On the night of 12 April 1893 the first German massacre in South-West Africa takes place in the valley of Hoornkrans, a hundred miles south-west of Windhoek. Hendrik Witbooi and around 1,000 of his people are sleeping in their clay huts spread across the valley. François informs his 200 soldiers that their mission that night is ‘to destroy the tribe of the Witboois’, but this is to be no conventional battle. The soldiers climb the steep slopes above the valley and encircle the encampment, and then, just as the sun starts to rise, with Hoornkrans still slumbering, François signals for the assault to begin. In the next half an hour, 200 rifles fire 16,000 rounds of ammunition, pounding the valley below. In the smoke and chaos and screaming, somehow Hendrik manages to order the Witbooi fighters to regroup at the far end of the valley, expecting the Germans to follow. But instead François orders his men to fix their bayonets and charge down the slopes into Hoornkrans, where they start butchering all those left behind – women, children, the sick and the elderly – and razing the place to the ground. Hendrik’s twelve-year-old son is shot trying to run away, then tries to crawl towards the Witbooi fighters, but a German soldier spots him and shoots him in the head. An eyewitness describes the carnage:
One woman was killed while her child clung to her screaming; a soldier shot the child through the head, blowing it to pieces … Houses were set on fire and burnt over the bodies of dead women and children … On another side of the camp all the women were killed except two, of whom one was wounded.
When the Germans finally leave, taking with them eighty Witbooi women to be used as slaves in the Windhoek garrison, the extent of the horror becomes evident – eighty women and children, and eight elderly men, all massacred.
François reports a military triumph to his superiors in Berlin, boasting that fifty Witbooi soldiers had been killed (a complete fiction), and that ‘any further resistance on the part of the Witboois is out of the question’. But it soon emerges that the overwhelming majority of those killed were women and children, and vivid eyewitness accounts of the massacre now begin to appear in British newspapers, directly challenging François’ account. Debate is soon raging in Berlin and London, with many muttering, shocked but somewhat hypocritically, that ‘European nations do not make war in that way!’
But it is not concern about François’ brutal behaviour at Hoornkrans that eventually sees him recalled to Germany, rather it is his inability to defeat Hendrik Witbooi. Remarkably, after Hoornkrans the Nama manage to regroup, and Hendrik conducts several successful raids on François and his garrison in Windhoek, at one point even cutting off the German supply routes to the coast. François and his men are confined to their fort for months. In stark contrast to François’ slaughter of non-combatants, Witbooi’s actions only target German soldiers, leaving settler farmers and their families unharmed. By autumn 1893 disquiet in Germany has spread, and in a Reichstag debate a speaker articulates the views of many when he states that ‘François … must be replaced by someone else … Hendrik Witbooi is the real master of the country and François is no match for him.’
4. Governor Theodor Leutwein: ‘divide and rule’, the British strategy (1894–1904)
On New Year’s Day 1894, François’ replacement, Theodor Leutwein, arrives in the new port of Swakopmund and then journeys to Windhoek to take up his position as governor. His background in law and diplomacy could not have been more different to François’, and he knew that the Herero and Nama should not be underestimated. Leutwein had studied Britain’s global experience of colonialism in detail, and wants to enact one of their main principles – the policy of ‘divide and rule’ among different tribal groups. He is quite explicit about this strategy, writing that he intends to make ‘the native tribes serve our cause and to play them off one against the other’. Rather than spending money and using soldiers from Germany, surely it was more intelligent ‘to influence the natives to kill each other for us’.
First of all he picks off two of the smaller Nama tribes, and forces them to sign treaties accepting German sovereignty. Then he turns his attentions to Hendrik Witbooi, sending him a series of very direct letters urging him to make peace, and then, when these do not work, in August 1894, launching an attack on Witbooi and his forces in the Naukluft mountains. After thirteen days of relentless artillery bombardment, Hendrik finally accepts Leutwein’s offer of a peace treaty. The terms of this deal are that the Nama are to return to the south of the country near Gibeon, where a German garrison would now be stationed. However, the Nama are to retain control over their lands and their animals, and are still to be responsible for maintaining ‘peace and order in [the] territory’. These terms do not go down well, either in the settler community or back in Berlin, where many believe Leutwein’s offer to the Nama to be far too ‘generous’.
With the Nama now effectively neutralised, Leutwein then sets about creating as many divisions as possible among the Herero. This is made easier by the fact that there is a succession dispute following the death of Tjamuaha, with Samuel Maharero and his cousin Nikodemus competing for the role of ‘paramount chief’. Samuel had been educated by missionaries and converted to Christianity, and adopted many European habits, living in a grand villa, wearing expensive, Western clothes and developing an addiction to brandy and fine wines. Nikodemus was far more traditional, a proven leader for the eastern Herero, and more popular with the people. Leutwein shrewdly considers all of this, noting privately all of Samuel’s weaknesses, and then declares German support for his election, writing later to the new German chancellor, Caprivi, ‘It is self-evident that a politically divided Herero nation is more easy to deal with than a united and coherent one’.
With Samuel safely elected, in December 1894 Leutwein negotiates an agreement with the Herero to limit the southern boundary of their territory to enable further German settlement – despite the fact that the nomadic, grazing livelihood of the Herero had known no definitive borders for hundreds of years. This soon creates resentment, especially with the eastern Herero, some of whose land Samuel has blithely signed away. Eventually Nikodemus’s patience snaps, and in April 1896 he attacks a German patrol and then a government military post at Gobabis. Under the terms of the various protection treaties that have been signed, Samuel Maharero and Hendrik Witbooi now are forced to fight against Nikodemus and the eastern Herero. All Leutwein’s cynical planning of divide and rule is beginning to bear fruit. The rebellion is crushed, Nikodemus is subsequently executed, and enormous bitterness is generated between the main Herero people and their eastern cousins.
To add insult to injury, the mid to late 1890s are disastrous for the Herero in other ways. Rinderpest (cattle plague) arrives in the country in 1896–7 and devastates the herds, some communities losing 95 per cent of their stock. The resulting malnutrition and disease leads to many Herero abandoning their way of life and seeking work and help at the German settlements and mission stations. Some Herero are forced to sell prime grazing land, giving German settlers more of a foothold in the country. There is even discussion among the colonial authorities – who had studied how American settlers had dispossessed the indigenous Indians – about establishing reservations for the Herero, to give the Germans even greater control of the land. This approach is very much the international fashion – Theodore Roosevelt (soon to be US president) had written his book The Winning of the West between 1889 and 1896, which spelt out the lessons of the American experience: