ABSTRACT
In responding to the colonized peoples, however, writers faced a more challenging call to reconcile imagination and imperialism. This chapter concerns to catalogue the brutal stereotypes put forward in colonial fiction than to suggest reasons for their victory over curiosity and imagination. It then concentrates on those writers who prided themselves on exploring as well as conquering and who sought intimacy rather than distance in their dealings with the 'Native'. It is convenient to begin with German colonial fiction since it shows the extent of the imagination's failure to understand, or even to investigate, the otherness of the colonies. Frieda Kraze's novel is characteristic also in that the ultimate repudiation of the Africans was provoked by the alleged sensuality of their culture: a factor which justified their repudiation on both ethical and cultural grounds. Male views of mixed marriages and of sexual relations with African women departed but slightly from this narrow stereotype.
