« It’s personal: Jennifer Matsunaga, ‘Anti-colonial Reflexivity in Social Work: Re‑personalizing the settler colonial past and present as settlers’, Canadian Social Work Review, 2024, pp. 67-85
Encampments vs. settler enclosures: Suleiman Hodali, ‘Encampment against Enclosure’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 124, 2, 2025, pp. 412-423 »

Settler mules: Martin Kalb, ‘Mules, Global Networks, and Settler Colonialism in German Southwest Africa, 1884–1915’, Global Environment, 2024

14Dec24

Abstract: The employment of mules and the networks supplying them to German Southwest Africa (1884–1915, modern-day Namibia) are at the centre of this article. Mules are infertile and difficult to breed yet of use specifically in disease-prone and arid environments. In German Southwest Africa, Germany’s first and only settler colony, colonists depended on them to cross the Namib Desert, construct infrastructure and fight wars. To supply them, officials tapped into existing global animal networks with mule imports mainly arriving from the Cape Colony/South Africa and Argentina. Arguably, mule mobilities and entanglements offer ways to think more critically about human-animal relations as well as imperial fantasies and frustrations; such a discussion also elevates this widely ignored commodity and actor.


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