Exclusion and Inclusion, a revision of Robbie Aitken's 2002 dissertation, contributes significantly to ongoing discussions about racism and racial identity in German Southwest Africa. Using the work of postcolonial theorists, especially Homi Bhabha and Robert Young, Aitken interrogates German efforts to force the historical complexities of race, gender, and class in the settler colony in present-day Namibia into a binary opposition of black and white. Rather than focusing on the genocidal antiblack racism for which the colony is now best remembered, Aitken demonstrates persuasively the importance of the “gradations of whiteness” in simultaneously constructing and destabilizing settler society. The author builds on recent work in whiteness studies, arguing that the category of the white self was at least as fraught and politically contested as that of the black other. He shows that racism, far from offering a simplification of settler society, brought further social, political, and legal chaos to the colony.

The earliest discussions of racial policy in Southwest Africa, Aitken relates, did not focus on the supposed nature of the indigenous African inhabitants of the region but rather on determining the sort of white person who authorities thought should be encouraged to settle in the colony. Plans to encourage German agricultural settlement in Africa emerged in part from elite concerns about the ill effects of urbanization on those who remained in Germany, as well as the loss to the nation of those emigrants who left Germany for the United States and elsewhere. The arid land of Southwest Africa proved unsuitable for the kind of smallhold farming that Prussia encouraged, for similar purposes, in its own eastern territories, but those Germans who wished to settle in the colony did not possess the capital necessary to found the large ranches that proved most economically viable in the early colonial period. The settlers of the German colony thus came disproportionately from the ranks of the local colonial military and bureaucracy. Authorities worried about poor whites who immigrated to Southwest Africa, seeking, for example, work on railroad construction. In 1905, following the example of neighboring Natal, the German governor introduced an immigration law that allowed officials to turn away, and eventually even to expel, a range of settlers, including poor whites.

As officials addressed the difference between the ideal settlers they imagined and the real settlers they ruled, they developed a graded conception of whiteness, where individuals could be more or less white. Rather than providing a rural haven from the supposed vices of the German city, such as alcoholism, prostitution, and homosexuality, Southwest Africa seemed to encourage these practices. Germans, both in Namibia and abroad, began to imagine such cultural “degeneration” of even “pure” whites as a process of “blackening” brought about by proximity to Africans. This “blackening” might include the loss of “racial consciousness” that led European men to have children with African women but also nonbiological forms of supposed cultural degeneration.

The gradated conception of whiteness, combined with a Manichaean distinction between blacks and whites, had settlers and colonial officials stymied by the racial categories they had introduced to clarify social policy. The German government of Southwest Africa gradually ceased to recognize marriages between Africans or mixed-race individuals and whites, thus developing a racial classification similar to the “one-drop” rule of the southern United States. Aitken shows, through a number of fascinating sketches of individuals, how this attempted racial clarification in fact disrupted the racial order of Southwest Africa, retroactively annulling some marriages and reclassifying some who had counted as whites as “natives,” with all the civil disabilities associated with that classification.

Aiken illustrates the problematic category of whiteness in Namibia with particular clarity through the example of Afrikaner immigrants to the German colony. Aiken shows how Afrikaners in Namibia underwent a process of assimilating to a black-white racial binary similar to that of Asian immigrants to the United States described by anthropologist Ahiwa Ong. German officials worried about a mass immigration of a nomadic, illiterate, and not fully “white” Afrikaner population, and they began to decry the “Boerification” (verburen) of German settlers, much as they worried about their “negrification” (vernegern).

One of the chief areas of interest in the history of German Southwest Africa has been the genocide carried out against the Herero, both as an exceptional atrocity in its own right and as a precursor to the Holocaust. Exclusion and Inclusion, which focuses on the racial politics of whiteness, addresses the Herero-Nama War only briefly. Aiken argues persuasively, and in dialogue with much recent historical and theoretical literature on German and other colonial situations, that German Southwest Africa, including the genocidal war against the Herero, was not particularly “German,” but rather part of a worldwide wave of aggressive racist and colonial politics. He also finds that the ideological and political work that “gradations of whiteness” performed in German Southwest Africa also functioned in European cities, especially in bourgeois concern about the “dangerous classes.” Aiken cautions against equating this bourgeois discourse of gradations of whiteness with the far more violent and pernicious antiblack racisms that existed in German Southwest Africa and elsewhere, but he also makes a persuasive case for the importance of interrogating whiteness in the colonial situation.