Kaiser's Holocaust (38 page)

As scientific racial theories began to shape attitudes in the colonies, the debate about racial mixing focused on fears that black blood would seep into the white population itself. Racial purity became an issue that weighed heavily upon the shoulders of the officials of South-West Africa and colonialist agitators back in Germany. The magazine
Kolonie und Heimat
argued that the imperative task facing the captains of the colonial project was that of ‘keeping our races abroad clean’.

The fight against racial pollution in South-West Africa was enthusiastically led by Deputy Governor Oskar Hintrager, a fanatical white supremacist. In September 1905 Hintrager, working closely with Hans Tecklenburg, the former Deputy Governor under von Trotha, passed an edict banning the colony’s marriage registry officials from officiating at mixed marriages. In 1907 the High Court in Windhoek nullified all existing marriages between Whites and Africans. The presiding judge also ruled that that once a bloodline had been ‘contaminated’ with black blood, nothing could change the status of subsequent generations. African blood was regarded as such a powerful pollutant that those infected by it were permanently excluded from the white race.

When left-leaning deputies in the Reichstag complained about the racial laws in German South-West Africa, the colonists openly compared themselves to the former Confederate States of the US and to the Boers, who had rebelled against British attempts to impose liberal racial laws on them.

In March 1907 Dr Angelo Golinelli of the Colonial Department redrafted Paragraph 17f of the Colonial Home Rule Act, allowing men who maintained relationships with Africans to be disenfranchised. Settlers with black or mixed-race wives were also officially barred from receiving government allowances, or loans to help them buy and equip new farms or make improvements to existing plots.

Irrespective of how many years a couple had been married, the number of children they had, or the past record of the settler in civic life or military service, men with mixed-race families were expected to abandon them in the name of racial purity. Those who refused were banished socially and economically from white colonial society.

In May 1912, in the tradition of his predecessor, Governor Seitz passed his own Race Law. Seitz’s decree required the registration of all mixed-race children at birth. It also provided the legal foundations for the forcible break-up of mixed-race families. The decree stated that ‘If the cohabitation of a non-native man with a native woman becomes a source of public annoyance, the police may require the parties to separate and, if this does not happen within a specified time, may compel such a separation.’
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The racial laws pioneered in German South-West Africa became the model for racial legislation in other German colonies. Similar laws were passed in German East Africa in 1906 and Togo in 1908. In Germany’s colony in Samoa, Secretary of State Wilhelm Solf personally intervened to ban interracial marriage in 1912, despite generations of racial mixing. In Berlin in 1905 there was even talk of a ban on interracial marriage, based on the German South-West African laws, being introduced in Germany itself. Although the law was not passed, the few mixed-race people who lived or had been born in Wilhelmian Germany were not permitted the status of citizenship.

The racial legislation pioneered in German South-West Africa propelled the issue of racial mixing out of the colonies and into Germany itself. A series of colonial debates held in the Reichstag between 1905 and 1912 were reported in the newspapers and discussed at length in the publications of the various colonial societies, and an entire lexicon of quasi-legal and pseudo-scientific terminology, much of it used in German South-West Africa, was introduced. Terms such as
Rassenmischung
(race mixing),
Rassenreinheit
(racial purity), Rassenschande (racial shame),
Mischlinge
(people of mixed-race) and
die Mischlingefrage
(the mixed-race question) seeped into the language. This terminology
created the foundations of an increasingly biological understanding of race and racial mixing. It flowed into the much older discourse on the place of the Jews in German society and their supposed inferiority to ethnic Germans.

Not only was German South-West Africa the colony in which racial laws and new racial categories were pioneered, it also became the field-laboratory of German racial scientists. In the years after the Herero and Nama wars, they set out on expeditions to prove scientifically the danger that racial mixing posed to the settler population.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was commonly asserted by both scientists and colonial enthusiasts that racial mixing led to some form of ‘degeneration’ – a decline in the health and intellect of mixed-race offspring. Over generations, it was believed, mixed-race people would continue to produce children marked by a range of physical and mental inferiorities, even if they bred only with ‘pure’ whites. Various theories had been put forward to explain ‘racial degeneration’, and much evidence to the contrary had been ignored. Felix von Luschan, Director of the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, and formerly of the Berlin Colonial Show, believed that in mixed-race populations negative traits inherited from the lower race would dominate to the extent that, after several generations of
Blutsmischung
(blood mixing), such populations would eventually produce offspring who were pure-blooded members of that lower race. Von Luschan claimed to have personally studied this effect, known as
Entmischung
(de-mixing), in ‘Hottentots’.

Despite von Luschan’s claims and the preponderance of competing theories, the process of degeneration remained scientifically unproven and unobserved. Among the many scientists who set out to prove the theory was the young German anthropologist Eugen Fischer.

In 1906 Eugen Fischer was a rising academic star. His first major study, on the skull-width of Papuans, had won the
prestigious Broca Award from the Parisian Anthropological Society. Buoyed by this success and the recent rediscovery of Mendelian genetics, Fischer, like many of his contemporaries, began to scour the globe for a mixed-race community whose physical traits and genealogical history would permit him to demo strate how racial degeneration actually worked.
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He required a community with an extremely specific racial heritage. The perfect case study would be an isolated, mixed-race people, who could trace their ancestry back to a single moment in history, when their forefathers – two peoples of ‘pure’ blood – had come together in sexual union. That moment of union, ideally between black and white, had to have taken place several generations earlier and, in the intervening decades or centuries, the mixed-race offspring needed to have eschewed interbreeding with all other peoples.

Scrutinising existing work on ‘the bastardisation of the races’, Fischer at first looked to the mixed-race populations of the southern United States, but in 1907 a colleague handed him a booklet titled
The Nation of the Bastards
. It had been written by Captain Maximilian Bayer, the German officer who had fought at the Waterberg alongside General von Trotha. After taking part in the pursuit of the Herero into the Omaheke in 1904, Bayer became a member of the German force sent to confront the commando units of Hendrik Witbooi. On his journey south, he encountered the town of Rehoboth, 50 miles south of Windhoek. Rehoboth was home to a small community of mixed-descent people known as the Basters, who traced their ancestry back to intermixing between white men and Nama women of the Cape centuries earlier.

The Basters had moved into the south-west in 1869, having been pushed out of the Cape by the Boers. In 1870, they had settled in Rehoboth, naming their new home after the town on the Euphrates mentioned in the Bible. The term ‘Basters’ dated back to the 1700s and was not considered offensive by the people of Rehoboth, or their descendants, who still live in Rehoboth and remain fiercely proud of their ancestry, their history and the name ‘Basters’.

Although they had lived in South-West Africa for well over half a century and had been in constant contact with the twelve Nama tribes and the Herero, they had remained a tightly knit community, with few marriages between them and other local peoples. When Rehobothers married outside their community, it was normally a case of a Baster woman marrying a white man. Devoutly Christian, the Basters had also kept meticulous birth and baptism records, and most families could trace their lineage back several generations through church records. They were the ideal people for Eugen Fischer to test his theories on.

In 1904 the leaders of the Basters had rejected Hendrik Witbooi’s call to arms and upheld the terms of their protection treaty with the Germans, supplying men to fight with the
Schutztruppe
against the Herero. It is partly through the accounts of Baster soldiers, shocked by the behaviour of their ‘allies’, that the true brutality of the war in the Omaheke later emerged. Having avoided becoming the targets of von Trotha, the Basters had survived the war with few casualties, and in 1908 they were two thousand strong.

Like any mixed community, their physical features varied from one individual to the next. Some looked distinctly Nama, while others clearly had European features; most were a mixture of both. The Baster women were particularly striking, with fair, afro hair and green or bright blue eyes, set above the high cheekbones common among the Nama. In an academic paper of 1910, Fischer wrote: ‘Among the hideous, yellow-skinned stumpy Hottentot population, and also among the needy, skinny, dark Damaras, the Baster makes a good impression.’
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While Fischer fixated on their physical appearance, the Baster people, like most religious, conservative nineteenth-century communities, placed much greater emphasis on matters of spirituality, propriety and decency. They were immaculately and modestly dressed. Many of the men wore bushy Victorian moustaches; the women tied their hair in tight buns behind their heads and wore ankle-length, high-necked dresses.

Unlike the Nama, the Basters spoke only Afrikaans and had adopted most of the cultural traits of the Boers. Their family names were (and remain) a matter of pride, reflecting their determination to celebrate their mixed heritage. Eugen Fischer’s notes contain his descriptions of members of the van Wyk and Cloete families, the Beukes, the Steenkamps and the McNabbs. These last were descendants of a Scottish sailor who had married a Baster woman. The current
Kaptein
of the Rehoboth Basters, John McNabb, is the grandson of the McNabbs whose photographs and anatomical measurements can still be found in Eugen Fischer’s original files, held by the Namibian Scientific Society in Windhoek.

Within days of his arrival Eugen Fischer, aided by the local missionaries, began to force his scientific attentions upon the Baster community. Despite reassurances from the missionaries that his intentions were purely benign, the Basters were not easily persuaded to subject themselves to Fischer’s programme of anatomical measurements. One elder reminded Fischer that ‘the Basters were not savages’, and asked him why he did not also carry out examinations of the white residents of Rehoboth, ‘the missionary and the Oberleutnant [District Chief]’.
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Several of the Basters refused to submit themselves to Fischer’s examinations; others only permitted him to carry out procedures that allowed them to retain their dignity. Fischer was especially disappointed that he was refused permission to measure genitals and pubic bones. He later complained, ‘I tried several times to frisk around this area but it could not be done, especially with the women.’

In the face of determined resistance, Fischer was forced to reduce the scope of his examinations to measurements of arms, hands, legs and heads, and to resort to a more extensive use of photographs. In total, he examined and/or photographed 310 members of the Rehoboth community.

Throughout his time in Rehoboth, Fischer’s work was characterised by a series of striking methodological lapses. Due to the refusal of the Baster people to be measured naked, many of Fischer’s measurements were taken over heavy clothing and were
extremely inaccurate. Even more worrying, a series of sample measurements from the two racial groups from which the Basters were descended, Nama and White Europeans, were also highly inaccurate. The measurements representing the average dimensions of ‘pure-blood’ Nama were based on examinations of just eight Nama individuals, whose body measurements were taken to represent their entire people.

After two months’ fieldwork Fischer had completed his research. Before leaving Rehoboth, he briefly toyed with the idea of robbing the graves of his Basters’ ancestors in Rehoboth’s Christian cemetery. Unable to satisfy his ‘ardent desire to encounter the dead of this small community’, Fischer exhumed a number of Nama skeletons from a set of graves in the desert between Swakopmund and Walvis Bay.

After this ‘encounter with the dead’, Fischer left German South-West Africa and never returned. In many ways, Fischer’s work and the conclusions it drew him towards were typical of racial studies of the era. His study was detailed and enormously complicated, while at the same time deeply flawed at a methodological level. Fischer’s files contain hundreds of anthropological photographs of Rehoboth people. Many of his subjects have been photographed from several angles to illustrate specific cranial and facial features. As well as the photographic material, there are a number of charts mapping the complex genealogy of various Rehobother families. The files are well ordered, neatly catalogued and beautifully presented. The rigour belies the fact that the measurements were at times almost meaningless, and that Fischer’s conclusions were merely the substantiation of preconceived racist assumptions, given legitimacy by the apparent application of scientific methods.