Conservatives and their Turtles - Tuskegee and German colonialism

Zimmerman's article ("A German Alabama in Africa") is first a methodological exploration of psychoanalytical history and cultural (also called linguistic and identity) history. Zimmerman uses the seemingly anachronistic results of systems (Althusser and Foucault) analysts to study historical method: parapraxis. Zimmerman's dialectic is symbolic : imaginary : real. Put another way, reality is affected by symbolic and imaginary cultural preconception.

This method is applied to the German Colony of Togo. The labor regime there was influenced by Baron Beno von Herman auf Wein "the agricultural attaché to the German embassy in Washington D.C." Baron Beno was inspired by Booker T. Washington's 1895 speech in Atlanta which promoted gradual race improvement based on industrial education and labor.

This is an issue of parapraxis because Booker T. Washington's vision of a gradual class-race ascent (Up From Slavery) was understood by Baron Beno and the Togo cotton labor regime as a permanent mercantilist framework--not a Hegelian-Marxist-Progressive. Zimmerman argues (among many other things) is that the cultural baggage which accompanies transnational labor regimes or transplanted social orders impact the practice. The result is parapraxis.

Southern racists and European imperialists heard, in the "Atlanta Compromise," a method for constructing an apartheid state. This is a historical parapraxis identified by Booker T. Washington himself, "less than a month after his Atlanta speech, Washington privately disavowed a segregationist interpretation of his message." (1369)

The construction of historical memory has a cultural component which results in ahistoricism in service of established systems of power.

Andrew Zimmerman. "A German Alabama in Africa; The Tuskegee Expedition in German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers" American Historical Review December 2005.