The genocide of the Herero and Nama

In 1904, in reaction to the rules imposed by the German colonial administration and the abuses and mistreatment of the settlers, a revolt broke out in South-West Germany, now Namibia. The forces of the Second Reich brutally repressed her and defeated the Herero. An extermination order – issued by General Lothar von Trotha on 2 October 1904 – enjoined the Kaiser’s troops to kill indiscriminately, thus condemning men, women and children. The Nama take up arms against the Germans and suffer the same fate as the Herero. In the concentration camps opened in 1905, such as those at Windhoek, Swakopmund and Shark Island, prisoners Nama and Herero were eliminated by labor and succumbed to disease, mistreatment and malnutrition. Skulls of victims were then sent to Germany for scientific racial research.

Beginnings

In the middle of the 19th century, the peoples who lived in the area that now corresponds to central Namibia were the Herero, Nama, Basters, Damara, Khoisan and Ovambo. Around 1840, when the first Rhenish missionaries landed in the colony, most of central Namibia came under the control of Captain Oorlam Jonker Afrikaner and his herero vassals, Kahitjene and Tjamuaha.

Some herero chiefs allied with the missionaries in order to obtain protection and material goods; the missions then became important centers of commercial and diplomatic exchanges. With the disappearance of Afrikaner and Tjamuaha in 1861, the hegemony of the Oorlam collapses and it is Tjamuaha’s son, Kamaharero, who then asserts himself as the most powerful of the generation of hereroindependent leaders.

In the 1880s, incessant disputes over pastures degenerated into a protracted conflict with Hendrik Witbooi, an educated and charismatic leader who managed to bring together the Nama and Oorlam clans in the south.

The protectorate of German South-West Africa was proclaimed on 7 August 1884. During the following decade, colonization was barely established: the financial gains were negligible and although the first governor, the Reich’s high commissioner, Heinrich Ernst Göring, appointed in 1885, managed to ratify a "treaty of protection" with Kamaharero, the Germans could not in reality offer him any assistance against Witbooi.  When Göring makes the unforgivable mistake of touching an ancestral burial place, Kamaharero, furious, cancels their agreement. In 1888, worried about his safety, Göring had no alternative but to leave the protectorate hastily.

On all sides terrible scenes were before our eyes. Beneath the hanging rocks rested the corpses of seven Witbooi who, in their agony, had crawled to the recess, their bodies pressed together. Elsewhere, the body of a Bergdamara woman blocked the way while children three or four years old sat in silence playing next to her body. It was a frightening sight: burning huts, human bodies and animal remains, rifles destroyed and unusable, that was the picture before us.”

In Kurd Schwabe [ German soldier in South-West Africa during the Hoornkrans massacre] Mit Sword and Pflug in Deutsch-Südwestafrika E. S. Mittler, 1899.

Violence and loss of territory

The first German troops arrive in the colony in the middle of the year 1889, led by Curt von François.
Samuel Maharero, son of Kamaharero, increasingly disappointed by the attitude of Germans, and Hendrik Witbooi, who understands the scale of the colonial threat, are allied. Faced with this unified front, von François launched, on the night of April 12, 1893, a surprise attack on the Witbooi camp: the German troops massacre no less than 75 women and children. Despite this bloodbath, von François is unable to subdue Witbooi.

In 1894, he was replaced by Theodor Leutwein, who regained control by imposing the implementation of protection treaties.  Samuel Maharero approaches Leutwein to expand his power. Defeated after a fierce thirteen-day battle, Witbooi had to resolve itself to sign a treaty of collaboration with the Germans.

In 1896, the two chiefs fought alongside Leutwein against the Mbanderu and the Khauas Khoi: it was the first of many campaigns conducted against the "rebel tribes" with the dual purpose of expanding Maharero’s influence and liberating land, livestock and labor for the German settlers. The survivors of the fighting are systematically sent to forced labor while the land and livestock of the Herero pass into the hands of the Germans. When cattle plague hits the overpopulated territories left to the Herero, the economic and social consequences are catastrophic. At the end of the decade, the Herero lost their independence.

The war fever

Despite the efforts of Herero chief Samuel Maharero to consolidate his alliance with the Germans, abuses increased. German officers indulge in rapes, beatings and murders of Africans with impunity.

In Okahandja, Lieutenant Ralph Zürn does not hesitate to forge the signatures of herero chiefs to appropriate land and even to exhume skulls as a source of additional income.

On 12 January 1904, while the German troops were busy trying to put down the "rebellion" of the Nama Bondelswarts in the south, the Okahandja Herero, exasperated by the injustices committed by Zürn and the continuous loss of territory, attacked the German farms, to the shops and colonial infrastructure. These attacks lead to a brutal repression by soldiers and settlers who engage in acts of lynching and indiscriminate reprisals.

In Germany, following the exaggerated descriptions of these aggressions, a real war fever develops. As violence spreads, the local uprising turns into a major conflict, forcing Maharero to side with the "rebels". Much to the displeasure of the politicians in Berlin, his men initially managed to resist Leutwein’s troops using guerrilla techniques.

Leutwein was relieved of his command and replaced by the ruthless general Lothar von Trotha, who landed in the colony in June 1904 with thousands of men. Unlike his predecessor, who had hoped to end the conflict through diplomacy, von Trotha is determined to do away with the Herero. From the general’s point of view, war with the Herero is inevitable and will allow the achievement of white domination in the colony.

«I, the great general of the German troops, am sending this letter
to the Herero people. The Herero are no longer German subjects. They killed and stole, cut off the ears, noses and body parts of wounded soldiers, and now, without any cowardice, there is no desire to fight. I say to the people: whoever delivers a captain shall receive 1,000 marks, and whoever delivers Samuel shall receive 5,000 marks. The Herero people, however, must leave the territory. If the populace does not comply, I will force them to do so using the Groot Rohr (cannon). Within the German borders every Herero, with or without a weapon, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children, I will return them to their people or let them be slaughtered.
Here is my statement to the Herero people.
The great general of the powerful German Kaiser.”

 Order of extermination, 2 October 1904, signed by Lothar von Trotha.

The order of destruction

When General Lothar von Trotha landed in the colony, the majority of the Herero, nearly 50,000 men, women and children accompanied by their flocks, had gathered under the command of Samuel Maharero on the Waterberg plateau. Anticipating negotiations, they stopped their attacks. However, von Trotha has no intention of negotiating. His troops surrounded the Waterberg camp and, at dawn on 11 August 1904, they attacked with orders not to take prisoners.

However, the Herero managed to break the encirclement and tens of thousands of them fled into the desert.  Von Trotha orders that we pursue them, while sealing off the territory and cutting off access to water points. For weeks, pushed further and further into the desert, countless Herero die of dehydration.

On 2 October 1904, the general issued a destruction order, the Vernichtungsenvoy, which declared that any Herero present on "German territory" would be shot down.

German soldiers, exhausted, sick and whose racial hatred was fueled by rumors of the cruelty of the Herero, massacre civilians, including Herero who did not take part in the war. When the order was lifted following the intervention of the missionaries, the genocide entered a new phase: the Herero survivors were incarcerated in concentration camps and forced to do hard labor.

Some Herero fighters manage to join the Nama from the South.  Hendrik Witbooi, who brought troops to reinforce the Germans at Waterberg, ended up turning against his allies two months later. Aware of the desire that animates the settlers to disarm and control all Africans, the Witbooi and their Nama allies open hostilities by attacking the farms of the Europeans as well as their convoys, killing men and seizing everything that has value. A painful guerilla war followed, which lasted four years.

The Nama use their knowledge of the terrain to ambush the German forces that continue to perpetuate their atrocities. On 23 April 1905, von Trotha made a declaration that threatened the Nama with the same fate as the Herero, but he failed to subjugate them before his departure on 19 November 1905.

After the death of Witbooi following an injury received on the battlefield near Vaalgras on 29 October 1905, other captains, including Cornelius Fredericks of Bethany, Simon Kopper of the Nama Franzmann and Jakob Morenga, a charismatic leader of mixed descent, herero and nama, continue the fight. The latter is finally shot by the police of Cape Cernés, Fredericks and his men are forced to surrender in March 1906.  They are all interned in the notorious concentration camp: Shark Island – the island of sharks.

The concentration camps

Following the brutal campaign of General von Trotha, the colony was faced with a severe shortage of manpower.  Herero prisoners – men, women and children – were then interned in concentration camps and used as forced laborers, notably in the construction of the new railway.

Friedrich von Lindequist, governor of the colony from November 1905 to August 1907, called on all the Herero to surrender and join the assembly camps of Omburo or Otjihaena, from where they were transported to the railway work centers, or in concentration camps such as those of Windhoek, Swakopmund or Lüderitzpréparatoire.

The conditions in these camps are terrible. The prisoners have only improvised shelters, with no sanitation facilities. Young girls are regularly raped. Thousands die from abuse, malnutrition, and disease. The decrease in the number of prisoners is starkly evident in the monthly reports kept by the district authorities, which carefully record prisoners fit for work (arbeitsorbite) and unfit (unorbite).

The war officially ended on 31 March 1907, but the camps would not be closed until 27 January 1908. When the Nama lay down their arms, they in turn were interned in concentration camps. In September 1906, von Lindequist decided to transfer 1,700 Nama prisoners to the camp on Shark Island, near the port city of Lüderitz, where the mortality rate was exceptionally high. Some 2,000 Herero are already interned there, suffering from the cold, lack of food and abuse. When the Nama arrive, already weakened by the forced labor to which they had been subjected in the north, their state of health deteriorates rapidly. Despite protests from the missionaries, older men, women and children were systematically conscripted into building a quay in the port of Lüderitz until they died.

In mid-February 1907, the high mortality rate of the Nama (70%) led to the abandonment of work; among those who were still alive, one third was so ill that it was likely to disappear very soon.

When the camps were closed in 1908, the colonial authorities, still fearing the potential guerrilla of the Nama, decided not to release them. In 1910, years after the end of the conflict, a group of 93 Nama Witbooi and Nama, including women and children, were deported to another German colony, Cameroon, where most of them disappeared, swept away by forced labor and tropical diseases.

Racial inequality

The majority of settlers who take over the Herero’s land and livestock treat Africans with a complete lack of respect. Rape is common, exacerbated by the shortage of German women. Fears of racial degeneration by the German people (Volk) eventually led to the prohibition of mixed marriages on 23 September 1905. The notions of racial difference are based on the German anthropology of the late nineteenth century, which established a distinction between so-called "civilized" peoples and others considered "primitive". It was hoped to understand the human race through the objective observation of so-called "primitive" peoples such as those exhibited in human zoos, very popular in Europe at the time. One of the most spectacular of these events is undoubtedly the Colonial Exhibition which takes place in Berlin: more than a hundred people from the German colonies are exhibited in the park of Treptower during the summer of 1896.  Samuel Maharero, considering it a unique diplomatic opportunity, sent five notables, including his own son, Friedrich Maharero, to meet with Kaiser Wilhelm II and consolidate their alliance with the Germans.  The search for objective data in order to establish the characteristics of each type led to a real collective frenzy that would drain in its wake a macabre trade in human remains.

The collection of human remains

Until 1904, the collection of human skulls for anthropological research was not organized. In Berlin, scientists have little control over the specimens that come into their collections, often "souvenirs" or trophies brought back by returning soldiers from the colonies. The concentration camp policy of von Lindequist makes it possible to systematize collection. Military doctors serving in the camps receive requests from Berlin scientists to preserve skulls and entire heads of Nama and Herero.  There is no doubt that Dr. Bofinger participated in such activities on Shark Island. Scientists undertake to prove the hierarchical difference between Europeans and Africans, including researchers at the Berlin Pathological Institute who receive, between 1906 and 1907, an undetermined number of heads nama and herero from the colony. The manipulation of results confirms the racist stereotypes prevalent in Germany and justifies the racial laws enacted in German Southwest Africa. Among the published studies, that of Eugen Fischer (1913), which aims to demonstrate the negative consequences of racial mixing within the Basters of Rehoboth, remains the most influential.

 "Do you know a way to acquire a large number of herero skulls? The skull you gave us corresponds so little to the images made so far from a problematic and inferior material that it seems necessary to me to obtain a larger collection of skulls for scientific research and rather quickly if possible.”

Letter from the anthropologist Felix von Luschan to Ralph Zürn, a lieutenant stationed in Okahandja at the beginning of the uprising on 22 June 1905. On his return to Germany, Zürn brought with him herero skulls as a souvenir that he donated to von Luschan. 

A model colony

While the Herero and Nama are incarcerated in concentration camps, their lands are confiscated: since 1882, the German government has appropriated nearly 46 million hectares.

In 1913, the colony had nearly 15,000 individuals, including many former soldiers. It can boast of having its own racetrack and a cinema as well as an extensive railway network built by forced labor. As the local economy grew, especially after the discovery of diamond mines near Lüderitz, the state responded to the labor shortage by tightening its system of racial control.

From 1907, all Africans over the age of seven were required to wear numbered passes (copper tokens) that assigned them a specific region of work, while the Herero were forcibly distributed as labourers among the settlers. The system is not flawless, however, as the territory is too large to allow for the strict control hoped for. African workers are regularly beaten and often fired.

The colony’s precarious prosperity was short-lived: in February 1915, during the First World War, South African forces invaded the territory. On 21 October 1915, the German South-West Africa came under a British mandate.

The Blue Book

In order to ensure the permanent confiscation of theformer German colony, the British Imperial War Cabinet decides to gather and publish the evidence of the atrocities committed by the Germans in South West Africa.
Starting in September 1917, Major Thomas O'Reilly produced a compilation containing translations of German documents, to which were added the sworn statements of witnesses (Africans) and survivors, accompanied by photographs. This compilation is published in a Blue Book, that is to say a report by the British government. Although the document clearly serves the interests of the Crown, it has been accurately produced and remains to this day a reliable source that includes invaluable stories from Herero and Nama about the genocide perpetrated by the Germans.

A past forever present

In the context of a policy of "reserves", the Nama and the Herero recovered some land and a certain autonomy. In the meantime, the Herero and the Nama are working to reconstitute their community identity around commemorative events. The funeral of Samuel Maharero, who died in exile and was buried in Okahandja on 26 August 1923, is a spectacular event. The event has been commemorated every year since then under the name of Red Flag Day or Herero Day.  On the Nama side, the inauguration in the 1930s of the memorial stone dedicated to Hendrik Witbooi marks the first Witbooi Day, an annual commemoration punctuated by reenactments of battles and political speeches.

In 1960, the national liberation movement of the people of South West Africa (SWAPO – Organisation du Peuple du Sud-Ouest Africain) was born and the struggle for independence intensified.  On 21 March 1990, Namibia became independent and the SWAPO government under President Sam Nujoma began to review the policy of remembrance as part of a national reconciliation.  A new national monument inaugurated in 2002, the Heroes Acre, is designed to symbolize the birth of a modern state, fruit of the armed struggle against colonialism. However, it was not until 2013 that the Reiterdenkmal, the greatest symbol of German colonial power, was withdrawn.

While the government focuses on nation-building, the Nama and the Herero demand an apology and ask reparation to the German governmentfor the atrocities committed and the incessant injustices: the majority of profitable farms is still in the hands of white farmers.
In 2001, the Herero led by Grand Chief Kuaima Riruako filed a complaint against the German government in the United States.. Although this complaint was dismissed, the compensatory claim is fueled by partial apologies made in 2004 and by the repatriation of the remains of the Nama and Herero victims of the genocide.

Finally, in July 2016, the German government announced that an official apology was about to be presented – an important step in the long process of accepting the painful past of the Nama and Herero, Namibia and Germany.

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