Luderitz’s timing was exceptional, because 1883–4 saw a sea change in German policy regarding colonisation. Reich Chancellor Bismarck had always been vehemently opposed to imperial plans, on the grounds of cost, stating unambiguously, ‘as long as I am Reichskanzler we shall not pursue a colonial policy’. However, in the 1880s the German public, gripped by heroic reports of Saharan explorers such as Heinrich Barth and Gustav Nachtigal, became seized by ‘colonial fever’. The German press and the newly formed German Colonial Society began to put increasing pressure on the government to change their approach. There was much public discussion about how the British, French and Portuguese would soon control all of Africa and force German traders out, and that Germany was about to miss the colonial boat.
From the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Bismarck followed Luderitz’s activities and German public opinion with interest. He had been persuaded that – by following the British colonial model of using companies like the East India Company, which financed their own private armies and organised the vast majority of administration themselves – the costs to the Reich of developing colonies would be limited, and the benefits could be substantial. But time was of the essence now, especially as he was hearing rumblings that Britain might make a territorial claim on the Namibian coast. On 19 April 1884 the chancellor informed Luderitz that his putative colony at Angra Pequena would receive full protection from the German state. Four months later, this was formalised as two German naval boats, under captains Schering and Herbig, arrived, flags were raised, and a proclamation read out declaring that this territory was now under the sovereignty of ‘His Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm I’ and was forthwith to be known as the ‘Protectorate of German South-West Africa’.
In October 1884, the European powers gathered at the Berlin Conference, at Bismarck’s official residence on Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, to finalise their spheres of influence in Africa. Although Germany was a late starter, compared to Britain, France and Portugal, it emerged with freedom to establish colonies in four African countries – South-West Africa, East Africa (later Tanganika/Tanzania), Togo and Cameroon – almost a million square miles of territory, with 14 million inhabitants.
But in South-West Africa, in early 1885 Luderitz suffered a series of disasters, died soon afterwards, and by the summer Bismarck’s dream (of an informal colony run by companies, the British model) was threatened. Germany, if it was to continue its interest in South-West Africa, would now have to create a fully state-funded colonial government, including the appointment of an imperial commissioner. But who would be chosen for this important colonial role – a role that will cement Germany’s ‘ownership’ of South-West Africa and begin the process of dispossessing the indigenous peoples of their land? Bismarck appointed a lawyer, a man whose name has an infamous ring, and provides a telling link between nineteenth-century racial supremacists and twentieth-century genocidists.
2. Dr Heinrich Goering and the ‘Protection Treaties’ (1885–8)
Dr Heinrich Goering – whose son Hermann, fifty-five years later, would oversee the Nazi colonisation of vast swathes of eastern Europe and the subsequent enslavement of millions of Poles and Slavs – takes up his new post in South-West Africa in September 1885. Formerly a judge, his knowledge of law, as well as the Dutch language, are the main reasons why he is appointed by Bismarck; the colonial priority is to negotiate further treaties and alliances between the Reich and the tribal peoples, which will aid the transfer of land ownership to the new colonial power.
Goering and his retinue reach the Herero capital at Okahandja in October 1885, and eventually agree a ‘protection treaty’ with the tribal leader, Maharero Tjamuaha. But all his efforts to negotiate a similar deal with the Nama chief, Hendrik Witbooi, the following year are rebuffed. Witbooi, a leader of exceptional intelligence and courage, wants nothing to do with the German colonisers with their arrogance, uniforms and flags. He writes this to one of Goering’s deputies: ‘You … call yourself a “Representative”. How shall I respond? You are someone else’s representative and I am a free and autonomous man answering to none but God. So I have nothing further to say to you.’
Goering’s tenure as commissioner ends in further ignominy, when the Herero leader Tjamuaha discovers that Goering has built an extension to his villa in Otjimbingwe over the sacred ground of a Herero graveyard. At the end of October 1888 he is summoned to explain himself, and the enraged Tjamuaha, in front of a hundred of his men, promptly nullifies the treaty they had agreed three years earlier. Goering is terrified, believes his life to be in danger, and immediately flees the country, with Germany’s ‘control’ of South-West Africa in tatters.
We learn that Goering later told his son Hermann thrilling tales of his time in the colony; we can only speculate on such imaginative storytelling powers, and smile at his chutzpah in transforming these calamitous years into ‘heroic’ actions:
Young Goering listened, his eyes sparkling with excitement, to his father’s stories about his adventures in bygone days. The inquisitive and imaginative lad was … thrilled by his accounts of his pioneer work as a Reichskommissar for South-West Africa, of his journeys through the Kalahari Desert and his fights with Maharero, the black king of Okahandja.
But although the fights with Maharero may have been fiction, the impacts of such stories on an entire generation of young Germans, such as Hermann, were real enough – in fact extremely dangerous – helping to create a potent myth of the German struggle for Lebensraum, a struggle that was predicated on the destruction of ‘inferior races’. A concept that the children of imperial Germany at the turn of the century would have grown up with, and found entirely natural.
3. Captain Curt von François: ‘nothing but relentless severity’ (1889–93)
Goering’s replacement arrived in June 1889 – a hardened Prussian army officer, Captain Curt von François, who had made his reputation as a mercenary contributing to King Leopold’s rule of terror in the Belgian Congo in the late 1880s. François’ racial fanaticism can be summed up by his view that ‘the Europeans have failed to give the black man the right kind of treatment … nothing but relentless severity will lead to success’. He soon strengthens the German military presence in South-West Africa, and eventually establishes a new headquarters and fortress in the middle of Hereroland at Windhoek (still the capital of Namibia today).
This begins to attract the first German settlers, who start to set up farms in the vicinity, reassured by the protection of the large fort. Soon, with the beginning of Windhoek’s expansion, the creation of a postal service and regular shipping links to Germany, the colonial outpost begins to take shape. He negotiates a new protection treaty with the Herero in 1890, because he has identified the key threat to German interests as the well-armed Witbooi Nama in the south, under the charismatic leadership of Hendrik Witbooi. At the beginning of 1893 François is at last sent the additional force of 250 soldiers he’s been requesting from Germany; finally he can begin the military action he’s contemplated for many months – but this is not to be an open battle between the army of the Germans and the warriors of the Nama.