Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905 by Matthew Unangst (review)

Reviewed by: Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905 by Matthew Unangst Peter Ogunniran Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905. By Matthew Unangst. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. Pp. xiii + 335. Hardcover $85.00. ISBN 9781487543402. As scholars continue to pay attention to German colonial history and legacy, historian Matthew Unangst's Colonial Geography has offered a brilliant understanding of the German colonial past in East Africa (Ostafrika). Focusing on the latter part of the nineteenth century until the early twentieth century, Unangst shows various attempts by Germany to transform the colony based on its changing conceptions of race and space from 1884 to 1905. To trace these changes, Unangst draws from critical geography that highlights the connection between the conception of space and economic changes and carefully examines pertinent primary sources: colonial propaganda, maps, (un)published writings of explorers and travelers, and public discussions of German colonial endeavors in the region. He argues that German colonizers shifted from the assumption that possessing and cultivating Ostafrika's land sufficed to make it German to the belief that the only way to transform the land and "Germanize" it was by reshaping its people (4). These shifting colonial models of land and race became the first German state project that used race to manage territory. The first chapter foregrounds the thesis and explains key concepts, while each chapter traces these changing colonial models. Unangst shows how African actors—different African ethnic groups, Africans on the coast, those in the hinterlands, Arabs, and Indians—made space on terms outside German control as these actors reshaped German projects to other ends, arguing that African spatial imaginaries intersected and influenced German spatial politics in twenty years of German presence in the colony. The second chapter discusses the precolonial spatialities of Ostafrika among the societies in the interior and along the coast when Germans encountered the colony, arguing and showing that scientific explorers portrayed East African societies and landscapes as reminiscent of Europe's past, by repurposing complex spatial representations developed long before Europeans' arrival. The information German explorers built upon to conceptualize the colonial space also depended on African intermediaries who influenced where the Europeans went and what they saw. He [End Page 341] then examines the introduction of a land-based approach to colonization by German colonial agents such as Carl Peters and the Society for German Colonization as they carried out expeditions aiming to acquire land through treaties with the local rulers. The colonial agents envisioned East African rulers as vassals to a new German king and erroneously believed that economic development was feasible simply by applying German political rule. Unangst offers intricate details about the signing of the treaties, showing that they were faulty from the onset; they ignored the typical standards of European treaties and were bound to impact German colonial policies. The next three chapters show the various debates and disagreements over colonial tactics after Germany took over. The disagreement among missionaries, the Foreign Office, colonial administrators, and agents revolved around the reasons for underdevelopment and the ways to transform the colonial subjects and the territory to extract profit through labor. To gain control over the coast, narratives of African landscapes evolving to resemble Germany and changing to deliver economic benefits were created, thus normalizing German sovereignty in all parts of East Africa as a part of the natural progress of history. The tension between race and space, however, continued when Germany confronted its first major colonial crisis. Unangst shows how the Abushiri War (1888–1889), among other issues, transformed East Africa into a site of conflict among civilizations, namely between European Christianity and Oriental Islam, birthing a pan-European struggle against Islamic authority in Africa. The creation of a narrative of humanitarian duty to protect Africans from the Arab slave trade, Carl Peters's expedition to rescue his compatriot Emin Pascha, and the deployment of the military against the Abushiri War became an extended race for political mobilization and German spatial expansion. Unangst argues that in the 1890s, the colonial policy on Ostafrika's future to simultaneously yield profits and improve the living conditions of Africans changed again. Administrators...

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