2 - The First Besatzungskinder: Afro-German Children, Colonial Childrearing Practices, and Racial Policy in German Southwest Africa, 1890–1914

Summary

Germany has forgotten the origins of its first generation of Afro-German children. In the years following the German military suppression and occupation of Namibia, then called German Southwest Africa, following the Herero and Khoi (Nama) uprisings of 1904 to 1907, an upsurge in miscegenation entailing several hundred births each year took place in the colony until 1914 and likely continued even afterwards. Germans in the metropole and especially German settlers in German Southwest Africa fretted anxiously over the citizenship, welfare, and upbringing of Afro-German children abandoned by their soldier fathers and in some cases their mothers as well. Like the Afro-German children born in the wake of the post-World War II U.S. occupation of West Germany, the problematic “fatherless” biracial children of German Southwest Africa were a powerful and highly visible symbol for Germans attempting to come to grips with their national identity as well as racial and gender ideologies, and therefore the source of significant discussion and policymaking. Unlike the Afro-Germans of the 1950s, however, the earlier generation of occupation children (Besatzungkinder) experienced racial segregation and suppression of their ties to German culture and identity, and in some cases of their African heritage as well. Unable to resolve the ambiguities of these children's identity, Germans instead erased the Afro-German population in the colony from their consciousness and their categories of citizenship.

From the very inception of German rule in 1884, the German colonial population in German Southwest Africa included large numbers of Afro-Europeans whose genealogy traced back over centuries of interracial contacts throughout Southern Africa. The most prominent of these belonged to a group known as the Rehoboth Basters, who possessed a fused Anglo-Dutch-African culture and accumulated wealth from agriculture and trade that made them attractive marriage partners to hardscrabble German settler artisans, traders, and ranchers on the colonial frontier. The Baster population, as well as Afro-European individuals of other ethnicities, held an ambiguous position somewhere between the two starkly defined legal categories of privileged “whites” and subordinate “natives” in the colony. Throughout the early nineteenth century, European men in German Southwest Africa and neighboring regions had intermarried with Afro-Europeans and Africans.