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Podcast: New Books in German Studies
Episode: Michelle Moyd, “Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa” (Ohio UP, 2014)
Description: In her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd writes about theaskari, Africans soldiers recruited in the ranks of the German East African colonial army. Praised by Germans for their loyalty and courage, the askari were reviled by Tanzanians for the violence and disruptions the askari caused in their service to the colonial state. Moyd questions the starkness of these characterizations. By linking askari micro-histories with wider nineteenth-century African historical processes, she shows how the askari, as soldiers and colonial intermediaries, not only helped...