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Britain, Germany and
Colonial Violence in
South-West Africa, 1884–1919
The Herero and Nama Genocide

Mads Bomholt Nielsen

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies

Series Editors
Richard Drayton
Department of History
King’s College London
London, UK

Saul Dubow
Magdalene College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a well-­
established collection of over 100 volumes focussing on empires in world
history and on the societies and cultures that emerged from, and chal-
lenged, colonial rule. The collection includes transnational, comparative
and connective studies, as well as works addressing the ways in which par-
ticular regions or nations interact with global forces. In its formative years,
the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, but there is
now no imperial system, period of human history or part of the world that
lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome the first mono-
graphs of young researchers, we also seek major studies by more senior
scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong thematic focus
that help to set new research agendas. As well as history, the series includes
work on politics, economics, culture, archaeology, literature, science, art,
medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most exciting new scholarship
on world history and to make this available to a broad scholarly readership
in a timely manner.

More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/13937
 Mads Bomholt Nielsen

Britain, Germany and

Colonial Violence in
South-West Africa,
1884–1919
The Herero and Nama Genocide
Mads Bomholt Nielsen
Ministry of Higher Education and Science
Copenhagen, Denmark

ISSN 2635-1633     ISSN 2635-1641 (electronic)

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
ISBN 978-3-030-94560-2    ISBN 978-3-030-94561-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94561-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Map of German South West Africa

Picture 1 Map of South West Africa with tribal lands and German Presence,
1890, National Archives of Namibia, Blue Book Draft, ADM 255
 Acknowledgements

This book is the culmination of a long journey. When I moved to London

in 2012 to do an MA at King’s College London, I was able to expand on
my interest in British and German colonial history with the support of
Richard Drayton and Francisco Bethencourt—who would both eventually
supervise my PhD dissertation. I owe them both my gratitude for seeing
potential in me and for expertly helping to turn my rather incoherent ideas
into something sensible. My PhD dissertation was eventually examined by
Chris Clark and Saul Dubow who also gave me wonderful advice on where
to improve (and perhaps most importantly, revise) the dissertation. After
my PhD, I moved back to the University of Copenhagen as a Postdoc,
where I was lucky enough to be mentored by Stuart Ward. I wish to thank
Stuart for always taking the time to give me advice and pushing me when
I needed it.
Being funded by the Carlsberg Foundation for another project, which
overlaps with the preparation of this book, I was able to visit archives
around the world and conduct research—of which much has gone into
this book. Of all the funding bodies that are providing vital financial sup-
port for early career scholars, the Carlsberg Foundation has proven to be
an incredibly generous and understanding support. I owe them my grati-
tude. Several people have also helped in the preparation of the book. The
team at Palgrave: Lucy Kidwell and Raghupathy Kalyanaraman have both
shown great patience and understanding in what it is, writing a book dur-
ing a pandemic and working from home. The anonymous reviewers also
deserve credit for their in-depth and constructive feedback, which helped
shape the book and clarify its purpose and scope.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

On a personal level, this book could not have been completed without
the support of friends and family. My parents who always supported and
believed in me were crucial in helping me through my years as a PhD stu-
dent in London. Among my close friends, Ali Adjorlu, Christian Weber
and Henry James Evans have proven to be the most loyal and understand-
ing friends. I must especially commend their ability to take work com-
pletely off my mind and for lending an attentive ear for whenever I vented
my frustrations. Parts of the book were written in the company of my
friend and colleague, Thomas Storgaard, during our ‘writing sessions’
which provided the most productive, focused and stringently organized
work environment one could imagine. I must also express my gratitude to
my friend, Daniel Steinbach. Daniel provided feedback and comments on
early drafts and gave me advice on how to improve the book in terms of
content, style and, above all, structure. Discussing the writing process
(and the affairs of the world) with Daniel while strolling through parks or
sitting at a café have lifted the quality of the book immensely and made the
writing itself more enjoyable.
Finally, there are two people I must thank above everyone else: my son
August and my wife Anna. The patience and unyielding support they have
given in the process of completing this book cannot be understated. I am
grateful for every minute of wonderful distraction they both have given
me. Had they not, writing this book would have been immensely more
difficult. This book is therefore dedicated to them both—not so much for
its ominous topic, but for the effort that has been put into writing it.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Colonial Violence in Southern Africa at the Turn of the

Twentieth Century 15

3 Imperial Cooperation and Anglo-German Diplomacy 43

4 Concerns and Non-Cooperation 71

5 Case 609: African Refugees in British Territory 93

6 Knowledge and Reactions121

7 Atrocity Narratives and the End of German Colonialism,

1918–19153

8 Conclusion193

Cited Works203

Index225

ix
 Abbreviations

A.B.I.R Anglo-Belgian-India Rubber

APS Aborigines’ Protection Society
BAB Bundesarchiv (Lichterfelde, Germany)
CAB Cabinet Papers
CMP Cape Mounted Police
CO Colonial Office
FO Foreign Office
GSWA German South West Africa
NAN National Archives of Namibia (Windhoek)
PMC Permanent Mandates Commission
NASA National Archives of South Africa (Pretoria)
SCC Special Criminals Court
SWA South West Africa
TNA The National Archives (Kew, United Kingdom)
WNLA Witwatersrand Native Labour Agency
WO War Office

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Speaking in the House of Lords on 3 July 1919—less than a week after

Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles—Lord Curzon, Leader of the
House of Lords, proclaimed the treaty to be ‘the end of a tragic chapter in
the history of the world’. Germany’s defeat was not only the downfall of a
nation, but of the ‘Prussian character, which is incompatible with good
government and the ordered progress of the world’. One of the stains of
this Prussian character on the world was the German colonial empire,
which had ‘a record of force and fraud and ruthless disregard for the inter-
est of the native people’. Indeed, ‘German rule’, Curzon asserted, ‘was
characterised by almost undeviating harshness, and in some cases revolting
cruelty. Under this system, vast areas of territory were depopulated. Some
tribes, like the wretched Herero’s in South-West Africa, were literally
exterminated.’ The ‘absolutely overwhelming’ evidence of German bru-
tality and violence, he declared, meant that the ‘13-14,000,000 dark-­
skinned men’ in the German colonies, ‘could not be abandoned’.1
Colonial violence was at the crux of the British and dominion campaign
to end German colonialism during the Paris peace conference after World
War I. Equipped with reports and evidence of German colonial misrule
and ‘wishes of natives’ to be under British rule, the British and dominion
governments successfully portrayed the confiscation of Germany’s colo-
nies as an act of humanitarian interventionism.2 The most influential and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
M. Bomholt Nielsen, Britain, Germany and Colonial Violence in
South-West Africa, 1884–1919, Cambridge Imperial and Post-
Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94561-9_1
2 M. BOMHOLT NIELSEN

renowned piece of evidence presented on German colonial violence was

the 1918 Foreign Office Blue Book, entitled Report on the Natives of
South-West Africa and their Treatment by Germany. Compiled after the
South African invasion of German South West Africa (GSWA) in 1915,
the report—conventionally referred to as ‘the Blue Book’—provided a
detailed account of German atrocities against the Herero and Nama, espe-
cially during the rebellions of 1903–8.3 German counter-insurgency dur-
ing these rebellions notably involved the use of concentration camps and
orders for the outright extermination of Africans. Approximately eighty
per cent of the Herero population and fifty per cent of the Nama popula-
tion perished in what is generally agreed to be the first genocide of the
twentieth century. This violence, the Blue Book concluded, should ‘con-
vince the most confirmed sceptic of the unsuitability of the Germans to
control natives, and show him what can be expected if the unfortunate
natives are ever again handed back to their former regime’.4
The Blue Book indicated that Britain was unaware of the violence in
GSWA before the 1915 invasion.5 Indeed, if Britain had been aware of the
violence at the time it occurred, any association, involvement or failure to
protest would significantly undermine attempts to confiscate German col-
onies on the grounds of violence and misrule. Yet, before 1914, Britain
and South African authorities were not just aware of the violence in GSWA,
but had cooperated with the Germans on a number of occasions. Moreover,
the extensive colonial borders and the trans-nationality of colonial regions,
where Africans, traders and information, for example, crossed the borders
relatively freely, meant that knowledge of the atrocities was widespread.
Above all, the placing of British military attachés with German forces in
GSWA from February 1905 meant that the British government was in
possession of detailed reports on the violence while it actually occurred.6
The fact that no official protest against German colonial violence and mis-
rule was launched until 1918 is indicative of the intricate links between
colonial violence on the one hand and politics and diplomacy on the other.
Indeed, the different international, imperial and diplomatic contexts of
1903–8 and 1918–19 respectively, were determining factors in how colo-
nial violence was presented to suit specific aims and interests. Thus, the
post-war denunciation of German colonialism intentionally obscured the
underlying and deeper level of interaction that existed during the Herero
and Nama rebellions.
This book concerns what can ostensibly be called ‘the British factor’ in
German colonial violence in GSWA. Through the eyes of British and Cape
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

statesmen, officials and colonial officers, it examines British and South

African (Cape Colony until 1910 and hereafter the Union of South Africa)
perspectives on, and involvement in, German colonial violence in GSWA
until the end of German colonialism in 1919. The book thus revolves
around two basic questions: How did a neighbouring colonial power react
to and perceive colonial violence and atrocities such as those committed
by Germany against the Herero and Nama? Further, what factors deter-
mined the different reactions, views and policies taken by the neighbour-
ing colonial power? In considering colonial violence in a trans-imperial
light, which accounts for both metropolitan and colonial contexts (whereas
trans-colonialism concerns the latter), this book attempts to show that
histories of colonial violence cannot be contained within nationally demar-
cated colonial borders. Instead, it occurred in a context in which other
colonial powers were involved either directly or indirectly. This occurred
on several levels that transcended the immediate space where colonial vio-
lence was perpetrated as the atrocities in GSWA were, for instance, per-
ceived and responded to by Britain in the context of European, imperial
and colonial considerations.
The intention of this book is to connect the developing scholarship on
colonial violence to broader historical themes of political, diplomatic and
imperial histories. A recurring problem with the scholarship on colonial
violence is arguably that it remains compartmentalised in nationally
deduced colonial empires. This book thus sets out to challenge this com-
partmentalisation of the colonial world, telling the story of German colo-
nial violence through the eyes of its colonial neighbour. Surprisingly few
studies of colonial violence move beyond the confines of German, French
or even British colonial histories. Instead, comparisons are widespread—in
particular, colonial violence is deemed ‘softer’ in British colonial history
than that perpetrated as part of Belgian or indeed German colonialism,
serving, as Kim Wagner has noted, to perpetuate narratives of British
exceptionalism as a particularly benign colonial power. However, brutal
and racialised colonial violence was as much a feature of British imperial-
ism as it was of German colonialism.7 Such casual comparisons or juxtapo-
sitions, though, are intended for inward elucidation: to either distinguish
a specific colonial type or make histories of colonial violence normative in
a nationally compartmentalised colonial historiography. Indeed, like impe-
rial history as a whole, it is characteristic of colonial violence as a sub-­
theme that the links between empires have not been as thoroughly examined
as those within empires.8
4 M. BOMHOLT NIELSEN

Despite criticism of the pervasive notion of Britain as a more benign

and ‘soft’ colonial power than others, the image still prevails in the ‘empire
debate’ and historically, with British statesmen and the public generally
conceiving of Britain as the most enlightened colonial power.9 This self-­
identification derives from the humanitarianism that emerged out of the
abolitionist movement in the late eighteenth century. Humanitarian dis-
course remained a central ideology of empire in Britain, sustaining both its
moral and legal basis.10 After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and
slavery in 1833, humanitarianism remained a key ideology and it was con-
stantly re-invented by influential lobby groups such as the Aborigines’
Protection Society or the Congo Reform Association which publicly pro-
tested against colonial mistreatment and violence.11 For the British gov-
ernment, humanitarian discourses were widespread within Whitehall and
anti-slavery remained a ‘blessed word’ in the Colonial Office because of its
central position as a view of British government officials, politicians and
the general public and because, by the mid-nineteenth century, it had,
according to Andrew Porter, become a ‘vital component of Britain’s
national and imperial identity’.12 Within this humanitarian discourse was
an inherent revisionist agenda towards the institution of empire, in which
moral standards, often reduced to notions of development, civilisation and
anti-slavery, were embedded as justifications for colonial rule. In other
words, seemingly benign views became a driving force for imperial
expansion.
Such moral expectancy, however, did not align with the oppressive
nature of colonial rule. At the crux of the moral underpinnings of imperi-
alism was a contradiction between the humanitarian expectancy of empire
and its violent reality.13 Furthermore, pervasive humanitarian notions also
put colonial rule ‘on trial’ and facilitated criticism of mistreatment and
violence.14 As Alice Conklin has shown in the context of French West
Africa, the civilising ideals colonial states were expected to uphold, did not
align with the widespread practices of coercion and forced labour in the
colonies. To overcome this clear contradiction, each situation could be
amended and explained. Thus, while coercion was seemingly morally inex-
cusable, forced labour was claimed to ‘improve’ colonial subjects, prevent-
ing natural racial ‘degeneration’.15 Humanitarianism was therefore not
necessarily the opposite of biological racial determinism. Rather, racial
attitudes were embedded in the discourse of ‘civilising’ and ‘protection’.
Crucially, humanitarianism remained a key context in which colonial vio-
lence was construed and reacted to. It was a widespread moral norm
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

associated with the purpose and justification of empire; meaning, that

when Germany so overtly violated the humanitarian expectancy in colo-
nial rule, this discourse formed a central backdrop in which reports, state-
ments and information on violence were read.
While the image of more benign British colonisers remains, German
colonialism has long been correctly associated with excessive violence and
brutality, not only in GSWA but also in other colonies such as German
East Africa, where the character and cruelty of Carl Peters—‘the German
Rhodes’—and his Deutsch Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (German East Africa
Company) epitomised colonial oppression and violence.16 Peters and his
followers have been described as cultivating ‘a cult of violence’ in which
Africans were degraded—treated like animals and used as forced labourers,
with blatant racial ideology directing the establishment of German colo-
nial rule.17 Furthermore, German military forces also brutally suppressed
two major colonial wars—the Wahehe rebellion (1891–8) and Maji Maji
rebellion (1905–7). In the latter, the main German aim was to punish the
rebels and prevent future rebellions, leading to excessive use of violence
and corporal punishment.18 The suppression of the Herero and Nama
rebellions in GSWA, however, is arguably the most noteworthy example of
German colonial violence. The German government acknowledged it as a
genocide on 28 May 2021 after years of pressure from scholars and activ-
ists and negotiations with the Namibian government. GSWA, therefore,
remains the most prominent example because of the widespread belief that
the genocide against the Herero and Nama constituted a precursor or
‘testing ground’ for the Holocaust. The use of concentration camps, med-
ical experiments on prisoners and the overt racism characterising this
genocide presents a clear imagery of parallels and comparisons to the
Holocaust and has led to a rekindled ‘colonial Sonderweg’, with the roots
of Nazism supposedly found in Namibia.19 Such view is of course deriving
Hannah Arendt’s and Aimé Césaire’s respective stipulation that colonial
methods of oppression ‘boomeranged’ and instigated total war and totali-
tarianism in Europe.20 This has had significant consequences on the histo-
riographical context in which German colonial violence in GSWA is
currently understood. The towering shadow of the Holocaust functions as
an end-point, whereby history is perceived retrospectively and contained
within German national history.21 Not only is such a perspective reductive,
it also points to German historical exceptionalism in terms of violence and
genocide, applying both to German national and colonial history.22 This
stands in contrast to the intensive entanglements and connections of
6 M. BOMHOLT NIELSEN

colonial spheres—drawing connections with the Holocaust, whether

intentionally or unintentionally, mainly serves to obscure the colonial con-
text. Consequently, as Reinhart Kössler noted, if GSWA remains transfixed
in a trajectory leading up to the Holocaust, ‘the overall question of colo-
nialism is easily lost sight of’.23
It is tempting to approach German colonial violence in GSWA from a
British perspective for a number of reasons: there is a strong empirical
basis for such an approach as extensive numbers of sources relating to
German colonial violence can be found in British and South African
archives. Geographically, the colonial borders between GSWA and the
Cape and Bechuanaland Protectorate were zones of interaction between
the colonial powers and African groups. The constant puncturing of the
colonial borders meant that violence and rebellion in one colony affected
stability and everyday lives in the other. While colonial violence in GSWA
occurred in a local regional trans-colonial context, it also appeared on
broader, international and trans-imperial levels. Diplomatically, GSWA
was a central part of the colonial rivalry between Britain and Germany,
which was more intense in Southern Africa than anywhere else except
Europe. Furthermore, as has already been alluded to, German colonial
violence was central to British diplomatic interests in 1918. On an imperial
level, the stance towards Germany’s suppression of the Herero and Nama
rebellions was constantly negotiated by the British and Cape governments,
with consideration given to their respective interests and viewpoints.
Where the British government was driven by diplomatic considerations,
the Cape was concerned about its security. Politically, Britain’s insistence
on its moral superiority, as reiterated in the Blue Book in 1918, may well
have been significant in shaping the notion of Britain as a ‘soft colonial
power’, as lamented by Wagner and others. Indeed, at the time, colonial
violence had a notable metropolitan aspect in relation to how public and
international opinion reacted, as was apparent during the Congo crisis of
1903–8, when public demands for intervention against King Leopold II’s
atrocious Red Rubber regime in the Congo were imperative for the trans-
fer of administration to the Belgian state in 1908. Colonial violence and
the reactions of the British government to it were therefore profoundly
political.
The notion of German colonialism as exceptionally cruel and violent
was in part the result of Britain’s denunciation after World War I. Andreas
Eckl meticulously set out the correlation between the arguments of the
Blue Book and Horst Drechsler’s influential Let Us Die Fighting (1966).24
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

In other words, the origin of German colonialism as exceptionally brutal

was most likely the Blue Book of 1918, which, despite its relatively accu-
rate description of German colonial violence, represented propaganda
with outright imperial and diplomatic intentions.25 At the crux of the
notion of German colonial exceptionalism, therefore, lies a profound
British factor, which changed according to shifting contexts in Europe and
Africa and at different times—even when the violence in question
had ended.

Trans-colonialism in Anglo-German Southern Africa

Understanding the colonial world in context of nationally defined empires
resonates with the foundations of history as a modern discipline, intended
to delineate the nation states of nineteenth-century Europe. L.H Gann
and Peter Duignan described their series on ‘the rulers of Africa’ as ‘paral-
lel studies’ and had each volume neatly divided into, among others,
‘British’, ‘German’ and ‘Belgian’ colonial histories thus perpetuating
national borders in the colonial world.26 Such demarcation has obscured
transnational and trans-imperial patterns in history and led to compart-
mentalisation first between nations and then empires.27 In Southern Africa,
the local trans-colonial entanglements across the Cape and GSWA borders
have been difficult to examine because of the pervasive national historiog-
raphies of South Africa and Namibia.28 In the case of the British imperial
system, John Darwin has shown that this cannot be seen as a historical
polity in itself because of its fragmentation by local sub-imperial agents
acting in accordance with their own, locally based, interests and because of
the external influences that profoundly shaped British imperial power
overseas.29 The notion of trans-colonialism therefore reiterates an under-
standing of the colonial world as one linked across borders and spheres
and in which Europe was not some external or indeed exceptional history
promoting a dichotomy of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’.30
Recently, new scholarship has emerged dedicated to examining the
interactions and entanglements of colonial histories.31 This complicates
prevailing understandings of European colonial empires in Africa and else-
where as disconnected extensions of the nation-state—an idea often form-
ing the unintended perspective in several volumes, particularly those with
comparative approaches.32 Instead of seeing German colonial violence in
GSWA as part of German national history, where there is often a tendency
to consider it as a precursor to the Holocaust, this book emphasises the
8 M. BOMHOLT NIELSEN

trans-colonial and international context. At the same time, however, it

remains important not to inflate colonial connections and inter-imperial
histories. Indeed, while it is necessary to challenge rigid and nationally
defined compartmentalisations, we should not completely abandon the
notion of separate spheres of influence in the colonial world. Although
notions of cooperation and shared experiences are useful to determine the
interactions between colonial powers, these risk obscuring elements of
estrangement, rivalry and provocation.
With the advent of global history, it has been established that imperial
power and decision-making were not the prerogative of the imperial gov-
ernment in London, but a cumulative response spanning imperial and
trans-imperial networks.33 Global history’s focus on connections, as Simon
Potter and Jonathan Saha have asserted, ‘can assist us in overcoming the
long-standing but often misleading tendency to examine the British
Empire as a singular, hermetically-sealed world system’.34 The same is true
of the German colonial empire, in which the colonial Sonderweg has func-
tioned as a form of compartmentalisation because it rests on the premise
of the Holocaust as a profoundly German national history.35 Although
there is a tendency within global history to emphasise subalterns and his-
tory from below, this should not remove the necessity to understand polit-
ical history—mainly belonging to the imperial and colonial elites—from
such perspectives. Indeed, European international history—particularly
relating to Anglo-German relations—has been shaped and informed by
colonial affairs in the context of trans-imperial interactions. While the
global turn in the history of the British Empire has been successful in
breaking a London-centred view and acknowledging external influences,
much less attention has been paid to the connections between colonial
empires than those within.36
In the colonial world, Anglo-German entanglements were profound.
Even before Germany formally acquired colonial possessions, the British
Empire hosted German emigrants and groups espousing visions of a
German colonial community.37 Settlers, missionaries and indigenous
groups, while formally affiliated with a specified colony controlled by a
European nation, roamed relatively freely across the colonial landscape
with little regard for colonial borders. Thus, colonial borders were not
rigid demarcations of colonial or national sovereignty but should be con-
sidered sites of interactions and also sites of fragility where colonial rule
was at its weakest and contested by cross-border movements, in which
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

colonial powers in turn attempted to exert control by means of violence.38

As we shall see, the colonial borderlands were key to interactions between
German, Cape and British actors but also for Africans in resisting German
colonial rule because many escaped to British or Cape territory either as
refugees or to prevent their pursuit by German troops.
Several historians have characterised Anglo-German colonial relations
and interactions in Southern Africa as defined by a ‘racial solidarity.’
Cooperation between the colonial powers in holding down Africans
amounted to what Drechsler called a ‘sharing of the white man’s bur-
den’.39 More recently, and arguably more persuasively, Ulrike Lindner
claimed that, in Africa, Britain and Germany were involved in a ‘shared
colonial project’. Although this project also amounted to ‘the white man’s
burden [being] equally shared among the colonial powers’, Lindner cor-
rectly reiterates the centrality of estrangement and rivalry in inter-imperial
relations and indicates that these are not opposed to cooperation. Indeed,
as she correctly observes, a complicated Spannungsfeld (‘zone of tension’)
existed between cooperation and rivalry, meaning that the terms were not
mutually exclusive but rather co-existed.40 British and German colonialism
in Southern Africa was therefore intrinsically linked and common ground
existed in wishing to ensure the maintenance of colonial rule over Africans.
It is the intention that this book will complement (rather than disprove)
the work done by Lindner and others on the shared histories of British and
German colonialism. This book adds to understandings of the notion of
imperial cooperation, focusing on the complexities and difficulties placed
on a neighbouring colonial power in the context of a colonial ‘small war’.
In focusing on a Cape and British perspective, it becomes clear that impe-
rial cooperation, deriving from sharing of the white man’s burden, is
essentially an oversimplification of the deeply ambiguous and multi-­faceted
history of colonial and imperial entanglements in Europe and
Southern Africa.
Indeed, there are few indications in British and South African-based
sources of any detailed or sympathetic policy towards the German sup-
pression of the Herero and Nama rebellions deriving from racist convic-
tions. That is not to say that there were no underlying racial prejudices
informing British or South African actors—merely that racial solidarity
alone did not necessarily mean intensive cooperation. Instead, the notion
of sharing the white man’s burden arguably derives from German sources
as the Germans in GSWA continuously sought to win British and Cape
10 M. BOMHOLT NIELSEN

support in the borderlands and hand over refugees. The British and Cape
authorities were essentially forced into a difficult situation requiring care-
ful management in accordance with their own interests. These rarely
amounted to notions of racial solidarity and were by their nature sporadic
and haphazard as there was never any established policy or directive on
how to react to German colonial violence in GSWA. The only consistency
in their involvement was a desire to ‘walk on eggshells’ and not to provoke
Boers, Germans or Africans. Perhaps most importantly, in addition to
imperial cooperation, non-cooperation—the active decision not to sup-
port the Germans—definitively shaped British involvement in German
colonial violence in GSWA.
Understanding the interactions and entanglements between the colo-
nial powers in the colonies themselves rather than from a metropolitan
perspective in London or Berlin is useful to fully comprehend the com-
plexities inherent in such relations. Indeed, although the period before
1914 was characterised by increasing Anglo-German antagonism, rela-
tions in the colonial ‘periphery’ were different, as Britain and Germany
collaborated on a number of cases. Britain’s involvement in GSWA and
collaboration with the German Schutztruppe (protection force) may there-
fore be indicative of a shared colonial project that occurred separately to
the deteriorating diplomatic relations in Europe. However, this is too
absolute and inconsistent with the ambiguous way in which British actors
in London and South Africa acted during the rebellion and genocide in
GSWA. Tilman Dedering, for instance, has shown how different interests
and agendas of metropolitan and colonial actors shaped Britain’s involve-
ment in GSWA, forced upon them by African cross-border mobility in
particular.41 As such, while notions of racial solidarity were indeed influen-
tial in motivating cooperation between colonial powers, they tend to flat-
ten the imperial, diplomatic and political contexts and reduce colonial rule
to a predominantly if not exclusively racial endeavour. Any involvement or
expression of views on the part of Britain and the Cape did not therefore
emanate from a racially motivated shared project but from British and
Cape interests and security. This led to an ambiguous and multi-faceted
British involvement in German colonial violence, whereby cooperation
co-existed with non-cooperation and stringent handling of information in
accordance with shifting diplomatic contexts.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Rue Royale. Why should she go back to the hotel since she didn’t
want to? A warm feeling of satisfaction stole over her, thanks to that
half-bottle of Pouilly. She called for cigarettes. A young man, sitting
at the next table, handed her his lighter, and she smiled. To think
that hardly an hour ago she wanted to plunge, in Bernard’s
company, into the dark Villandraut road, between the rows of
menacing pines! She cared no more for one country than another,
pines or poplars, plain or ocean. Nothing interested her except living
creatures, beings of blood and flesh. “It is not the stone-built city
that I love, nor lectures nor museums, but the living forest that stirs
within it, racked by passions more furious than any storm. The
lamentations of the pines of Argelouse, at night, were so strangely
moving because they seemed so nearly human.”
Thérèse had drunk a little and smoked a great deal; and she
smiled to herself like a woman who at last is happy. She made up
her cheeks and her lips with great care: and then went out into the
street,—to seek what she might find.

THE END
 Transcriber’s Note:
Words may have inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have
been left unchanged. Obsolete and alternative spellings were left
unchanged. Four misspelled words were corrected.
Obvious printing errors, such as partially printed letters and
punctuation, were corrected. Final stops missing at the end of
sentences and abbreviations were added.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THÉRÈSE ***

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