In the German Colonial Empire (1884-1918), the Kaiser's birthday was a public holiday. Under the third Kaiser Wilhelm II, from 1889 to 1918, the Kaiser's birthday was celebrated on 27 January, the date of his birth in Berlin. Wherever the German flag flew, it was celebrated with military parades, ceremonial speeches, banquets, etc. When the German flag was hoisted in Douala, the city of Cameroon, on 14 July 1884 and the territory was declared a German protectorate, the Emperor´s birthday ceremony was part of the colony's cultural life as it has been documented in photographic records of the Mecklenburg-expedition (1910-1911) of the Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg and the Pangwe-Expedition (1907-1909) of Günther Tessmann. As an elaborate ceremonial that involved both colonisers and colonised, the imperial festivity can be understand as a what Clifford Geertz called “cultural symbol complex”, the unpacking of which reveals its multifaceted dimensions. The following paper is based on the main argument that although colonisers and colonised shared many intimate spaces in the colonial celebrations, white imperial identities were nurtured through an artificial separation from the colonised. Consequently, this paper uses colonial visual sources to analyse issues of whiteness in the German and Cameroonian contexts to show how white imperialists were willing to go to great lengths to maintain their supposed whiteness. It also presents an idea that allows for a connection between white cultural elitism and colonial rule. I will discuss the images according to whiteness studies approaches combine with the Panofsky image analysis method.
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