Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck's Career as a Colonial Officer, 1900-1906 Knowledge Transfer and the Performance of an Imperial Biography - Guest Speaker Prof. Sibylle Scheipers

: Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck is best known as commander of the Schutztruppe in German East Africa during the First World War, where his daring and increasingly mobile campaign earned him the nickname ‘lion of Africa'. His previous career as a colonial officer with deployments in the Boxer Rebellion (1900-1901) and during the Herero and Nama uprising in German Southwest Africa (1904-1906) has received much less scholarly attention. This article presents an enquiry into how Lettow-Vorbeck's experience as a colonial officer offered him opportunities to acquire knowledge and learn practical skills that he could bring to bear on the campaign in German East Africa. The theoretical perspective that the article is based on brings together the concept of imperial biographies with notions of transimperial knowledge exchange and the ‘imperial cloud'. Based on Lettow-Vorbeck's diaries and autobiographical writings, my research demonstrates that Lettow-Vorbeck saw himself as an officer who learned through formal and informal knowledge exchange, who acquired skills through experience and who was also aware of the limits of the transferability of knowledge and skills. It evidences that learning and knowledge exchange were not simply processes that enabled imperial governance; rather, they were part of a performative repertoire that allowed actors to become experts on colonial war, thereby also demarcating the boundaries between metropole and the colonies.