A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

Frauenbund were vehemently opposed to the mixing of races and racial dilution in the
colonies. 23 But colonial reterritorializations of gender and society frustrated the
deterritorialization of German norms of racial purity and Herrschaftsutopie. Of particular
interest is the passing of many racial laws during the 1904-1905 Herero revolt. 24 More
ironic is the fact that the war was in part brought on by the rapes of prominent Herero
women by German settlers. 25 The challenge to German authority posed by both the war
and miscegenation seemed to require a reterritorialization in the shape of racial and
sexual definition through the establishment of racial and sexual difference in the colonies.
But what is remarkable is that this difference was only established at the colonial level,
for the highest colonial courts in Berlin refused to legislate exactly what constituted
German, native and mixed race. Here was another example of the oft-ignored separation
of opinion between Germans in the metropole and in the colony.
Overall, such efforts to establish Deutschtum in the colonies were stymied by
local realities that worked in favour of syncretic mixings of German and African social
codes. This sexual syncretism was evident in the efforts of male colonists to meld
German racial norms with African acceptance of polygamy and mixed-blood marriages. 26
Thus men incorporated selective elements of both German and African racial and sexual
codes. Deterritorialization and reterritorialization become evident in this linkage between
internal and external dynamics as well as the fact that colonial practice challenged
supposedly “Germanic” social and cultural standards.
A more specific component of society, the employment of people by colonial
companies, shows how various social units were imbricated in the colonial economy.
Given economic necessities and the small German population, native labour became a
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