Kaiser's Holocaust (19 page)

By 1904, the European quarter of the town of Okahandja had developed into a thriving colonial outpost. A string of German stores and settler homesteads ran along the main street, and a fortress had been constructed to house the local garrison and defend German interests. Opposite the fortress stood the new railway station connecting Okahandja to Windhoek, just 50 miles to the south. Outside the town, in the fertile grasslands of Hereroland, large tracts of pasture had been bought up by settlers and Okahandja had become the central node in a network of German-owned farms.

The Herero section of Okahandja, just a few miles to the north, had grown into a large sprawling settlement, always teeming with life. Thousands of Herero also lived in the surrounding areas. They made a living from riverbed farming and, on the plains beyond the mountains, reared their prized long-horned cattle, coming to town for supplies, and to buy and sell their livestock. Other Herero travelled to Okahandja from all over Hereroland, as the town was home to their Paramount Chief, Samuel Maharero.

Samuel ran his court from a splendid villa, built in the fashion of the German settlers. With a vast personal fortune based on cattle and increasingly on the sale of land, his home, furnished with plush velvet sofas and heavy carpets, reflected his social position. Govenor Leutwein described Samuel Maharero as ‘a true ruler’, a proud man of ‘impressive appearance’ At home in Okahandja, among his own people, he was regarded as a ‘family person’, a ruler who devoted much of his time to his children and to grooming his son Friedrich Maharero for the Herero chieftaincy.
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For Samuel, and many Herero, Okahandja was also a holy place, the spiritual centre of the ruling Maharero clan, whose ancestors were buried in a family cemetery by the Rhenish mission. It was also at Okahandja that Samuel Maharero maintained the holy fire of his clan, through which the living generations kept in touch with their ancestors.

On the morning of Tuesday 12 January 1904 Okahandja was deathly silent. It was the height of summer, and the sweltering heat lay like a shroud over empty streets. The only activity in the German quarter was within the walls of the fortress. Three dozen soldiers and armed settlers huddled behind the parapet watching over their own homes and shops through the sights of their rifles.

The German population of Okahandja had abandoned those homes and shops because of a rumour. Two days earlier, while on his journey to Okahandja, Alex Niet, a local Boer trader, had passed a column of around three hundred armed Herero men, also heading for the town. When Niet had reached Okahandja, he had reported this news to Lieutenant Ralph Zürn, the local Station Commander.

Lieutenant Zürn, a junior officer still in his twenties, had been placed in charge of a large area in the very heart of Hereroland. His term of command coincided with negotiations for the establishment of a second Herero reserve. This offered Zürn ample opportunity to demonstrate his utter contempt for the Herero. His arrogance, and a series of abuses committed against the Herero of Okahandja, fuelled both the Herero’s sense of injustice and Zürn’s paranoia that they would eventually seek retribution. When Zürn heard from Alex Niet that three hundred Herero were on the move, he was convinced it was the prelude to some sort of uprising and ordered all whites in Okahandja to evacuate their homes and take shelter inside the fortress.
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For two days, soldiers and setters had remained on twenty-four-hour watch over the town, and for two days nothing happened.
That morning two of the more senior settlers, Councillor Duft and Dr Maass, volunteered to leave the safety of the fortress and venture out into Okahandja to investigate. They headed through the empty streets towards the Herero camp and on their way they passed a Herero Church elder known as Old Johannes, who glanced ambiguously at them and mumbled a few incomprehensible sentences in the Herero language, Otjiherero. Although puzzled by the old man’s behaviour, Duft and Maass continued towards the Herero settlement. As they approached they saw around a hundred Herero men saddling their horses. Overcome with fear, the two men ran back to the fortress convinced that the arrival of so many Herero was the preparation for an attack and that Johannes’s ‘facial expression’ had been some sort of a warning.

Back inside the walls of the fort, Duft and Maass briefed Lieutenant Zürn, who again jumped to the worst conclusion. Without making any attempt to establish the facts, Zürn sent a telegram to the Colonial Department in Berlin reporting, not that the Herero were preparing to attack, but that the uprising had already begun.

It is not known who fired the first shot, but what is clear is that shortly after Duft and Maass arrived back at the fort, both soldiers and settlers had begun to fire from the battlements into the streets of Okahandja. In response, the Herero emerged from their homes and laid siege to the fortress. They also attacked the German quarter, raiding homes and stores, and killing two German couples who had decided not to take refuge in the fortress. To prevent the Germans sending reinforcements from Windhoek, the Herero tore up the railway tracks and managed to overturn a railway coach just outside the station.

The German missionaries of Okahandja, whose mission station stood just 300 yards south of the fort, were caught in the crossfire. When the firing started, Missionary Phillip Diehl was forced to rush for cover as bullets tore through the mission station. ‘One bullet’, he wrote afterwards, ‘penetrated my study, embedding itself in the wall above my desk … If I had been
sitting there, as I had at the same time the previous day, I would now be a dead man.’
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One of few photographs of Okahandja, taken in January 1904, shows the steeple of Diehl’s church pockmarked by rifle fire. Later Diehl was shocked to discover that the bullets that had been aimed at his home had come not from the rifles of the Herero, who had carefully avoided the mission compound, but from the German fortress.

The one hundred Herero men that Duft and Maass had seen saddling their horses that morning were not the harbingers of an impeding uprising. They were merely representatives of one of the northern Herero clans recently arrived in Okahandja in order to seek the arbitration of Paramount Chief Samuel Maharero in an inheritance dispute. They were some of the armed Herero riders that the trader Alex Niet had seen riding to Okahandja a few days before.

The Herero viewed the Germans’ actions prior to 12 January as extremely hostile and provocative. Not only had the whole community and the entire garrison barricaded themselves in the fortress and ranged their guns over the town but – as Samuel Maharero had discovered – Zürn had also requested that reinforcements be urgently sent from Windhoek. Although the Herero had not been planning an attack, and Samuel Maharero had not even been in Okahandja on the morning of 12 January, the behaviour of Lieutenant Zürn and his men had raised tensions to such an extent that the Herero response, when it came, was bloody and emphatic.

The outbreak of hostilities, based as it was on false rumours and a misinterpretation of events, might otherwise have been limited to Okahandja and resolved through negotiations. However, by 1904, the Herero people had endured several years of abuse and provocation and events in Okahandja were the spark that set all of Hereroland ablaze.

In the following days, a wave of violence radiated out from Okahandja. Brandishing clubs, knives and guns, the Herero
attacked German farms and isolated homesteads across the great central plateau. Settlers were killed in their beds, on occasion by their own Herero servants. Men who had murdered or raped Herero, whom the German authorities had failed to punish, were hunted down. Traders who had extorted cattle and exaggerated debts were also killed. The Herero seized (at times seized back) large numbers of cattle from the traders and the settlers.

The wave of violent anger that began in Okahandja was, in part, a furious reaction against Lieutenant Zürn himself. As the historian Jan-Bart Gewald has shown, it was Zürn more than anyone who had substantially deepened Herero grievances and pushed them to the point at which a relatively minor incident in one town could lead to a general uprising across the whole of their territory.

One episode that had exacerbated tensions occurred just five weeks before fighting in Okahandja broke out. It concerned the forging of a land treaty. At the end of 1903, Zürn had summoned a number of Herero leaders from northern Hereroland to a meeting at the German fort in Okahandja. He had demanded they sign a contract that transferred large tracts of their ancestral land to the German authorities and established a second Herero reservation. When the chiefs refused to sign the treaty, Zürn had them unceremoniously removed from his office. He then forged what he imagined were passable imitations of their signatures: a series of indistinct ‘X’s. In fact, several of the Herero chiefs were perfectly able to read, write and sign their own names. On 8 December 1903 Zürn announced that the boundaries of northern and central Hereroland had been formally agreed, irrespective of the chiefs’ rejection of the necessary treaty.
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This transgression had infuriated the Herero, but even before this Zürn had established himself as a figure of hate. On at least one occasion in 1903 Zürn had ordered his men to exhume skulls from various Herero graves in Okahandja. By the early twentieth century, race scientists in Germany were paying increasing sums for the skulls of Africans and other ‘native’ peoples, and Ralph Zürn had probably come to regard the skulls
of the Herero as an easy source of additional income. For the Herero, the desecration of their ancestors’ remains, as Heinrich Göring had discovered two decades earlier, was regarded as an act so odious as to be utterly unforgivable.

In 1905, Ludwig Conradt, a German trader and close friend of Chief Samuel Maharero, claimed that the desecration of the graves at Okahandja had been one of the main reasons why the Herero had risen up.
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Even among settlers who had little contact with the Herero leadership, it was fairly well known that Zürn had goaded them to the point of revolt and that he was at least partially responsible for the war. Samuel Maharero also singled out Zürn as the chief author of the conflict, writing to Leutwein on 6 March 1904, ‘This is not my war … it is that of Zürn.’

It is reasonable to assume that Leutwein and the German authorities knew that Zürn was the immediate cause of the violence. But once the war had begun, concerted efforts were made to ensure that all blame was laid on the Herero, and Samuel Maharero in particular. In June 1904 Zürn was quietly relieved of his command and sent back to Germany. As a final insult to the people whose destruction he had set in train, he brought back to Germany a Herero skull looted from the graves at Okahandja. In Berlin he donated the skull to the collection of Felix von Luschan, the racial anthropologist who, eight years earlier, had attempted to carry out anthropological examinations on Herero and Witbooi – including Friedrich Maharero, Chief Samuel’s son – during the Berlin Colonial Exhibition.
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