In early 1902, Eduard Dannert, a German Protestant missionary working among the Herero people in German Southwest Africa, reported to his superiors at the Rhenish Mission Society a recent and heated conversation with a colonial official that revealed growing tension between the missionaries’ agenda and the broader colonial project. Dannert had been discussing with the local district commander First Lieutenant Erckert the missionaries’ attempts to convince the colonial administration to designate land for Herero reservations. The Mission Society insisted that the Herero retain enough land beyond the reach of Europeans to sustain themselves in the growing settler colony. Erckert opposed the missionaries’ efforts, advising Dannert that they should “have no illusions, the government has not come here out of humanitarian motives.”Footnote 1 To Erckert, whose views Dannert considered “entirely consistent” with those of the colony's governor, Theodor Leutwein, colonial policy assumed a struggle for economic supremacy between Europeans and Africans. Erckert believed that only “the elimination of the other side” would guarantee white economic success against the cattle-raising skill of the Herero.Footnote 2 Herero reservations therefore would only make Herero economic competition a permanent feature of the colony. When Dannert protested that Erckert's notion of good colonial policy “deprives the natives of all human rights, makes crass egoism and the right of the strong into the principle of government, and that such a policy is ill-befitting a government that professes to be Christian,” Erckert countered, “What has Christianity to do with policy?”Footnote 3
Dannert's impassioned plea and Erckert's curt reply illustrate the fraught relationship between the German missionary and colonial agendas as they were interpreted and implemented on the ground in Germany's only settler colony. Moreover, while their exchange took place far from centers of colonial decision-making in Windhoek or Berlin, it reflected a broader clash of attitudes, dispositions, and goals between agents of both endeavors in Germany and throughout German Southwest Africa. Considering both the content of the conversation and its context—missionary efforts to influence colonial policies on land allocation and ownership—Dannert and Erckert's disagreement raises important questions about how conflict and cooperation between missionary and state agents shaped colonial ideas and practices on the ground.
First, the dispute draws attention to the importance of missionary preoccupations with how Africans “fit” into the settler-colonial order to their idea of mission work. Dannert's defense of missionary prerogatives suggests that their concerns about colonial policies had become intertwined with the missionaries’ concept of their spiritual vocation to Christianize the Herero. Second, the exchange highlights an apparent contradiction at the heart of the relationship between missionaries and colonial officials. Both groups embraced a vision of the colonial order that would fundamentally recast African life, yet their respective projects assumed different, even conflicting modes of settler colonialism.Footnote 4 Although missionary and colonial state agendas were conceptually adjacent, and at times overlapping, they were not identical. Dannert's proposal of a colonial order based on missionary notions of human rights, Christian values, and mutual benefits for Europeans and Africans was bound to conflict with Erckert's espousal of settler colonialism as a zero-sum game. Third, the conversation raises questions about how Rhenish missionaries attempted to influence colonial “native policy” in ways that favored their goals, making an instrument of state power in the service of a religious agenda that implied an alternative colonial vision.Footnote 5
Recent work on Germany's colonial empire has developed in scope and theoretical complexity as scholars engage with postcolonial studies to explore topics ranging from the colonial imagination and the influence of colonial discourses on German culture to the instruments and cultures of conquest and rule in Germany's colonies.Footnote 6 These studies have worked as a welcome corrective to a picture of the German empire that neglected its overseas possessions and demonstrate how research on imperial Germany has become more transnational and global in scope, advancing beyond an older historiography that typically focused on colonial state-building processes or otherwise engaged with Hans-Ulrich Wehler's social imperialism thesis.Footnote 7 Though recent scholarship has created a richer picture of German colonialism both at home and abroad, the actual mechanics of colonial policymaking remain underexplored and only partially understood. In particular, the kinds of questions raised by the conversation that opened this article about how nonstate actors embedded in local colonial situations—especially missionaries and mission societies—influenced German colonial policy require more attention.Footnote 8
The resurgence of scholarly interest in Germany's colonial empire has been accompanied by renewed attention to German missionaries in colonial settings. This literature, too, has grown in sophistication in its treatment of missionaries, mission societies, and their relationship to political, social, and cultural manifestations of German colonialism. An older historiography of missionaries in German colonies tended to focus on the extent to which mission societies and their agents assisted German colonial states in extending and securing colonial power over colonized territories and their populations.Footnote 9 However, recent work on German missionaries has moved beyond questions about missionaries’ supposed nationalist loyalties and their complicity in colonial rule toward greater recognition of their complex position in the German colonial world, particularly regarding their nuanced attitudes toward colonial ideology and colonial states and their roles in shaping colonial discourses and ethnography.Footnote 10 Yet despite such welcome scholarly trends, histories of missionaries in German colonies, particularly those dealing with Southwest Africa, generally have avoided focused exploration of how involved missionaries were in the processes of shaping colonial policies as both partners and rivals of state officials.Footnote 11 Thus, scholars have continued to miss the extent to which mission and colonial agents engaged each other as participants in an ongoing negotiation, a give-and-take that helped shape particular colonial policies and constitute colonialism “on the ground” more broadly.
This article works toward refining our understanding of how missionaries shaped colonial ideas and practices by examining one specific group of missionaries in German Southwest Africa: those who worked in the service of the Rhenish Mission Society among the Herero people around the turn of the century. This time and place are particularly fruitful for exploring negotiation between missionaries and colonial officials for several important reasons. From roughly 1897 to 1904, the pressures of expanding settlement on Herero landholdings generated great tension between missionaries and the colonial government, yet this was before Germany's genocidal conquest of the Herero fundamentally reconfigured Herero life (and mission work among them) in the colony. Exploring the work of this group of missionaries at this time illuminates how the missionaries’ vocational priority of converting the Herero to Christianity prompted particular political interventions with the colonial administration that helped to shape colonial native policy. Missionaries did more than squabble with colonial officials over single issues. Rather, the turbulent relationship between the two, vacillating between conflict and cooperation, reveals the extent to which mission and colonial state agents engaged in a protracted political struggle over the place of Africans in the colonial order, and thus over the very meaning of colonialism in Germany's only settler colony.
In this article I examine how missionaries to the Herero and their superiors in Germany helped shape the contours of colonial native policy prior to the violent conquest of the Herero through direct advocacy with the colonial government both locally and in Berlin. Their interventions were motivated by a desire to fix the place of the Herero in the emerging colonial order according to their notions of how Herero communities should be organized in order to bring about their conversion to Christianity. First, I detail the missionaries’ concept of conversion, particularly its emphasis on the importance of maintaining traditional social structures and a way of life at least partially isolated from settler society and the colonial labor market as preconditions for creating a “national church” for the Herero people. To the missionaries, converting the Herero implied that they transition from herding livestock to sedentary agriculture and that they remain self-sufficient, living in communities with only limited contact with settler society. At the same time, however, the colonial project in Southwest Africa increasingly developed toward settler colonialism, with the requirement that the African population serve as a labor force for European settlers. Thus, I next show how missionaries’ vocational imperatives came into conflict with the unfolding logic of settler colonialism as interpreted by colonial officials, even as the missionaries accepted the legitimacy of settler colonialism as such and sought to realize their goals within its framework.
The missionaries’ answer to the contradiction between missionary and state objectives for the Herero was to persuade the colonial administration to set aside land as unalienable Herero reservations. I therefore finish my examination by analyzing how missionaries negotiated with the colonial state to shape an important area of its own native policy in a way that would help realize a religious goal: Herero conversion to Christianity. That religious goal was particularly important because it presupposed a mode of life at least partially shielded from a settler-colonial order based on exploiting African labor. Thus, the missionaries’ political intervention assumed the possibility of an alternative form of settler colonialism in Southwest Africa, one in which the Herero lived, not as primarily a labor force for Europeans, but as a Christian agricultural community. However, the tensions between missionaries and state officials over the colonial project were never fully resolvable. Until the Colonial War of 1904 to 1907, the Rhenish Mission (hereafter referred to as “the Mission”) and German colonial officials continually debated and negotiated the reservation policy on which so much depended for mission, colony, and the Herero alike. In the wake of war and genocide, however, the situation for Africans in the colony was transformed to satisfy colonial labor demands, and the missionary effort to establish permanent Herero agricultural communities on reservations was destroyed. Prior to that conquest, however, the colonial administration's approach to the Herero emphasized a more gradual extension of control over Herero territory and people, providing an opportunity for missionaries to shape the emerging settler-colonial order by negotiating the place of the Herero within it.
Herero Pastoralism and the Missionary Vocation
Missionaries and colonial officials in Southwest Africa clashed most seriously and frequently over the issue that was also most important to each of their endeavors: the role of Africans in the colony. Concerning the Herero in Southwest Africa, native policy became the most prominent point of contention between the two groups, and thus the area of most intense political negotiation. The missionaries did not assume that the settler-colonial order in Southwest Africa would necessarily require the total subordination of Herero social and economic life to the demands of the German colonial state and settler society, even as they recognized that the Herero would live under German political authority. Instead, missionaries prior to the Colonial War sought to ensure that Herero communities would remain self-sufficient and argued for only limited Herero participation in the colonial workforce. The existence of such Herero communities also presupposed a limited degree of social and political autonomy, insofar as the regulation of Herero community life would remain in the hands of Herero leaders (and, the missionaries assumed, under their own influence), even as the Herero submitted to German rule. In part, missionary reluctance to encourage contact with settlers was the result of their opinions about the poor moral quality of the settler population. More important, the missionaries’ insistence on Herero self-sufficiency and partial autonomy was built into their notion of conversion.
The Rhenish missionaries’ idea of conversion, shaped by their pietistic confessional background, emphasized conversion as a transformation of one's whole life to comport with a model of Christian living.Footnote 12 The missionaries hoped to replicate their own conversions everywhere, even in those places “over the wide sea … on which darkness and the shadow of death lay.”Footnote 13 Evangelizing the Herero, they believed, fulfilled the biblical Great Commission, “to bring the precious gospel of Christ to heathen nations (Völkern).”Footnote 14 Yet conversion would necessarily operate differently in Southwest Africa than in Germany, a nation whose society was steeped in Christian knowledge and practice. At home, spiritual awakening meant a revival of belief; in Southwest Africa, conversion meant not only converting individuals, but eventually Christianizing entire societies. Thus, the emphasis from the Great Commission on converting whole peoples or “nations” was a crucial feature of the missionaries’ concept of their vocation.Footnote 15 Indeed, the missionaries’ ultimate goal of building self-sustaining Indigenous churches in Southwest Africa aimed for each group, over time, to be fully converted to Christianity even as they remained ethnically distinct from others in the territory.Footnote 16 From early on, then, the Rhenish missionaries to the Herero approached their vocation with an emphasis, not merely on converting as many individuals as possible, but on converting the Herero “nation” as such. Yet in doing so, they insisted on restructuring particular aspects of the Herero way of life.
One of the most serious challenges to the project of “national” conversion was the pastoral mobility necessitated by the cattle herds central to Herero life. Practically speaking, it made sustained mission work difficult to carry out. More fundamentally, missionaries and mission societies tended to view “nomadism” as antithetical to Christianity, as the symptom of a deeper spiritual and social problem. From a theological perspective, nomadism could represent “the degeneration of humankind from the settled and cultivating mode of existence that characterized the Garden of Eden.”Footnote 17 Moreover, the Old Testament portrayal of the Israelites wandering for forty years in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land vividly links peripatetic movement with God's disfavor or a nation's alienation from the divine will. At the very least, it suggests that in a theological framework, wandering must resolve itself in settlement. It was natural, then, for missionaries to the Herero to conceive of conversion as implying a sweeping cultural, social, and economic transformation from pastoralism to sedentary agriculture.
The Rhenish Mission Society's articulation of the cultural, social, and economic ramifications of conversion drew on more than theology. It also merged with ideas from contemporary anthropology to fuse into a religious iteration of the “civilizing mission.” By the late nineteenth century, the head of the society's operations, Mission Inspector August Schreiber, borrowed substantially from German anthropological discourse to reflect on the Mission's vocational tasks. In particular, anthropologists’ distinction between “primitive peoples” (Naturvölker) and “cultural peoples” (Kulturvölker) provided a useful framework for thinking about Christianity's role in cultural transformation and its indispensability to a humane and effective execution of the civilizing mission. Combining theological and anthropological discourses allowed Schreiber to interpret practices like pastoral nomadism as manifestations of humanity's fallen nature. From this perspective, Naturvölker like the Herero appeared, not as people living according to a pristine state of nature, but rather as degraded from a more exalted past.Footnote 18 Such peoples, Schreiber argued, refused to exercise their “human calling and dignity,” so that “instead of subduing Nature, they have fallen into complete dependence on it.”Footnote 19
Although some missionaries voiced doubts about Southwest Africa's suitability for large-scale crop agriculture, most seemed incapable of imagining the Herero as both peripatetic and Christian. The grip of the combined theological and anthropological discourses regarding nomadism was too strong. One missionary even claimed that the Herero among whom he worked “could live from their gardens alone,” but that the Herero as a rule “will not live exclusively from farming.”Footnote 20 Even where missionaries admitted that the land was unsuitable, they persisted in construing Herero mobility as the chief impetus for what they identified as “a chief social ill” for Herero society: “their dilly-dallying life” (müßiggängerisches Leben).Footnote 21 More was at stake in settling the Herero than turning them to crop agriculture—a whole way of life oriented around the missionaries’ concept of the virtue of labor and its connection to living out a disciplined, Christian way of life hinged on settlement. Bound up with settling the Herero was teaching them “to work six days a week,” a regimen that would replace a life filled with what the missionaries saw as little more than “chatting, laughing, and playing.”Footnote 22
Despite frustrations over their progress in persuading the Herero to take up crop agriculture and adopt European ideas of work discipline, the missionaries to the Herero continued to understand conversion to Christianity as intertwined with sedentary life. Missionaries built permanent structures—schools, homes, and churches—that ideally would be used year-round, rather than according to seasonal migration patterns. Missionaries even selected mission station sites with long-term settlement in mind. For example, the missionaries worked to persuade one Herero leader, Tjetjoo, to settle with his people at the mission station Okazeva with the hope that the resident missionary, August Kuhlmann, could help them transition to sedentary agriculture.Footnote 23
Missionaries like Kuhlmann, however, were not the only Europeans in Southwest Africa keenly interested in Herero movements and settlement. From 1884, the year that Germany acquired Southwest Africa as a protectorate, the missionaries pursued their goals within a colonial context, which added an additional layer of complexity to the missionary project among the Herero. Given that one of the principal tasks of a colonial state is the control of Indigenous populations, the colonial administration in Southwest Africa had the potential to act as either a competitor or a partner to the missionaries as they carried out their long-term goals.Footnote 24 Thus, although the missionaries sometimes found that the colonial context presented them with opportunities they would not have had outside of that framework, at other times it imposed limits on their ambitions.
Herero Pastoralism and Colonial Policy
The colonial administrators of Southwest Africa had been interested in controlling African settlement and demarcating their territory from almost the very beginning of Germany's colonial occupation.Footnote 25 Because the German administrative footprint immediately following the establishment of the protectorate in 1884 was so small, however, any plans to influence African movements and settlement patterns necessarily remained hypothetical.Footnote 26 When Governor Theodor Leutwein assumed administrative control of the territory in 1894, he quickly set about trying to rectify the colony's administrative weaknesses in order to promote Southwest Africa's development as a settler colony.
One of Leutwein's primary undertakings in Southwest Africa was to forge a coherent and effective native policy. As Helmut Bley has shown, Leutwein understood the creation of a settler colony to require the structure of a modern state, and so his native policy consisted of efforts to extend colonial state authority over African populations.Footnote 27 Thus, before the end of 1894, Leutwein began negotiating with Herero leaders over territorial borders and demonstrated German legal authority and jurisdiction by trying two Herero for the murder of a European and executing one of them.Footnote 28 Leutwein later portrayed himself as having been “sandwiched between whites and natives,” but obliged to treat both fairly.Footnote 29 He described his approach to Africans as one in which he tried “to find the middle way between leniency and strictness.”Footnote 30 Yet the priorities of his native policy are clear from the instructions he gave to his subordinate district officials. “The first duty” of colonial officials, Leutwein directed, “lay in the colonial enhancement of his district through the promotion of settlement; improvement of route, water, and grazing conditions … as well as the maintenance of political peace by means of proper treatment of the natives.”Footnote 31
“Proper” treatment of Indigenous communities could only be defined relative to the overarching goal of building a settlement colony. Leutwein understood how incompatible his concept of colonialism was with the existing modes of life for African groups, particularly the Herero, but he hoped to convince them to participate in a burgeoning cattle trade that would form the economic foundation of European settlement in the territory.Footnote 32 The problem for Leutwein was that the Herero preferred to build large herds rather than trade, and owned many cattle that, according to inheritance custom, could not be traded.Footnote 33 Thus, as John Noyes has noted, Leutwein saw Herero nomadic pastoralism as irrational (even as he acknowledged Herero cattle-breeding skill) and viewed his colonial policies as efforts to modernize agricultural practices in the colony toward a model that would supplant Herero pastoralism, even as colonists drew upon Herero experience and knowledge by—it was hoped—recruiting Herero as farm labor.Footnote 34
The basic contradiction between Herero priorities and colonial aims created an untenable situation for Leutwein's administration. Leutwein's concept of settler colonialism—much like the missionaries’ idea of conversion—required that the Herero stop living as Herero, yet the colonial government lacked the means to carry out such a far-reaching agenda early in Leutwein's tenure as governor. Leutwein also doubted the wisdom of attempting to force rapid social change upon the Herero. The picture of Leutwein's plans that emerges from the archival record reveals a hesitation to dispossess the Herero. Although he preferred to see Africans as laborers in the colony, he did not approach this task with great urgency and believed that, even as a population of laborers, the African communities in the colony would need to retain their traditional social organization and at least some of their lands. Leutwein looked to “the proletariat at home” in Germany as evidence that landlessness could not be equated with “dependable worker material.”Footnote 35 Nevertheless, if Leutwein could not fully draw the Herero into a colonial economy based on the cattle trade, he could still pursue his primary goal of fostering greater European settlement in the area of the colony best suited for it—Hereroland.Footnote 36
Colonial officials hoped to encourage settlement based on well-off Germans bringing their own funds to invest in the colony, but such an ideal remained elusive, prompting the government to offer limited subsidies to encourage settlement.Footnote 37 Moreover, to make settlement more appealing to Europeans, Leutwein needed to ensure that land would be available for settlement within a secure administrative and legal system, something that could be accomplished through negotiating border treaties in Hereroland.Footnote 38 In border negotiations, Leutwein made sure that the government took possession of any “unclaimed” land, a designation with no real meaning for the Herero, whose lands had never had fixed boundaries and who might keep some pastureland unused in case of drought.Footnote 39 This land could then be made available to settlers at affordable prices. But demarcating the borders of Herero territory not only gave Europeans more access to land; it also undermined Herero rulers’ authority and, by restricting land available, led to overcrowding and thus impoverishment and related deleterious social consequences in areas left over for the Herero.Footnote 40 In the struggle between the preservation of the Herero way of life and the dictates of settler colonialism, Leutwein had no illusions about which side should prevail. Leutwein acknowledged that colonialism—which included the very policies he pursued—was “inhumane” because “it must ultimately amount to an encroachment on the rights of the original inhabitants in favour of the intruders.”Footnote 41
Leutwein's approach to colonial encroachment on the Herero assumed gradual change. Thus, as Nils Oermann has noted, Leutwein valued Rhenish missionaries as potential intermediaries between the Herero and the colonial state, seeing them “as suitable mediators and ‘experts in native affairs.’”Footnote 42 For their part, the missionaries initially saw no fundamental contradiction between their goals for the Herero and the effects of Leutwein's native policy in Hereroland. On the contrary, Leutwein's attempt to integrate the Herero into an economic system organized around European ideas of rational economic behavior coincided with the missionaries’ goals of encouraging Herero settlement, farming, and artisanal forms of work. Moreover, the missionaries were willing to cooperate with Leutwein because a greater degree of German authority over the territory meant peace between the Herero and the Namaqua, who lived in the south of the colony and with whom the Herero had been at war intermittently for decades. In this sense, the Mission considered German colonial rule a safeguard for the stability and expansion of mission work. Conflicts between the missionaries and state officials thus took the shape of a rivalry over competing variations of settler colonialism. Missionaries contested the processes and ultimate ends of Herero displacement, but not the legitimacy of at least some displacement as an inevitable component of German colonialism in the territory. Under the right circumstances, colonial policies could promote the missionary endeavor. It was therefore no wonder that early in Leutwein's tenure as governor, the missionaries called his administration “a gift from our God.”Footnote 43
The Landfrage and the Missionary Project
The Rhenish Mission and the colonial state might have seemed like ideal partners in transforming Herero life because both treated Herero pastoralism as a major obstacle to realizing their goals in the colony. Yet despite early optimism about Leutwein's tenure as governor of Southwest Africa, deep fissures had appeared by the end of the century between missionaries and the colonial administration, and both sides soon clashed over what to do about Herero pastoralism, as well as over the place of the Herero in the growing settler colony. As the missionaries grew increasingly alarmed at encroaching settlement in Hereroland, they sought to influence colonial native policy in ways that would safeguard their plans for Herero life.
The immediate cause of the new strain between Mission and colony was the increasing loss of Herero land holdings to white settlers. The missionaries began, over time, to worry that the final end of colonization would be the complete alienation of the Herero from their lands. The emerging “Land Question” (Landfrage) resulted from both growing European settlement and the aftermath of a devastating Rinderpest epidemic in 1896 and 1897 that killed a staggering number of Herero cattle, forcing Herero leaders sell land or use it as collateral in transactions with European traders.Footnote 44 In this way, Rinderpest not only impoverished the Herero, but also transformed their relationship to the colonial project by crippling the basis of their self-sufficiency and reducing the amount of land available once their herds recovered.
Given the deep connection that had developed in missionary thinking among settlement, self-sufficiency, and Christian conversion, the Landfrage represented an existential threat to both the Herero and the missionary project. Herero who could not provide for themselves would “go to seed,” the Mission warned, and those without property would easily “form a proletariat that always creates a burden for others who still have something, and is a stain on the community.”Footnote 45 Even more ominously, spiritual degeneration followed social deterioration: “The desire to learn, and probably to pray as well, fades. One can no longer fulfill his duties to the community and to the children, and therefore he avoids the missionary.”Footnote 46 To the missionaries, then, changes in Herero landholding threatened to thwart Herero national conversion. Although the missionaries conceived of nomadism as antithetical to Christianization, Herero herds at least preserved their self-sufficiency. The Mission's long-term goal had been to put Herero self-sufficiency on a sedentary foundation, not to eliminate it altogether. Now, the rapid alienation of Herero land raised the possibility that the Herero eventually would be forced into a “bondage relationship, or at least a service relationship” to white employers in order to survive.Footnote 47 In addition, such a development threatened the viability of established mission stations wherever white settlement crowded out Herero landholdings.
The missionaries had only a few options at their disposal to counter the transfer of Herero lands. They tried pastoral exhortation to encourage Herero listeners to avoid the indebtedness that they identified as a root problem, yet it had little or no effect.Footnote 48 More ambitiously, they hoped to defuse the issue entirely by appealing to Leutwein to use his executive power to prevent further sales of Herero land to Europeans when those sales would put missionary interests at risk.Footnote 49 Leutwein, however, refused to impede these transfers, as they were entirely in keeping with his priorities. He desired as much land as possible to pass into the hands of settlers without completely destroying Herero society, having stated as early as 1895 that he believed the Herero needed to become eventually a “wage-earning people.”Footnote 50 Yet the destruction of Herero society was precisely what the missionaries believed they observed around them as Herero territory shrank steadily. The governor did give some indication of heeding missionary pleas when he issued an ordinance in 1899 restricting the practice of selling goods to Africans on credit and limiting the liability of Herero leaders or whole “tribes” for an individual Herero's debt, but he suspended it two months later after traders in Southwest Africa protested.Footnote 51 The Mission leadership concluded that Leutwein had succumbed to pressure from the white community in Southwest Africa to ignore the Herero when formulating colonial policy.Footnote 52 Likewise, the missionaries in the field complained that “despite some nice words, the government in fact accommodates our efforts to protect the natives from ruin only a little, but gladly gives its consent to the chiefs’ land sales to the whites.”Footnote 53
The Landfrage forced the missionaries to confront the fundamental incompatibility between their concept of Herero conversion and the logic of settler colonialism inherent in Leutwein's developing native policy. Leutwein's reluctance to hinder land sales should not have surprised the missionaries, yet they seem not to have anticipated the full extent of their vocation's incongruity with the agenda pursued by the colonial administration. To be sure, missionaries frequently complained about particular aspects of colonialism, especially the behavior of Europeans toward Africans, yet they did not oppose the legitimacy of Germany's colonial presence per se once it was an established fact.Footnote 54 After all, in pursuing their respective projects, missionaries and colonial officials shared the basic premise that Herero existence in the colony must be radically revised. Their ultimate purposes in promoting that transformation differed in meaningful ways, but both groups understood at least some degree of Herero displacement as a necessary part of settler colonialism. By the turn of the century, however, as it was becoming clear that Leutwein's native policy jeopardized their vision of Herero conversion, the missionaries looked to political intervention to promote a settler-colonial order that would remain hospitable to their objectives. In this way, the missionaries’ religious vocation became a relevant factor in the ongoing development of colonial policy.
In the face of Leutwein's unwillingness to use his executive authority to impede land transfers from Herero to white ownership, the Rhenish Mission leadership began urging its agents in Hereroland to pursue a bolder and more far-reaching strategy. They encouraged the missionaries to work to persuade Leutwein to allow the creation of reservations for the Herero, while the Mission's leaders pursued the same goal with the Colonial Department in Berlin.Footnote 55 In other words, rather than asking Leutwein to make case-by-case interventions in his native policy to safeguard Herero landholdings, the Mission sought to reshape native policy as such in a way that would favor its interests. Reservations of unalienable land would guarantee the stable political and social circumstances necessary for the missionaries to work toward the long-term goal of settling the Herero in agricultural communities. This would mean inscribing onto colonial policy the missionaries’ religious agenda and vision for the place of the Herero in the colony.
Negotiating Native Policy: Missionaries and “Native Reservations”
The Mission leaders proposed Herero reservations with some optimism because they were treading on somewhat familiar ground. The Mission and colonial administration had negotiated the formation of a reservation in the southern part of the colony for the Namaqua leader Hendrik Witbooi's people in 1897. Even to the colonial administration, reservations had been a theoretical possibility from early on in the protectorate's history, though the legal contours remained unformulated since the colonial state lacked the means to pursue such goals.Footnote 56 Officials showed interest in forming a reservation only when, during Leutwein's governorship, the missionary to Witbooi's group, Friedrich Schröder, began taking concrete steps in 1896 to acquire land from Witbooi that would be reserved for Witbooi's people to live on in perpetuity and in cooperation with the Rhenish Mission.Footnote 57 By that time, whites owned a significant amount of the land traditionally under Witbooi's control, either because parcels were sold or because members of Witbooi's group had used them as collateral for debts that could not be paid.Footnote 58
The colonial administration took an interest in Schröder's activities, and the reservation ultimately created at Rietmond-Kalkfontein was the result of protracted negotiations among Witbooi, the Rhenish Mission, and the colonial administration.Footnote 59 In the course of these negotiations, the German government formulated a legal instrument to guide the creation of reservations in the territory: the “Imperial Ordinance Regarding the Creation of Native Reservations in the Southwest African Protectorate.”Footnote 60 The Mission would have preferred to see reservation land under the control of the Mission Society, but the Imperial Ordinance recognized only the authority of the German government to create reservations and grant permission to settle on them.Footnote 61 The ordinance thus aimed to prevent the Rhenish Mission from acquiring so much land as to form the basis of what Leutwein termed “questions of power” between church and state.Footnote 62
The promulgation of the Imperial Ordinance on reservations and the conclusion of negotiations over the Witbooi reservation would seem to have created a precedent to resolve any future conflicts between the Mission and the German government over African landholdings. Yet the precedent's applicability in Hereroland was limited by differences between the two regions’ circumstances as well as differences in missionary attitudes toward the Namaqua and the Herero. Leutwein later recalled the creation of reservations in Namaland as easy in comparison to Hereroland because the Namaqua were, at that time, “cattle poor” and the population was smaller than that of the Herero.Footnote 63 Moreover, the reservation was created shortly after Germany's military defeat of the Witbooi, leaving Hendrik Witbooi with little leverage in negotiations. The situation in Hereroland, on the other hand, pitted settlers against the more numerous Herero with larger herds that were likely to grow as they recovered from Rinderpest, on some of the most desirable land in the protectorate. For its part, the Rhenish Mission's vision of Herero life in the colony differed from their hopes for the Namaqua, whose future they viewed with pessimism due to their smaller herds and tradition of cattle raiding.Footnote 64 Therefore, the Mission accepted that Namaqua reservations would provide for basic self-sustenance but otherwise operate as labor pools from which settlers could recruit workers.Footnote 65 By contrast, the Mission viewed the Herero, with their large cattle herds built through systematic breeding, as possessing an inner “vitality” that could ensure their survival in the colony as a self-sufficient people living in their own communities without depending on settlers for work.Footnote 66 Yet for the Herero to maintain any measure of economic self-sufficiency or social and political autonomy in a burgeoning settler colony required enough land for self-sustenance. The transition to sedentary agriculture would take time; the Mission believed that until then it was critical that the Herero keep enough land to continue raising cattle. Without self-sufficiency, the Herero would become “corrupted and degraded,” jeopardizing their national conversion.Footnote 67 In the context of a settler colony, however, linking moral anxieties and spiritual peril with land ownership created a problem. By framing its work among the Herero in this way, the Mission implied that missionaries required the cooperation of the colonial state in order to carry out their vocation in its fullest sense.
Given Leutwein's priorities, missionaries would have a difficult time convincing him or other personnel in the colonial administration to solve the Landfrage to the Mission's advantage. Yet the Mission's leaders believed that by applying pressure both in Berlin and Windhoek, the combined force of the Mission's appeals could persuade the administration—either Leutwein, or the Colonial Department, or both—that the missionaries were indispensable to the colony and that their plans for the Herero would serve the colony's greater good. To that end, Mission Inspector Schreiber corresponded and met with the director of the Colonial Department, Oskar Stübel, and other officials in Berlin. Schreiber admitted that the missionaries could have “no lasting influence over the natives … unless they gather communities on the reservations.”Footnote 68 Moreover, only unalienable reservation land would provide the Herero with the security to develop the infrastructure that would make sedentary life possible, particularly irrigation works.Footnote 69 Otherwise, the Herero would “go to rack and ruin.”Footnote 70 To Schreiber, what was at stake in the reservation discussions was nothing less than the place of Africans in a rapidly evolving settler-colonial order. Would the Herero be made a permanently dependent class in Southwest Africa, or was it not “better and more desirable … that they still should have, at least in part, an independent position and an independent use of the land on particular reservations”?Footnote 71 The Mission especially worried that landless African Christians would “be compelled to become servants of the whites.”Footnote 72
To the Mission, the solution to this brewing crisis was obvious: Schreiber insisted that only on reservations could missionaries train the Herero to be “useful citizens” (brauchbaren Bürgern).Footnote 73 Schreiber's language must have struck officials in Berlin as strange. George Steinmetz has noted that in Southwest Africa, Indigenous people “were referred to as subjects (Untertanen) but never as citizens (Bürger).”Footnote 74 Certainly, the nature of the settler-colonial project that the colonial administration sought to implement provided no room for any concept of African citizenship. Yet in light of the Mission's ultimate objectives for the Herero, the only mode of settler colonialism within which missionaries could pursue their vocation in a meaningful way was one that permitted the Herero to be politically subordinate to German authority without becoming an abject underclass permanently at the service of settlers. Disagreements between the Mission and colonial authorities over the Landfrage thus revealed opposing assumptions about the nature and purpose of the German presence in Southwest Africa. Extracting concessions for missionary goals in this matter would therefore require sustained and difficult negotiation.
Although the Mission leadership appealed to officials in Berlin, the missionaries in Hereroland continued to petition the government in Windhoek to place particularly valuable Herero landholdings beyond the reach of white colonists. For example, at the relatively well-watered station of Waterberg, missionary Wilhelm Eich worried that increasing settlement would bring “a lot of foreign elements to the land … of whom many will exert no good influence over the natives.”Footnote 75 Hoping to stave off potential problems, he worked to encourage as much crop agriculture as the local station would support and arranged a contract in 1899 with the local Herero leader, Kambazembi, that would secure all the irrigable land for the Christian community there and administer its use.Footnote 76 His efforts at promoting crop raising earned the praise of the local divisional commander, Lt. Eggers, who called the Herero plots the best African gardens he had ever seen.Footnote 77 Yet Eich's attempt to set aside the most useful land as the Christian Herero community's communal property would limit the possibility of white settlement there, so Eggers withheld his endorsement for government approval of Eich's contract with Kambazembi, seeing it as “impossible” to reconcile it with the interests of colonialism.Footnote 78 Moreover, he suggested that Eich's contract seemed “to have in mind a kind of little church-state (Kirchenstaat) as an ideal,” whose purpose was to “limit as much as possible” white settlement there.Footnote 79 Eggers therefore advised that the colonial government modify the contract so that it would grant the administration the right to intervene in water distribution and would include fewer restrictions on white settlement.Footnote 80
Eich's difficulties with Eggers illustrate a key challenge confronting the Mission and its agents in Hereroland: convincing colonial officials, particularly at the local level, to support the idea of designating valuable land for perpetual African ownership in a purported settler colony was bound to face opposition. Eggers may have admired Eich's efforts at Waterberg, but his support could not extend beyond his mandate to cultivate the right conditions for European settlement. Some local officials, such as 1st Lt. Erckert, whose discussion with missionary Dannert opened this article, vociferously opposed any compromises with Mission priorities. Still other local officials may have seemed amenable to missionary designs, but ultimately would not betray their higher priority of encouraging settlement. For example, in early 1902, Mission Inspector Schreiber requested that Director Stübel consult with two local colonial officials in Berlin at the time, 1st Lt. Volkmann and 1st Lt. Kuhn, confident that the two would confirm the Mission's fears about diminishing Herero landholdings.Footnote 81 Instead, they both advised that the time for creating Herero reservations was “still a long way off.”Footnote 82 As it was, Kuhn complained, nearly half of the land in Southwest Africa was in the hands of “indolent” Africans who did not “utilize” it properly; to acquiesce to the missionaries’ desires would be tantamount to leaving “our land” in “a kind of straightjacket.”Footnote 83
Like his subordinates Kuhn and Volkmann, Leutwein dismissed missionary concerns when reporting to the Colonial Department, telling them that the missionaries’ fears were “unfounded.”Footnote 84 Moreover, as governor he guarded his prerogatives carefully and speculated that the Rhenish Mission's call for reservations also hid an agenda to secure its economic interests in the colony “for all time.”Footnote 85 Leutwein had long been concerned that Mission-owned land was tantamount to valuable property left in the “dead hand,” an idea that recalled older conflicts between church and state and the secularization of ecclesiastical landholdings.Footnote 86 Between worries about an overly powerful Mission in the colony, his opinion that the Herero possessed enough land to meet their needs for the time being, and his desire that the Herero become in time a colonial workforce, Leutwein had ample reason to profess himself “not particularly sympathetic” to the missionaries’ appeals.Footnote 87
Nevertheless, constant pressure from the Mission in the form of appeals and petitions continued. Leutwein complained of the “in some cases too excessive requests” from the missionaries that were unlikely to abate without some type of policy accommodation.Footnote 88 Compounding the pressure on Leutwein, the Mission leadership kept up steady advocacy for reservations in Berlin as well, even in the face of repeated demurrals. Finally, the strategy began to pay off. In light of the continuous appeals, Leutwein acknowledged to the Colonial Department that adopting a “gruff standpoint” toward the Mission would risk alienating it and would thus work against the colonial government's own interests.Footnote 89 As he saw it, the government could neither “categorically satisfy the Mission's sometimes quite broad demands, nor categorically refuse every proposal for the creation of reservations.”Footnote 90
By 1901, Leutwein had concluded that an acceptable compromise required taking a “middle position” that would consider each Mission proposal on a case-by-case basis, with “the Governor's viewpoint to be considered decisive.”Footnote 91 With the door to creating reservations now opened, even if only barely, Schreiber proposed five specific locations to Stübel that he argued were in urgent need of such a designation.Footnote 92 The Colonial Department instructed Leutwein to identify areas for future consideration as Herero reservations and to deny land sales to whites within them.Footnote 93 Thus, in response to steady Mission pressure, Southwest African native policy in Hereroland began to move in the direction of allocating land for inalienable reservations.
When it came to settling the precise locations and boundaries of proposed reservations, however, much of the Mission's enthusiasm over its initial gains soon began to cool. Both in Southwest Africa and in Berlin, colonial officials worked to limit missionary influence over locating reservations and setting their boundaries. In November 1902, Inspector Schreiber met in Berlin with Director Stübel, legation councilor Dr. Angelo Golinelli, and Governor Leutwein to discuss the creation of the reservations.Footnote 94 The negotiations hinged on the question of whether reservations were needed immediately or if their creation could be delayed. Golinelli favored a system in which local officials identified potential reservation sites, and the governor simply refused to grant permission for land sales in those areas, an arrangement that prioritized the future development of the colony, which was difficult to predict and could be stymied by placing land off limits to settlement before absolutely necessary.Footnote 95 Schreiber signaled his agreement with such a plan in principle, but argued that in at least one location, Otjimbingue, a true reservation as allowed for in the 1898 Imperial Ordinance Regarding the Creation of Reservations was in fact urgently necessary.Footnote 96 Leutwein, the decisive voice in the matter, kept to his middle way of compromise and agreed that a reservation at Otjimbingue should be created, its boundaries settled by the resident divisional official and the local missionary, but that elsewhere in Herero territory commissions would identify potential areas for future reservations in which he would allow land sales only “in urgently exceptional cases.”Footnote 97
By keeping the decision-making over the locations and sizes of Herero reservations local, Leutwein continued his policy of maintaining maximum latitude for himself over binding policy decisions. Even so, guaranteeing the possibility of Herero reservations created a valuable opportunity for the Mission to create space within native policy for its vocational imperatives. At the same time, however, Leutwein's policy left crucial details over reservation locations and boundaries—and therefore their ultimate worth as African landholdings ostensibly meant to ensure self-sufficiency—to be determined through contentious negotiation between missionaries and local officials who might be unsympathetic to missionary goals. Land allocation, which had become a critical feature of both native policy and the missionary project, became the subject of local friction between missionaries and representatives of the colonial government, with Leutwein's priority of maximizing settlement as less a clear directive than a kind of implicit guide for like-minded local officials. The result was a situation in which missionaries and local officials negotiated the evolving place of the Herero in the colony without significant input from Herero leaders, though the missionaries appealed to their wishes or complaints when they felt it would lend weight to their arguments.
Using local tools such as officials’ assessments, committees, and the governor's prerogative allowed Leutwein to whittle away at missionary demands in order to create compromises that would not hinder settlement. Again, the case of Kambazembi's people at Waterberg is instructive. Missionary Eich had originally sought approval for all irrigable land at Waterberg, given through a deed of donation from Kambazembi to the local Herero Christian community, so that the mission could train them in the “rational utilization of the land.”Footnote 98 However, resistance to such an expansive donation from both the local divisional commander and Leutwein led to protracted discussions involving Leutwein, local officials, Eich, and the superintendent of the Herero missionaries that dragged on over the following year. Leutwein was willing to consider reserving a more extensive land parcel for the Herero at the nearby mission substation of Otjenga, but Eich's first priority was clearly to obtain as much as possible of the rich irrigable land at Waterberg.Footnote 99 In the end, the Mission had to settle for requesting that a reduced parcel of land at Waterberg amounting to only twenty hectares be reserved for the community, which satisfied the colonial government because it allowed opportunities for European settlement.Footnote 100 As the divisional commander at Okahandja put it, with plenty of land still available for whites, “We can calmly toss [the Mission] this chunk from the rich table of the Hereros, which never even belonged to us in the first place.”Footnote 101
Having succeeded in pressing the reservation issue to the point of action, the Mission found that its influence over the ultimate results was limited given the colonial government outmaneuvered missionaries. Even before his meeting with Schreiber and the Colonial Department in Berlin, Leutwein had set the tone by warning officials to expect “inordinate demands” from the missionaries and emphasized that the missionaries had “nothing to do with” the actual creation of the prospective reservations, even if they obtained “certain rights” within them.Footnote 102 Some officials proceeded with little or no regard for Herero or missionary input. Missionary Diehl reported from Okahandja that the local Herero leaders were unhappy with the land designated for them, which was “not at all good and valuable.”Footnote 103 He suggested that it followed from standard procedure in the colony, where “for the blacks, anything is good enough.”Footnote 104 Herero leaders’ opposition hardly mattered; the colonial official at Okahandja, Lieutenant Zürn, was able to threaten and pressure them into agreeing to the reservation's boundaries.Footnote 105
Missionaries had ample reason to complain that the colonial government gave “absolutely no consideration” to the needs of the Herero or the missionaries and thus seemed poised to allow all the best land to be sold, leaving only land that was “useless and worthless” for Herero reservations.Footnote 106 Nevertheless, they remained involved in the process of working on boundary-setting commissions and making recommendations in order to ensure that Herero groups would retain at least some useful territory. They did so because acceptable compromises were possible in some cases. For example, at Otjimbingue, the sole reservation fully established before war broke out in 1904 (the other locations remained hypothetical “paper reservations”), missionary Olpp reached an agreement with 1st Lt. Kuhn over the location of the reservations by settling for less than satisfactory boundaries in exchange for promised help in developing water wells on the reservation.Footnote 107 By the eve of the Colonial War, missionaries had managed to entrench themselves and their agenda within the process of developing Herero reservations to the extent that, in Hereroland, missionary participation was essential to working out native policy in practice. In this way, missionaries were negotiating compromises with colonial officials that shaped the ongoing development of settler colonialism in Hereroland. Nevertheless, missionaries remained frustrated by the limits to their successes; ultimately, they could not control as well as they had hoped this aspect of native policy for which they had lobbied so energetically.
Conclusion
Not only did the missionaries have to concede important parts of reservation building to colonial officials, but the process of implementing this policy also increased tensions between the German government and the Herero in ways that contributed to the outbreak of war in 1904. Jan-Bart Gewald has argued compellingly that Lt. Zürn's paranoid miscalculations in early 1904 led to Germans instigating the conflict.Footnote 108 In his telling, the war resulted in large part from a combination of settler frustrations over the emerging reservation policy and Zürn's duplicitous dealing over the borders of the Waterberg and Okahandja reservations. By restricting some Herero land sales in particular areas, the reservation policy reduced the amount of inexpensive land available to settlers, stoking their anger, while Zürn's “troubled conscience” over his treatment of local Herero leaders primed him to expect an armed uprising and provoked Germans to fire the first shots where he was stationed, in Okahandja.Footnote 109 In this sense, although the reservation policy did not directly cause the war, its formulation and implementation created additional friction in circumstances already simmering with hostility and frustration. In other words, the policy championed by the missionaries that was meant to ensure Herero self-sufficiency and to limit contact with and dependence on settler society instead helped to escalate local tensions that culminated in a genocidal war against the Herero.
The missionaries were at work on reservation negotiations until the outbreak of war in January 1904. The war changed everything, and by the following month, it was determined that the only reservation yet established at that time, at Ojimbingue, would be repealed.Footnote 110 Later that spring Leutwein made it clear that the valuable land the missionaries had hoped to set aside for exclusive Herero use could “no longer be left exclusively for the natives.”Footnote 111 The gains that missionaries had begun to make on the reservation issue after years of frustrating advocacy and painstaking negotiation evaporated overnight, interrupting the trajectory of their plans and altering the nature of mission work among the Herero. Germany's genocidal war against the Herero nullified the possibility that the Herero would retain the right to live in their own self-sufficient communities on reservations, and so the Hereroland missionaries’ vocation, having been so intertwined with that goal, also was forced to evolve in response to irrevocably changed circumstances. Turning back from their earlier agenda, the Hereroland missionaries would come to see their work as bound up with the task of integrating the Herero into a colonial order that treated them as a workforce to be held under strict social control. Even before the Colonial War was over, the missionaries concluded that the best prospects for converting the Herero would be to minister to them wherever they worked as laborers for settlers and the colonial state.Footnote 112
It was not just the missionaries’ reservation project that collapsed with the outbreak of war. Leutwein's native policy, along with his tenure as governor, soon expired. Because Leutwein was unable to win a decisive military victory over the Herero within a few months, Emperor Wilhelm II appointed Lt. Gen. Lothar von Trotha to take command in Southwest Africa over both military affairs and civilian policy.Footnote 113 With Trotha's arrival in June, when he declared martial law, Leutwein's stature was reduced to that of Trotha's subordinate head of the civilian administration; after Leutwein's departure for Germany in November, Trotha took his place as acting governor.Footnote 114 Trotha's military priorities combined in a violent mixture with his notion of the war as a racial conflict that must result in the total destruction of one or the other side.Footnote 115 One predictable result of Trotha's appointment was his abandonment of Leutwein's native policy. Although Trotha was eventually recalled and Southwest Africa returned to civilian leadership, the situation in German Southwest Africa, and particularly in the territory of the Herero, had changed irrevocably. With the Herero decimated by war and genocide, the way was open for the colonial government to take over Herero lands and to implement an intrusive system of monitoring to control Herero settlement, movement, and employment, thus realizing a particularly ruthless manifestation of settler colonialism.Footnote 116 Leutwein's policy goal, to be sure, had always been for the Herero to transition into a labor supply for the colony. Yet he had been willing to compromise with the missionaries, whose proposals had represented an alternative settler-colonial order, one whose organizing principles were not restricted to the exploitation of African labor, but instead made room for self-sufficient African settlements. After the war, however, Leutwein's search for an elusive middle way was discarded in favor of a rapid and compelled mobilization of the Herero as a colonial workforce.
The Colonial War ruptured the trajectories of both the missionary project and the colonial state's endeavor, even as their overlapping agendas helped create the conditions that led to violence. The contrast between pre- and postwar native policy reveals the extent to which the nature of settler colonialism prior to 1904 was more fluid than afterward, as the policies governing how colonialism functioned in Hereroland responded to pressure from multiple state and nonstate sources, with missionaries figuring prominently among those who helped to shape how the Herero were to fit into the evolving settler-colonial order. To return to Lt. Erckert's question to Dannert, which opened this article, it turned out that during the crucial early years of Germany's foray into settler colonialism in Southwest Africa, Christianity had plenty to do with colonial policy. The conflict and negotiation between the missionaries and the colonial administration over Herero reservations demonstrates how, during periods of limited colonial control over Indigenous populations, mission societies and their agents could use their unique positions as those Europeans most closely connected to African groups and as liaisons between colonial officials and Africans to influence the formation of colonial policies according to their own agendas. In this way, missionaries and mission societies had the power to help shape the development of colonialism in ways that reflected their vocational priorities. Yet, as with so many projects and endeavors in colonial contexts, missionary attempts to control how the Herero encountered colonialism led to unforeseen and unintended consequences, which included helping to generate a conflict that, in the end, crippled the Mission's ability to continue to influence colonialism in favor of its religious goals.
