Introduction

This introduces the book’s main issues via a historical vignette of German imperialism in Southwest Africa from the 1890s to 1908. The German strategy was to seize the land of the most powerful tribes in the area for German immigrants to farm. In the process, Germans unethically victimized the Africans, undercutting their culture, their roles, and identity as regional leaders. German racism was a continuum, a hallmark being frequent floggings, which Germans considered “parental chastisement.” When the key tribe rebelled in 1904, German forces fought not simply to defeat them but also to completely obliterate them. It was the twentieth century’s first genocide: 92,000 Africans were slain.

Christian Conversion and Colonial “Native Policy”: The Role of Missionaries in Formulating Reservation Policy in German Southwest Africa

This article examines how German Protestant missionaries to the Herero people influenced colonial “native policy” in German Southwest Africa in the years leading up to the Colonial War of 1904 to 1907. By the late 1890s, burgeoning European settlement increasingly displaced the Herero from their traditional territory. While colonial officials promoted more settlement, missionaries had developed a concept of conversion that linked Christianization with living in self-sufficient agricultural communities, and hoped to place limits on Herero displacement. Thus, missionaries and colonial officials engaged in protracted political negotiations over the creation of inalienable “native reservations” for the Herero. I show that missionaries’ model of Herero conversion prompted them to promote an alternative mode of settler colonialism that would make room in Southwest Africa for self-sufficient Herero settlements. Prior to the Colonial War, missionaries succeeded in convincing the colonial government to begin creating reservations, thus shaping colonial policy according to missionary priorities.