MARCH 2000
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NAMIBIA
COVER STORY
The tribe Germany wants to forget
According to reparation watchers, Germany has paid over DM90 billion to
Israel since 1949 in voluntary reparations essentially in atonement for the
gas chambers of Auschwitz. Yet the same Germany does not want to hear the
name, Herero. It is a little known tribe in Namibia which was nearly wiped
off the face of the earth by German colonial forces in the early 1900s.
Historians say the first seeds of the Nazi holocaust were sown in Hereroland
after the Germans had annihilated over 80% of the Hereros in a brutal
attempt to take their land. As Namibia celebrates 10 years of independence
this month, descendants of the Herero victims, after reading New African's
reprint of Lord Anthony Gifford's legal basis for reparations (see NA,
Nov/Dec/Jan), are going to court to seek justice and reparations from
Germany. But, as Regina Jere-Malanda reports here, Germany is not at all
happy with the Herero action.
The great general of the German troops, sends this letter to the Herero
people. Hereros are no longer German subjects... All the Hereros must leave
the land. If the people do not want this, then I will force them to do it
with the great guns. Any Herero found within the German borders with or
without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall no longer
receive any women or children; I will drive them back to their people -
otherwise I shall order shots to be fired at them... No male prisoner will
be taken. I will shoot them. This is my decision for the Herero people.
Signed:
The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser,
Lt-Gen Lothar von Trotha.
2nd October, 1904."
"The powerful, great German Kaiser wants to grant clemency to those of the
Hottentot [Nama] people who surrender themselves voluntarily. They will be
presented with life. Only those who at the beginning of the rebellion have
committed murder against whites or have commanded that whites be murdered,
have by law forfeited their lives. This I declare publicly and state further
that of the few who have not been defeated, it will fare with them, just as
it fared with the Hereros, who in their blindness also believed that they
could make successful war against the powerful German Kaiser and the great
German people.
I ask you, where are the Hereros today, where are their chiefs? Samuel
Maherero, who at one time styled himself the ruler of thousands of children,
has, hunted like a wild animal, fled across the English border. He has
become as poor as the poorest field Herero and now own nothing. Just so has
it fared with the other Herero people, most of whom have lost their lives -
some having died of hunger and thirst in the Sandfeld, some having been
killed by German Reiters, some having been murdered by the Owambos.
No harm will befall the Hottentot people as soon as they voluntarily appear
and turn over their weapons. You should come with a white cloth on a stick
along with your entire household and nothing will happen to you. You will be
given work and receive food until after the conclusion of the war when the
great German Kaiser will present new rules governing the affairs of the
protectorate. He who after this chooses not to make an application for mercy
must emigrate, because where he allows himself to be seen in the German
area, he will be shot until all are exterminated.
For the surrender of the murderous culprits, whether dead or alive, I offer
the following rewards: for Hendrik Witboi, 5,000 marks; Sturmann, 3,000
marks; Cornelius 3,000 marks; and all the remaining guilty leaders, 1,000
marks.
Signed:
Lt-Gen Lothar
von Trotha,
22 April 1905.
With these words, Germany's Lt-Gen von Trotha and his forces completed the
savage extermination of almost the entire Herero tribe of Namibia (then
called German South West Africa), leaving in its wake labour camps, sex
slaves and wounds that have refused to heal.
Most historians now agree that the annihilation of the Hereros is actually
"the first genocide of the 20th century". It is also now becoming
increasingly clear that this merciless German undertaking in Namibia, sowed
the first seeds from which Adolf Hitler plucked ideas for his racial
experiments against the Jews in the Nazi holocaust that came 40 years later.
Indeed, as Namibia celebrates 10 years of independence this month, this ugly
blot in the country's troubled past would not just go away. Attempts by
Germany to cajole everyone, including President Sam Nujoma's government in
Namibia, into believing that this is a better-forgotten issue, have just not
worked.
The descendants of the Herero survivors of this little known holocaust, are
today reviving the issue with aroused vigour, demanding from the German
government not only an apology for the atrocities that culminated in the
1904 butchery of their ancestors, but reparations as well.
They say if Germany can pay DM90bn to Israel in voluntary reparations in 50
years for the gas chambers in Auschwitz alone, and is still paying billions
more to the Jewish people for the other crimes committed against the Jews
and other slave labourers, it is only fair that the Hereros get a just
recompense.
Elsewhere in Europe and America, banks, governments and others are owning up
to their Nazi past, and are paying reparations or making restitution to the
Jewish people.
Japan recently apologised for its brutal colonial rule in Korea and paid
reparations to the "comfort women" (sex slaves) used by the Japanese troops
in World War II.
But this atonement has so far passed the Hereros by.
The history
Although Germany joined the European colonial plunder of Africa quite late,
it effected in record time one of the worst landmarks on the continent. The
German presence in Africa began, effectively, in 1884 when it colonised
Togo, Cameroon, Namibia and Tanzania. In Namibia, the German presence had
actually started in the 1870s with the arrival of a handful of German
missionaries.
But in January 1894, following the discovery of diamonds in Namibia, the
German leader, Otto von Bismarck, sent Major Theodor Leutwein (photo below)
as his representative in the territory. Luetwein was "a professional officer
with a classical education and a background in law, but had no experience in
colonial matters and knew nothing about Africa".
Apparently, Bismarck sent him to Africa because he was a "level-headed and
judicious man". However, it wasn't long before Leutwein showed his true
colours.
First, he played the two main tribes in the country (the Herero and Nama)
against each other, using the time-tested divide-and-rule tactics so loved
by all the European colonialists. At one time the Herero even allied
themselves with the Germans against the Nama (also known as Hottentots).
This ploy paid Leutwein handsome dividends.
But soon both tribes realised what the man was really up to - they were
losing their best land and cattle to the handful of German settlers in the
territory.
Leutwein had, by this time, been carried away by the profits of his exploits
in land grabbing. He started to arrange for more Germans to come in. But to
do this he needed more land. And the best land, at the time, still belonged
to the Herero.
So Leutwein decided to play tough. Ignoring the simmering discontent among
the Herero against his betrayal and land grabbing antics, he went ahead and
brought in boatloads of Germans. They, in turn, came along with guns,
arrogance and coarse racism. And this is where the problems really started.
The Germans began to slowly push the Herero from their traditional land - at
first, through persuasion and bribery. But by 1900, the Germans were going
all out to grab Herero land with brazen insolence. Nothing, and no one, was
there to restrain them.
By January 1904, the Herero had had enough! With barely any land and cattle
left for them, their chief Samuel Maherero led an armed rebellion. The
target: the now ubiquitous German military post. At least, 123 Germans were
killed at the beginning of the Herero uprising.
The Herero, like the Nama tribe, intensely disliked the Germans taking their
land, and eroding their centuries-old rights to common pastures and water
resources. Both tribes also resented the Germans introducing foreign laws
and taxes.
When the Herero revolt started, the Nama chief Hendrik Witbooi even felt
compelled to draw Leutwein's attention to the injustice being perpetrated by
the Germans. He wrote to Leutwein thus:
"The German himself... is just what he described the other nations... he
makes no requests according to truth and justice and asks no permission of a
chief. He introduces laws into the land [which] are entirely impossible,
untenable, unbelievable, unbearable, unmerciful and unfeeling.
"He punishes our people [in] Windhoek and has already beaten people to death
for debt. It is not just and right to beat people to death for that. He
flogs people in a shameful and cruel manner. We stupid and unintelligent
people, for so he thinks us to be, we have never yet punished a human being
in such a cruel and improper way. For, he stretches people on their backs
and flogs them on the stomach and even between the legs, be they male or
female. So, Your Honour can understand that no one can survive such a
punishment."
What happened next is the dirty, brutal secret that the German government
and strangely, also the Namibian government, want buried.
Back home in Berlin, the Herero uprising was very badly received by "the
Mighty Kaiser", Wilheim II. He chastised Leutwein for being "too soft", and
so relieved him of his military command and made him the governor of the
territory.
In Leutwein's place as commander-in-chief, the "Mighty Kaiser" sent a hard
man called Lt-Gen Lothar von Trotha. He was an experienced, "extremely
resolute" soldier, renowned for his brutal involvement in the suppression of
the Chinese Boxer Rebellion in 1900 in which the Chinese had risen up
against what they saw as European/American attempts "to destroy traditional
Chinese culture".
Trotha was also involved in the bloody suppression of African resistance to
German colonial rule in German East Africa (today's Burundi, Rwanda and
Tanzania).
So Trotha knew a thing or two about being brutal to Africans. In Namibia, he
actually threw all caution to the wind. He disregarded commands and refused
to take advice from his superiors in Berlin. He had a mission - not to quell
the Herero uprising but to annihilate the tribe altogether and set an
example to others intending to challenge the German occupation.
Trotha quickly came up with a battle plan that was simple but well
calculated. It achieved the intended result in the quickest possible time.
With 10,000 heavily armed German men ready to obey his every word, Trotha
began to shepherd the Herero north into the sandy Waterberg region. Here
they were surrounded and attacked from three fronts - leaving only one
possible escape route: into the Omaheke Desert (now called the Kalahari
Desert). With nowhere else to run, and German guns pointing directly at
them, the Herero had no choice but take to the desert.
Even then, Trotha would not leave them alone. He offered huge rewards to his
men to pursue the fleeing, thirsty, hungry and unarmed Hereros deep into the
desert. The Kalahari, thus, became the killing fields where the "first
genocide of the 20th century" happened.
The German brutality didn't end there. They killed more Hereros by poisoning
the few water holes in the desert, and forcing fathers and mothers perishing
from thirst to share breast milk with their dying babies.
To complete the slaughter, Trotha erected guard posts along the 150-mile
border of the Kalahari. Any Herero who tried to escape was mercilessly
bayoneted to death.
The surrender
Emaciated, diseased and left with no other choice, the Herero surrendered by
September 1904. Chief Maherero had managed to flee into neighbouring
Bechuanaland (now Botswana). By then over 80% of the Herero had been killed!
But Trotha rejected their pleas of surrender. Instead, he issued the
Vernichtunsfehl or extermination order:
"...Within the German borders, every Herero, whether armed or unarmed, with
or without cattle...will be shot. I shall not accept anymore, men, women or
children..."
This dashed any hopes for mercy. The Herero men who tried to surrender were
shot at sight, while the women and children were forced back into the
desert.
To seal his mercilessness, Trotha wrote in his diary: "To accept women and
children, most of whom are ill, is a serious danger to the [German] troops.
And to feed them is an impossibility. I find it appropriate that the nation
perishes instead of infecting our soldiers."
As expected, international condemnation of Trotha's carnage fell on deaf
ears in Berlin. By the time a reluctant Kaiser Wilhelm II brought himself to
condemn and withdraw Trotha's extermination order, the damage had already
been done.
The few surviving Hereros were finally rounded up, forbidden to own land or
keep cattle and became a reservoir of slave labour for the German settlers.
They were sent into labour camps where they were overworked and died of
hunger and diseases such as typhoid and smallpox in scenes reminiscent of
the Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s.
As their men died in the camps, thousands of Herero women were turned into
sex slaves by the Germans. By now, less than 15,000 of an estimated 80,000
Herero population remained.
Not only did the Herero men in the labour camps suffer death, slavery and
hunger, Hitler's theories of racial purity of his Aryan race can be traced
to these camps. It was here that the German geneticist, Eugene Fischer first
came to do his racial medical experiments. He used the Herero and mulattos
(the offspring of the German settlers and Herero women) as guinea pigs.
Fischer believed that there were genetic dangers arising from race mixing,
and he came to the Namibian camps to find out how and why. A book he wrote
about his findings, The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene,
became one of Hitler's favourites. Fischer's warped racial ideas, thus,
provided Hitler with a kind of scientific legitimacy to justify his Nazi
terror.
Fischer later become chancellor of the University of Berlin, where he taught
medicine to Nazi physicians. One of his prominent students was Josef
Mengele, the notorious doctor who did weird genetic experiments on Jewish
children at Auschwitz.
Zero response
The Herero ordeal would be incomplete without mentioning that, soon after
their defeat and extermination by the Germans, their tribal rivals, the Nama
(Hottentots) led by Chief Hendrik Witboi, tried to mount a similar revolt
against the Germans. But it was a short, sharp, shock for the Nama. The
Germans routed them. Here, Trotha's hard-heartedness was again crudely
exposed. See his proclamation to the Nama on page 17.
Today, the Jewish survivors of the Nazi holocaust are rightly being
compensated and drawing worldwide support for their suffering. But for the
Herero, despite their heart-rending ordeal, they have been denied a seat on
the compensation bandwagon. The German government, despite acknowledging the
country's dark past in Namibia, has flatly refused to apologise and
compensate the Herero.
Visiting Namibia in 1998, the German president, Roman Herzog, acknowledged
that the Herero massacre was "a dark chapter in our bilateral relations".
Yet he refused to apologise, saying "too much time has passed for a formal
apology to the Hereros to make sense".
The nearest President Herzog came to an apology was to admit that Trotha
"acted incorrectly" and that the killing of the Herero was "a burden on the
conscience of every German". These were appeasing words all right, but they
did not go far enough.
As a result, the Herero have recently sharpened the campaign for a proper
apology and compensation from the German government. On 16 January this
year, Professor Mburumba Kerina, a prominent Herero campaigner and secretary
general of the Chief Hosea Kutako Foundation (the leading group highlighting
the Herero plight), wrote to the British lawyer, Lord Anthony Gifford QC,
asking him to take on their case.
Lord Gifford is an activist par excellence who has campaigned on behalf of
oppressed people in many parts of Africa, including Mozambique, Angola and
South Africa. He fully supports Africa's claim to reparations for the slave
trade, and in 1993 published a detailed paper outlining the legal basis to
this claim. New African printed the full version of his paper in our
December 1999 and January 2000 issues.
Lord Gifford confirmed to New African that he had been asked by the Herero
people to represent them, but said he had written back to them for further
instructions.
In the letter to Lord Gifford, made available to New African, Prof Kerina
wrote: "The Chief Hosea Kutako Foundation of the Herero Nation in Namibia
has been mandated to explore the possibility of meeting with leaders and
representatives of the German government to discuss reparations...
Unfortunately our efforts have ended in zero response."
Indeed, for years, the Herero leaders have pleaded with the German
government to lend them an ear. In March 1999, the German foreign ministry
wrote to Prof Kerina in response to numerous requests from the Herero for a
meeting to discuss the issue. Signed by Dr Ludger Volmer, an official in the
German foreign ministry, the letter said: "I very much regret to have to
inform you that direct reparations to the Herero are not possible due to
legal constraints. Rest however assured that the Federal Government would
further, intensively, support your country and especially the Herero nation
within the framework of its financial means."
The letter continued: "We are aware of our moral and especially our
historical obligation towards Namibia and the Hereros. Therefore, the
Federal Republic maintains a comprehensive and unusually intensive
developmental co-operation with Namibia. Your country obtains the highest
per capita financial development contributions of all recipient states from
Germany. However, our developmental commitment must extend to all regions of
Namibia. The Federal government strives to include more strongly, the Herero
nation in the bilateral development co-operation in accordance with
agreements with the Namibia government."
Prof Kerina, who has a German grandparent, has made it categorically clear
that the Herero do not want cash. Their compensation request is very modest,
he says. "All we want is a mini-Marshall plan," he has told the Germans.
But it appears that the Germans are dragging their feet over the Herero
issue because of the land "problem" at the heart of the whole affair. What
will happen to the 25,000 or so rich German settlers still occupying Herero
land, if Germany apologises and makes restitution to the Hereros? Both the
settlers and Germany fear that this might lead to the loss of land, and the
thought terrifies them!
Professor Lora Wildenthal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology even
betters this argument: "There is fear that a payoff would invite multitudes
of similar claims for colonial-era crimes. I do not think any colonial power
will go anywhere near this," she told the US paper, Salt Lake Tribune, in an
interview.
To this day, German ranchers in Namibia who insist that there was no
genocide in the country, still own millions of acres seized from the Herero
over 90 years ago. In the meantime, it is not only the Herero, but also half
of Namibia's 1.8 million population live on crowded, impoverished land.
The current paramount chief of the Hereros, Chief Kuima Riruako, is quite
conciliatory on the land issue: "We want reparations to buy land and give it
to people who need it... We do not want to seize it the way they are doing
it in Zimbabwe."
This time last year, Chief Riruako was talking about taking the Herero case
to the International Court of Justice in The Hague (The Netherlands). "On
the threshold of the new millennium," Chief Riruako said at the time, "the
Hereros have decided to take Germany to the International Court of Justice
for a decision regarding reparations. We also warn the Namibian government
not to stand in our way as we explore this avenue to justice."
The relationship between the Herero and President Nujoma's government is
quite frosty. The government is dominated by people from the Ovambo tribe.
President Nujoma is an Ovambo himself. The Ovambos were lucky not to be
touched by the Germans during their rule of terror. The Ovambos, again,
happened to lead the liberation struggle in Mamibia that led to independence
in 1990 from South Africa.
But the majority of the Herero, it so happens, belongs to the opposition and
are viewed as rivals by Nujoma's government. In addition, the government
receives millions of deustche marks in aid each year from the German
government (about $400m in direct aid since 1990). As a result, the Nujoma
government does not want to rock the boat.
But Prof Kerina, who is a member of parliament himself, says the Herero will
not be pushed around any longer. Not by Germany. Nor the Namibian
government.
Copyright © IC Publications Limited 2000.
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