Conclusion

This concluding chapter offers some reflections on the nature of everyday violence in colonial Africa. Coming from multiple cultural groups, the African and German men of the Landespolizei shared a host of moral codes that can best be subsumed under the heading of honor. This study reveals significant similarities between policemen from Europe and those from Southern Africa. Out of the Landespolizei's distinctive racial and social composition unfolded a dynamic that made the police decidedly efficacious. Instead of a grand narrative of quantified violence, the chapter draws out the lives of people getting by, living with violence in the everyday. It tries to uncover how the dynamics of violence were inscribed into a moral economy of the accepted and normal. The chapter concludes that violence is not necessarily antithetical to community or social order. Indeed, it can be constructive. The daily brutality of modern colonialism was a horrific injustice. But it was also a way of life with its own rules and regularities.

Of Whips, Shackles, and Guns

This chapter approaches practices of everyday violence through the lens of its material instruments. Three tools are examined in depth: the whip, the shackle, and the gun. Their specific use emerged as improvised responses to contextual constraints, refining ideological discourses and official policy along the way. The chapter reveals that violent technologies of policing were parceled out according to the system of status hierarchy that defined colonial order. Under what circumstances they were used, and how, were more important as a matter of social distinction than efficient practice. Symbolically, who used what tools in what situations clarified hierarchy, for instance in the general ban on Africans owning guns. Moreover, the expert or approved use of tools—professionalism—could also serve as a marker of social distinction that elevated the policemen, Africans included, above other colonial actors, such as settlers. This chapter offers a first substantiation of the thesis that police praxis drove legal rationalization. As the cases of corporal punishment and of weapons usage against fleeing subjects illustrate, policemen manufactured procedures that police headquarters reluctantly yet gradually accepted as the rule.

Soldier-Bureaucrats

This chapter addresses the hybrid semi-civilian and semi-military institutional setting within which police codes of behavior emerged. On the one hand, police leadership held on tightly to military notions of etiquette, proper appearance, comradeship, and loyalty. This attitude became particularly apparent in police training. Not legal knowledge or administrational skills, but an imposing military habitus and access to lethal force were to provide the foundation for quality policing. On the other hand, being charged with civilian tasks, the policemen of the Landespolizei created a professional culture that increasingly introduced administrational techniques as modes of validation and legitimization. To them, it mattered that the job was done in accordance with an ever growing complex of decrees as well as that it was documented in proper form. In short, policemen were men of guns and paper—they injured and killed people “by the book.” This chapter returns to the significance of honor, demonstrating how the concern for proper appearance and performance was the most decisive factor in the emergence of a Landespolizei organizational culture.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a brief background on the power of everyday violence in the settler colony of German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) at the beginning of the twentieth century. It explores the “unspectacular” violent acts orchestrated by the police force of German Southwest Africa. Instead of being built primarily on formal, legal, and bureaucratic processes, the colonial state was produced by improvised, informal practices of violence. Contrary to most social theories of the state, the chapter argues that the organization of state power was not merely a matter of claiming the monopoly of force and thus proscribing any excessive, disruptive, and nonofficial violence. Rather, it reveals that colonial rule consisted in diffusing and regulating specific types of seemingly self-evident harm throughout society.