Germany, a latecomer to the colonial expansion of European powers, colonized several territories on the African continent in the 1880s: German East Africa (parts of today’s Tanzania), German South-West Africa (Namibia), German Kamerun (parts of today’s Cameroon) and German Togo (parts of today’s Togo).[1] Until the beginning of World War I, the German colonial empire thus governed different populations based on an ever-fluid racialization of the colonized subjects that allowed for the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of various groups along the lines of race, religion, language, and culture.[2]
A latecomer to colonialism
Carl Peters, a trained historian and self-declared philosopher, was a key figure in the early acquisition of formal colonies. In 1883, Peters established the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft and raised funds to pursue his vision of a "German India," organizing an expedition to Tanganyika. There, he persuaded certain local leaders to sign agreements of his own devising, then returned to Berlin in early 1884 presenting these as evidence of a newly established colony. Bismarck, seeing colonial expansion as diplomatically useful, recognized the documents as official Schutzverträge, thereby formally bringing German East Africa into existence.[3] The practice of treaty-making did not end there. In the wake of the Berlin Conference, both private actors like Peters and German state representatives continued negotiating agreements with local authorities — in Cameroon alone, no fewer than ninety-five such treaties were concluded with various chiefs between 1883 and 1907.[4]
The initial phase of German colonial activity, commencing in 1884, was largely driven by missionaries, geographers, and a handful of trading houses. However, uprisings such as the so-called “Arab rebellion” in East Africa (1888–1889), combined with poor internal governance, compelled the empire to transform its loosely held “protectorates” into formally administered colonies. Given the particular brutality with which German colonizers conducted themselves, Kaiser Wilhelm I, responding to pressure from the Reichstag, issued a series of decrees aimed at curbing their excesses — though these measures proved largely ineffective.[5] The German Colonial Society[6] and various commercial interests jointly lobbied the Reichstag to pass legislation granting the Kaiser greater authority to limit interference from rival colonial powers in German territorial ventures. After extended debate, the Reichstag passed the bill on April 10, 1886. A second phase then unfolded, defined by the formal occupation of territory and the establishment of bureaucratic structures. Underpinning the entire colonial endeavor was the conviction that Europeans, as a supposedly superior race, bore responsibility for the “cultural elevation” of colonized peoples, with full assimilation as the ultimate aim. In practice, this translated into settler colonialism, the appropriation of land for plantations, the imposition of taxation, and the coercion of indigenous populations into forced labor. Such repressive and extractive policies ultimately provoked major uprisings in German South-West Africa (1904–1907) and East Africa (1905–1908), prompting a significant reorganization of colonial governance. This reorganization ushered in a third phase, marked by the creation of the Imperial Colonial Office (Reichskolonialamt) in 1907, which centralized oversight of Germany’s overseas territories — with the notable exception of the Kiaochow concession (present-day Qingdao) in China. The driving intellectual force behind this restructuring was Bernhard Dernburg, a former banker, left-liberal politician, and later head of the Colonial Department, who argued that sound colonial policy required utilitarian principles and professional administrative competence — a position that was met with only partial support among colonial governors on the ground.[7]
A History of Destruction…
Five years after Carl Peters had ventured into the Tanganyika region — a name coined by the colonists to mean “to wander in the bush”[8] — placing it under the control of his colonial enterprise, a desecration of a mosque in the coastal town of Pangani set off the first sparks of an uprising, which ultimately brought down the existing Omani state authority in 1888. What began as a local revolt quickly spread along the entire coast, drawing together a broad coalition of patricians, working-class townspeople, peasants, and enslaved people, all united in their opposition to the German occupiers and the local authorities who had sided with them. This insurrection forced the Germans to convert their private commercial venture into a fully administered colony. Under Hermann von Wissmann’s command, troops pillaged and committed acts of violence against the local population, laying waste first to Pangani and then to the town of Tanga — leaving little standing in either place before both were eventually rebuilt by the colonial governance.[9] When Wissmann proved unable to establish order amid ongoing conflict, the imperial government stepped in during January 1891, assuming direct control over the colonial administration and formally incorporating the region into the German Empire.[10] For the Orientalist Carl Heinrich Becker, the internal diversity and fragmentation of the Muslim population accounted for “the absence of a concerted response, in the name of Islam, to imperial encroachment” in German East Africa.[11] According to missionary reports from the German Colonial Congress held in Berlin in 1902, the region also lacked any well-organized Muslim religious infrastructure.[12] Adding to this, the brutal and ruthless methods of colonial occupation dismantled local structures in what regional history remembers as the Vita Vya Kwanza, or the First War — a conflict in which hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives.[13] As Michael Pesek contends, “war was in many cases and aspects the precondition for colonial politics.”[14] The German colonization project was no exception: armed conflict not only began with Carl Peters but it persisted throughout the German colonial period. Although native networks in German East Africa did mount military resistance, these efforts were swiftly and decisively suppressed.[15] Such acts of defiance stood in sharp contrast to the far more cohesive resistance mounted by the inhabitants of German West Africa.[16]
… and Resistance
The Arab Revolt (Araberaufstand, also referred to as the Abushiri Revolt or the Slave Trader Revolt, Sklavenhändlerrevolte) was one of the most significant acts of resistance against the German colonial administration. Following the signing of a treaty between the DOAG and the sultan of Zanzibar in April 1888, whereby the DOAG was entrusted with the collection of customs duties, the wealthy merchant Abushiri (Abu Bashir bin Salim al‐Harthi), who saw the treaty as a harbinger of complete subjugation to German rule, galvanized the local people into action. The rebellion denounced German interference in the slave, ivory, and rubber trades, as well as their conduct in mosques. It spread inland until it was eventually crushed by forces led by the German explorer and later governor Hermann von Wissmann in April 1890. The resistance was not constituted solely by Muslims nor by Arabs, as the name “Arab Rebellion” seemingly suggests. It was led by Abushiri, a Muslim, alongside several other local leaders (including Bwana Heri bin Juma al- Mafazī in Saadani; the Washamba chief Semboja from the hinterland; the liwali (Muslim scholar) ʿAbd- al- Qawī bin ʿAbdallāh; the jimbo of Dar es Salaam, who was named Shindo; a former servant of the Sultan Sulaymān bin Sayf, the Omani merchant Muḥammad bin Qāsim; and the poet Hemedi bin Abdallah bin Saʿīd al- Buhriy) and was largely spearheaded by Yao slaves from the southern coast.[17] But they were all bound by ustaarabu, a hegemonic identity marker that included Islam but was not identical with it.[18] The Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (German colonial newspaper), the DOAG’s media arm, had “already run a series of anti-‘Arab’ articles by the time the uprising began. These articles were composed of racist stereotypes (‘dirty’ and ‘degraded’ Arabs vs. ‘clean’ but yet ‘uncivilized’ ‘Negroes’), denunciations of Islam, and exhortations to end the slave trade.”[19] Although the German Empire had seized control over the territories that Peters first conquered, there was continuity of personnel. Hermann von Wissmann, whose army crushed the Arab Rebellion, became the first imperial commissioner or governor (Reichskommissar) for German East Africa, a role he held from 1888 to 1891, as well as being the founder of the German Schutztruppe, the quasi-military of the German colonial regime.[20]
… and Cooptation
Throughout the 1890s, the German Schutztruppe pushed into the interior of Tanzania, engaging in a prolonged war against local resistance. At the same time, however, it had succeeded in drawing a portion of the indigenous population into the colonial administration, particularly its military structures. To reduce costs, the German colonial empire largely recruited demobilized Muslim soldiers — the askari — from the Egyptian army in Sudan.[21] These mercenary forces were initially composed of Muslim levies from Sudan and from Shangaan in Mozambique, before being gradually replaced by Muslim soldiers from the coast and, later, by Nyamwezi soldiers from the East African central caravan route.[22] The Schutztruppe of German East Africa was a White officer-led force that numbered around 1,200 soldiers at its outset, growing to approximately 15,000 askari and 3,500 German soldiers by 1914. Given the stark disproportion between the colonial army's modest size and the vast territory it was tasked with controlling — an area twice the size of Germany in Europe — establishing direct rule proved virtually impossible, and the resulting violence was all the more ferocious.[23] This extreme brutality was also rooted in the racial and religious framework through which Hermann von Wissmann perceived the local population. Criticized by contemporaries for running what amounted to a dictatorship,[24] Wissmann held that Islam was inherently a religion of war, and that Muslims were therefore especially well-suited for service in European military structures.[25] The figure of the African soldier — the loyal askari — within the German Schutztruppe was defined in relation to two mutually reinforcing male archetypes, and carried no implication of equality. In the German colonial imagination, "the loyal black soldier was the result and living proof of the achievements of the German male colonizer. Without the heroic character, the military abilities, and the disciplinary power of the latter, there would be no devoted colonial male subject."[26] The Schutztruppe also incorporated Africans who had converted to Catholicism and were under the care of German missionaries.[27] The askari were embedded within a racial hierarchy that placed them firmly beneath the White German soldier. Militarism would later be invoked as a counterargument by those within the German Kaiserreich — Christian missionaries chief among them — who opposed the inclusion of Muslims in the state apparatus. As crises involving Muslims in the colonized territories mounted, the military dimension was increasingly turned against them. The pastor Amandus Acker contended that “Islam does not provide subservient and reliable subjects due to the military spirit of Islam,”[28] while the Arabist scholar Martin Hartmann argued in his pamphlet Islam, Mission, Politik that Islam was in essence an ecclesia militans — a militant community — capable of one day posing a genuine threat to German authority.[29] Between 1890 and 1903, German expeditionary forces brought most of the colony under their control and subsequently incorporated Muslims into the administration and state schools. The wars waged by the German colonial state claimed enormous numbers of lives. From 1891 to 1896, the Schutztruppe was engaged in near-constant combat against the local population, and in 1891 alone it lost close to two-thirds of its soldiers at the Battle of Lugalo-Rugaro in the Tanzanian interior.[30]
Ustaarabu, the way of the Arab
Muslim communities in German East Africa were far from homogeneous. The Omani elite, regarded by outsiders as “Arab,” maintained their own places of worship in the form of Ibaḍī mosques, and stood as the most politically and economically influential stratum of society. For centuries, the coastline had formed an integral part of their trading networks, and Islam had been woven into the region's cultural fabric since the twelfth century. By the nineteenth century, “Omani Arab rulers and traders established their control over the coast and the Zanzibar archipelago, with caravans and trading networks extending far into the interior of the African continent, decades before the first Europeans followed in their footsteps.”[31] Their elite standing gave rise to what might be described as an “aspiration to acquire Arabness,” clearly reflected in the Swahili concept of ustaarabu — literally, the “way of the Arab” — a positively charged cultural marker carrying distinct religious connotations. The African Swahili population, by contrast, traced its heritage to Ḥaḍramī and Šīrāzī lineages and adhered to Sunni Islam within the Shafi'i legal tradition (maḏhab). Muslim South Asian traders, meanwhile, followed the Ismāʿīlī Shiʿah, while the askari of the Schutztruppe belonged to the Maliki maḏhab. Further adding to this plurality, a network of Sufi orders (ṭuruq) originating from the Somali coast had established a presence in the territory that would become German East Africa. As Jörg Haustein has observed, “This overall variety lent itself to a range of perceptions and observations about Islam in colonial discourse.”[32]
Racializing Blackness, Brownness, and Islam
Colonial usurpation first required ideological justification, and anti-Muslim discourse served precisely that purpose. A telling example is an 1888 article by Gustav Meinecke, editor of the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, drawing on the ideas of the Egyptologist Heinrich Karl Brugsch, which portrayed Arabs as merchants, soldiers, and missionaries who spread “hate against Christians and Europeans” alongside Islam, and cast “Mohammedanism” as an “eternal enemy” while framing fetishism as a “natural ally” of European colonialism. The piece concluded with a call for Christian civilization to overcome what it termed the “semi-barbarity of Arabdom,” so that “the Arabic tide, which has brought a curse rather than a blessing, will be dammed up, freeing the way for the cultural mission of Japheth.”[33] This militaristic register dominated discourse on Muslims throughout the first half of 1888, and was echoed by the missionaries as well as by Hermann von Wissmann, who declared in an article that there was “but one terribly dangerous enemy: the Arab.”[34] According to Haustein, this coordinated rhetoric was designed to “pressure the German government into taking a hard stance toward the Sultan,”[35] while simultaneously rallying German public opinion behind the colonial agenda. Arabs were systematically cast as “racially inferior, a geopolitical foe, slave traders, and religious fanatics.”[36]
The discourse began to shift, however, when the German consul in Zanzibar, Gustav Michahelles, concluded an agreement in April 1888 with Khalifah bin Saʿid — the successor to Sultan Barġash bin Saʿīd, with whom Carl Peters had previously negotiated — on behalf of the German East Africa Company (DOAG), following intense pressure on the sultan. Under the terms of this agreement, the sultan leased the administration of the coastline to the DOAG, granting it taxation authority, extensive jurisdictional powers, mining rights, trade control, and a range of additional privileges.[37] When the symbolic transfer of power was enacted — DOAG flags raised in all major ports and the sultan’s flags seized from his local representatives, the maliwali — resistance broke out almost immediately. Several ports came under attack, and two DOAG agents were killed in the town of Kilwa.[38] Once British support enabled Wissmann to suppress the uprising, a new phase began. Two Arab instigators, Abushiri and Muḥammad bin Qāsim, were hanged, while Bwana Heri and Semboja were pardoned and absorbed into the nascent German administration.[39] The sultan of Zanzibar’s authority was symbolically preserved through the joint display of his flag alongside that of the DOAG, accompanied by assurances that mosques would be protected.[40]
From 1892 onward, the integrated Muslim elite were incorporated into official ceremonies and symbolic acts of power-sharing, including celebrations of the emperor’s birthday, where they were allowed to address the population alongside district officers and the Offizierskorps. Muslim festivals, such as the end of Ramadan, were deliberately leveraged to cultivate closer ties with local Islamic elites. The German colonial authorities further sought to bring Muslims into the fold through a race-based criminal code that placed “true” Muslims and Arabs — identified by lighter skin tone — above the darker-skinned “Swahili” and those classified as Mischlinge, or half-castes, who were regarded as superficial, half-formed Muslims. As German rule consolidated, African Islam — Islam noire, as French scholars had termed it — came to be distinguished from Arab Islam, with the former portrayed as moderate, peaceful, and less prone to fanaticism.[41] In the hands of the colonial authorities, differential racialization thus generated contrasting Muslim figures: the allied Muslim on one side, the suspect Muslim on the other.
While Europeans broadly assumed the superiority of their own civilization — a belief that served to legitimize imperial conquest — German colonists were nonetheless compelled to reconcile their theories with the realities they encountered. Much as the Austro-Hungarian and British Empires had done, the German Empire incorporated Muslim elites and their institutions into the framework of the new colonial order. Recognizing that the precolonial political structures were sufficiently developed to be of use, German colonizers adopted and adapted them as a foundation for administering colonial rule.[42] As the historian Felicitas Becker has argued, most empires “wanted to instrumentalize Islamic institutions in the pursuit of social control.”[43] The result was an ever-changing ambivalent image of Islam: Muslims were praised on one hand for their civilizational qualities, while on the other, Islam was linked to political violence, moral decay, and civilizational stagnation. In the White German imagination, Muslim African peoples occupied an intermediate position in the racial hierarchy — culturally backward and inferior to Europeans, yet considered superior to non-Muslim Africans, who were placed at the very bottom of that hierarchy,[44] but still to be won, especially by the Christian missions, who focused on proselytization in the hinterlands and on keeping them away from Islam, seeing “Islam as a threat for our African colonies,”[45] as one missionary had put it.
When the German Kaiserreich entered World War I, the idea of Islam as an ecclesia militans was revived again, but this time as a positive trait. Fighting with the Ottoman Empire against the Triple Entente, the German Kaiserreich approached the Şeyhülislam to publish a fatwa calling for a jihad by theoretically all Sunni Muslims against the British and French,[46] also translating it into Swahili albeit with little effect on Muslim mobilization for the war.[47] But this example illustrates the extent to which the fluidity of constant racialization depended on what was at stake: German whiteness and their power.