This volume covers the results of the Study Process on the Role of German Protestant Work Overseas in Colonial Southern Africa. The Study Process is commissioned jointly by the successors to the organisations active at the time – German Protestant churches and mission societies – and the churches in South Africa and Namibia that can trace their origins to German mission work and diaspora services. The project is intended as a collaborative endeavour to come to terms with the colonial past and look critically at the history of all institutions involved.
The contributions collected deal with diverse aspects of this history such as the theological underpinnings of colonialism, the daily life of German-speaking settlers in southern Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the Herero and Nama genocide. They raise the question of how churches and mission societies contributed to constructing systems of racial segregation. Thus the Study Process is a joint attempt to confront the colonial legacy and to overcome the political and cultural categories of colonialism that continue to influence the way we think and act today.