Notions of difference dominated contemporary German discourses about African colonies under German rule since 1885. Otherness and conceptual othering informed writing about Africans but also affected those Germans who decided to live in the colonies (German South-West Africa [GSWA, present-day Namibia], German East Africa [GEA, pres-ent-day Tanzania], Cameroon, and Togo). The requirements these men (and soon also women) had to fulfil, it was postulated, were different
© The Author(s) 2020
D. Matasci et al. (eds.), Education and Development in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27801-4_5 J. Zollmann (*)
WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany e-mail: jakob.zollmann@wzb.eu
The author expresses his gratitude to Dag Henrichsen and Herbert Lewis for their critical comments.
from what was necessary for a “successful” life in the metropole. In Germany, colonial pressure groups and the colonial administration were thus looking for the “ideal settler,” who was in pursuit of better pros-pects than the overcrowded metropolis could offer. Yet the question for contemporaries was: What was to be expected from such an “ideal set-tler”? How should these men earn a living in Africa (or the few other German colonies on the Pacific Islands)? Agriculture was often seen as the most advisable and preferable undertaking for settlers. The reason for this was that it would allow men from all walks of life to develop their own homesteads, using their own two hands, in the “primitive”
conditions of the colonies. But given the imaginary task to create not only a Neu-Deutschland, but a different, a “better Germany” overseas, free from the “vices of modernity,” were those Germans arriving in the colonies prepared for their futures?1 How and where were they supposed to gain the knowledge needed for their colonial ventures?2 In short, questions of knowledge accumulation with regard to the colonies and
“colonial education” for (future) economic actors were paramount to the entire German colonial project and the settlement schemes that served to justify associated public expense (on this issue, see Chapter 6 by Caterina Scalvedi and Chapter 7 by Michael A. Kozakowski, both in this book).
Taking the example of German South-West Africa and the education of (prospective) farmers for life in this colony, this chapter is an attempt to merge the sub-fields of German (colonial) agrarian history and the history of (colonial) education into one analytical field. Education, teach-ing, learnteach-ing, and knowledge are elementary and interrelated terms of pedagogy, and the theory and practice of education, teaching, and learn-ing by historical actors offers concrete insights into societal norms and historical ideas about the future.3 This is particularly relevant for con-temporary debates about the German colonies and their intended
1 Birte Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel Seiner Kolonien (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 43.
2 On questions of “colonial knowledge,” see Rebekka Habermas and Alexandra Przyrembel, Von Käfern, Märkten und Menschen: Kolonialismus und Wissen in der Moderne (Göttingen: V&R, 2013), 10.
3 Theodor Schulze, “Erziehung und Lernen. Plädoyer für eine mathetische Erziehungswissenschaft,” in Erziehungsdiskurse, ed. by Winfried Marotzki and Lothar Wigger (Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt, 2008), 29–50, 37.
futures. Colonial activities by law makers, administrators, and—last but not least—settler communities were not only meant to “initiate the beginning of state formation,”4 as argued in 1886 by the state secretary of justice Herrmann von Schelling; colonies were also meant to develop into future sources of national wealth.5
From the perspective of policy makers, colonial education, as one form of colonial activity by officials and missionaries, was thus a pro-cess that concerned both the colonizers and colonized in the colonies and the metropolis. Its aim was to contribute to an improved, econom-ically viable future for the colonies (on this issue, see Chapter 1 of this book by Damiano Matasci). Typically, there was a generational aspect of transferring agrarian knowledge. In the case of agrarian knowledge to be applied successfully by settlers in the colonies, this generational aspect of knowledge transfer, however, differed from other educational efforts in schools and universities in the metropole. The knowledge about the col-onies often had to be gained at almost the same time (during research excursions) as it was supposed to be already available for dissemination to future farmers and others in Germany and the colonies. Those teach-ing and those learnteach-ing about the agricultural conditions in the colony understood that many questions remained unanswered for the time being. For many problems related to farming in the colonies, solutions still had to be found through continued research before being institu-tionally transformed into empirical knowledge and educational material.
Further, farmers did not always accept as applicable research findings by academics. Complaints about the “amateurism [Laientum] of our farm-ers” in GSWA remained until the demise of the German colonial empire in 1914.6
4 Stenographische Berichte des Reichstags, 6. Leg. Per., 2. Session, 1885/1886, vol. 1, session of 20.1.1886, 653.
5 See Jakob Zollmann, “‘Neither the State Nor the Individual Goes to the Colony in Order to Make a Bad Business’: State and Private Enterprise in the Making of Commercial Law in the German Colonies, ca. 1884 to 1914,” in The Influence of Colonies on Commercial Law and Practice, ed. by Serge Dauchy and Albrecht Cordes (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
6 Bundesarchiv Berlin (BAB) N 2272/1, Bl. 28–30, Heydebreck to Schuckmann, 9 February 1914.
The necessity to contextualize knowledge and education is most evident7 in the context of colonization. Therefore, this chapter will con-sider four points of interest: (1) how colonial enthusiasts and administra-tors perceived the necessity for improved tropical agricultural education given the setbacks farmers experienced in GSWA; (2) how knowledge related to tropical agriculture was institutionalized and administered;
(3) how, in Germany, two schools for tropical agriculture were set up;
and (4) how the debate on the “education” of the African workforce in GSWA contributed to the exclusion of this group from the most elemen-tary forms of education.