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My thanks to Alex Wisnoski, Basit Hammad Qureshi, Ann Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, Cameron Bradley, Jesse Izzo, Melissa Hampton, and Jason Daniels for reading early drafts of this article. I am also grateful to Julia E. Ault, Eric S. Roubinek, Stephen Morgan, Eric D. Weitz, Gary B. Cohen, Andrew I. Port, and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical feedback and helpful commentary. Awards from the Central European History Society, the University of Minnesota, and Black Hills State University supported research for this article. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own.
In March 1889, Captain Hendrik Witbooi, the leader of the Witbooi Namaqua--the largest ethnic group of the Khoikhoi community indigenous to the Cape Colony (present-day South Africa) and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (present-day Botswana)--sent a letter to Reichskommissar Heinrich Ernst Göring of German Southwest Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika, DSWA). "I appeal to you," he wrote, "be so good as to distance yourself from chiefs who engage in treachery [against me]. I consider it ill-judged of Your Excellency to cooperate with those who cannot make peace and are therefore envious of me. Stay neutral ... so [Captain Jan Afrikaner and I] can fight it out between ourselves."1Though the origins of the conflict between Witbooi and Afrikaner preceded the arrival of German officials in Southwest Africa, Witbooi's requests were part of a targeted response against the colonial government.2In particular, he wanted German administrators to vacate the protection treaties they had negotiated with Afrikaner following their seizure of DSWA in April 1884.
On the surface, protection agreements offered both sides acceptable outcomes at what the popular German periodical Koloniales Jahrbuch regarded as a "minimum cost."3Africans could maintain a degree of sovereignty in their traditional spheres of control, while white settlers could exploit the colony without fear of rebellion. In truth, however, German merchants, farmers, and military personnel intended to use these treaties as "speedy actions [to secure] certain areas for future colonial purposes."4In February 1885, for example, Sigmund Israel, an employee in Adolf Lüderitz's merchant enterprise in DSWA, deemed that protection agreements were the best means available "to achieve the cession of Damaraland [central Namibia] or, at least, a portion of territory large enough to open up...