Good Colonialism's Fifth Anniversary

An account of both the African and a non–BIPOC decolonised Germany's perspectives after five years of "good colonialism". In other words, the Western delineation of bad versus good masters

⏳  1,570 words

Concluding paragraph

From the long-term perspective of historiography, the immaturity of postcolonial research seems to prevail. Up to three generations of native population were virtually able to give testimony to an exclusively non-linear experience of European rule. Having been ruled and exploited as subjects of the German colonial empire before and partially during the world war, other masters replaced the beaten, interned and finally deported Germans.(7)  In the realm of non-academic literature from Asia and Africa, one prize-winning example is named in particular: Abdulrazak Gurnah's Afterlives (2021). In general, the production of non-European testimonies of a free and independent countenance to the Parisian Winter of 1919 mindset is growing. Western-centred and Anglo-Saxon biases are exposed. Though combined North-South research on the uniquely bilateral experience of Germany's colonised remains a desideratum.

Peter de Bourgraaf

Footnotes

1.  When Germany would eventually be allowed to send off its delegation in May, the Allied powers and their associates hosted it at an isolated location in Paris.

2.  Away from the Western Front, https://awayfromthewesternfront.org/campaigns/africa/togoland/.

3.  Gabriele Metzler, Zwischen Kolonialrevisionismus und Mandatspolitik. Das Auswärtige Amt und die koloniale Frage in der Weimarer Republik, in: Das Auswärtige Amt und die Kolonien. Geschichte. Erinnerung. Erbe (München 2024), S. 245-277, S. 251.

4.  Metzler, Zwischen Kolonialrevisionismus und Mandatspolitik, S. 247, 261‒262, 267 und 273.

5.  Idem, S. 269 und 276‒277.

6.  For its part, Portugal did not even need to report to the League of Nations, Permanent Mandates Commission, because the Entente supported this ally's outright annexation of the southern strip of German East-Africa.

7.  For its part, Portugal did not even need to report to the League of Nations, Permanent Mandates Commission, because the Entente supported this ally's annexation of the southern strip of German East-Africa.