This, in turn, galvanised reforms in the border regime, but border-control systems were never foolproof. As a result, subaltern migrants developed their own vernacular responses to colonial power. Anti-alienist hopes for an impermeable, coercive border regime were often undermined by strategic permissiveness and chaotic incapacity at the local level. This dissertation argues that early twentieth-century South Africa, straddling both Indian and Atlantic Ocean migrant networks, developed a restrictive but ultimately ambiguous international border-control system that resourceful migrants learned to manipulate. The episode of Afrikaner immigration was illustrative of the constant negotiation of categories of identification and the utilisation of a notion of whiteness in creating an exclusive settler society. In contrast desirable settlers were welcomed and Germanised. Undesirable Afrikaner immigrants were representationally blackened through the use of racial rhetoric as well as being politically excluded from access to resources and land, and even physically excluded from the colony. Cultural markers and economic considerations were used to differentiate desirable Afrikaner settlers from those deemed undesirable. The categories of black and white were deployed and reconstructed in order to assess the desirability of Afrikaner groups, leading to their assimilation or exclusion from settler society, and underlining the organising power of the schema. Others welcomed the immigration of the Afrikaners as colonial pioneers. Some elements of the German government and colonial press envisaged Afrikaner immigrants as a potential threat to continued German control over the colony.
The presence of settlers whose cultural practices and lifestyle did not match with the norms attributed to the desirable settler threatened to undermine the boundaries of difference between the colonists and colonised. These underpinned the construction of a polarised self – other, white-black dichotomy and separated the indigenous Africans and Europeans into distinct categories of identification. German justifications of colonial rule were psychologically supported by notions of the imagined cultural and racial differences between the colonisers and the colonised. It focuses on the response of the German colonial authorities in Windhoek and in Berlin to the prospect of large-scale Afrikaner immigration as well as the representation of Afrikaners in German colonial discourse. This essay explores Afrikaner immigration into German Southwest Africa during the period of German colonialism, 1884-1914.
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