On the difficulties of being a racist: On the chair of the European

A young African woman sits on a chair as it was mostly used by European. I do not know the exact date of the photograph, neither where it was taken. The surrounding suggests a German settlement or governmental compound. The young women seems to be very relaxed and all of her posture, her expression seems to say: This is a place I belong to, I have to right to be at, and this is not the first and will be not the last time I am sitting here. There is some intimacy between the photographer and his model that is in stark contrast to the majority of other photographs of African taken by Germans. There nothing of the fear or incomprehension that Africans often express when they are portrayed by German photographers.

It is not difficult to grasp the relationship between the photographer and his model. The woman belongs to the household of the photographer, either being in his service or his mistress, probably both. Such relationships between German colonizers and African women were very common during German colonial rule in Eastern Africa.

Historians and scholars of post-colonial studies stress that these relationships were part of and based on colonial power structures. A crucial element of colonial power structures was the easy access of the colonizers to the services of African women. Notably in the first years of colonial rule, the colonial society was an exclusive club of white males. The disparity of income, wealth and resources made available by the colonial state between Germans and Africans allowed German colonizers to establish large households with servants, cooks and guards. For many Germans coming from middle-class or impoverished aristocrats from East Prussia this was rather uncommon to their previous possibilities. The men, being often in the prime of their lives, had their desires and needs.

There was, however, this tiny little problem of racist prejudices. Most Germans who went to East Africa shared such prejudices, there is no doubt about this. Assumptions about the hierarchies of races belonged to the core of colonial ideologies. From the standpoint of the pure doctrine of racism, relationships between Germans and Africans were unthinkable. Nevertheless, from the perspective of a militaristic culture of colonialism, these relationships could be interpreted as the natural right of the conquerors: as long as this relationship remained within the framework of the exploitation of the conquered. Women were simply part of the spoils of colonial wars.

Intimacy, therefore, was the greatest danger to racial and colonial ideologies. Intimacy undermined the degradation of African women to sexually exploited objects. And it transgressed the borders between the colonizer and the colonized. There is a German account that describes this very well. A German officer warned against the danger of “bibis”, the Swahili term for a woman. Too much intimacy endangered the supremacy of the colonizers. African women would be enabled to look beyond the veil of the sacrosanct nimbus of the Germans. This would result in a loss of his authority. One can, perhaps, speculate about what Germans tried to hide before the eyes of Africans: their rampant alcoholism, their bad tempers and depressions resulting from the unaccustomed climate, their lack of understanding Swahili, the official language of the colony? Who knows?

Another enemy was visibility. At the frontiers of the colonial society, relationships between Germans and African women were not well hidden. A nice story is a court case against the District officer at Mwanza (Lake Victoria), Theodor Gunzert. The German official lived in barely hidden relationship with two African women. This annoyed a German settler woman, who became the “victim” of a daily parade of these two women. Gunzert endowed them with the last European fashion, and the women paraded with their outfit along the settler's woman house. The German woman accused Gunzert of violating the racial order. Gunzert, however, was one of the best colonial officials of the colony. His politics were regarded as a success story in Dar es Salaam as well as in Berlin. The court dismissed the case and, for the sake of peace in the colony, deported the woman back to Germany.

Nevertheless, relationships between Germans and African women were subject to much harder restrictions in Dar es Salaam, notably in the later years, when more and more German women came to the colony and the colonial society was transformed from a society of male “pioneers” to more bourgeois patterns. In Germany,these relationships were more hidden. In 1912, the German colonial secretary prohibited marriages between Germans and women from the colonies.