A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers

Abstract

IN 1900, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, the founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, sent three Tuskegee graduates under the leadership of a faculty member to establish an experimental cotton farm in German Togo. One of those graduates, John W. Robinson, founded a cotton school in the German colony in 1904 that trained hundreds of students, recruited from every region of the country, to grow cotton for the European market. German colonial officials required graduates of this school to return to their home districts and continue growing cotton using the methods they had learned, in expectation that their countrymen would choose to imitate them. Between 1901 and 1909, the cotton exported to Europe from Togo improved in quality and increased in quantity by almost sixty-fold. European and American observers praised the German government for employing African American experts to bring the techniques and equipment used by black cotton growers in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South to black peasants in West Africa. This praise for the mobility of technology presupposes an unspoken acceptance of the immobility of the racial category black, the economic category peasant, and the botanical category cotton. The claim by the expedition’s admirers that American techniques were brought to Togo, under the auspices of German authority, to transform Togolese farming also tacitly assumes the stability and independence of nations. Such reified concepts and nationalist categories have long been the stock-intrade of professional historians. From the perspective of the history of any one nation, the Tuskegee expedition to Togo looks like a minor, if widely imitated, program of technical assistance. Such a perspective, however, renders the true dimen-