Colonialism is almost proverbially enmeshed in violence. As the present book, based on a Cornell University Ph.D. thesis, demonstrates, it is the modalities and particulars of such violence that present challenging research topics and promise fruitful results.
Southwest Africa, today independent Namibia, experienced thirty years of German rule. Muschalek focuses on the closing period, from the end of the Namibian War (1907–1908) until the occupation by the South African army in 1915. According to widespread opinion, this was a time when violence extending up to genocide had ended, either in the quiet of a “graveyard” (Horst Drechsler), or in a combination of modest economic development and initiatives by indigenes to rebuild their communities. In this setting, the police were deemed instrumental to ensuring an order that was a prerequisite for colonial development.
Unlike earlier work, either apologetic (H.J. Rafalski) or focused on the institutional dimension and the perspective of officialdom (J. Zollmann), Muschalek takes a more actor-oriented approach. From her analysis, including an examination of personal files, she both reconstructs typical careers of policemen and shows indicators of their professional mentality. Even though sources are much scarcer for African policemen, Muschalek manages to at least provide glimpses into their situation and concerns. She does so in five chapters, dealing respectively with “identity formations”; the demands on behaviour or, “proper bearing”; “tools and technologies of policing”; “daily routines”; and “violent regulations of the labor market”.
One important feature concerns the relationship between the police and the army. Muschalek represents this both in African and German members of the police force. For Africans, she points to the practices of precolonial “gun-owner societies” (p. 21) in southern and central Namibia, as well as to the recruitment by German soldiers of young African men as Bambusen or orderlies, which not only inducted them into a military way of life, but also integrated them into patron-client relationships that differed markedly from precolonial ones. At the same time, police service was a way of reconstituting a material basis also for a family. German policemen were largely recruited from among NCOs in the colonial army – a phenomenon also widespread in Germany proper. The presence of “European men” among the “rank and file” was an exception in the colonies, one linked to the relatively large settler population (p. 58). After years of military service, these men were steeped in military values and behaviour. As Muschalek shows repeatedly, particularly in the colony, the army and the police remained closely related, and police work resembled military work in a number of ways, not least in its actors sharing a “moral economy of honor” (p. 15). However, in mapping a concept of masculinity that relates to the police, there are also differences, chiefly that the policeman lives at home, not in a barracks, is generally married, and, as paterfamilias, has domestic responsibilities, although in reality this did not apply to the majority of Germans in the police force. Still, the tension between the “adventurer” (p. 32) and the family man was an important feature of German policemen's masculinity, as was their subjection of Africans, decisively including their colleagues.
The institution of the police demanded proper, disciplined behaviour and appearance, as well as strict observance of the prerequisites of hierarchy. At the same time, policemen required “administrative and legal skills” (p. 61), which they were to acquire during their service. This system, along with the often secluded living conditions in a vast country, and a sparsely manned police force, created “poorly trained bureaucrats” (p. 68), who in effect were trained “to a large extent [in] riding and shooting” (p. 62), much being left to “practice and experience”, which for Muschalek rendered Southwest Africa “an affective state” (p. 73).
Muschalek recounts in considerable detail “tools and technologies of policing”. These include instruments for punishing or fixing the bodies of culprits. The use of guns was of particular importance, and here the author demonstrates incisive ways in which rules and norms followed an initially divergent practice, i.e. the widespread shooting of persons suspected of various crimes. At the same time, such practice clearly targeted Africans rather than “Europeans”, and stood in contrast to practice in metropolitan Germany. Muschalek also stresses the symbolic meaning of these practices, exerted in different ways, by German and African policemen, on whites and on Africans. Even if “instrumentally counterproductive”, these practices “become understandable […] as complex cultural practices that functioned as markers and rituals of status distinction” (p. 97). Such evaluations need always to be considered against the background of the general scarcity of personnel in a vast open country, which often implied very sparsely manned solitary posts and pervasive “improvisation” (p. 99).
Significantly, the following two chapters are titled, respectively, “Police Work” and “Policing Work” – Muschalek states that “most of the police's time” was occupied in tasks precisely to control African labour (p. 101). Not least, police work revolved around maintaining the norms of hierarchy and honour that lay at the foundations of their habitus but also of “bureaucratic procedure” (p. 107). Such procedure not only took up a lot of time, but proved “key to fostering power” (p. 107), and thus to legitimating the police also in its relations to other colonizers. Another important dimension was control of “an assigned territory” (p. 110), specifically partly in pioneering cartographic work, mapping the districts they served. Obviously, such work also involved violence, and Muschalek pointedly interprets “the police's use of violence as work” (p. 127), including for instance the killing of large numbers of San (“Bushmen”), which was considered an indication of “particularly good performance” (p. 127).
The “violent regulation of the labor market” (p. 130), within the context of a regime of at least partly forced African labour, was linked to classical colonial stereotypes, as Muschalek can show especially with reference to the examinations taken for certification as a police officer. Thus, an “economy of ‘educative violence’” was aimed at forcing the proverbial “lazy native” into salubrious work. Again, this is intrinsically linked to the myth of terra nullius, i.e. unused and unworked land, open for settlement. So far, the topic recalls mainstays of colonial ideology and practice. Muschalek's account is much more interesting, since she documents how police were instrumental in – mostly forcibly – recruiting workers for the needs of settlers, but also not infrequently how they came into conflict with employers who relied on their services to discipline their labour force, above all by returning runaways. This entailed the idea of projecting an image of constant supervision, which, of course, was at odds with the scarcity of personnel and the wide expanse of land the police had to cover. Still, the projection of “the personification of the paternal state” (p. 149) meant that, at least in some instances, police were actively enforcing discipline on workers, but occasionally also uncovered unacceptable working conditions that, also in their view, explained why workers absconded.
Muschalek regards the “moral economy of violence”, the production of “law” by policemen's “daily practices” (p. 160) as a “form of improvised statecraft” (p. 162), showing not grand violent acts, but “people getting by, living with violence in the everyday” (p. 164). This, she posits, “produced a viable peace time order” (p. 160). In this way, Muschalek forcefully underwrites her claim to an everyday perspective. However, the notion of “peace” in Southwest Africa even after 1907 appears problematic, not only on account of the pervasive low-scale violence by the police as well as ongoing small-scale indigenous resistance, but even more so owing to the persistent and often overlooked large-scale violence such as the systematic “Bushmen hunts” from 1911 onwards, which are touched on here only in passing. Moreover, a Hobbesian view of order as implied here might be confronted productively with a systematic critique of violence and, by implication, the law, as formulated by writers such as Walter Benjamin. Again, where her sources apparently fail her, Muschalek supplements these at various places with observations from other (partly German) colonial settings or general work on the police. In these cases, she does not always distinguish clearly between the historical record and more general, partly nomothetic work. Concerning more empirical, source-oriented analyses of colonial states, the pathbreaking studies of sociologists and anthropologists Gerd Spittler and Trutz von Trotha are grossly underused or conspicuously absent. Supplementing her analyses with considerations on the porous, yet episodically despotic colonial state, or the razzia as a means of projecting power, would have helped to put Muschalek's findings further into perspective. These critical notes notwithstanding, the great merit of viewing state violence from an everyday, as well as a dual, African and German perspective adds significantly to our knowledge and thinking, not only of the police in German Southwest Africa, but also of the colonial state in a wider perspective.
