Eight Herero women—some sick and others blind—had been supplied with food and water, and then left behind by their tribe as it retreated from the lost battle at Hamakiri. Hendrik Campbell, commander of the Rehoboth tribe, which fought on the German side, witnessed what happened next. The German soldiers set the hut housing the women on fire, burning them alive. Thousands more died in the slaughter of 1904, historian Horst Dreschler has written: The sick, the surrendered, and those scared to embrace death in the waterless wastes of the Omaheke.
Last month, as the International Court of Justice prepared to hear allegations of genocide in Gaza, Namibia reacted angrily to the German decision to support Israel. The country’s President, Hage Geingob, assailed Germany for being unable to “draw lessons from its horrific history.”
Few Indians remember the story, but it ought to have a special place in our national memory: The country had a small, but important, role in setting history right. Establishment 22, the super-secret special force set up with Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assistance after the 1962 India-China War, provided training to South West African Peoples’ Organisation (SWAPO) insurgents fighting the long war for freedom from apartheid-ridden South Africa.
Former military officer MG Singh, later a Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) Special Field Officer, would serve at the High Commission of India in Windhoek, opened at the moment of the African nation’s independence in 1990.
The debate isn’t just about Israeli violence, or German guilt. Erased, almost, from global memory, though the UN calls it the first genocide of the 20th century, the mass slaughter of the Herero and the Nama peoples was to provide a template for the many later efforts at the industrialised extermination of people.
The rise of settler-colonialism
From the 1880s, German settlers began to arrive in Southwest Africa, operating as traders and farmers. Their operations—and their crimes—had the support of the German state and its military. The farmers stole Herero lands, water sources and cattle. The Herero were subjected to everyday violence, and rape was common. Local people, though, could not seek justice from a legal system designed to protect White settlers. Anger mounted—finally igniting a poorly organised and ill-fated armed rebellion in 1904.
The Germans struck back with extraordinary ferocity, historian Matthias Haüssler has written. “In the first weeks and months of the war,” he records, “the Germans took no prisoners and also killed women and children.” Eventually, the Herero and Nama were blocked inside the waterless Namibia desert, and condemned to death or starvation.
Following this military victory—if the slaughter of civilians can be described as such—a string of concentration camps were set up to imprison rebels. Lüderitz, the most notorious of them all, was home to Shark Island – so-called because the staff ran out of space to bury corpses and simply threw them into the sea. According to historian Steven Press “Between just mid-1906 and early 1907, 1,203 out of 2,000 prisoners perished.”
Empires, the historian Tiago Saraiva has shown, even sought to remake the physical environment of its colonies to consolidate control. Even as German imperial authorities settled White cattle farmers in Northeastern Namibia, expropriating lands once controlled by the annihilated Herero, it successfully imported Karakul sheep from Central Asia into the more arid Southwest, to deepen the spread of settlers across the country.
Although Germany lost its colonies after 1918, and Namibia was administered by the Union of South Africa, Karakul pelts were to become the country’s most valuable exports by 1946, even ahead of diamonds.
Adolf Hitler, in an order issued in 1941, ordained that the Persian furs worn by elite German women would be produced by settlers in Eastern Europe—one sign, Saraiva notes, that Nambia lingered on in the Nazi memory.
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Blood and diamonds
Ever since 1897, when Germany had begun building the maze of railway lines it hoped would provide the infrastructure for its fortune in Namibia, sceptics had lamented the costs that came with an empire. The costs of war-fighting after 1904 added to the disquiet in Germany’s parliament. In 1906, Emperor Wilhelm II was compelled to dissolve parliament, after the government lost a confidence vote over funding for a narrow-gauge line linking Lüderitz to the interior of the country.
Then, something unexpected happened. Ever since the 1880s, the prospector Adolf Lüderitz had hunted for diamonds, hoping to find deposits to rival the finds in neighbouring South Africa’s cape. Finally, one man, Augustus Stauch, hit significant finds in 1908. European prospectors, traders and even criminals flooded in.
For Germany’s would-be diamond magnates, the genocide of the Herero and Nama posed a problem, Press notes. The 20,000-odd working-age males who survived the genocide had been compelled to work on farms and railway lines. Women, children and even the ailing were press-ganged to work in the mines. Laws were amended to further restrict ownership of cattle by indigenous communities, and fines were imposed on those deemed unwilling to work
The Nama and Herero were barred from hunting game, or from employment outside of the district in which they lived—unless it was to work on a diamond mine.
Labour also came from the Ovamboland, a region of Southwest Africa that lay outside German territorial control. Famine hit the region, forcing Ovambo to accept work. To reach the mines was a dangerous business, Press records. Reaching the road meant a 500-kilometre march by foot, after which they were herded onto suffocating compartments. There was little accommodation in the diamond-mine zone, and some froze to death on the sand dunes.
As surely as war, the mines decimated the Ovambo: With little to eat but rice, and sanitation non-existent, many fell victim to scurvy, pneumonia, enteritis, smallpox and tuberculosis.
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An incomplete reckoning
Though Germany issued a contrite official apology for its crimes in Namibia, promising $1.1 billion for development projects to benefit genocide-affected communities, the issue continues to cause bitterness. The time that has passed, obviously, makes it impossible to bring about the criminal prosecution of perpetrators. Leaders of the Herero and Nama peoples, though, have argued for more substantial reparations, and a greater acknowledgement of the crime within German memory and culture.
Germany’s conflicted attitudes to its colonial crimes remain in full view. Berlin continues to have a monument to soldiers who fought in Namibia, describing them as “heroes.” A 2003 school textbook provoked outrage by asking students to contrast the positive and negative features of German colonialism.
The ironies aren’t dissimilar to Germany’s reckoning with antisemitism. Though the country engages in deep atonement for its Nazi past, statues of the famous Christian reformist Martin Luther, who wrote vicious anti-Semitic tracts, dot the country’s streets.
Fighting together with Cuban soldiers—armed and equipped by China and the Soviet Union, and with a little support from India—SWAPO won its long war for freedom in 1990. The independence of Namibia, political scientist John Marcum has observed, was a climactic moment for the decolonisation struggle in the continent, since it was the last of 51 countries to gain freedom. Apartheid in South Africa, the last legacy of colonialism, ended in 1994.
The Herero and Nama, though, remain scarred by the rending of their social fabric and communities by the barbaric colonialism inflicted on them. Their demand that Western colonisers refrain from dishing out moral homilies on genocide and settler colonialism is far from unreasonable.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)