*
To look at the causation of genocide often involves going back many years – witness the enormous amount of recent research (and argument) about the way that nineteenth-century antisemitism in Germany created (or didn’t) the conditions necessary for the Holocaust to come about a hundred years later. However, the genocidal arc in the case of the Herero and Nama is far shorter, and much clearer in its historical frame – no longer than twenty-one years from the arrival of the first German settler in 1883 to the extermination in the Omaheke desert in 1904. This chapter covers a slightly longer span, taking us up to the outbreak of the First World War; I’ve attempted not only to show the historical stages – the process – by which the vast majority of the indigenous peoples of this country were exterminated, but also the way that this was not simply a military genocide: we will also meet corporations who played their roles, and key individuals from academia and science, who created the intellectual and social conditions necessary for genocide to happen – early-twentieth-century pioneers of the lethal practice of desk killing.
There are six discernible stages to Germany’s colonisation of South-West Africa, so the chapter will follow chronologically, keeping focus on those with power, the prime perpetrators, at each stage:
Adolf Luderitz and Heinrich Vogelsang (1883–5)
Dr Heinrich Goering and the ‘protection treaties’ (1885–8)
Captain Curt von François: ‘nothing but relentless severity’ (1889–93)
Governor Theodor Leutwein: ‘divide and rule’, the British strategy (1894–1904)
General Lothar von Trotha: annihilation (1904–5)
Governor Friedrich von Lindequist: from ‘extermination through work’ to the ‘settler paradise’ (1905–14)
1. Adolf Luderitz and Heinrich Vogelsang (1883–5)
On 10 April 1883, the Tilly, a German sailing ship, arrived in the desolate bay of Angra Pequena, situated on what was known to European powers as the ‘Skeleton Coast’ of South-West Africa – a seemingly desolate stretch of coast, consisting of endless sand dunes, which runs almost 1,000 miles from the Congo basin in the north to the Orange River, bordering the Cape lands in the south. The calm of the ship’s arrival on this April day belied the years of terror, gunfire and massacres that were to follow in its wake. There was a reason why this part of Africa was one of the last to be colonised – it is staggeringly dry, with a thick swathe of the Namib desert running right along the coast, and inland, the Kalahari in the south and the Omaheke further north; it seemed to be utterly inhospitable to settlement – only the British had established a single, coastal foothold at Walvis Bay. Yet what appeared to be a classic example of the ‘terra nullius’ that colonialists liked to see was – fifty miles inland, where the mountains started to rise, giving way to a central plateau – a fertile country where the Herero, Nama and other tribal peoples had lived for hundreds of years.
The earliest known inhabitants of this land were the nomadic San people, who for thousands of years had hunted over a vast territory from eastern Africa down to the Cape. In the early seventeenth century, Bantu-speaking peoples arrived in waves of migration from the north. Some of these, the Ovambo, settled in what istoday northern Namibia, and established settlements close to rivers which provided water for crops and agriculture. The second wave of migrants, the Herero, arrived with huge herds of cattle, looking for new pastures; in the central high plateau of the country, they soon found rich grasslands, and this area, approximately the size of Switzerland, became their territory. Although there were many Herero clans, each with an elected chief, they held their land in common, and recognised an overall tribal leader. They were also bound together by belief in their deity, Ndjambi, and the central role of their dead ancestors in communicating with this god, and in this way providing guidance to the people. In all Herero settlements holy fires were kept burning to symbolise the link between the dead and the living. By the late eighteenth century the Herero were thriving from the cattle trade, and it is thought that their population had increased to around 40,000.
In the early nineteenth century another wave of migration occurred, this time from the south, from the Cape. These were the Nama, a people who had grown out of unions between the indigenous Cape inhabitants, the Khosian, and the Dutch colonial settlers of the eighteenth century. Reflecting this mixed cultural background, most Nama were bilingual in Khoekhoegowab (the Khosian language) and Dutch. However, they had completely rejected the servant roles given to them by the Dutch Boer settlers, instead establishing themselves as small-scale farmers living as independently as possible from white society. And, in the early 1800s, just as they began their migration to the north, they made the shrewd move of starting to acquire guns and horses – two of the key sources of power in southern African societies at the time. Trade in these commodities was to become one of the engines of wealth for the Nama, as they settled north of the Orange River in the southern shrublands of Namibia, where the Kalahari desert meets the Namib desert, criss-crossed with deep canyons and mountains. Here they began to farm sheep, and also developed advanced skills in metalworking, which, together with trade in horses and guns, soon meant the Nama were prospering in their new land. They lived in twelve clans, under leadership of kapteins, tribal chiefs – the Witbooi the most powerful of these groupings (‘white boys’, so called because of the white bandanas they wore on their wide hats). Many of the Nama were Christian, and so in their main settlements churches were built, and European missionaries were invited to join the communities, where schools were soon established.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Herero and the Nama, both thriving from their chosen livestock and trades, had become the dominant peoples of the land, with a combined population of around 100,000. A vivid picture of life here, with its mixture of cattle herding and trade in commodities, is given by Olusoga and Erichsen:
At night the landscape was pinpricked by a constellation of campfires, as white traders, missionaries, Nama, Herero and San sought comfort from the cold of the desert night. The whole nation clustered around thousands of fires, telling ancient stories or dreaming of cattle, wealth or power.
*
A young man named Heinrich Vogelsang disembarked from the Tilly on this April day to find only a single proper building in the bay – the house of an eccentric English shark hunter named David Radford. Vogelsang was on a mission, conceived by his boss, Adolf Luderitz, a wealthy trader in tobacco and guano, based in Bremen, who wanted to establish a trading post here, eventually leading to the setting up of a German colony. Luderitz’s aims could not have been clearer, as can be seen in his statement, which today appears almost a caricature of colonial evil: ‘I should be pleased if it turned out that the entire colony is a colossal mineral deposit, which, once it is mined, will leave the whole area one gaping hole.’fn3
Vogelsang’s first action was to put up a prefabricated hut in the bay at Angra Pequena, which he rather grandiloquently called ‘Fort Vogelsang’. His next step was to set out for the Nama settlement of Bethanie, 120 miles inland, to meet the leader there, Joseph Fredericks, who, he’d been informed, controlled the land rights of the coastal region. With the help of a local German missionary, Johannes Bam, acting as translator, by 1 May 1883 Vogelsang had agreed a treaty with Fredericks for the land at Angra Pequena and a five-mile radius around – in exchange for £100 and 200 rifles. In August, Vogelsang returned to negotiate an even more exploitative deal – this time (in exchange for £500 and sixty more rifles) a 200-mile stretch of the coast northwards from Angra Pequena, ‘twenty geographical miles’ in width.fn4