Capturing German South West Africa: Racial Production, Land Claims, and Belonging in the Afterlife of the Herero and Nama Genocide

Because its geographic reach was not as vast as Britain, France, or Spain's, Imperial Germany is often rendered to the marginalia of colonial historiography. Yet Germany’s colonial endeavors, specifically its genocidal war against the Ovaherero and Nama (1904-1908) in German South West Africa is critically important as an expression of Lebensraum, a geopolitical understanding of ethnic identity and racialized space appropriated from biologist Oscar Peschel’s response to Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection. In complementing Ovaherero and Nama efforts for reparations, this dissertation embraces an altercentric historiography — a genealogical materialism guided by ubuntu philosophy — and approach to biological science that narrativizes Germany’s first genocide as a material expression of the colonial biomedical logics that animated the the colonial project and endure in the present.I am using three case studies that tether contemporary scientific and archival practice to colonial-era biomedical harms. First, the collection and ongoing incarceration of Ovaherero and Nama skulls and other skeletal remains in German and American and other archival collections is a feature of a broader regime of race-making and property rights. The the continued capture of these remains has been described by Ovaherero and Nama community members as a continuation of genocide through the linking of expropriative colonial actions to the “post”-colonial present. Secondly, an analysis of Eugen Fischer’s transnational “bastard studies” allows for an examination of the genocide continuity thesis. It connects the imperial German study of mixedness in southern Africa to eugenic study in Weimar and then Nazi Germany via the desire to manage perceived impurities to whiteness resulting from race-mixing. This illustration of continuity reveals how desires for racial management in each location yielded both consistent and differential racial structures and fates for the mixed-race communities in question. Finally, the deep interest in the sequencing and tracing of San genomes is inextricably linked to anthropological constructions of “hunter-gatherers” as ancient and primitive, and the Eurocentric compulsion to enclose and define and hierarchize human life with the creation of a “human” that always precludes African indigeneity. The always already racialized genomics projects and nation-state assertions of genomic sovereignty are occurring simultaneously to San communities being dispossessed of their land and turned into an underclass in the nation-states into which they are being forcibly assimilated