Superior: The Return of Race Science

by Angela Saini

But it’s important to remember that history might well have gone another way. Das pulls out another object from the archive. It’s a narrow tin box, resembling a cigarette case but twice as long. It was brought to London by Karl Pearson, but had been designed by Eugen Fischer, a German scientist who had been director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. The box still bears Fischer’s name. Inside is a neat row of thirty locks of artificial hair, ranging in colour from blonde (numbers 19 and 20) and light brunette in the centre, to bright red hair at one end and black Afro hair (number 30) at the other. At first glance it looks innocuous, like a colour chart you might find at the hairdresser’s. But the disturbing story behind it is betrayed by the order in which the hair samples are placed. The most desirable colours and textures have been placed in the middle and the least acceptable at the margins. This simple little gauge tells a story of pure horror. ‘Fischer used this device in Namibia in 1908 to establish the relative whiteness of mixed-race people,’ reveals Das. In what is now remembered as the first genocide of the twentieth century, in the four years preceding 1908, Germany killed tens of thousands of Namibians as they rebelled against colonial rule. According to some estimates, up to 3,000 skulls belonging to those of the Herero ethnic group were sent back to Berlin to be studied by race scientists. ‘Namibia was the first pla...