Locus (Jan 2022)
Kolonialbotanik: Networks of collecting practices in colonial Germany
Abstract
In April 1913, Dr. Friedrich Tobler, a lecturer in botany at the University of Münster in Germany, returned to Europe from the botanical research station Amani in Deutsch Ostafrika (DOA, German East Africa, including present-day Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda), where he and his wife spent six months. His trip was funded by a Botanical Tropical Stipendium, which was administered through the German Imperial Colonial Office (Reichskolonialamt). On his return, Tobler brought several specimens of African plants, indigenous to DOA, that he donated to the Botanical Gardens in Münster and other botanical gardens in Germany. Using Tobler’s research trip as a starting point, this article argues that rather than being benign, the ‘collection’ of plants in extra-European contexts was only possible through asymmetrical power relations that stretched across broader political, economic and scientific networks. The increased academic and public focus on the history and legacies of German colonisation in the last two decades has spread beyond the major centres of German colonialism (such as Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen and Dresden) into smaller areas, with a bigger spotlight on lesser-known actors. However, colonial botany has mostly been overlooked in Germany in favour of other sciences such as ethnology, and the associated Völkerschau (parades of people) in local German zoos, including the one at Münster. When colonial plants–such as tobacco–are at the centre of analysis, the focus is usually on how these plants were used as commodities within Europe, rather than how they were used within their originating spaces. Otherwise, the analysis tends to focus on Germans as botanists in other colonial powers, such as the British Empire. This paper contributes to research on how botanical knowledge was collected in German colonies, by exploring the networks and silences in the archives that hide local workers’ contributions to the collecting practices of Tobler’s tour. It demonstrates that the practice of producing botanical knowledge in the former colonies was created almost in isolation from local knowledge. In some ways, these practices were similar to that of historical ethnographic knowledge production, which was often recorded without the input of locals who were essential as informants, translators, and observable subjects. As the observation of colonial plants could be undertaken without involving local people, it becomes more challenging to uncover if, and how, local knowledge was incorporated into, or obscured in the European process of knowledge collection. Instead of being used for local African benefit, the collection of knowledge surrounding colonial botany was knowingly and overwhelmingly produced for the benefit of European commercial, scientific, and economic gains. Thus, it has underscored the asymmetrical power relations at play within colonial spaces.
