Imagined Power Contested

"The whole village consulted and came to the conclusion that the Germans had come to 'climb on our heads'. What could we do? Those who said they had come to develop us had come to destroy us only. We started planning a resistance. The people sent a bag of stones to the white man with the message: "Mpaw Manku wants to fight with you to see who is stronger!' " (Apa Martin Apa, 2001).

This study shows how power was constructed, enacted and contested by discursive and non-discursive strategies and practices. It emphasises the local and historic divergence of these processes and illustrates how Germans and Africans were able to produce exclusive power arenas but also engaged in a reciprocal extraversion of the respective power of the other.