Kaiser's Holocaust (36 page)

The morning of 27 January 1912 found the town of Windhoek abuzz with excitement. The red, white and black of the German tricolour hung from beneath windows and fluttered from masts erected along the main streets. It was the Kaiser’s birthday, an occasion always celebrated with a degree of patriotic fervour in German South-West Africa, but in 1912 the celebrations were particularly memorable. Around seven o’clock in the morning, before the summer heat rendered even the most gentle physical activity almost intolerable, the citizens of Windhoek began to make their way up the steep hill upon which the German fortress stood. Their journeys took them through the centre of Windhoek, a town that had been transformed by war and by the slave labour of the defeated Nama and Herero. Along Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse, they passed the window displays of the new shops that sold imported luxuries. Along Garten Strasse, they passed the hot water springs that fed the city’s new swimming pool. Those who cut through the Memorial Gardens walked over manicured lawns and between duck ponds. What had once been the home of the Herero was now a European city in miniature.
1

That morning, the men of Windhoek wore their best white linen suits, and the ladies who accompanied them dressed in long ornate frocks of white lace. The new colonial elite were prosperous, proud, and acutely aware of rank and status. To emphasise their position, many had added the prefix ‘von’ to their surnames, implying a lost aristocratic heritage.

In front of the fortress, a 16-foot tall bronze statue of a mounted
Schutztruppe
towered above the growing crowds. The
Rider Statue
, as it became known, had been paid for by private donations raised in Germany. It was the work of the sculptor
Adolf Kürle, and was intended as a memorial to the soldiers and settlers who had lost their lives in the wars against the Herero and the Nama.
2

Stern and austere, with a rifle in his hand, the rider was also a dramatic representation of the rugged ‘colonial type’ that the colonial societies and German nationalists had always claimed would emerge from the hardships and struggles of the colonial frontier. The unveiling of the
Rider Statue
on the Kaiser’s birthday in 1912 was the moment that German South-West Africa came of age.

The men of the Windhoek garrison, dressed in the same
Schutztruppe
uniform as the rider, stood nearest the statue on the morning of the inauguration ceremony. After both soldiers and civilians had placed wreaths at the foot of the plinth, local notables addressed the crowd from a specially built podium draped in the national flag. The keynote speaker was Theodor Seitz, the new governor. Seitz began by reminding the assembled crowd of the many sacrifices that had been made by the colonial army in the name of the Fatherland during the wars begun in 1904, but he ended with a simple statement of fact:

The Germans were masters not only of South-West Africa’s future, but of its past. Their version of the war had been set in stone and was now cast in bronze. The inauguration of the
Rider
Statue
was the culmination of the process of historical denial and distortion begun by Friedrich von Lindequist. The brutality of the settlers in the years leading up to the war, General von Trotha’s Extermination Order and the concentration-camp system were expunged from official history.

Part of the motivation behind the commissioning of the
Rider
Statue
had been a determination to remember the Germans who
had died in the war. Yet its location, on the lawns outside the old fortress, represented an equally determined effort to forget the suffering of the Herero and Nama. The statue had been erected on the site of Windhoek’s main concentration camp, where only four years earlier perhaps as many as four thousand Herero, mainly women and children, had been starved, beaten and worked to death.

By 1912 nothing remained of the camp. The mud huts and thorn-bush fences were gone, and the bodies of the victims had been interred in mass graves scattered across the town. But no one who attended the inauguration ceremony could have possibly misinterpreted the significance of the location. The site of the former camp was now the centrepiece of the German version of the war, a history in which a genocide was transformed into a heroic struggle for civilisation and progress.

From his granite plinth, the
Rider
gazed out far beyond the city limits into hills that surround the town, once dotted with Herero villages. The Herero who had survived the war no longer lived in Windhoek Valley. When the concentration camps had been closed in 1908, the survivors had been distributed among the settlers and made to work virtually as slaves, raising cattle on land that had once been theirs. They lived in small, isolated groups. Under restrictions imposed by the colonial administration, all Africans over the age of seven were prohibited from travelling without their employers’ permission and were made to carry passes, similar to those that had already been adopted in the British parts of South Africa (formerly the Cape Colony). Cut off from what remained of their families and communities, their culture almost atrophied.

In 1908 Matthias Erzberger, a Reichstag member for the Zentrum party spoke out and condemned the treatment of Africans in the colony. In the Reichstag itself he asked if they had not in fact been reduced to the status of slaves. Erzberger was loudly scorned by his fellow deputies and later referred to as a ‘nigger lover’.
4
Three years later, when Major Ludwig von Estorff complained that the Herero on the farms ‘are treated no different than slaves’, he was simply ignored.
5

The few Nama rebels who had survived the concentration camps were treated differently. Although the war had ended and the concentration camps had been decommissioned, the survivors of Shark Island were still incarcerated in 1912. They were held by the German army in a converted military stables in central Hereroland. Out of sight, Samuel Izaak, his sons and around a hundred of his people were being permitted slowly to die off. A headcount of the Nama held at Okawayo, conducted by the Germans in July 1909, revealed that of the Witbooi there were only thirty-nine men, sixty-five women and fifty-two children, some of whom had been born in captivity at Okawayo. Of the Bethanie Nama who had joined the Witbooi in rebellion, only thirty men, forty women and twenty-two children remained alive.
6

The Nama clans who had rejected Hendrik Witbooi’s appeals to rise up in 1904 had survived the war but had later been confined to small reserves. The Berseba Nama, some of the Bethanie Nama and the mixed-race Basters of Rehoboth all found that their territories had become islands of indigenously owned land in a sea of German farms. With so little land, many were forced to abandon their traditional lifestyles and seek employment as farm labourers.

In 1909 it had been suggested that the colony should make use of the Nama being held at Okawayo, by distributing them among the German farms in the south. However, the colonial authorities quickly discovered that although the colony was suffering an acute shortage of labour, the farmers had no interest in taking a people they regarded as inferior labourers, even as slaves. In March 1909, Major von Maercker, an officer of the
Etappenkommando
, wrote that ‘giving the natives to the farmers as workers etc. will only cause problems, because, as we have experienced already, the Nama, who are on average small and weak, are poorly suited as farm labourers and are therefore not very popular with the farmers’.
7

In the same year, the colonial government in Windhoek again toyed with the idea of deporting the Nama, this time to German
East Africa. Well aware of the Nama’s reputation as guerrilla warriors, Freiherr von Rechenberg, the Governor of East Africa, vetoed the plan, fearing that the Nama might ‘spread their dangerous influence among the people here’.
8

In the years before World War I, with the Herero and Nama decimated and the survivors reduced to virtual slaves, German South-West Africa truly belonged to the Germans. While the Herero and Nama had been incarcerated in the concentration camps, Governor von Lindequist and Deputy Governor Hintrager had confiscated their former homelands. In December 1905, Kaiser Wilhelm had formally expropriated all Herero land, and in 1906, von Lindequist and Hintrager issued instructions for the Land Surveyors’ Department to draft a new map of South-West Africa, subdividing much of the prime farmland of the Herero and Nama into hundreds of farm plots. On 8 May 1907, just weeks after Shark Island camp had finally been closed, the Kaiser completed the land grab, issuing a decree expropriating all Nama lands, apart from Berseba and the land of the Bondelswarts at Warmbad.
9

By 1908 the German government had acquired a total of 46 million hectares of land that had once been the property of Nama, Damara, Herero and San peoples. The German settlers, some of whom had previously leased their land from the Africans or owed outstanding payments, were notified by the German colonial newspaper
Deutsche Kolonialzeitung
that each farmer would be able to submit a claim for his ‘possession’ to the Fiscal Department of the colonial government.

In 1913 there were 1,331 German farms; before the Herero and Nama wars there had been just 480. By the same year there were almost fifteen thousand settlers in the territory – in 1904 there had been only around five thousand, and in 1891 only three hundred. Many of those who had settled after the war were former soldiers, men who had chosen to stay behind and claim a
plot of the land they had conquered. To cater for the farming boom, a host of new businesses had emerged. In Windhoek alone there were ninety-eight registered businesses in 1913; ten years earlier there had been just fifteen.
10

The colony’s Deputy Governor, Oskar Hintrager, who also acted as Secretary for Immigration and Settlement, was particularly dedicated to turning German South-West Africa into a model agricultural colony. Hintrager had spent years studying the example of the United States, and had marvelled at the endless wheat fields of the Midwest and the great profits made by the cattle ranchers of the western prairies. ‘Agriculture’, he explained to his superiors, ‘is the backbone of all other vocations.’
11
To ensure that agriculture became the engine of the colonial economy, Hintrager and his colleagues set about providing aspiring farmers with interest-free loans. The average loan was six thousand Reichmarks, enough to buy basic tools and a farmhouse. In addition to the loans, new farmers were sold the cattle that had been confiscated from the Nama and Herero at drastically reduced prices.

Not all settlers, however, qualified for these loans. Governor von Lindequist, along with Hintrager, set down a number of criteria that aspiring farmers had to meet to be considered. They were expected to prove their ‘German citizenship’, demonstrate that they were of ‘good repute’ and had ‘knowledge of an orderly agricultural enterprise’ to be awarded loans.
12
By these means, von Lindequist could control who was able to own land in the colony. Such regulations were part of a programme of social engineering to ensure that the expanding white population would constitute a new colonial
Volk
. The popular colonial magazine
Kolonie und Heimat
(In the Colonies and at Home) described the type of German settler that was needed in South-West Africa: