5
Vernichtungfn1
Hands digging in a desert.
Thousands of hands.
Fingernails splintering as the desperation increases.
Hands digging in a desert.
Thousands of hands.
Fingernails splintering as the desperation increases.
The primal human need for water.
Women, men, children, delirious with the heat.
No trees, no grass, no shelter, no way back to the mountains.
Only one thought:
Water.
Over days they dig.
In the furnace of midday they dig,
in the dusk and in the night they dig.
They dig holes as deep as high as themselves, and then dig deeper.
Still no water appears.
As their strength fades, it becomes ever more impossible to think of trying to cross the vast desert of Omaheke, and reach sanctuary on the other side.
And if they try to go back the way they came, towards their ancestral lands in the mountains, they know they will all be shot by the lines of German patrols that ring the periphery of the desert, where the water holes are. Because the ‘Extermination Order’ has been proclaimed, and no mercy will be shown.
So all they can do is pray for the rainy season – still weeks away – to come early. And, with the last of their strength, dig still deeper. With only their hands, some manage to dig twenty-five, thirty feet down through the sand.
But still there is no water.
Over days, and weeks, thousands and thousands of human beings die – the majority of the Herero people, in the land that today is called Namibia, but in 1904 was called Deutsch-Südwestafrika (German South-West Africa). Tens of thousands died – the vast majority of thirst and starvation – with the Germans hardly having to fire a shot.
*
The Genocide that Never Ended
I haven’t been able to get these images and thoughts out of my head since I first came across an account of the 1904 extermination of the Herero people – cattle farmers who had lived peacefully for years in the rich grasslands of northern Namibia, and the mountain plateau of Waterberg. It was when I read Exterminate All the Brutes for the first time in the late 1990s, but I recall the physical shock as if it were yesterday. Despite having read numerous descriptions of genocides and massacres over many years, this account affected me in a different way. It seemed not to belong to this world. It seemed to be out of a nightmare. But I went over the words again to make sure I hadn’t been hallucinating. No, they were all there, in black and white – it was just my head that couldn’t make sense of the reality that was described:
When the rainy season came, German patrols found skeletons lying around dry hollows, twenty-four to fifty feet deep, dug by the Hereros in vain attempts to find water. Almost the entire people – about eighty thousand human beings – died in the deserts. Only a few thousand were left, sentenced to hard labour in German concentration camps …
‘The month-long sealing of desert areas, carried out with iron severity, completed the work of annihilation,’ the General Staff writes in the official account of the war. ‘The death rattles of the dying and their insane screams of fury … resounded in the sublime silence of infinity’. The General Staff’s account further reports that ‘the sentence had been carried out’ and ‘the Hereros had ceased to be an independent people.’
What was done to the Herero, and also their sister people, the Nama, between 1904 and 1907 was the first genocide of the twentieth century. When I began researching in the late 1990s, very little had been published on the subject; it seemed to be one of the least known, one of the least understood of all genocides. I wondered whether one of the reasons for this cultural invisibility in the West, aside from our historic racism, was that imperial Germany, quite explicitly, had copied the brutal methodologies already established by the British Empire in its colonies and by the United States in its treatment of American indigenous peoples. So maybe there was a deep-rooted, and unacknowledged, shame in our cultures that did not want to see the linkage between our extermination of indigenous peoples and what Germany did to the people of South-West Africa, and later to its own Jewish population.
In the first decade of this century, at last, something began to shift; more papers and books started to be published on the Herero–Nama genocide, and documentary films began to be made. Finally this genocide was being recognised, and this process of cultural and historical visibility increased to such an extent that in 2017 the German government had to acknowledge that what happened in South-West Africa in the early 1900s indeed constituted ‘genocide’. The truly shocking aspect of all of this was that it had taken Germany, and most of the world, more than a hundred years to recognise the reality of this atrocity. Shocking not only in its own terms, but also because Germany, of all countries, should have understood, long before they did, the critical linkage between the two German genocides of the twentieth century.
My own journey of understanding, which had begun with that short passage in Exterminate All the Brutes, continued when I read Mark Cocker’s Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold in 1998, which seemed to pick up Lindqvist’s broader challenge for us to understand the brutal nature of European colonial psychology. Cocker went into greater detail than Lindqvist, looking at four case studies of European exterminations of tribal peoples, including a long chapter on Germany’s extermination of the Herero and Nama. By this stage I had already begun the intensive research phase of my work on the desk killer, and I had become more and more preoccupied by the question of how Germany’s extermination of the European Jews had been possible. What had happened in the minds of an entire generation, or rather two generations, of Germans, to enable such an event to occur? Before physical extermination surely there had to have been a mental and conceptual extermination? There were certain details in Cocker’s account that astonished me – for instance, the fact that Hermann Goering’s father had been the first imperial commissioner in South-West Africa. The fact that a German general had issued a Vernichtungsbefehl (an ‘Extermination order’) in 1904, thirty-eight years before the Wannsee Conference. I had an instinct that the deeper I dug into this territory, the more disturbing the linkages between the two genocides would become.
And then, in 2010, David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen published their groundbreaking work The Kaiser’s Holocaust. Most compellingly, they take us right into the mindset of the German colonialists, military strategists and planners at the end of the nineteenth century. For years I had wondered what the dominant ideas in German culture were when Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels and all were boys. What were they taught at school? What were the bestselling books they grew up with? What would their parents have been discussing? What were German newspapers reporting? What were the lessons learned by the governing authorities back in Berlin from the experiments carried out in South-West Africa? Now, for the first time, some of my questions were beginning to find answers.
But the more I read, the more I began to hear another voice in my head. The annihilation of the Herero and Nama should not be seen as important only because of the second genocide it prefigured; nor should it be seen as relevant only to Germany – because Germany, quite openly, followed the example of other powers, especially Britain and America. Most of all, though, I realised that this genocide needs to be read and understood on its own terms. The process of decolonisation – which some may regard as finished – has a long way to go. Decolonisation of our minds is only just beginning. To fully understand the significance of the Herero and Nama genocide we would have to see this event as part of our Western identity. We would have to acknowledge the exterminist impulses which have been at the heart of our cultures. We would have to open up this debate inside ourselves, however disturbing this process may be. We would also have to recognise that genocide can never be regarded as a finished episode. This is one of the most terrible truths of the Herero–Nama genocide – the fact that Namibia today, according to the United Nations, is the most unequal country in the world, where the top 1 per cent of the population earn more than the bottom 50 per cent, with appalling consequences for health and life expectancy.fn2 We also should understand that this economic inequality correlates almost exactly with the race composition of the country – the top 1 per cent being almost entirely the descendants of white European settlers, the bottom 50 per cent being almost entirely the indigenous black population. It seems clear that the legacy of the genocide that the Germans began by military means in 1904 is being carried on a hundred years later by economic means – a state which could be described as ‘the genocide that never ended’.