Nomadic fantasies: producing landscapes of mobility in German southwest Africa

Abstract

In nineteenth-century Germany, ‘nomadism’ was an epithet frequently applied with little distinction to pastoralist, hunter-gatherer and semi-agriculturalist societies. It was used as a description not only of actual indigenous social organizations or economies, but also of a propensity to wander, an inconstancy and hence an obstacle to civilization. This was not confined to anthropological and ethnographic discourse. It also influenced policymaking in the colonies, particularly in discussions of land rights and land utilization. At the same time, discussions of nomadism, when applied to indigenous populations, awakened associations with a key theme in German national identity and national history - that the German nation had once shared this love of wandering. Debates on nomadism in the colonies expressed certain perceptions of German identity, but also anxieties about the mobility of labour and capital. The example chosen in this paper is German southwest Africa at the turn of the century.