After a skirmish at Okanjira on 9 April, the Herero retreat to the north, and at Oviumbo on 13 April they inflict a crushing defeat on Leutwein’s forces, ambushing them from the hills above, and surrounding the Germans. The German forces are only saved from being completely wiped out by the coming of darkness, when Leutwein orders an ignominious retreat back to Okahandja. The news of this shocking defeat provokes a storm of outrage back in Germany, and Leutwein is informed on 9 May that he is to be relieved of his military duties, though he will be allowed to stay on as governor for a while.
5. General Lothar von Trotha: Annihilation (1904–5)
The new military commander, landing at Swakopmund on 11 June 1904, is General Lothar von Trotha, a name infamous in Namibia to this day. He was a veteran of ruthless colonial repression in German East Africa and China – where, in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, he established his uncompromising reputation by ordering mass hangings of rebels and burnings of entire villages and their populations. He is proud of his racial-supremacist views, extreme even by the standards of the day, relishing the fight against the ‘lower races’ of the world, and the Unmenschen (non-humans), as he describes them in his journal on the voyage to South-West Africa. Just after his arrival, he also writes this, which proves to be terrifyingly prophetic:
I know enough tribes in Africa … they are all alike. They only respond to force. It was and is my policy to use force with terrorism and even brutality. I shall annihilate the revolting tribes with rivers of blood and rivers of gold. Only after a complete uprooting will something emerge.
When von Trotha and Leutwein meet in Windhoek they clash straight away, with von Trotha saying that the governor has no understanding of the realities of war, and immediately declares a state of emergency, effectively sidelining Leutwein’s civilian powers completely. For the next six weeks von Trotha sees his military strength grow to an army of over 5,000 soldiers, and he plans his strategy.
The Herero, 50,000 in number by now, have moved again, further north, to their spiritual home – the plateau known as Waterberg (Water Mountain). This place, where a forest of ancient fig trees grows, is a sacred site for the people; it is the place where, according to Herero creation myth, the first ancestors had come down from heaven, climbing through the branches of the fig trees. It had also become the main meeting place for Herero tribes to come together to make decisions. Under the Waterberg there are deep and plentiful underground aquifers which provide water for people and animals – the last water before the hundreds of miles of desert, known to the Herero as the Omaheke (meaning sandveld – dry sandy land), stretching out to the east and the south. Here, Samuel Maharero and the other tribal chiefs now hold their councils, and try to agree on a strategy, knowing the Germans will soon be coming. Based on their previous experience of German behaviour, many expect them to offer negotiations, and Maharero puts out diplomatic feelers to this end. But the Herero could not have been more wrong about their adversaries.
By early July, von Trotha’s army assembled in Windhoek is now 6,000 strong, paid for by vast loans raised by the Colonial Department back in Germany, where an atmosphere of jingoistic aggression has encouraged thousands of young men to volunteer to fight. From the very beginning von Trotha is only interested in the total destruction of the Herero. In his own words, he now decided to ‘encircle the Herero masses around Waterberg and … annihilate them with an instantaneous blow’. He dismisses out of hand the advice of experienced officers who suggest that Germany should enter into peace negotiations, and in the early days of August 1904, von Trotha and his six huge battalions leave Windhoek and begin to encircle the Waterberg.
At 6 a.m. on 11 August, von Trotha launches the first ferocious assault on the Herero. For nine hours artillery and shells rain down on the encampment, killing hundreds, not discriminating between fighters and civilians. When the warriors try to break through the German lines they are mown down again and again by the powerful Maxim machine guns. Only one corner of the encirclement – in the south-east – appears to be weaker than the rest, and by late afternoon the Herero finally manage to breach the German lines here. And by nightfall tens of thousands of Herero have escaped through this narrow gap.
However, what appeared to be salvation is in reality a fatal chimera. The Herero have fallen straight into von Trotha’s trap – because this gap leads only to the Omaheke desert, which in the middle of summer will kill far more effectively than any number of Maxim guns or artillery. He had left the south-eastern force, under Major von der Heyde, deliberately smaller and less well armed than the other five battalions, in the hope that the Herero would break through at this point and then have only the desert in front of them. In the next days and weeks von Trotha sends units after the retreating Herero, into the furnace of the Omaheke, but when Herero are found, no prisoners are to be taken. As an officer recorded in his diary: ‘We had been explicitly told … that what we were dealing with was the extermination of the whole tribe, nothing living was to be spared.’ And so, in the next period, whenever the units come across Herero survivors, the vast majority are systematically executed – men, women and children alike.
But von Trotha knows that some Herero may try to return towards the Waterberg over the next weeks, and so on 16 and 26 August he issues orders to cut off access to any waterholes near the edge of the desert, and then deploys many troops all along the 250-kilometre western perimeter of the Omaheke in a chain, to ensure that no Herero can return and access the food and water of the Waterberg. The Herero’s fate is now effectively sealed – they cannot go back, so they can only continue across hundreds of miles of desert, with summer temperatures touching well above forty degrees centigrade, in the hope of reaching the British colony of Bechuanaland (Botswana today). Of course, only a tiny minority of the people have the strength to reach this border.fn9 The German units sent into the desert in pursuit of the Herero witness apocalyptic scenes, one soldier reporting that ‘whoever took part in the chase through the sandveld lost his belief in righteousness on earth’, another, ‘cattle and men [lay] dead and dying and staring blankly … a number of babies lay helplessly languishing by mothers whose breasts hung down long and flabby. Others were lying alone, still living, with eyes and nose full of flies … at noon we halted by the waterholes which were filled to the brim with corpses.’
Over the next weeks, the combination of the furnace heat and the virtually waterless Omaheke claims thousands more Herero lives. The few who’ve managed to bring cattle with them into the desert survive by drinking their cows’ blood, but the vast majority die, most of them after having used their last energies digging into the desert with their hands, in despairing attempts to find water. As Cocker relates:
The Herero … imprisoned in the Omaheke, dug desperately in its lifeless sands for water. In some places the Germans found a hundred separate holes, each two to three metres deep. In their craving for moisture some had drunk at the women’s breasts, or slit the throats of their cattle and drunk the blood … but most simply succumbed to their exhaustion and lay down to die.
In the rare cases when they did find a trace of water – maybe twenty-five to thirty feet below the desert – chaos usually ensued, with thirst-crazed people crushing each other to reach the water, often being buried alive in the process as these improvised wells collapsed. The German Official History of the Battle of Waterberg ends with the chilling statement I first came across in the late 1990s: ‘The month-long sealing of desert areas, carried out with iron severity, completed the work of annihilation. The death rattles of the dying and their insane screams of fury … resounded in the sublime silence of infinity.’