Kaiser's Holocaust (9 page)

Early on a June morning in 1889 a group of twenty-one German ‘explorers’ landed at the British port of Walvis Bay. Supposedly on a scientific expedition, each wore the standard uniform of the nineteenth-century explorer: khaki jacket and matching pith helmet. In the dark of the ship’s cargo hold, chewing on bales of hay, stood two camels, procured during a stopover at the Canary Islands. For explorers they were suspiciously well armed, each man carrying a new Mauser 88 rifle, and their leader, Curt von François, was a captain of the Prussian army with a fearsome reputation. They were in fact a unit of German colonial soldiers.
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No one like Curt von François had ever before set foot on the sands of the Namib. Tall and with an elegant corkscrew moustache, he was the image of a nineteenth-century Prussian army officer. His family, descended from French Huguenots, had been in the service of the Prussian kings for over a century. Curt von François’s reputation, however, had been made in the service of another monarch, Leopold II, King of the Belgians.

For three years von François had been a mercenary, paid by King Leopold to enforce and extend his rule over what had become a private slave state in the Congo. Armed with the rifle and the chicotte, a hippopotamus-hide whip that cut deep into human flesh, von François had raided villages and traded in slaves. In the forest of the Congo Basin, he had become a racial fanatic, with unshakeable views on how Africans should be treated. Von François took everything he had learned in Leopold’s Congo to South-West Africa in 1889.

On landing, Captain von François was appalled to discover how little progress had been made in German South-West Africa.
The land remained in the hands of the local people. Worse still, the Africans remained unbowed, considering themselves equal to the whites. They were armed, owned property and would address German officers in a casual tone that no German soldier would dream of using. From the outset von François was determined to end Germany’s difficulties through the application of ‘force against the natives’. In a private letter he wrote: ‘The Europeans [here] have failed to give the black man the right kind of treatment. They have made too many concessions, granting all [the black man’s] wishes without bearing in mind that this is only interpreted as a sign of weakness.’
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Curt von François had received only one piece of advice from Heinrich Göring, ‘Request reinforcements, stay in Walvis Bay and await the situation.’ But in early July, von François marched straight to Otjimbingwe and attempted to reoccupy Göring’s former headquarters. He and his men were refused access and were escorted by the Herero to a smaller building in the centre of the town belonging to the South-West African Colonial Company, a now partly British-owned enterprise. This was a deliberate policy of Chief Tjamuaha. Göring’s abandoned mission station had thick brick walls and was located on a strategically important site. The new German base was far more vulnerable, and might easily be surrounded, should the Germans and Herero come to blows.

Thwarted and humiliated by this show of defiance, von François found it impossible to live alongside the Herero at Otjimbingwe. By early August tensions were running high. Louis Nels, Göring’s former assistant who was in Otjimbingwe at the time, noted Captain von François’s propensity to antagonise the Africans. Writing to Berlin, Nels warned officials at the Colonial Department that ‘The Captain finds it difficult to subdue his anger about the Hereros and, as set out in the instructions, to avoid a war with the tribe.’
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In the early hours of 28 July, von François and his men rode out of Otjimbingwe without warning. They travelled for 22 miles, to the edge of the central plateau where the land drops
to meet the fringes of the Namib Desert. At a location known as Tsaobis, von François ordered his troops to halt. There, they gathered supplies of limestone, sand and cow dung, and within a few weeks had constructed a small, rudimentary fortress that von François named Wilhelm’s Fort, in honour of the newly crowned Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Von François had chosen Tsaobis for very specific reasons. It lay on the Bay Road, the trading route between Hereroland and Walvis Bay, and from Wilhelm’s Fort he was able to disrupt the movement of guns and ammunition to the Herero and the Nama tribes. In accordance with his original orders, von François also impounded wagons belonging to the English trader Robert Lewis, who was still regarded as an enemy of the German Empire. In order to sustain his troops in such a barren location, von François permitted his men to confiscate supplies of food from passing traders. Even among the few Germans who had been drawn to South-West Africa, Wilhelm’s Fort soon became known as ‘The Den of Thieves’.

Von François’s strategy at Wilhelm’s Fort was to deliberately set himself on a collision course with the Herero and the Nama, both of whom relied heavily on trade from Walvis Bay. With a force of only twenty men, war with either nation would undoubtedly have meant the annihilation of the German garrison. By placing himself in such a precarious position, von François hoped to force Chancellor Bismarck into making a serious military commitment to South-West Africa. Either Bismarck would agree to his request for reinforcements or have to stand aside and allow the German garrison to be massacred – a politically unpalatable option.

It was a spectacular gamble, founded on von François’s conviction that Bismarck’s brand of cautious, penny-pinching imperialism had been a failure, and that the German people would demand strident military action in order to protect their precious colonies and develop them properly. Years later, defending his strategy, he wrote, ‘Only serious, strong-minded and domineering actions against foreign nations, as well as quick
diplomacy and battle successes, could excite the support of the German people. Negotiations, deviation, delay and deliberation were completely impossible and detested concepts.’
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Towards the end of 1889, after expressing his anger at von François’s blatant disregard for his original orders, Bismarck reluctantly agreed to dispatch reinforcements to South-West Africa. It is perhaps Curt von François’s greatest accolade that, from the sands of the Namib Desert, he was able politically to outmanoeuvre Otto von Bismarck, one of the shrewdest statesmen of the age. However, his victory over the Chancellor was not total. Bismarck sent him only forty-one troops, not the one hundred and fifty he had requested. The new ‘Protection Army’, as it eventually became known, was large enough to maintain and defend Wilhelm’s Fort, but too small to stamp German authority over the peoples of South-West Africa. Two months after dispatching reinforcements to South-West Africa, Bismarck was removed from office by the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, and replaced by Count Leo von Caprivi. One of the criticisms levelled at Bismarck, at the time of his dismissal, was that he had lacked a true vision for Germany’s colonies.

While von François awaited the arrival of reinforcements, a Herero council was assembled at Okahandja to debate whether to attack Wilhelm’s Fort. Among those who favoured attack was Samuel Maharero, Chief Tjamuaha’s increasingly influential son, and a long-time friend of Robert Lewis. Even before the council met, Samuel had sent a letter to von François warning him, ‘If you come here with warlike intentions, then I ask you once again to pay heed to what I say, do not needlessly spend your money, but rather go home. If you do not want to listen to my words then please declare so openly and tell me directly that you are at war with us.’
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While many agreed with Samuel, Chief Tjamuaha, growing visibly old and frail, was opposed to attacking von François while his people were still at war with the Witbooi Nama. He concluded that, for the moment at least, the Germans were a lesser threat.

In January 1890, six months after he had established himself at Wilhelm’s Fort, von François’s reinforcements arrived, bringing the strength of the German garrison up to sixty-two men. With the Germans in a significantly more powerful position, the Herero council made a decision that would ultimately have a profound and permanent impact upon their people. They invited von François to Okahandja to negotiate a new protection treaty.

In May 1890, Curt von François and his men marched into Okahandja. Chief Tjamuaha invited von François and his officers to dine with him at his villa; at the meeting that followed, Tjamuaha, increasingly blinded by his fear of Hendrik Witbooi, agreed to sign a second protection treaty with Germany. Had Tjamuaha looked out of the window of his villa that evening he might never have signed. According to the traditional history of the Herero – stories related down through the generations – a terrible portent occurred that evening. One of the camels von François had imported into the colony chewed through its bridle and strayed into the town. Wandering around the inner sanctum, the hapless beast crossed between the chief’s villa and the ‘Holy Fire’, the flame kept permanently alight to signify the life force of the Herero people. For a hornless animal to pass between the two was to break the strictest of Herero taboos and was viewed as an awful omen. In the traditional Herero calendar, in which each year is named after a significant event, the year the protection treaty was agreed became known as ‘the year of the camel’ and was regarded as a cursed year.
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For von François, the conclusion of a treaty with the Herero was vindication of his aggressive strategy and his personal mantra that when dealing with Africans, ‘Nothing but relentless severity will lead to success.’
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Like Göring, he had not the slightest intention of offering any military assistance to his new ‘allies’. Rather, von François welcomed the continuance of the war between the Herero and the Witbooi.

In September 1890, the war reached a new level of intensity as the Witbooi launched a series of devastating attacks. The following month Chief Tjamuaha died. The passing of the old chief –
leader of his people for almost three decades – plunged the Herero nation into a deeply divisive succession crisis. Several minor chiefs laid claim to Tjamuaha’s cattle and his power, among them Chief Tjamuaha’s son Samuel Maharero.

Born in 1854, Samuel Maharero had been educated in the missionary school at Okahandja before being expelled for ‘immoral behaviour’. The exact nature of his infraction remains unknown, but it was rumoured he was a heavy drinker. Much of Samuel Maharero’s youth was spent in the shadow of his elder brother Wilhelm, but when Wilhelm was killed in a minor local dispute, Samuel Maharero became a leading contender for the Herero throne, despite being distrusted by sections of his own community, the traders and the missionaries.

On the death of Chief Tjamuaha, Samuel was challenged for the position of Paramount Chief by several uncles and a cousin, all of whom were well within their legal rights to pursue the chieftaincy. Lengthy meetings and bargaining turned into angry arguments and tussles. Divisions deepened and old enmities re-emerged. In past decades such disputes among the tribal elite might have had little consequence for the wider Herero nation, but during the decades of the ‘scramble for Africa’, internal divisions among African peoples were routinely exploited by European colonisers.

With the Herero focused on the succession crisis, von François was quick to act against their interests. In mid-October 1890, just days after Tjamuaha’s death, he moved the German headquarters from Tsaobis in the Namib Desert to a valley nestled between the Auas Mountains in the east and the expansive Khomas Highlands to the west. The valley, known by its Dutch name of Windhoek, lay in the fertile heart of Hereroland. At the time the Herero, a semi-nomadic people, had temporarily abandoned the Windhoek valley in part because of its proximity to the land of the Witbooi. Two months earlier von François had requested permission to settle in the valley and been refused. With the Herero elite increasingly preoccupied, he occupied Windhoek, and ignored the Herero’s complaints.
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The new location offered access to both Hereroland to the north and the territories of the various Nama tribes to the south. Windhoek also had a series of hot springs that provided ample, if slightly sulphurous, drinking water for the garrison. On a hilltop in the centre of the broad valley the Germans began to construct a large fortress. It was both a practical demonstration of their growing military power and a potent symbol of Germany’s determination to entrench herself permanently in the south-west.

The new fort and the presence of an expanded garrison encouraged German farmers to settle around Windhoek. A South-West African Settlers’ Company was founded and a postal service established between Windhoek and Walvis Bay. Moreover, a regular shipping service running between the colony and Germany was launched, operated by the shipping company of Adolf Woermann. By 1891 the white population of German South-West Africa stood at 139. South-West Africa was beginning to accumulate the trappings of a rudimentary colonial outpost.