ABSTRACT
The rejection of compulsion was the guiding principle of the “education for work”. The ‘education of the Negro for work’ had been a central project of state and particularly church policy since the annexation of the first colonies in 1884. The missions saw their task as that of gradually educating “the idle native to voluntary labor” and to enable him “unobtrusively” to achieve “an existence worthy of a human being.” Posing questions such as these suggests links between Germany and its overseas counterpart in ‘New Germany’ that may have been closer than generally believed. The relationship between the German Reich and its African colonies has long been regarded as a one-way street. Different from the German planters and settlers, the missions of both confessions stressed the nonextractive and humanitarian character of work as performed on the mission plantations. According to the rhetoric of the Christian press, work in the missions was aimed primarily at character building.
