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Author: Michelle Renee Moyd Publisher: ISBN: 9780549838203 Category : Languages : en Pages : 362
Book Description
Based on archival research in Tanzania, Germany, and the United Kingdom, this dissertation examines the social and cultural history of African soldiers who fought in the German colonial army (Schutztruppe) in East Africa between 1890 and 1918. These soldiers, known as askari, carried out the work of securing and defending Germany's colonial rule in East Africa. The askari were thus indispensable to German colonial military and civilian authorities, who repeatedly emphasized askari loyalty as servants of the German regime. In contrast, African civilians who experienced the askaris' violent and coercive methods most directly viewed them as the blunt instruments of colonial rule. However, neither of these standard characterizations adequately explain askari involvement in German colonialism. Instead, my work shows that the askari joined the Schutztruppe because it offered a blend of privileges and status markers that appealed to them as men aspiring to live honorable lives as professional soldiers, householders, and community leaders. In this sense, the askari viewed German colonial officials as patrons with specific obligations to fulfill in exchange for the askaris' continued service. The relationship between the askari and their German officers was based on a kind of mutual respect, but often was also fraught with inherent tensions because of German racist attitudes, as well as German officers' occasional unwillingness to fulfill their obligations as patrons. These tensions notwithstanding, I show that individual askari interests merged synergistically with those of German colonial administrators to generate channels of power that resulted in state control of German East Africa. Although this control was far from total, it nevertheless had profound consequences for the African communities who experienced it. This dissertation thus contributes to a more complicated understanding of the everyday functioning of the colonial state through its intermediary agents, in this case, the askari.
Author: Michelle Renee Moyd Publisher: ISBN: 9780549838203 Category : Languages : en Pages : 362
Book Description
Based on archival research in Tanzania, Germany, and the United Kingdom, this dissertation examines the social and cultural history of African soldiers who fought in the German colonial army (Schutztruppe) in East Africa between 1890 and 1918. These soldiers, known as askari, carried out the work of securing and defending Germany's colonial rule in East Africa. The askari were thus indispensable to German colonial military and civilian authorities, who repeatedly emphasized askari loyalty as servants of the German regime. In contrast, African civilians who experienced the askaris' violent and coercive methods most directly viewed them as the blunt instruments of colonial rule. However, neither of these standard characterizations adequately explain askari involvement in German colonialism. Instead, my work shows that the askari joined the Schutztruppe because it offered a blend of privileges and status markers that appealed to them as men aspiring to live honorable lives as professional soldiers, householders, and community leaders. In this sense, the askari viewed German colonial officials as patrons with specific obligations to fulfill in exchange for the askaris' continued service. The relationship between the askari and their German officers was based on a kind of mutual respect, but often was also fraught with inherent tensions because of German racist attitudes, as well as German officers' occasional unwillingness to fulfill their obligations as patrons. These tensions notwithstanding, I show that individual askari interests merged synergistically with those of German colonial administrators to generate channels of power that resulted in state control of German East Africa. Although this control was far from total, it nevertheless had profound consequences for the African communities who experienced it. This dissertation thus contributes to a more complicated understanding of the everyday functioning of the colonial state through its intermediary agents, in this case, the askari.
Author: Michelle Renée Moyd Publisher: ISBN: Category : Africa, East Languages : en Pages : 26
Book Description
"[The author explores] the social and cultural history of the Schutztruppe askari in East Africa ... emphasiz[ing] the process of "becoming askari" by tracing their self-understandings, from their pre-colonial origins to the Schutztruppe experiences, assembling impressions of who they thought they were, and what they thought they were doing as they went about the everyday business of being professional soldiers and 'colonial intermediaries.' They fought the colonial wars that made it possible for Germany to claim a portion of East Africa as German territory. In addition though, in their everyday activities as police, guards, messengers, ceremonial representatives, and tax collectors, they performed intermediary roles that contributed to their becoming askari, as well as to functioning of the colonial state of German East Africa. They were both wielders and subjects of colonial power and violence, and their self-understandings were shaped by a dynamic process that blended attributes and skills gained from their specific African social histories and military heritages with German military values and racial understandings"--P. 4-5.
Author: Michelle R. Moyd Publisher: Ohio University Press ISBN: 0821444875 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 351
Book Description
The askari, African soldiers recruited in the 1890s to fill the ranks of the German East African colonial army, occupy a unique space at the intersection of East African history, German colonial history, and military history. Lauded by Germans for their loyalty during the East Africa campaign of World War I, but reviled by Tanzanians for the violence they committed during the making of the colonial state between 1890 and 1918, the askari have been poorly understood as historical agents. Violent Intermediaries situates them in their everyday household, community, military, and constabulary roles, as men who helped make colonialism in German East Africa. By linking microhistories with wider nineteenth-century African historical processes, Michelle Moyd shows how as soldiers and colonial intermediaries, the askari built the colonial state while simultaneously carving out paths to respectability, becoming men of influence within their local contexts. Through its focus on the making of empire from the ground up, Violent Intermediaries offers a fresh perspective on African colonial troops as state-making agents and critiques the mythologies surrounding the askari by focusing on the nature of colonial violence.
Author: Santanu Das Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107782481 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
This volume brings together an international cast of scholars from a variety of fields to examine the racial and colonial aspects of the First World War, and show how issues of race and empire shaped its literature and culture. The global nature of the First World War is fast becoming the focus of intense enquiry. This book analyses European discourses about colonial participation and recovers the war experience of different racial, ethnic and national groups, including the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians, Maori, West Africans and Jamaicans. It also investigates testimonial and literary writings, from war diaries and nursing memoirs to Irish, New Zealand and African American literature, and analyses processes of memory and commemoration in the former colonies and dominions. Drawing upon archival, literary and visual material, the book provides a compelling account of the conflict's reverberations in Europe and its empires and reclaims the multiracial dimensions of war memory.
Author: Nina Berman Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472119125 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 357
Book Description
The first collection of interdisciplinary and comparative studies focusing on diverse interactions among African, Asian, and Oceanic peoples and German colonizers
Author: Willeke Sandler Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190697911 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 361
Book Description
With the end of the First World War, Germany became a "post-colonial" power. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 transformed Germany's overseas colonies in Africa and the Pacific into League of Nations Mandates, administered by other powers. Yet a number of Germans rejected this "post-colonial" status, arguing instead that Germany was simply an interrupted colonial power and would soon reclaim these territories. With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, irredentism seemed once again on the agenda, and these colonialist advocates actively and loudly promoted their colonial cause in the Third Reich. Examining the domestic activities of these colonialist lobbying organizations, Empire in the Heimat demonstrates the continued place of overseas colonialism in shaping German national identity after the end of formal empire. In the Third Reich, the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft and the Reichskolonialbund framed Germans as having a particular aptitude for colonialism and the overseas territories as a German Heimat. As such, they sought to give overseas colonialism renewed meaning for both the present and the future of Nazi Germany. They brought this message to the German public through countless publications, exhibitions, rallies, lectures, photographs, and posters. Their public activities were met with a mix of occasional support, ambivalence, or even outright opposition from some Nazi officials, who privileged the Nazi regime's European territorial goals over colonialists' overseas goals. Colonialists' ability to navigate this obstruction and intervention reveals both the limitations and the spaces available in the public sphere under Nazism for such "special interest" discourses.
Author: David Brock Katz Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers ISBN: 1776192311 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 394
Book Description
'An engaging, well-written and meticulously researched military biography ...' – Tim Stapleton, Professor, Department of History, University of Calgary Jan Smuts grabbed the opportunity to realise his ambition of a Greater South Africa when the First World War ushered in a final scramble for Africa. He set his sights firmly northward upon the German colonies of South West Africa and East Africa. Smuts's abilities as a general have been much denigrated by his contemporaries and later historians, but he was no armchair soldier. He first learned his soldier's craft under General Koos de la Rey and General Louis Botha during the South African War (1899−1902). He emerged from that conflict immersed in Boer manoeuvre doctrine. After forming the Union Defence Force in 1912, Smuts played an integral part in the German South West African campaign in 1915. Placed in command of the Allied forces in East Africa in 1916, he led a mixed bag of South Africans and imperial troops against the legendary Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his Schutztruppen. His penchant for manoeuvre warfare and mounted infantry freed most of the vast German territory from Lettow-Vorbeck's grip. General Jan Smuts and his First World War in Africa provides a long-overdue reassessment of Smuts's generalship and his role in furthering the strategic aims of South Africa and the British Empire during this era.
Author: David Boucher Publisher: UJ Press ISBN: 1776489683 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 436
Book Description
In this book, the authors cover both familiar and unfamiliar themes. One of the principal themes running throughout the book addresses head-on the deficiency in the literature highlighted by Saul Dubow, namely, the question of racism and Smuts’s reluctance to implement ‘native’ policies that may have averted future problems, rather than postpone them. We see throughout, a gap between the rhetoric and policy, and between policy and practice in its implementation. Amongst the familiar themes that are reappraised, are Smuts’s successes and failures in policies and leadership, domestically and internationally. ‘This wide-ranging volume re-evaluates myriad aspects of Smuts’ life, philosophy, political career and legacy. An important and timely book exploring one of South Africa’s most consequential and controversial leaders.’ Luc-Andre Brunet – Contemporary International History, The Open University. The book is a great contribution to South African cultural and social history. With the military element covered in other publications, the editors and authors have focussed on the less well-trodden aspects of Smuts’s history including but not limited to discussions on the atomic bomb, counter-revolution, film, early cabinets, racialism, trusteeship, ‘greatness’, political philosophy, racial segregation, and myth-making. The editors have skilfully continued the longer political discussion, reflecting on the myth and legacy of a prominent South African - Smuts. Antonio Garcia, Stellenbosch University, coauthor of Botha, Smuts and the First World War, co-founder Underground Strategy.
Author: David Ciarlo Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674059239 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 438
Book Description
At the end of the nineteenth century, Germany turned toward colonialism, establishing protectorates in Africa, and toward a mass consumer society, mapping the meaning of commodities through advertising. These developments, distinct in the world of political economy, were intertwined in the world of visual culture. David Ciarlo offers an innovative visual history of each of these transformations. Tracing commercial imagery across different products and media, Ciarlo shows how and why the “African native” had emerged by 1900 to become a familiar figure in the German landscape, selling everything from soap to shirts to coffee. The racialization of black figures, first associated with the American minstrel shows that toured Germany, found ever greater purchase in German advertising up to and after 1905, when Germany waged war against the Herero in Southwest Africa. The new reach of advertising not only expanded the domestic audience for German colonialism, but transformed colonialism’s political and cultural meaning as well, by infusing it with a simplified racial cast. The visual realm shaped the worldview of the colonial rulers, illuminated the importance of commodities, and in the process, drew a path to German modernity. The powerful vision of racial difference at the core of this modernity would have profound consequences for the future.
Author: Wayne E. Lee Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1479842214 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
An expanded edition of the leading text on military history and the role of culture on the battlefield Ideas matter in warfare. Guns may kill, but ideas determine when, where, and how they are used. Traditionally, military historians attempted to explain the ideas behind warfare in strictly rational terms, but over the past few decades, a stronger focus has been placed on how societies conceptualize war, weapons, violence, and military service, to determine how culture informs the battlefield. Warfare and Culture in World History, Second Edition, is a collection of some of the most compelling recent efforts to analyze warfare through a cultural lens. These curated essays draw on, and aggressively expand, traditional scholarship on war and society through sophisticated cultural analysis. Chapters range from an organizational analysis of American Civil War field armies, to an exploration of military culture in late Republican Rome, to debates within Ming Chinese officialdom over extermination versus pacification. In addition to a revised and expanded introduction, the second edition of Warfare and Culture in World History now adds new chapters on the role of herding in shaping Mongol strategies, Spanish military culture and its effects on the conquest of the New World, and the blending of German and East African military cultures among the Africans who served in the German colonial army. This volume provides a full range of case studies of how culture, whether societal, strategic, organizational, or military, could shape not only military institutions but also actual battlefield choices.
Author: Michelle Renee Moyd
Author: Michelle Renee Moyd
Author: Michelle Renée Moyd
Author: Michelle R. Moyd
Author: Santanu Das
Author: Nina Berman
Author: Willeke Sandler
Author: David Brock Katz
Author: David Boucher
Author: David Ciarlo
Author: Wayne E. Lee