Around 1900, a new figure appeared in advertisements across Germany, marketing a range of products from tobacco to pencil erasers. This new motif depicted a colonized African “native,” clad in striped shorts, and often straining under a burden of “colonial” goods. Visual advertising was scarcely a decade old in Germany; new technologies and commercial practices made the mass-production of full-color posters, ad inserts, and product packaging economically feasible. The colonial empire, too, was relatively new; and, apart from the humorous cartoons that accompanied the mid-1880s “colonial fever,” metropolitan visual culture had not manifested substantial engagement with new dominions in Africa. Why, then, did this trope of the colonized African emerge prominently, and circulate widely, at this moment?
Drawing on extensive research into the trademark registration rolls of the Imperial German Patent Office, my paper traces a shift in visual imagery of black figures from the 1880s and 1890s, when blacks were "seen" as ethnographic illustrations in colonialist publications and as exotic savages on lithographed show posters, to the last half of the 1890s, when mass-produced advertising took up the African figure. The mass marketing of “Africa” transformed the ethnographic or exotic into the “colonized.” I argue that the appearance of the African colonial subject in the consumer imaginary stood at the intersection of a number of diverse but interconnected impulses, including the legitimizing role of “colonial science” in polite society, the effort to capitalize on the (highly-commercialized) news of colonial warfare, and, especially, the crystallization of new techniques of visual power in the realm of mass-produced image production. The transformation of the “African” not only changed how Africans were (literally) seen, but helped to define the consuming desires of Germans. This visual and ideological shift offered an essential crucible in which racial identity and imperial community was forged.