Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa, 1884 - 1891 MATTHEW UNANGST T EMPLE U NIVERSITY A July 12, 1890 article in the Kolonialzeitung, Germany ’ s largest colonialist newspaper, lamented the end of an era in Germany ’ s relationship with Africa. The paper ’ s editors wrote that Carl Peters ’ s expedition to find the explorer Emin Pasha in the Egyptian province of Equatoria might be the world ’ s last real journey of exploration. 1 Peters had been feared dead, killed in a Maasai raid on his caravan, for several months earlier in the year. Even though those fears had turned out to be ungrounded, the paper concluded that further German exploration of Africa was too dangerous («Im dunkelsten Afrika» 182). The article ’ s author declared that German colonialists would have to reorient themselves away from exploration toward new ways of exerting control over Africa. 2 While travel, including exploratory travel, remained central to the German experience in East Africa after 1890, the Emin Pasha expedition marked the end of an era for how the German reading public experienced that travel. The style of travel writing about East Africa changed to fit the new needs of the colonial state and the reading demands of the metropolitan public. 3 Writing about travel took new forms when it began to support a real, rather than an imagined, empire. Bernd Wiese has argued that the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century marked the decline of traditional travelogues with their focus on scientific aspects of expeditions (Wiese 229). That transition, as far as East Africa was concerned, was at its clearest with Peters himself, six years earlier. 4 Peters and his fellow leaders of the Society for German Colonization (Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation, GfdK), the founding organization of Germany's East African colony, repurposed the scientific travel narrative that had formed the entirety of their knowledge about East Africa before 1884 to further the organization's goals of building a colonial empire. It replaced the scientific or religious callings of earlier explorers with its own higher calling, the German nation, making the travelogues of its members into narratives of imperial conquest. 5 Travelogues were particularly important in German East Africa as compared to Germany ’ s other colonies because the GfdK began its acquisition of territory without the support of existing networks in the region and contrary to the Bismarck regime ’ s wishes (Smith 32). It planned to force Bismarck and the Kaiser to support German colonialism by presenting them with an already-acquired colony. Its members knew about the area they arrogated from travelogues they had read rather than from expeditions. After the German government granted the GfdK a Schutzbrief for its territories in 1885, the genre changed significantly, and it began to resemble travel writing about parts of Europe more closely due to changing German aims in East Africa. Travel writing about East Africa is also valuable to see changes in the genre because Germans continued to write about travel in the region after formal colonization began. Travel and political domination were closely intertwined in the German colonial project in East Africa. As Michael Pesek has asserted, German colonial rule in East Africa had depended on travel. Pesek argues that accounts of exploratory expeditions influenced the colonial state ’ s approaches to governance in parts of East Africa through the entirety of German rule there. Colonization began with expeditions of exploration by German scientists, and continued with the constant movement of German officials and officers around the colony, a necessity given the small staff responsible for covering an area nearly twice as large as Germany's European territory (Pesek 12 - 13). Following the German government ’ s takeover of German East Africa in 1891, travel writing changed again. The colonial state ’ s needs were different from those of the GfdK and neither pre-colonial travelogues nor those in the GfdK style fit its needs. As the colonial state took control of East African spaces and travel in them, travelers became part of the apparatus of imperial rule rather than lone representatives of diffuse imperial agendas. They no longer traversed «Africa,» but «German Africa,» a space with fewer rhetorical possibilities. Long travelogues of exploration in the nineteenth-century style disappeared: First, the expectation that pre-colonial travelers were the only authentic sources of information about faraway, mysterious places no longer existed. Second, the colonial state was more concerned with understanding how to govern and make economic use of lands traversed, not magical descriptions so common in earlier travelogues. And third, metropolitan audiences had other sources of information about East Africa. This article will trace the outlines of that decline in order to explore the ways in which German colonial fantasies changed with the creation of a formal colonial empire to a point where exploratory travelogues could no longer fuel them. By «travel writing» and «travelogues» I mean here the expeditionary reports and descriptions in the style that formed the primary corpus of 267 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa European writing about Africa in the pre-colonial period. The anthropologist Johannes Fabian has identified the common topos of such travelogues: «That of the encounter between a European explorer, the intrepid leader of an expeditionary caravan and emissary of science, and the African chief, a local ruler (real or presumed) cast in the role of a representative of his society and culture and invariably identified as either a political friend or foe of European penetration.» 6 Mary Louise Pratt has labeled European travel writers within a colonial paradigm as agents of the «anti-conquest,» by which she means the non-violent processes of asserting European hegemony while representing Europeans as innocent observers (Pratt 7). They were the heroic protagonists of their travelogues, civilizing a static non-European world. Travel writing in that style played an important role in the development of German colonialism. Scholars of pre-colonial Germany have drawn attention to the importance of travel literature in shaping the German world imaginary. Susanne Zantop argued for the influence of what she called «colonial fantasies» in shaping German ideas about empire before formal colonization began. These colonial fantasies «formed a cultural residue of myths about self and other(s) that could be stirred up for particular political purposes - progressive as well as reactionary ones - whenever the need arose» (Zantop 3, 168). Germans were among the most active explorers of East Africa in the decades before colonization. They were more involved in the exploration of East Africa than perhaps anywhere else on the globe, meaning German travelogues about the region were more prominent internationally than those about other parts of the world. In the 1880s, exploration had dominated the German colonial experience in East Africa. German East Africa ’ s founder, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation (GfdK), and its successor, the Deutsche Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (DOAG), dedicated most of their resources to journeys of exploration and conquest from the middle of the 1880s onwards. 7 Precolonial travel literature, particularly book-length travelogues, served as a means of establishing tropes about the spaces Germans entered and on which German colonialists could build political claims, as the GfdK had done in its expedition to found the East African colony in 1884. The GfdK began the German colonization of East Africa with an expedition to acquire land in October 1884. The expedition was led by the Society ’ s founders, Carl Peters and Joachim Graf von Pfeil. Accompanying Peters and Pfeil were Karl Jühlke, an old school friend of Peters and a member of the GfdK, and August Otto, a young businessman traveling at his own expense to explore trade opportunities in the area. Travel in the region was so common that the expedition ’ s members attempted to pass it off 268 Matthew Unangst variously as an International African Association exploratory expedition, a hunting trip, a scientific expedition, or an English trading expedition (Wagner 28). 8 In East Africa, the four men operated secretly to sign a series of extremely dubious treaties with various local leaders, headmen, and other figures that promised the Society sovereign rights over thousands of square miles. Those treaties later served as the basis of German claims to what was to become the German East African colony and the justification for government protection of the GfdK. Before beginning the expedition, members of the GfdK, and the European public more generally, knew about East Africa almost entirely through explorers ’ travelogues. Those travelogues were almost all the product of the second half of the nineteenth century. East Africa had been left out of the first wave of European exploration, when European explorers and geographers focused their attention on the Americas. In 1851, Henry Venn, secretary of the British Church Missionary Society, had declared that any further exploration in Africa must proceed from the East Coast (Richards and Place 1). The first to take up that call was Johann Ludwig Krapf, a German missionary working for the British Church Missionary Society. British, German, and Belgian explorers followed Krapf and explored Eastern Africa under the auspices of scientific and missionary societies over the next three decades. As the biographer of the explorer Carl Claus von der Decken put it in 1869, these explorers were the «pioneers of culture» in East Africa and connected metropolitan audiences in Germany with the region (Kersten, Baron Carl Claus von der Decken ’ s Reisen 386). Their accounts, one author claimed, represented Africa as truthfully as photography could (Pless 233). Explorers ’ travelogues about East Africa, particularly the fantastical descriptions of empty landscapes, provided material around which readers could construct their visions for the future of East Africa. Travelogues were part of a «cultural residue» that Germans could use to create national myths and ideas about the Other. Travelers marked territory with meaning for European audiences. Travel writing domesticated the exotic for European consumption and engaged European publics with imperial projects (Pratt 4). Beginning with Alexander von Humboldt, German travel writers had used the genre of the travelogue to place non-European spaces within European totalizing frameworks. Travelogues produced tropes and topoi about Africa that German colonialists could call upon to create Africa for metropolitan audiences. Travelogues created a discourse of «colonial fantasies» around East Africa before Europeans attempted to take possession of the territory. The pervasiveness of travelogues and their intertwinement with German identity before the Reichsgründung meant Germans had already colonized 269 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa the world in their minds before Germany had any colonies (Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox, and Zantop 19). Scientific accounts of East African travel by German explorers and missionaries were prominent in Germany in the early 1880s, despite Germany's lack of a formal overseas empire. German explorers worked for the British government and the International Africa Association (IAA). The Hamburg Geographical Society sent the doctor Gustav Fischer to explore farther west to Lake Victoria. Mittheilungen der afrikanischen Gesellschaft carried reports from the German branch of the IAA in which German explorers presented information about East and Central Africa. Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen carried the latest in geographic research and reports of German travelers to exotic locations, including East Africa. Both presented travelogues of the territories traversed to German mass audiences, popularizing exploration in Africa. The aforementioned Krapf had served a British missionary society and wrote about East African travel for both British and German audiences. Pfeil and Peters, the two most prominent figures in the GfdK, both dated their interest in empire back to childhood experiences reading German travel writing about the region (Peters, Gesammelte Schriften 1: 31; Pfeil, Zur Erwerbung von Deutsch-Ostafrika 11). Peters ’ s father was a friend of von der Decken ’ s, a prominent explorer of East Africa during Peters ’ s childhood. The older Peters had told young Carl of David Livingstone ’ s travels and, pointing to East Africa on a map, had told him «here lies the future of Africa» (Gesammelte Schriften 1: 20). Peters made up his mind to make that future a German one. Pfeil had been inspired to go to Africa by an indirect connection to Gerhard Rohlfs, a German explorer of Abyssinia in the 1860s and 1870s. One of Rohlfs ’ relatives was a teacher at Pfeil ’ s Gymnasium. The teacher exposed Pfeil to travelogues by Andersen, Baldwin, the Forsters, Cook, and Humboldt (Zur Erwerbung 22 - 23). 9 When Pfeil heard the news of Henry Morton Stanley ’ s travels in «deepest Africa,» the Rohlfs travelogues from his youth ran back through his mind and «powerfully enflamed in me the need for mental activity» (Zur Erwerbung 23). Peters, too, had read and been inspired by Stanley ’ s travels in East and Central Africa (Falkenhorst 8). Although Pfeil claimed the 1884 expedition had been the product of «spontaneous acts» (BArch N 2225/ 7, pag. 9), the genesis for the GfdK ’ s 1884 expedition came out of Peters ’ s and Pfeil ’ s readings of travelogues, particularly Stanley ’ s. As Peters became part of the burgeoning colonialist movement in the early 1880s, he hoped that he could find «wide stretches in which German agriculturalists can progress» with a vague conception that such stretches could be found somewhere in Africa (BArch R 8023/ 265, pag. 270 Matthew Unangst 61). He founded the GfdK for this task, but its members had little or no experience in Africa. They therefore drew on the travelogues they had read, and, over the Society ’ s first few months of existence, they suggested possible places to find such wide stretches. Their lack of knowledge of Africa was apparent in their proposals: Joseph Freiherr Molitor von Mühlfeld called for greater emigration to Argentina, Major Friedrich Wilhelm Alexander von Mechow suggested colonizing on the Kwango River, and Alexander Merensky recommended what is today southern Angola. Peters took up the Merensky plan, but the rest of the organization vetoed it because it was clear the German government would not support such a plan as Portugal had already claimed the area. While laid up with an illness in Lorenzo Marques (now Maputo, the capital of Mozambique), Pfeil thought back over Stanley ’ s travelogues. They inspired him to dream up a plan to acquire land in East Africa. Great riches, he believed, were to be made on Lake Malawi. He suggested the region of Usagara, which according to Stanley held great hope for colonial development (Zur Erwerbung 56). The GfdK approved Usagara by unanimous vote on 16 September 1884 (Kurtze 3 - 4). The society made no explicit plans for the colonization of Usagara following the expedition. It would acquire territory through treaties with local rulers, then simply declare the land German, and encourage German settlers to go there (BArch N 2225/ 6, pag. 5). The 1884 expedition ’ s members followed the pre-colonial travelers' methods and published travelogues about their exploration and conquest. 10 Like earlier travelers, Peters and Pfeil went on lecture tours and presented their travels to metropolitan audiences. 11 Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen, one of Germany ’ s leading journals for geographic research, praised the company ’ s openness. Whereas the International Africa Association had been secretive about its explorations in order to keep its findings to itself and prevent others from taking advantage of them, the DOAG ’ s members published freely («Geographischer Monatsbericht. Afrika. Ostafrika» 281). The GfdK ’ s published openly because the Society ’ s travelogues served to announce conquest, not science, and therefore dispensed with many of the topoi of earlier travelogues. The GfdK travelogues mirrored earlier travel writing in many ways, placing the Society's conquests within European frameworks of knowledge about East Africa. Like Peters and Pfeil, pre-colonial explorers had often attributed their decisions to explore East Africa to a childhood passion for geography and exploration. Carl von der Decken ’ s editor, for example, noted the explorer ’ s love of history and geography as a child. Decken had traveled around Europe, but it soon held no more interest for him. He thought about 271 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa joining the British imperial service, but chose to express his patriotism for the unifying German nation instead (Kersten, «Dem Andenken» 385). Ludwig Krapf told readers that he had developed his passion for East Africa in his first year of school. He read many travel accounts as a boy and wanted to see the world beyond Europe. He became a missionary, giving thus a higher purpose to his travel, as a compromise between his own ambition to see the world and his father ’ s ambition for him to become a minister (Claus 5 - 6). Explorers frequently suggested that their travels served a higher calling that would advance the progress of humanity. A calling beyond the self explained the explorer ’ s willingness to brave danger and made him a hero to those who believed in the same calling. To promote their own bravery and skill in the eyes of European audiences, explorers had to convince them that the dangers they faced were beyond anything one could experience in Europe. Explorers traversed unknown places posing a great deal of personal danger and had to depend on aid networks of which they had little knowledge. The higher calling that gave them the necessary strength to brave danger was in many cases religious, as it was for Krapf and for many other missionaries (Baur and Le Roy 184 - 87, Krapf 16). In other cases, the higher calling was scientific, to broaden the European base of knowledge by exploring the unknown (Kennedy 60). Precolonial travelogues constructed the East African wilderness as a place to experience that calling ’ s sublime glory and get lost in quiet contemplation of home, or the future, as «the present disappears» (Pless 231). Stanley wrote of the «sublime hour» in which his dreams would be realized (104). Joseph Thomson described Lake Nyasa/ Malawi as «a perfect Arcadia, about which idyllic poets have sung, though few have seen it realized» (189). At Lake Tanganyika, he «felt as if we had passed from a purgatory to a paradise» (192). Charles New wrote that nothing could be more «sublime» than to see God ’ s work. Mount Kilimanjaro exhibited «unparalleled grandeur, sublimity, majesty, and glory» (56). John Hanning Speke described a «fairy-like, wild, and romantic» landscape that was more fantastic than anything he had seen outside a theater (149); he thought it obvious the «untutored savage» would see magic in the existence of Mount Kenya (62). East Africa was thus envisioned as the setting for an explorer to come closer to the absolute truth and knowledge his calling promised. In order to assert their mastery of knowledge over East Africa, explorers frequently denied the people they encountered in the East African interior a history outside of natural processes and fell back on European history or literature to explain East African people and history (Kennedy 14). Speke wrote that the Wanyamwezi had no history until travelers from India had 272 Matthew Unangst started to write about them (Speke 138). Travelers drew comparisons between African societies and ones more familiar to European audiences. Decken described the Sultanate of Witu ’ s history as one that put the Ghibelline-Guelph feud of medieval Europe to shame (Kersten, «Dem Andenken» 370). Charles New, a British CMS missionary, described the Galla as the «Ishmaelites» of Africa, barbarous and ferocious perpetrators of deeds too horrible to describe (39). Thomson drew on Shakespeare, comparing himself to Caliban, and the cicadas around him to Titania (124 - 25). The French missionaries Étienne Baur and Alexandre Le Roy compared a local ruler to the medieval French king, Charlemagne, Louis the Fair, and Henri IV (203). Duff MacDonald thought the Great Lakes region resembled what Britain had looked like centuries before Christianity (145 - 46). The use of European history to explain Africa placed the continent within a European framework for understanding the world that allowed no space for indigenous knowledge. Peters ’ s and Pfeil ’ s travelogues fit many of the topoi of earlier travelogues about East Africa, but they sought to fix their travels as permanent markers on the East African landscape, to make German colonialism real in East Africa through writing. The first element of the GfdK ’ s colonial project was repurposing travel writing from Pratt's «anti-conquest» of control through observation to describing an explicit physical arrogation of land for a German overseas empire. The expedition was not in Africa to explore, but to conquer. The expedition ’ s accounts of its actions, therefore, needed only those elements of pre-colonial travel literature that would support conquest. They did not need the religious or scientific motivations of earlier travelers and were meant for a broader audience. Peters and Pfeil stripped out the religious and scientific issues earlier travelers had emphasized in their focus on land. The GfdK dropped all pretensions to science that earlier expeditions had made. Thus Peters ’ s descriptions of new, unexplored areas were perfunctory. His focus was rather on preparations for the expedition, his grand goals, and the expedition ’ s results, the set of treaties by which the GfdK claimed thousands of square miles of land. More important to Peters than the narrative of his expedition were the treaties he included in full text. The narrative served to illustrate and explain the primary text of his travelogue, which were the series of treaties on which the GfdK based its political claims. As legal documents, the treaties attempted to fix time and place in order to create political reality out of the GfdK expedition. Peters ’ s travels and travelogues also served a higher calling - the glory of Germany. Colonialism offered a possible unifying force for the young German nation in the midst of Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf against the 273 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa Catholics. The Franco-Prussian War had turned the then 13-year-old Peters into a German nationalist (Gesammelte Schriften 1: 31). While living with his uncle in London, Peters developed his ambitions of empire. He saw the British as more economically independent and free from state control to acquire territory anywhere in the world, all because of Britain ’ s colonial empire (Gesammelte Schriften 1: 56). Peters noted that critics had called him and his compatriots adventurers. But he took delight in the term, claiming that the British Empire too was started by the adventurers Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. Adventure and colonial conquest could be one and the same (Die Gründung von Deutsch-Ostafrika 53). Peters believed that German Protestants and Catholics could work together to civilize East Africa, bringing both sides of the religious divide together into one national mission. He made it his mission to acquire a colonial empire for Germany in order to create opportunities for the post-unification generation of young Bildungsbürger like those available for young British middle-class men because of the British Empire. Like earlier travelers, Peters cited European history to make his argument, but he used a specifically German history in a way that inscribed German cultural achievements onto the East African landscape. Besides a brief mention of Cortes ’ s conquest of Mexico, Peters ’ s historical references were all German, and served to inscribe the German presence on the East African landscape («Die Usagara-Expedition» 288). He compared the landscape to the fruit trees of Mother Hulda («Die Usagara Expedition» 301). He passed the time by reading Lessing ’ s critique of Voltaire ’ s Semiramis («Die Usagara Expedition» 304). In all of his accounts of East African travel, Peters resorted frequently to quoting poetry to demonstrate his Germanness or a European spirit of exploration. His historical references were not meant merely to make landscapes more familiar to domestic audiences, but served to make them specifically German. Peters and Pfeil attempted to cast themselves as the German nationalist version of the lone European hero traversing the wilderness, bringing Germany to Africa in their own persons. Their travelogues constructed their expedition as an encounter between German civilization and African wilderness. For example, Peters got lost hunting and feared being stuck alone for the night. At one point, he dreamed he was not really in Africa, and chalked up his survival to strength of will and cold-bloodedness («Die Usagara Expedition» 308 - 09). He thought he would die and told Jühlke to rush on to the coast to get the treaties to Germany. At the same time, Peters dreamed of home. He thought of a tavern near his hometown, the Einnahme of Ilsfeld, and drinking German beer to relieve his thirst («Die Usagara 274 Matthew Unangst Expedition» 297). He and Jühlke spent their afternoons discussing the Heimat («Die Usagara Expedition» 298). After the expedition ’ s return, Peters claimed the whole experience lay behind him like a «wonderful grotesque dream» («Die Usagara Expedition» 313). It was as if he had never been in Africa at all; the experience had not shaped him, merely demonstrated the character he already had. It had demonstrated Germany ’ s potential as a colonial power. If a few men could accomplish so much, certainly the German nation could accomplish much more. Encounters with «civilization» gave the expedition ’ s members strength, and the loss of civilization weakened them. An encounter with an English missionary and his wife going west gave Pfeil «new strength» (Zur Erwerbung von Deutsch-Ostafrika 88 - 89). Pfeil and Kurt von Toeppen, who later brought a caravan to resupply him, sat around singing German songs in what they imagined was a silence which had never before been disturbed (Zur Erwerbung 108). Being in Africa did not weaken Peters ’ s and Pfeil ’ s Germanness; it only strengthened it through the crucible of dangerous travel. Pfeil demonstrated a greater understanding than did Peters of the purposes and form of pre-colonial travelogues and attempted to straddle the divide between science and conquest in other publications. He wrote several articles for scientific audiences immediately after the expedition. These articles reported his studies on the geology of the Rubeho Mountains and the breadth of the Ulanga River, and attempted to explain the flora of East African swamps. Pfeil translated the GfdK ’ s «primeval forest» [Urwald] into the scientific «rain forest» [Regenwald] for his scientific audience («Die Erforschung des Ulanga-Gebietes» 357 - 58, 363). He apologized to his readers for the inexactness of his maps, as he had been unable to take measurements by the stars due to bad weather. In contrast, the GfdK ’ s treaties had paid little attention to exact borders («Beobachtungen während meiner letzten Reise in Ostafrika» 1). Pfeil thus demonstrated an understanding of the scientific expectations and claims of earlier explorers and attempted to establish a reputation as a scientific explorer at the same time he was establishing himself as a German imperialist (Kennedy 42). Pfeil proposed that writing about East Africa ought to change to fit the needs of German colonialism, a sentiment Peters shared. The time for tales of «adventures of travel» was over. The colonial project's success depended on physical labor, the shipment of goods, and cultivation of fields (BArch N 2225/ 5, pag. 1). Writing about East Africa needed to be about teaching or forcing Africans to provide that physical labor. In Pfeil ’ s immediate account of his time in East Africa, from 1886, he disclaimed the importance of continued travel writing about the region between the coast and the DOAG ’ s 275 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa first station, at Sima. He thought the area was «already known to my reader, as it has been detailed and described uncountable times» and needed no more exploratory travel description (BArch N 2225/ 21, pag. 3). Although Peters called for more research expeditions to East Africa, his focus was on controlling more land, promoting settlement, and studying agricultural conditions («Konsolidierung der deutschen Kolonialbewegung» 352). Yet scientific accounts of East African exploration did not disappear overnight. The DOAG, which formed out of the GfdK after the success of its expedition, and much of the rest of the colonial movement, continued to base its arguments on travel writing and used older travelogues to promote the value of the new colony. Carl Grimm published a book in 1886 that consisted entirely of excerpts from travelers ’ accounts to praise the value of East Africa. The Kolonialzeitung relied on the explorer Paul Reichard to write about East Africa. Reichard offered a position of authority as a pre-colonial, scientific explorer of the region. He had paid his own way to join an expedition sent by the German branch of the International African Association to East Africa from 1880 to 1886. Reichard claimed an expertise about East Africa derived from his lone survival through the «thousands of dangers and difficulties» East Africa offered the European traveler as well as the scientific surveys he conducted there (58). Through the 1880s, then, scientific travelogues remained one of the primary means through which the German public learned about East Africa. New forms of media played an important part in enabling further changes to the form of travel writing about East Africa in the 1880s. The assumption of formal colonial control provided the impetus for an expansion of publication outlets available to travel writers. No longer were they limited to scientific publications such as Petermanns geographische Mitteilungen or Mittheilungen der afrikanischen Gesellschaft but travel reports now appeared in colonialist publications such as the Kolonialzeitung and even in major newspapers. Furthermore, the technologies of colonial rule enabled quicker reporting. News from Africa now arrived months, or even years earlier, through newspaper reports sourced from telegrams. The creation of regular lines of communication between Zanzibar and the East African mainland and the installation of a telegraph line running from Zanzibar enabled the quick reporting of travel back to the urban centers in Germany. But quicker reporting also changed the modes in which travelers wrote. Travel writing about East Africa no longer meant only travelogues constructed in the metropole after the journey was completed; it included reports written in Africa before the traveler could create a narrative for the entire expedition. 276 Matthew Unangst Much of the travel literature on East Africa published in the late 1880s dropped the scientific reports included in earlier travelogues altogether, and much of it dropped the heroic framings of earlier accounts. Although many of the earlier tropes remained, travelers no longer presented themselves as quite the lone heroes they had previously been. Nor did they necessarily attribute a higher purpose to their travels. The editors of Nachrichten aus der ostafrikanischen Mission, the periodical of the Berlin III Mission Society established specifically for East Africa, complained in 1888 that the narratives of earlier travel literature had filled children ’ s heads with ideas of adventure, not the hard work necessary to make colonies function (Rev. of Deutsch- Afrika und seine Nachbaren im schwarzen Erdtheil 78). The goal of the mission publication was now to show the hard labor of travel and the rewards of mission work. It thus heeded Pfeil ’ s call to change the form of travel writing. Its editor wrote that one would have to increasingly read reports of Africa travelers critically. The paper's editor wrote that the traveler could no longer appear as the lone European hero, master of all he surveyed, as one report might contradict or make appear foolish actions or thoughts from a predecessor. The focus shifted away from narrative and scientific description to interesting anecdotes or extended, in-depth ethnographic or geographic descriptions. Enthusiasm for colonialism led to new publications meant for new audiences, particularly for people interested in overseas trade or mission work. The aforementioned Kolonialzeitung provided thus a forum in which regular, non-scientific expedition accounts could be published. By the end of the 1880s, metropolitan audiences consumed reports of East African travel, but no longer primarily scientific travelogues. A particularly illustrative example of the changes is Rudolf Hellgrewe ’ s Aus Deutsch-Ost-Afrika, published in 1888. Although Hellgrewe included an introduction reminiscent of earlier writing about travel to East Africa - he wrote about the journey from Germany to the Orient and down to Zanzibar, then across to the mainland in a typical manner - he was no longer entering the unknown. In contrast, Hellgrewe traveled between outposts of civilization, the DOAG stations. He thought it unnecessary to include extensive written description, as East African landscapes and people were already «quite well-known» by German readers from other travelogues (36). Hellgrewe ’ s book was given over largely to his paintings of that forest and the nearby savanna, pictures of the empty landscapes he sought in East Africa. This is not to say that Hellgrewe invented the genre of travelogues based around pictures. 12 Hellgrewe ’ s pictures served not so much as illustrations of the text, but as a substitute for it. Travel for Hellgrewe was a series of short vignettes as he moved between stations of German 277 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa Kultur in the East African wilderness; travel was not the long journey away from civilization. Hellgrewe ’ s book makes clear that the change in form could not be attributed solely to the lack of new areas to explore. Hellgrewe still searched for the fetishized African wilderness that had motivated pre-colonial German travelers to East Africa and provided the majority of the material for their accounts. As he neared the station at Petershöhe, Hellgrewe grew excited, «Finally a piece of primeval forest [Urwald] [. . .]. It surprised me so much that I did not know in that moment where I should begin to paint» (n. p.). The whole day felt like «a dream» (n. p.). Such moments still existed, though they could no longer frame an entire narrative. Like earlier travelers, many of Hellgrewe ’ s landscapes were empty, bereft of any human presence even when clearly touched by humans. Hellgrewe was still the lone European hero in a wild landscape - the cover of the book was a painting of Hellgrewe painting with his African assistant seated at his feet - but his editorial decision to present himself as such a hero was made clearer in his paintings than in textonly travelogues. Africans appeared in his paintings as featureless aspects of the expedition, indistinguishable from one another. In other paintings, particularly one of a «water carrier,» they appear as ethnographic objects to fascinate the German reader. Such was the state of travel writing as planning began for the German expedition to rescue Emin Pasha in 1888. Inspiration for the expedition had come largely from a travel narrative in the pre-colonial style, Wilhelm Junker ’ s Reisen in Afrika. Junker had traveled in East Central Africa from 1875 through 1886. Near the end of his travels, he had become trapped in Equatoria when the Mahdi attacked Khartoum and cut him off from Egypt. Emin had served as Junker ’ s host there until he could find another route out. Junker wrote a glowing account of Emin ’ s rule in Equatoria and of his knowledge of African politics and society. Equatoria was far enough away from European settlement to still appear exotic and available for colonization to European audiences. Public campaigns for an expedition to find Emin and bring him out of Africa were mounted in Germany and the United Kingdom. The campaign in the United Kingdom led to an expedition under the command of Henry Morton Stanley. Peters designed his expedition to outrace Stanley and win the glory of saving Emin for Germany. Public reporting around the Peters expedition demonstrates how much things had changed since 1884. Peters was unable to get letters to the Indian Ocean Coast while marching west through Maasai territory and metropolitan newspapers, now accustomed to regular reports from East African expeditions, seized control of the narrative of the expedition and used it to 278 Matthew Unangst argue for or against further government support for the East African colony. The Kolonialzeitung published a retrospective series on Peters, including his letters from the expedition. The Berliner Tageblatt referred to the «martyr ’ s death» suffered by Peters to argue for further government investment in East Africa (BArch R 1001/ 252, pag. 13). 13 The Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, in contrast, celebrated Peters ’ s death, as it would open the path for friendlier relations with the United Kingdom (BArch R 1001/ 252, pag. 15). Pre-colonial travelers had been able to establish their own myths through their expeditionary narrative, but Peters was not afforded the chance in the wake of his failed expedition. 14 Metropolitan Germans had been able to closely follow the progress of the expedition, and form their own conclusions, months and years before Peters could publish his account. Peters begged the expedition ’ s organizers to allow him to establish the «truthful» narrative of the expedition, attempting to recapture control over its meaning. He wrote that «extravagant rumors» had distorted what had really happened («Dr. Peters» 199). He published an account in 1891 as Die deutsche Emin Pascha Expedition. His assistant Adolf von Tiedemann did the same, in perhaps the last true example of the genre, a day-by-day recounting of events and observations with no pictures (Tana-Baringo-Nil). But neither was successful at recapturing the expedition's meaning; Peters became a secondary figure in the development of German East Africa, the lessons from his expedition already gleaned. Nostalgia for the old travel writing crept in almost immediately. To drive its point home that this was the end of an era of travel writing, the Kolonialzeitung fell back on older travel writing about East Africa to fill its pages. In subsequent issues, the newspaper reprised Carl Claus von der Decken ’ s travels for younger readers who might never have heard of the explorer. The paper ’ s editors seemed to yearn for the days when travel literature had the power to inspire great national feats, not just lead to confusion and failed expeditions (Kersten, «Dem Andenken» 245). Travelogues no longer carried the hope that had inspired the GfdK ’ s initial move to East Africa. Other forms of travel writing replaced the travelogue of African exploration prevalent earlier in the century. Expeditionary reports certainly remained central to German colonization in East Africa after 1891. As noted earlier, German administrators spent much of their time traveling, as did missionaries in the colony. Missionaries and officials both wrote regular reports of their travels, but they were no longer intended for the kind of book-length travelogue popular before the German overseas empire. They 279 Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa were now designed for bureaucratic purposes or a specific metropolitan audience such as people interested in mission work. The creation of a telegraph service on the East African mainland made immediate reports back home possible, and decreased the demand from both government and the public for longer-form narratives. The changes in travel writing are particularly explicit in the publication of Adolf von Tiedemann ’ s Aus Busch und Steppe in 1907 with illustrations by Rudolf Hellgrewe. Tiedemann published the book in the wake of the Maji Maji War, with metropolitan interest in East Africa at its height. He admitted much of the book was a simple reprisal of his earlier travelogue on the expedition, but gone was the day-by-day recounting of events from the first publication. Tiedemann provided only sensational stories and images detached from any anchoring chronology. The book offered nostalgia for the days when German colonialists could imagine themselves as pioneers in Africa, before imperial rule had changed the German reading public ’ s experience of East Africa. Notes 1 Emin Pasha, born Eduard Schnitzer in Prussian Silesia in 1857, was a linguist and doctor working in the Egyptian service in the Sudan. He had been appointed governor of the province of Equatoria, in today ’ s South Sudan and Uganda, at the accession of Charles Gordon to Governor-General of the Sudan in 1874. When Muhammad Ahmad, better known as the Mahdi, captured Khartoum in 1884, Emin was cut off from travel to the sea. He became something of a cause célèbre in Europe over the next few years, inspiring public calls for expeditions to rescue him. The Peters expedition was one of several that attempted to find Emin and bring him out of Equatoria. 2 The idea that the Emin Pasha exploration marked the end of an era of European travel in Africa remains prevalent, as seen even in the title of Daniel Liebowitz's and Charles Pearson's The Last Expedition: Stanley ’ s Mad Journey through the Congo, though the authors write about a rival British expedition to find Emin that both left before Peters did and returned before he did. 3 By «metropolitan,» I mean here the German public that consumed travelogues in Germany itself as opposed to Germans in East Africa. 4 Peters ’ s role in shaping the German colonial movement and German nationalism in the 1880s has been much discussed. For the best overview, see Perras. 5 Peters compared himself to early modern Spanish conquistadors, a comparison that demonstrates his own conception of his actions as «conquest.» He and Pfeil imagined that their force of will was the explanation for their acquisition of territory. They believed that they were taking territory by force, if not military force. 6 Fabian 3. Fabian defines topos as «Rather than a topic for exposition and perhaps argument, a topos is a space without place: it is everywhere and nowhere; it goes without saying and may therefore be (almost) without specifiable content» (Fabian 3). 280 Matthew Unangst 7 The company sent eighteen expeditions to East Africa for the purpose of exploration and the acquisition of territory between 1884 and 1886, almost bringing about its bankruptcy (Kurtze 54 - 56). 8 According to Ernst Vohsen (BArch R 8023/ 265, pag. 102). 9 Pfeil did not name specific books in his memoir. Hans Christian Andersen, Johann Reinhold, Georg Forster, James Cook, and Alexander von Humboldt were among the most renowned travel writers of 18 th and 19 th -century Europe. 10 Except Otto, who died on the expedition. 11 Pfeil ’ s lectures were described in the Kolonialzeitung («Deutscher Kolonialverein» 745). 12 As Bernd Wiese has argued in WeltAnsichten, pictures were prominent in German travelogues from the 18 th century forward. 13 As noted earlier, Peters did not die on the expedition, but the German public believed for several months that he had. When Peters ’ s reports on his progress did not make it to the German coast, rumors of his death spread through the German press. Both proponents and opponents of his style of colonialism used his presumed death to argue their position, attributing fantastic glory or cruelty to Peters in making their arguments. After he returned to Germany in 1891, the rumors of cruelty persisted (because they were true) and dogged Peters until his eventual disgrace in the early twentieth century. 14 Beyond the rumors of Peters ’ s death, Henry Morton Stanley's rival expedition found Emin Pasha before Peters made his way to Equatoria. The Peters expedition thus failed to achieve its goal. Works Cited BArch N 2225/ 5 Nachlass Joachim Graf von Pfeil. Schwierigkeiten bei der Zusammenstellung einer Expedition. BArch N 2225/ 6 Nachlass Joachim Graf von Pfeil. Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation, August 1884; April 1886. BArch N 2225/ 7. Nachlass Joachim Graf von Pfeil. Allgemeiner Deutscher Kongress zur Förderung überseeischer Interessen, August - September 1886. BArch N 2225/ 21. Nachlass Joachim Graf von Pfeil. «Wanderungen in Afrika.» BArch R 1001/ 252. Die deutsche Expedition zur Befreiung Emin Pascha ’ s, vom 6 November 1889 bis 5 July 1890. BArch R 8023/ 265. 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