German Victorian Worlds

A dinner party of German officials

This picture illustrates the everyday life of German colonizers in the later days of colonial rule. We see an evening party of some German officials. On the table we have the notorious beer, which was produced in several places in the colony. The party of consists of, as it seems, officers or colonial officials. All men wear white uniforms. The colonial society of German East Africa was both male and militaristic even in the habitus of its civil administrators. In the first year of colonial rule, the military dominated colonial politics and the colonial society. Personal accounts from these years often celebrate these men as “pioneers”, who, by the virtue of their military might and will, established colonial rule. The officers often expressed a blatant hatred against civilian  elements of the administration, whom they despised a “bureaucrats” with no feeling for the “real” Africa. Many officers came from rural regions or small town of Prussia. Hermann Wissmann, the first Governor and founder of the colonial troops, often recruited men from regiments from the heartland of Prussia. Many belonged to the lower aristocracy and were to some extent upset with the loss of the old order in Gemany because of rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie in the second half of the 19^th century. To them, Africa was often a place to escape modernity and to rebuild old Junkerian worlds. 

East Africa, indeed, offered them a life they hardly could afford at home in Germany. The first German official in Rwanda, Richard Kandt, who with his Jewish roots was for most of the time an outsider in the colonial society shaped to the bone by conservatism, once ironically commented that the life in the colony allowed some Germans to replace the meagre bread in Germany with a richly-laid table abundant with meat in Africa.^[1]The dinner party was served by at least three African servants, the so called “boys”. This not only shows the luxury available to German colonizers by the exploitation of Africans (many of the under-age children), but also the influence of British colonial life-styles, which Germans not only adopted in the use of language.

A German settler at his manor in the Kilimanjaro region

The conflict between civilians and the military was a major conflict that shaped the colonial society and politics in many ways.  Under the Governship of Count Adolf von Götzen (1901-1906) the military administration was successively transformed into one with a more civil outlook and staff. The old guard of officers responded to this loss of the influence of the military by a sharp criticism of the colonial administration and by the retreat to their manors at the countryside mostly in the Kilimanjaro region. Here, they sometimes tried to preserve the ideal colonial world lost to the bureaucrats and the growing influence of bourgeois patterns in the urban centers of the colony. Their manors became minor barrack squares with armed guards drilled by their German master. Military ceremonies like raising the flag at morning and a brutal regime of exploitation with corporal punishment the norm belonged to this vision of this little private feudal empires.  

With the beginning of the 20^th century, more and more women came to colony either as wives of officials and settlers or as nurses and missionaries. Their arrival marked the beginning of the end of the male dominated “pioneer” society. The emergence of a bourgeois colonial society saw the adaption of British ways of colonial life-style. The German colonial society became more and more some sort of a European Victorian society. 

A garden party of Germans

This Victorian German played tennis in his leisure time, held garden parties and made boat trips at weekend and consumed goods produced in the British Empire, foremost in India. On the table we see coffee instead of beer, cigars and wine.

English was a major lingua franca in the German colony because the Government had hired many Indians, who had previously been  in the service of the Sultan of Zanzibar, as custom officials and administrative clerks in a variety of functions. The Indian Ocean was at that time a British Lake with English as an important lingua franca in all ports from the Arab peninsula to the ports along the East African coast and India. A German journalist, who travelled to German East Africa in 1908, lamented that he was not able to communicate in the German language with the port authorities in Dar es salaam. “ In a German colony!” The journalist travelled as a member of a delegation headed by the Secretary for Colonial Affairs Bernhard Dernburg, who  tried to got a picture on the situation of the colony for his planned reforms of colonial policies. Interestingly enough, Dernburg travelled not only through the German colony, but through their neighboring British colony, where he met with British colonial officials. These talks influenced his understandings as much as what he saw in the German East Africa.  

While in Europe, the British and the German Empires were on a collision course, eventually resulting into the outbreak of the First World War, the Germans in East Africa and in the Colonial Office developed a cordial relationship with their imperial rivals.

These are some pictures from the Archive of the Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft) at Frankfurt am Main. The archive, which is accessible at http://www.ub.bildarchiv-dkg.uni-frankfurt.de/ is one of the biggest pictorial archives for the German colonies. The Colonial Society was a major lobby organization in the Empire with a great influence on German colonial politics. Its official journal, the Deutsches Kolonialblatt, is a major source for German colonial history, since it published most of the official reports from the colonies, of which many got lost during the First World War. I used the Kolonialblatt a lot for my research.

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[1] Kandt, Richard. Caput Nili. Eine empfindsame Reise zu den Quellen des Nils.  Berlin: Reimer, 1905, p. 16