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Historians of European colonialism in Africa tend to neglect large areas of the colonial state's territory, often focusing on a history of colonial rule's main places. It is a history of towns and administrative centers, of plantations and mines, of mission stations and governmental schools. Such histories take particular places in which the colonial rule manifests itself visibly as a pars pro Mo of the colonial territory. This focus arises from a notion of the colonial territory as a coherent entity made and maintained by a state in which the state has a continuous presence.
My view on the making of colonial territory arises at the intersection of colonial discourse and the practice of early colonial rule in the German colony of Eastern Africa. The underlying narrative of this paper is the emergence and dissolution of various relations between discourse and practice, between performance and politics. The first part of this article deals with the invention of East Africa as a colonial territory as a result of a peripatetic practice of explorers and colonial officials. The second part depicts the consequences of this invention in the practice of colonial rule.
The territorial state itself is a social space, a historically-situated configuration of social, economic and political relations. These relations both model the social space and are themselves shaped by it. Itself being a product of history, the social space also produces history by enabling or limiting particular events and processes. Social spaces also have a symbolic dimension; they are tissues of meaning. Representations shape spaces by filling them with symbols, monuments and artifacts. Spaces are scenes of rituals, ceremonies and feasts, which transform particular places into representational spaces. Spaces are frames for social, cultural, and political identities. (Lefebvre 2004:73) Spaces are also formed by representations and discourses: the moment we see and represent a space, we construct it according to particular discourses. Such discourses can be based either on, for example, mythical narratives that connect social spaces to cosmologies or Utopias, or on the rational narratives of science such as geography, which construct space as an abstract entity (Duncan 1993:233). Or spaces can be shaped by discourses of power, which project power relations in such spatial concepts as centre and periphery (Massey 1999:10; Natter and...