The relatively brief history of the German colony in South West Africa (now Namibia), which existed from 1884 to 1915, has attracted a remarkable amount of attention in German and international politics in recent years. The campaign by Namibians for reparations from Germany over the genocide of the Nama and Herero people in 1904-1908 has rendered the work of historians on the period of unusual immediate political relevance. The extreme right in Germany, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, has been keen to minimize the extent of the violence of this episode of colonial rule, so historical interpretation of a period more than a century back, has become a very live political issue.1 There is now a rich historiography of the genocide2, some of it touching on questions of labour3, as well as notable contributions to the study of the economy of German South West Africa.4 But up to now, there has been no book giving an overview of the history of the work force that sustained the colony under German rule, and in the immediate aftermath of South Africa’s conquest of the territory on behalf of the British Empire in 1915. William Blakemore Lyon’s book brilliantly fills this gap. It is moreover, an exemplary contribution to global labour history, particularly notable for breaking down the entrenched barriers between the historiographies of West Africa and Southern Africa. The book is commendable for overcoming the tendency to separate histories of war from histories of labour. Lyon shows how the labour requirements of the German forces during the genocidal war that followed the Herero rebellion in 1904, and the subsequent mass mortality among the Herero and Nama, led to important restructurings of the organization of the labour system. Maritime history is integrated into the mainstream of labour history to a degree which is unusual in Southern African studies, especially through Lyon’s exploration of the key role of the Woermann shipping line of Hamburg in recruiting West African labourers, both for work onboard their vessels and for onshore labour in the colony. The text is available in open access, online, which is particularly laudable given its pertinence to current events.

Lyon identifies three crucial “labour corridors” through which the needed railway construction workers, miner workers and longshoremen flowed to the colony. Discussion of these “corridors” is then used as the basis of the chapter structure. The South African labour corridor brought people from the Cape Colony, mainly isiXhosa speakers from the Eastern Cape and (mixed race) so called “Cape Coloureds”, with a few isiZulu speakers from Natal. The West African labour corridor drew in seafaring Kru people from Liberia and Sierra Leone, who had spread along the West Coast of Africa, as well as some workers from the German colonies of Togo and Cameroun, and some individuals from the British West African colonies. And the Ovambo labour corridor channeled migrants from the Ovambo polities of the northern border, where South West Africa met Portuguese-ruled Angola. Lyon also traces the intriguing history of what he sees as a sort of failed labour corridor of Italian and other European workers brought in to work on the railways.

Lyon shows how historical shock events redirected the evolution of the labour system. The decimation, in the genocide, of the Nama population in the south of the country, and the Herero in the north-central region, meant that their labour had to be replaced. (Some Herero and Nama were used as prisoner-of-war workers, but the conditions were so dire that mortality was at a level which prevented this from being a solution to the problem of labour shortages faced by the colonial state and private companies). The outbreak of war in 1904 meant that the Germans needed to bring in thousands of troops as well as horses and supplies, and that raised the demand for longshoremen, who were imported from West Africa. The authorities also needed to build railways, for military purposes, and Cape and European workers especially were used to fill this role. Then in 1908, the discovery of diamonds in the southern coast Lüderitz Bay area led to a new need for labour. Ovambo workers, who had previously been able to make an arduous walk to the northern mines centred on Tsumeb, now had to be transported the vast distance to the Lüderitz mines on rail and by ship. As the colony flourished, the South African and West African workers became something of a relatively highly-paid labour elite, some of them with jobs in retail or as clerks, and a few West Africans were able to establish small businesses, and to accumulate a little wealth. The South African conquest was yet another upheaval, with the South Africans essentially opting for an Ovambo workforce, after they and the Portuguese had militarily crushed the Ovambo resistance, something that the German colony had never been able to achieve. Under the new rulers, the South African and West African worker strata were increasingly squeezed out of their previously strong position in the labour market, and they reacted by becoming politicized through Garveyism and the labour-populist ICU movement.

The book is methodologically innovative in its use of archival and photographic evidence. Lyon utilizes a remarkable archive of the records of workers’ deaths, which yields much rich detail about their life trajectories. He has also unearthed a stunning archive of photographs: a significant part of the book is devoted to the interpretation of these images, and this strategy is astutely, and sometimes brilliantly, executed, providing insights into work processes, racial relationships, and leisure activities.

Lyon presents an unsparing picture of colonial violence, but also a nuanced portrayal of workers as active agents, able to carve out spaces of creative activity for themselves. Drawing on unpromising sources, he gives a rounded picture of them as religious believers, political activists, small scale entrepreneurs, musicians and people who enjoyed their free time.

My criticisms of the book are fairly minor. Firstly, Lyon’s use of the term “South African labour corridor” is confusing, because it does not clearly differentiate between the self-governing Cape Colony from which most of the workers actually came, and the unified South African state, which was only formed in 1910. This has the effect that the particular political dynamics of the Cape and its relationship to the German colony do not come into sufficient focus. Secondly, in the excellent case study of the Italian labourers, too much emphasis is perhaps laid on the failure of this project, and too little on what such limited flows of workers from Europe actually can tell us about dynamics of labour migration to southern Africa.5 Thirdly, De Gruyter could have done a better editorial job – some instances of repetition, awkward phrasing, typos and anachronisms needed to be eliminated. These are however, small flaws in an otherwise outstanding addition to the literature of Southern African labour history.

Notes:
1 I discuss this in detail in Jonathan Hyslop, The Kaiser’s Lost Empire and the Alternative für Deutschland: Colonial Guilt-Denialism and Authoritarian Populism in Germany, in: Historia 66,2 (2021), pp. 101–124, https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid=S0018-229X2021000200006&script=sci_abstractract (11.12.2024).
2 Most prominently in the work of Jürgen Zimmerer: See Jürgen Zimmerer / Joachim Zeller (eds.), Genocide in South West Africa. The Colonial War (1904–1908) and its Aftermath, Monmouth 2008.
3 Jonas Kreienbaum, A Sad Fiasco. Colonial Concentration Camps in Southern Africa 1900–1908, New York 2019.
4 Steven Press, Blood and Diamonds. Germany’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa, Cambridge MA 2021.
5 Compare for example E.A. Mantzaris, Greek Workers in South Africa: The Case of Railway Workers and Cigarette Makers, 1905–1914, in: Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 14,3-4 (1987), pp. 49–63, https://scholarship.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/communities/35a1c80c-a6d1-4aec-8975-a0f52a3643de (11.12.2024).