A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

A chief rationale behind the government’s pro-native policy was the
instrumentalization of indigenous peoples as a colonial workforce. With the legal end of
slavery in German Africa in 1905, a pragmatic policy of tacit acceptance of slavery was
implemented in East Africa to facilitate the colonial economy. It has already been shown
how colonial medicine was harnessed to the purpose of keeping a healthy workforce and
thus a profitable plantation economy. Eckart and Zimmerer describe how colonial
officials and doctors imbibed ideas of eugenics and Social Darwinism that worked in
perfect collusion with the needs of the state for a healthy and docile native labour pool. 73
In fact, one of the chief concerns raised by the massacre of the Herero was that Southwest
Africa’s labour force would be wiped out, with a commensurate loss of colonial
income. 74 In this context, the Marxist vision of labour is substantiated by Eckart and
Zimmerer’s research.
After the Herero, Nama and Maji Maji wars and the resulting colonial scandals,
State Secretary Dernburg implemented significant improvements to native welfare in
colonial policy. Under Dernburg, the new colonization of the native was to proceed by
“preservation” through missionary and railroad instead of the “assimilation” by bottle,
missionary and gun that had been practiced before. 75 In addition, the German state of law
(Rechtsstaat) upheld the rights of native labourers against the worst abuses of the German
settlers, traders and administrators. Because of new German sensitivities to the plight of
colonial subjects in this period, the government continually reiterated the evolution of
positive relations with indigenous peoples. 76
Though Germany had always assumed a paternalistic attitude toward its colonial
subjects, the aftermath of the revolts reaffirmed this doctrine. 77 Erzberger attacked
92