ABSTRACT
Employing records from the newly digitised Hamburg Passenger Lists as a starting point for research, this chapter draws on information regarding 277 Africans who arrived as servants in Imperial Germany between the years of 1884 and 1914. It seeks to capture elements of the experiences of this highly mobile, transient group, which has left few traces in the historical record and which, as a consequence, has been largely ignored in the secondary literature. Through focussing on the experiences of servants whose lives traverse Africa and Germany, the chapter provides insights into the impact of transgressing the global colour line. It examines moments when servants’ lives became visible—often moments of crisis in the servant/master relationship, such as when servants broke from their masters or were abandoned by them to their own fates. These crisis points brought their cases to the attention of local, colonial, and welfare institutions as well as local newspapers, helping to shape the German authorities’ views regarding Black migration from the colonies in general. The chapter highlights the opportunities recent digitisation projects have created for recovering elements of the historical experiences of even the most transient Black visitors to Europe.
