The Rise of The Bushman Penis, Gordon

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The rise of the Bushman penis: germans, genitalia and

genocide
Robert Gordon
University of Vermont, USA

Published online: 24 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: Robert Gordon (1998) The rise of the Bushman penis: germans, genitalia and genocide, African Studies,
57:1, 27-54
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African Studies, 57, 1, 1998
The Rise of the Bushman Penis:

Germans, Genitalia and Genocide1
Robert Gordon
Downloaded by [University of Minnesota Libraries, Twin Cities] at 11:42 25 September 2013
University of Vermont, USA
National Socialism is the most masculine

movement to have arisen in centuries
Ziel und Weg, editorial 1933
(cited in Procter 1988:118)
In 1913 a University of Freiburg Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology,

Eugen Fischer, wrote to the Governor of German South West Africa requesting
that they mail him a preserved Bushman penis. The Governor agreed, but
suggested that the request be executed in such a way as not to create an outcry.
We do not know if the requisition was actually fulfilled as World War I broke
out shortly afterwards. This incident provides an entry point into examining a
number of pertinent issues in the study of genocide and genitalia and their
possible linkages.
The body is one of the foremost metaphors for a society's perception of itself,
recurring constantly in myths and cosmologies. Mary Douglas (1970) has
suggested that by examining people's attitudes to parts of the body one can
understand the social body. What does Fischer's interest in Bushman genitalia
tell us about himself and, more importantly, about the German and German
colonial society in which he lived?
In particular I wish to assess oft-made claims about the uniqueness of the
Holocaust by showing its transcontinental and colonial roots. Like the machine
gun which was first tested in the colonies and then used with devastating effect
in World War I, important tests and preparatory work for the Holocaust are, I
argue, to be found not only in European history, but also in the colonies:
especially in regard to colonial policy concerning those labelled by the colonisers, 'Bushmen'. The paper aims to challenge the artificial boundaries between
academic constructs like 'German History', 'African History' and 'Anthropological History', and suggests that there might be some merit in being an avowed
disrespecter of boundaries.
0002-0184/98/010027-28
1998 Carfax Publishing Ltd on behalf of the University of Witwatersrand
28 African Studies
Fischer's request was not an isolated whim of some eccentric scientist. On

the contrary, there were important features of the socio-cultural milieu which
made his request pre-eminently feasible and by studying this context one can
ponder the possible relationship between the epoch of imperialism and
the European construction of sexuality and how these "inter-secting rhetorics"
make visible the intertwining of anthropology, sexology and imperialism (Bleys
1995).
While the (in)famous Hottentot Venus or Sarah Baartman has provoked much
current debate and discussion in a variety of forms * learned papers, poems,
paintings and plays (e.g. Fausto-Sterling 1993; Schiebinger 1993) this paper
serves as a reminder that male genitalia were also an issue of concern for
academics, albeit for a more restricted but powerful elitist audience. In examining Bushman photographic collections at various European institutions like the
Basel Ethnology Museum and the collections at the University of Frankfurt I
was struck by the fact that photographs of naked males outnumbered those of
females by a ratio of almost two to one. As enclaved commodities with restricted
circulation, it could be argued that they were 'sacred' and thus not generally
commodifiable and it is this sacredncss which gives them their power. In this
regard it is also necesssary to counterpose this with the contemporary debate
about Khoi female genitalia and that was unleashed recently by Phillipe Rushton
concerning penis size and intelligence (Lewontin 1996). Indeed, if there is one
thing this paper will demonstrate it is that Sander Gilman's well-known claim
(1985) that male genitalia were not a subject for discussion is misplaced and
serves to obscure the discussion of gender and sexuality. A consideration of how
male genitalia were represented might enable one to re-assess the commonplace
belief that the Hottentot Venus served as an emblem for black female sexuality.
Resurrecting the Hottentot Penis

The question which directly prompted Fischer's request was the controversy
surrounding a claim made by an Austrian academic Franz Seiner in a number of
publications (e.g., 1913 a,b) that a distinguishing racial characteristic of Bushman was the penis; indeed, that the penis could be used to distinguish between
Bushmen and what were known as Hottentots. As racial admixture proceeded,
he claimed, the penis began to droop. The 'purer' the Bushman the more erect
the penis. What is surprising about this claim is that Seiner examined less than
fifteen males but this did not stop a major discussion from arising. Other scholars
involved in this debate included Felix von Luschan (1914) who had visited
South Africa in 1906 to attend the meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, Rudolf Poech who studied the South African Bushmen
in 1907-9 and Siegfried Passarge who traversed the Kalahari in 1904-6. It was
an issue which was to be discussed periodically in the interwar years (see, e.g.,
The Rise of the Bushman Penis 29
Drury and Drennan 1926; Lagerkrantz 1938; Martin 1926; Vedder 1937) and
pictures of Khoi genitalia were a common feature in a number of German
standard texts (Eickstedt 1934, 1943). Indeed, even today such photographs still
occasionally appear in German publications (Kenntner and Kremnitz 1994) and
all of them are reprints of those taken by Franz Seiner. As Lagercrantz (1938)
put it:
One of the most contentious problems in contemporary Africanistics concerns the
relationship between Bushmen and Hottentot. For a closer enlightenment of this
question Monorchie is an important variable.
Of course, it was not a new concern. On the contrary, given that Linnaeus used
genitalia for the basis of his classification system and imagined plants had
vaginas and penises and mated in marriage beds it is not surprising to note that
he classified the Khoi (the collective grouping of so-called Bushmen and
Hottentot) not as Homo Sapiens but as Homo Monstrosus Monorchidi human
monsters with one testicle.2 Indeed discussion of Khoi male genitalia was a
common topic in polite circles of London conversation. Thus, Samuel Pepys
noted in his diary on 30 December 1662 after he had dinner wilh two officers
from the (British) East India Company:
With the officers I had good discourse, particularly [sic] of the people at the Cape
of Good Hope of whom they of their own knowledge do tell me these one or two
things, viz., that when they come to age, the men do cut off one of the stones of each
other, which they hold doth help them to get children the better and to grow fat
(cited in Merians 1993:24).
Indeed until the early nineteenth century the dominant concern of European
visitors to the Cape who left a written trail concerned not female but male
genitalia. How this change in emphasis on male to female genitalia took place
is a complex matter tentatively analysed elsewhere (Gordon 1992b). What
concerns us here is to account for this renewed interest in Bushman male
genitalia immediately prior to World War I, when modem technology was to
give new meaning to the term 'male dismemberment' in the trenches, a time
heralded as the start of the Age of Modernity, and continued especially in the
portals of German academia in the interwar years. Certainly qualitatively this
fixation was different in so far as the concern of Fischer and others like him was
part of a trend towards the medicalisation of the human body and since males
were frequently defined as those in possession of a penis, part of the rhetoric of
hegemonic masculinity in association with male privilege. Medicalisation was
also a consequence of, and further served to underwrite, a further association,
namely that between body and mind. A healthy body equals a healthy mind and
this was to have consequences on a variety of fronts. Many believed that the
physician, not the moralist, had to define the meaning of the fin de siecle with
its immorality and contempt of tradition.
30 African Studies
The Crisis in Masculinity

By the era of high modernity which started at about the outbreak of World War
I the body had become, according to Shilling, central to a sense of self-identity
(Shilling 1993). This was part of a broader process of bifurcation in which the
body acquired a duality, separating outer manifestation from, but relating it to,
inner being. What this meant in practice was that sciences like phrenology,
physiognomy, anthropology and Darwinian evolution sought to interpret a
person's inner nature from outward appearances
By the end of the nineteenth century in Europe, and especially in Germany, there
was a heightened sense of masculinity with much talk of the 'new man', 'the
new German' and the 'New Jew'. This talk "emphasised youth, vitality,
decisiveness and discipline and these manly qualities symbolised control over
the passions (see, e.g., Mosse 1994, 1996). By 1913 the comfortable world of
European nationalistic masculinity was increasingly being threatened, most
symptomatically on a dramatic level by Nijinsky's The Rite of Spring which
scandalised Paris and more mundanely, and hence more provocatively, by
modernist women the 'new woman' exerting new rights and liberties,
smoking and having short cropped hair as well as by fin de siecle homosexuals
and lesbians starting to come out into the open.
Masculinity, the way men assert what they believe to be their manhood, in this
period came to connote the so-called manly virtues like will-power, honour,
courage and, above all, self-control. European nationalism adopted the masculine
stereotype as one of its means of self-representation. The male body, as George
Mosse shows, "was thought to symbolise society's need for order and progress,
as well as middle-class virtues such as self control and moderation" (Mosse
1996:9). Moreover, the masculine stereotype, he argues, was strengthened by
the counter or negative stereotype of men who failed to measure up to the ideal.
Indeed, it is a common argument that Europeans used others as social mirrors to
discover attributes in "savages which they found first, but could not speak of, in
themselves" (Jordan 1982:56). And what better medically authenticated example
could be provided than Bushmen male bodies, well known for their effeminacy
and delicacy with semi-erect penises, a condition widely believed in the
bourgeois medical world to indicate lack of self-control? Bushmen were certainly being inserted into German bourgeois consciousness by way of Germany's
colonial expansion. A late starter in procuring colonial real estate in Africa,
Germany aggressively acquired territories after 1884 and visualised Namibia and
Tanganyika as potential 'settler-colonies' which thus received far more publicity
and attention than the other holdings especially when Ansiedler died in colonial
wars. The discovery of diamonds in Namibia in 1906 and the extended war of
1904-07 of course did much to focus attention on that colony and 'settler novels'
entered the popular literature. These (mis)adventures certainly had an impact on
the shaping of bourgeois German notions of masculinity.
The relationship between European nationalism, anthropology and sexology is

complex. It would be too easy to relate the Victorian science of penis measurement, officially called phalloplethysmography (Gill 1995:38-9), to the currently
fashionable fixation with 'difference', but as Robert Young brilliantly points out,
"nineteenth-century theories of race did not just consist of essentialising differentiations between self and other they were also about a fascination with people
having sex interminable, adulterating, aleatory, illicit, inter-racial sex"
(Young 1994:181).
These connections can also be mapped out in terms of social and intellectual
networks. Alfred Ploetz,3 for example, widely believed to have been a major
driving force behind what later became the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Anthropology, Genetics and Eugenics, cultivated Fischer's friendship and ideals
to such an extent that the latter formed a Freiburg branch of Ploetz's Racial
Hygiene Society in July 1908 and lectured on the racial improvement of the race.
Later Ploetz moved on to Berlin where Sexualwissenschaft was making its mark,
and in 1913 formed the Berliner Gesellschaft fuer Sexualwissenschaft und
Eugenik. Not only did sexual reformers and racial hygienists share a marginal
position in society but they also commonly shared the belief in a biological basis
for sexual behavior.
The science of sexology emerged in the 1890s and was largely concerned with
defining the pathological and the deviant. It was based on the assumption that
sex was one of the strongest human 'drives' and that failure to control it would
lead to masturbation and other forms of self-abuse. It, and the attendant
intellectual ramifications were especially a concern in German-speaking countries. In 1910 no fewer than nine of the eleven journals dealing with sexology
were published in German and it is estimated that between 1886 and 1933 more
than 10,000 monographs and articles on the subject were published (Hill
1994:286).
This era saw the less specifically sexual aspects of masculinity highlighted as
well. The connection between the influence of Winkelmann's notion of masculinity based on his interpretation of the ancient Greeks and the rise of physical
culture and gymnastics has been noted by many. At the same time there were
important links to the German Youth Movement. Lenz, later Fischer's co-author
in his classic study on Human Genetics, had close ties to the Jungdeutschlandbund and the Wandervogel which carried an ideological message of physical
fitness and a duty to the 'race'. Indeed, the first Boy Scout Troops in Germany
were established in 1909 by no less a personage than the man who gave Fischer
his original inspiration to study the Rehoboth Basters, Major Maximilian Bayer,
who in 1907 published a monograph entitled Die Nation der Bastards.
And these Youth Movements were in turn linked to various Christian Moral
Purity Movements or Sittlichkeitsvereine which multiplied at the end of the
nineteenth century and whose leadership cadres consisted mostly of Protestant
32 African Studies
clergy and teachers. These Moral Purity Movements called for a "gymnastics of
the will by which is meant strengthening male courage [mannesmut] through
sexual restraint and physical exercise":
Nor were manly men chaste and pure because their willpower and self control
overcame all temptation; they were subject, instead, to hidden anxieties about their
sex. Though some efforts were made to confine any discussion about sexuality to the
medical community, this proved impossible ...Purity Leagues opposed this new
openness (and thus greatly furthered the very visibility they opposed) (Mosse
1994:105).
The heterogenous and even contradictory connections between these Moral

Purity Movements, even with their ostensible apolitical nature, and German
colonialism needs to be further examined.4 Data are scanty at present, but surely
it is more than coincidental that at the time that Missionary Vedder of the
Rhenish Missionary Society and Beringar von Zastrow, the Grootfontein
Bezirkamtmann were starting to express concern about the wholesale decimation
of Bushmen, Reinhard Mumm, a leader of the Moral Purity Movement and
recently elected Reichstag Member, would make an eloquent plea for a reserve
for the 'poorest of the poor... the slaves of the slaves'. Bushmen were a product
of a tragic history, dispossessed by farmers and railroad companies, and riddled
with venereal disease. As.a reserve, Mumm suggested the area stretching from
the Grootfontein farms to the Kavango River (Deutsche Sudwest-Afrika Zeitung
16/7/12). In 1914 he again unsuccessfully renewed his plea for a Bushman
reserve.
Masculinity and the Dignity of Labour: Arbeit macht frei?

Mumm's plea was part of a larger discussion in which several of the academics
involved in the debate on Bushman genitalia were active participants. A brief
review of the arguments used in this discussion show how ineluctably notions of
Bushman personhood, especially their alleged reluctance to engage in sustained
work, tied in with dominant theories of uncontrolled sexuality.5
The academic who provided the immediate reference point for the debate was
the geographer Siegfried Passarge who in 1907 published a compilation of his
contributions to the Mitteilungen aus des deutsches Schutzgebiets as a book
entitled: Die Buschmaenner der Kalahari. His research was based on a sojourn
of a few months in the Kalahari where he was accompanied by a Dutch-speaking
Bushman. Most of his information is derived from white traders or Bechuanas
since he found it difficult to get information directly from Bushmen: "Nothing
is more changeable, undependable, and unpredictable than the character of the
Bushman; it combines within itself the greatest imaginable contrasts, virtues, and
vices." As a race, Bushmen were on a closed development path, he claimed.
They were incapable of adopting to agriculture or pastoralism. He concluded that
the only policy in a settlement situation was to exterminate them: "What can the
civilised human being manage to do with people who stand at the level of that
sheep stealer? Jail and the correctional house would be a reward, and besides do
not even exist in that country. Does any possibility exist other than shooting
them?" (emphasis mine).6
Professor von Luschan, a noted 'liberal imperialist' and Virchow's successor to
the Chair in Berlin, found such proposals unacceptable, and suggested, on the
contrary, that a Bushman reserve should be created in the 'interest of science'
(Von Luschan 1906, 1908). In the same issue the Deutsche Kolonial Zeitung
endorsed this suggestion and the following year carried a strong plea by Lt
Gentz, an officer with many years of experience in Namibia:
With the deathkncll of these people ringing, one wishes that there was a reserve for
them, as there arc for the lazy Herero and Hottentots. A reserve where they can live
in peace and where they can maintain their lifestyle so important for scholarly
research (Gentz 1909:452).
Argument was joined from other quarters. The Grootfontein District Council
requested that all "non-working" Bushmen be placed in a reserve, and Siebert,
a government medical doctor, made a strong appeal:
[Bushmen] arc unsuitable as settled employees and the rclinquishmenl of their
nomadic lifestyle spelled their doom. While they were of little economic value, they
were of large scientific value. And even the Cameroons had a law which protected
gorillas by placing them in reserves.7
Copies of the Siebert letter were sent to all the relevant district officers for
comment; all were predictably unfavourable. For example, the Maltahohe
Commander replied that it was debatable whether there were any full-blooded
Bushmen left, and that a reserve would simply provide a hiding place for
runaway servants. Bushmen had excellent potential to serve as herd-boys. He
concluded that:
a wild animal (or gorilla) can be held captive for breeding in which case the race
would not become extinct by the process of natural selection. It is not possible to
hold a Namib Bushman captive because they arc still human beings, but they have
no pride in their race, in fact they.are without racial consciousness (emphasis
mine).8
Probably the strongest argument against the wholesale 'eradication' of Bushmen

was the so-called 'economic argument', by the Austrian Franz Seiner. Seiner had
travelled and published extensively on Bushmen during the height of what the
German colonial press referred to as the Bushman 'Plague'. As a geographer he
wrote about their distribution, dividing them into 4 groups: The Kaukau who
lived in an area which at that time did not border on any settler farms. They were
supposedly the most warlike and possessed firearms and were known to attack
Herero and Bechuanas. The second and third groups were the IKung au, a
northern group, and the Nog au (ju-(wasi) who lived north and east of the
Omuramba Omatako (River) as far as Tschitschib. The fourth group consisted of
34 African Studies
the Kung under Nama-gorub, who achieved a certain notoriety as a bandit leader
especially after he attempted to raze the German police station at Blockfontein
with his well-armed (with rifles) followers.
The only way to 'tame' Bushmen, Seiner argued, was to have the men deported
to the coast and the children and wives placed on farms. The way to make
Bushmen into reliable labourers was to start with the children and resocialise
them from an early age, divorced from their traditional milieu and their parents.
Bushmen were in no danger of extermination by the fanners, he argued, because
they had a vast 'natural reserve' in the Kalahari. A far greater threat for them
was bastardisation with various elements in this no man's land. Farmers
preferred wild 'pure' Bushmen as the wild Bastard-Bushmen, who constituted
the vast majority, were naturally prone to theft and murder. The way to round
them up was to strengthen police patrols with more 'intelligent' natives who
knew the area. At the same time, Seiner felt that by having the women placed
on farms they would start miscegenating with local blacks leading to a generally
superior labourer. Seiner, as we know, relaunched the debate on Bushman
penises and based on his penile findings suggested that all the northern
Bushmen, that is those north of Grootfontein, were 'Bastard Bushmen' (Hybrids)
(Schapera 1930:58) and thus were not an Urrace worthy of protection.
Seiner had influence. In a letter, bypassing the local colonial authorities, to the
Imperial Government in Berlin he complained about conditions Bushman prisoners were living in at the inhospitable, desert harbour town of Swakopmund. He
was, he claimed, not raising the matter for humanitarian reasons, but rather out
of concern for the immense waste of potential Bushman labour. To back up his
complaints, Seiner included photographs. These made the Governor more
sensitive because, as a bureaucrat noted in the margin of Seiner's letter, "If
Seiner publicises such photographs, the administration may expect to be attacked
most sharply".
Seiner's protest led to minor modifications in policy. The Governor explained to
the Colonial Office in Berlin that he had not approved of the suggestion to
remove all Bushmen to the coast. Only adult male Bushmen who were certified
by a physician as healthy and physically capable of work would be deported to
the coast since "a more objective view of the situation must take into account
the fact that the Bushmen are by no means only harmless children of nature, but
constitute a serious danger to more intensive settlement of the fertile northern
districts. Weakness cannot therefore be justified by any means in the treatment
of the Bushmen".9
Seiner's was not a solitary academic voice. On the contrary, consider the
remarks made by Professir Leonard Schultze, a renowned geographer-anthropologist with extensive fieldwork in Namibia and New Guinea. Schultze had made
a close study of the Nama, indeed his book Aus Namaland und Kalahari (1907)
is widely regarded as being the definitive study of the Nama (Hahn et al.
1928:150) and Bushman. He was, moreover, to be the person who would coin
the term Khoisan. Schultze also achieved much fame for his photographs of
Khoi genitalia which were almost as frequently reproduced as those of Seiner.
If we consider the natives according to their value as cultural factors in the
protectorate, then one race is immediately eliminated right off: The Bushmen. The
Bushmen lack entirely the precondition of any cultural development: the drive to
create something beyond everyday needs, to secure or permanently to improve
systematically the conditions of existence, even the most primitive ones like the
procurement of food. In the course of centuries he has come into contact with
cultures of all levels; in conflict with them he has often enough had the knife put
to his throat; tireless missionaries have attempted to save him from such struggle,
to protect and to join him as the modest member to a civilised community; but the
Bushman has always run away. He feels better out in the Sandveld behind a
windscreen of thin leaf ihom-bush than in a solidly built house with a full pot and
regular work as long as he is free. Colonists cannot count on such people; they
let them live as long as, at least, they do not do damage. But when they do not fulfil
this requirement, they have been killed off like predatory game. The idea has been
considered to preserve the Bushmen in reservations as the last remnants of the
primordial past of the human race, just as elsewhere attempts are made to save
endangered animal species. But we will not be able to afford the luxury of leaving
fallow the required land areas and everything else which man requires for the
maintenance of the species without inbreeding (Schultze 1914:290).'
And indeed in the settler Landestag a debate raged on whether Bushmen should
be declared vogelfrei and thus like vermin could be shot on sight. Officials
considered tattooing Bushmen, but discarded that as impractical. Instead the
liberal Governor Seitz issued a Verordnung which allowed for African police to
be armed when on anti-Bushmen patrols and explicitly stated that firearms could
be used when Bushmen were believed to be attempting to resist arrest.
It is appropriate to conclude this section with a brief discussion of Hannah
Arendt's well-known thesis linking colonialism to the emergence of fascism.
Helmut Bley claimed to confirm, even reinforced, her contention that the "seeds
of modem totalitarian rule" can be found in African colonialism since in South
West Africa "state control reached a point at which every aspect of the African's
life was subordinated to the Europeans' search for power security" (Bley
1971:282). This conclusion has been strongly criticised by Gann and Duignan
who claim to find "no evidence" for this thesis and argue that German
colonialism was the product of an older tradition. They rest their case on two
arguments: firstly that Arendt and Bley vastly exaggerate the importance of
colonialism to German life in the metropole, and secondly that they take
insufficient account of the ideological and sociological divergencies within
German colonialism both within the German variant and amongst other colonial
powers (Gann and Duignan 1977:228-38). Colonies, they conclude, generally
lacked the capacity to engage in totalitarian acts. To this Ridley responded that
Arendt and Bley were suggesting that colonial society anticipated rather than
caused totalitarianism (Ridley 1983:137-8).
36 African Studies
More importantly, Ridley correctly pointed out that Arendt was concerned with
the emergence of a particular ideology and its testing in colonial practice. It is
important to note the relative importance of science and the practice of science
in Germany vis-d-vis other colonial and former colonial powers. Numbers tell a
story. Anthropology was largely a Germanic phenomenon. As early as 1885 von
Luschan could boast that "the Berlin collection is seven times as big as the
ethnographic department of the British Museum" (cited in Irek 1990:5). As late
as 1920, with Germany stripped of its colonial possessions, the Berliner
Gesellschaft fiter Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte of which Fischer
served as President from 1932-37, could still outdo the Royal Anthropological
Institute with its 484 total members, by having some 895 ordinary members, 103
corresponding members and 5 honorary members with membership peaking at
1,144 ordinary members in 1924. Even smaller German societies outdid their
British and American colleagues. In 1906 the Vienna Anthropological Society,
for example, could claim 459 members. Given the mandarinate nature of
German academe, in practice this meant that academic and scientific pronouncements enjoyed a much wider currency and authority than they did among other
metropolitan powers (see, e.g., Friedlaender 1996). In this era, the historian
Gordon Craig observed, professors enjoyed inordinate respect in Germany and
were more admired than bishops or Ministers of State (1982:171).
Arendt (1958:206) writes that:
African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what
later was to become the Nazi elite. Here they had seen with their own eyes how
peoples could be converted into races and how simply by taking the initiative in this
process, one might push one's people into the position of the master race.
The credibility of this statement derives in part from its being based not on idle
hearsay or theoretical speculation but on intimate first-hand acquaintance with
some of the characters who feature in this story.
The Distinguished Careers of Eugen Fischer and his Fellow

Academics
What sort of people were these academics so heavily engaged in this debate?
And in what sort of academic milieu did they operate?
The omnibus German Anthropological Society claimed some 2,350 members as
early as 1884, but despite such support, physical anthropology in Germany had
a notoriously low level of professionalisation, if one uses the number of chairs
in the subject as a measure. Unlike chemistry and physics which could lay a
claim to relevance in terms of industrial development, and ethnology and
linguistics which could claim relevance to colonial administration, physical
anthropology had limited marketing strengths. Thus the transformation from
physical anthropology to biological anthropology must be seen in larger more
indirect markets or relevancies, namely the emerging rhetoric and values

epitomised by the male body and the increasingly fashionable interest in
improving the body through eugenics. The old debate on polygenesis vs
monogenesis was submerged by the emergent biological and genetic academic
fashions. One of the earliest, and prime, questions with which the various
Gesellschafts fuer Rassenhygiene concerned themselves was the issue of 'racial
mixture'. As Von Luschan put it at the First Universal Races Congress held in
London in 1911, "God created the white man and God created the black man,
but the devil created the mulatto" (1911:23). The emergence of a state
sympathetic to these views was to provide an obvious boost to the reputation of
biological anthropology (at least in certain circles).
The Prussian Siegfried Passarge (1866-1958) initially studied medicine and
obtained his doctorate in geology but achieved fame as a geographer. In 1894 he
undertook an expedition to the Cameroons and the following year, according to
one historian, started publishing grossly racist statements about Africans. He was
a well-known proponent of corporal punishment who would personally accompany punitive expeditions against Africans and brag about the deaths he
witnessed. The next year he was engaged by a British company to survey the
Kalahari and explored this area from 1896-8 in the company of Frederick
Lugard who felt that Passarge was unduly brutal in his treatment of indigenes
(Thomson and Middlcton 1959:142). Nevertheless, it was on the basis of this
fieldwork that he was able to publish two books, one on the geography of the
Kalahari and the other on the Bushmen of the area, and it was on the reputation
accrued from this effort that in 1908 he was appointed Professor of Geography
at the Colonial Institute in Hamburg. Passarge was later to write Das Judentum
ah landschaftskundlich-ethnologisches Problem, which was published by the
leading publisher of racial hygiene literature, Lehmann of Munich, in 1929. The
book is remarkable for its claim to see similarities between Bushman and upper
Egyptian characteristics.
Some of the photographs used in Passarge's book were courtesy of Leonard
Schultze-Jena. Schultze-Jena (1872-1955), another Prussian, obtained his doctorate in zoology under Haeckel at Jena where he lectured before going to
German South-west Africa between 1903 and 1905 to investigate fisheries for
the government. The expansion of his research led to the publication of Aus
Namaland und Kalahari (1907), which so augmented his reputation that he was
appointed Professor of Geography at Jena after which he concentrated on
geography, anthropology, ethnography and linguistics. Later he moved to the
University of Kiel, and finally, that of Marburg. In 1928 he managed to publish
his Zoologische und anthropologische Ergebnisse einer Forschungsreise im
westlichen und zentralen Suedqfrika which is chiefly commemorated for his
coining the term 'Khoisan'. Building on doubts already apparent in Von
Luschan's inability to distinguish between 'Bushmen' and 'Hottentots' during
his 1906 visit to South Africa (Peringuey 1911), and a careful study of some
38 African Studies
70-odd 'Hottentots' and 15 sundry 'Bushmen', Schultze argued that physically

they were the same. Schulze was also a major source for photographs of Khoi
genitalia. His political and ideological positions are quite clear from statements
cited earlier.
Then there were the Austrians, Seiner and Poech. Franz Seiner'(1874-1929)
originally went to South Africa as a Boer volunteer in 1899, first visited German
South-west Africa in 1902 and returned for revisits in 1905-7 and 1910-12. His
research expeditions were largely self-financed and, to recover expenses, he took
and sold many photographs and published widely on a variety of topics
including, for example, hunting in the Caprivi Strip in Kolonie and Heimat, the
journal of the Kolonial Frauenbund. He was not above asking permission to
obtain Bushmen corpses from the authorities (Slals 1984:132) and left the
Colony while suing a local editor for libel. In this case the experienced settler
editor, Kindt, accused Seiner of lacing his accounts with fantasy and moreover
provided sworn statements from Pater Bierfort, a Catholic missionary on the
Kavango River, who pointed out Seiner's numerous elementary linguistic faux
pas. Other expert witnesses testified to Seiner's uebernervoes and overanxious
state: he was prone to take exception to the smallest thing and punished his
Bambuse (manservant) once with 25 lashes. Bierfort, who served as his interpreter, called his article on the "Buschmanngefahr" pure "Erfindung" (invention)." After World War 1 he became one of the leaders of the right-wing fascist
Grossdeutschen Volkspartei and Secretary of the Gesellschaft fuer Geopolitik
und (Colonisation.
Rudolf Poech, on the other hand, was an experienced anthropologist who had
started off studying medicine and undertaken expeditions to India and German
New Guinea. From December 1907 to December 1908 he travelled through the
Kalahari studying Bushmen, making sound recordings and filming their activities. He also accumulated the world's largest Bushman skull collection, much to
the envy of scholars in South Africa. The first Chair of Anthropology at the
University of Vienna was created for him. He became an active member of the
German national 'racial hygiene' society which had Fischer as its president
(Massin 1996:136). During World War I he applied his anthropological measuring skills to captured prisoners of war at Theresienstadt. After he died in 1922
his widow, Frau Dr Hella Poech, continued his work and in 1926 gave an
illustrated talk of his Bushman material which featured a photograph, taken by
the redoubtable Frau herself, of a preserved Bushman penis (Poech 1926).
Fischer's protege and successor, Dr Wolfgang Abel, who was to achieve a
certain notoriety with his studies of Gypsies and the 'Rhineland Bastards' during
the Nazi era, did his dissertation by comparing Bushman, mixed Hottentot and
Bantu skeletons which Poech had brought to Vienna (Muller-Hill 1988).
But what of the main personage in this story? Fischer was an academic of some
consequence. Inspired by Maximilian Bayer's short monograph on the Rehoboth
Bastards which described this community of 'Coloureds' or people of 'Mixed

Race' descent as having a remarkably cohesive community structure, he had
visited this Gebiet in 1908 to investigate the biological effects of 'bastardisation'
of Dutch settlers and indigenous Khoi women. His book on this research, Die
Rehobother Bastarden und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen, published in 1913, was hailed as the first valid application of Mendelian genetics to
anthropology and underlined its classic status by being republished (almost in its
entirety) as late as 1961.12 When asked to write an article commemorating the
fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the book by the South West African
Scientific Society, he not only agreed but modestly called it a "ground-breaking
discovery in genetics" and an "important chapter" in human genetics (Fischer
1963). Fischer saw himself as a 'social anthropologist' which defined how social
associations could determine not only the life of an individual but also his or her
hereditary lines. As a scientist he had no compunction in asking for preserved
Bushmen penises. Indeed, he went further and asked the governor if he might
use his good offices to send a condemned Bushman to Germany where the
climate would soon kill the Bushman and then the body could be used for
science (Stals 1984:132).
Fischer was, moreover, a keen proselytiser of the new learning. He was an early
leader in the Racial Hygiene Movement, believing as early as 1910 that the first
step in "saving our wonderful German Nation" was for scientists to convince the
public of the intrinsic merit and importance of racial hygiene. As an activist in
the cause he spoke widely to influential groups like the Deutsch-Nationaler
Jugendbund on the importance of the 'racial factor'. Like a surgeon, the racial
hygenist had to be prepared to "cut ruthlessly in where something is rotten"
(quoted in Massin 1996:141-2).
After World War I, along with colleagues Baur and Lenz, Fischer published a
textbook, later translated as Human Heredity (1931), which became the authoritative work on the subject. It is an intriguing book in more ways than one:
having pictures not of naked females, but only of males! More importantly, or
ominously* it was read by Hitler during his incarceration and large portions of
its arguments were incorporated in Mein Kampf because what this book did was
proclaim, as Fischer later put it, that:
What Darwinianism was not able to do, genetics has achieved. It has destroyed that
theory of the equality of men ... The theory of the heritability of mental as well as
physical traits has finally been vindicated (Fischer 1933:11-12, as cited in Proctor
1988:148).
From 1918 to 1927 he was Director of the Institute of Anatomy at Freiburg but
soon moved on to bigger things. In 1927 he became the first Director of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics
which was charged with among other things, combating the "physical and mental
degeneration of the German people" (Procter 1988:39-42). In the mid-thirties he
40 African Studies
became Rector Magnificus of Berlin University. He certainly moved in the right

circles becoming Himmler's "special favorite anthropologist" (Padfield
1990:363), and receiving numerous awards, including the Adler-Schildes which
was the highest award the National Socialists could bestow upon civilians
(Linimayr 1994) and, on his sixty-fifth birthday, Germany's highest scientific
honour, the Goethe Medal from no less a personage than the Fiihrer himself. The
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was renamed the Eugen Fischer Institute.
These accolades were recognitions of a career as one of Germany's leading
'racial hygienists', well-documented by a number of scholars (Proctor 1998 a,b;
Weingart 1989; Muller-Hill 1988). It had entailed, inter alia, training SS doctors
in the problems of 'bastardisation' and eugenics, suggesting compulsory sterilisation of the 'Rheinland Bastards', and helping to suggest solutions to the 'Gypsy
problem' (Linimayr 1994:194ff). Under the auspices of the Prussian Science
Academy, one of the most prestigious German scientific bodies, he initiated a
Weiss-Afrika-Kommission which included Diedrich Westermann as a major
co-worker. Fischer argued that the Sahara had never been populated by blacks
and that north Africa was white man's land (Mischek, personal communication).
His influence extended beyond Germany, with popular articles on Geistige
Rassenunterschiede (spiritual racial differences) appearing in German settler
journals like Veranda-Stunden (Fischer 1939:9).
He appeared to have emerged relatively unscathed after World War II. Only
Franz Weidenrcich publicly criticised him in a letter to Science (25 Oct. 1946)
pointing out that Fischer "was one of the leading Nazi anthropologists who was
morally responsible for the persecution and extinction of the peoples and races
the Nazis considered 'inferior'". He was the first Nazi rector of the University
of Berlin and took over this post when decent scholars withdrew or refused to
have truck with the Nazis. His address delivered at the inauguration ceremonies
(29 July 1933) was entitled "The Conception of the Volkisch (Nazi) State in the
View of Biology". This address foreshadowed the official execution of the
principles of 'racial hygiene' as taught by the Nazis. "If anyone, he is the man
who should be put on the list of war criminals," wrote a scandalised Weidenreich. Despite this, Fischer's notions of race and anthropology continued to be
accepted in post-war Germany and in the United States where major figures like
Carleton S. Coon enthusiastically propagated his ideas. Fischer's remarkable
sway over German anthropology and ethnology has only recently been subjected
to critical scrutiny.
Fischer retired in 1942 to Freiburg. His daughter described the last days of his
life: "He was clear-headed up to the end. At ninety, he was dictating to me from
his bed. He thought a great deal about the history of the white man in Africa.
It became lonely for him. Heidegger visited him now and then" (cited in
Muller-Hill 1988:108).
Fischer's strange obsession with Khoi genitalia seemed to remain with him to
the end of his life. The last academic article he wrote (1955) concerned the
so-called Hottentot Apron and semi-erect Bushman penises. This provocative
document starts by claiming that it was now 56 years since he had completed his
doctorate on the "Urogenital apparatus" of the female Orangutan. He claimed to
be returning to the topic by discussing Khoi genitalia and drew direct comparisons between baboons, apes and Bushmen,13 citing Schultze, for example, that
some apes also have semi-erect penises. He buttressed his argument by referring
to Seiner's photographs, and concluded that Bushman genitalia were a distinctive inborn racial characteristic and that neighbouring groups, when they showed
it, had obtained it through "manipulation".
In 1959 Fischer's autobiography, entitled Begegnungen mit Toten, was published. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is rather thin, consisting of eight short
chapters in which he styles himself as an anatomist. What is noteworthy about
this book is the chapter concerning his search for a true Etruscan in Tuscany. He
concluded that Etruscans were a distinct race and claims to have met and
photographed a "typical real Etruscan", a young fellow. Later he met the youth
who introduced himself as Alosio Breitemoser and over drinks the youth
confided that while he had been born in Tuscany his father had been a German!
Then, claims Fischer, he woke up and realised it was a dream. The question
arises as to why this dream should have been included in an autobiography, other
than to make a statement about a psychological state of mind. This becomes
even more intriguing when the name Breitemoese is considered. Breite means
large and Moese is colloquial German for 'cunt'. Is it possible that Fischer's
"dream" suggests a subconscious haired towards Bushmen, Jews and women?
(Muller-Hill 1988:86,91)
The Bushman Stereotype Problem

In 1852 Wilhelm Bleek predicted that Africa would be as significant for
philology in the second half of the century as the Orient had been during the first
half, and considered an adequate understanding of Khoi so crucial and long
overdue that he expressed a willingness to spend years among the people of
southern Africa (Ryding 1975:6). The impact of Bleek on South African
anthropology has been the subject of numerous recent symposia, but most of this
literature is surprisingly narrowly focused on his linguistic studies of Bushmen
and ignores the wider intellectual and the bodily context.14
Fin de siecle culture was strangely obsessed with treatises that mapped the body
by dividing it into parts and put it back together via quasi-disciplines like
physiognomy or phrenology. And it was not just scientists or intellectuals who
were interested in the body. Anatomical museums were a standard feature of the
'Grand Tour'.
42 African Studies
Writing about the embrace of nationalism and sexuality, George Mosse observes
that:
... the stereotyped depiction of sexual 'degenerates' was transferred almost intact to
the 'inferior races' who inspired the same fears. These races, too, were said to
display a lack of morality and a general absence of self-discipline. Blacks, and then
Jews, were endowed with excessive sexuality, with a so-called female sensuousness
that transformed love into lust. They all lacked manliness (Mosse 1985:36).
But why was it specifically Khoi genitalia which attracted attention? And how
does this relate to the tendency to view Bushmen as a separate category? One
of my dominant impressions in working in the Namibian Archives is how
German bureaucrats always distinguished between Eingeborene (natives or
indigenes) and vagabondierten Buschleute. And the nature of stereotyping was
qualitatively different as well. Given their putative habitat beyond the boundaries
of society occupied by settlers and blacks, Bushmen were seen as sub-human
and thus capable of being imaginatively concretised and made familiar. Could it
be that Bushman bodies represented a site of uncertainty and ambiguity? It was
their genitalia in conjunction with their other body features which puzzled
Europe's finest minds. They were a contradiction in many terms. Late nineteenth-century orthodoxy, established largely by Cesare Lombroso the noted
criminologist, for example, believed that large ears were a good indicator of
criminality yet here were vagabond people famous for their small ears which
lacked lobes. Moreover their noses were not so-called 'Jewish noses'; indeed,
Winkelmann saw their squashed noses as the obverse to the straight and pointed
European nose. Germans idealised hairless torsos and Bushmen were famous for
their lack of torso hair. With their paedomorphic bodies they were the gender
benders par excellence; Bushman bodies, while displaying male genitalia, were
defined as effeminate on account of their unmanly softness and delicacy.
The internal reflected the external; their cultural condition was connected to their
physicality. The reason why they lived the way they did was because they lacked
the central European masculine values of moderation, honour and self-control.
They were creatures of emotion and passion and thus lacked true creativity.
Moreover, they were arbeitscheu. They lacked the ability to undertake sustained
work which was the mark of bourgeois respectability. This explained, at least to
some scholars, why they were incapable of 'development'. Their lifestyle proved
that they were gemeinschaftsunfaehig innately incapable of sustaining social
life. And to top it off, they were always described as living in filth and dirt. Not
only was this the antithesis of a central masculine value but, since cleanliness
was next to Godliness, it was also taken to indicate that these people lacked a
notion of God.
The following quotation from the ethnologist and diffusionist, and prominent
Man of Science, Friedrich Ratzel, is indicative of the conventional wisdom about
Bushmen at the turn of the century. He quotes Fritsch approvingly as saying that
they are the "Unfortunate Child of the Moment", but then because of their
paedomorphism and fatal thoughtlessness:
the inclination of the moment is decisive with him, and this explains all the
contradiction and bad qualities which has made him, of all South Africans, the most
detested by white and coloured men... what makes him an outlaw and puts him
outside the pale of humanity is the cruelty with which he carries out his raids. The
Bushman is the anarchist of South Africa. On the other hand, wherever he comes,
as a servant, into permanent relations with white men, he has always the reputation
of trustworthiness... ([but] it seldom happens that he ever comes over into the
'tamed' state, and still more seldom that he perseveres in it) ...The fear of the
Bushmen has indeed produced an effect in the disforesting of South Africa; since the
colonists in order to guard against stealthy attacks, removed the bush near their
dwellings (Ratzel 1897:267-8).
Bushmen and Hottentots, collectively merged as the Khoisan or Sanids, were

famous foremost for their genitalia, thus Eickstadt (1934) in his classic volume
on Human Races starts his section on the Khoisan with Le Valliant's famous
picture of a naked female displaying her genitalia and then follows it with one
of Seiner's pictures of Bushman penises.
But at the same time a counter-discourse was emerging which emphasised their
supposedly innate ability to hunt, and this struck a responsive chord. Hunting
was a masculine activity par excellence and this served to increase ambiguity
about Bushmen. Indeed, several of the authors who wrote on Bushmen, like
Seiner, were avid hunters, and in one of his articles on Hunting published in
Kolonie und Heimat the journal of the German Kolonialjrauenbund has a
photograph of the author sitting on top of a prize hippopotamus the most
female of large game. At the same time, their hunting and tracking skills haunted
outsiders because with such talents they were obviously well set up to be the
scapegoats in conspiracy theories. Their concern with Bushman genitals was
clearly not a fixed stereotype, but a site embodying confusion and indeterminacy
about their own sexuality.
The Jewish Connection

In 1931 a close collaborator of Eugen Fischer, the highly visible 'racial hygiene'
populariser Hans "Rassen" Gunther, published Rassenkunde des Juedischen
Volkes. What is puzzling about the book are two transposed photographs: One
of Benjamin Disraeli, the prominent Jewish politician and next to it, one of
Abraham Platje, a 'Bushman-Hottentot' Chief from Bethanie, Namibia. The
purpose of the transposition is obviously to display the perceived resemblances
between the two. He goes on to quote Von Luschan on the Jewish similarities
with Bushman-Hottentots and argues that this arises from, and is indicative of,
a common Hamitic infusion (Gunther 1931:108-9). Gunther was not the first to
draw a comparison between Disraeli and Abraham Platje. In 1912 in an
Appendix to Carl Meinhof s dissertation Die Sprachen der Hamiten, Felix von
44 African Studies
Luschan, who had succeeded Virchow to the prestigious Berlin Chair, explicitly
made the comparison and suggested that it accounted for Platje's exceptional
intelligence (1912:252-3). Meinhof was believed by many to be the most
influential Africanist in Germany during the inter-war years and his dissertation
was standard reading for any budding German-trained Africanist.
Clearly this putative connection lingered implicitly in the minds of many
educated and semi-educated Germans. It was part of the epistemic murk which
lingered on in education but was never challenged. Indeed, Himmler himself was
interested in these connections. After his Ahnenerbe researchers found female
figuries in Slovakia with "fat rumps" reminiscent of the so-called Venus of
Willendorf, Himmler concluded that these people were closely related to
contemporary Hottentots or at least belonged to the same racial stock. Since they
were not in the area any more, this was evidence that "Nordic man" had invaded
the area and pushed them out: proof that Nordic Man was stronger.15
This asserted connection still surfaces in certain crypto-scientific, yet authoritative, circles. In 1968 a Namibian newspaper, Die Suidwes-Afrikaner, carried an
article by C.A. Pyper MA, claiming that Hebraic words had been found in
Bushman languages (14 Oct. 1968) and a few years earlier the Lecturer in
Hebrew at the University of Cape Town, Dr Eilor, had undertaken research
expeditions to the Kalahari Bushmen to examine, inter alia, this affinity {Cape
Argus 13/4/63).
The putative linkage between Bushmen/Hottentots and Jews is a strong feature
of the diffusionist tradition in German ethnology. Thus, as Ratzel summarised
the state of conventional wisdom:
Thus after all the labour or two centuries we have got happily back to the opinion
with which Peter Kolb concludes his discussion of the resemblances between
Hottentots, Jews, and Troglodytes: "For my part I make bold to think that we have
here primitive African peoples, who, being continually dislodged, and as time went
on chased even further from their ancient abodes, welded themselves together no
less out of those Jews who were carried hither, than out of other peoples of Africa,
and Carthaginians in particular, and at last betook themselves to this extreme point
of the land. And seeing that there were so many and various nations, one was ever
taking somewhat from another and each alike forgetting its own peculiar customs;
so that by this time a state of confusion is found among them" (Ratzel 1897:260).
Kolb's opinion was apparently widely shared. For example, Grevenbroek writing
in Latin to a clergyman in 1695 describes how:
From the Jews also the natives near us must have acquired the practice of removing
the left testicle, if you will excuse the mention of it Indeed who is so blind as not
to see that it is from the Israelites that both divisions of the Hottentots have derived
all their sacerdotal and sacrifica! rites, which are redolent of the purest antiquity ... (Schapera 1933:209).
And Valentyn who lived at the Cape in 1705 and published a book in 1726 noted
that:
But others, who have investigated somewhat more closely the reason for the
tying-off of the left testicle (e.g., Bogaert) think to have discovered, that it is merely
a custom and ceremony proper to this Nation (as it is for the Moslems and Jews the
cutting-off of the foreskin), and that, just as in those two nations it is the custom that
none of their women will lie with an uncircumcised man or marry him (Valentyn
1973:63).
Kolb is a major source and much used on this point by other experts like Von
Luschan in Germany and Peringuey in South Africa.
Diffusionist theories postulating a Jewish (Semitic) Bushman connection continued into the nineteenth century with the emergence of comparative philology
which assumed a connection between speakers of a language and bodily
transmitters of that language, and indeed, were quite general (see, e.g., Lepsius
1873). For example, Alexander Winchell, in his book on the Preadamites,
reiterated the existing slate of knowledge with regard to those defined as
Bushmen:
The ... Koi-Koin speak a language of great ethnological interest, since, according to
Moffat, Lepsius, Pruncr Bey, Max Mullcr, Whitney and Blcck, it presents some
rcscmblcnce to the language of ancient Egypt. Though other philological authorities
dissent from this view, the existence of an opinion of this kind so well endorsed,
proves that the Koi-Koin arc in possession of a language which has reached a
remarkable development... [probably a degeneration from a former better position]
(Winchell 1880:71).
Karl Meinhof, generally acknowledged to have been the leading authority on

African linguistics used ethnological inferences to back up such claims about
"Semitische Spuren in Sued-Afrika" (Meinhof 1915).16
Some South Africans, and especially the haute bourgeoisie, believed that
Bushmen were the result of a visit by King Solomon's fleet (Cameron 1873).17
Even in the 1930s influential people like Sir Harry Johnston were postulating a
Bushman-Etruscan/Jewish connection,18 and arguing that "both sexes amongst
the Bushmen have peculiarities in the external genitalia absent from the true
Negro type" (Johnston 1930), and where these 'peculiarities' were found in other
parts of Africa they were taken as evidence of earlier Bushman habitation of
those areas. Indeed, in certain circles, diffusionism appears to refuse to be
discredited. After World War II the noted archaeologist, the Abbe Brueil, was
still connecting rock paintings to Phoenicians and the supposed linguistic
connections between Khoi and Hamitic/Semitic languages were still commonplace. And Raymond Dart, generally conceded to have been the most prominent
scientist in South Africa, popularised these ideas in a series of popular talks
broadcast nationally. In propagating such views he was strongly supported by his
colleague Mervyn D. Jeffries (1968, 1973).
46 African Studies
But diffusionism had a nasty political undertow. Smith has shown how avid a
colonist Ratzel was, and has demonstrated the conservative implications of the
Kulturkreis approach which his followers developed. Indeed, Smith argues that
diffusionism was strongly linked to the emergence of migrationist colonialism
and the growth of radical conservative political ideologies which focused on the
need to maintain an agrarian base of German culture, in which, one might add,
notions of masculinity played a prominent role (Smith 1987).19
Genitals and Genocide

By German scholars and "murderous scientists", Bushmen and Khoi were
viewed in a similar light to the other categories of people who were later to be
subjected to extermination. One of the linkages derives from the idea that
Bushmen, like Jews, were abnormal sexually. Many, apart from Freud and
Sander Gilman (1995), have noted the importance of the circumcision-castration
complex in understanding German views of Jews. Indeed Gilman refers to it as
"the Old Question" and shows how in the nineteenth century circumcision was
undoubtedly the most popular means of defining the Jewish male body; a
definition which, inter alia, served to legitimate the prohibition of "mixed
marriages" (see, e.g., Lyons 1981:504). Khoi were seen as equally distinctive
sexually, being classified by Linnaeus as one-teslicled human monsters. It was
this castration-circumcision operation which was an important element in consigning Khoi to the invented typology of Hamitic and/or Semitic Race. Furthermore, it is no accident that those particularly vulnerable to genocide were
perceived as 'vagabond Bushmen', 'Wandering Jews' and 'roaming Gypsies'.
Such people of no fixed address or property are perpetual outsiders; as such they
pose threats to staid settled communities, especially in the realm of sexual
fantasy (Gilman 1995; Young 1994). These threats, in the German case, led to
the taking of extreme measures:
If hating and exterminating Jews had its origins in ill-comprehended aspects of
sexuality, it becomes much easier to understand why the extermination of Jews,
Gypsies and mental patients took on a ritual uniformity, whereas the Slavs were to
be exterminated by working them to death (Muller-Hill 1988:91).
To pursue the idea of the parallel: in the German colony of South West Africa,
Africans or Eingeborene were more frequently worked to death while Buschleute
often met their death in a bizarrely ritual way (Gordon 1992a:77-85).
Eickstadt claimed that Bushmen have great sex appeal and this accounts for the
fact that many members of Zulu royalty have Bushman blood (Eickstadt
1943:38). Indeed, he and Fischer both surmised that while these genital
formations were natural amongst those labelled Bushmen, neighbouring groups
frequently engaged in manipulative operations to produce similar genitalia
because of their alleged appeal to the opposite sex. Even into the early seventies,
one of the most popular theories to explain the decline in Bushmen numbers was
not the deliberate government policy of genocide, but excessive fornication with
outsiders which resulted in the spread of venereal diseases and bastardisation,
and thus weakened the race as a whole (Gordon 1992a).
Set in a settler colony with a massive demographic imbalance, such sexual
allures could be downright discomforting. When the young Eugen Fischer set
foot in South West Africa to study the Rehoboth Bastards, one of the burning
issues in settler politics was that of 'mixed marriages' which had just been
declared illegal (Bley 1971:212-20). And of course, as Judith Butler (1990:93)
has pointed out, the very act of prohibition creates the desire for precisely that
kind of sex. Some of the reasons for this ban included, inter alia, trying to
contain the spread of venereal disease, maintaining 'White Prestige', preventing
'moral decay', and the belief, held particularly by missionaries, that descendants
of such unions would inherit the bad characteristics of their parents. Politically,
the most significant reason was most clearly articulated by the long-term
Governor, Theodor Leutwein, namely that if mixed marriages were allowed
unchecked people would have divided political loyalties and eventually turn their
backs on the Heimat. This was further legitimised by Mendelian geneticists'
underwriting of the nineteenth-century belief in polygenesis. Nazi ideologues
were obsessed with the perils of 'mixed-marriages', epitomised by the notorious
Nuremburg laws of 1935, and with trying to have the state regulate all aspects
of sexuality (Mullcr-Hill 1988:22; Reich 1970).
This Nazi obsession played itself out in a curious way back in Namibia. In the
Jackpot Story, Jack Stodel has a photograph of a naked Khoi lady posed
sideways with a swastika painted on her buttocks (Stodel 1965). The caption
reads, "She only answered me in German, so I painted a swastika on her (Namib
Desert)". Ciraj Rassool has identified the lady as ./Kaniku, who was a leading
member of what was known as 'Bain's Bushman Troupe' (see Gordon 1992a)
and has offered some provisional speculations on the provenance of this
photograph. It seems probable that the photograph was taken at the Cape just
before World War II. Clues for one possible reading of it, since it is not referred
to directly in the text itself, are to be found in a chapter entitled, perhaps
significantly, "Donkerhoek" Dark Corner which deals with a retired
sergeant of Fallstaffian proportions called Herr Wunder (Mr Wonder) who
farmed on the edge of the Namib desert with his common-law wife, one Katrina
of Herero origin who spoke German fluently. Stodel served in Military Intelligence during World War II and was a prominent Smuts supporter. A copy of the
same photograph features in the papers of Cocky Hahn, another Namibian
intelligence officer. One possible speculation is that both Hahn and Stodel were
concerned about the German minority in Namibia who were reputed to be heavy
Nazi sympathisers and after World War II were to be crucial in giving the
National Party electoral victory in the settler elections. The Nationalists at that
time were major proponents of the 'Immorality Act' which made sexual
intercourse between different 'races' a criminal offence so, I would suggest, this
48 African Studies
particular photograph could be interpreted as an illustration to the Smuts

supporters of German and nationalist hypocrisy.
There are a number of approaches and perspectives one could take in analysing
the 'sexually desiring machine' that led to National-Socialism, but one which
bears revisiting, if only because it tried to integrate material conditions and
consciousness, is that of a German contemporary of Eugen Fischer, Wilhelm
Reich. In his The Mass Psychology of Fascism, thought out during the German
crisis years 1930-33 and first published in 1933, Reich saw repressed sexuality
among the masses as responsible for fascism in Germany. While this is
obviously too strong a statement, his insight that sexual repression is the result
of socio-economic forces rather than instinctual merits consideration. His argument was that sexuality is conducted and shaped largely through the (masculinised) patriarchal family, and it is the acceptance of this culturally
constructed masculine father that plants the kernel for acceptance of an authoritarian society. The Nazis knew how to play the double game of sexuality by
denouncing sexual freedom while arousing the frustrated desires of people
through an emphasis on sexual substitutes. Such sexual suppression led to
heightened militarism and to various forms of sadism. In order to understand
these dynamics, Reich argues, we need to understand both why people suffer
from this embarrassment about sexuality, and their strategies with dealing with
it, like projecting it on to 'Others' (Reich 1970; Brown 1973).
Shortly before his death Hitler had this to say in his last political will:
The Jew is the quintessential outsider. The Jewish race is, more than anything else,
a community or the spirit. In addition, they have a sort of relationship with destiny,
as a result of the persecutions they have endured for centuries ... And it is precisely
this trait of not being able to assimilate, which defines the race and must reluctantly
be accepted as a proof of the superiority of the 'spirit' over the flesh (cited in
Muller-Hill 1988:86).
There are interesting parallels between this perception and attitudes towards
Bushmen. After World War II, Professor Lenz, Fischer's erstwhile collaborator,
now at the Institut fuer Menschliche Erblehre at the University of Gottingen,
could declare with great confidence in the UNESCO Statement on Race that:
As far as I am aware, neither African pygmies nor Bushmen interbreed with Negroes
or with Europeans; thus owing to their natural instincts and their habits, they are
physiologically isolated (cited in Sanders 1996:8).
Much of the current debate about those labelled Bushmen concerns their alleged
inability to assimilate. And genetics is still held by some to be crucial.20 In the
1950s the Namibian Bushman Preservation Commission focused on the question, "Can the Bushmen be Civilised?" It is a belief rather than a question
which still persists in various invidious forms. Thus, for example, the film
narrated by John Hurd entitled "Hunters of the Kalahari" portrays Bushmen
stripped of the accoutrements of 'Western civilisation' to subtly reinforce the
impression of unassimilability and implicit spiritual difference. Ironically then,

Hitler's last will overlaps considerably with the radical environmentalist posture
which argues that some primitive or primal people, like those labelled Bushmen,
exemplify how we can live in harmony with nature (and with each other) and
that this alleged mystical ability is innate. In such cases they would be
well-advised to consult Karl Marx who noted the obvious:
Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist
does ... Such a primordial condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question
away into a grey nebulous distance. It assumes in the form of a fact, of an event,
what the economist is supposed to deduce namely, the necessary relationship
between two things (Marx 1972:192).21
Notes
1. Many people provided encouragement as well as delightful and insightful comments on this
paper including, but not restricted to, Judy Irvine, Zoe Strother, Luise White, Udo Mischek,
Udo Krautwurst and John Noyes. This paper is designed as a companion piece to my "The
Venal Hottentot Venus", African Studies 51(2), 1992:185-202. Some prelimary and tentative
ideas and material on penises and the local Namibian context in pre-World War I Namibia
are explored in my "The Making of the 'Bushmen'", Anthropologica 34(2), 1992:183-202.
2. This was only in the first two or three editions. He later changed his classification, yet no
historian of science has commented on this change. I suspect that it might have been the result
of his student Anders Sparrman's research in southern Africa.
3. Ploetz, interestingly enough, as a young doctor considered moving to South Africa so that he
could study Bushmen. Sec Weindling (1989) and Wcingart (1989).
4. Compare, for example, the agonising factionating dilemma of the Rhenish Missionary Society
concerning the ban and nullification of "mixed-marriages" in South West Africa.
5. The following nine paragraphs arc adapted from my book The Bushman Myth and the Making
of a Namibian Underclass (1992a).
6. 'Was soil der Kulturmensch mit Leuten anfangen, die aufdem Standpunkt jenes Schafdiebes
stehen! Gefaengnis und Zuchthaus waren Belohnung, existieren ausserdem in jenem Lande
gar nicht. Bleibt da etwas anderes ubrig als Erschiessen?' Most of Passarge's observations
were made immediately after the rinderpest epidemic which decimated cattle herds in the
Kalahari. The quotes used in this paragraph are from Passarge 1907:2, 132, 124 respectively.
7. National Archives of Namibia, 24 Sept. 1911, ZBU 2043.
8. Ibid., 2 Dec. 1911, ZBU 2043. emphasis mine.
9. Ibid., unsigned rough draft, Govt. Whk to Col. Sec., Berlin, Sept. 1913 ZBU 2043.
10. Indeed Schultze was in many ways representative of the dominant paradigm within German
voelkerkunde. In 1914 in the authoritative Das Kolonial Reich he provided the following cant
of empire:
The ethnologist may lament the fact that a portion of humanity with such strongly
developed characteristics as displayed by the tribes of German South West Africa,
especially the Hereros and Hottentots, in their physical, intellectual, and political
peculiarities, will one day become wholly melted down in order to be put into
. circulation again as common day labor coin, stamped with the imperial eagle and the
Christian cross, with the inscription "colored laborer", to constitute an economic
value. But the struggle for our own existence allows no other solution. At the same
time work is the only solution for them: He who doesn't want to work perishes here
with us as well; We have no reason to be more sentimental in Africa than in Europe.
50 African Studies
We who build our houses on the graves of those races must, however, take twice
as seriously our obligation to avoid no sacrifices for the purposes of civilisation, i.e.
for the greater development of all means of existence in this new land (p. 295).
11. National-Archives of Namibia, B53/12 Seiner vs Kindt. GW 556.
12. On the basis of Mendelian genetics Fischer argued that it was "very probable" that
behavioural characteristics, like physical characteristics, were genetically bequeathed. Populations could mix without blending and that certain racial features could be "dominant".
13. In his acknowledgments Fischer profusively thanked his colleague, Pater Martin Gusinde
SVD (1886-1969), and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for sponsoring the Jatter's research.
Gusinde was inspired to become an anthropologist by a group of Exhibited Dinka. He appears
to have shared many of Fischer's interests, publishing extensively on topics like PygmaenNeger-Bastarde im oestlichen Kongogebiet (Stuttgart 1944) and an article "Die Rasseform der
Kongo-Pygmaen" (Berlin 1944; both examples cited in Linimayr 1994:6). In the early 1950s
Gusinde did research amongst Namibian Bushmen, and on his return to Vienna showed slides
of Bushmen to over 1,300 spectators in the Great Concert Hall. According to his obituary "the
valuable material on Hottentot-Aprons he ceded to Eugen Fischer for publication" (Bornemann 1970). In the early 1950s the SWA Bushman Preservation Commission met Professor
Gusinde. He argued in a memorandum that blacks and Bushmen should not live together on
one reserve:
It is my conviction that it is essential to prevent close dependency of the Bushmen
on the Bantu. The natives are very clever and the Bushmen very childish and the
Bushman has not enough courage to act against the superiority of the native. He is
too childish to go to the Commissioner for help. (Notes dictated to CNAC, Rundu,
nd, author's files.)
14. For example, Sir John Lubbock (1913:437) noted that:
Bleek regards them as the lowest of human races, and Hacckcl even goes so far as
to assert that they seem "to the unprcdjudiccd comparative student of nature, to
manifest a closer connection with the gorilla and chimpanzee than with a Kant or
a Goethe".
15. Udo Mischck, citing Kater (1974) in a personal communication.
16. The linguistic, and indeed even the physical anthropological situation is extremely complicated with linguists and anatomists having heated debates on the nature of the relationship
between "Bushman" and "Hottentots". Suffice it to say that for purposes of this paper these
differences were conflated.
17. Representative of this genre is the book published in Cape Town by James McKay entitled
The Origin of the Xosas and Others (1911). It starts off with two remarkable photographs
which belie the written discourse. The first is of a woman showing her copious steatopygia.
The caption reads:
Specimen of a woman of the Ovambo Hottentots, North West Africa. Among this
people there are some who have almost white skins and rose-tinted cheeks; these are
generally of medium height, while others are shorter and darker in colour, being
more of the Bushman than Hottentot type.
It then proceeds to argue the most fanciful diffusionist views of the Khoi migration from the
Mediterranean. As late as the 1960s such diffusionist doctrine was still taught at the
University of the Witwatersrand by Raymond Dart and Mervyn Jeffries.
18. Sir Harry Johnston argued very strongly for a Bushman-Egyptian/Jewish connection which he
held was clear from evidence produced in sculpture, rock paintings and Eastern Mediter-
ranean pottery. The distinguishing physical criteria for Bushmen he claimed were, apart from
skull formation, steatopygia, small folded-over ears, "hypertrophy of the labia vulva minora
in the woman, and, in the men, of the peculiar angle at which the penis is set in relation to
the pubic region". He goes on to point out that steatopygia was found "as far north as Poland,
carried thither by the Jews" (see Johnston 1915:3789). As late as 1963 A.T. Bryant was still
arguing that:
The male Bushman on the other hand carries his distinction in his
penis ...horizontal as seen depicted on ancient Etruscan vases (Bryant 1963:79).
19. For studies on the notion of "the Jewish Race" see Patai and Patai 1989 and Efron 1994.
Surprisingly they ignore the Jewish-Khoi connection.
20. Thus foremost folklorist Megan Biesele writes in her Women Like Meat (1993:43):
What I am suggesting is that folklore, far from being a kind of cultural froth, may
actually represent an important phase in the syslematics of the knowledge of
hunter-gatherers. Blurton Jones and Konner... make the evolutionary point that
successful habits of mind connected with learning, storing, and communicating
survival information.will have been strongly selected for. This selection pressure has
left an imaginative legacy in the expressive forms, strongly imprinted with the
attitudes towards work, social life, and the supernatural which all along have been
adaptive in the foraging milieu.
21. And of course they have clear class interests:
Their motto, that "man the conservationist" holds the fate of all creatures in the
palms of his uncertain hands is a little embarrassing to their more sophisticated
colleagues but it is all good for public relations, and from the industry's point of
view the conservationists have one irreplaceable quality: their activities in the
interests of wildlife cause as many problems as they solve and so ensure a steady
(low of new work all round (Mamham 1979:8).
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The rise of the Bushman penis: germans, genitalia and

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African Studies, 57, 1, 1998

The Rise of the Bushman Penis:

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National Socialism is the most masculine

In 1913 a University of Freiburg Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology,

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Fischer's request was not an isolated whim of some eccentric scientist. On

Resurrecting the Hottentot Penis

The Rise of the Bushman Penis 29

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The Crisis in Masculinity

The Rise of the Bushman Penis 31

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The relationship between European nationalism, anthropology and sexology is

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The heterogenous and even contradictory connections between these Moral

Masculinity and the Dignity of Labour: Arbeit macht frei?

The Rise of the Bushman Penis 33

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Probably the strongest argument against the wholesale 'eradication' of Bushmen

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The Rise of the Bushman Penis 35

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The Distinguished Careers of Eugen Fischer and his Fellow

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The Rise of the Bushman Penis 37

indirect markets or relevancies, namely the emerging rhetoric and values

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70-odd 'Hottentots' and 15 sundry 'Bushmen', Schultze argued that physically

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The Rise of the Bushman Penis 39

Bastards which described this community of 'Coloureds' or people of 'Mixed

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became Rector Magnificus of Berlin University. He certainly moved in the right

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The Rise of the Bushman Penis 41

The Bushman Stereotype Problem

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The Rise of the Bushman Penis 43

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Bushmen and Hottentots, collectively merged as the Khoisan or Sanids, were

The Jewish Connection

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The Rise of the Bushman Penis 45

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Karl Meinhof, generally acknowledged to have been the leading authority on

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Genitals and Genocide

The Rise of the Bushman Penis 47

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particular photograph could be interpreted as an illustration to the Smuts

The Rise of the Bushman Penis 49

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impression of unassimilability and implicit spiritual difference. Ironically then,

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