Namibia under German Rule

"It’s often forgotten—outside Germany at least—that the Germans, too, had an overseas Empire, founded in the 1880s. Bismarck was against acquiring colonies. The British and French had colonies, the Italians were doing their best to acquire them. The Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish all had colonial empires in other parts of the world. This is an era when Europe was, uniquely in history, supreme in the world. There were a number of different reasons for that—command of the seas, technological advances, weaponry, all of those sorts of things. German nationalists—particularly the Liberals—in the 1870s were clamouring and saying, ‘Why haven’t we got an Empire? The French and Italians have an Empire. We need an Empire!’ And Bismarck famously said, ‘I don’t want an Empire. We don’t need colonies.’ And, in a meeting, he strode up to a map of Europe and, pointing to Europe, said, “Here is my Africa. What’s important to us is what goes on in Europe.” But the pressure from the Liberals was difficult to resist and in the early 1880s the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’ began. It’s a complicated story, but it was triggered by the British effectively taking over Egypt. That then led quickly to a number of other annexations. Testimony to the new-found importance of the united Germany in European international politics was the congress held in Berlin in 1884 to divide up Africa. The participants drew a lot of imaginary lines across Africa, which remain the borders, even today, between now-independent African states. Bismarck was reluctant, but gave in to pressure from the Liberals and from traders and merchants who had got into trouble in various parts of Africa. They required support from the German state when they were attacked by tribes, kingdoms and other states that were well-organized militarily. Germany got, as it were, the ‘leftovers’: Togo and Cameroon, which are fairly insignificant as imperial possessions, they got East Africa, which is now Tanzania, and in 1890 they did a deal with the British where they recognised British control of Zanzibar in return for a barren but inhabited rock in the North Sea called Heligoland . German East Africa was fairly prosperous. Then they had South West Africa, Namibia as it is now, which was mostly desert, but where it turned out there were some diamonds. They also had part of Melanesia, of group of islands which is called the Bismarck Archipelago, as well as the top righthand corner of New Guinea. “This really was genocide. It’s a very, very shocking book and a powerful story” If you go to Namibia—I haven’t, but I’d love to, it’s on my bucket list—you can still see abandoned railway stations with their names in Gothic script. There’s still a German community there, there’s still a German language newspaper there. But, of course, it was inhabited by native Africans and the German settlers in South West Africa just took over their land and chucked them out. There was a rebellion by the Herero and Nama tribes. This is the subject of Helmet Bley’s book, which first appeared in 1976 and has been reworked and reissued since. It was an absolutely revelatory book. This really is the dark side of German history because, when the Hereros attacked settlers and farmers who had seized their lands, the government in Berlin sent out an army under General Lothar von Trotha, who openly declared that his aim was to exterminate the Hereros. He fought them, kicked them out and drove them into the desert and left them to starve there. He opened up a concentration camp for the Herero and Nama people, where they were appallingly badly treated and many thousands of them died. It’s a really shocking incident. It’s not the only one. There was a campaign against another revolt in German East Africa and, of course, the British, French and, above all, the Belgians in the Congo—which was the private possession of the King of Belgium—also committed many atrocities. But this, I think, outdid them all. This really was genocide. It’s a very, very shocking book and a powerful story, but because of that, it’s compulsively readable as you go through all these horrors. Yes. The conditions weren’t quite as good as they were in German East Africa because there’s a lot of desert, but along the coast there are some reasonably fertile areas. It was mainly grazing, whereas in East Africa there were more cash crops. As I mentioned, there were very powerful critiques of these atrocities by the Social Democrats and by the Catholic Centre, the two largest parties in the Reichstag. And it is indicative of the limited nature of parliamentary authority in Bismarck’s and Wilhelm II’s Germany that those critiques really didn’t get anywhere. There was a huge amount of publicity, but it didn’t really change the system. A kind of proto-apartheid was set up in South West Africa, with limitations on marriage between whites and blacks and so on. The parallels with the Nazi genocide are pretty obvious, although the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews was a very different kind of thing—it wasn’t ruthlessly clearing out inconvenient populations. That was more like the way they treated the Poles, the Belarussians and the Ukrainians. For the Nazis the Jews were a ‘world enemy’ as Goebbels, the propaganda minister, put it. They were an existential threat to Germany everywhere. “The Herero in South West Africa were seen as subhumans whose lives weren’t worth anything” The Herero in South West Africa were seen—particularly by the German military—as subhumans whose lives weren’t worth anything. Any colonial administrators, like the original Governor, Theodor Leutwein, who thought differently and wanted more peaceful dealings with the Herero, were sidelined or thrown out. You can’t really, in the end, show either ideological or personal continuities between the Germans in South West Africa and the Nazis. You can pick out one or two. Hermann Göring’s father, for example, was an important figure in South West Africa, but that’s really the exception. The Nazis themselves weren’t interested in overseas colonies, hardly at all. They wanted their empire within Europe. The German colonies were all taken away by the peace settlement at the end of World War I . The League of Nations mandated these territories to other countries. The South Africans took over South West Africa. The French and the British chopped up Cameroon between them. The British took over Tanzania—Tanganyika as it was then. There was a movement in the Weimar Republic to restore the German colonies. When Rudolf Hess, the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, undertook his madcap lone flight to Scotland in May 1941 with so-called ‘peace terms’—which he claimed came from Hitler, but were actually his own invention—he included restoring the German colonies among them. But that was really a non-starter. I don’t think you can see any continuity, really. There were some critical remarks from the newspapers and from the media. It was very widely criticized, particularly in Germany itself. One always has to remember in German history that there are always currents of opposition: currents of opposition to Bismarck, currents of opposition to the Kaiser. It’s never a one-way street. Some historians have fallen victim to the temptation to link up the Herero massacres with the Third Reich, but it doesn’t really work. You can show some sort of continuities with German atrocities in August 1914 in north-east France and Belgium , where recent work has shown that they really were shooting quite large numbers of innocent civilians in those areas. But it’s a step too far linking it up with the Nazis."