Herero and Namaqua Genocide

Herero survivors after an escape through the arid desert of Omaheke

The Herero and Namaqua Genocide is considered the first genocide of the 20th century.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} It occurred from 1904 until 1907 in German South-West Africa (modern day Namibia), during the scramble for Africa.

On January 12, 1904, the Herero people, led by Samuel Maharero, rebelled against German colonial rule. In August, German general Lothar von Trotha defeated the Herero in the Battle of Waterberg and drove them into the desert of Omaheke, where most of them died of thirst. In October, the Nama people also rebelled against the Germans only to suffer a similar fate.

In total, between 24,000 and 65,000 Herero (estimated at 50% to 70% of the total Herero population) and 10,000 Nama (estimated 50% of the total Nama population) were killed. The genocide was characterized by widespread death by starvation and from consumption of well water which had been poisoned by the German colonial army in the Namib Desert.^[6][7][8]

In 1985, the United Nations' Whitaker Report recognized Germany's attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of South-West Africa as one of the earliest attempts of genocide in the 20th century. The German government recognized and apologized for the events in 2004.^[9]

Background

Theodor Leutwein (far left) with Samuel Maharero (fourth from left) in 1895.

German Schutztruppe in combat with the Herero in a painting by Richard Knötel.

The Herero were originally a tribe of cattle herders living in a region of German South West Africa, presently modern Namibia. The area occupied by the Herero was known as Damaraland.

During the scramble for Africa, the British made it clear that they were not interested in the territory. In August 1884 it was declared a German protectorate; at that time, it was the only overseas German territory deemed suitable for white settlement. From the outset, there was resistance by the Khoikhoi to the German occupation, although a tenuous peace was worked out in 1894. In that year, Theodor Leutwein became governor of the territory, which underwent a period of rapid development, while the German government sent the Schutztruppe, imperial colonial troops, to pacify the region.^[10]

German colonial rule was far from egalitarian; natives were routinely used as slave labourers, and their lands were frequently confiscated and given to European colonists, who were encouraged to settle on land taken from the natives, causing a great deal of resentment. Over the next decade, the land and the cattle that were essential to Herero and Nama lifestyles passed into the hands of German settlers arriving in South-West Africa.^[11]

Though diamonds are often cited as one of the major German interests in the area and the primary reason for committing genocide, reports of their discovery only emerged in 1908. Though German colonists did seize and exploit much Herero/Nama soil, as far as current documentation can tell, diamonds did not play a role in Germany's later decision to annihilate the natives of this land.^[12]

Revolts

In 1903, some of the Nama tribes rose in revolt under the leadership of Hendrik Witbooi.^[10] A number of factors led the Herero to join them in arms in January 1904.

Unsurprisingly, one of the major issues was land rights. The Herero had already ceded over a quarter of their 130,000 square kilometres (50,000 sq mi) to German colonists by 1903,^[13] prior to the completion of the Otavi railroad line running from the African coast to inland German settlements.^[14] Completion of this line would have rendered the German colonies much more accessible and would have ushered a new wave of Europeans into the area.^[15] Discussion of the possibility of establishing and placing the Herero in native reserves was further proof of the German colonists' sense of ownership over the land.^[16]

A new policy on debt collection, enforced in November 1903, also played a role in the Herero uprising. For many years, the Herero population had fallen in the habit of borrowing money from white traders at great interest. For a long time, much of this debt went uncollected and accumulated, as most Hereros had no means to pay. To correct this growing problem, Governor Leutwein decreed with good intentions that all debts not paid within the next year would be voided.^[17] In the absence of hard cash, traders would often seize cattle, or whatever objects of value they could get their hands on, in order to recoup their loans as quickly as possible. This fostered a feeling of resentment towards the Germans on the part of the Herero people, which escalated to hopelessness when they saw that German officials were complicit in this scheme.^[13]

Underlying this development were the racial tensions between the two groups; the average German colonist viewed native Africans as a lowly source of cheap labour, and others welcomed their extermination.^[13] In illustration of the gap between the rights of a European and an African, the German Colonial League held that, in regards to legal matters, the testimony of seven Africans was equivalent to that of one white man.^[18]

The Herero judged the situation intolerable and revolted in early 1904. Led by Chief Samuel Maharero, they surrounded Okahandja and cut links to Windhoek, the colonial capital. Maharero issued a manifesto in which he forbid his troops the killing of Englishmen, Boers, uninvolved tribes as well as women and children in general.^[19]

The timing of their attack was ideal. After successfully asking a large Herero tribe to surrender their weapons, Governor Leutwein was convinced that they and the rest of the native population were essentially pacified and half the German troops stationed in his colony had been withdrawn.^[20]

Leutwein was forced to request reinforcements and an experienced officer from the German government in Berlin.^[21] Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha was appointed Oberbefehlshaber (Supreme Commander) of German South-West Africa on 3 May, arriving with an expeditionary force of 14,000 troops on 11 June.

Leutwein was subordinate to the Colonial Department of the Prussian Foreign Office, which reported to Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow while general Trotha reported to the military German General Staff, which was only subordinate to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Leutwein wanted to defeat the most determined Herero rebels and negotiate a surrender with the remainder to achieve a political settlement.^[22] Trotha, however, planned to crush the native resistance through military force. General Trotha's rationale for the use of violence is clearly based upon his racism; defending his policy of extermination he stated that: "My intimate knowledge of many central African tribes (Bantu and others) has everywhere convinced me of the necessity that the Negro does not respect treaties but only brute force" ^[23] It must be noted that at the time this overt racism was extremely common among European (and White) societies in general.

Genocide

Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha

Central figure Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, the Oberbefehlshaber (Supreme Commander) of the protection force in German South West Africa, in Keetmanshoop during the Herero uprising, 1904.

General Trotha openly stated his proposed solution to end the resistance of the Herero people in a letter, before the Battle of Waterberg:^[24]

Trotha's troops defeated 3,000–5,000 Herero combatants at the Battle of Waterberg on 11–12 August 1904 but were unable to encircle and eliminate the retreating survivors.^[22] As the Hereros were retreating, Jan Cloete, acting as a guide for the Germans, witnessed the atrocities committed by the German troops and deposed the following statement:^[25]

The survivors retreated with their families towards Bechuanaland, after a British offer of asylum under the condition that they would not continue the revolt on British soil. Some 24,000 Hereros managed to flee into the Kalahari Desert in the hope of reaching the British protectorate. German patrols later found skeletons around holes (25–50 feet deep) that were dug up in a vain attempt to find water . Maherero and 1,000 men crossed the Kalahari into Bechuanaland . On 2 October, Trotha issued a warning to the Hereros:

Trotha then ordered that captured Herero males were to be executed, while women and children were to be driven into the desert.^[22] The German general staff was well aware of the atrocities that were taking place, indeed it is noted in its official publication, named Der Kampf, that:

Governor Leutwein, later relieved of his duties, complained to Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow about Trotha's actions, seeing the general's orders as intruding upon the civilian colonial jurisdiction and ruining any chance of a political settlement.^[28] According to Mahmood Mamdani, opposition to the policy of annihilation was largely the consequence of the fact that colonial officials looked at the Herero people as potential source of labor, thus economically important.^[29] For instance, Governor Leutwien wrote that:

Having no authority over the military, Chancellor Bülow could only advise the Kaiser that Trotha's actions were "contrary to Christian and humanitarian principle, economically devastating and damaging to Germany's international reputation."^[28] After a political battle in Berlin between the civilian government and the military, Wilhelm II countermanded Trotha's decree of 2 October on 8 December , but the massacres had already begun. Upon the arrival of the new orders at the end of 1904, prisoners were herded into concentration camps and given as slave labourers to German businesses-men. Many died later of overwork and malnutrition.

Concentration camps

Herero people chained in 1904 by German troops.

Survivors, mostly women and children, were eventually put in concentration camps, such as that at Shark Island, similar to those used in British South Africa during the Second Boer War. The German authorities gave each Herero a number and meticulously recorded every death, whether in the camps or from forced labor, even including the name of each dead person in their reports. German enterprises were able to rent Hereros in order to use their manpower, and workers' deaths were permitted and even reported to the German authorities. Malnutrition, disease and forced labour killed an estimated 50–80% of the entire Herero population by 1908, when the camps were closed.

An official report on the camps in 1908 described the mortality rate as 45.2% of all prisoners held in the five camps. The prisoners were fenced in, either by thorn-bush fences or by barbed wire, and people were typically crammed into small areas. The Windhoek camp held about 5000 prisoners of war in 1906. Food rations were minimal, consisting of a daily allowance of a handful of uncooked rice, some salt and water. Rice was an unfamiliar foodstuff to the Herero and Namaqua people , and the uncommon diet may have contributed to the high death rate. Diseases in the camps were rampant and poorly controlled. A lethal combination of a high concentration of people in a small confined area, lack of medical attention, poor unhygienic living quarters, and lack of protective clothing contributed to the spread of diseases, such as typhoid, which spread rapidly.

Beatings and abuse were also part of life in the camps, and the sjambok was often used to beat prisoners who were forced to work; a September 28, 1905, article in the South African newspaper Cape Argus detailed some of the abuse, with the heading: "In German S. W. Africa: Further Startling Allegations: Horrible Cruelty". In an interview with Percival Griffith, "an accountant of profession, who owing to hard times, took up on transport work at Angra Pequena, Lüderitz", related his experiences.

During the war, a number of people from the Cape (in modern day South Africa) sought employment as transport riders for German troops in Namibia. Upon their return to the Cape, some of these people recounted their stories, including those of the imprisonment and genocide of the Herero and Namaqua people. Fred Cornell, a British aspirant diamond prospector, was in Lüderitz when the Shark Island camp was being used. Cornell wrote of the camp:

The concentration camp on Shark Island, in the coastal town of Lüderitz, was the worst of the five Namibian camps. Lüderitz lies in southern Namibia, flanked by desert and ocean. In the harbour lies Shark Island, which then was connected to the mainland only by a small causeway. The island is now, as it was then, barren and characterised by solid rock carved into surreal formations by the hard ocean winds. The camp was placed on the far end of the relatively small island, where the prisoners would have suffered complete exposure to the strong winds that sweep Lüderitz for most of the year. The first prisoners to arrive were, according to a missionary called Kuhlman , 487 Herero ordered to work on the railway between Lüderitz and Kubub. In October 1905, Kuhlman reported the appalling conditions and high death rate among the Herero on the island. Throughout 1906, the island had a steady inflow of prisoners, with 1,790 Nama prisoners arriving on September 9 alone. In the annual report for Lüderitz in 1906, an unidentified clerk remarked that "the Angel of Death" had come to Shark Island. German Commander Von Estorff wrote in a report that approximately 1,700 prisoners had died by April 1907, 1,203 of them Nama. In December 1906, four months after their arrival, 291 Nama died (a rate of more than nine people a day). Missionary reports put the death rate at between 12 and 18 a day; as many as 80% of the prisoners sent to the Shark Island concentration camp never left the island.^[31]

After most Herero males had been killed, the surviving women were forced into prostitution.^[32] Dutch historian Jan-Bart Gewald of the University of Cologne has written that the Germans set up special camps for their troops and that many children were born of German fathers and Herero mothers. Trotha was opposed to contact between natives and settlers, believing that the insurrection was "the beginning of a racial struggle" and fearing that the colonists would be infected by native diseases.^[28]

Number of victims

The German authorities never conducted a census before 1904. A census was performed only in 1905, which revealed that 25,000 Herero remained in German South-West Africa.^[33]

According to the 1985 United Nations' Whitaker Report, some 65,000 Herero (80 percent of the total Herero population) and 10,000 Nama (50% of the total Nama population) were killed between 1904 and 1907. Other estimates give a total of 100,000 killed. However, German author Walter Nuhn states that in 1904 only 40,000 Herero lived in German South-West Africa, and therefore "only 24,000" could have been killed.^[34]

Aftermath

It took until 1908 to fully re-establish the German authority over the territory. At the height of the campaign, some 19,000 German troops were involved. At about the same time, diamonds were discovered in the territory, and this did much to boost its prosperity. However, it was short-lived. In 1915, at the start of World War I, the German colony was taken over and occupied in the South-West Africa Campaign by the Union of South Africa, acting on behalf of the British Imperial Government. South Africa received a League of Nations Mandate over South-West Africa in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles.

Links with the Holocaust

A number of researchers have argued that the Herero genocide set a precedent in Imperial Germany to be later followed by Nazi Germany's establishment of death camps, such as the one at Auschwitz.^[35][36]

Mahmood Mamdani claims that the links between the Holocaust and the Herero Genocide are beyond the execution of an annihilation policy and the establishment of concentration camps. Focusing on a statement written by General Trotha:

Mamdani takes note of the similarity between the aims and desires of the General and the Nazis. In both cases there was a Social Darwinist notion of "cleansing" after which "something new" would "emerge".^[38]

Furthermore, the German geneticist Eugen Fischer came to the concentration camps to conduct medical experiments on race, using Herero people and mulatto offspring of Herero women and German men.^[38] Fischer later became chancellor of the University of Berlin, where he taught medicine to Nazi physicians . One of his prominent students was Josef Mengele, the doctor who made genetic experiments on Jewish children at Auschwitz.^[39]

Later Nazi use of "Lebensraum" and "Konzentrationslager" (concentration camp) suggests an important question: did Wilhelmine colonization and genocide in Namibia influence Nazi plans to conquer and settle Eastern Europe, enslave and murder millions of Slavs, and exterminate Gypsies and Jews? The German experience in Namibia was a crucial precursor to Nazi colonialism and genocide and that personal connections, literature, and public debates served as conduits for communicating colonialist and genocidal ideas and methods from the colony to Germany.^[40]

Recognition and compensation

In 1998, German President Roman Herzog visited Namibia and met Herero leaders. Chief Munjuku Nguvauva demanded a public apology and compensation. Herzog expressed regret but stopped short of an apology. He also pointed out that special reparations were out of the question .

The Hereros filed a lawsuit in the United States in 2001 demanding reparations from the German government and the Deutsche Bank, which financed the German government and companies in Southern Africa. ^{[41] [42]}

On August 16, 2004, at the 100th anniversary of the start of the genocide, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany's Minister for Economic Development and Cooperation, officially apologized for the first time and expressed grief about the genocide committed by Germans, declaring. "We Germans accept our historic and moral responsibility". She ruled out paying special compensations, but promised continued economic aid for Namibia which currently amounts to $14m a year.^[9]

The von Trotha family travelled to Omaruru in October 2007 by invitation of the royal Herero chiefs and publicly apologized for the actions of their relative. Wolf-Thilo von Trotha said:

Peter Katjavivi, a former Namibian ambassador to Germany, demanded in August 2008 that the skulls of Herero and Nama prisoners of the 1904-08 uprising, which were taken to Germany for scientific research to "prove" the superiority of white Europeans over Africans, be returned to Namibia. Katjavivi was reacting to a German television documentary which reported that its investigators had found over 40 of these skulls at two German universities, among them probably the skull of a Nama chief who had died on Shark Island near Luederitz.^[44]

Media

A BBC Documentary [7] explores the Herero/Nama genocide and the circumstances surrounding it.

A short documentary in production, From Herero To Hitler: Planting the Seeds of a Future Genocide, will examine how events in German South-West Africa relate to the actions of Nazi Germany.^[45]

Fictional representations

One chapter of Thomas Pynchon's novel V. (1963) is about the Herero genocide. A group of characters of Herero descent are also present in his Gravity's Rainbow (1974), which hints more than once at the Herero massacre.

See also

• Genocides in history

References

Bibliography and documentaries

• Rachel Anderson, Redressing Colonial Genocide Under International Law: The Hereros' Cause of Action Against Germany, 93 California Law Review 1155 (2005).
• Clark, Christopher (2006). Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600–1947. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard. pp. 776. ISBN 067402385-4. 
• Exterminate all the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist, London, 1996.
• "A Forgotten History-Concentration Camps were used by Germans in South West Africa", Casper W. Erichsen, in the Mail and Guardian, Johannesburg, 17 August 2001.
• Genocide & The Second Reich, BBC Four, David Olusoga, October 2004
• German Federal Archives, Imperial Colonial Office, Vol. 2089, 7 (recto)
• "The Herero and Nama Genocides, 1904-1908", J.B. Gewald, in Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, New York, Macmillan Reference, 2004.
• Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia 1890 - 1923, J.B. Gewald, Oxford, Cape Town, Athens, OH, 1999.
• Let Us Die Fighting: the Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism, 1884-1915, Horst Drechsler, London, 1980.
• "The Revolt of the Hereros", Jon M. Bridgman, Perspectives on Southern Africa, Berkeley, University of California, 1981.
• A probable source for much of this information is Isabell Hull's Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Parts of this entry are nearly word-for-word summaries of Hull's analysis.
• Hull, Isabell (2005) "The Military Campaign in German Southwest Africa, 1904-1907. Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Issue 37, pp. 39-49.
• Zimmerer, Jürgen (2005) "Annihilation in Africa: The 'Race War' in German Southwest Africa (1904-1908) and its Significance for a Global History of Genocide." Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Issue 37, pp. 51–57.

Further reading

• Official German apologies (German)
• The resistance struggle culminates in genocide: 1904-1906
• The tribe Germany wants to forget, Mail & Guardian, 13 March 1998
• Genocide and the history of violent expansionism
• Atrocities committed on the Herero people during the suppression of their uprising in German South West Africa 1904-1907