*
Throughout the Herero uprising, and their subsequent extermination from August 1904 onwards, the position the Nama took was extremely problematic. In line with Leutwein’s ‘divide and rule’, strategy, Hendrik Witbooi had signed a treaty with the Germans, which meant that not only would the Nama stay neutral in the event of a German conflict with the Herero, they were actually supposed to provide armed support for the colonists. Samuel Maharero knew this, and in January 1904, at the beginning of the Herero uprising, he had written a powerful plea to Hendrik Witbooi to disregard this treaty and join their struggle:
I appeal to you my brother, do not shy away from this uprising, but make your voice heard so that all Africa may take up arms against the Germans. Let us die fighting rather than die of maltreatment, imprisonment or some other tragedy. Tell the kapteins down there to rise up and do battle.
Tragically, this letter was intercepted, and so the possibility of a great anti-colonial alliance between the Herero and the Witbooi never got off the ground. And so, in line with their treaty agreement, a contingent of one hundred Witbooi men were sent to fight alongside the Germans at Waterberg in August 1904. Six weeks later nineteen survivors reached the village of Rietmont, where Hendrik Witbooi and his key leaders were staying. They heard the news of the Witbooi survivors – about the massacres of the Herero after Waterberg – with heavy hearts. They also realised that the often-spoken rumour that ‘once the Government has finished with the Herero, they will come down to the people of Namaland’ was now turning into a distinct possibility.
So it wasn’t until early October 1904 that Hendrik Witbooi belatedly began the Nama uprising against the Germans. It is impossible to know what might have happened had Witbooi and Maharero been able to co-ordinate their attacks against the colonists, but as it was, the Nama only started their war at the moment that the vast majority of the Herero had already been destroyed following Waterberg. In the first wave of attacks on colonial settlements and farms, forty German soldiers and settlers were killed, all men. Just like Maharero, Witbooi insisted that women and children were not to be harmed. The Nama were determined not to make the same mistakes that the Herero had made – open battles could only benefit the Germans with their vastly superior machine guns and artillery, so this war was to be a guerrilla campaign, fought in the desert, mountains and gorges – a landscape that the Nama knew intimately, including the locations of all the hidden waterholes. This knowledge, and strategy, was to given them a decisive advantage over the colonists. The first exchange of the war occurred at Auob in December 1904, and saw the Germans heavily defeated, with the loss of fifty-nine soldiers. von Trotha took over command of the war in April 1905, warning the Nama, in another proclamation, that they would ‘suffer the same fate as the Herero’, but his tactics proved totally ineffective in the south, where the Nama insurgency went from strength to strength.
The Germans tried to negotiate a peace settlement in July 1905, but Hendrik Witbooi refused, writing back that ‘peace will spell death for me and my nation’. He launched another series of attacks on German convoys in autumn 1905, but at Fahlgras on 29 October, Witbooi was badly wounded, and he died three days later. With his death, and the loss of their inspirational leader, the alliance of Nama tribes began to disintegrate. Witbooi’s son, Isaak, and many of the younger Nama decided to continue fighting, while other elders began peace negotiations with the Germans. But all of this came too late for von Trotha, who had asked to be relieved of his duties, and departed from Luderitz on 2 November 1905. As he arrived in the port he received a telegram stating that Hendrik Witbooi was dead. Back in Germany, he was awarded the highest honours for his devoted service to the Reich, and told that he ‘deserves the warmest gratitude of the fatherland’.
6. Governor Friedrich von Lindequist: from ‘Extermination Through Work’ to the ‘Settler Paradise’ (1905–14)
At the end of November 1905 South-West Africa’s new governor arrives – Friedrich von Lindequist, who had been deputy governor under Leutwein from 1894 to 1898. His first priority is to deal with the ongoing war against those Nama clans who have not yet surrendered, but he does this by diplomacy rather than fighting, promising generous terms of surrender. One by one, fatally, the clans accept von Lindequist’s promises, and by March 1906, the last of the Nama groupings has laid down its weapons. The Nama, 2,000 of them, are then transported to Windhoek, to the concentration camp just outside the town, already housing 4,000 Herero in terrible conditions. They realise too late that they have been tricked, and a few days after their arrival the new governor addresses them, saying that they are collectively guilty of murder, and that they ‘all deserve to be executed’. They will atone for their crimes by being put to work.
And so begins the next phase of German colonisation of South-West Africa, which can, without hyperbole, be called ‘extermination through work’ – a continuation of the genocide of the Herero and Nama, but through forced labour rather than guns. Two railway projects (in the north, connecting Swakopmund and the mines of Otavi, and in the south, connecting Luderitz and Aus) take the majority of the slave labourers. Already almost 7,000 Herero prisoners are deployed on this work throughout the country – ‘public-private partnerships’ involving the colony and two German private corporations – Arthur Koppel AGfn10 on the northern line, and Firma Lenz on the southern one. Arthur Koppel takes three years to complete the line from Swakopmund to the Tsuneb mine near Otavi – 352 miles, making it the longest narrow-gauge railway in the world. We do not have records of the profits this made for this company, nor the cost in numbers of Herero lives. But Firma Lenz, of Hamburg, did keep detailed records of its Herero slave labourers, noting carefully that 1,359 out of 2,014 prisoners had died creating the Luderitz to Aus railway between 1906 and 1907. A clerk employed back in the Hamburg head office even calculated, with bureaucratic precision, that this represented a casualty rate of 67.48 per cent.
This inhumanity, though, however appalling, cannot be compared to what happens on Shark Island, less than half a mile west of the port of Luderitz. Originally this ‘island’ – actually not an island, but a narrow peninsula – has been used as a quarantine station for arriving German troops, but in early 1905 it becomes a concentration camp for Herero prisoners. From the beginning it has a dreadful reputation, with some Herero preferring to commit suicide rather than be sent there. It has an extremely harsh climate, with south Atlantic winds pummelling the island, often bringing air from the Antarctic and sub-zero temperatures; and sea fogs would add damp to the bitter cold.
On 9 September 1906, almost 2,000 Nama prisoners are marched from the town of Luderitz to the narrow causeway connecting the mainland to Shark Island. As they walk towards the camp, on the northern tip of the island, they can see 1,000 Herero prisoners behind the walls of barbed wire – they are starving, emaciated and traumatised. Within weeks, the Nama would be in a similar condition. In October a missionary records that every week 50 Herero and 15–20 Nama are dying there. By Christmas, this has risen to more than 120 deaths per week. Food provision is almost non-existent, mainly uncooked rice and flour; prisoners scavenge for anything edible on or around the island, but soon even the seaweed and limpets have been eaten. The makeshift huts and sacking for clothes can’t possibly keep out the cold. All these conditions mean starvation, illness and death is virtually inevitable.