MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

The Rehoboth Basters (Bastards) and the Problem of Miscegenation Among Humans: Anthropological and Ethnographic Studies on Rehoboth Bastards in German Southwest Africa is a field study by a notorious anthropologist and eugenicist, Eugen Fisher. In 1906, Fischer conducted field research in German South West Africa (now Namibia) that aimed to determine whether human heredity followed Gregor Mendel’s 'laws of inheritance' by studying the interbreeding of two different human 'races'. The small community of Rehoboth Basters, the offspring of German men and indigenous women, was very specific — the group did not form any officially recognised ethnicity and was considered to be different from the rest of the native population. In this context, Fischer conducted the first medical experiments on people in concentration camps, the harbinger of Nazi practice that would follow a few decades later. In doing so, he collected anthropometric data from 300 people, the photos of which are included as an appendix in his book. Following the Mendelian theory, he demonstrated that such interbreeding did not result in a new intermediate race that was reproductively stable. In the last part of the book he describes the Rehoboth Basters as an illustration of “the clash of advanced European (Boer) culture” and “lower positioned Hottentot culture”, a “miscegenation” that led to racial and cultural decline. Despite the dubious methodology and substantiation, and sometimes even total lack thereof, the book influenced Germany's colonial policies (including a prohibition of mixed marriages) andf ormed the 'scientific' basis for the Nuremberg anti-Semitic and racial laws (1935) in Nazi Germany. Shocking too is Fischer's plea for genocide: “So accord them just the measure of protection they may require as a race which is inferior to us, in order to continue their existence: nothing more, and only as long as they are of use to us. Otherwise survival of the fittest, i.e., to my mind, in this case,extinction. This point of view sounds almost brutally egotistic, but whoever thinks through thoroughly the notion of race, cannot arrive at a different conclusion”.