Violence as Usual

Policing and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa

Marie Muschalek

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501742859
• eBook ISBN: 9781501742873
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Slaps in the face, kicks, beatings, and other forms of run-of-the-mill violence were a quotidian part of life in German Southwest Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unearthing this culture of normalized violence in a settler colony, Violence as Usual uncovers the workings of a powerful state that was built in an improvised fashion by low-level state representatives.

Marie A. Muschalek's fascinating portrayal of the daily deeds of African and German men enrolled in the colonial police force called the Landespolizei is a historical anthropology of police practice and the normalization of imperial power. Replete with anecdotes of everyday experiences both of the policemen and of colonized people and settlers, Violence as Usual re-examines fundamental questions about the relationship between power and violence. Muschalek gives us a new perspective on violence beyond the solely destructive and the instrumental. She overcomes, too, the notion that modern states operate exclusively according to modes of rationalized functionality. Violence as Usual offers an unusual assessment of the history of rule in settler colonialism and an alternative to dominant narratives of an ostensibly weak colonial state.

CHAPTER 1

Honor, Status, Masculinity

Violent Identity Formations

Who were the African and German men of the Landespolizei? Or rather, who did they and others think they were, or were supposed to be? To answer these questions of identity formation, this chapter examines the policemen’s socioeconomic and cultural upbringings as well as the material conditions within which they lived and worked, while drawing connections to the values and identities these men aspired to.¹ Juxtaposing African and German life stories, three elements of identity formation are considered in depth: social class, soldiery, and masculinity. The chapter shows that the policemen’s liminal social standing placed them at an uncomfortable albeit central position within the colonial power constellation. And although the men came from quite disparate cultural worlds, all were deeply invested in honor and a clientage relationship to the state. Striving for status—as soldiers and warriors, but also as family men and adventurers—they partook in a fluid “game of honor.”² These men all understood themselves within a moral economy of status. This was so not simply because they all came from places with vestigial traditions of honor, but also because the new economy of status they produced for the colonial context enabled a dynamic negotiation of the hybridity that characterized the policing situation.

Honor

Some preliminary remarks regarding honor are necessary: it is a concept that has significance within both African and European history.³ Thus, it is a useful focal point allowing me to include all policemen in the analysis of identity formations, and in doing so, to bridge to a certain extent the historiographical divide between the two fields of scholarship. But first, some general anthropological and sociological explanations of how honor works.

Authors who have written on the subject agree across the board on the relational character of honor. Honor is a social phenomenon. Without an onlooking public, honor does not exist. People establish, maintain, and defend their honor via the judgment of others. As Pierre Bourdieu notes in his ethnological study of the Kabyle honor system in the mid-twentieth century, the “point of honor is the basis of the moral code of an individual who sees himself always through the eyes of others, who has need of others for his existence, because the image he has of himself is indistinguishable from that presented to him by other people.”⁴ And because it is relational, honor has to be reciprocal. All members of an honor culture have to potentially be able to act honorably. They have “to be worthy of” participating in the culture.⁵ In that sense at least, honor cultures are to a certain degree equalizing and inclusive—at least for those who are allowed to play the “game of honor.”

Related to the features of relational character and reciprocity is that honor is also always situational. An honorable act within one group might be considered dishonorable within another group, or in another time or circumstance. Honor is therefore not a universal code of behavior. Bourdieu observes that “the ethos of honour is fundamentally opposed to a universal and formal morality which affirms the equality in dignity of all men and consequently the equality of their rights and duties.… The dictates of honour, directly applied to the individual case and varying according to the situation, are in no way capable of being made universal.”⁶ If honor applies to each individual and to each instance differently, it is rather misleading to define honor as a law or a right.⁷ For ideally, these are supposed to apply uniformly and in an equalizing way to all members of a given society.

Accordingly, German sociologist Georg Simmel remarked in the time period that is of interest to me that honor, rather than being a law itself, was situated between the law and morality [Sittlichkeit]. He stressed the way in which honor connected the inner, spiritual life with the outer, social life. The function of honor, he claimed, was to perpetuate a given social order, to preserve and reproduce social strata, and to ensure cohesion within these. Honor was so effective in fulfilling its conservative purpose precisely because of its position between external, objective, generalized and internal, subjective, individualized means of establishing order:⁸

If one were to bring these types of norm to their completely articulated expression, … law brings about outer purposes through outer means, morality effects inner purposes through inner means, and honor, outer purposes through inner means.… Honor takes a middle position: an injury to it is threatened by penalties that neither pure inwardness of moral reproach nor the corporal force of the legal sphere possesses. While society establishes the precepts of honor and secures them with partly inwardly subjective and partly social and externally perceptible consequences for violations, it creates for itself a unique form of guarantee for the proper conduct of its members in those practical areas that law cannot encompass and for which the guarantees through moral conscience alone are too unreliable. If one also examines the precepts of honor for their content, they always appear as a means for maintaining a social group’s solidarity, its reputation, its regularity, and the potential to promote its life processes.⁹

The “triumph” of honor, Simmel argued, was that the individual was made to believe that the task of preserving his or her honor was “his most inner, deepest, most personal interest [Eigeninteresse]” when in fact it had a “sociological function [Zweckmäßigkeit].”¹⁰ Simmel thus quite perceptively exposed the hidden logic behind the bourgeoisie’s nineteenth-century liberalizing and democratizing effort to overcome corporate hierarchies. Namely, by connecting honor to internal qualities such as virtue and personal character (presumably achievable by everyone) instead of to external markers such as rank, birth, and estate, Enlightenment thinkers had produced a more surreptitious and more powerful tool to reinforce social structures than the early modern system of honor had ever been. Honor, in this interpretation, is a forceful disciplining device that inculcates conformist behavior, even or especially in times of social transformation. Historian John Iliffe, author of Honour in African History, claims that the strategic shift away from outward criteria toward an internalization of honor values can also, though to a lesser degree, be observed in colonial Africa, mainly due to the introduction of world religions on the continent.¹¹ I will come back to the historical specificities regarding honor at the turn of the twentieth century in the subsequent sections of this chapter.

Honor, we have learned so far, is relational and situational. Because of these features, practice is crucial in establishing what it is. “The system of the values of honour is lived rather than clearly conceived,” Bourdieu writes.¹² Full comprehension and awareness are not required for the system to work. Without really being able to recite the exact rules, the members of an honor culture will still know how to act properly in any given case. However, often there is not only one right course of action, but several. As a consequence, honor operates in a highly flexible and adaptable fashion: “Everyone, with the complicity of public opinion, can play on the ambiguities and equivocalities of conduct.”¹³ It is these qualities—the flexible and adaptable character of honor—that make it a truly powerful mechanism with which communal life can be organized. This observation can be seen as complementary to Simmel’s analysis according to which the effectiveness of an honor culture rests above all in its mediating ability between internal and external means of structuring society, between the law (and its executive power, the state) and morality.

Finally, in addition to relying on everyday practices for their perpetuation, systems of honor commonly depend on a series of punctuated rituals, religious or otherwise, structuring the lives of individual persons and groups into distinct sections such as childhood, adolescence, manhood, and elderly maturity. Rituals are, in Talal Asad’s words, “symbolic activity as opposed to the instrumental behavior of everyday life.”¹⁴ However, Asad immediately calls into question this opposition between a figurative and a literal realm. For, at least in its original theological sense, the term “ritual” designated the script—that is, the instruction manual—that taught people how to practice religion. The tendency of modern scholars to surmise that “ritual is to be conceived essentially in terms of signifying behavior—a type of activity to be classified separately from practical, that is, technically effective, behavior”—obstructs our ability to understand rituals as both representing and at the same time practicing a moral economy.¹⁵ Yet, it is precisely the way in which the various initiation rites and oath-taking ceremonies existing in the colonial theater were meant to symbolically represent while at the same time still upholding—at least to a certain extent—the function of effectively training or disciplining honorable selves that is of interest to me. For these were the moments in which honor had both a bodily, practiced, and immanent quality and a symbolic, transcendent dimension.

With these general observations on honor in mind, I now turn to the historical context and the actors within it to whom honor mattered.

African Men

In the relatively small corpus of secondary literature that exists on African colonial police forces as a whole, scholars have, until recently, characterized them in sweeping remarks as “vagabonds and adventurers,” “ex-slaves,” “freebooters and brigands,” or “the foreign, uprooted, oppressed, and poor,” often recruited from remote areas and not from within the colonized society they policed.¹⁶ But the scholarly field is growing rapidly and adding complexity to the social makeup of colonial police.¹⁷ A closer look at the nonwhite portion of the police force in German Southwest Africa suggests that they by no means came from the margins of society, nor from outside of it, but were rather at the core of a newly evolving social structure.¹⁸

Several peoples lived in Southwest Africa at the time of German intrusion. Broadly, they fall into three main categories: the Bantu-speaking (Ovambo and Herero),¹⁹ the Khoisan-speaking (Nama, Damara, and San)²⁰ peoples, and the mixed-race Afrikaans-speaking Basters.²¹ All of these peoples had migrated at some point into the area known today as Namibia. Very roughly speaking, first—that is, before European contact—the San, Damara, and Nama settled in, although when exactly is contentious among scholars;²² then, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Herero and Ovambo arrived; in the early nineteenth century, another wave of Nama (the Oorlam) and the Basters moved into the area.²³ Only Herero, Nama, Damara, and Baster men seem to have been employed in the Landespolizei.²⁴ Those are thus the relevant groups discussed in the following.

Beginning with the establishment of German colonial rule in 1884, or at the very latest after the German war against the Herero and Nama in 1904–1907, indigenous social structures, which had already been steadily evolving and changing since the mid-nineteenth century, were radically and irreversibly altered. All colonized men and women who had survived the German genocide were forced to reposition themselves within the new postwar economic a...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Honor, Status, Masculinity
• 2. Soldier-Bureaucrats
• 3. Of Whips, Shackles, and Guns
• 4. Police Work
• 5. Policing Work
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index