Abstract
Abstract The dowsing debate in Imperial Germany and its role in the solution to the ‘water question’ in German Southwest Africa is a window on the three principal themes of this article: environmental challenges, imperial fantasies and the fluidity of epistemologies. First, the water question, as contemporaries termed it, was a significant concern in German Southwest Africa, and discussions of divination illustrate its centrality in the development of Germany’s first and only settler colony. Secondly, the main protagonist, district administrator and dowser Rafael Perfecto von Uslar, and his role in the search for water sources in German Southwest Africa capture the limits of German colonial control. Von Uslar stepped into a vacuum created by German ethnocentrism and its dismissive colonial gaze. Finally, the resurgence of divination, a folk tradition many believed existed only outside the sciences, blurred the line between objective scientific knowledge and superstition within the German Empire—all the while silencing local African expertise.
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