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Article of Dr Otto Wehmer
“On the Questionable Methods of Dr Heinrich Renk in the Maratongo Delta”

Journal of Colonial Geography and Ethnology, 1928

 “On the Questionable Methods of Dr Heinrich Renk in the Maratongo Delta”
 By Dr Otto Wehmer (Leipzig), Journal of Colonial Geography and Ethnology, 1928

It has recently come to my attention that the so-called “Maratongo Reports,” published 
under the authorship of Dr Heinrich Renk, have been received with uncritical enthusiasm 
in certain academic and administrative circles. While I do not deny Dr Renk’s diligence 
in the field, I must express grave reservations about his methods, his conclusions, and, 
above all, the unscientific sentimentalism which seems to have pervaded his expedition.

Dr Renk’s insistence upon “collaboration” with native assistants betrays a dangerous 
naïveté. By according interpretive authority to local informants, he blurs the essential 
distinction between observer and observed, thus jeopardising the objectivity upon which 
all serious ethnological work must rest. His so-called “participatory mapping exercises”
—wherein the inhabitants were invited to draw their own representations of the Delta—may 
amuse the ethnographic salons of Berlin, but they have no place in proper 
scientific cartography.

Moreover, his reluctance to impose categorical boundaries upon the region renders his 
maps practically useless to the colonial administration. Rivers are shown as “mutable,” 
villages as “seasonal,” and routes as “perceptual.” Such relativism may delight 
the philosophers, but it obstructs the very progress the Empire depends upon. If every 
waterway is “fluid in meaning,” as Dr Renk suggests, then how is any form of governance 
to be established?
Equally troubling is his persistent moralising tone. His field diaries, now circulated 
among students, speak of “ethical discomfort,” “cultural entanglement,” and the “illusion 
of mastery.” These phrases belong not to the lexicon of science but to that of weak 
introspection. A scientist’s duty is to describe, not to doubt.

Finally, I must note the economic implications of Renk’s attitude. His refusal to estimate 
the Delta’s navigable routes and mineral deposits has deprived the colonial office of 
valuable data. Such omissions, whether born of negligence or ideology, border on 
insubordination. If every ethnologist were to follow Renk’s example, we should soon have 
a science without purpose, a geography without profit.

I write not out of malice but out of concern. Dr Renk represents a troubling new tendency 
in our discipline: a turning inward, a questioning of our own right to know. If this 
self-doubt continues unchecked, the entire edifice of colonial knowledge may well collapse 
under the weight of its own conscience.

—Dr Otto Wehmer, Leipzig, March 1928