ABSTRACT
A British memorandum of 1911 described the German military strategy in colonial wars as having ‘an inclination towards a policy of extermination’. It is clear from the memorandum and further discussions and communications by British colonizers that they saw the genocidal Herero and Nama War in the German colony of South-West Africa (1904–7) as an exception, even compared to the atrocious colonial wars waged by the European colonizers in Africa during High Imperialism, most of which the colonizers won due to their strong technical supremacy. Britain had to fight similar wars in several African colonies during the period 1870–1914. Both in the British and the German African colonies, the enforcement of colonial rule with strict labour allocation policies, an introduction of head/hut tax and the alienation of land led to uprisings and devastating wars around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, such as the Herero and Nama War in German South-West Africa, the Maji Maji War in German East Africa, the Ndebele and Shona risings in British Rhodesia, the hut tax wars in Sierra Leone and the Bambatha Rising in British Natal. Colonial armies of both empires used exceedingly brutal strategies in their so-called ‘asymmetric wars’ against colonized peoples. Furthermore, both the British and the Germans were influenced by theories on colonial wars, such as the publication of Charles Edward Callwell on ‘Small Wars’ in 1896. Callwell specified strategies and measurements of war against ‘uncivilized races’: when fighting against colonized people and not ‘European combatants’, measurements of attrition such as burning villages, destroying crops and – to some extent – killing prisoners of war were seen as justified. This chapter analyses British and German discourses on some of these colonial wars in Africa and asks if and how the discourses employed similar arguments of a superior European civilization, of racial superiority, of a Darwinian struggle between the races and of a European military prestige that could not be tainted by a victory of the colonized.
