EXPLOITING THE "URWALD": GERMAN POST-COLONIAL FORESTRY IN POLAND AND CENTRAL AFRICA, 1900-1960

Like their European rivals, Germans in Africa were obsessed with increasing labor supplies, arresting population decline, mastering tropical diseases and promoting African fertility, even though their policies often had the reverse effect. Inter-war German medical science, for example, claimed to have solved the sleeping sickness problem that had frustrated population growth in tropical Africa. Unrecognized in colonial anxieties about labor scarcity was the ability of Africans successfully to resist colonial labor demands and efforts to control their forests. In viewing the Holocaust as the end point of German colonial racism, the "Windhuk to Warsaw" discourse ignores African resiliency and agency. It furthermore obscures how German economic and scientific imperialism had the capacity to outlast the Second World War and influence international development discourses well into the 1960s. Here, Sunseri argues that the inter-war Bialowieza post-colonial model was ready-made to shape Food and Agricultural Organization tropical forestry in the era of nationalism and decolonization.