60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

84 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
were just not enough European or Asian immigrants (in contrast to
Northern America and Australia) who could have replaced the Africans
as indentured servants or contract workers. Therefore, the indigenous
population was – together with land – the most important ‘resource’
for the colonisers. In contrast to American Indians and the Aborigines
in Australia, Africans have not fi gured as a ‘dying race’ in the eyes of the
Europeans and were considered to be fi t for labour. Whereas the relationship
between colonisers and indigenous peoples in Australia and in
the Americas centred almost solely on (the expropriation of or expulsion
from) land, the question of labour was formative for the encounter
between Europeans and Africans (Wolfe 2001).
Colonial offi cials and both farmers and planters were thus well aware
that a large reservoir of indigenous workers was a necessary prerequisite
for the development of a modern and effi cient infrastructure and
economic growth in the African colonies. Though, the envisaged
incorporation of the indigenous population as wage labourers into a
capitalist system turned out to be rather diffi cult because the Africans
were normally not ready to give up their economic independence.
Consequently, Europeans wanted to overcome the Africans’ reluctance
through negative incentives like penal taxation and through
means of force and harassment. Massive expropriation of indigenous
land was a common method to let the Africans abandon their subsistence
economy (Good 1976: 603). The colonisers did not even shrink
from attempting to destroy indigenous social, political and religious
structures in order to acquire control over labour. From the very
beginning of colonisation, the Europeans sought the dissolution of
the indigenous populations’ social and cultural organisation and the
transformation of the African societies into a proletarian class without
‘tribal identity’ and high culture.
These ideas were particularly prevalent in Southern African settler
colonies. After the defeat of the Herero and Nama in 1908, the German
colonial authorities in Southwest Africa, for instance, developed
and executed plans that aimed at the total dissolution of the African
cultures. Already in July 1905, deputy governor Tecklenburg had
stated that all tribal organisation ought to come to an end (Zimmerer
2001: 57). And Paul Rohrbach, one of the most infl uential German
colonial propagandists, had clear plans about the position and the status
of the Africans in colonial society:
Only the necessity of loosing their free national barbarianism and
of becoming a class of servants for the whites provides the natives
– historically seen – with an internal right of existence… The idea