Kaiser's Holocaust (32 page)

In the third week of February (the records do not give an exact date), the Nama arrived at the Windhoek concentration camp. It was located on the slopes of the hill on which the old German fortress stood. In place of barbed wire, the perimeter fencing consisted of a thick layer of felled camel-thorn trees, whose thorns grow several centimetres long and are easily capable of slicing through flesh. Inside the fence of thorns were several rows of closely packed, makeshift huts, formed from the branches of trees and covered with cloth. At the northern entrance of the camp stood a number of large, canvas army tents, which accommodated the hundreds of prisoners unable to find a place within the huts. The whole camp was dirt-ridden and foul-smelling. At that time around four thousand Herero prisoners were housed there.
18

From February 1906 onwards, a steady stream of Nama prisoners flowed into the camp. The Witbooi were among the first to arrive; soon they were joined in captivity by members of the other smaller Nama clans, who one by one surrendered in the south and were marched north. The arriving Nama were housed in a separate part of the camp to the Herero, and just few days after their arrival, Governor von Lindequist came to address them.

Accompanied by a retinue of journalists, prominent settlers and government functionaries, the governor delivered a speech, blaming the Nama for the war and claiming that they had behaved in a barbaric fashion:

Von Lindequist informed the Nama that they would suffer the same fate as the Herero, as punishment for the ‘crimes’. ‘You will be sent to work,’ he warned them, ‘and I advise you: work hard and follow the instructions of those who give them to you in my name.’
20

With thousands of Herero and Nama in captivity, von Lindequist’s civilian administration set about exploiting the labour of the Africans more intensely than had ever been attempted by von Trotha. Under von Lindequist, forced labour became the defining feature of the concentration-camp system and the main cause of its pathology. Von Lindequist’s regime was so calamitous for the Herero and Nama that it can be considered a continuation of their extermination, by non-military means.

In Windhoek, the four thousand Herero already in the camps had been deployed in the construction of new government buildings, private homes, and even a villa for Deputy Governor Oskar Hintrager. However, it was the construction of the railways, by far the biggest public-works project attempted in the colony, that became the engine driving the whole concentration-camp system.

By 1906 two railway projects were well under way. The first ran between Swakopmund and the mines at Otavi in the north, the second between Lüderitz and the inland settlement of Aus in the south. Seven thousand Herero, spread across the colony, were already working outside the formal concentration camps, most of them on the railways. Many were housed in special
mobile pens that moved along with the progress of the tracks, deeper into the desert or further into the bush.

The constant need for new labour on the railways encouraged the Germans to raid the Herero collection stations. So pressing was the demand for labour that the Germans even refused to allow the Herero enough time to recover from the effects of malnutrition. In early 1906, when work began on the Lüderitz to Aus railway, the colonial authorities ordered Missionary Kuhlmann at Omburo to send prisoners directly to the railways. He was specifically ordered to send as many as possible, the sick as well as the healthy, the old as well as the young.
21

The work, especially the laying of the heavy steel rails and prefabricated steel sleepers, was extremely hard labour. Like the prisoners in the concentration camps, the forced labourers on the railways were inadequately fed and poorly housed. They were also routinely abused by their guards. Traugott Tjienda, a Herero man working on the Otavi railway, gave this statement describing the conditions:

The railway’s voracious appetite for labour was, in part, due to the extremely high death rates suffered by the prisoners. According to statistics compiled by Firma Lenz, the company charged with construction of the embankments for the southern Lüderitz to Aus railroad, 2,014 Herero prisoners were employed on the line between January 1906 and June 1907.
23
In a report to the colonial authorities, Firma Lenz openly admitted that
1,359 of the prisoners had died over the course of those eighteen months.
24
The company’s clerk even calculated the exact proportion of casualties: 67.48 percent.

In early 1906 the Nama in the Windhoek camp were prepared for forced labour. They were divided into two categories: the
Arbeitsfähige
(‘work-able’) and the
Arbeitsunfähige
(‘workunable’). The ‘unable’ were left to their fate in the Windhoek concentration camp, but those deemed able – men, women or children – were moved out to one of the many government construction projects around the colony; like the Herero, most were sent to the railways. Those who arrived on the Swakopmund to Otavi line worked alongside the Herero who had been forced out of Missionary Kuhlmann’s collection point at Omburo.

The Nama, comparatively small in stature, found the labour regime on the railways perhaps even harder than the Herero. By 1906 it was being reported that they were ill suited to railway work and made poor labourers in general. Long before the Nama War, letters and editorials in the colonial newspapers had claimed that the Nama were an innately martial and untameable people who, when the time came, would be unable to adapt to the loss of their freedom and take on the role of landless, subservient labourers. Now it was claimed that this prediction had been borne out by experience and the Nama’s future hung in the balance.

As an increasingly Darwinian world view took hold in German South-West Africa, attitudes towards the Nama darkened. The German anthropologist Leonard Schultze, who in 1905 had carried out field research among Nama prisoners, suggested that it was of vital importance for the success of the German colonial project that those races unfit for labour should be allowed to disappear. ‘The struggle for our own existence allows no other solution,’ he claimed. ‘We, who build our houses on the graves of these races, have a responsibility to safeguard [our] civilisation, sparing no means.’
25

The Nama, like the Indians of North America and the aboriginals of Tasmania, were a people whose labour was
deemed to be of little value. Their reputation as warriors also worked against them. By the middle of 1906, the presence of Nama prisoners, especially the Witbooi, in the Windhoek concentration camps had begun to disturb the local settlers. An article published in the settler newspaper
Der Deutsche
on 1 August 1906 claimed that the population of Windhoek, both soldiers and settlers, were angry that the Witbooi were housed so close to German homes. Although by this point many of the Nama in the Windhoek camp were women, children and those unfit for labour, they were still deemed an unacceptable threat to the 2,500 white residents of Windhoek. The escape of a small number of Witbooi from the camp at the beginning of August put further pressure on von Lindequist to remove them from the capital.
26

Having discounted them as labourers, von Lindequist looked for a solution to the Nama problem. His initial plan was to deport them to the German colony of Samoa, in the South Pacific, but this was hastily rejected by the Colonial Department due to ‘the cost of transportation’. Von Lindequist’s final solution was to dispatch the Nama to the concentration camp on Shark Island, in Lüderitz harbour.

The town of Lüderitz had originally been envisaged as the gateway to the south of the colony. With Walvis Bay claimed by the British, the harbour at Lüderitz was by far the best remaining natural harbour between the border with Portuguese Angola and the Orange River. However, it was Swakopmund that established itself as German South-West Africa’s main seaport while Lüderitz stagnated.

Each year a few more settlers came and went. They were fishermen, minor colonial officials or workers bound for the guano islands offshore. Lüderitz at the turn of the century had the appearance of a base-camp from which the colonial pioneers had intended to launch some great expedition that had somehow never come about. A British military doctor who visited the town struggled to understand how such a place could have been brought into existence:

Yet within just two years, starting in 1904, two decades of stagnation were wiped away. Lüderitz was transformed into a thriving port town, not by the discovery of natural resources or a sudden wave of settlement, but by the German-Nama War.

In early 1905, the town became a major port for the arrival of troops and supplies, and the site of an important hospital. A Rhenish mission was founded, new hotels opened and houses built. Rows of military tents and hastily constructed depots began to appear. In 1907 the town even acquired its own generator,
although the electricity supply was at first reserved for military installations and lighting the main street. Before 1904 Lüderitz had had just twenty permanent white residents; by the middle of 1905 the German population stood at a little more than eight hundred.

The conflict that was the unmaking of the Nama was the making of Lüderitz. War became the sole business. The town was dominated by soldiers constantly arriving on the transport ships from Germany, or amusing themselves while waiting to be shipped home, at the end of their term of service. Three ‘waitress hotels’ opened, the Fust Bismarck, Hotel National and the Central Hotel, attracting prostitutes and adding to Lüderitz’s growing fame.

The soldiers were not the only new arrivals in Lüderitz in 1905. Opportunists, adventurers, drifters and thugs from across the world heard the rumours and made for the town. The record of criminal cases for those years hint at a frontier town driven by money, plagued by street violence and alcohol, and buoyed by an unreal wartime economy. Those arrested in Lüderitz during 1905 include men from as far afield as Argentina, Sweden and Ireland. This was a legendary period in Namibia’s history: the years of the ‘Wild South-West’.

For German soldiers and white adventurers, Lüderitz was a frontier boomtown, but the war that fuelled the boom also brought Lüderitz thousands of African prisoners. For them, as for all the black peoples of German South-West Africa, Lüderitz became the most feared place on earth.
2

At its height, there were three German concentration camps in Lüderitz. The most dreaded stood on Shark Island, one of the three small islets that shielded Lüderitz harbour from the South Atlantic. Just 1,300 yards from north to south and 300 yards wide at its broadest, Shark Island was linked to the mainland by a narrow causeway.

As military operations in the south began to escalate, the colonial authorities built a large quarantine station on the island
in which German troops arriving from the hinterland were held for about a week, before being allowed into town. Sometime in early 1905, another use for Shark Island was identified.

With only one, easily policed route on or off Shark Island, it was chosen as a site for a concentration camp. The camp was situated on the farthest tip of the island, where the winds of the South Atlantic crashed down from three sides. In its earliest form, it consisted of a few corrugated iron shacks, in which the guards sheltered from the wind and cold, and a line of barbed-wire fencing sealed it off from the rest of the island.

The main source of information we have about the early days of the Shark Island camp comes (again) from the letters of the missionaries. Although there are records that show that Herero prisoners were sent to Shark Island as early as June 1904, the camp properly got under way in early 1905, when a group of Herero were placed there. In late May 1905 Heinrich Vedder, the Swakopmund missionary, got hold of a military report from Lüderitz in which some of the first deaths on Shark Island were recorded. Writing to Wilhelm Eich, his colleague in Okahandja, Vedder reported that fifty-nine men, fifty-nine women and seventy-three children had died in the Shark Island camp. As the population of the camp at this time is unknown, a death rate cannot be deduced, but Vedder described it as being ‘incredibly high’. A week after receiving Vedder’s letter, Missionary Eich replied, ‘Lüderitz lies heavy on my heart.’
3

Later in the year, Eich noted that the Herero in the Okahandja concentration camp had heard of Shark Island and feared being sent there. On one occasion he was refused permission by the military authorities to inform a group of Herero in Okahandja that they were being sent to Lüderitz. ‘I would have liked to have spoken with them before they left,’ Eich wrote to Vedder, ‘but they are not to know where they are going and therefore I was not allowed to speak with them.’
4

Even Herero prisoners in the Swakopmund camp, which itself had extremely high death rates, lived in dread of being transferred to the Lüderitz camp. One account from Swakopmund in
1905 tells of a group of Herero assembled on the waterfront. Shortly after they had been informed that they were to be sent to Lüderitz, one prisoner fell to the ground, bleeding profusely, having drilled his fingers into his own neck in a desperate attempt to commit suicide.
5

Officials of the Arthur Koppel Company, the German engineering company contracted by the Otavi railway concession to build the line between Swakopmund and the Otavi copper mines, reported in 1907 that a group of Herero prisoners working for them had escaped, ‘solely out of fear that they might be sent to the south’.
6

Those Herero who managed to escape the Swakopmund camp, or Koppel’s railway camps in the desert, attempted to make the journey of 20 miles to the British enclave of Walvis Bay. From there they either went to work in the South African gold mines or simply lived on the streets of the British settlement. A German reporter encountering them wrote, ‘Most lived off fishing or by begging from the Nama. Their mood is subdued; in spite of this they would not consider going back into German territory; they declared rather wanting to starve to death.’
7

There are several eyewitness accounts that explain why the Shark Island camp was so deeply feared by the Herero. The Rhenish missionary August Kuhlmann was among the first civilians to visit the camp. What he saw in September 1905 shocked him profoundly: ‘A woman, who was so weak from illness that she could not stand, crawled to some of the other prisoners to beg for water. The overseer fired five shots at her. Two shots hit her: one in the thigh, the other smashing her forearm … In the night she died.’
8

Similar scenes were recorded by a group of South African transport riders – men hired to drive the ox wagons that ferried supplies from Lüderitz Bay to the hinterland in the years before the southern railway was constructed. According to the testimonies of several transport riders, the German overseers on Shark Island and the other Lüderitz camps used
sjamboks
indiscriminately and routinely to beat prisoners and force them to
work. Percival Griffith, an accountant fallen on hard times, worked in Lüderitz unloading cargo during 1904. In an interview conducted at the beginning of 1905 for the South African newspaper the
Cape Argus
, Griffith described the scenes he had witnessed in Lüderitz:

In 1905 the same South African newspaper ran a whole series of reports on ‘The German Operations’ in Lüderitz using the accounts of transport riders. In an article published on 28 September 1905, a transport rider, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, described the punishment regime in a Lüderitz concentration camp:

The most important witness to come to the Shark Island camp during 1905 was Lieutenant Düring, a German officer serving in the south. Evidently a relatively wealthy man, Düring brought one of the latest roll-film box cameras to South-West Africa. By 1905 the unwieldy dry-plate cameras of the nineteenth century were slowly being replaced by multiple-exposure roll-film cameras. These box cameras, pioneered by the American Kodak Company, were easy to use, highly portable and, most importantly, had short exposure times. They ushered in the age of the informal snapshot – a major departure from the formal posed styles of Victorian photographic portraiture. Lieutenant Düring and the other German officers who owned cameras created a scattered but invaluable catalogue of images from the war. While many of the photographs taken by German officers in South-West Africa were highly orchestrated portraits, Lieutenant Düring’s were true ‘snapshots’, taken as mementos or
aide-
mémoires
.
11

In 1905 Düring was posted in the Nama town of Bethanie, a few day’s ride from Lüderitz. Many of the photographs in his collection are of daily life, showing German soldiers and settlers going about their business in a backwater colonial town. But sometime in January 1906, presumably on his way back home to Germany, Düring arrived in Lüderitz. Like all soldiers arriving from the hinterland, he and a travelling companion, Dr Gühne, reported to the quarantine station on Shark Island. There Düring decided to visit the concentration camp and take photographs of the Herero prisoners, inadvertently leaving by far the best visual record of the camp.

Only five of Düring’s photographs of Shark Island are known to have survived. The first, taken at some distance, reveals the general layout of the camp. The shelters the Herero had managed to construct – ragtag huts made from blankets and cloth – are strewn like garbage heaps across the rocks. Above these hovels, the German imperial flag flutters over a corrugated
iron shack, most likely an improvised shelter for the handful of soldiers tasked with guarding the prisoners. Huddled together among the rocks are the prisoners themselves.