Forced Labour and Transimperial Connections: Railway Construction and the Labour Question in German Southwest Africa, 1903–1909

Abstract The colonial project required the construction of infrastructure both to integrate overseas territories into the global economy and to make colonial rule possible. Building telegraph lines, ports and railroads necessitated large numbers of workers, making the ‘labour question’ the central challenge facing colonial powers. This article scrutinizes two railway construction projects in early twentieth-century German Southwest Africa: the privately constructed Otavi railway in the north, built between 1903 and 1906, and the state-run railway between Lüderitzbucht and Keetmanshoop in the south, built between 1906 and 1909. It argues that in both cases, albeit to different extents, the colonial state and the construction companies involved used two key strategies to meet the problem of labour scarcity. They tapped into transimperial labour networks, hiring hundreds of Italian workers as well as Africans from the neighbouring British Cape Colony and Ovambos from the borderlands between the German colony and Portuguese Angola. Additionally, they forced thousands of Herero and Nama, incarcerated in concentration camps as a consequence of the genocidal war that started in 1904, to work at the railway sites in terrible conditions. With these various groups present, the building yards were sites of colonial transactions that allow us to glimpse the different positions the colonizers and the various groups of labourers filled in the hierarchy of the colonial order and how this order was shaped.