German Colonialism in Africa
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- List of maps
- Introduction
- Acknowledgements
- 1. Benevolent colonialism? German colonial rule and the reconstruction of Rwanda’s history today - Klaus Bachmann
- 2. Between the King, the Church and the Emperor – Ijwi Island as a Rwandan, German, Belgian and Protestant colony - Klaus Bachmann
- 3. The IRIBA Centre & the Young Artists in the City Programme Rwanda: The experience of a Decolonial Documentation, on German colonization. - Assumpta Mugiraneza
- 4. Contemporary conflicts in Cameroon and their roots in colonial boundary delimitation - Joanna Bar and Ngenge Ransom Tanyu
- 5. Four famines in Rwanda. The social and political impact of natural disasters on the legitimacy of Rwandan governance - Klaus Bachmann
- 6. Paying for colonial atrocities. The paradoxical outcome and the unexpected adverse consequences of the German-Namibian settlement concerning the genocide against the Herero and Nama - Gerhard Kemp, Łukasz Majewski, Klaus Bachmann
- 7. A keyhole to Rwandan history. Missionary accounts about pre-colonial Rwanda and their limitations - Klaus Bachmann
- 8. The White Fathers and Rwandan Society during the German colonial period (1900–1916) - Stefaan Minnaert
- Annex
- The Editors and Authors
- Series index
List of maps
Map 1: Location of the various Duala nations of Cameroon
Introduction
The current public discussions about colonialism and its legacies, no matter if in Africa, Europe or Northern America, often relies on simple contrasts about good and evil, perpetrators and victims, contrasts, which neglect the nuances of collaboration, cooperation, the internalization of colonial stereotypes by those, who were colonized, their agency under colonial rule and the unequally distributed benefits and losses among indigenous populations and their elites.
The colonial centers’ ignorance of pre-colonial realities on the ground was most striking in their determination to draw arbitrary boundaries across a continent, about which they had meagre knowledge and many pre-fabricated stereotypes. These boundaries helped to moderate and settle conflicts among the colonial centers, for example between Britain and Belgium, Britain and Germany, Germany and France or France and Britain. But at the same time, they became new hotbeds of regional conflict for the nations, ethnic groups, lineages and clans living in territories which these boundaries severed from each other. Joanna Bar and Ransom Tanyu Ngenge describe this interaction between European conflict settlement and the emergence of African conflicts in their article about Cameroon.
But there is an additional picture behind the discussion about how colonial rule cut into pre-existing boundaries. In many cases, these pre-colonial boundaries were neither natural nor ethnically unambiguous. They had been established by conquest, too. Klaus Bachmann describes the example of Ijwi Island, today a rather remote and forgotten island in the Kivu Lake, which belongs to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In the nineteenth century, it was conquered by the Rwandan king Rwabugiri1, who installed a local collaborator (regarded as traitor by the Ijwi political leadership) and established a similar kind of indirect rule as later the Germans did in Rwanda proper. Rwabugiri’s rule on Ijwi was short-lived and broke down after the Rucunshu coup at the end of the nineteenth century had deprived his son of the drum (the Rwandan counterpart to royal crowns in Europe) and elevated the rival abega-clan to supreme power in the kingdom.2 With the advent of the Europeans, Ijwi became ←9 | 10→a territory of German protestant conversion and remained so after Belgian took it over (and merged it with the Belgian Congo) in 1910, despite the outspoken German nationalism of the protestant missionaries. Until 1910, the island had belonged to the Rwandan kingdom and to German East Africa.
Two chapters of this book specifically deal with the blind spots of the current media debate about colonialism, post-colonialism and colonial legacies. They both show, how the unequal treatment of indigenous groups on the ground reinforced existing social and later ethnic cleavages and created patterns of legitimization, whose influence can be traced until today. Until today, Rwandans see German colonial rule in a rather rosy light, because, as the story goes, the Germans respected the local habits and the existing institutions, cooperated with king Musinga and strengthened his rule over territories, where this rule was contested. Klaus Bachmann demonstrates that the German Schutztruppe’s (the colonial army) conduct in Rwanda did not much differ from its conduct in other parts of Africa: everywhere it used its limited military power to strengthen cooperative groups on the ground against insurgent ones, often with no regard for the civilian population and those insurgents’ traditional customs and institutions. In Rwanda, the German soldiers submerged the rebellious northern kingdoms in Mulera and Rukiga carrying out murderous campaigns, but because this was beneficial for the royal court in Nyanza and because many people (largely independent of their ethnic affiliation) in Rwanda identify with the royal abanyiginya tradition, German colonial rule appears as almost benevolent to them. This would be different, if the northern perspective were included in the way, how Rwandans today interpret their past, but the views from Rwanda’s peripherical regions have been silenced in recent decades. Assumpta Mugiraneza shows, how the absence of knowledge about pre-colonial Rwanda reinforces the internalization of a retrospective neo-colonial perspective about Rwanda today. People see it as natural to have a capital like Kigali, which, historically seen, only existed as a capital-like settlement during the short time when Germany maintained its civil Residentur there (and after independence), while for most of Rwanda’s history, the king’s residences were scattered across the country, the only permanent royal seat being (beginning with Musinga’s rule) Nyanza, not Kigali. Under Belgian rule, Nyanza remained the king’s permanent place, while the capital was moved to Butare, then renamed Astrida (after Astrid of Sweden, a Swedish princess and later wife of Belgian king Leopold III). In Rwanda, history before the Belgians ←10 | 11→means mostly German colonial rule and colonial remnants enjoy better conservation and more popularity than places which were more intimately linked with Rwandan (rather than German colonial) history, as Assumpta Mugiraneza demonstrates – and tries to enroot again in Rwandan society with her center and its activities.
The popular understanding of colonialism as exploitative and abusive European governance of Africans by European countries sometimes is also at odds with the reality on the ground because of rather unexpected and seldom understood interactions among Europeans. Formally, Rwanda was a German colony and that state of things was recognized by other colonial nations. But the strongest impact on everyday life in Rwanda proper (the realm of the Rwandan king) did not have German soldiers or German bureaucrats, but the Congregation of Missionaries of Africa, called the “White Fathers”, whose members had arrived long before Germany created its first civilian outpost in Kigali. The White Fathers were German subjects, but in many, many cases their citizenship was the result of Germany’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine after the Prussian-French War in 1870/71; the missionaries felt French, spoke French (French was the official language imposed on the congregation members even in cases when members from the same country were together of whom none had French as a native language). Some, like bishop Jean-Joseph Hirth, kept their French citizenship. For Rwandans as well as for visitors from outside Germany, the mission was French and their mission territory regarded as French territory, notwithstanding its status under international law. It was the mission, not the Schutztruppe, that changed the relations on the ground between abahutu and abatutsi, interfered in court proceedings, negotiated between Germans and wealthy abatutsi chiefs in the regions and the royal court in Nyanza. They were armed. The mission had arrived with heavily armed inhabitants of the adjacent Buganda kingdom, with whom they had fled the violence there, their mission stations often looked like fortresses and the missionaries were determinate to use the gun as well as the bible to convert the locals. In 1904, the German army came to their rescue, subduing an upheaval in and around Rwaza, that at least has been the prevailing interpretation of these events in the literature so far. Stefaan Minnaert, himself a former White Father, historian and archivist, describes how the story looked like in the light of the respective missionaries’ internal correspondence: the conflict had started because they had settled a dispute with local chiefs by force, raiding and looting the region.
Klaus Bachmann points to some other aspects, where missionary reports, diaries and chronicles must be taken with one or even several grains of salt: violence is almost absent from these publications and records, as is a popular way ←11 | 12→of converting children by kidnapping them from their families. Bachmann also shows the remarkable evolution which the meaning of “slavery” underwent over time: already being a Catholic concept of anti-Muslim propaganda in the nineteenth century, it turned into a cornerstone of the public ideological quarrel between the White Father leadership and the German administration, with the first exaggerating Muslim influence and slave trade in Rwanda and the Germans downplaying it before the German public. The meaning later shifted turning the trope of “Muslims enslaving Rwandans” into “Tutsi enslaving Hutu” and became a powerful tool in the power struggle during late Belgian rule and in the two Rwandan republics, when Hutu nationalism stereotyped “the Tutsi” into descendants of slave-owners and “the Hutu” into their collective victims, equating the abanyiginya monarchy with slavery and ethnic oppression. The evolution escalated during the genocide in 1994, but its origins are rooted in the ideological fights of the late nineteenth century, when, as all sources indicate, actual slave trade was marginal in Rwanda and individual serfdom relatively humane.
There are yet two other chapters which show, how the colonial past throws its shadow over today’s politics: In Rwanda, the way the Belgians dealt with the first famine they encountered there, bolstered a new way of looking at colonial rights and obligations. By using the 1917 famine and the Belgian response to it as a propaganda tool supporting their diplomatic claims to Rwanda, the Belgian government implicitly acknowledged the agency of Rwandans and their right to good governance, something which went beyond the purely exploitative policy of colonial centers in their traditional colonies. This backfired after World War II, when their approach to the 1944 famine undermined the legitimacy of their rule in Rwanda as well as of the traditional institutions of the country. It is then, Bachmann claims, when the erosion of colonial and traditional governance started, which led to the violence in the late 1950s and to independence. The article about Namibia shows, in contrast, how the hermetic legal framework for addressing colonial atrocities pushes African interest groups to embark on formally legal, but mainly political strategies of litigation and it shows, why this ended with a contested success in the case of Namibian – German negotiations over the Herero and Nama genocides at the beginning of the twentieth century.
1 Kigeli (also: Kigeri) IV Rwabugiri.
2 Rwandan lineage and clan names are always given according to the original spelling in Kinyarwanda. Hutu, Tutsi and Twa appear as umuhutu (singular) and abahutu (plural), umutusi and abatutsi, umutwa and abatwa when they are treated as social strata (before the 1930s) and as Hutu, Tutsi and Twa when they appear as ethnic groups. The use of these names is different in Stefaan Minnaert’s chapter.
Acknowledgements
This book came into being thanks to a grant from the German-Polish Science Foundation (Deutsch-polnische Wissenschaftsstiftung) in Frankfurt/Oder3 and the flexibility of the foundation’s staff in addressing the challenges of our project during the 2019–2022 COVID19 pandemic. We are very grateful for this flexibility, which allowed us to reassign a part of the budget for travel to this publication, which, however, would not have come into being without the hospitality of the Willy-Brandt Center for German and European Studies at the University of Wrocław and its director, Prof. Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, who hosted our panel on German colonialism in Africa in October 2023 and Assumpta Mugiraneza, whose IRIBA Foundation organized a book promotion in Kigali in the framework of her foundation’s de-colonization program in November of the same year.
Details
- Pages
- 226
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631896396
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631902707
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631896389
- DOI
- 10.3726/b20859
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (June)
- Keywords
- Germany’s colonial rule in Africa German/Namibian settlement Colonial atrocities
- Published
- Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2023. 226 pp., [7] fig. col., [1] fig. b/w, [1] tables
Biographical notes
Klaus Bachmann (Volume editor)
Klaus Bachmann is a professor of social sciences at SWPS University in Warsaw, Poland. He has specialized in colonial history in Africa, transitional justice and international criminal justice. Joanna Bar is an associate professor at the Institute of the Middle and Far East of the Jagiellonian University. Her research field centers around the social and political change in East African countries, with a particular focus on contemporary social and political changes in Rwanda, Tanzania and Burundi.
