african resistance in german swa 1907-15

Journal of Southern African Studies

Guns and Top Hats: African Resistance in German South West Africa, 1907-1915Author(s): Philipp PreinReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Mar., 1994), pp. 99-121Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2637122 .

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Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 20, Number 1, March 1994 99

Guns and Top Hats: African Resistance in German South West Africa, 1907-1915*

PHILIPP PREIN (University of Hamburg)

This article is a study of African resistance during the last eight years of German rule in South West Africa (GSWA). Having waged a brutal war against the pastoralist populations in the centre and the South for three years, German colonialists were eager to construct a profitable settler economy after 1907. They failed, however. Too many Africans had been killed and the survivors would not let themselves be reduced to the status of mere contract labourers. Much has since been written about the post-war years, but questions about means and motivations in the resistance of the African population still await closer analysis. Pre- vious authors have emphasised the brutality of colonial rule while stressing Africans' unbroken will to resist after 1907. Supposedly, Africans' die-hard spirit of resistance was powerless under the might of German rule. By contrast, this study argues that Africans did indeed have effective means to resist while their motivations were more complex than a uniform anti-colonial spirit. Throughout, attention is paid to various layers of conflict in colonial society, which leads to the conclusion that resistance in GSWA after 1907 cannot be explained by an inherent opposition between colonisers and colonised. Rather, it grew out of local, day-to-day struggles between people with multiple and colliding visions of society.

Introduction: Resistance in the 'Graveyard'

When you consider what has happened to Namibians, it may be very tempting sometimes to talk of Namibians in the relatively passive way that slaves have been talked about ... And yet one has to see ... their amazing creativity.'

On a midsummer day in early 1913, a German missionary walked down a dusty road in Windhoek, South West Africa (GSWA). The missionary, Gustav Becker, was on his way to hold a wedding in the church of the Nama speaking parish. He had good reason to anticipate

An earlier version of this paper was submitted for honours in the History Department at Northwestern Univer- sity (Illinois), 22 May 1992. Many thanks to my advisers Jim Campbell and Jonathan Glassman. Thanks also to Matthew Boulton, David Bunn, Elisa Forgey, Dag Henrichsen, Gesine Kruger, Matthew Kutcher, Helga and Hans-Werner Muller, Irmel Platthaus, Carl Schlettwein, David Simon, and an anonymous referee. Research was supported, in part, by the Hurd Scholar Research Grant and the History Department at Northwestern University. Archives of the Vereinigte Evangelische Mission in Wuppertal, Germany (formerly Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft (RMG)), 2533 (C/h 50a, b), Missionary Becker, Windhoek, 23 September 1913. Unless indicated otherwise, trans- lations are my own.



100 Journal of Southern African Studies

nothing more than an uneventful ceremony for, since his arrival in Windhoek one year earlier, relations with the parishioners had been smooth; or at least without audible discord. When Becker entered the church, however, he was disturbed by what he saw. He faced a crowd crowned with top hats, despite his order days before not to wear them. He had claimed that the hats made Africans the laughing stock of Europeans, but now he felt little inclination to laugh himself. He reported to his superior that this was 'open resistance'.2

Initially, this episode can at best seem odd, if not absurd. Germans in GSWA should have had little reason to fear 'open resistance' during the summer of 1912-13. After all, the Schutztruppe (Protection Troops) had fought a ruthless war against Herero and Nama speaking pastoralists between 1904-07. During the following eight years Africans did not go to war against German colonialists again.3 In the light of the brutality of German warfare and post-war rule, the period between 1907-15 has been commonly described as a time of African suffering and misery. The historian Horst Drechsler, having fin- ished his account of 'organised' resistance up to 1907, went so far as to call the final period of German rule 'the peace of the graveyard'.' His statement has gained prover- bial status since.5

Notwithstanding its initial absurdity, the top hat episode suffices to illustrate that the 'graveyard' had at least some African inhabitants who were very much alive. In- deed, another look at contemporary settler newspapers, missionary accounts and administrative reports shows that Becker's fear was no exception. Not all expressions of fear were as frantic as to conjure up 'rebellion', of course, but they nonetheless attested to the contestant liveliness of African men and women. This liveliness may not have qualified as 'organised' resistance in the eyes of historians and politicians. Apparently, though, it was enough to scare Becker.

Several authors have been well aware of German alarms, but they rarely used them to question the colonialists' claim for absolute domination. Supposedly, German fears

2 The next military confrontations took place mostly between African and South African forces. Mandume ya Ndemufayo fought in Ovamboland against South African as well Portuguese forces from 1915 to 1917. On Mandume's kingship from 1911-1915 see Patricia Hayes, 'Order Out of Chaos: Mandume Ya Ndemufayo and Oral History', Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies, 19, 1 (1993), pp. 89-113. On the battles of the Bondelswart in 1922 and the Rehobother in 1925, see Richard Freislich, The Last Tribal War (Cape Town, 1964); Franz Dewaldt (ed.), Native Uprisings in SouthwestAfrica (Salisbury, 1976); Patrick Pearson, 'The Rehoboth Rebel- lion' in P. Bonner (ed.), Working Papers in Southern African Studies, 2 (Johannesburg, 1981), pp. 31-51.

3 The next military confrontations took place mostly between African and South African forces. Mandume ya Ndemufayo fought in Ovamboland against SouthAfrican as well Portuguese forces from 1915 to 1917. On Mandume's kingship from 1911-1915 see Patricia Hayes, 'Order Out of Chaos: Mandume Ya Ndemufayo and Oral His- tory', Journal of Southern African Studies, 19, 1 (1993), pp. 89-113. On the battles of the Bondelswart in 1922 and the Rehobother in 1925, see Richard Freislich, The Last Tribal War (Cape Town, 1964); Franz Dewaldt (ed.), Native Uprisings in Southwest Africa (Salisbury, 1976); Patrick Pearson, 'The Rehoboth Rebellion' in P. Bonner (ed.), Working Papers in Southern African Studies, 2 (Johannesburg, 1981), pp. 31-51.

4 Horst Drechsler, Suidwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (Berlin, 1966), p. 260. According to Drechsler (p. 252) 80 per cent of the Herero and 50 per cent of the Nama population lost their lives between 1904-19 11. See also Tilman Dedering, 'The German-Herero War of 1904: Revisionism of Genocide or Imagi- nary Historiography?', Journal of Southern African Studies, 19,1 (1993), pp. 80-88.

5 For more recent reiterations of Drechsler's statement see John Bridgman, The Revolt of the Hereros (London, 1981), p. 169, as an example of academic writing; and Helga and Ludwig Helbig, Mythos Deutsch-Siidwest (Weinheim, 1983), p. 168, as an example of anti-apartheid literature. Significantly, neither of the authors gives a reference to Drechsler when using this phrase in a broader context. Other publications may not use the actual phrase, but they are similar in tone, because they stress the totality of German rule as well as African powerlessness. See for example Gilbert Schrank, German South West Africa: Social and Economic Aspects of its History: 1884-1915 (Dissertation, New York University, 1974).



African Resistance in German South West Africa, 1907-1915 101

were indicative of an unbroken 'will to resist' among Africans, although this will had little effect on the balance of power in colonial society.6 The contradiction between the 'will to resist' and the 'graveyard' thesis is therefore more apparent than real. Horst Drechsler himself, for example, lists armed resistance for the 'graveyard' period.7 In his account, however, this resistance is more fierce than it is effective. Likewise, a general notion of African powerlessness runs through the sympathetic accounts of the plight of the colonised in post-war GSWA. Accordingly, Africans may have had an unbreakable 'will to resist', but between 1907-15 they neither had the military means nor the ideological unity and coherence to succeed.

Resistance studies of the past three decades have shown that questions about means and motivations are not easy to answer. Like the power of the rulers, the resistance of the ruled does not only grow out of the barrel of a gun, but runs the gamut from 'material' to 'symbolic', from gun to top hat.8 The motivations of the ruled cover an equally wide spectrum from the clearly stated political programme to the most bizarre combi- nations of seemingly unpolitical concerns. In fact, the consciousness of people in resistance appears to take 'contradictory' forms in most historical situations.9 The armed bandit may have just as 'contradictory' a notion of colonial society as the top hat wearing wedding guest. The issues of means and motivations in resistance are therefore complex, but they must be addressed if the pitfalls of victimisation ('peace of the graveyard') and romanticisation ('will to resist') are to be avoided.10

This article argues that the 'graveyard' had African inhabitants who resisted particular pressures, albeit without firearms. Despite the relative inaudibility of their ac- tions, they shaped colonial society. Their resistance was both meaningful and significant, while their minds were often tangled and inconsistent. This article is in three

6 For publications that emphasise the unbroken 'will to resist' see for example South West Africa People's Organisation of Namibia (SWAPO), To Be Born a Nation: the Liberation Strugglefor Namibia (London, 1981); and Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (London, 1988). On the German claim for absolute domination compare with Helmut Bley, South West Africa under German Rule: 1894-1914 (Evanston, 1971) (first published: Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch Siidwestafrika (Hamburg, 1968)).

7 Drechsler, Siidwestafrika, pp. 268-278. 8 The two ends of this gamut, however, should not be stylised into two distinct modes of operation, one 'physi-

cal' and one 'mental'. The rise of this dichotomy is part of the process of colonisation. See Timothy Mitchell, 'Everyday metaphors of power', Theory and Society, 19 (1990), pp. 545-577.

9 For a discussion of the literature on rebellious consciousness see: Jonathan Glassman, 'The Bondsman's New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast', Journal of African His- tory, 32 (1991). Glassman draws particularly on E. P. Thompson's 'moral economy' and A. Gramsci's 'contradictory popular consciousness' in order to show that the consciousness of slaves - and most other exploited populations - was 'a tangled web of contradictory ideological components' (p. 311). See also Terence Ranger, 'Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-SaharanAfrica', TheAfrican Studies Review, 29,2 (1986), pp. 1-69; and Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago, 1991), especially pp. 31-32.

10 Anton Blok, for example, raises doubts about the value of the study of resistance in its less overt forms: 'The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14 (1972), pp. 494-505. Blok responds to the concept of the 'social bandit' coined in Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (London, 1959). For responses to Hobsbawm in African history see Donald Crummey (ed.), Banditry and Social Protest in Africa (New Hampshire, 1986). Allen Isaacman reviews approaches to rural resistance in Africa comprehensively in 'Peasants and Rural Social Protest in Africa', African Studies Review, 33 (1990). However, while he acknowledges the ambiguity of consciousness, it plays only a minor role in his final analysis. Either consciousness becomes irrelevant because only the cumulative subversive effect matters (Allen and Barbara Isaacman, 'Resistance and Collaboration in Southern and Central Africa, c. 1850-1920', The Interna- tional Journal of African Historical Studies, 10 (1977), p. 55), or the ambiguity is reduced to 'one intent' that suggests that insurgents wanted 'to block or undercut the claims of the state or appropriating class' ('Peasants', pp. 32-33) .




parts: the first outlines the political economy of GSWA after 1907; the second focuses on rural resistance against the expropriation of cattle; the third looks at developments in urban settlements. I I

Undermining Post-war Reconstruction

In early 1904, the Herero, Bantu speaking pastoralists in the centre of GSWA, declared war on German colonialists; Cape Dutch and Nama speaking pastoralists in the South followed months later. Over the next three years Germany spent nearly 600 million marks and employed up to 14,000 soldiers in an embarrassingly long war.12 In the face of sky-rocketing costs and atrocities, opposition to Germany's colonial budget grew steadily in the 'Reichstag' .13 The larger the financial losses from the war, the louder the demand that GSWA pay for itself. Consequently, the need to build a prosperous settler colony dominated Ger- man debates, even before the fighting had concluded. In the following eight years, though, Germany never managed to construct a profitable colonial economy.14

As a military threat, Africans had lost significance soon after the beginning of the war. MostAfricans were on the defensive and tried to escape the German onslaught. Many Herero, for example, fled beyond the reaches of German intervention to Ovamboland in the North, to British Bechuanaland in the East, or to remote water sources in the 'veld'.15 Other Herero and Nama were held as captive labourers in concentration camps and on settler farms.16 Yet, as more and more Africans fled or died, the colonialists began to notice that they were losing their most important resource for reconstructing the economy: African labour. The German administration needed labour to build railways, whereas settlers needed it to breed livestock and to grow crops, but their demand outstripped supply. Distressed about the severity of the labour shortage, one administrator exclaimed: 'Without natives any economy is impossible!'17 Indeed, although initially rounded up in miserable concentration camps and later forced into contract labour, Africans continued to unsettle the colony. The permanent labour shortage and the failure to turn GSWA into a prosperous settler colony was not

11 Although many people have written about the period from 1907-15 in one way or another, in-depth studies are rare (a notable exception is Bley, South WestAfrica). In its limited format, therefore, this article can sometimes not do much more than give tentative answers to questions that still need further investigation. Furthermore, this article focuses on the central and southern parts of the colony, where the German presence was strongest. For the northern parts, follow the references in the footnotes.

12 See Horst Gruinder, Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien (Paderborn, 1985), pp. 12 1-122. 13 On the debates in the 'Reichstag' between 1904-07, see: Hans Spellmeyer, Deutsche Kolonialpolitik im Reichstag

(Stuttgart, 1931), pp. 90-122. 14 Gruinder, Geschichte, pp.126-127. 15 Drechsler, Siidwestafrika, pp. 197-199. 'Veld' is an Afrikaans term for the countryside beyond human settle-

ment; it includes pasture as well as the more arid land between pasture and desert. In this study, veld is frequently used in the context of African flights. As German settlers occupied the best pastures in the centre, Africans often had to flee into more marginalised areas that limited the possibility to keep livestock. The Germans never managed to subjugate the Ovambo polities, which therefore remained independent until the advent of South African rule.

16 Drechsler, Sudwestafrika, pp. 242-251. 17 Bundesarchiv Potsdam (BAP),Akten des Reichskolonialamtes (RKA), 1229, District Commissioner Streitwolf,

Gobabis, 2 December 1907. 18 The Reich's budget for GSWA could be seen as an indication of continued threats from Africans. In 1910, for

example, expenses (32 million marks) were still more than twice as high as revenues (13.6 million marks). A considerable part of the expenses covered administrative and military costs, which were not least due to establishing law and order against threats from Africans. See Gruinder, Geschichte, pp. 126-127. On the debate about genocide in the context of the war see Brigitte Lau, 'Shark Island', Southern African Review of Books, June/July 1990, p. 21 as well as letters by Randolph Vigne, Henning Melber and Brigitte Lau, SouthernAfrican Review of Books, August/October 1990, p. 23. For a recent review of the debate see Dedering, 'Revisionism'. Gesine Kruger (University of Hannover) will treat this issue in greater detail in her doctoral thesis.




merely a consequence of genocide, but also of fierce African resistance."8 When the war officially ended in 1907, military hardliners in the German administration sought to bring the shaken colony under their control once and for all. They enunciated their vision of a stable future in a Native Ordinance, according to which the remaining Africans in the 'Po- lice Zone' - the territory of the colony without the northern regions of Kaoko, Ovambo, Kavango and Caprivi - became contract labourers altogether.19 The Ordinance barred Afri- cans in the 'Police Zone' from owning land, cattle, or horses, except with the explicit permission of the governor. To guarantee an even distribution of African labour over the colony, any werft of more than ten families needed the governor's permission to exist.20 Together with close administrative supervision, stringent pass laws, and work contracts, the measures were designed to make any option other than contract labour impossible.21

By expropriating Africans the administration tried to turn the costly military victory into an advantage for settlement. The administration offered land formerly owned by Africans to white settlers for low prices. Until 1907, hundreds of Schutztruppe soldiers had decided to remain in GSWA as farmers or craftsmen. The main wave of immigra- tion followed between 1907-11, when the white population of the colony nearly dou- bled within four years from 7,110 to 13,962. Nevertheless, despite cheap government land, settlers still had to wrestle with severe economic obstacles. Livestock was scarce immediately after the war. Settlers depended on the hardly existing railway lines for transport of supplies and communication. They also needed sufficient capital reserves to survive at least the first three years on their farm without financial returns. While settlers' access to livestock, transport, communication, and capital improved after 1907, their access to African labour worsened.22

As strict as the 1907 Ordinance appeared on paper, i't could not relieve the settlers of their labour problems. The administration had to make many compromises when im- plementing the Ordinance. For example, it lacked both the material and human resources to register the entire African population in the 'Police Zone' or to capture all runaways. In the beginning, the official contract books and registers were not even available.23 The lack of resources also inhibited the Germans from running the kind of 'systematically organised native administration' they observed in British South Africa.24 Consequently, inexperienced local administrators supervised the 'werften' until better trained 'Native Commissioners' could be found and financed beginning in 1912.25

African resistance became all the more important as the centre of political decision moved from Berlin to Windhoek after the war. The era of progressive reforms, started

19 The Police Zone comprised areas within a 100 km distance of railway lines and main roads. Here the colonial government guaranteed police protection. Practically, the Police Zone included the colony except the mentioned northern regions. See Hans Rafalski, Vomn Niemandsland zumn Ordnungsstaat (Berlin, 1930), p. 59. For a copy of the Native Ordinance see Deutsches Kolonialblatt, 24, 15 December 1907, pp. 1179-1184.

20 Werft (pl. weiften) is originally an Afrikaans term for dwelling place on a farm. It was used by Germans in GSWA to designate any African settlement (rural and urban).

21 For an explanation of the Native Ordinance by the administration see BAP, RKA, 2235, Blatt: 10-22. For a discussion of the Ordinance see Bley, South West Africa, pp. 170-173.

22 For settlement statistics see Hans Oelhafen von Schollenbach, Die Besiedlung Deutsch-Siidwestafrikas bis zumn Weltkriege (Berlin, 1926). On white settlement see also Carl Schmidt, Geographie derEuropdersiedlungen im deutscheii Sudwestafrika (Jena, 1922); and Johannes Gad, Die Betriebsverhliltnisse der Farmen des iniittleren Hererolandes (Hamburg, 1915).

23 RMG, 2533 (C/h 50a, b) Missionary Wandres, Windhoek, 2 January 1908. See also Bley, South WestAfrica, pp. 250-5 1.

24 BAP, RKA, 2235, Blatt 16, administration's explanation of the Native Ordinance. 25 On the German administration see Wilhelm Kulz, Die Selbstverwaltung fur Deutsch-Siidafrika (Berlin, 1909)

and Andre du Pisani, South WestAfrica/Namibia: The Politics of Continuity and Change (Johannesburg, 1986), pp. 21-45.




in 1907 by colonial secretary Dernburg, had little effect on GSWA. Dernburg visited the colony in 1908 and proposed to the settlers that they grant Africans more self- determination. Confronted with the intractability of the African population, however, settlers rejected Dernburg's paternalist ideal of 'native protection'. Dernburg's ideal may have influenced the course in other German colonies, but 'it was powerless in the face of the situation in SWA'.26 The structure of colonial society after 1907, then, was hardly determined by legislative debates among the colonisers. Instead, Africans and Germans negotiated the structure of colonial society in their daily confrontations.

One of the first African responses to the 1907 Ordinance became evident when prisoners of war were finally released in 1908. Displaced forced labourers, especially Herero, from all over the country migrated back to their ancestral lands.27 The Ordinance dic- tated them to work, but it also limited the duration of labour contracts to a maximum of one year.28 Challenged by African pressure for mobility, the administration thus legal- ised partly what it could not stop entirely. Migration particularly hurt those farmers to whom the government had assigned labourers during the war. The abandoned settlers felt threatened, for without labour they could hardly maintain their herds. Loss of Afri- can labourers thus endangered the very existence of a settler farm. Accordingly, in 1908 a settler complained quite dramatically about African flights. Far from considering African labourers to be helpless victims, he believed that settlers themselves were victims of African resistance:

from every farm people fled, after all they were allowed to do so now and were secure from punishment. Who would be so stupid under these circumstances to punish his workers. Then they really don't want [to work], they cause trouble and harm. Finally they run away and that is the worst.29

In an attempt to explain the motivation of the migrants some settlers began to spread ru- mours about rebellious conspiracies. When Herero migrated back to the centre of the colony in 1908 and 1909, they speculated that the Herero nation was secretly regrouping. They also suspected that messengers of the 'rebellion leader', Samuel Maherero, who had fled to Brit- ish Bechuanaland, were inciting the migrating Herero. Emergency police patrols, however, found no Herero ambush in the veld.30 By contrast, other settlers fled into the stereotype of the naive native. A farmer in the district of Windhoek, for example, 'gladly' re-employed a Herero worker he knew had stolen his cattle during the war. Apparently unaware of the possibility that the herdsman took advantage of his prejudices, he justified his decision by noting that 'against this naivete one is simply defenceless'.31

Beginning with the late 1960s, some European, American, and African authors ex- amined these Herero migrations. Interestingly, they shared the settlers' point of view in

26 Bley, South West Africa, pp. 229-230. 27 DSWAZ, 13 January 1909 and Bley, South West Africa, pp. 255-260. Wolfgang Werner mentions a similar

movement for 1915, when Union Troops conquered GSWA. See "'Playing Soldiers": The Truppenspieler MovementAmong the Herero of Namibia, 1915 to ca. 1945', Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies, 16, 3 (1990), pp. 479-480.

28 BAP, RKA,2235, administrative explanations of the Native Ordinance, Blatt 10. 29 DSWAZ, 4 March 1908. 30 DSWAZ, 13 January and 20 January 1909. 31 Die deutschen Kolonien, 3 March 1908, in BAP, 2235, Blatt 39. For another example of African role playing

see SW, 23 August 1912. Petrus Goliath claimed not to understand German during his trial, perhaps evoking the image of the naYve native who cannot be held responsible for his acts. After the sentence, however, he gave up this role and pleaded in German.




one respect: although they demonstrated more sympathy for the fugitives, they still depicted the migrations as a 'clandestine' plot. They praised what settlers had dreaded as a general movement among Africans for 'communal' or 'national solidarity'. In their quest to locate 'the birthplace of modern African nationalism among the Herero', these authors depicted the Herero perspective in a rather teleological way.32 Apparently Herero clans regrouped as a result of the migrations, but that does not necessarily imply that they nurtured Herero communal or African national solidarity in defiance of German colonial rule.

While settlers debated the motivations behind African migrations in 1908 and 1909, the scramble for labour grew even more intense. The discovery of diamonds in the Namib coastal belt near Luderitzbucht in 1908 stimulated industrial development. Copper mining around Tsumeb as well as railway construction in the whole colony expanded.33 On the one hand, success in mining provided the colony with badly needed capital; on the other it put further strain on labour resources. For a few years the industrial sector was able to recruit labour from South Africa, but after German soldiers shot striking migrants at a railway construction in Wilhelmsthal in October 1910, this source dried up abruptly.34 All subsequent attempts to import cheap foreign labour failed. On one occasion, GSWA's sister colonies refused, while on another Berlin forbade recruitment in India or China.35 Left to rely on its own meagre labour resources after 1910, GSWA began tapping Ovamboland in the North more vigorously.36 However, the number of Ovambo migrant labourers fluctuated greatly and could hardly satisfy the most basic

32 Bley, South WestAfrica, pp. 255-260. Of course, one should be careful not to equate all authors. 'Proto-nationalist' historiography has gone through various developments. Yet, no matter how sensitive, subtle, or even critical the 'proto-nationalist' reading, it remains tied to a 'continuist' interpretation of African resistance. On the migrations see also SWAPO, To Be Born a Nation, p. 162; Winfried Nachtweih, Narnibia - Von der antikolonialen Revolte zum nationalen Befreiungskampf (Mannheim, 1976), p. 62; Alfred Moleah, Namnibia - the Struggle for Liberation (Wilmington, 1983), p. 95. More generally see Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resist- ance; Kaire Mbuende, Namibia, the Broken Shield (Malmo, 1986); and Neville Alexander, 'The Namibian War of Anti-Colonial Resistance: 1904-7', in Wood (ed.), Namibia 1884-1984, pp. 193-203. A critique of nationalism in Namibia is given in Na-iem Dollie (ed.), A Political Review of Namibia. Nationalism in Namibia (Windhoek, 1988). For the most prominent representation of 'proto-nationalist' historiography in the late 1960s see Terence Ranger, 'Connexions Between 'Primary Resistance' Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa', Journal of African History, 9, 3 (1968), pp. 437-453 and 9, 4 (1968), pp. 631-641. See also Ranger's self-criticisms: 'The People in African Resistance: a Review', Journal of Southerni African Studies, 4,1 (1977), pp. 125-146, and 'Resistance in Africa: From Nationalist Revolt to Agrarian Protest', Gary Okihiro (ed.), In Resistance (Amherst, 1986), pp. 32-52.

33 On economic development see, for example, Bley, South West Africa , pp. 220-224. 34 On South African migrants in GSWA see William Beinart, "'Jamani"- Cape Workers in German South West

Africa, 1904-1912', in Beinart and Colin Bundy (eds.), Hidden Struggles in Rural SouthAfrica (London, 1987). On the shooting, see Heinrich Loth, 'Zu den Anfangen des Kampfes der Arbeiter Suidwestafrikas gegen den deutschen Imperialismus', Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universitat Leipzig, Gesellschafts und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, 3 (1961), pp. 351-356.

35 GSWA first tried the Cameroons and then Togo. Both times local German industrialists lobbied vehemently against sending Africans to GSWA. See for example, DSWAZ, 16, 27 April, 7 December 1912, and 1 February 1913. A comparison with South Africa shows that the strong bargaining position of Africans in GSWA could have been broken with the import of foreign labourers. See Peter Richardson and Jean Jacques Van Helten, 'Labour in the South African gold mining industry, 1886-1914', in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa (Burnt Mill, 1982), esp. pp. 88-90.

36 Aside from setting up recruitment stations at the border to Ovamboland, the administration also planned the construction of a railway line that would have connected the area with the mining centres. See for example, DSWAZ, 5 August and 12 November 1913.




needs of the mines.37 The situation after 1910 made German colonialists even more susceptible to resistance against labour coercion.

Competition over labour changed the options for Africans. Besides running into the veld, farm labourers increasingly realised the option of fleeing to the growing mines and urban settlements. The veld option was seasonally tied to the rainfalls; in times of plentiful rains as in 1908-09, 1909-10, or 1911-12, the veld offered better living opportunities than in times of drought, as in 1910-11 and 1912-13.38 The mining and urban options, on the other hand, represented a more permanent alternative.

Runaways threatened the colonial economy not only because they drained the labour supply, but also because sometimes they attacked settlers directly. 'Bushman' hunter gatherers formed some of the most notorious gangs that stole cattle, plundered Ovambo migrants and led a veritable war against German patrols. Yet, for all their audacity, these bandits should not be stylised into radical anti-colonial rebels too rashly. Eco- logical factors, traditional forms of subsistence, and alienation from one's own society played determining roles in resistance next to fear and hatred of colonial oppression.39 The notorious 'Rolf Gang' in the South of GSWA is a telling example for the complex- ity of conflicts for runaways who turned to banditry. Seventeen Bondelswart men who had been sent by their headmen to work on railway construction between Luideritzbucht and Keetmanshoop fled their employment in 1907. Considering the fact that their collaborating headmen had handed them into German service, they must have had little desire to return to the Bondelswart reserve. First, they went across the border to South Africa. They returned months later and attacked several farms in GSWA for cattle and ammunition. But to say that the members of the 'Rolf Gang' saw themselves as carriers of some kind of an anti-colonial struggle seems rather reductionist.40 Of course, they must have been very embittered with the German farmers and soldiers who hunted them down and finally hanged them in Keetmanshoop in October 1909. Yet, at the same time, they may have been driven by scarcity of food in the veld as well as disappoint- ment with their previous headmen, who even testified against them in court.4'

Although the 'Rolf-Gang' episode remains a mere sketch, it is enough to emphasise at least two points. For one, post-war reconstruction in GSWA was not entirely peace- ful but a fiercely contested process. For another, labels such as 'anti-colonial', 'anti- imperialist', or 'anti-capitalist' bury the conflicting voices behind African resistance more than they could explain them. The question regarding the consciousness of resisting Africans therefore remains. The basic misconception among colonialists was their expectation that Africans would attack the colonial system at large. They imagined a threateningly coherent and anti-colonial political consciousness among Africans, a view

37 On developments in Ovamboland as well as on the beginnings of Ovambo migrant labour see Harri Siiskonen, Trade and Socioeconomic Change in Ovamboland, 1850-1906 (Helsinki, 1990); Gervase Clarence-Smith and Richard Moorsom, 'Underdevelopment and Class Formation in Ovamboland, 1844-1917', in R. Palmer and N. 35 GSWA first tried the Cameroons and then Togo. Both times local German industrialists lobbied vehemently against sending Africans to GSWA. See for example, DSWAZ, 16, 27 April, 7 December 1912, and 1 February 1913.Acomparison with SouthAfrica shows that the strong bargaining position ofAfricans in GSWA could have been broken with the import of foreign labourers. See Peter Richardson and Jean Jacques Van Helten, 'Labour in the South African gold mining industry, 1886-1914', in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa (Burnt Mill, 1982), esp. pp. 88-90.

38 On rainfalls see H. E. Lenssen, Chronik von Deutsch-Sudwestafrika (Windhoek, 1972) 39 See also Robert Gordon, The Bushman Myth (Boulder, 1992) esp. pp. 49-136. 40 For an interpretation of the 'Rolf Gang' in terms of anti-imperialist struggle see Drechsler, Sudwestafrika, pp.

271-272. 41 See RMG, 2532 (C/h 49) Missionary Nyhof, Warmbad, 26 August 1911 and DSWAZ, 20 October 1909.




that would later prove appealing also to historians and political activists. In the rel- evant period, however, Africans rarely resisted a colonial 'system' on the basis of an overtly stated plan of action. In that sense, their resistance was not anti-colonial. On the other hand, in so far as most pressures that Africans faced were somehow tied to colonial rule, African resistance was clearly aimed at distinct features of German colonialism. In this sense, their resistance was indeed anti-colonial. For example, many of the migrating Herero did not violate the new Native Ordinance; most of them moved legally after expiry of their contracts. However, they did resist their displacement as prisoners of war and the treatment on farms or at railway construction sites. African men and women undermined post-war reconstruction not as notorious anti-colonial insurgents but as people with more immediate grievances and demands. The ways in which they perceived socio-economic pressures in colonial society shaped the course of their resistance and consequently the development of GSWA.

Quest for Cattle on the Farms

From the perspective of a German imperialist, African resistance often appeared like the struggle of people with an outdated tribal ideology against their inevitable transition to a class of wage labourers. Colonial theorists reasoned that Africans would eventually give up their 'tribal pride' after losing all their possessions and accept the role of a sedentary prole- tariat. As if the future of Africans was evolutionary destiny, Paul Rohrbach, an influential farmer and former colonial bureaucrat, wrote in 1907 that only as 'a class of workers, living on the wages and bread of whites' would Africans acquire 'a right to exist in a higher sense'.42 Even from an academic point of view it may sometimes seem justified to depict Africans resistance as a struggle against proletarianisation. When applied to African consciousness, however, categories such as tribe and class have led observers towards imposing clean-cut ideological oppositions where complex interwoven fabrics of the mind were under constant reconstruction. As settlers quickly learned, pastoralists in the Police Zone made cattle the core issue of their resistance. Apparently, money wages alone did not suffice to keep farm labourers from running away. For example, a local newspaper advised in 1908:

We would recommend ... the farmer to pay a part of the wage in livestock ... He will not lose, but only benefit, if the Native in his service ... will accumulate a possession to which he is attached with all his heart.43

Yet, the desire among pastoralists to accumulate cattle was neither a matter of irrational passion, nor was it indicative of their clinging to a static notion of a 'primordial tribal past'. They retained traditional idioms of social relations and production and remodelled them in response to the changing colonial context. Their tendency to perceive social relations in terms such as patronage and clientelism therefore did not represent a strait-jacket to their resistance. On the contrary, it enabled them to wrest concessions from settlers44

Cattle were an important element in the social relations of pastoral people like the

42 Paul Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirschaft (Berlin, 1907), p. 286; see also the formulations in the explanations to the Native Ordinance: BAP, RKA, 2235, Blatt 15. On the German rhetoric in the 'native question' see also Bley, South West Africa, pp. 226-248.

43 DSWAZ, 15 January 1908. 44 See also James Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, 1985): although first saying otherwise (p. 33), he

goes on asserting that the normative context of resisting people was just that: 'a context, and not a strat-jacket' (p. 198).




Herero, who had once controlled the pastures of central GSWA.45 For example, cattle played a key role in the performance of rituals as well as in the accrual of wealth and prestige. Only a man who possessed a considerable herd was regarded as an omuhona (plural: ovahona). The richer he was in cattle, the more wives and clients the omuhona could support. Male clients tended the omuhona's herds. Men without cattle were 'un- important' and sought to attach themselves to the patronage of an omuhona.46 Among the Herero it was virtually 'compulsory for ... a person [with few cattle] to throw in his lot with an owner of property'. 4 For offering his services to an omuhona, the client was entrusted with cattle and became part of the omuhona's clan. While gaining access to cattle, the client in turn tried to expand his own following by marrying more women and by entrusting cattle to dependents.48 The relation between an omuhona and his cattle clientele was by no means static or harmonious. Ambitious young male clients, eager to establish their own wealth and prestige, challenged the paternalistic authority of elderly ovahona.49 They neglected the omuhona's cattle or sought a better patron. Ceremonies, rituals, and festivities represented a common forum in which clients ar- ticulated their demands on patrons to redistribute cattle wealth. A missionary observed redistribution in Herero ceremonies when describing hereditary customs. Typical of a European observer, he saw the hereditary ceremonies as an expression of monolithic tribal custom:

The two persons who are the lawful heirs are compelled by custom to present their relatives with things they have inherited. As everyone strives after retaining as much as possible, the administrator of a large estate has no easy task.50

Inheritance ceremonies, however, were yet another occasion for clients to remind the ovahona of their redistributive obligations. Clients, acting in a customary idiom of patronage, and not custom itself, compelled patrons to share their wealth.

Other ties of paternalistic domination, as between senior householders and their junior and female dependents, were equally contested. Women, for example, played an important role in the pastoral economy as domestic workers and as the bearers of children, who would in turn provide additional labour. When discontented with the patriarchal control that their husbands and elders exercised, women were ready to challenge them.5 Similar to cattle clients, one of their strategies was to look out for better patrons.

Just as relations between patrons and their various dependents were often strained among Africans, conflict was bound to occur between European settlers and African farm labourers. Without cattle of their own, the returning Herero men were 'unimpor- tant men'. In order to regain access to cattle and ultimately to become ovahona in their

45 For comparative studies on pastoralists see John Galaty and Pierre Bonte (eds), Herders, Warriors and Traders (Boulder, 1991); Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance (Chicago, 1985); and Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau (London, 1987).

46 Heinrich Vedder (et al.), The Native Tribes of South West Africa (Cape Town, 1928), p. 175 uses the term oinundu iriri to refer to the cattleless men. They are probably comprable to the ahoi among the Kikuyu, who alsosought to acquire wealth of their own. See Kanogo (1987), p. 26.

47 Vedder (et al.), Native Tribes, p. 175. 48 For a Herero account of the relation between an omuhona and his sons and other dependents before 1904 see

Ernst Dammann (ed.), Herero Texte (Berlin, 1983), pp. 35-37. 49 For examples of conflict between cattle clientele and their omuhona see Dammann, Herero Texte. 50 Vedder, Native Tribes, p. 195. 51 For example, a missionary noted that polygamous marriages frequently led to strife between men and women:

J. Irle, Die Herero (Nendeln, 1973), first published, Gutersloh, 1906, p. 110.




own right, they were willing to offer their services to wealthy cattle owners. Conse- quently, when the Herero returned from their forced employment in other parts of the country, and found cattle-raising German settlers on their ancestral lands, they accepted employment in the hope of establishing a new pastoral existence. They used the idiom of patronage and clientele in a flexible way that allowed them to incorporate German settlers as ovahona.

Settlers could not ignore the importance of cattle for pastoralist farm labourers, but they were unwilling to give too much livestock away for fear of losing control on the farm. Ideally, settlers still conceived of themselves as the absolute masters on their estates. African ownership of cattle stood in contrast to this ideal. Settlers argued that Africans would stop working once they had enough cattle. Even worse, black cattle breeders might drive out whites from the market.52 Nevertheless, settlers did make concessions to African demands. In order to synthesize their desire for absolute authority with their concessionary practices some tried to impose new meanings on the idiom of patron-client relations. Settler notions of omuhona patronage put more emphasis on the master's commanding authority than on the redistributive obligations that were so important to pastoralist clients. For example, when explaining to his colleagues how to become a respected omuhona, one farmer went into great detail about proper ways to command Africans. He never mentioned the redistribution of livestock.53

The settlers' position on the cattle issue was therefore thoroughly paradoxical. They knew that they could keep African farm labourers on their estates only if they granted them livestock, yet they hardly ever talked about the fact that they gave Africans some property. Thereby they held on to an ideal of absolute racial superiority that excluded the notion of African agency. The fact that the 1907 Native Ordinance remained basi- cally unchanged until 1915 expresses this contradiction nicely. Apparently there was room for changes in the relations between Africans and Germans, although such changes rarely found their way to written law. On the abstract level of law, colonialists cher- ished their ideal of absolute authority over a powerless African working class, whereas in practice they had to negotiate their visions with defiant African agents.

The settlers' paradoxical concept of their own authority was tested in 1912. The opposition in the 'Reichstag' demanded that all Africans be allowed to raise cattle. As in the years before, settlers feared losing control over cattle, land, and labour.54 At the same time, however, their reaction shows how far they had actually gone in their concessions. According to the 'Landesrat', the colony's settler advisory council, nearly 25 per cent of the sheep and goats in the Police Zone were in African hands. In addition, the African population of roughly 60,000 to 70,000 owned over 20,000 cattle. On average, every adult African male supposedly possessed one and one-quarter cattle and seventeen and one-half sheep or goats.55 To be sure, the 'Landesrat' tried to soothe concerns in the 'Reichstag' by arguing that the lifting of restrictions on cattle property for Africans was actually 'unnecessary'. But even

52 RMG, 2693 (C/s 1 (1,2,3), Prases Olpp's report about the meeting of the Landesrat Commission on native affairs, Karibib, 7 May 1913. On the settlers' rhetoric of superiority see also Bley, South WestAfrica, especially pp. 249-279.

53 'Der Omuhona', SW, 27 March 1914. Even if the farmer had mentioned granting livestock to African farm workers, it would most likely have been in terms of benevolence rather than obligation. See Frederick Cooper, Platation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, 1977), pp. 153-212. Drawing on E. P. Thompson and E. Genovese, Cooper stresses the ambiguity of the paternalistic idiom between benevolence and obligation.

54 For a settler reaction to the Reichstag debates see SW7 June 1912. 55 BAP, RKA, 2097, vice-governor Hintrager, Windhoek, 26August 1913. The figures are dated 1 April 1913 and

refer to the police zone only.




if the reported numbers are exaggerated, they still reflect the fact that Africans success- fully pressed settlers for a share in livestock. By 1914, African pressure had grown so much that even farmers suggested that 'natives should hold cattle'.56

Some farmers were more willing to give their workers access to livestock than oth- ers. So called Alte Afrikaner (Old Africans) - settlers who had started farming before the war, or even before the Rinderpest in 1897 - had survived by carefully negotiating with the then still powerful Herero ovahona. Alte Afrikaner developed a paternalist tradition towards Africans, which showed when they were at the forefront of those colonialists who sought negotiations to end the 1904-07 war.57 They were more likely to grant their African workers a limited number of sheep and goats, if not cattle. Re- cently arrived farmers, on the other hand, were less experienced in asserting their authority and tended to lose control more quickly. Never having experienced the days of powerful Herero ovahona, they also must have felt little need to grant their captive labourers livestock. Captive pastoralists in turn had even less reason to stay.

The story of the farmer couple Cramer illustrates the clash of recently arrived settlers with Herero notions of omuhona authority.58 Cramer emigrated with his wife, Ada, in 1907. He bought a large estate, Otjisororindi, in the district of Gobabis. During the first months he had difficulties keeping the captive labourers he had been assigned by the district office from running away.59 Beginning in late April 1908, the migration of formerly captive and fugitiveAfricans to their ancestral lands made itself felt on Cramer's farm. Herero who had lived at Otjisororindi before the war returned and started to work for Cramer.60 Cramer gave them some sheep and goats. Furthermore, he entrusted Herero herdsmen with the supervision of cattle at different spots of his estate. Cramer considered the cattle his private property, whereas Herero herdsmen were more likely to look on the cattle as the omuhona's loan. With these opposing notions about cattle property, dispute between Cramer and his Herero workers/clients was bound to erupt.

Cramer soon complained about loss of cattle. He thought himself surrounded by conspir- ing Herero workers who either poisoned and slaughtered his cattle or helped the hunter- gatherers in the veld steal it.61 Ada Cramer noted in her memoirs that her husband had to struggle with 'herdsmen who killed the cattle that their master had entrusted to them in a more or less cruel fashion'.62 As Mr Cramer's poison allegations appear to have been another paranoid myth, the 'cruel fashion' that Mrs Cramer observed perhaps alludes to Herero practices of killing cattle for rituals.63 For example, the birth of a new child was celebrated with a strangled ox. Herero made the same sacrifice to pray for a cure in case of sickness. After a person's death, they killed the cattle with spears or guns.f4 Quite possibly then, the Herero

56 SW, 27 February 1914, Wolfgang Werner mentions in his studies of the Namibian countryside after 1915 that some pastoralist possessed a considerable amount of livestock from the very beginning of Union conquest. It seems likely that not all of this livestock was appropriated only in the course of the first world war, but already before. See 'Struggles in the Namibian Countryside, 1915-50' in Brian Wood (ed.), pp. 268-280 and 'Playing Soldiers'.

57 Bley, South West Africa, pp. 86-91, 164. 58 The 'Cramer Case ' is well known in the literature, although it is generally used to illustrate the 'total helpless-

ness' of Africans after 1907. See for example Drechsler, Sudwestafrika, pp. 262-268; Schrank, Social and Economic Aspects, pp. 214-218; Moleah, Namibia, p. 20 or Helbig, Mythos, 169-180. Bley, pp. 260-267 em- phasises the settlers' desperate attempt to claim absolute authority rather than African helplessness.

59 Ada Cramer, Weiss oder Schwarz (Berlin, 1913), pp. 30-55. 60 Ibid., p. 62. 61 On cattle theft by hunter-gatherers see Gordon, Bushman Myth. 62 Cramer, Weiss oder Schwarz, p. 76. 63 No farmer in the area could confirm an incident of poisoning by Herero. See SW, 15 April 1913. 64 Irle, Die Herero, p. 81-82.



African Resistance in German South West Africa, 1907-1915 1 1 1

considered their killing of Cramer's cattle less a theft than the omuhona's contribution to the reinforcement of patron-client bondages. Cramer showed little sympathy with what he considered an attack on his private property. He started to take away the sheep and goats he had given to the Herero upon their arrival. Increasingly, he also resorted to the use of the 'sjambok' - a hippopotamus-hide whip - to punish his workers.65 As Cramer's treatment of the Herero worsened, discontent grew. Mrs Cramer noticed signs that the Herero were in ferment during the plentiful rains in the first months of 1910. This was all the more threat- ening to the Cramers because not only the veld, but also crops flourished in times of good rain. The maize stood high and pig-breeding promised profits. Fearing that all Herero would run away before the harvest, the Cramers called a police guard. Nevertheless, by the end of May the last Herero had left Otjisororindi.66

Based on their failure to understand the Herero's notion of patronage and clientelage, the Cramers explained the flights as an underhanded conspiracy. According to Mrs Cramer, the Herero fled after the rainy season, when they were needed in the harvest, because they wanted to take revenge. She even went so far as to suspect a colony-wide conspiracy: 'Systematically, entire native werften fled and threatened the success of long and hard labour'.67 In her eyes, the Herero seemed still not to have forgotten the old days of 'tribal wealth' and national 'pride' that the Germans had terminated so brutally.68 If revenge was a motive in the Herero's resistance, it was neither the only one nor was it of the mysterious tribal kind that Mrs Cramer imagined. As other settlers noticed, farm workers fled particularly after good rains, not so much because they wanted to harm the farmer when he was most vulnerable, but because life in the veld was most viable when water, vegetables and game were plenty.69 Cramer's Herero had been discontented with their client status for a while, but the Tmajority of them fled only after plentiful rains in early 1910. Moreover, the Cramers felt resistance before Herero might have thought of their acts in that way. Only after Cramer had whipped the flexibility of patron-client relations to shreds, did the Herero seem to renounce their bonds with him altogether. Instead of giving them livestock, Cramer took away their few sheep and goats. When cattle continued to disappear, Cramer flogged his workers close to death.70 If the Herero killed Cramer's cattle as a client's share at first, they had every reason to take revenge once Cramer had stepped beyond the boundaries of patronage. Allegedly, some runaway Herero remained in the vicinity of Otjisororindi and occasionally stole Cramer's cattle.71

Chiefly leadership was an integral part of the Cramers' idea of tribal revenge. They believed that the resistance on their farm was incited by a certain Kadwakonda. Mrs Cramer was convinced that 'Kadwakonda had no cattle and no land, but he still was the master over the people'.72 Kadwakonda indeed seemed to hold a prominent position among the Herero at Otjisororindi. However, precisely because Kadwakonda had no

65 See DSWAZ, 8 April 1913. 66 Cramer, Weiss oder Schwarz, pp. 80-87. 67 Ibid., p. 94 68 BAP, 2235, administrative explanations of the Native Ordinance, Blatt 15. 69 See, for example, SW, 4 October 1912. 70 The British government collected (and probably created as well) evidence on German flogging in a Blue

Book. See Report on the Natives of South West Africa and their Treatment by Germany (Windhoek/London, 1918). For German response see The Treatment of Natives and other Populations in the Colonial Possessions of Germany and England (Berlin, 1919).

71 See Cramer, pp. 103-104. On motives for banditry see also Gordon, Bushman Myth, especially 57-60, 81-88, 115, 132-135.

72 Cramer, p. 107.




cattle and no land, his authority must have been dwindling. The Herero resented Cramer's maltreatment, but they also had decreasing incentive to follow the lead of an impover- ished headman such as Kadwakonda. Maybe then it was in a last attempt to assert his authority that Kadwakonda led those Herero who had not already fled away from Otjisororindi into the veld in May 1910.73

When 'traditional' ovahona fled into the veld, they may have evaded the brutal German version of patronage, but they also faced problems trying to maintain their social networks. Life in the veld beyond German settlement could considerably limit the resources for keeping livestock; thus colonial fears that Herero in the veld would reconstruct a preordained 'tribal spirit' originated in a misunderstanding of what happened to 'tribal life' in the veld. Although life in the veld was a viable option in times of good rain, it was an option in which 'traditional' forms of omuhona authority based on the redistribution of cattle wealth were often harder to maintain.74 Kadwakonda therefore must have had trouble keeping his following together after the flight from Otjisororindi. In 1911, police patrols captured Kadwakonda together with only a few women in the district of Gobabis.75 By declaring chiefs responsible, colonialists again disregarded the possibility of individual African action.76 This made it much easier for them to deal with African unrest. After all, if they admitted that almost every African could have the initiative to resist, they would have had to admit the bankruptcy of their administration as well. They preferred to look for the chiefly instigator. Consequently they failed to see the importance of conflicts between African patrons and clients, seniors and juniors, men and women. Despite their ignorance these conflicts were not confined to African communities. They accompanied and often determined the course of resistance against particular colonial pressures.

The fact that the Herero abandoned Cramer after initially accepting him as an omuhona demonstrates the rebellious potential of indigenous ideologies. While constantly remodel- ling their patemalist idioms in order to incorporate the colonial context, Herero pastoralists were willing to repudiate patron-client ties if the terms became unacceptable.77 Once free, however, they were neither seeking to realise their class interest against the German ex- ploiters nor trying to cherish a monolithic and out-dated mode of patron-client subsistence. Rather than rejecting colonial society, Africans fought for ways to participate in it even more vigorously. They grasped new opportunities to gain prestige and influence, most im- portantly by fleeing to the emergent mines and cities.

73 Ibid., p. 87; this is not to say that a headman could not maintain his authority despite the loss of cattle. Samuel Maherero and Simon Kopper are examples of fugitive leaders who were able to maintain a certain following on their flights and to restock on British territory. See for example Drechsler, Siidwestafrika, pp. 198, 237-242.

74 A former Kikuyu squatter of the White Highlands in Kenya reports a similar decline in 'tradition' after loss of livestock: 'Kikuyu traditions began to die away with the extinction of the goats, because the traditions neces- sitated slaughtering [of livestock]' in Kanogo, Squatters, p. 77. On the other hand, the connection between loss of cattle and declining 'tradition' should not be drawn too functionally. Other factors such as the horrifying experience of German warfare had their share in inducing change.

75 Cramer, Weiss oder Schwarz, p. 104. 76 In the administrative explanations of the 1907 Native Ordinance the stereotype about tribal leadership comes

out clearly: 'No matter how small the group of natives, they cannot get by without a headman'. BAP, RKA, 2235, explanation of Native Ordinance, Blatt 17.

77 See also Glassman, 'The Bondsman's New Clothes'.




Quest for Better Patrons in the Cities

Pastoralists who went to Tsumeb or Windhoek could hardly establish social ties as they used to, for there were hardly any cattle in the cities.78 Nevertheless, they continued to understand their social relations in their own idioms of paternalistic domination. Clients were still seeking better patrons and young male and female dependents still challenged senior authority. Yet, at the same time they were increasingly weaving European items and idioms into their conflicts. In this process they did not feel they had to make a choice between defending a 'traditional' mode of thinking and conforming to a 'modern' one. They drew creatively from all available sources when renegotiating social relations.

When Africans flocked to the cities in increasing numbers, settlers pressured the administration to impose tighter controls. They proposed to install maximum wage ceil- ings so that capital-poor farmers could better compete with the mining companies. Farm- ers also demanded state control over the distribution of African labour.79 The administration, however, knew that it lacked the means to impose more rigid controls. Further- more, the opposition in the 'Reichstag' continuously threatened to cut the colonial budget. Harsh measures against African mobility would have fuelled this opposition. Nevertheless, in 1911 governor Seitz recognised that flights 'influenced economic life in a more and more disadvantageous way'. 80 In order to discourage African migrations, he installed a two mark fee on travel-passes.

Fugitives undermined attempts to stabilise the labour force. Some escaped the net of pass laws by changing their randomly assigned nicknames from Hans to Fritz, or from Fritz to Franz. For example, members of the 1913 Grootfontein farmer convention accused OMEG, the copper mining company in Tsumeb, of hiring farm runaways. By giving a false name and claiming the loss of their metal pass tags, fugitives found jobs in the Tsumeb mines. According to the farmers, the recruiters at Tsumeb neglected to investigate the whereabouts of new workers without a pass number.81 OMEG responded in defence that sometimes it was simply impossible to find out about a recruit's background.82 Indeed, African name- changing represented an administrative problem. In 1911 the district offices reminded settlers not to assign a random nickname to every newly hired African but rather to use last names because 'the identification of Natives is immensely impeded by the arbitrary changing of names'. The keeping of coherent registers where Africans were listed by names and pass numbers had become almost impossible.83

Pass regulations were also directed against women. According to the Windhoek newspaper Siidwest, the purpose behind the two mark fee on travel-passes in 1911 was 'to curtail the number of journeys for visiting and pleasure which had lately increased incredibly, predominantly among Native women'.84 Indeed, women very likely went to the cities to seek pleasure and adventure, although their idea of pleasure may have differed from the SUdwest's.A5 At the same time, they escaped their homes. They left

78 Africans retained some cattle in the cities, nevertheless. ForWindhoek see SW, 7 July 1911, and 12 May 1914. 79 See for example, SW, 6 February 1912, 22 October 1912, or 12 September 1913. 80 BAP, 1230, Governor Seitz, Windhoek, 20 September 1911. 81 DSWAZ, 30 September 1913. 82 DSWAZ, 18 November 1913. 83 BAP, 2235, Governor Seitz, Windhoek, 29 March 1911. For an earlier suspicious remark about African name-

changing from a farmer's perspective see Maria Karow, Wo sonst der Fuf3 des Kriegers trat (Berlin, 1909), p. 152.

84 SW, 4August 1911. 85 A comparative example for the attraction of urban life in the eyes of young rural women is given in Belinda

Bozzoli, Women of Phokeng (Johannesburg, 1991), esp. pp. 81-105.



114 Journal of Southerni African Studies

behind exploitative settlers as well as husbands and elders who exerted patriarchal control over their labour and reproductive power. Even the Suidwest once noted that women tended to 'run away from their families'. 86

Women's mobility threatened European as well as African men. When a farmer demanded too much of his female labourers, they refused to help in the harvest or to guard livestock. Some farmers tried to gain control over women by granting privileges to men whom they considered respected elders. Women, however, resisted these elders if necessary. Frustrated by women's resistance, one settler requested greater rights to make women work, but the application of force gave women even more reason to flee.87 Leaving exploitative farmers and weakened patriarchal family structures behind, young women went off 'to work for the Germans without the parents knowing of it, and when the parents remonstrate[d] the contract [was] already made'.88

If farmers did not adhere to Cramers' paranoid notion of an African conspiracy, they typically belittled the migrations as a primitive drive for pleasure and sociability.89 Based on this notion that Africans must be bored, settlers tried to increase the attrac- tiveness of farm life. Some resorted to inviting mission educated evangelists. In 1911 a certain farmer Wormann asked the Rhenish Mission to send him a teacher. W6rmann wished the teacher to sing with the families on his werft. In fact, as far as Wormann was concerned the evangelist could do almost anything as long as it 'kept ... workers from their plan to move to Windhoek'.90

Inviting evangelists cut both ways, however. Evangelists could function as 'engines for labour output', but they also established communicative links between the scattered farm workers.91 Communication among farm workers represented a danger because they were more inclined to flee when they heard about better living opportunities on other farms or in the cities. Not surprisingly, most settlers remained suspicious. Some even called the evangelists wandelnde Wochenblatter (walking weeklies).92 Their fear was justified. Young African men and women in particular left their homes to 'raid the city for its resources'.93 Pushed by limited opportunities on the farms and pulled by tales about urban adventure, prestige, and opportunity, they sought neither 'lazy' seclusion nor complete rejection of the colonial system. They struggled for better terms of par- ticipation in urban colonial society.

While settlers were still demanding the reversal of the flow to the cities, the administration was already concerned with the question how to control the growing urban population. Since 1907, urban werften had quickly outgrown administrative capacities. Beginning in 1910, the government finally began to look for 'people of experience' to become Native Commissioners in the major cities.94 By 1912, Windhoek, Keetmanshoop,

86 SW,2Junel911. 87 SW, 11 April 1913; see also, SW, 6 September 1912; RMG, 2503 (C/h 15a), 10 July 1913; and: Cramer, Weiss

oder Schwarz, p. 82. 88 Hoernl6, 23 November 1912, in Peter Carstens et al. (eds.), Trails in the Thirstland: The Anthropological Field

Diaries of Winfried Hoernle (Cape Town, 1987), p. 56. 89 See for example, SW, 7 May 1912; and RMG, 2657 (C/o 1), Missionary Kuhlmann, Omaruru, 22 May 1912. 90 RMG, 2693 (C/s 1 (1,2,3)), Prases Olpp, Karibib, 15 April 1911. 91 Lothar Engel, Kolonialismus unid Nationalismus im. deutschen Protestantismus in Namnibia 1907-1945 (Frank-

furt am Main, 1976), pp. 111-113. 92 SW, 15 May 1914. 93 Bozzoli, Women, p. 97. 94 DSWAZ, 7 May 1910.




Swakopmund and Luideritzbucht all had their own Native Commissioners, whom the government had recruited either from its own ranks or from the Rhenish Mission.

The commissioners appointed African headmen to supervise the urban werften. They drew headmen from those whom they considered the most influential in the werft, the elders. According to the colonial stereotype about tribal leadership, Africans would follow these elders blindly. Furthermore, commissioners liked to recruit mission educated men. These Africans were often literate in German as well as in their own lan- guage. Perhaps the administration believed that these Africans were most likely to cooperate; after all, they had already 'adapted' to Christianity.

Yet, urban headmen were neither uncontested tribal leaders nor conformist Chris- tian collaborators. Granted, some elders probably resorted to administrative support because they saw no other possibility to protect their weakened paternalistic authority. They became alienated from their former following and dependent on colonial institutions. More ambitious men, however, established ties with the administration and the mission to increase their influence among urban Africans. In order to alienate neither side, these headmen constantly had to negotiate the demands of their African following with those of their colonial employers. They were walking a fine line between popular resistance and colonial punishment.

By applying the policies of indirect rule, the colonial administration in turn walked a fine line between keeping headmen 'strong enough to control their people and yet weak enough to be controlled by the regime'.9 Mouthpieces of the administration were good collaborators, but had no genuine influence on their community, whereas popular headmen could lead their following, but would not function as mouthpieces. Mission- ary interests made the fragile balance of indirect rule even harder to maintain. Whereas the regime tried to build on a chief's customary authority, the mission 'attacked as "heathenism" much that was customary'.96 Consequently, if the mission requested the help of the state against an insubordinate headman, the administration had to make a difficult choice. One way it risked losing the services of an influential headman, the other way it risked losing control over him. In a sense, the position of the mission was even more fragile. The mission could not resort to the use of force as easily as the state without admitting its own failure. After all, missionaries had come primarily to evan- gelise and not to exploit, to persuade and not to coerce.97 Personal obedience therefore was essential to the functioning of the missionary enterprise. In fact, it was so essential that missionaries made it a central part of their definition of morality. They often considered disloyalty to be as immoral as beer drinking or licentiousness. Because they depended so heavily on the 'morality of obedience', missionaries watched 'morality' among Africans closely.98 In turn, they became very susceptible to protest, for every sign of disobedience could be interpreted as a fundamental rejection of their authority.

Some headmen stood in the service of the mission and the administration at the same time. As the confidants of the missionaries, they taught at the mission's school and conducted various church services. When the missionary was touring on the farms,

95 Karen Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Africa (Princeton, 1985), p. 192. 96 Ibid.,p.41. 97 On the political dimensions of the missionary church and its collaboration with the colonial state in Namibia

see also Lukas de Vries, Mission and Colonialism in Namibia (Johannesburg, 1976); Engel, Kolonialismus und Nationalismus; and Peter Katjavivi and Kaire Mbuende (eds.) Church and Liberation in Namibia (Lon- don, 1989).

98 Fields, Revival and Rebellion, pp. 106-107.




they even administered the parishes. For a modest salary, these headmen also helped the Native Commissioners keeping pass registers, controlling work contracts, and looking after the sanitary conditions on the werften.99 With the government's approval, headmen made judicial decisions in matters that were, supposedly, 'of no interest to the [settler] public'.100 Headmen could establish themselves as brokers for whites in general. Settlers, for example, contacted headmen when they wanted women to do their laundry or other domestic labour.101 Shopkeepers referred to headmen in order to col- lect debts of African customers.102 In fact, shopkeepers hardly had another choice. Con- vinced that debts had aggravated African discontent before the rebellions, the administration had denied traders the right to sue Africans for their debts. Shopkeepers continued to sell on credit, but 'the native commissariat refused absolutely any cooperation' when merchants ran into financial bottlenecks.103 Not surprisingly then, merchants complained that they were 'completely at the mercy of their customers'.104

Challenges to urban headmen from below grew out of the continual contests among Africans about the meaning of traditional idioms. Some women, for example, evaded patriarchal claims by entering relationships with men for pay. The Rhenish missionary in Tsumeb reported that women made their living as 'washerwomen for white bachelors and earn much money. But besides washing they are also concubines and thus most of them have two men'.105 Nevertheless, opportunities in the cities were not as rich for women as for men. Urban men invoked 'traditional' ideologies of patriarchal authority against women. At the same time, these men were often themselves contesting 'tradition' when they challenged the position of established patrons and elders. Traditions therefore were not primordial laws written in stone but social variables open to contest by members of society with differing interests.

In the contest over the terms of paternalistic ties, Africans used European idioms as a welcome weapon. Missionary reports as early as the middle of the nineteenth century offer examples. Among the Nan-ta pastoralists in the south, a man 'traditionally' inherited his elder brother's widow. Missionaries condemned this practice. To the missionaries' satisfaction, some widows joined their protest. But, as an anthropologist noted in 1925, 'the women seem to have taken advantage of the objection on the part of the missionaries to avoid this relationship [with their former husband's brother] in some in- stances'.106 Apparently, the protesting widows did not simply 'adapt' to Christianity. They manipulated the idiom of Christian morals in order to improve their social standing in the face of patriarchal control in Nama society. Over time, the appropriation of European idioms could take seemingly contradictory turns. In 1906, African men complained to the missionary in Swakopmund that they could no longer find women to marry. Women, the missionary reasoned, found it 'more advantageous ... to take one mark from a man, ... than

99 Total expenses of the German administration in 1912 for payments to chiefs and headmen amounted to 8,200 Marks; see SW, 28 January 1913.

100 BAP, RKA, 2235, explanations to the 1907 Native Legislation, Blatt 17. 101 See RMG, 2533 (C/h 50 a, b), Missionary Bohr, Windhoek, 23 September 1913. 102 Common articles sold at these shops included shoes, clothes, prints and tobacco. Alcohol, despite great de-

mand, could not be sold to Africans without special permission. See advertisements in SW 103 BAP, RKA, 6578, Native Commissioner Bohr, 31 March 1913. 104 SW, 30 January 1914, Windhoek Chamber of Commerce. 105 RMG, 2529 (C/h 46a), Missionary Lang, Tsumeb, Konferenzbericht 1913. 106 Winfried Hoernl6, 'The Social Organisation of the Nama Hottentotts of Southwest Africa', in Peter Carstens

(ed.), The Social Organisation of the Nama (Johannesburg, 1985), p. 55 (first published in: American Anthro- pologist, 27 (1925) pp. 1-24); Hoernl6 referred to missionary reports from: Berichte der Rheinischen Missionsgesellschaft (BRMG), 1856, p. 331 and 1860, p. 21.




to tie themselves to a particular man permanently'.107 The episode provides a significant contrast to the Nama widows of the nineteenth century. Then, the widows had appealed to missionaries to escape patriarchal pressures. Now, the men invoked Christian morality in order to force women into monogamous marriages. Clearly, African men and women employed European idioms as it fit their interests.

Young men had a good bargaining position to challenge their seniors in the cities. They were less dependent on elders for wealth and prestige than they had been as pastoralists. Strengthened by the self-reliance that came with a wage income, many demanded a greater share in social prestige and political power on the werft. The threatened elders appealed to the colonialists for help. In 1912, for example, a missionary in Windhoek reported the 'insubordination of the young people against the elders'. In one case the youths refused to go to church with their parents. In the face of this resistance, the elders reportedly told the missionary that 'not even in heathen times had anything comparable happened'.108

Different headmen struck different balances between the conflicting interests of Eu- ropeans and Africans. Some became very dependent on support from colonial institutions when faced with challenges from below. Discontented men and women who had been contracted to work for settlers by their headmen provided one such challenge, discontented beer brewers another. Beer brewing seems to have represented an opportunity to establish an independent subsistence for ambitious Africans, and thus a potential threat to the control of headmen. Headmen had to make the choice of either betray- ing their following to the missionary authorities or covering them and therefore jeop- ardising their own ties to the mission. The position of headmen was further compli- cated because they could not merely rely on the support from colonial institutions. Some headmen learned this by betting too high on categorical colonial support. Help- less against enterprising beer brewers, they denounced them to the missionaries.109 As the mission proved unable to help, they even approached the colonial constituencies in Windhoek. To the missionaries' and headmen's frustration, however, the settler repre- sentatives saw no immediate need for restrictions on independent beer brewing. In fact, they welcomed its anti-scurvy properties.110

Especially in times of strong resistance from the werft population, elders were forced to reconsider their loyalties. As on Cramer's farm when Herero workers slaughtered cattle, ceremonies, rituals, and festivities offered a common occasion for the negotiation of social conflict between elderly patrons and their various dependents in the cities as well.111 Fur- thermore, Africans increasingly integrated European elements such as songs or uniforms into their ceremonies. Contrary to the opinion of many European observers, however, Afri- cans did not simply mimic European culture when they wore European clothes or sang German songs. Similar to Africans pugnacious use of Christian idioms, they frequently employed European items as satirical weapons that were directed more against black authorities than whites.'12 The top hat episode in Windhoek in early 1913 (mentioned in the

107 RMG, 2528 (C/h 45a), Missionary Spiecker, Swakopmund, late 1906. 108 RMG, 2533 (C/h 50a, b), Missionary Meier, Windhoek, 1912. 109 See for example, RMG, 2533, Missionary Meier, Windhoek, 20 April 1914. 110 SW, 19 March 1912. 111 See again Vedder (1966), p. 195. 112 See also Werner, 'Playing Soldiers' and Terence Ranger, Dance and Society in Easternt Africa, 1890-1970

(London, 1975), for example p. 75. On the rebellious potential in festive life see Natalie Zemon Davis, 'The Reasons of Misrule', Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), pp. 97-123.




introduction) offers a particularly dramatic example of such a conflict-ridden festivity."13 Rhenish Missionaries had decided at their annual conference to bar the wearing of top hats by African parishioners. Generally missionaries welcomed the wearing of Euro- pean clothes as a sign of civilisation. Top hats, however, seemed to take the process a step too far, supposedly making African Christians 'the laughing stock of [European] people'.114 Missionary Becker, the recently arrived head of the Nama-speaking parish in Windhoek, was determined to carry out the anti-top-hat policy. Returning from the conference, he met with the Damara elders, who appeared to understand his argument. They, in turn, told the rest of the Damara. The young men on the werft, however, apparently did not agree with the elders' argument. A few days after his meeting with the elders, Becker arrived at a wedding to find an audience full of top hats. At that moment, top hats ceased to be the sign of clumsy mimicry in Becker's eyes: 'All the young people came with top hats, while usually only two or three or only the bridegroom came with top hats. This was open resistance.'115

Despite Becker's paranoid reaction, the young men of the Damara werft probably wore top hats not so much to upset Becker as to send a message to their elders. For the young men, top hats might have been a valued means of expressing social achievement and prestige.'16 In that sense, top hats could have signified upward mobility and economic independence in defiance of elderly authority. Possibly, the youths also wore top hats as a satirical marker to make a mockery of the elders' dependence on European institutions.117

By wearing top hats to the wedding, the young men threatened elders and their ties to the mission. At least, if that was their intention they did it well. Becker grew suspicious of the elders. The youths nurtured Becker's suspicions by telling him that the elders were the ones who had defied his orders: the elders had made them wear top hats. Regardless of what the youths actually said, Becker's report is indicative of his stereotypical understanding of African societies: Because Africati youths always followed the instructions of their leaders, it must have been the leaders' fault if the youths wore top hats. Consequently, the elders were caught between Becker's scorn and the youths' challenge.118 One headman of the Damara werft found a way out of this dilemnma. Franz von Windhoek, as Becker called him, took the elders' lead and sought permission from the Native Commissioner of Windhoek to wear top hats. Commissioner Bohr, a supposed 'expert on Herero and Damara', was not informed about the incident at Becker's church.119 As an administrator, Bohr was also more interested than the mission in giving Franz freedom to exercise power as long as cooperation with the state was guaranteed. Bohr assured Franz that nobody could forbid them to wear top hats. Becker was humiliated. He declared Franz responsible for the whole episode

113 On the following see the description in Engel, Kolonialismus und Nationalismus, pp. 88-102. 114 RMG, 2533, (C/h 50a, b), Missionary Becker, Windhoek, 23 September 1913. 115 Ibid. 116 For the acquisition of European articles by Damara see Vedder, Native Tribes, p. 58. 117 Engel sees the top hats as 'symbols of Damara independence' vis-a-vis the whites. This interpretation, how-

ever, seems unwittingly to adopt the missionaries' own view that the top hat incident was only a matter of conflict between colonisers and colonised, between whites and blacks. See Kolonialismus und Nationalismus, p. 90. For the significance of the top hat in South African history see Robert Ross, 'The Top Hat in South African History: The Changing Significance of an Article of Material Culture', Social Dynamics, 16, 1 (1990), pp. 90-100. Ross interprets top hat wearing African leaders as demonstrating their acquaintance and acceptance of the norms of the British Empire. Perhaps Damara youths ridiculed this very acquaintance and acceptance of colonial norms.

118 RMG, 2533 (C/h 50a, b), Missionary Becker, Windhoek, 23 September 1913. 119 Dr Oskar Hintrager, Suidwestafrika in der deutschen Zeit (Munich, 1955), p. 134.




and dismissed him from his position as the mission's teacher and preacher in the Damara parish.120 Contrary to Becker's judgement, Franz did not simply seek to harm the mission. Franz was much more preoccupied with the conflicts between youths and elders on his werft. When balancing conflicting African and European demands, Franz strove for a broad clientele among Africans while cautiously tapping the main sources of colonial support. With this political style, Franz differed from those headmen who relied exclusively on the backing of colonial institutions.121 He was also more likely to collide with the colonisers.

Franz's rivalry with another headman illustrates his appreciation of popular support. In late 1912, Zedekia, the headmen and missionary aide of the Damara parish in Klein Windhoek, betrayed the existence of several barrels of beer to Becker. Angry about Zedekia's betrayal, Damara from Klein Windhoek asked Franz for help. Franz realised the chance to win clientele and sent for Zedekia to reprimand him. Signifi- cantly, Franz justified his right to judge over Zedekia by claiming that Zedekia was only installed by the administration, whereas he himself was also elected by the people. Zedekia reacted by asking Becker for help.122 Franz was prepared for conflict with Zedekia and Becker, having secured broad popular support as well as the confidence of Commissioner Bohr. In fact, precisely because he had been able to prove his influence over large parts of the werft population, Franz had become particularly valuable for Bohr. Consequently, Bohr was unwilling to abandon Franz, despite Franz' increasing opposition to the Rhenish mission. Franz, on the other hand, knew that he could count on Bohr as long as he gave the impression of a collaborative headman. In his dealings with Bohr and Becker, Franz showed an ingenious understanding of the European con- ception that politics and culture (or religion for that matter) were separate. To Bohr, Franz was important as a politician. Franz could do What he wanted as long as he remained politically loyal. Consequently, when the missionaries started to ask the administration for help against Franz, Bohr declined and argued that the mission's problems with Franz were purely a church matter. Franz's politics, however, were inseparable from his religious activities, as Bohr and Becker were soon to see.123

After his expulsion from the mission, Franz demonstrated how much his position was built on both politics and religion. Franz continued to preach and teach. In the middle of 1913 he even went one step further and formally reclaimed his offices by founding his own independent church and school. The majority of Damara followed Franz. To Becker's horror, Bohr still did not see any major threat to the colonial state. He refused to intervene. Left alone by the administration, Becker considered himself helpless in the face of 'Franz's despotism'. Bohr, on the other hand, was apparently completely ignorant of his own inability to control Franz.124 Becker's central dilemma when trying to gain Bohr's support against Franz von Windhoek stemmed from the fact that Franz never was what Becker ultimately wanted him to be: an anti-colonial rebel. Franz did not resist the system of colonial rule altogether but the specific threats from the mission to his authority on the Damara werft. Nor was he a fatally misguided col- laborator. Franz did not naively cooperate with Native Commissioner Bohr, but clearly

120 RMG, 2533 (C/h 50a, b), Missionary Becker, Windhoek, 23 September 1913. 121 On headmen politics see also Colin Bundy, 'A Voice in the Big House', and 'Mr. Rhodes and the Poisoned

Goods', in Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, pp. 78-105, 138-165. 122 RMG, 2533 (C/h 50a, b), Missionary Becker, Windhoek, 23 September 1913. 123 On the artificial dichotomy between political and cultural/religious realms see also Fields, Revival, esp. pp. 3-

23; On the division between church and state from a theological perspective see de Vries, Mission and Coloni- alism; and Engel, Kolonialismus und Nationalismus.

124 RMG, 2533 (C/h 50a, b), Missionary Becker, Windhoek, 23 September 1913.




recognised the value of administrative support for his own position. Nevertheless, after months of indifference, the administration finally adopted the view that Franz was an anti-colonial rebel. The mission had found support from influential settlers when lob- bying the administration for a trial against Franz. Unlike Bohr, the settlers did not have to be convinced of Franz's political danger. In fact, they exaggerated Franz's anti-colonial intentions even more than Becker ever did. For example, the editor of the Siidwest, Rudolf Kindt, evoked the 1904-07 war when talking about Franz: 'I have experienced one uprising and I don't feel like living through another one'.125 Finally, the governor himself intervened. In his eyes, as well, Franz had 'become too big'. Thus, at the end of 1913, Franz was exiled for two years to Ltideritzbucht.126 In order to understand Franz's boycott as resistance one has to abandon the tendency to evaluate every act of the colonised solely in relation to an abstract colonial system.127 According to that view, the colonised either attacked colonial structures intentionally or they merely tried to shut themselves off from the colonial onslaught. Although Franz did not plan to over- throw white control, this does not mean that his boycott was merely inward-looking and insignificant for colonisers.

Colonisers became targets as soon as they took a side in conflicts that did not at first concern them,128 as exemplified by the resistance against Becker when he stepped in to protect Zedekia against Franz and the discontented Damara community. The Damara boycott became further tied to colonial pressures in so far as Franz seemed to ride on a wave of discontent about the mission. Christianity had become a need among urban Africans. Yet the mission excluded people who were, for example, engaged in 'prosti- tution' or beer brewing.

Franz and his followers resisted the mission's exclusive claim on idioms such as Christianity or education. Colonial power therefore was not so much a matter of imposing foreign goods and values that destroyed 'tribal' structures as it was about controlling access to imported items and idioms once they had became socially valued.129 Africans did not so much decide between adapting and rejecting Christianity; rather, they appropriated its idioms and struggled for access to them against the claims of the mission.130 They defended their notions of Christianity against German claims to pos- sess the only valid interpretation. Thus, on the one hand, Franz's resistance evolved out of the struggle between African youths and elders on the werft. On the other, it grew out of the struggle between Africans and Germans over the use of 'modern' items and idioms such as top hats, Christianity or education. Indeed, in this sense Franz's resistance represented a sincere threat to the colonial system. It did so not because Franz directly planned it that way, but because ultimately the colonial system was unable to deal with African thought, culture, and action.131

125 Becker quoting Kindt, in: RMG 2533 (C/h 50a, b), Missionary Becker, Windhoek, 23 September 1913. 126 RMG, 2693 (C/s 1(1,2,3)), Prases Olpp, Karibib, 23 October and 5 November 1913. 127 Engel, for example, while stressing the interdependence of cultural and political elements in Franz' opposi-

tion, follows the missionary reports in drawing the line of conflict between colonised Damara and colonising Germans only. See Kolonialismus und Nationalismus, p. 94.

128 See also Fields, Revival and Rebellion, p. 154. 129 See also Gordon, Bushman Myth, p. 211. 130 For a study that evaluates the influence of European culture on Africans in the dichotomy of adaptation and

rejection see James W. Sollars, African Involvement in the Colonial Development of German South West Af- rica, 1883-1907 (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Washington, 1972), esp. pp. 156-182.

131 See also Fields, Revival and Rebellion, esp. pp. 99-127; for the first independent church in Namibia see de Vries on Hendrik Witbooi in Mission and Colonialism; independent African organisations grew particularly in the early 1920s, when the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the Industrial and Commer- cial Workers' Union (ICU) were established. See Tony Emmett, 'Popular Resistance in Namibia, 1920-1925', in Tom Lodge (ed.), Resistance and Ideology in Settler Societies (Johannesburg, 1986).




Conclusion: Re-imagining the 'Graveyard'

In September 1913, missionary Gustav Becker told a tale of 'open resistance'. Initially, his tale can at best seem strange, for German colonialists should not have had reason to fear African resistance. Had they not wiped out far more than half the population of central and southern GSWA during the 1904-07 war? Even more bewilderingly, the young rebels Becker had encountered had carried top hats on their heads rather than guns in their hands. They had blamed their elders responsible for their action rather than declaring a coherent opposition to colonial rule. How can this be called resistance and why did Becker fear it?

The indigenous population of central and southern GSWA came mostly from a pastoralist background. When these pastoralists applied their concepts of social relations to colonial society they clashed with settler ideals. Expropriated of their cattle after the rebellions, many of them accepted cattle-owning settlers as their new patrons. They reminded these patrons of their redistributive obligations, but few settlers knew how to react. Settlers recognised that they could only keep African workers when they granted them access to cattle. Yet, they feared losing control if they gave too much. More and more dissatisfied Africans started to look out for better opportunities to participate in colonial society. Some of them ended up fleeing to the emergent cities.

Flight from the farms did not mean the same for every African. Previous chiefs had lost a lot of their authority after the expropriation of cattle. By fleeing into the veld they could not always re-establish their former influence. Young men and women, on the other hand, used the opportunity to flee oppressive farmer rule as well as gerontocratic and patriarchal family structures. During the process of establishing urban communities the struggles between patrons and clients, seniors' and juniors, women and men continued.

Seeking to enhance their social position, Africans with conflicting interests constantly reinterpreted the meaning of their social ties. They used European items and idioms as weapons in these contests. While widows called on Christian morality when they opposed being remarried to a man not of their choice, men did the same when they wanted to force urban women into monogamy. Young urban men turned top hats into markers of achievement and ridiculed their elders' dependence on colonial support.

Colonialists had their own notion of what happened. Either they belittled African usage of European idioms as the primitive mimicry of naive natives, or they panicked about an imminent revenge of savages. Where urban headmen competed over influence in African communities and access to colonial institutions, settlers often saw anti-colonial conspiracies led by tribal leaders with blindly following subordinates. Their racist stereotypes blinded them to the sources of conflict among Africans as well as between themselves and Africans.

Africans vigorously resisted the particular pressures of both white and black authorities in post-war GSWA. They needed neither guns nor anti-colonial slogans to be successful. In order to appreciate their influence it does not suffice simply to substitute the 'peace of the graveyard' with an ominous anti-colonial 'will to resist'. By paying closer attention to the complex nature of consciousness as well as the various means involved in resistance, one can begin to re-imagine the Namibian past in ways that more fully account for the significance of Namibians' 'amazing creativity'.



african resistance in german swa 1907-15

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