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Land and memory are the twins that remain closely intertwined to this day for the Herero and Nama peoples, who inhabit the country of Namibia in the far southwest of Africa, and Germany located in the center of the European continent.
Exactly 100 years ago, German colonialism tightened its harsh rule over Namibia. The large-scale killings were part of the German collective punishment campaign between 1904 and 1908, which is known today as the first genocide of the 20th century. But the story of German colonialism began 3 decades before That bloody era.
“African reserves”
In 1884, after the Berlin Conference divided African lands between the European powers, Namibia went to the Germans. By the early twentieth century, approximately 5,000 German settlers had arrived, ruling about 250,000 indigenous Africans. As German control grew, the rights and freedoms of African peoples rapidly diminished, and the Herero and other groups were systematically expelled from their ancestral lands, and the colonists assigned them what they called “reserves.”
Africans who the Germans considered to have broken the law were sometimes flogged and hanged, and even German official records show numerous cases of white settlers receiving light sentences for rape and murder. This ongoing brutality, coupled with the land issue, has sparked widespread anger and resentment among the local population.
By 1904, the Herero, led by their leader Samuel Maharero, revolted against German colonial invaders. On January 12 of the same year, many of their fighters attacked the town of Okahanga, where more than 120 people were killed, most of them Germans.
The conflict quickly grew, with the Herero movement initially being very successful, overrunning the weakly defended colonial settlements, while the Germans struggled to organize their defense under their ruler Theodor von Leutwin.
But in June of the same year, the Kaiser removed him from battlefield command, appointed General Lothar von Trotha in his place, and immediately implemented a military policy of “not pacification but extermination,” which quickly disconcerted the Herero.
As dawn broke on August 11 on the Waterberg Plateau, 50,000 or more Herero men, women and children were awakened by the bombing of their simple huts.
The men rushed to fight the Germans, leaving their families behind, and were killed by a brigade of about 6,000 German conscripts called “Schutztruppe,” which is the official name of the German forces in the African lands of its empire.
Although German soldiers were few in comparison to the resistance, they had superior weapons, including Maxim machine guns, and quickly destroyed the Herero defences.
Early in the battle, Herero fighters overran German artillery positions, but General Lothar von Trotha ordered machine guns forward, and their rapid fire drove the Herero back and killed thousands of them.
Those who survived fled east, through a gap in the German defences, into the harsh, waterless Kalahari Desert known as Omaheki, where tens of thousands died of thirst, while others were captured, taken to concentration camps and used in forced labour.
ethnic cleansing
During the journey across the Sahara, the German war on the Herero turned into a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing. General von Trotha ordered his forces to establish a line of outposts hundreds of kilometers long to prevent the Herero from returning to their abandoned farms and villages, and ordered others to prevent them from using water wells.
On October 3, 1904, near the remote Osombo zo Windimbe desert waterhole, German General von Trotha read the infamous Vernichtungsbefehl: “I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this message to the Herero. The Herero are no longer German subjects… Any Herero found within the German borders with or without a gun or without cattle will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children, I will send them back.” “To their people or I will let them shoot them. These are my words to the Herero people.”
Desperate Herero moved on the brink of death in search of refuge and water wells, and tens of thousands of them died. Finally, political anger in Germany over this colonial brutality forced the Kaiser to telegraph von Trotha to withdraw the order on 8 December 1904.
By late 1904, the Nama people, some of whom were in some way allied with the Germans to protect their lands, had seen enough of the brutality of the Europeans, and feared the growing hostility and open racism that whites were showing towards them. Their charismatic leader Hendrik Witbooi, then in his seventies, summoned the Senate to hear reports of the atrocities.
Soon after, Witbooi called on all Nama to fight the Germans. Many clans, including those of another famous leader, Jacob (Jacob) Muringa, responded and joined a war on the colonists, killing prominent men, but sparing the women and children.
German soldiers struggled against the heat, thirst and constant exhaustion of the Nama’s thunderbolt raids. There were about 200 raids and skirmishes before Whitbooi was mortally wounded in late 1905 by shrapnel in one of his attacks. He died 3 days later, and the Nama alliance collapsed.
Soon after, the displaced among them surrendered, and the Nama, along with the last meager remnants of the surviving Herero, were surrounded and sent to concentration camps.
The family of Ida Hoffmann, a Nama activist whose ancestor was killed by the Germans, carries a harrowing story across generations. “The Germans also killed my great-grandfather’s daughter, Sarah Snow,” Hoffman says.
She added to Al Jazeera, “According to oral history that was transmitted for generations, Snow was pregnant at the time of her murder, and the Germans cut open her stomach, took the child, and killed him in cold blood.” The family still honors her memory in a grave in the desert where she was buried.
Descendants of eyewitnesses say that many nude (sexual) photos of women were turned into postcards and sent to Germany. Those who were strong enough were taken to do forced labor in the port and nearby railways.
No one knows the exact number of people imprisoned in the camps. Records documenting this are haphazard or non-existent, but they show thousands of Herero and Nama deaths, wherever they are kept.
There were also other inhumane experiments. Many prisoners suffered from scurvy (vitamin C deficiency disease), and doctors injected them with opium, arsenic, and other substances to see how they might affect a disease caused by a lack of fresh food. They opened the bodies of those who died as a result in order to see the effects of these experiments.
Many of them ended up at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where Josef Mengele studied and later conducted lethal medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz in the early 1940s.
Blue book
What happened to the African people in Namibia was a brutal, almost forgotten harbinger of the Nazi Holocaust against Jews and other groups in World War II.
But the memory of these events is disputed in Namibia itself. The first real documentation of the genocide was in the famous “Blue Book” written and produced by the South African authorities in 1918 after the German defeat in World War I.
The Union of South Africa, which was a British colony at the time, invaded the German colony of South West Africa in 1915 after an early defeat at the beginning of the war, and the Union quickly overran German forces, who surrendered in July of the same year.
It is estimated that about 65,000 Herero out of 80,000 died, while about 10,000 Nama (about half the population) perished.
Some claim these statistics are exaggerated, while Herero activists believe the numbers were much higher. “But what do the actual numbers matter?” they ask, saying “the actions themselves were genocide.”
After nearly 120 years, reconciliation between the Germans on the one hand and the Herero and Nama on the other remains elusive.
United Nations: “genocide”
In 1985, the United Nations’ Whitaker Report classified what happened to the Herero and Nama peoples as genocide. In May 2021, the German government itself officially recognized what happened as genocide.
In a joint declaration with Namibia, the Germans pledged to pay the Namibian government €1.1 billion in aid over more than 30 years, which the agreement stipulated should be spent in areas where descendants of atrocity victims now live.
There has been much dissatisfaction in Namibia over the joint agreement between the Namibian and German governments, along with demands from Nama and Herero activists to renegotiate the agreement, provide more money to affected communities, and involve them directly in the discussions.
In fact, neither government has signed the agreement yet. The Namibian government indicated its desire for further negotiations, while the German Parliament refused to hold further talks.
Many Herero and Nama feel that the majority government party, the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), does not adequately represent them or their people, because the strongest support for the ruling party comes from the Ovambo people in the northern half of the country. While the government believes that it represents all Namibians, the agreement cannot be restricted to the consent of the Herero and Nama only.
Fanuel Kapama, a senior negotiator in the Namibian government, tells Al Jazeera that currently there is an “internal consultation process to build consensus.”
“The joint declaration has been discussed in Namibia since May 2021, and is often viewed as controversial. The federal government is monitoring this discussion and awaiting the outcome,” the German government’s special envoy, Ruprecht Bollens, confirms in an email.
On the centenary of the genocide in Namibia, the African country rejected Germany’s support for Israel’s position in international justice Court Where you face a charge Genocide Against the Palestinians in Gaza strip.
The Namibian presidency – in a statement on the X website yesterday, Saturday – expressed its deep concern about the “shocking decision” issued by Germany two days ago, in which it rejected the moral indictment submitted by South Africa before the International Court of Justice against Israel.
Namibia rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza
On Namibian soil, #Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most… pic.twitter.com/ZxwWxLv8yt
— Namibian Presidency (@NamPresidency) January 13, 2024
Germany announced that it would intervene as a third party before the Court of Justice to support Israel in the genocide case filed against it.
Namibia referred to what it described as “the first genocide” in the 20th century, committed by Germany on Namibian soil between 1904 and 1908, in which “tens of thousands of innocent Namibians were killed in inhumane and brutal conditions.”
She said that the German government has not yet fully atoned for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil.
Windhoek criticized Berlin’s ignoring of the violent deaths that led to the death of more than 23,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It also ignored United Nations reports that highlight the internal displacement of about 85% of civilians in Gaza, amid a severe shortage of food and basic services.
The Namibian presidency reiterated President Haji Geingob’s call made at the end of last month, saying that “no peace-loving person can ignore the massacre committed against the Palestinians in Gaza.”
Geingob appealed to the German government to reconsider its inappropriate decision to intervene as a third party to defend the “acts of genocide” committed by Israel, and to support Tel Aviv before the International Court of Justice.
