Washington, Booker T., and German Togoland
Expedition of Tuskegee Institute students and one faculty member from 1901 to 1909 to improve the cotton output of the German colony of Togo in West Africa.
Germany led other European colonial powers in seeking to develop sources of industrial-quality cotton in Africa that would allow them some independence from the near monopoly of U.S.
producers. Booker T. Washington admired what he wrongly believed to be a policy of racial uplift in German colonies. He thus willingly helped Germans in their attempt to import the racialized labor relations of the southern United States to German Africa in hopes of transforming first Togo and later other African colonies into cotton-producing economies that would rival the United States. Widely admired before World War I and widely imitated afterward, this apparent success of the Tuskegee Institute in Africa in fact involved a great deal of violence and coercion.The agricultural attache to the German Embassy in Washington, D.C., Baron Beno von Herman, contacted Booker T. Washington in August 1900 on behalf of an association of German Textile Manufactures, the Kolonialwirtschaftliches Komitee (Colonial Economic Committee), which was working closely with the German government to encourage cotton production in German colonies. Washington was the founder, in 1881, of the Tuskegee Institute, an industrial school for African Americans, and remained the principal of the institute until his death in 1915. Baron von Herman had attended the Cotton State Exposition at Atlanta in 1895, where Washington gained international prestige with a speech promoting at least temporary acceptance of social and political segregation and recommending the cooperation of black workers with white agricultural and industrial employers. Herman became convinced by an 1897 study trip through the southern United States that cotton could be grown profitably only by black people and thus became an enthusiastic supporter of growing cotton in German Africa with the assistance of African American educators from Tuskegee.
The Tuskegee expedition landed in Togo in December 1900. It consisted of three Tuskegee graduates, Allen L. Burks, Shepherd L. Harris, and John W. Robinson, led by a German-speaking Tuskegee faculty member, James N. Calloway. The four established a model plantation at Tove that operated throughout the German colonial period. Since Togolese already grew cotton, although not of a quality suitable for German spinning machinery, the expedition initially planned simply to set an example to indigenous farmers, work on improving cotton seeds (partially in consultation with George Washington Carver at Tuskegee), and improve marketing opportunities for cotton in Togo. In May 1902 a boat bringing additional Tuskegee personnel capsized while landing in the rough surf off the Togo coast, drowning two of the farmers. Two other farmers, Walter Bryan and Horace Griffins, along with Griffins’s wife, briefly set up unsuccessful cotton farms in Togo. By 1904 Robinson had become the de facto leader of the exhibition. The German government sent home the other Tuskegee expedition members and placed Robinson in charge of a new cotton school in Nuatja. This school trained hundreds of Togolese, forcibly recruited from every region of the country, in methods of farming industrialquality cotton. German colonial officials compelled Nuatja graduates to return to their home districts and continue farming cotton in the methods they learned from Robinson, in hopes that their countrymen would choose to imitate them. Robinson was joined in 1906 by his wife, Danella Foote, who remained in Togo until sometime before July 1909, when Robinson drowned crossing a river in Togo. The cotton school was taken over by a German colonial official and kept in operation until Togo was defeated by Allied forces at the beginning of World War I.
Between 1901 and 1909, the cotton exported to Europe from Togo improved in quality and increased in quantity by almost sixtyfold, from 2,000 to 116,850 kilograms (4,400 to 257,600 pounds) per year.
Washington and admirers of the project in Germany and throughout Europe attributed this massive increase to a successful transformation of Togolese into the economically cooperative and politically docile “Negroes” that Washington had praised in his Atlanta speech in 1895. This project the Germans regularly referred to as Erziehung des Negers zur Arbeit (Education of the Negro to Work). It is clear from documents in the Togo National Archives and the archives of the Reichskolonialamt (Colonial Office) in Berlin that this apparent case of transatlantic “racial uplift” was in fact a forced production drive, accompanied by all the physical violence and other forms of coercion of the colonial state. Nonetheless, the apparent success of the Tuskegee expedition to Togo gave great international prestige to German colonialism and to Booker T. Washington.Andrew Zimmerman
References and Further Reading
Fierce, Milfred C. The Pan-African Idea in the United States, 1900—1919: African- American Interests in Africa and Interaction with West Africa. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993, 171—197.
Harlan, Louis R. “Booker T. Washington and the White Man’s Burden.” American Historical Review 71 (1966): 441—467.
Radcliffe, Kendahl L. “The Tuskegee-Togo Cotton Scheme, 1900-1909.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1998.