A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

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