Pützstück, Hentschel and the Schutzgebiet — reading the German colonial archive on Notsé

If you want a written record of Notsé from before the contemporary period, you have essentially three options: oral history (excellent, but oral), French colonial documentation post-1919 (limited — the French inherited the territory after Versailles and were less ethnographically interested than the Germans had been), and the German colonial archive from 1884–1914. The third is the most extensive. It is also the most ideologically loaded. This Field Note is for the traveler who wants to read it without being read by it.

This is the third piece in our Agbogbo-Za Field Notes set, and the most bibliographic. The primer tells you what the festival is. The Operator Notes tell you how to be in it. This one tells you how to read what the Germans wrote.

The Schutzgebiet — what the territory was

The German colonial empire established the Togoland protectorate (Schutzgebiet Togo) in 1884, in the same wave of European territorial claims that produced the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. The territory was administered from Lomé from 1897. The German period ended with British and French military occupation in 1914 and was formalized as the British and French Togoland mandates under the League of Nations in 1919. The eastern (British) half eventually became part of independent Ghana in 1957; the western (French) half became independent Togo in 1960.

Notsé sat in the central plateau of the colony, on the main north-south corridor. It was administered through the regional station at Atakpamé. German officers, missionaries, and naturalists passed through it. They wrote about it. The wall was visible to them, and they recorded it.

Pützstück — the colonial officer's ethnographic notebook

Albert Pützstück was a German colonial officer stationed in Togo in the 1890s. His writings on the Ewe peoples — published in Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten and in shorter pieces in the Globus journal — include some of the earliest European descriptions of the Notsé wall and of the local oral tradition surrounding it. He was, by the standards of his profession and time, careful. He named his informants when he could. He distinguished what he had seen from what he had been told.

What Pützstück got right: a usable physical description of the wall as it stood in the 1890s, with measurements that contemporary archaeology has largely confirmed. A correct identification of the chiefly lineages of the time. A rendering of the Agokoli narrative substantially consistent with what later oral history would record.

What Pützstück framed badly: he wrote inside the German colonial administrative project, which had material reasons (tax collection, labor recruitment, infrastructure planning) to think of the Ewe peoples as a manageable category rather than as multiple polities with distinct political histories. His framing tended to flatten the Notsé situation into a generic « Eweland » that was easier to govern from Atakpamé but harder to recognize on the ground.

Hentschel — the missionary linguist

Bernhard Hentschel was a Bremen Mission pastor whose work in Togo overlapped with the Notsé station in the 1900s. His linguistic work on Ewe (a grammar, lexical materials, translations of biblical texts) is part of the broader Bremen Mission project that produced Jakob Spieth's monumental Die Ewe-Stämme (1906) and that we discuss separately in our Hogbetsotso bibliographic Field Note.

Hentschel's specific value for understanding Agbogbo-Za is his recording of the Notsé dialect's specific terms for political and ritual offices — terms that diverge in interesting ways from the coastal Anlo dialect that Spieth was primarily recording. The divergences map, with reasonable fidelity, to the political divergence that Hogbetsotso and Agbogbo-Za commemorate today. If you compare the two missionaries' word-lists side by side, you can see the two memorial traditions taking shape in language already by the early twentieth century.

A colonial archive is a witness with a job. You read it carefully because no one else was writing things down. You read it suspiciously because the things it was paid to write down were not the same as the things you want to know.

The wider Schutzgebiet archive

Beyond Pützstück and Hentschel, the German colonial archive on Notsé and the central plateau includes:

• Cartography. The first reasonably accurate topographic maps of the Notsé region were produced under the German administration in the 1900s. They are still consulted by Togolese cartographers today.
• Administrative reports from the Atakpamé station, deposited in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. These include population estimates, tax records, labor recruitment quotas — useful for economic history.
• Naturalist collections. The German Togoland period produced significant plant and animal collections held at the Berlin Natural History Museum, with provenance often listing « Notsé district. »
• Photographic records. A few hundred glass-plate photographs of the central plateau, mostly held at the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt, include images of the Notsé wall in the 1900s that are useful for comparison with the wall as it stands today.

If you have an academic interest in the colonial archive, we can put you in touch with researchers in Lomé and at the University of Ghana's African Studies Institute who are currently working with these materials.

How to read the archive without being read by it

Three principles, learned over years of working with travelers and journalists who come to Notsé with the German archive in hand:

One. Use the archive for what it is good at: the physical description of objects and places, the rendering of names, the recording of words. Do not use it for what it is bad at: the interpretation of political meaning, the framing of intercommunity relations, the explanation of why people did what they did.

Two. Always read the archive alongside contemporary Ewe scholarship. The work of Y.A. Kpodzo, Robert Kuevi, and the historians at the Université de Kara is the indispensable counterpart. Reading German 1900 alone is reading half a conversation.

Three. If your project involves citing the German archive in print or on screen, name the colonial frame each time. Pützstück was not a neutral observer; the Schutzgebiet was not a neutral administrative unit. Naming the frame is the minimum condition for reading the archive responsibly.

The wall the Germans photographed is the wall you will walk to with the Mama's delegation. The continuity of the object is real. The interpretation of the object is contested. Both are part of arriving at Notsé prepared.

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