A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
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Cultural articulations like <strong>German</strong> technology were also important to the <strong>German</strong><br />
conquest of the colonies. Technology was both a benefit and a detriment to African<br />
peoples since what was used as an instrument of power could also improve African<br />
lives. 88 Advances in tropical medicine through government-sponsored work like Robert<br />
Koch’s research minimized plagues like sleeping sickness, but it was also used to<br />
wittingly infect Africans with diseases in order to test the efficacy of new<br />
pharmaceuticals. 89 In fact, Wolfgang Eckart argues that colonial medicine was devoted<br />
to the control of the colonial labour economy. Similarly, technological improvements in<br />
communication, as D.E.K. Amenumey argues, were predicated largely upon the<br />
facilitation of economic exploitation. 90 The engines of liberal economics that thrust<br />
<strong>German</strong>y further into the interior also brought European diseases, taxation and soldiers.<br />
But European technology vital to the <strong>German</strong> expansion was also reterritorialized by<br />
African peoples and used to block the expansion. An example of this were the Herero<br />
attacks upon <strong>German</strong> trade and communications and the exploitation of the European<br />
technologies of “God and the Mauser” during the 1904 war. 91 In this African willingness<br />
to reterritorialize and adopt <strong>German</strong> technologies, the cultural mimicry described by<br />
Bhabha is again evident. 92<br />
This European technology was vital to expansion because it aided the many<br />
expeditions that opened the African continent to <strong>German</strong> control. A growing number of<br />
expeditions in the later years of the colonial period attests to increasing <strong>German</strong> interest<br />
in its colonies. Government and organizations like the DKG and the missionary societies<br />
gladly funded colonial exploration under famous explorers such as Carl Peters and Leo<br />
Frobenius in the hopes of inculcating <strong>German</strong> cultural values, establishing <strong>German</strong>y’s<br />
62