Gruesomeness is my policy
Richard J. Evans
- BuyGerman Colonialism: A Short History by Sebastian Conrad
Cambridge, 233 pp, £17.99, November 2011, ISBN 978 1 107 40047 4
Dotted around the world, there are still a few reminders of the fact that, between the 1880s and the First World War, Germany, like other major European powers, possessed an overseas colonial empire. If you go to Windhoek in Namibia, you can still pick up a copy of the Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper which caters for the remaining German-speaking residents of the town. If you fancy a trip to the Namibian seaside you can go to the coastal town of Lüderitz, passing ruined railway stations with their names still in Gothic letters, and spend time in Walfisch Bay enjoying the surf and keeping an eye out for penguins. In Tanzania, you can stay in the lakeside town of Wiedhafen. If you’re a businessman wanting to bulk buy palm oil in Cameroon, the Woermann plantations are still the place to go. In eastern Ghana, German-style buildings that once belonged to the colony of Togo are now advertised as tourist attractions.
Letters
Vol. 34 No. 5 · 8 March 2012
From Peter Dreyer
Richard J. Evans, in his review of Sebastian Conrad’s German Colonialism, says it was the Germans in South-West Africa who first officially used the term Konzentrationslager, but they had a fine example to copy in South Africa, where British concentration camps had only a few years earlier served to exterminate more than 26,000 Afrikaner women and children (LRB, 9 February). The British military created concentration camps for black Africans too, and many of them – a figure of 12,000 is cited – also died of exposure, disease and starvation. I also know, at first hand, that the German anthropologist Eugen Fischer didn’t coin the name ‘Rehoboth bastards’ (or ‘basters’). That’s what they called themselves, and still do. Missionaries tried to persuade them that the name was shameful, but they were proud of it. I offer these corrections on behalf of my baster relatives, Hans Dreyer, murdered at Pella on the Orange River around 1810, and Augustinus Dreyer, arrested with his mates near Karasberg in southern Namibia on Christmas Eve 2003 on charges of rustling and slaughtering eight sheep and a donkey. As the old song goes, ‘Dis swaar om ’n Baster te wees!’ It’s hard to be a bastard!
Peter Dreyer
Charlottesville, Virginia
Vol. 34 No. 7 · 5 April 2012
From Peter Dreyer
I did not say, in my letter about the Rehoboth Basters, that I know ‘at first hand’ that the German anthropologist Eugen Fischer did not coin the name (Letters, 8 March). That editorial insertion implies that I am myself a Rehoboth Baster. I am not. However, I am related to the two men I mentioned in my letter, because we have a common ancestor, the picaresque Isacq d’Algué, baptised Johannes Augustinus Dreyer (1689-1759), who was the forebear of almost everyone named Dreyer in Southern Africa, and also of innumerable others, including both the apartheid era foreign minister Pik Botha and Jan Smuts. The Rehoboth Basters are only a fraction of the millions entitled to the name Baster. They are remarkable in that they take pride in it.
Peter Dreyer
Charlottesville, Virginia
