"The People Who Make Our Heads Spin": White Violence in German East Africa

This dissertation explores violence perpetrated by the colonial state and white settlers in German East Africa from the 1890s to the First World War. It examines the place of white violence, almost all of it directed at black bodies, in East Africa and traces the ways in which broader social and political tensions in the German community shaped debates and contestations over the boundaries of “acceptable” white violence in the colony. Violence was a contested issue, one that divided the community of German colonists against itself. The issue was not that Germans disagreed about their right to treat Africans violently or dominate them by force. Rather disputes arose because the boundaries and limitations of white violence were never clearly defined, so that colonial administrators and German settlers were left to sort it out amongst themselves. The case of the plantation manager Georg Passarge demonstrates that social conflicts in the German colonial community could play a significant role in drawing officials’ attention to non-official white violence and ultimately in the prosecution of settler abuses. Further, the frustrations and anxieties that beset the German settler community shaped coverage of corporal punishment in the settler-friendly press, which defended whipping and flogging of Africans as integral to the success and well-being of German colonists. Finally, contemporary photography reveals the manner in which German officials tried to distance themselves from disciplinary violence as well as the unease with which some observers documented German colonial violence toward the black population in East Africa. This study demonstrates that violence was both ubiquitous in East Africa and a contested issue among German colonists. It shows that broader social and political tensions within the German community were manifested in the colonial courts, the settler press, and in the visual representation of colonial violence in East Africa. These same sources were constructed so as to manage or render invisible the black people who were the targets and victims of white violence. Accordingly, this dissertation also analyzes German representations of colonial violence and the people who executed it, witnessed it, and felt it on their own bodies.Ph.D