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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Looking for Die Besten Boeren: The Normalisation of Afrikaner Settlement in German South West Africa, 1884-1914
Author:Aitken, Robbie
Year:2007
Periodical:Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:33
Issue:2
Period:June
Pages:343-360
Language:English
Geographic term:Namibia
Subjects:immigrants
Afrikaners
images
attitudes
racism
colonialism
Ethnic and Race Relations
History and Exploration
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Urbanization and Migration
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057070701292632
Abstract:This article explores Afrikaner immigration into German South West Africa (now Namibia) during the period of German colonialism, 1884-1914. It focuses on the response of the German colonial authorities in Windhoek and in Berlin to the prospect of large-scale Afrikaner immigration as well as the representation of Afrikaners in German colonial discourse. German justifications of colonial rule were psychologically supported by notions of the imagined cultural and racial differences between the colonizers and the colonized. The presence of settlers whose cultural practices and lifestyle did not match with the norms attributed to the desirable settler threatened to undermine the boundaries of difference between the colonizer and colonized. Some elements of the German government as well as the colonial press envisaged Afrikaner immigrants as a potential threat to continued German control over the colony. Others welcomed the immigration of the Afrikaners as colonial pioneers. The categories of black and white were deployed and reconstructed in order to assess the desirability of Afrikaner groups, leading to their assimilation or exclusion from settler society, and underlining the organizing power of the schema. Undesirable Afrikaner immigrants were blackened through the use of racial rhetoric as well as being politically excluded from access to resources and land, and even physically excluded from the colony. In contrast, desirable settlers were welcomed and Germanized. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract, edited]
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