Kaiser's Holocaust (11 page)

The Hoornkrans massacre was unprecedented in the history of South-West Africa, a land shielded from European colonialism for so many centuries. But by the end of the nineteenth century the tactics employed by Curt von François had been used against innumerable peoples across the world. In Africa, Asia, Australia, and North and South America, soldiers like von François had unflinchingly ordered mass executions, driven millions from their land and taken part in what military strategists liked to describe as ‘small wars’.

While colonial wars were undoubtedly small by European standards, they were almost always cataclysmic for the tribal peoples concerned. Very few of them were wars in the conventional sense; rarely were matters in the colonies settled by the clash of opposing armies on the battlefield. Grand set-piece encounters like the colonial battles of Omdurman or Isandlwana were rare events, and such battles account for only a tiny fraction of those who died confronting European colonisers. The majority were killed in massacres, ambushes and punitive raids, events identical in many respects to von François’s attack on Hoornkrans.

Through much of the nineteenth century, empire-building was portrayed in Europe as a noble crusade, an act of charitable paternalism. The colonial massacre and the punitive raid clashed with this fiction and were hidden from the public gaze, little discussed outside military circles. Even today they remain relatively obscure in Europe. Those that are remembered tend to have involved the death of a notable European, or yielded an unusual quantity of booty.

What is also forgotten is how easily and how often conflicts in the colonies became genocidal. Accepted rules and conventions of warfare were widely regarded as inapplicable to wars against ‘savages’. By the time of the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the 1880s, various indigenous peoples across the world had been forced to the brink of extinction; a handful had been pushed over that final precipice.

The pattern was the same on every continent. Settlers came in search of land and displaced native populations, leading to the loss of pastures and hunting grounds, and often to famine. Hunger sparked armed confrontations. The parity of military technology that existed between the colonised and colonisers in South-West Africa was a rare exception; elsewhere settlers and soldiers were equipped with far superior weapons to the native tribes who opposed them. Almost always, the musket and later the rifle overcame the spear of the indigenous warrior.

In Australia the convicts whom the British government had once considered settling on the Namib coast had decimated the Aboriginals. In Tasmania during the 1820s and 1830s settlers had exterminated almost the entire Aboriginal population; fumbling attempts to relocate the more remote tribes led to the near extinction of the entire people within just thirty years. Across North and South America the Indian nations had been swept from their lands by repeated waves of European settlement.

All of this was clear, even in the first half of the nineteenth century, yet across Europe, some searched for more palatable explanations as to why the indigenous peoples of the colonies seemed unable to survive contact with Europeans. Religious theorists suggested that the black races of Africa, Asia and the Americas had been simply holding their lands in trust for the whites in accordance with a divine plan. As the higher race was now ready to take possession of its inheritance, the blacks were no longer needed, and simply faded away. The nineteenth-century British theologian Frederick Farrar put it best: the ‘irreclaimable savages’, unable to embrace civilisation, were, he believed, destined to ‘disappear from before the face of it as
surely and as perceptibly as the snow retreats before the advancing line of sunbeams’.
1

In the latter half of the century, as Africa became the focus for a renewed burst of colonial conquest, the destruction of indigenous peoples was increasingly explained using ideas drawn from science rather than scripture. While the advent of Darwinism represented a direct and powerful challenge to the Church, the religious scandal surrounding the publication of
On the Origin
of Species
has tended to obscure the fact that, in many ways, Darwin’s ideas were perfectly in keeping with his times. While the religious establishment was rocked to its foundations, much of the Victorian scientific elite, along with various economists, philosophers and politicians, welcomed ‘Darwinism’ wholeheartedly. It was a theory that advanced concepts that were already current and that allowed them to thrust open doors upon which they had already begun to knock.

The first group whose plight was taken as evidence that the ‘struggle for life’ was the key force shaping human society, as well as the natural world, was not the indigenous races of the colonies but the industrial poor of Europe’s teeming cities. From the comfortable Georgian squares of West London and the garden suburbs of Berlin, the millions trapped in the slums were easily dismissed as men and women who had simply failed to adapt. They were the ‘unfit’ and had been consigned to the bottom strata of the society, a harsh world of crime, violence, alcoholism and destitution. ‘Theirs is the life of savages’, said the Victorian social investigator Charles Booth, when considering the fate of the nineteenth-century underclass.

In the colonies the fate of those other ‘savages’, the dark races of the world, seemed to be governed by the same laws of natural selection. Surely their disappearance was a result of their inability to adapt to the arrival of stronger, more capable races and the civilisation they brought with them? The annihilation of the Tasmanians, the Patagonians, the Native Americans and perhaps soon the Africans all testified to their innate weakness, their unfitness for the future.

While imperialism could be justified by a number of arguments – economic self-interest, European rivalry and the white man’s duty to spread civilisation and the Gospels – the extermination of whole races was more difficult to explain. Yet Social Darwinism, along with a range of racial theories taken from the older Scientific Racism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was able to recast both historical and contemporary events, and in this capacity it took on the twisted logic of a witch trial.

The white races had claimed territory across the globe by right of strength and conquest. They had triumphed everywhere because they were the fittest; their triumphs were the proof of their fitness. Whole races, who had been annihilated long before Darwin had put pen to paper, were judged to have been unfit for life by the very fact that they had been exterminated. Living peoples across the world were categorised as ‘doomed races’. The only responsibility science had to such races was to record their cultures and collect artefacts from them, before their inevitable extinction.

The spread of Europeans across the globe came to be regarded as an almost sacred enterprise, and was increasingly linked to that other holy crusade of the nineteenth century – the march of progress. Alongside the clearing of land, the coming of the railways and the settlement of white farmers, the eradication of indigenous tribes became a symbol of modernity. Social Darwinism thus cast death itself as an agent of progress. The notion that the strong were destined to overcome the weak in the struggle for life became almost a mantra, repeated thousands of times in memoirs, speeches, biographies and scientific tracts. Any last spasms of Christian morality or guilt could be allayed by the fact that all this was inevitable.

Of course there were those who strongly opposed every aspect of this form of colonialism. In the early nineteenth century, millions of people across Europe, including Charles Darwin’s own family, had mobilised to confront the brutality and iniquity of slavery. When slavery was finally abolished, the same organisations turned their energy and compassion to the fight against imperialist
violence. Liberals in Britain, France and Germany condemned the mistreatment of native peoples and spent decades writing reports, publishing pamphlets and holding public meetings to draw to public attention the aspects of imperialism that were otherwise little discussed. But by the time Africa was divided up at the Conference of Berlin, advocates of an unbridled colonialism had learned to harness a distorted version of Social Darwinism in order to dismiss the views of the humanitarians as hopelessly outdated and unscientific. After all, there was no humanitarianism, compassion or brotherhood in nature.

The British explorer William Winwood Reade, writing in the 1860s, captured the growing consensus of his age. The last chapter of his book
Savage Africa
, entitled ‘The Redemption of Africa’, concluded with a prophecy of the continent’s future. Reade’s vision was founded upon his unshakeable belief that Africa belonged to the white man.

Reade fervently believed that in the not-too-distant future European noblemen would build their estates in Central Africa and ‘young ladies on camp stools under palm-trees will read with tears “The Last of the Negroes”, and the Niger will become as romantic a river as the Rhine.’
3

Although Germany came late to the colonial table, her scientists had been among the first to accept the logic of Social Darwinism. In 1868, while working on
The Descent of Man
, Darwin, in a letter to Wilhelm Preyer, Professor of Physiology at the University of Jena, reported that ‘The support I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.’
4

Germany was particularly receptive to Darwin, partly because his ideas attracted the support of a number of well-respected German scientists. Chief among them was Ernst Haeckel, one of Germany’s most esteemed intellectuals. Haeckel began to explore what very quickly became known as Darwinism soon after the publication of
On the Origin of Species
. Over the next forty years he wrote a stream of highly influential books on evolution, some of which became among the most popular works of non-fiction published in Germany during the age of the Kaisers. A generation of German scientists and intellectuals came to know Darwin partly through the filter of Ernst Haeckel, and one of the key characteristics of Haeckel’s work was the way in which he applied Darwin’s theories to human racial difference. The extreme caution that Darwin had exercised when making links between his central theories and the struggles between the human races was not practised by Haeckel.

While Germany’s scientists stood at the forefront of the Darwinian revolution, in her African empire – particularly in South-West Africa – her colonialists were confronted with a situation that was at odds with the fundamental racial suppositions at the heart of imperialism. Germany’s only African colony suitable for large-scale white settlement remained dominated by tribes of Africans who had, in almost every respect, failed to accord with colonial theory. The Nama and Herero had not retreated into the hinterland in the face of the white man, nor had they fallen prey to introduced disease. The continuing military and economic independence of the South-West Africans was profoundly unsettling to the German pro-colonial lobby, and by the 1890s a deep-seated frustration with German colonialism had taken hold. Before the Hoornkrans massacre, armchair imperialists in Berlin, and agitators in the Missionary and Colonial societies, had accused the Colonial Department of failing to apply military force properly in South-West Africa. Some interpreted the massacre at Hoornkrans and the removal of Bismarck from office as portents heralding a new era in the colonies. From now on, they hoped, the Nama and Herero
would be put in their place by German military might. Yet, as events quickly demonstrated, all that von François had achieved at Hoornkrans was to start a war he was incapable of winning.

After fleeing Hoornkrans, Hendrik Witbooi and his people found refuge in the Khomas Mountains on the fringes of the Namib Desert. There, Kaptein Hendrik wrote letters to the leaders of the other Nama tribes, whom he beseeched to join him in an alliance against the Germans. In April 1893 he wrote again to John Cleverly, the British magistrate in Walvis Bay whom the Witbooi rightly deduced was a channel through which he could alert the outside world to the massacre at Hoornkrans. He hoped to outmanoeuvre the Germans by appealing directly to public opinion in Europe. After describing in detail the attack his people had suffered, Hendrik Witbooi concluded his letter to Cleverly: