In this engaging, wide-ranging book, Andrew Zimmerman magnifies a peculiar and fascinating episode in colonial history – the enlistment of African American educators by German imperialists to teach cotton cultivation to Togolese farmers – in order to expound on labor, race, and sexuality in the Atlantic World of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He illustrates how economic, political, and academic trends in Germany's East and America's South revealed themselves in the Tuskegee Expedition in West Africa. Ultimately, Zimmerman argues that the American New South became a model for what he terms a Global South, but the resistance of Polish peasants, African American sharecroppers, and the Togolese themselves frustrated capitalist efforts to control free labor.
The book begins with an overview of the New South, where recently emancipated African Americans equated land with freedom, and whites attempted to deny them both. The infamous ‘Negro Question’ concerned not only white elites determined to perpetuate the cotton economy but also German and American sociologists. A parallel situation existed in the German East, where former Polish serfs employed as seasonal workers in agriculture enjoyed a degree of economic and social independence. As the German imperial government pursued a policy of ‘internal colonization’ to prevent ‘Polonization’, German social scientists studied New South sharecropping as a model of social control. Zimmerman reconstructs the formation of the ensuing ‘transatlantic science’, linking German and American sociologists (the latter based primarily at the University of Chicago) and the African American leader Booker T. Washington. Relations between German and American academics and political figures and Washington's Tuskegee Institute were extensive, long-lasting, and mutually beneficial, and ultimately translated into the Togo experiment.
Togo specialists have offered the Tuskegee Expedition as an example of economic development in Germany's so-called model colony, while African American historians have interpreted it as an early form of Pan-African developmental assistance. Zimmerman situates the expedition more broadly in the economic, political, and intellectual contexts of the Atlantic world. The author demonstrates that the point of the expedition was not only to introduce a new type of cotton and foreign agricultural techniques to the colony but, more importantly, to replicate the stereotyped, docile, hardworking ‘negro’ of the American South in Togo. Local marriage and family arrangements, which encouraged the relative economic independence of women and a migratory kind of commerce, were not conducive to colonial labor demands. Therefore, German imperialists, like their white American South counterparts, strove to create patriarchal, monogamous families working small farms primarily dedicated to cotton cultivation.
In January 1901, in the aftermath of roughly a decade of German military campaigns to occupy central Togo, four Tuskegee men arrived in the colony to establish an experimental cotton farm in Tove. One of these men, John W. Robinson, later opened a cotton school in Notsé in 1904. All of the students were men who were forced (with only a few exceptions) to attend the school for three years and required to return to their home districts upon graduation to set up a family farm. In 1909, Robinson left Notsé to create a second school farther north, but he died in a drowning accident, and Tuskegee's direct role in German Togo came to an end, although the Notsé school and the Tove farm remain in operation as agricultural research stations in present-day Togo.
The Germans lost their African colonies during the First World War, after which the League of Nations mandated that Togo be divided between the British and the French. Zimmerman extends the story of the Tuskegee Expedition in two ways. First, he shows how the New South system of sharecropping and segregation, backed by Washington's program of industrial education, became a model for colonial rule in Africa. While Germany's imperial rivals now criticized the ‘model colony’ reputation of Togo, they continued to admire the perceived success and promise of the Tuskegee Expedition.
Second, Zimmerman examines reinterpretations of and challenges to the Global South, particularly in the interwar period. The Soviet Union presented an alternative to capitalism, communist parties championed the liberation of exploited peoples, and ‘new political alliances and new sciences’ confronted the racism and oppression of colonialism. Despite these political and ideological advances, the author proposes that the colonial-era Global South model survives today in the form of neo-colonialism, of which, for example, ‘cotton cultivation has been one of the most effective foundations’ (p. 248).
A specialist in German intellectual history, Zimmerman has grappled with the literature of many divergent fields and consulted archives from Berlin to Tuskegee to Lomé to produce this masterly study. In the hands of a less skilled historian, the analysis would have been lopsided, but Zimmerman contextualizes and interprets every subplot of this intriguing story. Alabama in Africa is a history of paradoxes, ideas, and legacies but ultimately it is a testament to anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and self-emancipatory struggles in the age of globalization.
