Kaiser's Holocaust (8 page)

Witbooi simply ignored this letter. When eventually Göring’s deputy, Louis Nels, wrote suggesting a conciliatory meeting, Hendrik Witbooi replied,

Hendrik Witbooi’s contempt for the Germans was matched only by his fury with the Herero. As the war escalated, Göring, Nels and Goldammer became mere spectators. Again and again, Witbooi’s mounted fighters raided Chief Tjamuaha’s cattle, each attack demonstrating the military prowess of the Herero’s opponents and the worthlessness of their ‘alliance’ with the Germans.

Unable to influence events, in 1886 Göring trekked across the southern parts of the protectorate in an attempt to persuade the minor Nama chiefs to sign protection treaties. The journey to the south revealed how vast the Nama’s territory was. Only about forty thousand strong, the Nama inhabited an area twice the size of Great Britain. To their east was the Kalahari Desert and in the west the Namib. Only in the middle of the territory did the dense grassland of the central plateau offer the Nama and their cattle some sustenance. The twelve Nama clans lived in scattered villages but were bound to each other through marriage and a strong political entity known as the
Wittkamskap
, a union of mutual protection and common purpose.

Göring’s mission through Namaland was a wasted effort. Only a couple of the more minor chiefs agreed to sign. But Hendrik Witbooi, quick to re-establish his authority, scuppered even these small triumphs. When Chief Manasse of the Nama clan known as the Red Nation signed a treaty and accepted a German flag from Göring, Witbooi confiscated it. He then wrote to Göring: ‘I captured the flag which you had presented to [Chief] Manasse. It is now in my keeping. I should like to know what to do with this flag; I ask because it is an alien thing to me.’
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In 1887, two years into his tenure as Imperial Commissioner, Göring was forced to report to Chancellor Bismarck that the situation in Namaland was ‘not very encouraging’.
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If the lack of progress was a disappointment for Bismarck, it was a disaster for the German South-West African Colonial Company. In 1885 it had bought out Adolf Lüderitz, who drowned the following year while exploring the Orange River. Angra Pequeña had subsequently been renamed Lüderitz Bay in his honour. But the minerals and riches that Adolf Lüderitz had dreamed of had never materialised, and the company’s ambition to transform the protectorate into a flourishing mining colony had come to nothing. By the time of Lüderitz’s death in late 1886, the company’s funds were once more exhausted and new investors could not be induced to come forward. Financially and politically, German South-West Africa seemed a failed enterprise. Serious questions began to be asked in Berlin as to whether the protectorate was even worth keeping. However, at the very moment that Göring’s mission seemed destined to fail, incredible news reached Berlin – gold had been discovered.

Remarkably, the precious metal had been found only a few hours’ ride north of the headquarters Göring had set up in the Herero town of Otjimbingwe. The fortunate prospector was an Australian named Stevens, the owner of a small mine in a backwater called Anawood. Göring, in his role as Imperial Commissioner, had been the first on the scene and, having personally verified the find, he proudly transmitted the news to
Berlin. He even insisted on personally escorting the gold samples back to Germany, arriving in Berlin in early December 1887.

Only a year earlier, under almost identical circumstances, a gold strike in the Wittwatersrand Mountains of South Africa had led to the uncovering of one of the largest gold deposits on earth. The investors of the German South-West African Colonial Company held their breath in anticipation and Germany looked forward to her own colonial gold rush. All that remained was to determine the extent of the deposits.

A team of the nation’s leading geologists and mineralogists was hastily assembled for an African expedition, but before they even reached South-West Africa, private mining companies and prospectors were rushing to invest. Germany’s desert protectorate had become the jewel in the Kaiser’s crown.

For the prospecting expeditions arriving in South-West Africa, the powerlessness of the German authorities was a profound shock. They were especially disturbed to discover that in order to prospect for minerals on land owned by the Nama they had to seek permission not from Imperial Commissioner Göring but from
Kaptein
Hendrik Witbooi. The expedition leader – a man as incapable of diplomacy as Göring – alienated Witbooi almost immediately. Perhaps imagining himself a character in a Wild West novel, he informed him that he came in peace. Unimpressed, Hendrik coldly responded, ‘You come as friends? Well this is my land, and I don’t want anything to do with the white man.’
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When the geologists and mineralogists arrived at Anawood, they made a sobering discovery. Although the gold samples that Göring had brought back to Germany were real enough, they had not come from Anawood, or anywhere else in South-West Africa. Small pieces of gold had been loaded into a musket and fired into the rock face. The gold find had been a hoax. The identity of the culprit remains a mystery, but the suspicion remains that it might have been a desperate, last-ditch attempt by Heinrich Göring to bring investment into the protectorate and save his mission.

If Göring was behind the hoax, it did him little good. Rumours of the Anawood find had spread fast, and one of the first to hear the exciting news was the English trader Robert Lewis. Lewis had lived among the Herero for several years, and had forged strong bonds of friendship and trust with several Herero chiefs. In addition to his trading activities, Lewis was a prospector and the holder of a decade-old contract with Chief Tjamuaha. This contract gave him exclusive rights to all prospecting and mining in northern Hereroland, but did not extend into southern Hereroland where the Anawood mine was located. To gain these mining rights Lewis set about exposing Göring’s protection treaty as worthless.

Tjamuaha and his councillors were receptive to Lewis’s claims. They were well aware that Göring’s promises were empty and the treaty a meaningless document. Furthermore, they had turned against Göring and the Germans months earlier, due to the behaviour of the prospectors and mineralogists who had flooded into their territory. Under the terms of the protection treaty the Germans were expected to ‘respect the customs and habits of the Hereros’, but many of the prospectors, living among a people they considered inferior, were violent and abusive. Often drunk, some had taken ‘liberties with the Herero women’. The chiefs were outraged. Yet it was Göring who transgressed the customs of the Herero most unforgivably.
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In 1885 Göring had purchased the old mission building in the Herero settlement of Otjimbingwe and had later decided to add an extension to the old building. Whether Göring was aware of it is not known, but the extension was built over a Herero graveyard, and the bones of the sacred ancestors were disturbed.
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When the news of this desecration reached Tjamuaha – probably through Lewis – he was enraged, and at the end of October 1888 he summoned Göring to Okahandja. Flanked by over a hundred of his people and Robert Lewis, he formally nullified the ‘protection’ treaty and dismissed Germany’s Imperial Commissioner from his own protectorate. Göring left Okahandja fearing for his life. His nerves shattered, his last
official act was to issue a general evacuation order instructing all Germans, including the missionaries, to abandon the protectorate. It was roundly ignored, even by his assistants, Goldammer and Nels. But the Imperial Commissioner had left, and German South-West Africa was German only on paper.

In Berlin, Göring’s flight was viewed as a catastrophe. Bearded men in flannel suits held long meetings in the Colonial Department, trying to understand the causes of this fiasco. Few of Germany’s colonial bureaucrats had ever left Europe, and they were baffled by Göring’s failed mission. But they were unwilling to even consider the possibility that he had been outmanoeuvred by independent, literate and educated Africans.

Unable to come up with an acceptable explanation, they produced the next best thing: a scapegoat. The Colonial Department blamed Germany’s abject failure on the British, the perennial enemy, who, they claimed, were conspiring to wrest South-West Africa away from the Reich. Given the role that Lewis had played in Göring’s downfall, it was a vaguely plausible explanation and far more palatable than the truth. When this conspiracy theory was served up to Bismarck he immediately accepted its logic, stating, ‘We are finding ourselves up against England rather than … the Hereros.’ In this version of events, Göring had not been outmanoeuvred by so-called ‘savages’, but was the victim of ‘Perfidious Albion’.
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Göring was largely forgiven, thanked for his loyal service and appointed German ambassador to Haiti – the only black republic in the western hemisphere. In January 1893, not long before leaving for Haiti, Göring’s wife Franziska gave birth to a boy, whom she named Hermann.

Throughout the winter of 1888–9 the question of what do to with South-West Africa rumbled on in Berlin. In January Ludwig Bamberger, a liberal member of the Reichstag, publicly asked the question many officials had long debated in private: should
Germany finally abandon her claims to the protectorate? South-West Africa was running at a constant loss, and as long as the indigenous people resisted German rule and fought among themselves, there would be little prospect of the protectorate making a profit for the fatherland. Surely the sands and scrub of the Namib Desert, or even the grasslands of the central plateau, were not worth the effort of keeping them?

Only by deploying a full-scale military expedition could Germany truly take control, and this Bismarck refused to mount. ‘There can be’, he informed the Colonial Department, ‘no question of applying force against the Hereros.’ Bismarck’s solution was in part a symbolic gesture, designed to appease nationalist and colonial lobby groups. He sent a tiny force to South-West Africa and gave their commander strict orders to avoid conflict with the Africans. However, to lead the expedition Bismarck appointed one of the very few German officers with any military experience in Africa, a man with very different ideas.
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