Any white men who have lived among natives find it almost impossible to regard them as human beings at all in any European sense. They need centuries of training as human beings, with endless patience, strictness and justice.
Given this febrile atmosphere among the colonists, and growing anger among the Herero and Nama at the regular mistreatment of their people by the settlers, it didn’t require much for the situation to escalate. The blue touchpaper was lit in the tiny settlement of Warmbad on the southern border of South-West Africa. It all begins in late October 1903 with a dispute between the leader of a minority tribal group (the Bondelswarts) and a Herero woman on her way to the Cape Colony (later South Africa). The local German commander, a Lieutenant Jobst, hears about this dispute, and summons the Bondelswarts leader, Jan Christian, to appear before him. Christian ignores the order as the dispute has already been resolved, and he doesn’t believe Germany should have any power regarding inter-ethnic disputes anyway. Jobst, enraged at this lack of respect, as he sees it, goes round to Christian’s house with two aides. Christian is dragged out of his house, resisting furiously; Jobst then orders the soldiers to shoot him, which they do. Before he dies, he whispers, ‘Now the war starts.’ Jobst and the two soldiers are then killed by the Bondelswarts.
As news of these deaths reach Windhoek and Berlin, the reaction is predictably hysterical. The kaiser insists on sending huge military reinforcements immediately to all of Germany’s territories in Africa, ‘less we lose all our colonial possessions’, and Leutwein (though privately furious with Jobst for escalating such a minor dispute) is forced to issue a declaration of war against the Bondelswarts. In late November 1903, he leads a force of soldiers 500 miles south to crush the supposed rebellion, leaving the arrogant and inexperienced Lieutenant Zurn in charge of northern Hereroland, which turns out to be a catastrophic mistake. Zurn is based at the fortress of Okahandja, the Herero capital, where Samuel Maharero has his villa and headquarters. In early January 1904, with Leutwein still away in the south of the country, Zurn picks up a rumour from a local trader that hundreds of armed Herero are on their way to the town. Without attempting to establish the facts, Zurn orders all the whites to evacuate their houses and take shelter inside the fort. He then sends a telegram to Berlin reporting (quite inaccurately) that the Herero uprising had begun. Soon afterwards, the German soldiers begin to fire from the fort into the town, and the real war begins.
Zurn’s reputation with the local Herero had already been sullied by two deeply offensive actions. Firstly, he had ordered Herero skulls to be exhumed from revered ancestral graves in Okahandja in 1903, so he could then sell them to race scientists back in Germany to make him some extra income. And secondly, he had demanded in December 1903 that northern Herero leaders transfer significant amounts of land to German settlers, and that they agree to establish a second Herero reservation. When the leaders refused to sign this treaty, Zurn simply forged their signatures and announced that the changes had been agreed. Given all of this provocation, it is not surprising that Samuel Maharero wrote to Leutwein in early March 1904, stating: ‘this is not my war … it is that of Zurn’. Maharero’s conduct of the ensuing war was in stark contrast to the Germans’ – he specifically commanded that there should be no violence against Europeans in general, or Boers, or Nama, and no German women or children were to be targeted either. The Germans had no such compunction: their war against the Herero was brutal and total – lynchings became commonplace, and from late January three gallows were erected in Windhoek to hang any captured Herero.
Even though they did not instigate it, the Herero are well prepared for war. By December 1903 Maharero and the tribe elders had been discussing if they could continue to put up with such provocations by Zurn and the German settlers. By early January they become aware that Leutwein and the majority of the German soldiers have travelled south, leaving Zurn and only a small force behind in Windheok and Okahandja. So when Zurn’s soldiers open fire on them, in Okahandja at the beginning of January 1904, the Herero respond with a force that overwhelms the Germans. On 12 January the town is seized, the stores looted and burned; the fortress is then besieged for several days, but eventually German soldiers from Windhoek manage to break through and bring reinforcements. From 12–18 January the Herero control the centre of the country, with the German garrisons largely confined to the towns, sheltering in their forts. In this period the Herero fighters attack dozens of remote German farms and settlements, killing more than 120 German settlers and traders. But, in the majority of cases, Maharero’s order not to target non-Germans, or German women and children, is respected.
Although the Herero experience these early victories, their key strategic failure is that they do not capture the main towns and forts of Windhoek and Okahandja, which would have given them the critical guns and ammunition they were now running short of. And on 27 January, Captain Franke and his 2nd Field Company manage to lift the siege of Okahandja’s fort. Maharero and his fighters retreat to the east, into the Onjati mountains; there is then a fierce six-hour battle here, which leaves a hundred Herero dead, but heavy casualties are also inflicted on the Germans, who lose a fifth of their troops. However, Franke continues on and by 4 February also manages to lift the siege of the town of Omaruru in the north.
Further skirmishes and battles take place in the rest of February, March and early April 1904, with heavy casualties on both sides – for instance, at Okaharui on 3 April, forty-nine Germans are killed or seriously wounded, and forty-two Herero die. But what is perhaps most remarkable, behind these statistics, is that on paper at least, the Germans have an overwhelming advantage, in terms of numbers of soldiers, modernity of weapons (such as the Maxim machine guns) and quantity of ammunition. Yet the Herero’s intimate knowledge of the landscape, especially the mountains, enable them to carry out a strikingly effective kind of insurgent warfare, which means that for three months one of the largest military powers in Europe cannot defeat them.
Meanwhile, hundreds of soldiers are pouring into South-West Africa from Germany each week, with formidable additonal supplies of artillery and Maxim guns. Among the volunteers is a thirty-five-year-old Bavarian lieutenant, Franz von Epp, a keen believer in the Lebensraum project and an extreme Social Darwinist who views colonial war as a racial crusade. (Later he is to become General von Epp, and it is his right-wing militia that a young Adolf Hitler joins in Munich in 1922.fn8) By 1 March over 2,000 new German soldiers have arrived in South-West Africa. Leutwein has finally got back to Okahandja by this time, but the Herero, now a fighting force of 4,000 men, have, after their initial attacks, withdrawn to the mountains near Okanjira fifty miles to the east. Leutwein’s instinct is to negotiate with Samuel Maharero, but he is ordered only to ‘relentlessly suppress’ the uprising, so, on 7 April 1904, he reluctantly leads a force of 800 soldiers out of Okahandja towards the mountains. He already realises that the powers in Berlin, and many settlers within South-West Africa, will only be satisfied with total destruction of the Herero – writing (without any effect, as it later transpired) to the Colonial Department: ‘I do not concur with those fanatics who want to see the Herero destroyed altogether. Apart from the fact that a people of 60,000 or 70,000 are not so easily annihilated, I consider it a bad mistake from an economic point of view.’