Die verkehrte Hautfarbe. Ethnizität deutscher Namibier als Alltagspraxis
... Hier finden sich Hinweise auf ein Spannungsfeld zwischen Standardsprachideologien und sprachpuristischen Einstellungen auf der einen Seite und die Abgrenzung gegenüber Deutschland im Sinne einer lokalen, "namibischen" Identität auf der anderen Seite (vgl. hierzu etwa auch Schmidt-Lauber 1998;Kellermeier-Rehbein 2015). Während erstere einen Sprachgebrauch stützen, der nah an der deutschlanddeutschen Standardsprache ist, kann die lokale Identifizierung lexikalische Entlehnungen begünstigen. ...
... Für ausführlichere Ausführungen vgl.Pütz (1991Pütz ( , 1995,Gretschel (1995),Schmidt-Lauber (1998),Böhm (2003),Deumert (2009Deumert ( , 2018, Ammon (2014), Dück (2018), Shah & Zappen-Thomson (2018), Kroll-Tjingaete (2018), Zappen-Thomson (2019) und Zimmer (2019). ...
This paper describes the corpus Deutsch in Namibia (DNam, 'German in Namibia'), which will be openly accessible via the Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch (DGD, 'Database for Spoken German'). This corpus is a new digital resource that comprehensively and systematically documents the language use of the German-speaking minority in Namibia and related language attitudes. We discuss data collection and elicitation methods (conversation groups, "language situations", semi-structured interviews), data processing including transcription, normalisation and tagging, general corpus characteristics available (size, available metadata etc.) and some basic functionalities within the DGD. First research results based on this new empirical resource illustrate its value for studies on language contact, variation and sociolinguistics.
... So far, no study has deliberately analysed othering experiences of "GDR children from Namibia". The studies by Timm (2007), Rüchel (2001), Reuter and Scheunpflug (2006), Krause (2009), Sikora (1995, Owens (2001) and Schmidt-Lauber (1998) do, however, contain passages in which othering experiences are mentioned implicitly. Rüchel (2001, 50) notes that the full integration of the children into GDR society was never intended. ...
... On one hand, the children received a typical GDR education; on the other hand, they were taught in separate classes marking them as different to other schoolchildren. When the children returned 1 to Namibia, Sikora (1995), Owens (2001) and Schmidt-Lauber (1998) reveal that they were considered to be "from the GDR" and "German" by their families and were not in fact seen as "Namibian". Many of them were the first black 2 schoolchildren to attend schools previously only frequented by the German-speaking, white population racism there. ...
The article analyses a historical case of politically induced flight. The so-called German Democratic Republic (GDR) children from Namibia are about 430 people brought to the GDR between 1979 and 1989. They came from Namibian refugee camps and were part of a solidarity project between South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) and the GDR. They were educated to become the Namibian elite once the country had been liberated. Their stay was to be temporary, with the children identified as Namibian by SWAPO and GDR. The article reconstructs culturalist and biological-racist forms of othering as characteristic biographical experience of the young people which deny them belonging to GDR and Namibia. Simultaneously it examines how the young people irritate the categories of othering and create spaces of agency. They build a new hybrid language “Oshi German” thereby breaking culturalization and staying together as a collective in search of a place of belonging.
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... The community is generally proud of their ability to speak German and of the variety of German they speak (see Wiese et al. 2022 on the tension between standard language ideology and pride in local NG characteristics). For this close-knit speech community, language is considered an in-group marker and seems to constitute a significant component of their unique Namibian-German identity, allowing them to demarcate themselves from the "other Germans", that is, Germans from Germany, as well as from other Namibian ethnic groups (see also Schmidt-Lauber 1998:308-309, Wecker 2017, Wiese et al. 2017:7, Bracke 2021, Wiese & Bracke 2021, Wiese et al. 2022. ...
In this paper, we provide an overview of the history and sociolinguistic setting of Germans and German in Namibia, which serves as a backdrop for our discussion of two grammatical innovations in Namibian German. German has been actively used in Namibia since the 1880s, having been brought to the country through colonization, and it remains linguistically vital today. Via a questionnaire study, we investigate the expanded use of two grammatical innovations in Namibian German, namely, i) linking elements and ii) gehen as a future auxiliary. We explore various factors that could have contributed to the emergence of these innovations in order to better understand the dynamics of German in multilingual Namibia.*
... This setting supports an interesting tension between a local, Namibian identity and an ethnic German identity (Leugner 2018(Leugner , 2020. On the one hand, participation in the national context of Namibia integrates Namdeutsch in a multilingual and multiethnic African society and sets its speech community apart from that in Germany (cf. also Schmidt-Lauber 1998;Kellermeier-Rehbein 2015), with Germans mockingly referred to as "Jerries" (e.g., in Sell 2011, a popular humorous Namdeutsch dictionary). On the other hand, coherence of the speech community within Namibia is linked to a demarcation from other ethnolinguistic groups and an association with Germany. ...
The paper investigates sociolinguistic coherence and differentiation for the example of Namibian German (‘Namdeutsch’), based on corpus data and a copy-editing task. The Namdeutsch speech community draws on a local Namibian identity as well as an ethnic German identity. At the linguistic level, this leads to a tension between a tendency for Namdeutsch to develop distinctive local features on the one hand, and to remain close to standard German in Germany on the other hand, and this can interact with register distinctions. Data from the DNam corpus of German in Namibia shows that noncanonical local variants are primarily associated with informal registers, but that some are also used in formal language. We hypothesised that particularly variants with weaker overt reflexes, which we assumed to be of lower social salience, can enter formal registers. This was confirmed in a copy-editing task where Namdeutsch speakers were asked to correct a newspaper article. Taken together, our findings point to a broader Namdeutsch dialect that encompasses informal and formal settings in an orderly heterogeneity that is modulated by social meaning linked to local and ethnic identities and a hierarchy of sociolinguistic salience reflecting the overt manifestation of linguistic variables.
... Einen Überblick über soziolinguistische, historische und sprachpolitische Informationen zum Deutschen in Namibia gibtZimmer (2019a); siehe auchPütz (1991Pütz ( , 1995,Gretschel (1995),Schmidt-Lauber (1998),Böhm (2003),Deumert (2009Deumert ( , 2018,Ammon (2014),Dück (2018), Shah/Zappen-Thomson (2018), Kroll-Tjingaete (2018) und Zappen-Thomson (2019). 2 Daneben ist auch die Bezeichnung "Südwesterdeutsch" geläufig, die aber allmählich außer Gebrauch zu geraten scheint. Außerdem werden -mit zum Teil leicht abweichender Bedeutung -auch "Namsläng" und "Namlish" verwendet (für terminologische Überlegungen siehe Zimmer 2019a: 1185-1186). ...
... 8 Support for the assumption that male NG speakers might use more transferred lexical items than female speakers comes from narratives by community members. In an extensive ethnography on the Namibian German community Schmidt-Lauber (1998) addresses the role of gender and gender(ed) stereotypes. She reports that, in her interviews with community members, it became apparent that "the Farmer" serves as an ideal and a figure of identification for many members of the group. ...
This chapter presents a quantitative corpus study of informal speech from male and female adolescent and adult Namibians with L1 German. A key feature of Namibian German is various forms of language mixing, mostly with material from English and Afrikaans. Previous sociolinguistic research, as well as statements by community members, suggest that male speakers might use more other-language material in their speech. I identified other-language material in a corpus of peer group conversations by Namibian German adolescents and adults and investigated the amount of transferred lexical items (other-language material excluding multi-word code-switches) that speakers of different age and gender used. Furthermore, I analyzed the proportion of the donor languages English and Afrikaans. Concerning the frequency of transferred lexical items, the results show an age difference between younger and older speakers, but fewer clear differences between speakers of different gender. English is the prime donor language in all groups, but subtle differences in the proportion of Afrikaans may point to interesting sociolinguistic dynamics.
... Im Folgenden möchte ich eine andere Perspektive auf das Deutsche in Namibia einnehmen. Dazu fokussiere ich auf den innerdeutschen Varietätenkontakt als potentielle Sprachwandelursache. Dieser Aspekt wurde bislang so gut wie gar nicht berücksichtigt, 3 hat sich bei der Analyse anderer extraterritorialer Varietäten aber als bedeutsam herausgestellt, vgl. 1 Einen Überblick über soziolinguistische, historische und sprachpolitische Informationen zum Deutschen in Namibia gibt ZIMMER (2019); s. auch PÜTZ (1991PÜTZ ( , 1995, GRETSCHEL (1995), SCHMIDT-LAUBER (1998), BÖHM (2003), DEUMERT (2009DEUMERT ( , 2018 2 Daneben ist auch die Bezeichnung Südwesterdeutsch geläufig, die aber allmählich außer Gebrauch zu geraten scheint. Außerdem werdenmit zum Teil leicht abweichender Bedeutungauch Namsläng und Namlish verwendet (für terminologische Überlegungen s. ...
This paper examines the role of dialect contact in the emergence of Namdeutsch (i.e. a variety of German spoken by about 20,000 Namibians today). In order to show that German speakers of different regional origins interacted with each other in the former colony of German South West Africa, a concrete setting is reconstructed on the basis of historical sources and information on geographic distributions of surnames. Subsequently, it is shown that phenomena can be found which are usually regarded as the result of dialect contact and thus contribute to the emergence of new varieties: levelling, interdialect developments, reallocation and focusing. It is argued that dialect contact is a third cause of language change which is central to German in Namibia along with borrowings from the main contact languages English and Afrikaans and the elaboration of internal tendencies of German.
... Support for the assumption that male NG speakers might use more transferred lexical items than female speakers comes from narratives by community members. In an extensive ethnography on the Namibian German community Schmidt-Lauber (1998) addresses the role of gender and gender(ed) stereotypes. She reports that, in her interviews with community members, it became apparent that 'the Farmer' serves as an ideal and a figure of identification for many members of the group. ...
This paper presents a quantitative corpus study of informal speech from male and female adolescent and adult Namibians with the L1 German. A key feature of Namibian German are various forms of language mixing, mostly with material from English and Afrikaans. Previous sociolinguistic research as well as statements by community members suggest that male speakers might use more other-language material in their speech. I identified other-language material in a corpus of peer group conversations by Namibian German adolescents and adults and investigated the amount of transferred lexical items (other-language material excluding multi-word code-switches) that speakers of different age and gender used. Further I analyzed the proportion of the donor languages English and Afrikaans. Concerning the frequency of transferred lexical items the results show an age difference between younger and older speakers, but less clear differences between speakers of different gender. English is the prime donor language in all groups, but subtle differences in the proportion of Afrikaans may point to interesting sociolinguistic dynamics.
... Für ausführlichere Ausführungen vgl.Pütz (1991Pütz ( , 1995,Gretschel (1995),Schmidt-Lauber (1998),Böhm (2003),Deumert (2009Deumert ( , 2018, Ammon (2014), Dück (2018), Kroll-Tjingaete (2018), Shah & Zappen-Thomson (2018), Stolz & Warnke (2018), Zappen-Thomson (2019) und Zimmer (2019). ...
... Sikora (1995) and Owens (2001) study the life situation of the children and adolescents starting with their repatriation to Namibia. However, these studies are primarily devoted to the effects of a socialist socialisation on the children's later lives, the construction of their 'Germanness' in Namibia (Schmidt-Lauber 1998) and their experiences with racism. ...
This article represents the first ever analysis of the generational relations of an otherwise largely neglected group – the ‘GDR children of Namibia’ and their children. The ‘GDR children of Namibia’ are a group of 430 people who were removed from Namibian refugee camps between 1979 and 1989 and taken to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as part of a solidarity pact between the South-West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). During their time in the GDR, the children were raised to become the future elite of a liberated Namibia. However, the independence of Namibia and the reunification of Germany in 1990 meant that the children were repatriated to Namibia. Their refugee experiences acquire intergenerational meaning through their relations with their children. The way in which the parents experienced displacement and the time of the German colonial era on the territory of what is now modern Namibia resonates through the biographies of the next generation. This study draws parallels between the crises experienced by both generations. Parents and children alike find themselves confronted by structures which distinguish between black and white and which are marked by division and degradation rather than the appreciation of diversity.
This paper provides an overview of the history and sociolinguistic setting of Germans and German in Namibia, which serves as a backdrop for our discussion on selected structural features of Namibian German. German has been actively spoken and used in Namibia since the 1880s, having been brought to the country through colonisation, and it remains till today to be linguistically vital. In this paper, we investigate two grammatical innovations in Namibian German via a questionnaire study, namely the expanded use of a) linking elements and b) gehen as a future auxiliary, and explore various factors which could have contributed to their emergence to better understand the dynamics of German in multilingual Namibia.
This introductory chapter explains the aim of the book, defines what we understand by the term pacification and gives an outline of the following chapters. Pacification as a process, whereby a state achieves a monopoly of violence and law over politically autonomous small-scale communities, and thereby ends both tribal warfare between those communities and any armed resistance against the imposition of state control, should not be understood as a unilateral imposition of state control, but as the result of an interaction between various state actors, on one hand, and politically autonomous local groups on the other.
All over the world and throughout millennia, states have attempted to subjugate, control and dominate non-state populations and to end their wars. This book compares such processes of pacification leading to the end of tribal warfare in seven societies from all over the world between the 19th and 21st centuries. It shows that pacification cannot be understood solely as a unilateral imposition of state control but needs to be approached as the result of specific interactions between state actors and non-state local groups. Indigenous groups usually had options in deciding between accepting and resisting state control. State actors often had to make concessions or form alliances with indigenous groups in order to pursue their goals. Incentives given to local groups sometimes played a more important role in ending warfare than repression. In this way, indigenous groups, in interaction with state actors, strongly shaped the character of the process of pacification. This volume’s comparison finds that pacification is more successful and more durable where state actors mainly focus on selective incentives for local groups to renounce warfare, offer protection, and only as a last resort use moderate repression, combined with the quick establishment of effective institutions for peaceful conflict settlement. ---------------------------------------------
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
JÜRG HELBLING AND TOBIAS SCHWOERER
2 Pacification as Strategic Interaction of Indigenous Groups and State Actors
JÜRG HELBLING
3 The Herero and Nama in German South-West Africa (1830–1910)
MATTHIAS HÄUSSLER
4 The Eastern Highlands of New Guinea (1930–1965)
TOBIAS SCHWOERER
5 The Iban in Sarawak (1840–1920)
JÜRG HELBLING
6 The Lobi in French West Africa (1897–1940)
NATALIE AMMANN
7 The Naga in British North-East India (1830–1890)
RUTH WERNER
8 The Karimojong in Uganda (1898–2010)
TOBIAS SCHWOERER
9 The Waorani in Ecuador (1940–2000)
JÜRG HELBLING
10 Conclusion: Comparing Configurations and Processes of Pacification
JÜRG HELBLING AND TOBIAS SCHWOERER
Die »neue Unterschicht« ist disziplinlos, arbeitsscheu, dumm, fettleibig, fernsehsüchtig - kurz: »Unterschichtler« sind asozial. Solche Zuschreibungen beherrschen die aktuelle Debatte über die »Unterschicht« und das »Prekariat« in seiner »abgehängten« Form. Doch wer wird hier eigentlich beschrieben und was für ein Bild von Gesellschaft wird dabei produziert? Neben der kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit Mainstream-Diskursen über »die da unten« wird Prekarisierung in diesem Band auch als gesamtgesellschaftliches Phänomen in den Blick genommen. »Unterschicht« und Prekarität werden dabei aus sozialwissenschaftlichen, künstlerischen und lebensweltlichen Perspektiven thematisiert.
Much as postcolonial theory promises to probe Namibian post-independence literature better than other concepts, this chapter takes a critical stance toward the overall usefulness of postcolonial models for the interpretation of social, cultural and historical circumstances as they come to be articulated in German-language fiction and nonfiction texts. The contribution seek to demonstrate how Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, based as it is on a bi-polar arrangement of one colonizer and one colonized subject, needs to be modified to match the situation of Namibia 1940 passim. Instead of figuring as a strategy of sly subversion, executed by the colonial subject, mimicry here signifies a practice that enables the former (German) oppressor to cheat the present one, the white South-African rulers, by putting on the garments of that ethnic group which both have been oppressing, i.e. by wearing Herero woman’s dresses. Transposed to the seminal distinction of Eurocentrism versus Postcolonialism that World Literature theorists such as David Damrosch and others seek to transcend, the cunning cross-racial dressing practice is tantamount to a return of deeply Eurocentric stereotypes. As a factual incidence, confirmed and resonating in documentary and even fictional texts, it thus poses a challenge to any theorization of fact-based World Literature.
Oral history adds granularity to the great historical narratives by supplementing them with
the everyday stories of contemporary witnesses. It is against this backdrop that this article
devotes itself to the story of a young woman who, as a child, was taken from a Namibian
refugee camp and sent to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where she spent her
childhood and young adulthood in a children’s home, was then returned to Namibia, and
who is currently living in Ovamboland in northern Namibia in isolation and poverty. Her
biography is indelibly marked by the programme of cooperation which existed between
the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) liberation movement and the
GDR between 1979 and 1990. This political programme was part of a large-scale
international solidarity pact and saw children and teenagers being provided protection
in the GDR, where they were educated to be the future elite of an independent Namibia.
The narrative related by our contemporary witness is one of vulnerability, a story which
stands in stark contrast to the powerful narrative of international solidarity. She tells her
story with the help of a photograph album. The album provides her own personal story
with pictorial support, without which she would have struggled to tell her story at all. Her
story is at one remove from the master-narratives surrounding the cooperation between
the GDR and SWAPO; it permits an alternative reading of history and reveals a story of
personal injustice, the effects of which are still being felt today.
In Afrika gibt es deutschsprachige Minderheiten in Namibia und in der Republik Südafrika. Die multilinguale Situation in diesen Ländern wird in diesem Beitrag unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Deutschen beschrieben. Dabei werden historische und sprachpolitische Aspekte thematisiert und die Vitalität der Minderheitensprache wird erörert. Darüber hinaus werden die sprachlichen Repertoires der deutschsprachigen Community in Namibia dargestellt sowie die Lage von Deutsch als Fremdsprache in den beiden Ländern mit deutscher Minderheitensprache.
The relationship between Namibia and Germany is marked by intense exchanges about the meaning and the consequences of the colonial wars of the early twentieth century in the erstwhile German colony. This engages various state and civil society actors including groups from across the political spectrum in Germany, whereas in Namibia the debate concerns the descendants of the victims on the one hand and German-speaking Namibians on the other.The article explores this discursive situation and brings out a range of relationships and interactions to be understood as expressions of an entangled history that eschews attempts of appropriation on one side. The problems emerge most poignantly in terms of the still ongoing exchanges around the denial of genocide in 1904–8 which, given that the framework of the debate is predicated to considerable measure on German history, inevitably points to the Holocaust. A further strand of acting out and negotiating historical responsibility concerns the mode of apology and redress which remains a contended question. Not least, this involves an incoherent set of state and non-state actors on both sides. Here, the call for dialogue made particularly by Namibians raises the sensitive issues of intercultural communication.
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