BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

The perception that Germany worked at cross-purposes to British interests in Africa came
to the fore when German protests cancelled a provision of Britain’s Congo Treaty with King
Leopold that in 1894 had leased a strip of land adjacent to the German East African frontier to
Britain, thereby frustrating the long-cherished imperialist dream of a Cape to Cairo railway. This
development signified the Wilhelmine government’s more openly confrontational policy since
Bismarck’s dismissal in March of 1890. The most revealing facet of British opposition to
German colonial expansion in East Africa appears in its focus on national character. Reviled as
an arrogant and acquisitive parvenu, Germany was taken to task for imitating the “methods of the
cuckoo” and acting like “a dog who leaves his own plate of dinner before he has begun, to seize
the dinner on another dog’s plate.” 4 The fear that Germany was bent on “the humiliation and the
spoliation of England,” compounded by a belief in the German national characteristics of
perseverance and patience, actually galvanized British imperial ambitions. 5 Writers condemned
German methods and motives and criticized British complacency:
There is a large unoccupied uncoloured space on the map between Angola, the Zambesi,
and the Congo Free State which she might explore and settle and paint Prussian blue if
she has any stomach for the adventure. But as a rule the work of opening out new country
is not to her taste. It is so much more easy and pleasant to leave that to Englishmen, and
when they have overcome all the difficulties and dangers that await the first explorers and
settlers, to walk in after them and turn them out either by force or by negotiation, the
latter method as a rule being preferred, as it is found by experience to be the less
troublesome and more efficacious of the two.
In surveying the negotiations between England and Germany as a whole, one is
struck by three things: the impudence (it is a strong word, but no milder will serve) of the
claims made by Germany, the humbleness, not to say subserviency of England in the face
4 Earnest W. Beckett, “England and Germany in Africa,” pt. 3, Fortnightly Review 48
(July 1890): 148-49, 152, 150.
5 “Progress of the World: The Anglo-German Agreement,” 6; Beckett, “England and
Germany in Africa,” 160.
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