Sabine Gelb-Chikwanda, Dreams of Past and Future: The Copperbelt’s Children, 1925-75 (Kitwe: Nkana, 1998)
… Kazembe and Barotseland spent the 1930s putting themselves back together. Wealth, disease and too-rapid exposure to modernity had combined to cause social collapse, but like the Pacific Islanders had done in their place, the Copperbelt kingdoms responded to the demise of the old by rallying around the new. The church, the German schools and the new ideas that filtered in from Europe provided a foundation for rebuilding, and the new Copperbelt was a place of parliaments, theaters and civil servants. [1]
By the end of the 1920s, the Copperbelt states were once again places of peace and law, with the new commercial and professional class having taken the place of the old chiefs. The traditional authorities still made a stand in the form of the kings and their cabinets, but by unwritten custom, a majority of the ministers were German, and they were as likely to side with the parliamentary leaders as with royal prerogative. And as the 1930s wore on, the legislatures won more privileges: although the Kazembe Organic Law of 1933 and the 1936 Barotseland constitution fell short of responsible government, they gave the elected representatives control over taxation and the budget.
This was also the time that saw the Copperbelt’s industries expand beyond mining. In the old days, retired miners might buy land or open a store. Now, many of the retirees were senior engineers, and they invested their money in copper refining and manufacturing, often with German partners attracted by an educated work force. By 1940, Kazembe would produce an increasing amount of Germany’s wire, and the mining towns were dotted with light industry. The towns themselves had grown to cities, with futurist downtown buildings that were the tallest yet in Africa.
But there were many holes to fill. The Congo fever was starting to decline as social order was restored and public health campaigns took effect, but in the meantime, tens of thousands had been orphaned, and their extended families had also been devastated by the disease. A generation of Copperbelt children grew up on their own, with peers, church and schools as their family, and they would become the center of Africa’s first youth culture.
It really started in Germany, with the rise of the
Wandervögel during the late 1910s and 1920s. [2] They were middle-class children of the Great War generation, finished with their eighteen months’ national service and looking for an escape from a German society they saw as stuffy and materialistic. The fact that they could exist at all only because Germany had grown rich enough to support a mass counterculture was something most of them wouldn’t realize until later, although some have argued that the subtle irony that crept into some of their literature arose from an unconscious sense of exactly that.
The
Wandervögel found their escape in an idealized past, a medieval fantasy of strength, love, poetry and song. They formed bands under democratic or charismatic leadership professing every political philosophy or none, went on long hikes and encampments, wore peasant clothing (or sometimes, in their forest camps, eschewed clothes altogether), sang folk songs and collected stories. For many, the wandering years would be a stage; for some, it would inspire serious scholarship in folklore or history; for others, it would lead to a lifelong spiritual commitment.
The last group were the ones who traveled farthest. Most of the
Wandervögel confined their wanderings to Germany’s forests and rivers, but some, moved by the Indian and African spirituality they had learned of from classmates or fellow conscripts, sought inspiration farther afield. Their destinations were as many as an eclectic spiritual imagination might conceive: India, Siberia, Japan, South America, the American Southwest that they knew from Karl May. But they found themselves most commonly in the farther reaches of the German empire: the jungles of New Guinea, Madagascar’s beaches and highlands, the banks of the Uele, and the towns of the Copperbelt kingdoms. They would bring the poetry and stories of these lands back to Germany with them, and in Kazembe and Barotseland, they would leave something of themselves behind.
The lost generation of the Copperbelt had questions for which their elders had no answers. The region’s living standard had increased exponentially, but much of its wealth went into the coffers of German companies. Its cities were full of futurist buildings that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Berlin or Paris, but there was little of Africa in them. The old equality of poverty had given way to riches that left many behind, and growing shantytowns stood on the edges of the cities and sometimes invaded the streets of the business districts. And the families that had passed on the wisdom of generations were shattered, with much of their role taken by Germanized schools whose wisdom was meant for another place.
The generation that had grown up with these things had its differences from the
Wandervögel. They were more practically minded, even those who were middle-class: most of them worked, and material wealth was too recent and fragile an achievement to eschew. Nor did they idealize the premodern past, which after all had existed within living memory and had flaws that some had experienced firsthand. They had been infused with Verne’s futurism, and their dreams were of scientific and technological glory as well as ancient legend. But they too sought relief from sterility and anomie, and they had grown used to raising each other and looking to each other for support. And many of the German wanderers’ ideas caught fire with them.
By the mid-1930s, it was common for the young people of Kazembe and Barotseland to gather at campsites outside the cities for sports, song and society. Initially, they emulated the dress and slang of the
Wandervögel, but as the movement matured, they looked more to Africa for inspiration. While they lacked the Germans’ reverence for an imagined Middle Ages, they shared an interest in folklore, and they created an ideal Africa with clothing, design and poetry were inspired by an eclectic mix of Luba, Lunda and Lozi stories, with a dash of ancient Teutonic legend and a dream of futurist glory.
The members of these encampments called themselves a movement of rediscovery, but they were really a movement of creation – one that would extend to art, architecture, literature and ultimately politics. As the children grew up, their ideals would play a part in shaping the Copperbelt’s future, for better and for worse. The values of poetry, love and solidarity would stay with them, but the other side of the
Wandervögel ethos – the worship of vitality, reinforced by futurism – would sometimes work at cross purposes…
Bernhard Razafimahaleo, The Transformation of Madagascar (Bombay: Prakash, 1987)
… The general strike of 1929 began as a protest over low wages on the plantations, but as it spread across the island, it became much more. The protest meetings turned into a litany of local grievances: high taxes, oppression by petty officials and landlords, the preference given to the highland Merina over the coastal peoples, and ultimately, the arbitrary rule of the monarchy. By the time the movement entered its third month, it had become a general strike: the capital city was virtually shut down, and people marched through the streets chanting political verses. Soon after, the strike caught the attention of trade unions in Germany itself, who sent messages of solidarity and called for German intervention on the workers’ side.
This would, ironically, have the opposite of the intended effect, not because of any decisions taken in Berlin but because of panic in Antananarivo. The prospect of German labor activists joining the marchers, and of the strike becoming a political issue in Germany, was terrifying to the royal court, which had thus far avoided interference in its internal affairs. Thus far, the king had heeded the German commissioner’s advice to promise moderate reforms and let the strike play out, but now he felt that matters had reached a critical point and that he was in danger of losing control of the country. On October 24, 1929 – “Black Thursday” – the king sent the army into the streets.
Some of the strikers fought back, but Madagascar had sat out the Great War, and the protesters didn’t have the surplus military weapons that they would have had in central Africa. Enough were armed so that the battle lasted three days, but in the end, the army took control of the capital and began enacting reprisals throughout the country. A paralyzed government in Berlin let it happen: the trade unionists calling for the German army to protect the workers were opposed by coffee and vanilla interests who strongly supported the monarchy, and the conservative majority in the Reichsrat was able to block any move to intervene. A few Prussians of the old school were even heard to envy the Malagasy monarchy and to regret that the German labor struggles couldn’t have been resolved in similar fashion. And by the time an opposition to them could coalesce in the Reichstag, the crackdown was a fait accompli.
The aftermath of Bloody Thursday put an end to the cautious reforms of the 1920s, and for more than a decade afterward, Madagascar was a virtual police state in which a partnership of the monarchy and the large planters (many of whom were German) repressed any political dissent. From the outside, it seemed that the island spent the 1930s in stasis. Under the surface, however, this was not the case. The 1929 strike had transformed pro-democracy sentiment from an intellectual movement to a mass movement, and the Democratic Party of Madagascar, driven underground, established organizations in the countryside and provincial towns. Oratory and music, which had always been sources of authority in Madagascar, became means of protest: underground poets circulated works such as the
Epic of Radama IV, a parody of classic Malagasy verse in which members of the royal court competed in injustice to win the favor of evil ancestors.
The repression in Madagascar also turned the trickle of labor emigrants that had occurred during the 1920s into a steady stream. In 1930, there were fewer than 3000 Malagasy living permanently in Germany, with a few hundred more studying at universities or military academies; by 1940, there were 60,000, most of them in the Hanseatic ports and the industrial cities of the Ruhr. Thousands of other Malagasy emigrated to France (with which a few families still had pre-Great War ties), Zanzibar, Mozambique and South Africa, and some – especially the politically active Muslims among them – retraced the steps of their Austronesian ancestors and journeyed to Malaya and Aceh.
The emigrants would form new associations and renew old ones. Most of the Malagasy in Germany were apolitical, wanting nothing more than to earn a living and be left alone, and they retained much of their reverence for traditional society. Those who
were politically active, however, tended to be radical. Members of the Democratic Party formed a government in exile, and as Malagasy workers joined German labor unions, the repression at home became an important political issue on the left. They also formed networks with the Malagasy diaspora elsewhere, and in the 1940s, the ideas that made their way through this network would be brought home to Madagascar…
Dieter Lisimba, German Africa in the Twentieth Century (Berlin: Allgemeine, 2008)
… The coming of direct rule to German Central Africa was both more and less than its proponents had hoped. For the first time, the three central African colonies had real governments and courts down to the district level, as opposed to a scattering of civil servants overseeing a system that was subcontracted to private companies. The lower ranks of the new administration included not only the German-educated African elite but Africans drawn from the village schools. The law was administered with regularity and some sense of fairness, as opposed to the arbitrary justice of the rubber and forestry barons. Both administrative and judicial forced labor – the latter of which had often amounted to virtual slavery, with convicts leased to private employers and their contracts bought and sold – were abolished. In general, the new regime was anxious to end the abuses documented in Karl-Johan Nsilou’s
Blood of the Forests [3] and the subsequent fact-finding missions, and the days in which concessionaires could conscript whole villages and summarily execute troublemakers were over.
But while the rule of law had come to Central Africa, it was German law, and it was a law that still strongly favored German interests over African. Forced labor might be gone, but a head-tax remained, and as in the Portuguese colonies, it was payable in cash only and designed to force Africans into formal-sector employment. And in contrast to the Copperbelt kingdoms, where Germans had sponsored schools and encouraged the development of democratic institutions, education in Central Africa remained largely a project of the mission schools and self-government above the village level was nonexistent. There were a few more freedoms than before – among other things, the underground Carlsenist and Ibadi schools were now legal, and the law guaranteed the right to petition against oppressive or corrupt officials – but these freedoms were matters of grace rather than right.
Part of the difference between the Central African provinces on the one hand, and the Copperbelt kingdoms and Madagascar on the other, was that the former were colonies while the latter were princely states. But the difference was also informed by a more fundamental prejudice. Throughout the colonial period, Europeans had drawn a distinction between state-level societies, which were worthy of respect, and pre-state peoples who warranted far less. And Germany, with an empire that included regions with a very broad range of precolonial development, often took this distinction farther than other powers.
A 1934 textbook unit on the German colonial empire, intended for the upper elementary grades, illustrates the popular opinion. The Herero are portrayed as hard workers and loyal soldiers, albeit with a strong dose of noble-savage patronization. The Copperbelt kingdoms are depicted as eagerly modernizing, and their people as educated and capable; the illustrations show them as students and mining engineers. Madagascar is shown as a nation of poets and orators, and the exploits of the Merina kings who united much of the island are described in a manner reminiscent of ancient German chieftains. But Kamerun, Ubangi-Shari, the northern Congo and New Guinea are portrayed as backward and primitive, and the students are told that these regions lacked civilization before the Germans came. And these prejudices were often confirmed by what Germans saw day to day: after all, the Africans in their universities, factories and offices were overwhelmingly from the more developed parts of the empire.
With this distinction in the background, it is little wonder that even liberal Germans felt that self-government above the village level was unnecessary in Central Africa, at least until there had been a decades-long process of preparation. And it is equally unsurprising that many Africans who initially welcomed direct rule became disillusioned with it. The German administrators in 1930 had been greeted with flowers and song; six years later, the prevailing attitude was more one of sullen acceptance. Discontent was especially strong among the African civil servants, who were eligible for promotion as individuals but who could do little to advance their nations. The central African colonies’ equilibrium was fragile once again, and the surface calm would soon be shattered by the outbreak of war to the east…
… In South-West Africa, where feudal bonds had existed long enough for the Africans to be considered part of the “German family,” the changes of the 1930s took another direction. The property qualification for the local and lower-house franchise was reduced in 1933 and again in 1937, and an increasing number of Africans met the alternative qualification of a secondary diploma. By the end of the decade, genuine mass politics existed in the cities, although rural voters still followed their feudal patrons’ lead, and the colony had settled into a cooperative relationship between the African-dominated lower house and an upper house with a majority of European landowners. In 1939, Wilhelm Katerna, a substantial landowner and businessman, was appointed governor of the colony – the first African to hold such a post in the German empire, although by this time the governor’s authority was largely ceremonial and a chancellor appointed by the upper house held most of the real power.
The most pressing political issue in the 1930s was not racial relations but the relationship between South-West Africa and the changing South African Union. Two princely states owing loyalty to the Kaiser were already part of South Africa, and while South-West remained outside the union, it had acceded to a joint mining authority and several commercial treaties. The economic benefits of a close relationship with South Africa were plain, but the colonial government feared being drawn into the union’s chaotic politics and internal conflicts. As the decade drew on, an increasing number of politicians believed that the growing ties to South Africa needed to be balanced by a closer relationship with metropolitan Germany…
Lecture by Professor Aishwarya Trivedi, “International Congo and the Rule of Law,” at Zanzibar University Law Faculty, 22 April 2014:
“In my history classes, I sometimes call the postwar International Congo the purest example of the rule of law that humanity has so far invented. It was, after all, ruled by an international court, and its people were unique in being considered neither citizens nor subjects but wards. Between 1903 and 1940, the Congo took up more of the court’s business than anything else. But like everything else in the law, practice fell short of theory, and I’ll start by discussing the reasons for that… yes?”
“The court didn’t control the whole territory.”
“Yes, there was certainly that. Germany, Portugal and Zanzibar all had trusteeship areas where the court had no control. The terms of the trusteeships did put limits on what the powers could do, but those limits weren’t what anyone would call strict, and what happened in eastern Congo during the Imperial period and the Ethiopian war showed that they were sometimes honored in the breach. But even in the territory the court
did control, the rule of law was hardly a pure thing…”
“Judges make bad administrators.”
“That’s exactly it. Courts aren’t well suited to make day-to-day administrative decisions. When ordinary courts have to take charge of a business or a piece of land, they appoint a special master. For the Congo, the Court of Arbitration relied on its staff and local experts, meaning that day to day, it wasn’t run much differently from other colonies.”
“Especially when the experts were the rubber companies.”
“True enough – can you tell me more about that?”
“The staff would rotate in and out every few years, but the rubber and forestry companies were always there, so weak governors would rely on them.”
“Yes. Strong provincial governors could keep the companies in check, but the weak ones tended to lean on them, and in a system where there was still compulsory labor, this meant that many abuses never saw the light of day. Let’s switch gears, though, and talk about some of the ways that the rule of law
did exist before we get to the changes in the 1930s. Madam?”
“Legislation.”
“Yes. The court didn’t legislate often for the Congo – it usually left that to the governor-general and the provincial governors – but when it did, it held hearings and took evidence first. As early as 1908, it held that all changes in policy would have to be based on proof, and the questions at legislative hearings could be quite challenging. The 1924 public health law, for instance, was issued after a month of hearings on the transmission of Congo fever, and the transcripts of the hearing actually became a reference for doctors. Anything else?”
“The right of appeal.”
“That’s really the heart of it, yes. Everything done by the Congolese government was done in the name of the court, so everything could be appealed to the court once local appeals were exhausted. That applied to both administrative and judicial acts, and to rulemaking as well as decisions that affected individuals. In 1930 alone, 682 appeals were docketed from the governor-general’s office or provincial high courts. Now, in 1935, there were fewer appeals – less than 500 – but their character was changing. If you’ve read ahead, can you tell me how?”
“More Congolese attorneys?”
“There were, especially once the Congo Reform Congress set up its Center for Legal Advancement in 1934. But that wasn’t really what I was looking for. Was there any change in the
kind of appeals that were made?”
“More constitutional challenges?”
“Yes, that’s it. Before the early 30s, more than 90 percent of the appeals concerned rulings in individual cases, usually criminal or tax matters, and most of the others related to local administrative policies. Ever since the forced labor ruling [4], most of the Congolese had considered challenges to fundamental laws, or to the structure of the colonial state, to be an exercise in futility. But in the later 30s that changed, both because of the Congress’ formation and because of changes in the court itself…”
“It was less European.”
“Well, not really. The court’s makeup was still weighted toward Europe. But since the Indian revolution, and with the abuses in Natal and German Central Africa becoming public, the standards of acceptable treatment of colonial subjects had changed, and those changes were starting to be reflected on the court. The British judge in 1935, when Britain’s goal was to create an ‘All-Dominion Empire,’ looked at colonial questions differently from his counterpart in 1910, and so did the German and French members. Anything else? “
“The Ethiopian war.”
“True, but that was only part of the way the court was changing. Up to the 30s, most of its cases involved border disputes and construction of treaties, but under the leadership of Chief Justice Fabiani beginning in 1932, it became more willing to take up questions of customary international law and the structure of the international system. The court’s role in making peace on the Nile was part of that, and so was a greater willingness to put standards on colonialism, starting with its own.
We can see this in the 1934 petition that was the first one litigated by the Congress’ law center. The issue was whether the Congress itself could exist: it was a challenge to a regulation prohibiting Congolese political parties. The result was a 12-5 ruling in the Congress’ favor, and while three of the judges struck down the rule on narrow grounds, nine of them held that political expression was a fundamental right that could not be denied simply because the people exercising it were under colonial tutelage. It effectively established a principle of international law that colonial peoples had a right to organize – not necessarily a right to self-government, but a right to assemble collectively and speak with their own voice. And the same spirit can be seen in the 1938 decision…”
“What about the forced-labor ruling, though? It was never overturned.”
“That’s true, but look what happened instead – the week after the second forced-labor case was filed in 1937, the governor-general replaced the corvee obligation with a head tax. Papers released then have shown this was no coincidence - the court wasn’t ready yet to take the political risk of condemning all forced labor, but it realized that the practice could no longer be defended.”
“That 1938 ruling you were about to mention, though – wasn’t it also ambiguous? It upheld freedom of speech and of the press, but it held that they could be suspended in the interest of public safety…”
“That’s a good point, but the court was hardly going to require more in a colony than many of its members allowed at home, was it? The important thing was that it required no
less in the Congo – and though the exception very nearly swallowed the rule, it created an opening that the Congolese would use to their advantage…”
_______
[1] See post 4110.
[2] I thought about whether to give them a different name in TTL, but OTL’s is both a natural and a perfect choice.
[3] See post 4110.
[4] See post 3108.
) alignment of the BOGs, everyone was really a special case. In the Germanies as they were before the war, North Germany was predominantly Protestant--but had a very large Catholic minority, which was regionally (around the Rhine for instance) the majority--and one major goal of the King of Prussia/Confederation President was to absorb the Catholic south German principalities. OTL's Kulturkampf demonstrates that the Prussians were quite capable of wanting to rule Germany without accepting the logic that would compel them to accept the southern German's faith--but here, the circumstances on the ground had the war itself break out over a Catholic German state's people voluntarily seek membership in the Confederation, rejecting their monarch (and absolutism under any dynasty of any religious affiliation too) but seeking union with Germany--while in no way seeking to reject their Catholic faith. From the Papal Legion point of view the Catholic commoners of Bavaria were in the enemy camp. Then later, the people of Baden and Wurtemburg went the same way. In Germany, the sort of ultramontanism that went in hand with being a Legionary was hardly to be found, and the new Catholic subjects of the new Empire had voted with bayonets and blood for Germany--without feeling they were betraying their faith in any way no matter what the Pope said.
