Andrew Zimmerman

A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers

In 1900, Booker T. Washington, the founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, sent three Tuskegee graduates under the leadership of a faculty member to establish an experimental cotton farm in German Togo. One of those graduates, John W. Robinson, founded a cotton school in the German colony in 1904 that trained hundreds of students, recruited from every region of the country, to grow cotton for the European market. German colonial officials required graduates of this school to return to their home districts and continue growing cotton using the methods they had learned, in expectation that their countrymen would choose to imitate them. Between 1901 and 1909, the cotton exported to Europe from Togo improved in quality and increased in quantity by almost sixty-fold. European and American observers praised the German government for employing African American experts to bring the techniques and equipment used by black cotton growers in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South to black peasants in West Africa.

This praise for the mobility of technology presupposes an unspoken acceptance of the immobility of the racial category black, the economic category peasant, and the botanical category cotton. The claim by the expedition's admirers that American techniques were brought to Togo, under the auspices of German authority, to transform Togolese farming also tacitly assumes the stability and independence of nations. Such reified concepts and nationalist categories have long been the stock-in-trade of professional historians. From the perspective of the history of any one nation, the Tuskegee expedition to Togo looks like a minor, if widely imitated, program of technical assistance. Such a perspective, however, renders the true dimensions of the expedition virtually invisible, hidden in plain view, like the purloined letter in Edgar Allen Poe's story, for lack of a "set of principles of search" appropriate to "the principle of its concealment."¹ If transnational history rejects the assumption that national subjects exist outside and apart from their transnational interactions—that is, if it clearly distinguishes itself from mere international relations—then the Tuskegee expedition appears as a quilting point, stitching together and thus permanently transforming three powerful networks: German social science, New South race politics, and African cash cropping. At their points of intersection, these three networks produced objects whose apparent stability both conceals and results from a dynamic and transnational history: blackness, peasants, and cotton.

The importance of the Tuskegee expedition to German Togo has been further concealed by the unhappy coincidence that the major areas it involved—Germany, the United States, and Africa—have until recently been cut off from transnational history by claustrophobic exceptionalisms. While German exceptionalism, the so-called German Sonderweg, has been widely and usefully criticized,² the study of German imperialism has been hobbled by the view that overseas expansion had more to do with the domestic politics and culture of Germany than with the societies it ruled or with its contributions to a political and economic hegemony far greater and longer-lived than its own brief colonial history.³ The exceptional treatment of sub-Saharan African history has long consisted in excepting it from history altogether. In rejecting this racist and imperialist position, many Africanists have also rejected Marxist political economy, because it makes individual agency problematic and highlights the transnational origins of apparently local phenomena.⁴ This new, postimperialist African exceptionalism thus reproduces some of the isolationism that marked the earlier historiography that it had originally displaced.⁵ While U.S. history has also suffered from national exceptionalism, African American history has long been in the vanguard of transnational history.⁶ It is therefore not surprising that most accounts of the Tuskegee expedition to Togo have focused on the African American side of the story, centering on the fraught relationship between, as Louis R. Harlan phrased it, "Booker T. Washington and the White Man's Burden."⁷ There has been little interest, however, in the interactions of the expedition with economies, societies, and households in Togo, Germany, and the United States.⁸ I hope that the psychoanalytic and Marxist approach I take to archival material from these three nations will allow the Tuskegee expedition to appear in its full, transnational importance, beyond national or regional particularisms.

Including multiple subjects in a single analysis not only rectifies earlier empirical oversights, but also challenges the notion that history proceeds from any subject, whether identified as an individual, a nation, a class, or any other grouping reckoned as homogeneous. Joan Wallach Scott has taught that employing gender as a category of historical analysis does not merely set the history of women alongside the history of men, but rather fragments the unified subject that anchors, as a vanishing point, the linear perspective of realist historical representation.⁹ Transnational history pushes the discipline to abandon the subject as ultimate historical cause, whether this subject takes the form of the individual of biography, the trucking and bartering homo economicus of liberal approaches, the collective class subject of populism, or the collective national subject of area studies.

Class essentialism, though often mistakenly associated with Marxism, in fact appears most prominently in the populist approach to peasants that has dominated much agrarian history in recent decades. James C. Scott has taught students of agriculture to treat peasant as an essential characteristic of small producers, so that peasant resistance consists in peasants' defending their conditions as peasants.¹⁰ Marxist scholars, by contrast, have shown how colonial states encouraged the formation of apparently autonomous peasantries as a basis for political oppression and economic exploitation. These scholars study the dynamics of class conflict rather than the stasis of classes; they have therefore encouraged analysts to speak of peasantization rather than of peasants.¹¹ Neoclassical economics shares the economic essentialism of populist peasant studies but replaces the stable, collective subject called peasant with a stable, ratiocinating, and profit-maximizing individual. Many of these liberal and neoliberal historians have followed Anthony G. Hopkins in explaining West African cash cropping with a so-called "vent-for-surplus" theory, maintaining that Africans possessed reserves of land and labor that remained untapped until European colonialism supplied a "vent" through which their surplus products could be exported to international markets.¹² By assuming a transhistorical political-economic status quo, both peasant essentialism and neoclassical political economy make impossible the study of the historical formation and dissolution of classes and subjects.¹³ They are, finally, ahistorical because they both, to borrow a phrase from Marx, assume "as a fact ... what has to be explained."¹⁴

In contrast to populist and liberal approaches, Marxism and psychoanalysis allow historians to deal with agency and identity without presupposing the agency of ahistorical subjects. Sigmund Freud's division of the self into a conscious and an unconscious and Marx's postulate that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles"¹⁵ place a split, a rift, in the place where others have posited such privileged agents of historical causation as the nation, society, the working class, the peasantry, culture, or the great man.¹⁶ Psychoanalytic Marxism takes subjectivities, knowledge, and ideologies seriously in terms of their parapraxes (or "Freudian slips") and their apparent failures and shortcomings—that is, their actual participation in history. These failures, it will always turn out, are in fact successes—successes not in the sense that outcomes conform to intentions, but rather in the sense that the repressed always returns, the truth always emerges in spite of a speaker's intentions.

Rather than rejecting the study of culture and identity, psychoanalytic Marxism can follow psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in regarding them across the registers of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. Roughly, the symbolic is the world of ideology and culture; the imaginary is the self with which the individual identifies in relation to that culture; and the real is the stumbling block that trips up both the symbolic and the imaginary. The real is not a biological or physical outside to culture and identity, but rather an internal limit created through the impossibility of a failsafe symbolic or imaginary. Psychoanalysis pushes understandings of subjectivity beyond the almost functionalist theories of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, both of whom taught that society reproduces itself through the formation of subjects whose very condition of possibility is subjugation to society.¹⁷ The real is what makes the world of surprises, mistakes, and misunderstandings that we inhabit on a day-to-day basis so unlike the flattened world of an all-determining "culture," the matrix in which historians and other social scientists have found themselves since the linguistic or cultural turn.

Mistakes (parapraxis) and class conflict are the main explanatory principles in this article. I begin in the register of the symbolic with a discussion of the New South ideology of the "Negro" globalized through an international misunderstanding of Booker T. Washington's famous address at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition. An axiom of psychoanalysis, formulated by Lacan, is that "the sender ... receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form," and that this "reverse form" reveals the truth of the message, separated from the obfuscations designed to make that message acceptable to the speaker him- or herself.¹⁸ This is a situation common in analytic practice, when analysands come to understand their own words as analysts hear them, full of meanings that the analysands insist (correctly) that they never intended.¹⁹ Thus, for Lacan, the unconscious is in the field of the other: it is not some interior part of the mind, but something that appears from without, for example, in misunderstood messages or in bungled actions. Such parapractical causality, in which history operates through the failure of intention, occurred repeatedly in the Tuskegee expedition to German Togo, from development schemes that yoked Africans like oxen, to programs of free labor that incorporated flogging, to, even today, free markets that force African cotton growers into poverty. These failures do not merely give the lie to liberal ideology: they reveal its truth.

I connect parapraxes to class conflict in my discussion of how the Tuskegee expedition and the German government identified Togolese as "Negroes" who would be subjected to labor-coercive regimes analogous to those imposed upon African American cotton growers. Lacan famously theorized identity formation as the result of a "mirror stage," in which infants misrecognize their own fragmented, polymorphously perverse bodies as the images of whole persons shown to them in a mirror.²⁰ This origin of identity in the image is part of why Lacan classifies identity in the register of the imaginary. German and Tuskegee personnel were faced with imposing an identity on individuals who already possessed self-images (themselves based on prior misrecognitions), who no longer experienced themselves as fragmented bodies without identities. The imperialist effort to transform Togolese into "Negroes" thus involved not only holding up an image, but also fragmenting the political power, the modes of production, and even the bodies of the individuals whom they would then invite to identify with this image. This process indicates the violence and instability at the heart of colonial identities, violence that in this case took the form of class conflict.²¹ Class conflict stands in for the real as an unmasterable, unassimilable kernel that simultaneously drives and undermines the symbolic register of ideology and the imaginary register of identity.²² In this case, class conflict explains why intentions failed, why practices became parapraxes, and thus why the Tuskegee expedition succeeded in creating a cotton-growing peasantry in Togo as a result of its real failures to do so.

Booker T. Washington's famous speech at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition helped inspire German interest in the southern United States as a model for race and labor relations in African colonies. The exposition presented the "New South," the South that would replace the Old South of slavery and secession, as "cotton states" uniquely blessed with hard-working African Americans.²³ Almost certainly in the audience that day was Baron Beno von Herman auf Wein, the agricultural attaché to the German embassy in Washington, D.C. Baron von Herman became an early advocate of developing cotton growing in the German colonies and would be the major intermediary between Washington and the German government.²⁴

Washington's "Atlanta compromise" speech became famous, and later infamous, for an image that seemed to accept racial segregation while maintaining African Americans as subordinate laborers in a white-dominated economy: "In all things that are purely social," he declared, "we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."²⁵ Less than a month after his Atlanta speech, Washington privately disavowed a segregationist interpretation of his message: "If anybody understood me as meaning that riding in the same railroad car or sitting in the same room at a railroad station is social intercourse they certainly got a wrong idea of my position."²⁶ Indeed, at Atlanta, Washington did not emphasize segregation so much as African American immobility, admonishing African Americans to "cast down your bucket where you are." African Americans, he maintained, should remain in the South and accept in the short term, at least, the menial positions accorded them, beginning, as he put it, "at the bottom of life ... and not the top." This was a profoundly conservative view of class hierarchy that, although no endorsement of racism, did nothing to challenge already existing racist hierarchies.²⁷ It was this conservatism, combined with what Washington termed the "wrong idea of my position," that made him attractive to white elites around the world employing the racist politics of imperialism to develop capitalist modes of production in Africa and elsewhere.²⁸

At Atlanta, Washington endorsed a paradoxical image of African Americans that was already common in the "redeemed" U.S. South, namely that "Negroes" should be subjected to extraordinary political and economic control in order that they might be free. This image was given its classic formulation at two conferences on the "Negro question" held in 1890 and 1891 in Mohonk, in upstate New York.²⁹ General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, founder of the Hampton Institute and mentor to Washington, opened the first conference with a lecture that illustrates how the contradictory identity "Negro" placed those to whom it was ascribed in a kind of permanent state of exception that allowed racist labor repression to persist in a capitalist economy based on free labor:

The Negroes are a laboring people. They do not like work, however, because they have had it forced on them ... They work under pressure. The great thing is to give them an idea of the dignity of labor; that is, to change their standpoint.³⁰

To resolve this logical mess into a coherent idea supposedly lurking behind it would be to miss the pincers movement with which Armstrong, like many white elites, sought to capture African Americans. "Negroes," according to Armstrong, had an inherent tendency to work that was perverted by being forced to work under slavery.³¹ Negro freedom, therefore, demanded that Negroes remain compelled to work ("under pressure") so that they could recover from having been forced to work under slavery. The end of slavery thus required, paradoxically, continued extra-economic coercion of African Americans. In this sense, the "Negro" was no exception to, but rather a particularly clear illustration of, the position of ostensibly free labor in capitalism. Even in the early twentieth century, the legal framework of free labor in many parts of the world included not only contracts and wages, but also master-servant codes, vagrancy laws, and other elements that were gradually eliminated, not by any supposed "logic of capitalism," but rather by the political struggles of organized labor.³²

Baron von Herman accepted, perhaps without fully understanding, a connection between black people and cotton growing endorsed at the Atlanta Exposition.³³ The belief that cotton required black labor, although empirically false—significant numbers of whites also grew cotton as tenant farmers³⁴—contained a grain of truth: the production of cotton for the mechanized textile industry did require the levels of control exercised over black cotton growers in both slavery and freedom. Spinning and weaving after the industrial revolution required precisely standardized fibers, since even slight variations in staple length required costly recalibration of machinery. Yet the substance commonly referred to as "cotton" could consist of any number of varieties of the four species of the genus Gossypium that had been cultivated from Asia to the Americas since antiquity.³⁵ Because cotton is a perennial that hybridizes easily, growers had to be compelled to destroy their plants and resow their fields each year with carefully selected seeds.³⁶ The two most important factors in determining the price of a bale of a given variety of cotton, color and trash content, depended on control of the time, pace, and process of cotton picking. Cotton bolls lost their uniform white color if growers left them on the stalk to be stained by sun, rain, mildew, frost, or soil. Before the widespread mechanization of cotton picking after World War II, careless hand picking resulted in excessive amounts of trash—leaves, stems, and dirt—mixed in with the fiber. American cotton was prized for a strong, medium staple that could withstand punishing processing in mechanized mills. As important as these inherent properties, however, was the fact that American cotton growers were subject to greater levels of discipline than growers in any other colonial economy before the turn of the century. The industrial cotton demanded by European industry was not a fruit of sun and soil alone, but also an artifact of discipline supported by American racism.³⁷

The racialized labor relations of the New South drew international attention from German social scientists, who hoped that they would provide models for the control of ethnic minorities and free agricultural labor in Germany. Economists and sociologists founded the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Social Policy Association) in 1872 to guide the state in managing the transition from feudalism to free labor in a way that would limit proletarianization and the growth of socialism.³⁸ In the 1880s, the organization turned its attention to the question of free agricultural labor in eastern Germany. Although serfdom had been officially abolished in Prussia by the liberal reforms of 1807, eastern landlords had preserved much of their political and economic authority until their employees, many of them former serfs, began moving in large numbers to industrial areas of western Germany and to the United States. Migration to the United States from eastern areas of Germany was especially intense in the period 1880–1893, and landlords in these regions became increasingly dependent on migrant laborers from Russian and Austrian Poland.³⁹ In the 1880s, the Prussian state began persecuting its Polish residents, starting with mass expulsions of those without Prussian citizenship. In 1886 it began a program of "internal colonization," settling German tenant farmers in West Prussia and Posen, regions with large populations of Prussian citizens of Polish origin.⁴⁰

In this period, Georg Friedrich Knapp, a Strassburg economist and one of the founders of the Verein, began drawing policy lessons from parallels between the Prussian situation and the history of African American slavery and emancipation.⁴¹ For Knapp, agrarian labor always involved domination and submission, whether in slavery or after emancipation. In the United States, the transition from slave to free labor had not done away with the real or perceived inferiority of African American agricultural workers, so that the problem of slavery had become the problem of a "racially alien proletariat."⁴² "The Negro question" in the New World and in Germany's own African colonies was, for Knapp, "the labor question for the agricultural-industrial large enterprise of the plantation." Even though formally free labor existed in Germany, Knapp held that it was still necessary for the state "gradually to lift up the rural proletarians of the eastern provinces, so that we might recognize them as equal compatriots."⁴³ Knapp and other members of the Verein were especially interested in developing tenancy arrangements that would keep small farmers attached to the land in a postfeudal era of free movement and free labor.⁴⁴

To an extent greater than any other Verein member, Max Weber placed questions of race at the center of agrarian policy. Weber feared that, especially in eastern Prussia, Polish migrant labor would always be more economically attractive than the labor of settled German farmers, because Poles had lower standards of living and a "lower cultural level," and thus demanded lower wages. This meant, Weber warned, a lowering of the "cultural level" of the entire German East, and it also endangered the integrity, and even military defensibility, of Germany's border with Russia.⁴⁵ Like other Verein members, Weber applauded the Prussian program of settling German tenants in the East as a way to prevent proletarianization on the land and thus check the spread of social democracy, but he also placed peculiar emphasis on the anti-Polish aspects of this policy.⁴⁶ While Weber was not the first Verein member to take race and ethnicity as categories of economic analysis, he did foreground these topics in his political and social scientific work.

These interests in ethnicity and labor led Weber to visit Tuskegee, and also to seek out W. E. B. Du Bois at Atlanta University during his 1904 visit to the United States.⁴⁷ Weber especially valued his visit to Tuskegee for the insight it gave him into "the great national problem of all American life, the showdown between the white race and the former slaves."⁴⁸ Weber persuaded Du Bois to contribute an article on "The Negro Question in the United States" to the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, the journal of the Verein.⁴⁹ Ten years earlier, Du Bois had begun a dissertation in Berlin under a colleague of Weber's in the Verein, Gustav Schmoller, comparing African American farmers in the United States with peasants in Germany. Although he never completed this dissertation, returning to the United States to receive a doctorate in history from Harvard in 1895, Du Bois did conduct study trips to observe German peasants and wrote a seminar paper on "the labor question in the southern United States."⁵⁰ In his 1906 article for the Archiv, Du Bois enumerated the regimes of labor coercion that had replaced slavery in the United States. He focused especially on the sharecropping system, which held the Negro in "a system of corvée labor, bound to the soil under paternal domination."⁵¹ He thus developed connections already made by Knapp between agricultural labor in Prussia and the "Negro question" in the United States. Like his German teachers and colleagues, Du Bois concerned himself with the ways in which forms of tenancy and ethnic relations shaped agricultural labor and class conflict, even if he was far more concerned about the exploitation and oppression fostered by racism and ethnocentrism.

Conferences held in Paris and London in the summer of 1900, only months before the first members of the Tuskegee expedition arrived in Togo, placed Africa at the center of the transatlantic discussions about free labor and the "Negro question."⁵² Both conferences situated the "Negro question" in the context of European imperialism and emphasized its relevance to broader discussions of social policy. At the International Exposition in Paris, the U.S. commission included in its "Social Economy Building" an "exhibition on the present condition and progress of the Afro-American" as a model of "racial adjustment." "To the statecraft of Europe," the exhibition's African American organizer explained, "the 'Negro Problem' is destined to become a burning reality in their African colonies, and it is our privilege to furnish them the best evidence at hand to prove that the only solution that will ever succeed is that of an equal chance in the race of life without regard to 'color, race or previous condition.'"⁵³ For Du Bois, who attended both the Paris and the London conferences, the conditions of African Americans presented questions about social policy and "the larger aspects of human benevolence" analogous to such institutions as Belgian working men's circles, the Red Cross Society, and German state insurance programs.⁵⁴ Most speakers at the Pan-African Congress in London that summer spoke far more critically of European imperialism and U.S. racism, but they still related both to larger questions about race, labor, and justice. In the concluding declarations of the London conference, Du Bois first proclaimed: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."⁵⁵ While the participants in the Paris and London conferences, as well as the members of the Tuskegee expedition to Togo, expressed different ethical and political views of European colonialism and the "Negro question," they all shared and disseminated the assumption that Africans and African Americans, because they were of the same "race," could enjoy similar social reforms, labor relations, and emancipation from white domination.

Influenced by the international misunderstandings of his 1895 address, Washington came to regard the New South, and especially its race relations, as a model for colonialism as much as a solution for the problems left by America's erstwhile "peculiar institution."⁵⁶ The newly transnational conception of the Negro, proclaimed in Paris and London and, as we shall see, worked out in theory and practice in German and other colonial circles, had exercised a reciprocal influence on the discourse in the United States. The international fame that Washington gained in Atlanta in 1895 by advising African Americans to "cast down your bucket where you are" gave him the opportunity to cast his own bucket around the world, from the Philippines to West Africa.⁵⁷ In the first decade of the twentieth century, he became an international authority on the racist politics of empire, the very politics he had privately disavowed in 1895 as the "wrong idea of my position." "[I]n the effort to solve the Negro problem by means of industrial education," he wrote in 1909, "we have succeeded in working out in this country a practical and useful method of dealing with other primitive races."⁵⁸ In 1914, he declared the southern states a model for colonial societies: "There are millions of Black people throughout the world," Washington explained to the Southern Sociological Conference. "Everywhere, especially in Europe, people are looking to us here in the South, Black and White, to show to the world how it is possible for two races, different in color, to live together on the same soil, under the same laws, and each race work out its salvation in justice to each other."⁵⁹ Washington had come to regard Tuskegee and the New South as models for colonial societies everywhere.

German colonial interests seized on the New South ideology of the "Negro," available already in German social scientific writing, during the revival in fin-de-siècle Togo of earlier European attempts to develop African and other colonial cotton growing for the world market.⁶⁰ Many European powers had long hoped to break the U.S. monopoly on cotton fiber through what Germans called a "cotton Kulturkampf against America."⁶¹ French colonists began promoting cotton growing in Senegal as early as 1817.⁶² In the 1840s, the East India Company brought cotton experts from Mississippi to India to transform cotton growing in the land that had first taught the world how to grow, spin, and weave the fiber.⁶³ In 1859–1860, Martin Delany traveled to Abeokuta, Yorubaland, to found a settlement of African Americans who, he promised, would improve cotton fiber exports, allowing Africans and African Americans to "enrich themselves, and regenerate their race." Nothing came of this scheme.⁶⁴ In the nineteenth century, Egypt developed a fine, long-stapled cotton that has been used ever since to produce especially soft fabrics, but in quantities too limited to cover the massive needs of the European textile industry.⁶⁵ Colonial producers redoubled their efforts to increase colonial cotton exports during the cotton supply crisis caused by the U.S. Civil War, and growers from India to the region of the Slave Coast that would later become German Togo earned quick profits by selling to British merchants. All of these booms, however, turned to major busts for those Indians and Africans who had invested everything in cotton, as British manufacturers returned immediately after the war to the superior fiber supplied by American growers.⁶⁶

Driven at least in part by an interest in the New South, Germans concerned with Africa began increasingly to privilege the term "Negro" (Neger) over the older anthropological term "natural peoples" (Naturvölker) or the colonial term "natives" (Eingeborenen).⁶⁷ While Germans had used the term "Neger" even in the early nineteenth century, in early-twentieth-century colonial discourse it designated an individual capable of improvement, in contrast to the "natural person," who was doomed either to extinction or to a travestied approximation of civilization. German colonial reformers looked to Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute for guidance in what they called Erziehung des Negers zur Arbeit: "Teaching the Negro to Work."⁶⁸ The proponents of Tuskegee-style education in Togo, and later throughout Africa, hoped to make Africans just like U.S. "Negroes," only more so—more productive, more docile, more rational and free, and more obedient and constrained.⁶⁹ The concept of the "Negro" buttoned together a number of ideological discourses about race and ethnicity, free labor, and agricultural production in the United States, Africa, and Germany.

Direct imperialist intervention in Togolese relations of production began when the German Foreign Office learned in 1889 that inhabitants of the hinterland grew cotton, and that regional markets offered "very durable cotton cloth" but sold fiber at prices too high to make a profitable export trade.⁷⁰ The region that became German Togo had essentially been a no-man's-land between the Asante empire to the west and the kingdom of Dahomey to the east.⁷¹ The Ewe were the major ethnic group in the south of this region, which would produce the most cotton for export. The territory came to be known as "Togo" or "Togoland" when the German Gustav Nachtigal signed a "treaty of protection" with King Mlapa of Togoville, a village on the north shore of Lake Togo, on July 5, 1884, thus establishing an official German presence on the Slave Coast between the British sphere to the west and the French to the east. As the Germans extended their authority hundreds of miles into the hinterland, they preserved the name "Togo" for their territory and thus extended, by implication, the sovereignty that King Mlapa had signed over in 1884.

Germans hoped to improve the raw cotton exports of Togo by establishing what they called Volkskultur (literally, people's agriculture) instead of European-run plantations. In reality, the only part of indigenous West African "culture" that the Germans wanted to preserve in what they defined as Volkskultur was the simple fact of cotton growing.⁷² Everything else—from the seeds used, to the techniques and relations of production in cotton growing, to the processing of the raw cotton—they hoped to banish from Togo.⁷³ Proponents of Volkskultur held that the advantages of commercial cotton farming were so self-evident that simply training Africans to be rational farmers would lead them to produce cotton for the world market of their own free will. The unspoken corollary of this assertion was that if African farmers refused to grow cotton, they would be forced to do so—forced, in a sense, to be free. Those involved in creating Volkskultur understood that capitalist farming, even under the guise of Volkskultur, required, in the words of one colonial official central to the Tuskegee cotton expedition, "gentle and even possibly strong pressure" from the state.⁷⁴Volkskultur relies on a mistaken identity—the identification of freedom and coercion—that lies at the heart of every liberal and neoliberal understanding of the market. This mistaken identity of freedom and coercion was both supported and understood through a second mistaken identity, that of the Togolese Volk, whose Kultur (that is, agriculture and civilization) the German policy of Volkskultur would foster. German businesses and the German state identified this Volk not with any of the many ethnic groups of Togo, but rather with the racial concept "Negro."⁷⁵ Defining the inhabitants of the Togo Protectorate as "Negroes" meant that the New South that German observers had come to admire could be extended directly into the region.

Booker T. Washington helped Germans import both American-style cotton and the New South concept of the "Negro" to Togo. Since 1889, German diplomatic personnel in the United States had gathered information about cotton growing for the Colonial Section of the Foreign Office and sought out American cotton experts to send to West Africa.⁷⁶ Baron von Herman himself contacted Washington in August of 1900 to "select for us two negro-cottonplanters and one negro-mechanic" to work in Togo for the Kolonialwirtschaftliches Komitee (Colonial-Economic Committee, hereafter KWK), an association of textile manufacturers that was working closely with the German state to develop African cotton exports. These three "negro" experts would "come over to said company's land ... to teach the negroes there how to plant and harvest cotton in a rational and scientific way." Washington agreed to send "kindly disposed, respectful gentlemen" who would allay KWK fears that these "negro-planters might find some difficulties ... in finding the necessary authority towards the native population and in having at the same time the necessary respect towards the German government official."⁷⁷ He sent three Tuskegee graduates, Allen L. Burks, Shepherd L. Harris, and John W. Robinson, under the leadership of a German-speaking Tuskegee faculty member, James N. Calloway.

The identity "Negro" played a contradictory role in German understandings of the expedition. As "Negroes" like the "Negroes" of Togo, Tuskegee personnel might have a better relation with their charges.⁷⁸ At the same time, these Tuskegeeeducated African Americans represented a superior "Negro," whose example could improve the inhabitants of the Togo Protectorate. If the Tuskegee personnel were both like and unlike white colonizers, the Togolese whom they were supposed to teach to grow cotton were both already and not yet Negroes. The identity "Negro" was brought to Togo not only as a set of characteristics to be imposed on an unwilling population, but also as an impossible paradox: those identified as Negroes had to be forced to become what they were supposed already to be.

The Tuskegee expedition hoped to transform an economy already shaped by long-standing commercial relations among German and Ewe traders and a diffuse domestic division of labor that Germans and Americans regarded as economically and morally inferior to patriarchal monogamy.⁷⁹ Ewe women generally had their own houses and fields, which they farmed with the assistance of their dependent children. Several women shared a single husband, who lived separately from his wives. This left women time for farming, marketing, and craft production. Women dominated the Ewe side of the trade with German merchant houses, which consisted primarily of exchanges of palm kernels and oil for European manufactured goods, tobacco, and liquor. Children also had significant economic independence; they could own their own cattle and were generally permitted to sell or keep at least some of the products of their labor. Still, mothers could expect their unmarried daughters to work in their households, and their sons to transfer wealth to them in the form of gifts. Fathers could get cash for their own agricultural or craft production, but they could also put up a wife or child as collateral on a loan, the terms of which required that the human "collateral" work a specified number of days for the creditor.⁸⁰ Husbands, for their part, had to provide their wives with economically significant gifts if they hoped to enjoy their companionship and care, for women's economic independence and separate residences did not allow for constant coercion.⁸¹ Despite the personal autonomy that Ewe households afforded their members, the authority of parents over children and husbands over wives bound families together in ways that also allowed for economic coercion and cooperation.

German economic activity in Togo had a differential impact on the economic activity of women, men, and children.⁸² Cotton textiles formed an important part of the household division of labor in southern Togo.⁸³ Only women grew cotton, which they ginned and spun by hand with the assistance of their children. Men sometimes did help women pick cotton, but they neither grew nor spun it. Women sold yarn to weavers, all of whom were male, and from whom they in turn bought cloth. While cheap English fabric did not compete well with the sturdier and more luxurious local weaves, chemically dyed yarn gradually pushed out the products of local spinners. The Ewe, like many West African textile producers, dyed yarn with locally grown indigo, a time-consuming and labor-intensive process that made it difficult for African spinners to compete successfully with their European counterparts.⁸⁴ This shift to yarn supplied by American growers and European spinners struck at an important source of Ewe women's income, while leaving male weavers relatively unaffected.

Ewe men gained new economic opportunities under German rule, even as their wives and daughters saw their economic opportunities shrink. With the growth of the state and the mercantile economy, men with little property or education could earn as much in wages from a day carrying goods as they could from the produce of one or even two weeks of farming.⁸⁵ Mission schools throughout West Africa had long provided young men with opportunities for economic advancement within the institutions of European power and with personal autonomy from domestic authorities.⁸⁶ The academic instruction these schools offered gave men the skills necessary to become clerks for merchant houses or government offices. Some also offered training in skilled trades that similarly gave young men greater personal and economic autonomy than did labor within agricultural households. One Togolese teacher at a mission school expressed a common view when he complained that his students "see school as a form of protection from fieldwork. They believe they can laze about here undisturbed, protected from their fathers, who want to take them along to the field."⁸⁷ In fact, white-collar or skilled work, in Togo as elsewhere, offered higher wages and personal freedom than farming did. Students left the fields and entered the schools not because they were lazy, but rather because they desired wealth and independence, and perhaps in hopes of becoming one of the Ewe "dandies" and "gentlemen" who marked the urban environment of Lomé.⁸⁸ Many Germans expressed contempt for such men, whom they derided as "black fops" or "trouserniggers," but of course the functioning of local government and merchant houses depended on such white-collar blacks.⁸⁹

Missionaries, colonial officials, and the members of the Tuskegee expedition all sought to impose bourgeois domestic ideals to correct what they regarded as a crisis in the Ewe household. One African missionary teacher explained that "Blacks cannot bring up their children" because women in female-dominated households became "the Herr [both master and man] over the children" and undermined paternal authority.⁹⁰ Even though many African and European observers worried that women had too much domestic and economic power, transformations brought about by German rule, as we have seen, in fact limited the economic opportunities of women more than those of men or male children. German colonial officials and Tuskegee personnel sought neither to restore and preserve Ewe households nor to liberate Africans from the confines of the household. Rather, they tried to impose a patriarchal monogamous household on Ewe men, women, and children. They wanted to wreck not only the economic activities of women and children, but also those of the supposedly dominant male, who would become a peasant farmer rather than a clerk, an urban dandy, or at least a better-paid porter.

From the moment the four members of the Tuskegee expedition landed at Lomé, Togo, on December 30, 1900, they began working closely with German efforts to destroy Togolese economic autonomy and impose these patriarchal households. The government first directed the expedition to Tove, a collection of six villages about sixty miles inland. Tove would have been a poor choice had the goal of the expedition been restricted to encouraging already existing cotton cultivation. Unlike most of southern Togo, Tove had no significant textile industry; it had long been a major center of pottery production, an industry, like cotton growing and spinning elsewhere, that was dominated by women.⁹¹ As German explorer Heinrich Klose observed the year before the Tuskegee expedition arrived, the people of Tove had been relatively immune from foreign competition because, unlike textiles, ceramic pottery was too heavy and fragile to be shipped cheaply from Europe to compete with the local industry.⁹²

The people of Tove had also long been politically independent from both Germans and other Ewe polities. They had refused to fight against the Asante in the 1874 war, and even permitted the invaders to reside in their villages for several months during the conflict.⁹³ In 1888, Curt von François, perhaps the first German government official to visit Tove, found the inhabitants there "less friendly" than those in other areas, complaining that they fired rifles in the direction of his tent.⁹⁴ The area around Tove did not come under German political domination until an 1894–1895 expedition led by Hans Gruner and Lieutenant Ernst von Carnap.⁹⁵ The two carried out "punitive expeditions" and exemplary executions to establish German hegemony in the region. In 1895, a minor skirmish (which originated when people in Tove mocked a German botanist) escalated into a small war that had Germans in the hinterland partially cut off for a short time. Gruner used the conflict as an occasion to burn five of the six villages, destroy the local pottery industry, kill about thirty individuals, wound many more, and require tribute from the survivors.⁹⁶ His troops reportedly decapitated their victims and shipped the heads to Germany.⁹⁷ Thanks to these actions, German merchants were able to establish stations in the area around Tove for the first time. For years after the uprising, the destruction was still evident in the area, with collapsing, empty houses and shattered pottery strewn along the main road. The inhabitants of Tove remained hostile to Germans, but they tended to hide in the bush rather than openly confront their invaders.⁹⁸

Less than six years after the German conquest of Tove, Calloway, Robinson, Burks, and Harris arrived in the area. Hans Gruner, the officer responsible for the 1895 massacre, commanded the nearby Misahöhe Station and was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Tuskegee expedition.⁹⁹ Because there were no draft animals to pull the expedition's wagons of cotton seed and agricultural implements from Lome, porters had to pull the wagons themselves. Washington twisted this incident into an illustration of the backwardness of Africans who had not yet received the benefits of Tuskegee-style education. He rendered the episode increasingly absurd and insulting with each retelling, until he finally had the Togolese disassembling the wagons and carrying them on their heads because they had never seen wheels.¹⁰⁰ The four Tuskegee pioneers set up a model plantation of at least seventy-five acres, leased mostly from the king of Tove.¹⁰¹ Gruner had local political leaders recruit two hundred men, women, and children to work the Tuskegee fields at a wage meager even by colonial standards.¹⁰² All twenty-two oxen and twenty-two horses sent to Tove soon died of sleeping sickness. So deep was the Tuskegee commitment to introducing plows into African agriculture that when there were no draft animals available, rather than return to the familiar hoe, Calloway had the Tove employees hitch themselves to plows to prepare the fields. In the name of progress and racial uplift, Tuskegee personnel placed Africans in the position of animals.¹⁰³ This was not merely economic exploitation, but also a visible sign of the political submission of Tove to the German state and to the Tuskegee mission.

In fact, Africans yoked like draft animals to wagons, plows, cotton presses, and other equipment marked many Tuskegee agricultural "improvements." (See Figure 1.) The Tuskegee program for Africa, like many German and other European plans, centered around introducing animal-powered equipment into African agriculture, especially shifting African farming from the hoe to the plow.¹⁰⁴ (See Figure 2.) For many imperialist observers, plows had more than just the apparently obvious advantage over hoes of increasing the efficiency with which fields could be prepared. Many hoped that men would carry out plow agriculture and thus end the agricultural employment of women and children, leading to male-dominated, monogamous domesticity.¹⁰⁵ Using plows also would require Africans to care for draft animals, which, reformers thought, would encourage greater personal responsibility.¹⁰⁶ Although tsetse flies quickly killed off draft animals in Togo, as in many other regions of tropical Africa, introducing plows and other animal-driven farm equipment remained the principal goal of Tuskegee interventions in African agriculture, even if this meant treating Africans themselves as draft animals. The image of African men yoked to plows like oxen in the name of progressive farming presents the sort of negative modernity highlighted by Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis": the technocratic civilization designed to improve humans in fact places them in the position of animals. This image was no ironic reversal of good intentions, but rather a parapraxis indicating a truth that no one at the time was willing to speak: the Tuskegee expedition, like many imperialist development programs, ended up dominating those people it was charged with helping, not in spite of, but precisely by means of, its failure to achieve the results it claimed it sought.¹⁰⁷

Figure 1: Togolese men pulling wagons of cotton, n.d. The wagon covers bear the initials "KWK" for Kolonialwirtschaftliches Komitee, the organization that sponsored the Tuskegee expedition to Togo. Because of the difficulty of keeping draft animals alive in Togo, humans were often required to take their place on animal-drawn farm equipment. Ironically, the progress of Togolese cotton production could involve a regression of humans to the work roles of animals. Staatsarchiv Bremen, reproduced by permission of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft.

Figure 2: Tove cotton field, 1905. This photograph was shot at one of the rare times when the Tuskegee expedition had living draft animals healthy enough to pull plows. Normally, tsetse flies ensured that Togolese employees or students did the work of draft animals. The figure in khaki and sun helmet in the center may be one of the members of the Tuskegee expedition. While the expedition had already moved to Notsé at the time this photograph was shot, Tove continued as an experimental cotton farm and seed production center throughout the German colonial period. Staatsarchiv Bremen, reproduced by permission of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft.

Both Booker T. Washington and the KWK had initially hoped that the original four members of the expedition would be joined by additional African American settlers who would inspire Togolese farmers by their good example. Four additional Tuskegee graduates, one accompanied by his wife, did arrive in Togo in 1902, but two of the men drowned while trying to land in the rough surf.¹⁰⁸ The survivors—Walter Bryan, Horace Griffin, and Griffin's wife—set up farms near Tove. It is unlikely that these Tuskegee cotton farms inspired anybody in Togo to follow their example: the Griffins could not get anyone to work for them, and Bryan could not get American cotton varieties to grow at all.¹⁰⁹ John Robinson introduced and bred new cotton seeds that would produce industrial-grade cotton fiber in Togo, which expedition members and German officials distributed gratis to growers throughout the protectorate. Tuskegee personnel and German officials encouraged cotton monoculture until they realized that cotton grew better in Togo when interplanted with corn, as was commonly done by local farmers.¹¹⁰ Government purchasers bought cotton at markets set up in every district in the colony at prices that were apparently high enough to attract cotton from some Gold Coast growers.¹¹¹ Still, the German government forbade the export of cotton to the Gold Coast, so that all cotton grown in Togo was ginned in Tove and then sent, via Lomé merchants, to Europe.¹¹² The Tuskegee expedition did manage to triple the cotton exports of Togo in its first two years at Tove, both through the products of its own plantations and farms and by purchasing cotton from African smallholders.¹¹³

Washington, the Tuskegee personnel in Togo, and German colonial officials all imagined that cotton Volkskultur would introduce a patriarchal, monogamous domesticity to Togo. Gruner explained to a meeting of local political notables and missionaries that growing cotton would improve family life by allowing a man to make a living as a "free farmer on his own plot, at home with his family." Men would no longer have to travel long distances to earn money as day laborers or porters, and "the women would cease to ramble around." "Orderly family relations," Gruner concluded, "could take hold."¹¹⁴ In 1906, Danella Foote, who had married John Robinson during his brief leave in the United States, joined the wife of Horace Griffin in exercising what Calloway and Washington both regarded as a positive moral influence on Togolese women.¹¹⁵ These Tuskegee wives supposedly gave Togolese women housekeeping tips and inspired them to become "better consumers."¹¹⁶ According to Washington, by 1904, inhabitants of Tove observed the Sabbath and went to church in holiday attire. Their houses, according to Washington, had proper beds, shutters, doors, and bathrooms, so that their inhabitants no longer bathed in public view.¹¹⁷ Of course, women in Togo continued to grow and sell cotton and likely contributed significantly to the increasing exports of the fiber from the protectorate. (See Figure 3.) The Germans did, however, manage to impede some women's industries, such as spinning and pottery, and did force some men to grow cotton. They imagined that this would result in cultural transformations that would bring the normal bourgeois Christian family to Togo. Indeed, their actions may have revealed an uncomfortable truth about the normal bourgeois Christian family. Germans could call this attempt to radically restructure the Togolese economy Volkskultur only because they identified Africans with the imaginary "Negroes" concocted by New South ideologues—inherently pathological agents requiring outside force to become what they supposedly had always, essentially, been.

Figure 3: Market day in Notsé, 1906. The man posing near the center of the photograph may be a buyer employed by the German government as part of the Tuskegee cotton program. Even in Notsé, which had become the center of Tuskegee efforts in 1904, women still dominated cotton marketing. In all likelihood, much of the cotton sold here was grown by these women, a gendered division of labor that Tuskegee personnel and the German government hoped to change. Staatsarchiv Bremen, reproduced by permission of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft.

In 1904, the expedition's organizers abandoned their original plans for Tuskegee graduates to settle in Togo as exemplary "Negro" cotton farmers. Instead, one of the Tuskegee members, John Robinson, would set up a cotton school to train selected Togolese to serve as examples to their countrymen. The German state located this new cotton school in Notsé (the German colonial name was Nuatjä). Tove remained a KWK experimental farm, and in 1912 it became a specialized seed production and distribution center.¹¹⁸ Calloway and the remaining Tuskegee graduates returned to the United States, leaving Robinson in charge of the new school.¹¹⁹

Locating the Tuskegee cotton school at Notsé, like stationing the expedition at Tove, attacked prior Ewe history and identity to clear the way for the imposition of the new identity "Negro." More than fifteen years earlier, in 1888, the North German missionary E. Bürgi had found that the people of Notsé, a group of seven villages, had had little prior contact with Europeans or with other Ewe. The locals had welcomed Bürgi and his Ewe porters, but the missionary found the king of Notsé so "shamelessly beggarly" that he fled after only one day of preaching.¹²⁰ As late as 1891, Bürgi still seemed to be the only German who had recently visited Notsé, and he did not attribute any special significance to the area.¹²¹ By the turn of the twentieth century, however, it became widely known among Germans in Togo that the Ewe all traced their historical origins to an exodus from the sadistic rule of a King Agokoli of Notsé.¹²² In Togo today, an annual Ewe cultural festival draws visitors to Notsé every September, and parts of Agokoli's palace and the city wall have been excavated and reconstructed.

King Agokoli of Notsé, probably in the sixteenth century, sought to aggrandize his power, bypassing the mediating roles of his royal counselors and forcing his people to perform cruel and difficult tasks, including building a wall around the city. Versions of the history collected in 1914 by Hans Gruner himself had Agokoli hiding spikes in the ground to lacerate the feet of pedestrians, so that their blood would soak the earth to make mud for the walls.¹²³ He also had all the Notsé elders killed, fearing that they would lead a popular uprising against him. To escape the tyranny of Agokoli, women agreed to empty washing and cooking basins on a specific place on the earthen wall, softening it until it could be breached in the dark of night. The Ewe fled throughout the region between the Mono and Volta rivers, settling down into independent states that all traced their origin to Notsé. By beginning their history with an exodus from a walled city, from an absolute authority, and from submission to the labor demands of others, the Ewe understood themselves as a society marked by local, familial, and individual independence.¹²⁴ Ewe households, as we have seen, also reflected this dispersed political organization. Ewe historical memory ran counter to the despotism of state formation, capital accumulation, and patriarchal monogamy. The German colonial state and the Tuskegee expedition would send Ewe back to Notsé not only to train them to grow cotton, but also to transform them into "Negroes," subject to the new Agokoli of colonial capitalism.

Every district in the colony, not only in Ewe territory, was required to send students to the Notsé cotton school¹²⁵ to learn what the school's supporters regarded as rational and free farming: rational because it was male-dominated plow monoculture of cotton; free because it was motivated by market incentives. Students were to spend three years learning about "rational agricultural implements" (especially plows), draft animals, natural fertilizers, crop rotation, and cotton seed selection.¹²⁶ Once the school had been in operation long enough to have several classes at different levels, Robinson set up an instructional hierarchy. He trained the first- and second-year students to use agricultural implements, especially the plow, and taught them about fertilizer, plant varieties, and pest control on several large common fields. The school gave each of the third-year students a personal plot where they could spend about a third of their time, keeping any profits they earned. The first-year students served as field hands and apprentice farmers on these personal plots. Advanced students thus gained experience managing farm employees, teaching agricultural skills, and responding to market pressures.¹²⁷

Education was a central issue in colonial domination and resistance in Togo, not only because Germans sought to control and exploit African labor through agricultural education, but also because many Togolese sought to escape both the imperial race-class hierarchy and African domestic hierarchies through the academic education offered at mission schools. The Tuskegee school in Notsé, to a far greater extent than Washington's own Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, scrupulously avoided any instruction that might appear to give the students academic qualifications. Washington endorsed the Notsé cotton school in part because, unlike mission schools, it did not give its students the academic skills necessary to become merchants—a career, he claimed, that led Africans to take many wives and consort with unscrupulous Europeans.¹²⁸ The German government did offer elementary education to train Togolese clerks, but regarded even this education as a threat to the colonial social order. German governors had long complained that missionary education offered too much academic training rather than "the love of practical work," as one put it.¹²⁹

In 1907, the North German Mission Society sought to reorient its own schools in Togo toward manual and agricultural labor. The head office in Bremen sent the German translation of Washington's Up from Slavery to missionaries in Togo and encouraged them to familiarize themselves with the program at Notsé and to apply Tuskegee ideals to their own schools.¹³⁰ Missionaries sent a number of African teachers to Notsé for a one-month summer course to learn agricultural methods that they might transmit to their students. Essays by these teachers suggest that neither they nor their students found much value in agricultural education.¹³¹ One teacher who did try to pass on what he had learned at Notsé discovered the extent of student resistance to Tuskegee-style education. A student he asked to assist him in this rare lesson in agriculture refused to use his right hand to plant seeds, because he regarded the soil as unclean. The student also refused to fetch manure from the chicken coop for fertilizer, and when the teacher went instead, the class erupted in laughter. The teacher threatened to punish his students to convey the importance of agricultural education. By doing so, he perhaps demonstrated a greater understanding of the true program of the cotton school than any of its boosters.¹³²

Local German officials, under pressure from the government (and perhaps eager to increase cotton production in their own districts), forced students to attend the cotton school.¹³³ The governor of Togo asked few questions about recruitment methods, and found, not surprisingly, that students and graduates of Notsá "enjoyed diminished prestige among the other natives" because of the "compulsion under which they stand."¹³⁴ Only two students ever attended the cotton school voluntarily, and their willingness so surprised the governor that he ordered an investigation. It turned out that they were orphans in poor health, with apparently no other options for securing a livelihood.¹³⁵ The head of a government station in the north of the colony wrote bluntly that students could be recruited only through "involuntary measures [Zwangsmassregeln] and punishments."¹³⁶ A number of Notsé farming students were taken from the nearby penal colony at Chra, as were, in all likelihood, the many laborers who also worked in the school fields.¹³⁷ The cotton school at Notsé represented a political, economic, and symbolic assault on the independence of the Ewe and other groups living in Togo under German rule. Paradoxically, John Robinson and the German officials who set up the school carried out this coercive program to create independent peasant cultivation. This fusion of coercion (whether legal, physical, or economic) and freedom was underwritten by the New South discourse of the "Negro," admired by German colonists, and imported to Africa by Calloway, Robinson, and the other Tuskegee personnel.

The students at the cotton school did not, evidently, come to identify themselves as "Negroes," at least insofar as they did not voluntarily grow cotton after graduation. This refusal to be what they supposedly were led Germans and Tuskegee personnel to further develop their program of coerced, but formally free, agricultural labor. German colonial officials and the American John Robinson each contributed a model of semifree agricultural smallholding from their own national tradition to the new identity they hoped to foist upon the graduates of the Notsé cotton school. Robinson proposed that graduates be treated as "croppers," applying to Togo the system of coercive tenancy that marked so much African American agricultural labor between the Civil War and World War II.¹³⁸ During the U.S. Civil War, freedpeople demanded, and often succeeded in appropriating for themselves, parcels of the land they had worked as slaves, thus gaining some political and economic autonomy.¹³⁹ After the war, southern and northern elites, assisted by an increasingly conservative Freedmen's Bureau, managed to divert African American demands for self-sufficient, independent farms into a coercive system of sharecropping. The law generally classified croppers as employees rather than renters, so that landlords could intervene in the labor process, forcing tenants to grow cotton rather than food crops. The system of crop liens further entwined tenants in a system of labor coercion carried out in the monetary terms of the market economy. This system, brutally unfair as it was, resulted from an implicit compromise in which landlords exploited the economic autonomy that African Americans had forced them to accept.¹⁴⁰ Such a system, Robinson imagined, would allow the German government to control otherwise free African farmers so that they would continue growing cotton using the methods they had learned at the Notsé cotton school.

German policymakers captured the identity of the graduates of the Notsé school with the term Ansiedler, which was already used in Prussia to describe the ethnic Germans settled under government supervision to counter the perceived "Polonization" of the kingdom's eastern portions. The "Settlement Commission" (Ansiedlungskommission) of the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture purchased and subdivided large estates in Posen and West Prussia, on which they had settled more than 85,000 German farmers and agricultural laborers by 1908.¹⁴¹ Each estate was placed under an administrator, who advised the settlers on farming, set up rental contracts that also stipulated their tasks, and supervised "political, general economic, social, and communal things."¹⁴² Creating peasants, or semi-independent smallholders, whether in Europe, the United States, or Africa, required constant supervision and control.¹⁴³

Gustav Schmoller, a Verein member and former academic advisor to W. E. B. Du Bois, brought the discussions of internal colonization, agricultural settlements, and the political and economic benefits of small farming to the attention of colonial planners several years before the Notsé student settlement scheme.¹⁴⁴ Like most members of the Verein, Schmoller advocated tenancy contracts to control rural workers by keeping them tied to the land. After a presentation at the 1902 German Colonial Congress by Baron von Herman, who had recruited Booker T. Washington for the Togo project, Schmoller called attention to the relevance of the agricultural sociology of the Verein für Sozialpolitik to the colonial question of "plantation versus native culture." Schmoller endorsed small-scale cultivation to further the "entire mental and economic development of the natives" and improve the "future of the conquered, lower races."¹⁴⁵ The Tuskegee expedition to Togo, Booker T. Washington, and the "education of the Negro to work" became central aspects of the discussions at the next German colonial congresses in 1905 and 1910.¹⁴⁶

Both the Ansiedler and the sharecropper models presented German and Tuskegee officials with possibilities for controlled but ostensibly free smallholding in Togo. The German model of the Ansiedler, in contrast to the American model of the sharecropper, also shared with the Tuskegee program the aspiration to improve entire regions through carefully planned settlements of farmers. Government regulations arrived at before the first class graduated from Notsé required students to return to their districts of origin to teach their new cotton farming techniques by example. Because the governor feared that, "without the necessary pressure, the people would immediately return to their old methods of cultivation," he had graduates settled in concentrations, usually near a district station, where local officials could exercise the requisite "oversight and control."¹⁴⁷ The district government gave each student twenty acres of land, two or three draft animals, a plow, and other agricultural implements. Harvests would be the property of the settlers; however, because they could sell their cotton only under governmental supervision to German merchant houses, the crop was not private property in a meaningful sense.¹⁴⁸

Many German officials found it paradoxical that this program coerced African farmers in order to create free farming, but they located this paradox in the pathological nature of the "Negro," whose freedom demanded supervision and coercion. These officials had seemingly become good students of New South racial ideology. The station chief of Atakpame, the district containing Notsé, observed that the cotton school trained its pupils to accept "supervision and compulsory labor [Arbeitszwang]" even though its goal was "to educate the students into independent farmers, who earn their bread themselves and through cotton cultivation gradually achieve comfortable prosperity." Such coercion, he acknowledged, was nonetheless necessary to achieve the independence that it seemed, simultaneously, to undermine.¹⁴⁹ After making a tour of settlements in a number of districts, the officer remarked on the irony that the "free, hardworking farmers, who would be an encouragement and example to the rest of the population," worked only "under the firm [scharfen] pressure of officials" and thus were, by definition, themselves not "free farmers."¹⁵⁰

Rather than producing the model patriarchal households imagined by Washington and others, the Tuskegee cotton program in Togo often produced lonely and miserable young men, unable to attract spouses to a life on an exemplary farm under German oversight. The German agricultural expert Albert Sengmüller observed: "The farms look lonely and abandoned. There is no sense of a cheerful family life, for the settlers lack the most important element for that: women ... The people are not glad to be on their settlements; the frequent running away is proof of that."¹⁵¹ Although it was clear to many involved in the project that the application of Tuskegee education in Togo had created a program of coercion at odds with its own ideals of freedom and rationality, this paradox went beyond mere fraud.

The ideology of the "Negro" in Togo provided the foundation of a self-perpetuating system of extra-economic coercion whose very failures justified and furthered its own reproduction. Resistance to the Tuskegee cotton program in Togo only further elaborated the characteristics of the "Negro" and thereby intensified the very interventions that had produced this resistance in the first place. The only immediate possibility for liberation from this forced peasantization lay in escaping government control altogether, and many did undertake a second exodus from Notsé before they graduated or fled their settlements afterward.¹⁵² Resistance from within the role "Negro peasant cotton farmer," by contrast, had few liberating effects. One such strategy involved neglecting cotton in favor of more profitable crops, especially corn, a form of resistance made easier by the eventual German acceptance of interplanting the two crops.¹⁵³ Rather than undermining the cotton program, such piecemeal acts of insubordination brought about the very coercion they were designed to resist, and thus furthered the forced production drive. German observers explained resistance to the cotton program as the result of an inherent tendency of "Negroes" to "laziness."¹⁵⁴ Officials compensated for this "laziness" with what they called "supervision" or "pressure," described frankly by one district officer when he wrote: "reminders and warnings do nothing: it finally comes down to hard punishments."¹⁵⁵ This official spoke, no doubt, of the infamous twenty-five lashes emblematic of German rule in Togo.¹⁵⁶ Defining the Togolese as "Negroes" subjected them to racist political-economic regimes comparable to those found in the United States, placing them in a permanent state of exception that allowed violence and coercion to be exercised in the name of normalizing free labor.

The Tuskegee expedition seemed to bring about a situation in Togo in which "Negroes" freely produced industrial cotton. Thanks to Tuskegee efforts, Togo's cotton exports improved in quality and increased in quantity by almost sixty-fold, from 2,000 to 116,850 kilograms per year.¹⁵⁷ This apparent success, however, resulted from the real failures of the Tuskegee idea and the violent compensation that these failures elicited. The Tuskegee cotton expedition offered Togolese an identity as a "Negro" "people" who participated in a "culture" of small-scale cotton growing for European markets. This "Negro" identity marked its bearer as a subject lacking precisely that outside authority that imperialists were only too eager to provide. Rejecting the identity "Negro" similarly marked an individual as a subject for external coercion by Tuskegee and German authorities. The trap of identity allowed Tuskegee personnel to oversee a forced cotton production drive under the signs of free labor and racial uplift.

Today, West African smallholders grow cotton willingly and complain that they are prevented from competing fairly on the world market because their U.S. and European competitors enjoy enormous government subsidies.¹⁵⁸ That today's global hegemons prevent West Africans from exporting cotton in order that first world growers might prosper suggests a true, reverse form of the message of Tuskegee and subsequent imperialist cotton drives: imperialists never desired cotton; they only wanted to immobilize Africans for their shifting political-economic needs. In the present era of structural adjustment, marked by what James Ferguson has called the "global redlining of Africa," Togolese and other West African cotton farmers are discovering that forced poverty has taken the place of forced cotton production.¹⁵⁹ The mass immobilizations characteristic of most forms of actually existing capitalism are the true, reverse forms of the increasing mobilization of capital, commodities, and elites, which included the Tuskegee expedition to German Togo.

National, ethnic, racial, and other identities have been essential in maintaining these mass immobilizations. Because the subject is split, however, identity—the imaginary—is bound to the dynamic and dialectical symbolic, and both are doomed to stumble repeatedly over the real. Class conflict thus always produces historical parapraxes, apparent failures of identities, and ideologies that present possibilities for new forms of class oppression, as we have seen in the case of the Tuskegee expedition to Togo, but also possibilities for revolutionary transformations of class societies. The immobilized of the world have recourse to stronger stuff than the weapons of the weak, revolutionary possibilities indicated by psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches to even the most gruesome periods, in even the most hopeless times.

I am grateful to all the friends and colleagues who read and commented on earlier versions of this article. They include Marshall Alcorn, Nemata Blyden, Dane Kennedy, and Adam Rothman. John David Smith not only read many drafts of this article, but also acted as a mentor in these beginning efforts in American history. In Togo, my work was greatly assisted by the expertise and the hospitality of Professors N'buéké Adovi Goeh-Akue and Pierre Ali Napo. Johanna K. Bockman has been generous in her willingness to read drafts, discuss ideas, and offer advice. This project has profited from discussions at more conferences and seminars than I can list here. Michael Grossberg and anonymous readers all contributed substantially to the development of this article. I am also grateful for the research assistance of Elizabeth Fine, Steven Bulthuis, and Brett Morrison. My research has received external support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (FT-46516-02). The George Washington University, including the History Department and the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, has been generous in its support of my research and travel. Even with all this help, there undoubtedly remain numerous shortcomings in this article, for which I alone am responsible.

Andrew Zimmerman is an assistant professor of history at the George Washington University. His Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, 2001) developed from a 1998 University of California, San Diego, dissertation. At the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, he began researching the coproduction of scientific knowledge and state power in colonial Africa. An article based on this work, "'What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?' Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania," will appear in Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 2 (April 2006). He is currently writing a book about free labor, race, and social science in Germany, Africa, and the United States, centered on the Tuskegee expedition discussed in this article.

Notes

¹ Edgar Allen Poe, "The Purloined Letter" (1844), in Tales of Terror and Detection (New York, 1995), 76–91, 85. Poe's story was the focus of a seminar by Jacques Lacan that is an important source for this article: Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 38–72.

² Most importantly in David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984).

³ Recently, historians in Germany have called for a more thoroughly transnational account of German history. See Jürgen Osterhammel, Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats: Studien zu Beziehungsgeschichte und Zivilizationsvergleich (Göttingen, 2001), and Sebastian Conrad, "Doppelte Marginalisierung: Plädoyer für eine transnationale Perspektive auf die deutsche Geschichte," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 145–169.

⁴ The classic statement of this Africanist position is T. O. Ranger, "Introduction," in Ranger, ed., Emerging Themes of African History (Nairobi, 1968), ix–xxii. For a recent statement of the Africanist position, see Allen Isaacman, "Peasants and Rural Social Protest in Africa," African Studies Review 33 (1990): 1–120. For examples of Africanist approaches that attack Marxism for denying African agency, see Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1995), and Alan Isaacman, Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938–1961 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1996). Steven Feierman has warned against allowing world history to swallow up African history in "Africa in History: The End of Universal Narratives," in Gyan Prakash, ed., After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 40–65. For surveys of the controversy between Africanist and political-economic approaches, see Ralph A. Austen, "Africanist Historiography and Its Critics: Can There Be an Autonomous African History?" in Toyin Falola, ed., African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi (Ikeja, Nigeria, 1993), 203–217, and Bill Freund, "Africanist History and the History of Africa," chap. 1 in The Making of Contemporary Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 1981), 1–15. For important critiques of the anti-Marxist Africanist position, see E. A. Alpers, "Re-Thinking African Economic History," Kenya Historical Review 2 (1973): 163–188; Henry Bernstein and Jacques Depelchin, "The Object of African History: A Materialist Perspective," 2 pts., History in Africa 5 (1978): 1–19 and 6 (1979): 17–43; Frederick Cooper, "Africa and the World Economy," African Studies Review 24 (1981): 1–86; Bridget O'Laughlin, "Proletarianisation, Agency and Changing Rural Livelihoods: Forced Labour and Resistance in Colonial Mozambique," Journal of Southern African Studies 28 (2002): 511–530; and Arnold Temu and Bonaventure Swai, Historians and Africanist History: A Critique (London, 1981). There has been excellent work refusing the false opposition between African agency and political economy, including Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth-Century Malawi (Cambridge, 1987), and Sara Berry, No Condition Is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, Wis., 1993).

⁵ Historians focusing on Togo have thus given little attention to the expedition as an external influence on internal African history. See C. Adick, Bildung und Kolonialismus in Togo (Weinheim, 1981), 192–193; Arthur J. Knoll, Togo under Imperial Germany, 1884–1914: A Case Study in Colonial Rule (Stanford, Calif., 1970), 144–147; Donna J. E. Maier, "Persistence of Precolonial Patterns of Production: Cotton in German Togoland, 1800–1914," in Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts, eds., Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa (Portsmouth, N.H., 1995), 71–95, 82; and Edward Graham Norris, Die Umerziehung des Afrikaners: Togo, 1895–1938 (Munich, 1993), 141–149.

⁶ See Robin D. G. Kelley, "How the West Was One: The African Diaspora and the Re-Mapping of U.S. History," in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 123–147. For a brilliant account of modernization in the United States and the Atlantic world in the transnational context of the African diaspora, see David McBride, Missions for Science: U.S. Technology and Medicine in America's African World (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002).

⁷ Louis R. Harlan, "Booker T. Washington and the White Man's Burden," AHR 71, no. 2 (January 1966): 441–467. See also Harlan's excellent two-volume biography of Washington, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (London, 1972) and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (London, 1983).

⁸ The most recent scholarship on the expedition, by the Togolese historian Pierre Ali Napo, has focused on its African American participants, applauding this first Tuskegee involvement in African development projects. Professor Napo's monograph marked the centenary of the expedition, for which Tuskegee University signed a Convention of Cooperation with the University of Lomé and unveiled a plaque dedicated to the members of the expedition at the University's École Superior d'Agronomie. Pierre Ali Napo, Togo, Land of Tuskegee Institute's International Technical Assistance Experimentation: 1900–1909 (Accra, 2002), translation of Le Togo, Terre d'Expérimentation de l'Assistance Technique Internationale de Tuskegee University en Alabama, USA 1900–1909 (Lomé, 2001). Like Napo, Kendahl L. Radcliffe treats the expedition as a case of African American assistance to Africa in "The Tuskegee-Togo Cotton Scheme, 1900–1909" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1998). Booker T. Washington enjoys a better reputation in Africa, where he has long been regarded as an advocate of black self-help, than he does in the United States, where he is often blamed for accommodating white racism. See W. Manning Marable, "Booker T. Washington and African Nationalism," Phylon 35 (1974): 398–406; Donald Spivey, "The African Crusade for Black Industrial Schooling," Journal of Negro History 63 (1978): 1–17; and Michael O. West, "The Tuskegee Model of Development in Africa: Another Dimension of the Africa/African-American Connection," Diplomatic History 16 (1992): 371–387. For a recent collection of generally laudatory accounts of Washington, see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up from Slavery 100 Years Later (Gainesville, Fla., 2003). For more negative appraisals of Washington, see James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988); Brian Kelly, "Sentinels for New South Industry: Booker T. Washington, Industrial Accommodation and Black Workers in the Jim Crow South," Labor History 44 (2003): 337–357; and Donald Spivey, Schooling for the New Slavery: Black Industrial Education, 1868–1915 (Westport, Conn., 1978). On Tuskegee in Africa after the Togo expedition, see Kenneth James King, Pan-Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy and Education in the Southern States of America and East Africa (Oxford, 1971), and Donald Spivey, The Politics of Miseducation: The Booker T. Washington Institute of Liberia, 1929–1945 (Lexington, Ky., 1986). For the influence of Tuskegee in South Africa, see James Campbell, "Models and Metaphors: Industrial Education in the United States and South Africa," in Ran Greenstein, ed., Comparative Perspectives on South Africa (New York, 1998), 90–134. For Booker T. Washington in the larger context of African American interest in Africa, see Tunde Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission (Lexington, Ky., 1998), and Elliot P. Skinner, African Americans and U.S. Foreign Policy toward Africa, 1850–1924: In Defense of Black Nationality (Washington, D.C., 1992).

⁹ See Joan Wallach Scott, "Women's History," "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," and "Some More Reflections on Gender and Politics," in Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. (New York, 1999), 15–50, 199–222. For Scott's most recent treatment of Lacanian psychoanalysis for history, see "Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity," Critical Inquiry 27 (2001): 284–304.

¹⁰ See especially James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn., 1985). "Peasants," Christine Pelzer White has observed, "do not necessarily want to remain peasants, and do not necessarily place highest priority on preserving their status as poor petty commodity producers in a richer world." White, "Everyday Resistance, Socialist Revolution and Rural Development: The Vietnamese Case," Journal of Peasant Studies (hereafter JPS) 13 (1986): 49–63, 62.

¹¹ The JPS has generally been so critical of peasant essentialism that one of its editors, Henry Bernstein, eventually bade "farewell to the peasantry," leaving the journal to locate the "economic form agricultural petty commodity production" (formerly known as peasant production) in "the shifting places of agriculture in the international divisions of labour of imperialism." Henry Bernstein, "Farewells to the Peasantry," Transformation 52 (2003): 1–19, 14, and Bernstein and Terence J. Byres, "From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change," Journal of Agrarian Change 1 (2001): 1–56. Bernstein had long maintained that there was no peasant mode of production, and that peasants in Africa were, in fact, "wage labor equivalents." See Bernstein, "African Peasantries: A Theoretical Framework," JPS 6 (1979): 421–443. Under the editorship of Tom Brass, the JPS has turned even more fiercely against peasant essentialism. See collected JPS articles by Tom Brass in Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates (London, 1999) and Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism: The Return of the Agrarian Myth (London, 2000). Other excellent work on the political economy of peasants in Africa includes Victor L. Allen, "The Meaning of the Working Class in Africa," Journal of Modern African Studies 10 (1972): 169–189; Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (Berkeley, Calif., 1979); Frederick Cooper, "Back to Work: Categories, Boundaries and Connections in the Study of Labour," in Peter Alexander and Rick Halpern, eds., Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA and Africa (New York, 2000), 213–235; Bill Freund, The African Worker (Cambridge, 1988); O'Laughlin, "Proletarianisation, Agency and Changing Rural Livelihoods"; and Anne Phillips, The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa (London, 1989). There has also been some movement in the development community to reject both modernization theory and the "farmer first" populism meant to challenge it. See Ian Scoones and John Thompson, "Knowledge, Power, and Development: Towards a Theoretical Understanding," in Scoones and Thompson, eds., Beyond Farmer First: Rural People's Knowledge, Agricultural Research and Extension Practice (London, 1994), 16–32.

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