising II (Hutter: 2011) 196 Africa colonial landscapes 44–5 “Dark Continent” term, negative connotations 198n10 free trade zones, creation 96 partitioning 96–7 travel, German artists (relationship) 38–43 zones, spheres of influence 96–7 African art, term (naming) 15 African Diaspora 191–2 African landscapes, depiction (analysis) 14 African Lions (Kuhnert) 48 Africanness, prefixed notion (interrogation) 189 Africans, active battle (legitimization) 109–10 African space (discourse), painters (impact) 58 Afrikaner, Jonker 74–5, 106 settlement site 112 Afrodeutsch movement, impact 6 Allégert, Eli 148 alluvial diamonds, presence (impact) 82 Alta Feste (Windhoek) 106, 112 interior courtyard 107 POW camp 108

Amuthenu, Petrus 165, 169, 178, 180 Anghie, Antony 97 Angra Pequena (Lüderitzbucht) 74–5, 97 land purchases 76 Ankermann, Bernard 130 Annenberg Program, funding 151 anti-colonial engagement, Witbooi (impact) 105 anti-colonial resistance, mass murder (response) 3–4 apartheid policies, prefiguring 91 ­settlement planning 112–13 urbanism, awareness 93–94 applied arts, research 18 architecture 19–21 Bafut, architecture 133–6 colonial architecture, response 121 impact 91–92 scholarship 10–12 Arnold Schad Promenade 81 Arriens, Carl 43, 44 art 19–21 German colonial art, emergence 43–6 German colonies presentation 37 importance 47–8 Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) 192 Aus (settlement), railway line (connection) 82 autoethnography 123 avant-garde artistic movements 14–15 Bafut, architecture 133–6 Bafut Beagles, The (Durrell) 150 Bafut Palace Fon residence 134 Guest House 149, 150–2

INDEX

Bamum alphabet, iterations 137 Bamum authenticity, myth 55 Bamum royal artists, objects (production) 15 Bandjoun, brick palace 150 Bangangté 148, 160n81, 160n83 brick palace 150 Banka/Bamum, conflicts/resolution 160n81 Banounga, brick palace 150 Bantzer, Carl 54 Banyo (palace) 144 Barbier, J.C. 147 Barmen (Ovaherero) 75 Barth, Heinrich 38, 39, 42 Basel Missionaries, possessions 124, 126 Bataillon d’Intervention Rapide (BIR), attack 161n87 Battle of Waterberg 164, 173 Bechuanaland (Botswana), British annexation 100 Behn, Fritz 14, 44 Behrens, Peter 92 Bell, David Mandessi 138 Bell, King Auguste Ndumbe Manga 131–2 Bell, Rudolf Douala Manga (architecture, von Oechelhäeuser perspective) 157n41 belonging, markers 191 Benin Bronzes, looting 9 Berber-Credner, Hede 44 Beringe, Friedrich Robert von 49 ­Berlin Academy Exhibition (1887) 49 Berlin Africa Conference, effects/ meeting 97, 104, 114 Berlin Trade Exhibition (1896) 44, 46, 53 Bernatz, Johann Martin 39, 42–3 Berseba church 73 station, establishment 74 Beuys, Joseph 191 Bignon, Liora 11 Bismarck, Otto von 3, 95–7, 104 Black European subjectivity 16 Blackler, Adam 104–5 Blier, Suzanne 142 Blue Book 89

229

Bombay table, appearance 18 Braams, Conny 169 Bracht, Eugen 49 Brauchitsch, E. von 132 Buea (Cameroon) German constructions, impact 154n6 governor residence/palace 122, 128 Bülow, Bernhard von 173 Bülowstraße (Windhoek), village colony 94 Bunte leuchtende Welt (Vollbehr) 56 Burundi, colonial empire addition 2 Büttner, C.G. 100 Bwo pa’ (beautiful house) 147 Cadman, Henry 149 Café Zoo 79–80 Cameroon anglophone regions, conflagrations 161n94 Bamum Kingdom, colonial architecture/photography (Njoya appropriation/transformation) 67n105 French rule 31n94 German protectorate 2, 22n7 Grassfields, Bandjoun architecture (study) 123 independence 147 Lamido/Lamibe, ruler designation 159n64 protectorate, establishment 43 regions, incorporation 142 Canvas of (Un)ritualized Movement (performance) 193 Chilver, Elizabeth 134 Christianity, spread (requirement) 72 Christol, Frank 147 Church (Berseba) 73 “Close By Between Us” (Hutter exhibition) 189–90 Cole, Teju 91 colonial amnesia 5 colonial architecture ­Njoya appropriation/transformation 67n105 response 121 colonial architecture guide 10–11 colonial art, impact/importance 43–4

230

INDEX

colonial atrocities 90 colonial buildings 53 diachronic ethnographies 13 political/social context 10 white surfaces, emulation 138 colonial art exhibition (1910) 44 colonial expropriation 100 colonial history, Holocaust (continuities) 6 colonialism coincidence 14–15 domestic causes 5–6 financial/diplomatic risks, Bismarck opposition 3 history, German suppression 2 predication 10 violence 110 violence, self-conscious application 23n17 Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany (Osayimwese) 91 colonialization, travel/travel reportage (importance) 39–40 colonial landscapes, elements (appropriation) 59 colonial Namibia settlements/ placemaking, water (presence/ absence) 69 colonial painting 20 colonial photography, Njoya appropriation/transformation 67n105 colonial planning, impact 91–2 colonial power structures, narrativeenforcing feature 90–1 colonial propaganda, Witbooi victimization 168 colonial territory (South-West Africa), design 89 colonial travel writing, impact 40–1 colonial violence, perpetrators (commemoration) 1–2 colonized landscape, creation 109 colonized people, lifelike scale models (display) 63n47 “Colored,” term (designation) 185n18 Conrad, Sebastian 3, 6, 12 controlled labor, reservoirs (spread) 94 Cordon sanitaire 112

corner firing towers (specula), usage 108 Corner, James 113 Damaraland 70 Damara nation, settling 101–2 Das Thierleben der Erde (Haacke) 46 DeLancey, Mark Dike 20, 121 Dernburg, Bernhard 43–4, 92, 93 Deutsche Kolnialhaus façade, Hellgrewe design 53 Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition (1914) 18, 92 Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon 89–91 Diebitsch, Carl von 12 ­Die deutsche Emin-Pascha Expedition (Peters) 51 discourse/formal analysis, combination 11 displacement, totalizing concept 113 District Office (Douala) (1895–1912) 129 domestic space/domesticity, scholarship 11–12 Douala 124–9 bricks, Saker production 158n54 District Office (1895–1912) 129 economic power 145 Kamerun capital 137 Nachtigal Hospital (1900–03) 137 palace, turret (usage) 150 Drees, Henri 138 Dreschler, Horst 101 Duft (adjudicator) 103 Durrell, Gerald 150 Earth, spatial writing 89 East Africa German annexation 42 protectorate, establishment 43 Eckenbrecher, Themistokles von 51 economic canonization 176 Egerton, F. Clement C. 147 Eikhams (settlement) 74 Einstein, Carl 3n105, 15 Elizabeth Bay, mine (function) 82 El-Tayeb, Fatimah 192 empire (German South-West Africa), mapping 95–9

INDEX

Engineer Corps (Ingenieur-Korps), troop dispatch 105 Equinox (video installation) 192 Eros Mountain 112 European buildings, Njoya copies 154n7 Europeanness, prefixed notion (interrogation) 189 European sovereignties, diplomatic agreements 99 Europeans, pre-colonial settlement attitude 70, 72 Evans, Amanda 170 Fabian, Johannes 39, 42 Fahlenbrach, Kathrin 176 Fanon, Frantz 110 Federal Republic of Germany, political philosophies (divergence) 5 Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela 147 figural posts (installation), idea (borrowing) 148–9 Fine, Jonathan 15 First World War, German colonial empire (establishment) 4 Florvil, Tiffany 6 Fon Achirimbi II, building design/ palace 151, 157n49 Fort François, construction 106 Fort Gochas (postcard) 111 fortifications 104–14 ­Fort Naiams 108 Fort Namutoni, importance 110 Fortress Construction units (Festungsbau-Offiziere), troop dispatch 105 Fort Tsumeb, uprising protection 110 Fort Warmbad, construction/postcard 108, 109 Fort Windhoek, military relocation 106 Fotso II (reign) 148–9 Foumban palace, comparison 147 structure, differences 130 François, Curt von 104, 106, 112–113 Fredericks, Cornelius 170 Fredericks, Joseph (land acquisition) 101 Frederiks II, Josef 103–4

231

Frederiks, Josef 104 free trade zones, creation 96 Frobenius, Leo 41–4 From the Other Side of Daylight (print) 192 Fulbe diaspora 143 Gabus, Jean 123 Galton, Francis 72 Garoua, German architecture (impact) 149–50 Gatter, Frank Thomas 97 Geary, Christraud 15, 20, 42–45, 55, 121, 125, 168 General Act (Berlin Conference) 96 German-African studies, intercultural dimension (scholarship dissemination) 7–8 German artists, African travel (relationship) 38–43 German colonial art, limitations/ emergence 13–14, 43–6 German colonial empire 2–4 German Colonial Exhibition (1896) 47, 51 German colonialism 37 architecture, scholarship 11–12 global/transnational perspective, shift 6–7 history, telling 4–9 panoramas 17 scholarship 10–14 seeing/building 1, 9 study, difficulties 7–8 German colonial mapping, imaginative process 12 German colonial style 133–4 German colonies, art (presentation) 37 German colonization, resistance (wars) 82 German colony boundary, demarcation 99 establishment (Windhoek) 76–8 significance 100 German Democratic Republic, political philosophies (divergence) 5 German East Africa (Tanzania/ Rwanda/Burundi), colonial empire additions 2

232

INDEX

German East Africa Exhibition (Louisiana Purchase Exhibition) 47 ­German South-West Africa, annexation 2–3 German travel writing, change 39–40 German veterans, deeds (transfer) 105–6 Germany colonial empire, growth 2 colonial revisionism 4–5 exceptional path (Sonderweg) 5–6 land captures (Landnahme), securing 106–8 national self-understanding, spatial project 91–2 overseas colonies, possession (importance) 37–8 self-identity, nationalism (importance) 38–9 South-West Africa history, entanglement 92–5 Ghomsi, Emmanuel 121 Gibeon (station), establishment 74, 75, 173 Gilman, Sander 14, 38 Glauning, Hans 125 Goebbels, Joseph 57 Göring, Heinrich Ernst 97, 100, 113 governor residence (Buea, Cameroon) 122 Grassfields architectural innovation 135–6 architecture, study 123 palace successors 146–50 Great Berlin Art Exhibition (1893) 46, 49 “Great House” (Bobe Aboh: Kingdom of Kom) 135 Great Namaland 70 Grootfontein, fort construction/ completion (1905) 108 Groß-Windhoek 76–9 groundwater availability 83–4 management measures, identification/implementation 78 Guest House (Bafut Palace) 149, 150–2 Güssfeldt, Paul 42–3

Haacke, Wilhelm 46 Hagenbeck, Carl 17 Hariman, Robert 176 heathen cultures, rejection 109–10 Hege, Patrick 93 Heimat, missionary (relationship) 72–3 Heimatschutz (Homeland Preservation) movement 12–13 Heimatshutzstil 150–1 Heimatstil (building element) 97 Heims, Ernst 43, 44 Hellgrewe, Rudolf (colonial artist) 37, 40, 43, 44, 46 colonial expertise 51–2 commissions 52 East Africa visits 51 House of the Chief of the Pende People 52 illusionism 53 ­Kilimanjaro 50 paintings, orientalist norms 49–50 Hendrik Witbooi (Indongo) 166, 166, 182–3 Hereroland 70 “Heroes Day” celebration 164, 169 Herz, Manuel 123 Heydebreck, Joachim Friedrich von 103 History and Customs of the Bamum (Njoya) 126 Hitler, Adolf (photograph appropriation) 192 Holstein, Cläre 18 Hornkranz, battle 112 House of the Chief of the Pende People (Hellgrewe) 52 Humboldt Forum, debate 8–9 Hutter, Mwangi multidisciplinary aspect 194 postcolonialism, relationship 189, 194–5 Hutter, Robert 189 If (Hutter: 2003) 195 Ik ben Hendrik Witbooi (Braams) 169 Im Land meiner Modelle (Kuhnert) 46 imperial protection, assurance 104 Indongo, Inatu 169, 171, 182–3 Isaak, Samuel 103

INDEX

Islamic prototype, Njoya palace (relationship) 142–6 Islam, Njoya interest 144–5 “It’s a Thin Line” exhibition 190 Jackson, Richard Mather 132 Jaeger, Hugo 192 Jugendstil art experiment 44, 82 building element 97 Jungdeutschland in Afrika 51 Kaberry, Phyllis 151 Kaiser Diorama, importance 49 Kamerunstadt 125 Kaptein, Witbooi authority 167 Karasberge, occupation 108 kaTjamuaha, Maherero 100, 102 ­Katjavivi, Peter 89 Keetmanshoop (Keetman’s hope) 74, 83 Kennedy, Hollyamber 19, 21, 89 Khoisan ethnic group 103 !Khorebeb-llNaixab (!Aman leader) 103–4 Kilimandscharo von Moschi (Hellgrewe) 49, 50 Kilimanjaro, Hellgrewe painting (impact) 49–50, 50 Kingdom of Kom, “Great House” 135 Kirchner, Ernst 14 Klein-Windoek 77–8 Klipfontein, mission station (establishment) 73 Kolmanskop 82, 84 Kolonialwaren (colonial wares) stores 44 Konzentrationslager (Shark Island concentration camp) 95 Kovango, groups (presence) 103 Kuhnert, Wilhelm (colonial artist) 14, 37, 43–4, 46, 51 debate 48 violence, signs 48–9 Kulturabeit (cultural labor) 101 La bataille de Ndago (Ngoy) 59 land expropriation 4, 13, 104, 132 treaty 99–104

233

landscape deputization 91 design, merger 13 human activity, absence 48 paintings 39, 42, 49, 54 panorama 112 partitioning 99, 110 role, entanglement 19 Lauber, Wolfgang 133 Lau, Brigitte 70, 84 Lautherborn, Christian (diary, implications) 31n95 Lebensraum, term (usage) 112 Lehmann, Fabian 19–21, 163 Lemme, Hans Martin 41–4 Let Us Die Fighting (Dreschler) 101 Leutwein, Theodor 78, 101, 103, 106–7, 113, 171 Lloyd, Jill 14 Lobe Waterfall (Heims) 44, 45 London Missionary Service (LMS), church/dwelling (destruction) 73 Lucaites, John Louis 176 Lüderitz, Adolf 2, 97, 101–2 Lüderitzbucht 74–5, 81, 97 distillation plant, construction 82 fresh water production 82 German colonization initiation 81–3 land purchases 76 ­postcard 98 railway line, construction 82 Sperrgebiet (prohibited area) 82 Lüderitz (trading station), stagnation 82 Magic Lantern Empire (Short) 98–9 Maherero, Samuel 102, 164, 170 Maji-Maji War (1905–08) 4, 7–8, 48 Malaquais, Dominique 123, 148 Mamarom, brickworks (establishment) 136 Manga Bell, King Auguste Ndumbe lineage/reign 131–2 Pagoda 135 palace 131 Manga Bell, Rudolf Douala (execution) 133

234

INDEX

Mantoum villa, Njoya commission 156n32 material landscape, power conversion 90 Mbembe, Achille 90, 91, 114 Mbuembue, King (resettlement) 126 Ménard, René 54 Menzel, Gustav 169 Michel, Andreas 15 Miller, Philip 170 “Mischling” (mixed race) 192 missionary, Heimat (relationship) 72–3 missionary/leader, arrangement 72 mission house (parsonage), construction 72–3, 109 mission stations, arrival/establishment Ovaherero 75–6 Klipfontein 73 Nama 72–4 Warmbad 73 Mit Emin Pascha ins Herz von Afrika (Stuhlman) 46 Mit Pinsel und Palette durch Kamerun (Vollbehr) 54 modern power, pastoral function 109–10 Mohammadou, Eldridge 143 money, exchange/visual medium 179 Morenga, Jacob 170 Mosterz, Heinrich 44 mournability, paradox 91 Müller Friedman, Fatima 94 multiple beings, autobiographical case 199n20 Mushaandja, Nashilongweshipwe 59 Muslim Fulbe cavalry, German/French fascination 159n72 Mwangi, Ingrid 189 Nachtigal, Gustav 104, 137–8 Nachtigal Hospital (Douala) (1900–03) 137, 149 Nama ethnic group camps/forced labor 6 concentration camp deportation 95 ­conflict 103 Dutch/Afrikaans, lingua franca 73 genocide 3–4 Germany, war 174

leaders, annual commemoration 8 Leutwein attack 113 Oorlam people, connection 74 Nama nation, war (impact) 92–3 Namaqua groups, population 103 Namibia aridity 69–70 colonial Namibia settlements/ placemaking, water (presence/ absence) 69 colonial past, memory 164 colonization, choice 83–4 Nama, mission stations (arrival) 72–4 postwar German restoration, prevention 90 pre-colonial Namibia, map 71 transport infrastructure 74–5 Witbooi (anti-colonial hero) 163 Nampost advertisement 175 Nampost Savings Bank poster 177 narrative dissonance 89 National Liberal Party 90, 92 National Socialist party, Vollbehr (service) 57 National sovereignty, money symbol 179–80 native townships, spread 94 ‘native tribes’, withdrawal (argument) 106 Naumann, Friedrich 105 Nbiepla, Njianga 136 Ndijiharine, Vitjitua 59 Ndikung, Moholi 171, 183 Ndjidda, Bouba (sooro construction) 143 Nelson, Steven 121 New Guinea, German annexation 43 Ngaoundéré rulers, tributes (sending) 143 Ngoy, Clovis 59 Nicodemus, Everlyn 15 Njikam, Martin Njimotapon 121 Njiké II, King 147–8 brick palace (1920–30) 148 Njoh, Ambe 11 Njoya, Aboubakar Njisse 121 Njoya, Ibrahim (artist) 136–7, 139 Njoya, King Ibrahim

INDEX

courtyard (inherited palace) 139 first brick palace (1908–09) 127, 158n54 French opinion 145 German colonial architecture, synthesis 154n6 inherited palace (1906–07) 124, 124–31, 125 ­King/Chief/Mfon/Sultan designations, understanding 153n1 pagoda 131–3 Schwarz, Eugen (journals/ architectural materials, impact) 155n15 second brick palace (1913) 136–41 self-portraits, production 16 throne room (Palace of King Njoya) 141 villa, commission (1912–13) 156n32 Njoya, King Ibrahim (palace) 20, 136 1917–22 121, 122 grandeur 55–6 Grassfields, successors 146–50 Islamic prototype 142–6 Njoya, Sultan al-Haji Ibrahim Mbombo 140 Nochlin, Linda 191 Nolde, Emil 14 Nomos of the Earth 96 non-German settlers, presence (impact) 31n95 North German Trade and Industrial Exhibition (1890) 51 Noyes, John 11, 112 Nsangu, King 124 Nujoma, Sam 101, 178, 179, 180 Oechelhäeuser, Adolf von (architecture perspective) 157n41 Oguntoye, Katharina 6 Okahandja (station), establishment/ closure 75 Okupa, Effa 99, 100 Old Calabar, building style 132 One Ground (critique) 193 One Ground (Hutter) 190, 193, 195, 197

235

Oneness, unfolding vision 193 On the Other Side of Midnight (print) 192 Oorlam, arrival 99 Opitz, May 6 O’Reilly, T.L. 89 Orientalism (artistic movement) 14 orientalist landscape painting, tropes 42 orientalist painting 44–5 Orlam group, conflict 103 Osayimwese, Itohan 1, 20, 37, 91, 109, 123 Otjimbingwe troop headquarters 76 water, abundance 75 Otjomuise, strategic centerpoint 106 Ottoman Empire railways, German production 12 Ovaherero arrival 99 Barmen (renaming) 75 fortification 104–14 genocidal war 95 group, conflict 103 Maharero, insurrectionary leader 102 mission stations, arrival/ establishment 75–6 Oorlam relations, deterioration 75 political structures, change 102 war, impact 92–3 Ovaherero ethnic group genocide/camps/forced labor 3–4, 6 leaders, annual commemoration 8 Ovaherero nation, settling 101–2 Ovambo, uprising 110 Palace of Azi, BIR damage 161n87 Palace of Bafut ­damage, BIR attack 161n94 Fon residence 134 Palace of Banyo 144 Palace of Rey 143 Palace of the King of Bamum, The (Vollbehr) 54, 55 Palgrave, William Coates 70 palms, planting (Swakopmund) 80–1 Paré, Isaac 136 partitioning 96–7 Paul, Gerhard 176–7, 182

236

INDEX

Pende ethnic group, architecture (presentation) 52–3 Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen 38 Peters, Carl 42, 51 Peters, Walter 10–11, 19, 69 photography colonial photography collection, usage 59 usage 16 picture postcard, visual media (usage) 17–18 picturesque/romantic landscapes 16 placemaking, water (presence/absence) 69 Plehn, Albrecht 138 Pogge, Paul 51 Pohamba, Hifikepunye 178 portrait genres, elements (appropriation) 59 Portraiture, importance 45 “Power of the Archive and its Limits, The” (Mbembe) 91 Pratt, Mary Louise 49 pre-colonial Namibia, map 71 Protection Treaties, usage 76 protectorates, colony designation 22n10 Pulverturm (armory tower), construction 75–6 Puttkamer, Jesko von 132 quick-firing gun, exercise 112 Quotes of War 171, 172, 183 raciality, spatial analytic 112 Rathenau, Walter 92, 93 Ratzel, Friedrich 112 reed buildings, transportation (ability) 73 Reilly, Maura 191 Reimann-Dawe, Tracey 38 Reverend Dr Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi (Amuthenu) 165, 165–6, 182–3 Rey (palace) 143 Rhenish Mission Society (RMS) operations, commencement 74 South-West African mission base 75–6 station, establishment 72 Richthofen Falls (Lemme) 41, 41–3

rightlessness, status 91 Rinderpest epidemic 80 ­Rohrbach, Paul 105–6, 113–14 Roman fort typology (castra), adaptation 107–8 Romanticism (artistic movement) 14 rooftop statues (kishikishi) 53 Rosenbach, Ulrike 191 Royal Prussian Settlement Commission (RPSC) 113–14 Royaume Bamoum (Tardits) 123 Ruckteschell, Walter von 44 Rundbogenstil (architectural design) 11 rural/semi-urban landscapes, painting 57 Rwanda, colonial empire addition 2 saddleback building/earthen pillars (1908–09) 130 Saker, Alfred (brick production) 158n54 Salomon, Armand 140 Samoa, German annexation 43 Sarr, Felwine 9 Savoy, Bénédicte 9 Schilling, Britta 5 Schlieffen, Alfred von (Quotes of War) 171–3, 172 Schloss impact 121–2, 129, 136 white surfaces, emulation 138 lantern, usage 150 Schmidt, Carl 70 Schmitt, Carl 96 Schmitthenner, Paul 150 Schnee, Heinrich 89–91 Schultz, Dagmar 6 Schutzgebiete (protectorates), term (usage) 100–1 Schutztruppe (military troops) 99, 101, 104–5, 113 interventions, visual-military technologies 112 Schutzverträge (contracts) 95, 100–1 Schwarz, Eugen 128, 155n15 Schweinfurth, Georg 38 settlements European pre-colonial attitude 70, 72 water, presence/absence 69

INDEX

Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) 94 Shark Island concentration camp (Konzentrationslager) 95 Short, John Phillip 53, 98–9 Sjambok (leather whip), police usage 90 Sonderweg (exceptional path) 5 Songhay Village (Bernatz) 40 Sooro (soorowal), origination/usage 142–3, 145 Soulillou, Jacques 132 Southern Africa colonization, choice 83–4 “colored,” term (designation) 185n18 South-West Africa ­camp typology, presence 93 colonial territoriality, construction 19–20 colonial territory, design 89 demarcation, lines 99–104 empire, mapping 95–9 fortifications 104–14 German rule, impact 84 German South-West Africa, annexation 2–3 Germany history, entanglement 92–5 land reform 13 land, treaty 99–104 protectorate, establishment 43 refuge, absence 104–14 sovereignty, silencing 95–9 water deficiency 78 Sperrgebiet (prohibited area) 82 spheres of influence 96–7 Spickernagel, Ellen 48 Static Drift (Hutter) 189–94 Steinmetz, George 4 Stern, Christel 70, 84 Strother, Zoe 15 Stuhlmann, Franz 46 Swakopmund groundwater, availability 83–4 palms, planting 80–1 shipping, commencement 80 water, abundance 80–1

237

Swakopmund Art Association, exhibition 58–9 Swartmodder, mission station (establishment) 74 Tanzania East Germany, socialist bilateral relations 12 German colonialism, postindependence engagement 7 land reform 13 Tanzania, colonial empire addition 2 Tardits, Claude 123 Tchatchoua, Thomas 147–8 Techné 113 territoriality/territorial borders, precolonial notions (attention) 118n42 territory, notions (coverage) 118n42 Thiemeyer, Thomas 7 Thomsen, Hermann 54, 56 Thorbecke, Marie Pauline 42–4 Tikari origins 151 Time Zone (video installation) 192 Tireless Embrace in View of Not Knowing (Hutter: 2017) 196 Toenyih, Foenchang 134 Togo French rule 31n94 ­protectorate, establishment 43 Tournous, basilica pillars (interest) 141 Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa (Barth) 39 “Treaty of Protection and Friendship between the German Empire and the Rulers of Bethany, South West Africa” 104 Treaty of Versailles (1920) 4, 89 tribal dissolution (multivalent strategy) 101 tropical landscapes 57–8 Trotha, Lothar von 173 annihilation order 94–5 language, commonality 106 Tsha’tshua, Mfen 160n81 Tuathail, Geraróid Ó 99 Türcke, Christoph 179

238

INDEX

Unangst, Matthew 40, 50 Unter deutscher Flagge (Pogge/ Wissmann) 51 Hellgrewe illustrations, depictions 52 Untitled (Witbooi) (Amuthenu) 180–2, 181 urbanism 19–21 van der Merwe, Hentie 182, 183 Van Hoesen, Brett M. 19 van Laak, Dirk 96 van Wyk, Andrew 177–9, 183 Victoria, German constructions (impact) 154n6 violence, maintenance (function) 114 visual arts, reflections 163 visual culture 19–21 visual experience (Hutter photo essay) 194–5 v. Lettow-Vorbeck, Paul 9, 10 Vogel, Susan 128 Völkerschau (foreign peoples show), study 17 Vollbehr, Ernst (colonial artist) 20, 37, 44, 46 artistic license, allowance 57–8 East Asia journeys 57 impressionism, impact 57 militaristic activity, interest 56 paintings, exhibition contribution 56 Palace of the King of Bamum, The 55 renown 53–4 Walvis Bay British annexation 70, 72, 80 harbor, importance 84 port function 80–1 Wangemann, Hermann Theodor 109 Warmbad. See Fort Warmbad barracks, situation 108 mission station, establishment 73 water deficiency (South-West Africa) 78 ­legacy, survival 83–4 potable water, piping 83 presence/absence 69 sourcing 72–3

water, abundance Swakop/Kuisib 76 Swakopmund 80–1 Windhoek 74–5, 77 Waters, A.J. 90 Werften (prison-like worker colony) 93–4 Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going to? (van Wyk) 183 White House (Fphia Ndia) 149–50 Widerstand und Gottesfurcht (Menzel) 169 Wiese, Bernard 39 Wilberg, Christian 49 Wilbrandt, Hermann 54 Wilhelmine (building element) 97 Wilke, Sabine 14, 46 Windhoek 74–8, 79. See also Alta Feste archipelago urbanism, description 94 Bülowstraße, village colony 94 colonial urbanism, financial investments 112–13 colonization, choice 83 governance seat 84 Independence Avenue 79 map 77 strategic centerpoint 106 Troop Garden 79 water, abundance 74–5 Zoo Park 78–80 Wissmann, Hermann 51 Witbooi, Hendrik 19, 21, 103 anti-colonial hero 163 appearance 172–3 colonist battle 79 death 110 defeat 168 dialogue 169–74 economic canonization 176 historical photo (Rehoboth) 167, 168 icon, popularity 175–7 influence 105 Nampost office advertisement 175

INDEX

perception 174 portrait, artistic reflection 182–4 portrait, commercialization 163–4, 177–182 portrayals 165–9 Quotes of War 171, 172 untitled artwork 181 ­Witbooi, Isaak 164 Witbooi-Nama, self-identification 168–9 Woermann, Adolf 59 Wolf, Eugen 96 Wolff, Fritz 53

239

Worringer, Wilhelm 15 Wuhrmann, Anna 54 Yahya, Lamido, reaccession (impact) 159n67 Yahya, Modibbo (palace construction) 144, 145 Yuh, Fon 133–4 Zantop, Suzanne 5–6, 12, 38 Zeller, Joachim 14 Zoo Park (Windhoek) 78–80 Zwart Morast, mission station (establishment) 74

240

241

242

PLATE 1  Wilhelm Kuhnert (German, 1865–1926), African Lions, c. 1911. Oil on canvas. 64 × 50 inches. JKM Collection®, National Museum of Wildlife Art.

PLATE 2  Swakopmund, c. 1914. Source: Scientific Society Swakopmund. Treelined boardwalks on Kaiser Wilhelm Street, today Sam Nujoma Avenue.

PLATE 3  Entrance façade of the Palace of King Njoya, 1959, Foumban, Cameroon. Photo: Robert Ritzenthaler. Milwaukee Public Museum, Milwaukee, WI, Ritzenthaler Slide Collection, L-24.

PLATE 4  The White House, Azi Palace, 2009, Fontem, Cameroon. Photo: James Achanyi-Fontem.

PLATE 5 Leutwein, 2012, Hentie van der Merwe. Film still.

PLATE 6 Witbooi, 2012, Hentie van der Merwe. Film still.

PLATES 7 AND 8  Static Drift, 2001, Mwangi Hutter. 2 C-prints, each 75 cm × 110 cm. Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter.

PLATE 9  Canvas of (Un)ritualized Movement, 2015, Mwangi Hutter. Performance. Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter.

PLATE 10  Proximity of Imperfect Figures, 2015, Mwangi Hutter. Aluminum, wax. Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter.

PLATES 11 AND 12  From the Other Side of Daylight, 2017, Mwangi Hutter. 2 C-prints, each 65 cm × 59 cm. Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago and Paris. Copyright Mwangi Hutter.