Kaiser's Holocaust (6 page)

The more Lüderitz invested his money and his hopes in South-West Africa, the more his ambition swelled. He imagined a network of trading posts and enormous mineral wealth ripped from the earth. He also dreamed (though perhaps less vividly) of a German colony of farms and German settlers. The first step in achieving this grand vision was to wrest ownership of the land from the local African leaders, which, as Vogelsang had shown,
was the easy part. The greater challenge would be for Lüderitz to have his new territories recognised and offered consular protection by the German government. This would involve an encounter with the most formidable statesman in Europe: the Chancellor of the German Reich, Prince Otto von Bismarck.

Throughout the 1870s, Bismarck’s view on colonies, in public at least, had been consistently negative. As long as German traders could sell their goods in British and French colonies, Bismarck saw little reason for Germany herself to claim colonies. He was acutely aware that Germany lacked a navy large enough to protect far-off territories, and to create such an armada would be an enormous expense. Moreover, if Germany were to become a colonial power, the administration of these foreign possessions would be another unwelcome cost. Bismarck had long been willing to send gunboats across oceans to intimidate and bombard Africans or Asians, or force them into unequal treaties. He was even open to the establishment of naval bases and coaling stations on foreign shores to make this sort of trans-global intimidation more efficient, but he remained resolutely opposed to formal colonies, stating, ‘As long as I am
Reichkanzler
, we shall not pursue a colonial policy.’
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So when in January 1883 Adolf Lüderitz came to Berlin to request consular protection for his planned trading post, he cannot have been too surprised that Bismarck responded, ‘Sovereignty over this country now lies either with the Negro prince concerned, or with Lüderitz, but not the Reich.’
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Despite this apparently emphatic rebuttal, Bismarck was secretly biding his time to see if Lüderitz’s acquisition became viable. Most importantly, he wanted to see how the British, with their possessions in the Cape Colony and at Walvis Bay on the Namib coast, would react to the presence of Germans in southwestern Africa. Bismarck’s customary anti-colonial stance was beginning to buckle under the weight of popular pressure.
Germany in the 1880s was in the grip of what became known as the ‘colonial fever’.

Ever since unification in 1871, organisations had been formed to promote the idea that the young nation should acquire colonies. The earliest movements were created by merchants who wanted to secure new markets for German goods, and during the severe depression that followed unification, their economic arguments for colonial expansion gathered increasing levels of support. Then, on the eve of the 1880s, in the midst of an economic recession, a book was published that set in motion a full-scale national debate on the colonial question:
Does
Germany Need Colonies?
by Friedrich Fabri, the inspector of the Barmen Rhine Mission. The immediate acquisition of overseas colonies, claimed Fabri, had become ‘a matter of life or death for the development of Germany’. Despite Germany’s military power – four times that of Great Britain in Fabri’s estimation – without colonies she would remain a second-class nation. Although Fabri would never set foot in Africa, he set himself up as an African expert and in the 1880s helped found the
Westdeutsch Verein für Kolonialisation und Export
(West German Society for Colonisation and Export). Unlike earlier organisations, Fabri’s society campaigned not for overseas markets, but for colonies to which German farmers might emigrate. In 1882 another movement was formed through the amalgamation of several smaller groups. The
Deutsche Kolonial Verein
(German Colonial Society) became the most influential pro-colonial movement.

In the Germany of the 1880s popular enthusiasm for empire, especially for empire in Africa, was stoked by the dramatic accounts of the great explorers and, despite having no colonies, Germany was at the forefront of tropical exploration. Long before unification, German explorers had proved their mettle by reaching lands bewilderingly distant and remote. Perhaps the greatest German explorer was Heinrich Barth, who had crossed the Sahara as a member of a three-man British-led expedition. After the deaths of both his colleagues, Barth had carried on
alone, eventually reaching Timbuktu. By the time he left Africa he had travelled 12,000 miles during five years of unbroken exploration. The account of his journey,
Discoveries in North
and Central Africa
, ran to five volumes and was published in English and German simultaneously. A decade later Friedrich Röhlfs became the first European to cross Africa from north to south, and in the 1870s Gustav Nachtigal added his name to this national roll of honour by exploring previously unknown parts of the central Sahara. During one expedition Nachtigal was given up for dead, only to escape the clutches of the jungle and dramatically reappear at Khartoum.

Germany could also claim a role in the most glamorous (and most stage-managed) African adventure of the age – Henry Morton Stanley’s epic struggle to build an empire in the Congo for Leopold II, King of the Belgians. In Germany, some of the genuine excitement surrounding Stanley’s exploration of the ‘dark continent’ stemmed from the fact that two German explorers were working alongside him. The German army lieutenant Hermann Wissmann had made his name exploring the Tushelango area, where he had ‘virtually discovered’ Lake Munkamba.
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Another German, Curt von François, had worked alongside Wissmann until 1885, after which he had set off on his own to explore the Lulengo and Uruki tributaries of the Congo. Stanley later thanked von François for discovering 1,000 miles of navigable waterways that were added to Leopold’s empire.
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By the time the ‘colonial fever’ was reaching its crescendo, German explorers had hacked their way through some of the continent’s most impenetrable forests and trekked across its most desolate wastelands. They had endured appalling privations and encountered unimaginably exotic peoples, but for the ordinary millions caught up in the ‘colonial fever’ this was no longer enough. They longed to see Germany’s representatives in Africa plant flags and claim new lands for the Reich – as Pierre de Brazza had done for France and Henry Morton Stanley had done for King Leopold. Writing on German public opinion at the end of 1884, a correspondent of the
London Globe
reported
that, ‘So deeply are the people imbued with a vague but nonetheless enticing vision of the wealth to be won in Africa that thousands of young men are longing and waiting for an opportunity to seek their fortune in the new El Dorado.’
10

As the dream of a German colonial empire – once the fixation of a middle-class minority – spread across German society, it became increasingly intertwined with the issue of national prestige. If Leopold II of the Belgians, acting as a private citizen, could build a colony seventy-six times the size of his own realm, then surely Germany, fast becoming the greatest military power in Europe, had not only a right but a duty to take a slice of the colonial cake. The fear grew that if Germany continued to delay her arrival at the colonial feast she might find the door slammed in her face. By the middle of the decade ‘colonial fever’ was giving way to
Torschlusspanik
– ‘door closing panic’. This national paranoia was stoked by the nationalist, conservative press and manipulated by the German Colonial Society. Bismarck himself acknowledged that ‘public opinion in Germany so strongly emphasises colonial policy that the position of the German government essentially depends upon its success’.
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In March 1883, just a month before Heinrich Vogelsang landed in Angra Pequeña, Adolf Woermann, the owner of the Woermann trading house, wrote to Bismarck warning him that the British, French and Portuguese were combining to take control of much of Africa and push the German traders out. Just weeks later Bismarck received similar warnings from Heinrich von Kusserow of the Foreign Office, and in July the Hamburg traders added to the clamour for African colonies by again calling for the annexation of the coast of Cameroon. This time Woermann warned Bismarck that if Germany wanted colonies in Cameroon, ‘now, so to speak, is the last moment to acquire them’.
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On 25 August 1883, as the pressure on Bismarck was increasing, Heinrich Vogelsang negotiated a second treaty with Joseph Fredericks of the Bethanie Nama. Even by the low standards of European colonialism, it was exploitative and one-sided. It is
even suggested that Vogelsang may have plied Joseph Fredericks with liquor during the negotiations. Whatever his tactics, the substance of the deal was this: Fredericks would sell to Lüderitz a strip of coastal land stretching from the Orange River in the south up to a latitude of twenty-six degrees in the north. For this Joseph Fredericks and his people would receive
£
500 and sixty Wesley-Richards rifles. The treaty defined the coastal strip as a ribbon of land twenty ‘geographical miles’ in width. This ‘geographical mile’ was a German measurement that will have meant nothing to Fredericks, but is almost five times the distance of a normal (or English) mile. Fredericks had been tricked into selling off the bulk of his people’s land. In a letter to Vogelsang, Lüderitz ordered his agent to ‘Let Josef Fredericks believe for the time being that the reference is to 20 English miles’.
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So outrageous was this second treaty that a later German administrator was dispatched to investigate it, but he died on his way back to Germany and the Bethanie Nama lost their land for ever.

At the beginning of 1884 Bismarck was still waiting to see how the British would react to Adolf Lüderitz’s acquisition of Angra Pequeña. Despite several dispatches to the British government enquiring as to whether they had any historic claim on Lüderitz’s land, the British had remained silent. Through high-handed inaction and a series of blunders, the British authorities gave the impression (to Bismarck at least) that they were attempting to strangle the new German colony at birth. In March 1884 news arrived that the British Cape government had, somewhat suspiciously, stumbled across a batch of previously lost documents that proved Britain had rights over Angra Pequeña. Bismarck was furious.

Three months later Heinrich von Kusserow, the pro-colonial official from the Foreign Office, sent Bismarck a memorandum that offered a positive assessment of Angra Pequeña as a potential trading post. Von Kusserow also took the opportunity to
remind the Chancellor that the British – the very power that threatened to undermine German interests in Africa – had pioneered a colonial model offering Bismarck the possibility of acquiring colonies without the attendant financial burdens. Although much of the British Empire was made up of Crown Colonies, run by British administrators and garrisoned by British soldiers, other possessions were merely ‘protectorates’. This was Britain’s famous ‘paper empire’, in which the administration and development of vast areas was undertaken by private companies working under a Royal Charter and with only the nominal protection of the British flag. These companies recruited their own private armies and financed their own affairs.

There were already stretches of the African coast on which German traders were the dominant presence. If they could be persuaded to run those areas as colonies according to the British charter company model, then the declaration of an African empire would be a mere formalising of arrangements that already existed. Encouraged by von Kusserow, Bismarck began to regard the British model as a way of yielding to the public mood. Just weeks after receiving the von Kusserow memorandum, Bismarck made his final and irrevocable leap into the dark. ‘Now let us act,’ he told von Kusserow.
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In the spring of 1884 the highest levels of the German government were flung into action to secure the future empire. On 19 April, Bismarck informed Adolf Lüderitz that his private colony would receive full protection. Nine days later the Hamburg trader Adolf Woermann was summoned to Berlin and told that all German traders working on the West African coast were to be placed under the protection of the Reich.