Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s career as a colonial officer: learning the 'colonial way of war'?

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck is best known as commander of the Schutztruppe in German East Africa during the First World War, where his 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 asks whether Lettow-Vorbeck’s experience as a colonial officer offered him opportunities to acquire knowledge 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. 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.