German Missions in German Colonialism: A Historical Contextualisation of Afterlives

Abstract In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels set in German East Africa, German colonialism is portrayed as violent, with administrators, military personnel, plantation overseers, and missionaries all engaging in acts of violence towards East Africans. Of these groups, the figure of the missionary is the most ambivalent, given that Christianity had both protective as well as culturally damaging functions in colonial spaces. This article provides a historical contextualisation of German missionary presence in German East Africa around 1900 and thereby productively complicates the role of missionaries and places them within the broader context of colonial violence in German East Africa. It examines the use of German within mission schools to contextualise the use of the German language in the novel as well as the ways in which missionaries were engaged in epistemic violence. In a third section, the article examines some of the ways in which German missionary societies contributed to the colonial revisionist movement – a movement that is described in the last chapter of Afterlives . This article reflects on how German missionary groups tried to keep their legacies alive in post-war Germany by creating memories of the former German colonies and thus provides context for the transnational and multilingual entanglements of the novel Afterlives .