Unit 3.1 Pseudo-scientific ideas of

race: Race and eugenics in Namibia (page 89)

Activity 3: (page 92)

Investigate the implementation of pseudo-scientific racial theories in southern Africa

New words

Reservations : areas of land set aside for the people originally from a particular place to live on

Segregation : separation, in this case based on race

Laws : a set of rules that everyone in a country or community must obey

Anglo-Saxon : coming from Britain

Deposed : removed from power, authority taken away atoned

Atoned : made amends or had to pay back for a negative or hurtful action

Practices of race and eugenics in the USA,

Australia, Namibia and South Africa

• Some governments in the 20th century used the pseudo-scientific

theories about race and eugenics to justify their social policies.

Race and eugenics in the USA

• Racial theories were also used in the USA to justify keeping different

races apart.

• The government treated Native Americans and African Americans as distinct races to be separated from whites.

• By 1900, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans had been killed.

• They had been starved, defeated in battle, killed by disease and had lost their land.

• Those who remained were forced to live in reservations

• African

• Americans were also targets of racist laws, which reinforced the idea that blacks and whites were two distinct races.

Race and eugenics in the USA

• Each state passed a series of laws in the 1870sand 1880s, which enforced segregation in schools, on public transport, in restaurants, and at all public amenities.

• Everywhere there were reminders that the two races were distinct and that whites were 'superior'.

• Eugenics became very popular in the USA in the early 20th century.

• Scientists such as Charles Davenport and psychologists such as Henry Goddard argued that governments should encourage the genetic improvement of the 'fittest'.

• Davenport set up a centre of eugenic research in the USA and promoted these ideas in other countries.

Race and eugenics in the USA

• The idea that competition was good because it allowed the 'fittest' to survive, fitted well with the capitalist system of the USA.

• American capitalists argued that the 'weak' poor and unemployed should not be given government support but should be allowed to collapse.

• This explains some of the opposition to the policies of the New Deal that you learnt about in Topic 2.

• Some of the eugenics policies included programmes to encourage greater fitness and health.

• But many were also negative.

• Many Americans believed that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were inferior races compared to the Anglo-Saxon majority.

Race and eugenics in the USA

• They thought this was the cause of the high levels of crime and poverty in the crowded industrial cities.

• By 1900, the cities also included large numbers of black Americans who had migrated from the southern states, after the end of slavery in the 1860s.

• As a result, many American states passed laws to control the breeding of people they considered inferior.

• Compulsory sterilisation of criminals and those considered mentally handicapped was first introduced in the state of Indiana in 1907.

Native Americans

Native Americans in a reservation, without work,

land or their culture.

Race and eugenics in the USA

• By 1924 such laws existed in 21 states. Between 1907 and 1968, over 60 000 people were forcibly sterilised in the USA, almost a third of them in California.

• In 1896 the state of Connecticut passed a law to prevent people considered mentally 'feeble' from marrying, and this law was extended to many other states.

• Immigrants were also not allowed into the USA if they were considered to be mentally or physically inferior.

Segregation in the USA continued until the 1960s.

Some states were more extreme than others. In

Georgia, there were separate Bibles for black witnesses to

swear on in court. In Oklahoma, there were

separate public telephones for black and white users. In

Florida, special laws 'protected' white children from having to use school

textbooks previously used by black children.

Race and eugenics in white settler colonies

(Australia, Namibia and South Africa)

• Social Darwinist and eugenic ideas were also applied in some of the

European colonies where there were white settler populations alongside indigenous people.

• The settlers thought that their belief in the superiority of Europeans was justified by science.

• In some places (such as in South America, Tasmania and parts of North America), many indigenous people had died because of disease, the violence of colonial wars and the conquest of their land.

• Many Europeans believed that this was because they were inferior or doomed races, unable to compete in a modern world.

• This was particularly evident in Australia.

Source D Genetics provided an explanation of how one man could, ... be inferior to ) another by virtue of race alone .

... Just when white power was at its most powerful and widespread, scientific I theory helped to ram it home. Inferior races were doomed to extinction by natural selection, or could be actively exterminated in the interests of progress.

This extract from Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Ideas that Changed the World,

Darling Kindersley, London, 2003, page 319, explains how

Social Darwinism helped those who supported empire

building.

Race and eugenics in Namibia

• Namibia is an example of a colony where pseudo-scientific racial theories were applied.

• It became a German colony called South-West Africa in 1884.

• Ernst Haeckel, a German intellectual, published a number of books arguing that Darwin's ideas about the survival of the fittest applied to human races.

• Soon these ideas were applied to Germany's colonies.

• The Germans believed that migration was a sign of a 'vigorous race' and thought that South West Africa was a suitable place for white settlement.

Race and eugenics in Namibia

• A student of Haeckel, Friedrich Ratzel, developed the idea that for a nation to flourish, it should have more lebensraum, or living space.

• He believed that land for white settlement was needed in colonies such as South West Africa.

• However, the land was occupied by Khoi people known as the Nama, and by Herero farmers who showed no sign of dying out.

Source E The decision to colonise in southern Africa means that the native tribes must leave the land where they have raised their cattle, so that the white man can raise his cattle there. If we are asked about the morals of this, the answer is that the natives of Southern Africa have a low cultural standard, and an important law of survival says that they should no longer be savages but should become workers for the whites [sic] and dependent on them.

This statement made in 1903 by the German Commissioner

for Colonial Settlement in German South West Africa

shows this desire to take over the land for white settlement

and rid it of the indigenous people, which later led to a

policy of genocide against the Herero.

As a result the German administration in South West Africa planned to forcibly remove the local population from their land. They justified this in racial terms:

Source F In order to secure the peaceful white settlement against the bad, culturally inept and predatory native tribe, it is possible that its actual eradication may become necessary under some conditions.

This statement by the German Commissioner for Colonial

Settlement in German South West Africa in 1907 sums up

the colonial attitude.

Race and eugenics in Namibia

• In 1904 the Herero rose up in revolt against German occupation.

• They killed over a hundred Germans, and drove settlers off the farms.

• In order to crush the uprising, the Germans brought in more troops and implemented a policy of genocide.

• The Herero people were either shot or driven into the Kalahari desert where thousands died of thirst and starvation.

• Only 16 000 Herero people survived out of a population of 80 000.

Herero

This photograph shows the starving Herero who survived

the uprising and the 'Extermination Proclamation '.

Source G

The Herero nation must leave the country. If it will not do so I shall compel it by force .... Inside German territory every Herero tribesman. armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. No women and children will be allowed in this territory; they will be driven back to their people or fired on. These are the last words to the Herero nation from me, the great General of the mighty German Emperor.

The 'Extermination Proclamation' issued by General von Trotha, the general in charge of the

troops sent to crush Herero resistance, 1904.

Race and eugenics in Namibia

• The Nama also rose in revolt. • They used guerrilla tactics successfully until this uprising too was finally

crushed in 1907. • After this the Germans took harsh measures to prevent any further

resistance. • All remaining Herero and Nama cattle were confiscated, and their leaders

were deposed. • During this period of violence, the Germans imposed ideas of racial purity. • In 1905 mixed marriages between Europeans and Africans were forbidden. • In 1907, white men who had relationships with African women were

barred from voting, or from receiving government loans and support. • In 1912 a new Race Law allowed the government to break up mixed

couples living together.

Race and eugenics in Namibia

• These racial laws became a model for other German colonies like German East Africa (present day Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania) and later for Germany itself.

• After the Herero and Nama wars, German racial scientists went to South West Africa and carried out experiments which were intended to prove that mixed race people were physically and mentally inferior to 'pure' white people.

• One of them was Eugen Fischer, a social anthropologist who studied the Baster people of Rehoboth in southern Namibia.

• They were descended from white men and Nama women. Fischer wrote:

Source H Every European people that has adopted the blood of inferior races - and that Negroes, Nama and many other are inferior, only mad people would deny - has, without exception, atoned for the adoption of these inferior elements with their mental and cultural downfall.

From Eugen Fischer's study Die Rehobother Bastards,

Gustav Fischer, Jena, 1913, page. 302 cited in D Olusaga and C Erichsen, The Kaiser's

Holocaust: Germany's forgotten genocide and the

colonial roots of Nazism, Faber and Faber, London,

2010, page 250.

Race and eugenics in Namibia

• Fischer later became an influential scientist in Germany under the Nazis.

• He argued that any mixing of pure German blood produced inferior children.

• His ideas about eugenics and racial purity influenced many people.

• Adolf Hitler read his work, and one of his students was Hendrik Verwoerd (who later promoted apartheid in South Africa).

Race and eugenics in Namibia

• Even before the apartheid era, the government in South Africa introduced laws designed to separate races.

• In 1927, the Immorality Act outlawed sexual relationships between white people and Africans.

• This was later extended under the apartheid government, to ban marriages and sexual contact between South Africans of different races.

Source I The European minority, occupying ... the position-of the-dominant race, cannot J allow a considerable number of its members to sink into [poverty] and to fall below the level of the non-European workers.

A government report commenting on the situation of many poor white people in the urban areas in the early 1900s quoted in R. Davies, Capital, State and White

Labour in South Africa 1900-1960, Humanities Press, New

Jersey, 1979, page 80.

Poor whites

Poor whites were targeted for birth control by the Race

Welfare Society, to reduce the number of white children

born into poor circumstances.

Race and eugenics in Namibia

• The government in South Africa also focused on improving the genetic quality of white South Africans.

• A particular target in the 1930s was the 'poor whites'.

• These were white people who were poor as a result of the Great Depression.

• Many of them were Afrikaners.

• In 1930 the Race Welfare Society was established in Johannesburg.

• Its main aim was to encourage birth control among poor white women, so that they would have smaller families and in this way have a better chance of uplifting themselves economically.

Race and eugenics in Namibia

• Although some supporters of eugenics supported sterilisation in South Africa in the early 1930s, this was never carried out.

• One reason was that such policies were beginning to be questioned in Britain.

• Another was that Afrikaner nationalists were becoming powerful in the 1930s.

• They rejected attempts to lower the birth rate of poor Afrikaners.

Activity 3: (page 92) Investigate the implementation of pseudo-scientific racial theories in southern Africa

1. According to Source D, how was science used to justify colonialism?

Why did this make it hard to criticise?

2. How do Sources E and F corroborate the argument made in Source D?

3. Using the text and Sources E to H, explain how the ideas of Haeckel, Ratzel and Fischer influenced events in Namibia.

4. How does Source I reflect Social Darwinist thinking?