Entangled histories: the British, Germans and Indians in East Africa

My PhD Project examines entanglements among German and British colonialists and their perceptions of the Indians in East Africa, using a transimperial perspective based on an entangled history framework. The focus is on race, racism and othering as well as – more broadly – the construction and re-construction of colonial identities in East Africa from (roughly) the 1880s until the early 1930s, a period that covers the onset of British and German colonialism to the region, the end of formal German colonialism and the re-entry of German settlers to the region following their exclusion at the end of the First World War. It is a study of the British and Germans who migrated to British East Africa (Kenya) and German East Africa (Tanganyika), their perceptions of the Indians in the region, and how these perceptions were linked to self-understandings and perceptions of each other.

My thesis project uses British and German discourses on Indians – and, at times, discourses about each other (though this is not the primary focus) – as an example of the ways in which processes of othering worked in the colonial context. Because Indians were a non-indigenous group that did not neatly fit in dichotomous colonial (and scholarly) frameworks of colonisers and colonised, a sustained analysis of British and German perceptions of Indians may add to our understanding of the operation of whiteness, racial categorisation and othering. In particular, discourses on Indians in East Africa offer fertile ground for examining concepts of sub-imperialism and, more broadly, what it meant to be a ‘coloniser’ (as a category of practice).