A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

dispensation for companies in colonial law as legal arrangements all contained significant
discussions of commercial rights to resource extraction. 117 Colonial native law is
particularly salient in its provision of legal backing for the government’s expansion.
While Walter Nuhn observes that indigenous peoples had a highly “irregular”
relationship with German law, the domineering nature of native law indicates something
more than this. 118 More realistic is Silvester and Gewald’s belief that native law offered a
continual tool of oppression to the Germans. 119 Although belief was maintained in the
German “legal state” and the 1906 reforms did bring improvement, native law was
premised upon the control of indigenous peoples. These disciplinary regimes of power
exercised over the bodies of African peoples were just the sort of power identified by
Foucault as “war continued by other means,” where every repression of native desire
represented the extension of power over the African indigene. 120 Here also was the
creation of absolute difference between German and African that was vital to the
extension of power by the colonizer. As seen above in the social and cultural domains,
the surveillance of the native was another form of this disciplinary regime, with law
instead of science as the instrument of domination. But if the history of the social and
cultural realms of German expansive colonialism has shown anything, it is how the actual
borders between the German and the African were quite fluid. Therefore, whereas the
extension of German law did represent a deterritorialization, these laws were often the
specific targets of reterritorializing forces which sought to evade the imposition of
German social, cultural, economic, political and legal codes through various acts of
defiance, from resistance to German law to defaulting on taxes to outright revolt.
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