Anyone familiar with the history of South West Africa would place this apparently innocent circulation of sheep in the violent context of Germany’s colonial experience.[58] The projects for the establishment of Karakul farms in South West Africa were a direct consequence of the 1904–1907 wars against the Herero and Nama, which resulted in the annihilation of approximately 80 percent of the Herero and half of the Nama by the German Protection Forces (Schutztruppe) commanded by General von Trotha, with a death toll estimated at 70,000.[59] The combination of quarantining captives in the Namib Desert, poisoning water holes and wells, deporting people to other German colonies, and imprisoning many people in concentration camps makes it hard to avoid comparisons with other genocides. The Herero war has been used to make comparisons between colonial practices in Africa and the Nazis’ behavior in occupied Europe.[60] This literature has nevertheless recently come under harsh criticism because of the difficulty in establishing concrete historical ties between the two imperial experiences.[61] Here, in order to overcome some of that criticism, African and European experiences of the frontier are connected through Karakul. It is not just a matter of formal comparison; it is also a matter of material circulation of industrialized organisms.
As in eastern Europe under Nazi rule, the metaphors of the American frontier helped make sense of German colonizers’ actions in South West Africa. According to Shelly Baranowsky, General Lothar von Trotha suggested that natives follow the example of Native Americans and disappear in favor of European settlers.[62] The war had begun in 1904 when the Herero had reacted violently to the loss of their lands to German settlers. The Imperial German Colonial Office had planned to have settlers form outposts of Germanness, “organizing rural communities grounded in the values of hard work, thrift, the patriarchal family, and ethnic unity.”[63] The role of natives was clear in such schemes: they were a pool of cheap labor for settlers and for colonial administrators.[64]
Under the “Imperial Decree of 26 December 1905 Pertaining to the Sequestration of Property of Natives in the Protectorate of South West Africa,” the whole territory of Hereroland (central South West Africa) and later the whole of Namaland (southern South West Africa) passed to the possession of German colonial rulers.[65] General von Trotha’s brutal repression of the Herero and Nama rebellion paved the way for settlement of the territory by brave German pioneers. Analogous to the promise made to SS members of idyllic farms in the open spaces of eastern Europe after the victory over the Bolsheviks, a huge portion of the new settlers of South West Africa came from the military after the demobilization that followed the victory over indigenous rebellions. Military personnel were allotted 5,000 hectares per person (an area that would more than double in subsequent years) at the price of 30 pfennigs per hectare.[66] By 1913, one seventh of the land marked for white ownership had been settled by 1,042 farmers. Germany would lose the colony during World War I, but the settlement pattern would endure until late in the twentieth century.[67]
The historical experience in South West Africa offers us a good hint of how German colonial rule would have looked in an eastern Europe settled by armed veterans of the SS. The natives who survived von Trotha’s brutal repression were confined to locations with no more than ten families each, their movements strictly controlled through a restrictive system of pass laws. Forbidden to own land, breed cattle, or raise horses, they had no means of survival other than forced labor for the colonizers.[68] Labor legislation not only criminalized desertion from employment; it also empowered employers to use physical punishment when they saw fit.
The infamous motto “Arbeit macht Frei” also informed a civilizing mission that claimed to be liberating the natives from their savage condition of nomad shepherds and taught them the virtues of hard labor in settled communities. In 1900 the missionary Peter Heinrich Brincker had described the Herero as “a nation submerged in the dirt of cattle, a nation which only lived for its cattle, whose entire thought and will blossomed only for its cattle.”[69] The nomadic Herero apparently were unable to settle the land, always moving from place to place to satisfy the needs of their cattle. They were seen as mere passive servants of their beasts. Never mind that the Herero were actually not nomadic and that they had stable settlements. Civilization was to be advanced by converting open pastureland into farms demarcated by barbed wire and settled by German colonizers. Active German settlers were contrasted with passive Herero, dominating the land to make it sustain virtuous communities of “rooted in the soil” farmers, living from the soil instead of being submerged in the dirt.[70]
Paradoxically, in spite of all this racist vocabulary concerning animals and human social habits, and in a pattern common to many other colonial situations, settlers performed a mimicry of indigenous practices: Germans were to live in service of their animals as much as the Herero did.[71] While in the northeastern regions of the territory German settlers would become cattle ranchers, in the dryer southwest Karakul sheep were to be the structuring element of white settler sociability.[72] In the interwar years, already under the administration of the Union of South Africa and with a new influx of white settlers of Afrikaner origin, Karakul pelts would become the cornerstone of the territory’s economy and South West Africa would rise to the rank of major world producer of Persian furs second only to the Soviet Union. In 1946 Karakul pelts were responsible for at least four-fifths of overseas exports, overtaking diamonds, the second source of the territory’s income.[73] From 1,165 pureblood and 21,533 crossbred Karakul in 1913, South West Africa progressed to almost 2 million Karakul in 1937, of which 25,000 were pureblood.[74] German settlers were eager to reproduce small pieces of Germany in their farmhouses, typically trying to reproduce German manners in the desert. Depictions of Germans in South West Africa showed how Karakul had produced a colonial sociability as based on animals as the one Germans had exterminated.[75]
What accounted for the success of Karakul in South West Africa? First, whereas Karakul farmers in northern Europe struggled with excessive humidity responsible for all sorts of diseases, South West Africa had an environment very similar to that of the Bukhara region, where the Karakul had originated. Second, South West Africa’s grasses and bushes were perfect fodder for the sheep. Third, local sheep breeds were easily crossed with Karakul.[76] Crucially, the local Damara and Nama sheep breeds, which had also developed fat tails to respond to the harsh environment of South West Africa as Karakul in Bukhara, were easily crossed with pureblood Karakul to produce millions of curly skins that could be exported from the territory. In spite of the strict separation of settlers from natives, the settlers had to tap the animal resources developed by the natives in order to undertake their profitable Karakul business. Even in such extreme cases as imperial genocide as in South West Africa or in Nazi-controlled eastern Europe, settler life is always built on indigenous resources.
58
On German South West Africa, see Helmut Bley,
59
Isabel V. Hull,
60
See Jürgen Zimmerer,
61
Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, “Hannah Arendt’s ghosts: Reflections on the disputable paths from Windhoek to Auschwitz,”
62
Shelley Baranowski,
64
According to Theodor Leutwein (the governor who preceded von Lindequist, serving from 1894 to 1905), the aim of the colonial policy toward the natives was to create a “sedentary labor force, which is satisfied with its wages” (quoted on page 208 of John K. Noyes, “Nomadic landscapes and the colonial frontier: The problem of nomadism in German South West Africa,” in
65
Helmuth Stoecker, ed.,
66
Guido G. Weigend, “German settlement patterns in Namibia,”
67
A survey of farms undertaken in 1982 didn’t show a single black-owned farm in the southern part of the country, where Karakul dominate the landscape.
68
Baranowski,
71
Ricardo Roque, “Mimesis and colonialism: Emerging perspectives on a shared history,”
73
D. C. Krogh, “Economic aspects of the Karakul industry in South West Africa,”
75
On Germanness in German colonial context, see Willeke Sandler, “Deutsche Heimat in Afrika: Colonial revisionism and the construction of Germanness through photography,”