Kaiser's Holocaust (18 page)

The centre of opposition to the governor and the cauldron in which the settlers’ racial hatreds fermented was Windhoek. By 1903 the capital had become a European enclave into which few Africans ventured. Although by European standards it was more a large village than a small town, it was just big enough
to become a fantasy-land. Beneath von François’s fortress, the enormous disparities between the Africans and the settlers, in both numbers and military power, were rendered almost invisible. Convinced of their own strength and of the need to circumvent the governor, retired soldiers of the German
Schutztruppe
and the most extreme settlers came together in bars and taverns like the infamous Kasino Sylvester to vent their frustrations. There they condemned the supposed leniency of the governor, and denigrated the Africans as ‘baboons’ and the colony as ‘Monkeyland’. Well aware of the discontent among the settlers, Theodor Leutwein described them as ‘inclined, with the inborn feeling of belonging to a superior race, to appear as members of a conquering army, even though we had conquered nothing’.
21

The racial contempt that both settlers and soldiers felt towards the Africans was compounded by their frustrations, impatience and greed. The result was a wave of violence and abuse, the records of which can be seen in the Namibian National Archives in Windhoek. Official reports of beatings, rapes and murders committed in the years up to 1904 speak of a colony slipping out of control, in which isolated settlers and
Schutztruppe
officers were able to act with almost complete impunity against ordinary Herero and Nama, and even members of the wealthy elite.

The most commonly reported incidents were beatings. Many of these attacks were viewed by their perpetrators as semi-official acts of corporal punishment. They were carried out with
sjamboks
– hippopotamus-skin whips – and were invoked by the smallest infraction or perceived lack of respect towards a white person. A mistake made while working for a settler, a minor theft, simple failure to respond to a question – all could be punished by whippings or beatings.

One case reported in 1902 involved a German baker named Schaeffer, who accused the ageing Herero under-chief, Assa Riarua, of insolence and attacked the old man. Dragging Riarua from his store and out into street, Schaeffer publicly flogged him ‘until the blood ran’. The humiliating abuse of a prominent
Herero elder was such a serious – and potentially dangerous – event that Governor Leutwein personally intervened in the case, fearing the Herero might retaliate. Yet even this blatant case of abuse did not result in a custodial sentence. An out-of-court settlement was reached in which Schaeffer was ordered to pay a fine of 20 marks.
22

The case that most deeply damaged Herero relations with the Germans took place in the middle of 1903. Barmenias Zeraua, the son of Herero Chief Zacharias Zeraua, later recounted the events that led up to the death of his wife:

Dietrich was charged with manslaughter, not murder, and was at first acquitted. He was finally sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, but later released and made a non-commissioned officer in the
Schutztruppe
.

The outrage felt by the Africans at their treatment by settlers and soldiers was aggravated by a colonial legal system that made it nearly impossible for them to obtain justice under the law. Although the African elite had retained possession of their land, their legal rights had been silently stripped from them.

The courts were staffed by former soldiers or settlers, few of whom had even the most rudimentary legal training. In Leutwein’s memoirs,
Elf Jahre Gouverneur
(Eleven Years as Governor), he noted that the evidence of one settler was deemed legally to outweigh that of up to seven Africans. When whites who had killed Africans were convicted, they were almost always sentenced to terms of imprisonment lasting just months. Africans found guilty of killing whites were hanged.

The racial bias of the German legal system was equally blatant in cases of rape. When accusations of rape by settlers were brought before the courts, it was not uncommon for the judges to rule against the victim and sentence them to be jailed or whipped for bearing ‘false testimony’.

From Windhoek, Governor Leutwein was unable to dictate the verdicts of all the provincial courts, nor control the behaviour of the settlers. Out in the provinces, authority lay in the hands of the District Officers posted in a network of miniature fortresses and garrison houses with command over small units of soldiers. These officers, answerable to the governor, were responsible for maintaining the peace and upholding the terms of the protection treaties. As many
Schutztruppe
soldiers planned to settle in the colony at the end of their term of service, they were firm allies of the settlers and, like many of them, were dissatisfied with Leutwein’s policies. Some were also prone to dealing with the Africans in an extremely aggressive and provocative manner. The excessive violence and even murders that characterised their responses to minor infractions or local disputes were in part a consequence of the very nature of the German forces in South-West Africa.

Unlike the other colonial powers, the Germans, upon staking claim to a colonial empire in 1884, had chosen not to form a regular colonial army. Instead they had formed small ‘protective forces’ –
Schutztruppe
. What marked out the
Schutztruppe
of South-West Africa from those stationed in Germany’s other African colonies was that the entire force – both officers and men – were white. Black Africans were not conscripted into its
ranks, as was the case elsewhere. Under the protection treaties signed by both the Herero and Nama, the Africans were obliged to send men to fight alongside the Germans when requested and, on those occasions, the African fighters were given the desert-brown
Schutztruppe
uniforms and placed under the command of German officers. Yet no Africans were ever formally recruited. The
Schutztruppe
was a white man’s army, and in South-West Africa it became a hothouse of ultra-nationalism and racial fanaticism.

The
Schutztruppe
’s reputation for extremism was matched only by its record of indiscipline. They and the colonies in general were regarded by the regular army as a dumping ground into which disgraced officers could be placed. A disproportionate number of
Schutztruppe
officers in South-West Africa were men with a chequered past; some had only agreed to serve in the colonies in the hope of reviving their careers.

In the last years of the late 1890s and early years of the twentieth century, as levels of racial abuse in South-West Africa began to increase, a succession of junior
Schutztruppe
officers were implicated in murders, rapes and beatings of Africans. The tendency of such officers to adopt a disproportionately violent stance towards Africans was aggravated by the sheer isolation of their postings. Many units were stationed tens or even hundreds of miles from their commanding officers. From tiny garrison stations, they were responsible for vast areas but were for the most part unsupervised, unrestrained and often under-occupied. Those who committed the most grievous excesses were dismissed and their crimes explained away as cases of ‘tropical frenzy’. Governor Leutwein’s inability to exercise control over such officers provided the sparks that led to war and disaster in German South-West Africa.

In 1903 the young officer Lieutenant Walter Jobst was stationed in Warmbad, a remote Nama settlement on the border with the
Cape Colony and 200 miles from the nearest town of any significance. Jobst had been a member of the German contingent that had carried out punitive raids in China in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. By 1903 he had come to value African life as cheaply as he had Chinese life three years earlier.

The people of Warmbad, a Nama clan known as the Bondelswarts, were only about one thousand strong. Since Jobst’s arrival, they had come to regard him with a mixture of fear and repugnance. In late October 1903, a dispute erupted between Jan Christian, the chief of the Bondelswarts, and a Herero woman on her way to the copper mines of the Cape. It concerned, of all things, the price of a goat. Although this minor incident had already been resolved by the time Lieutenant Jobst became involved, he still chose to summon Jan Christian to appear before him. Under the terms of the protection treaty between the Germans and the Bondelswarts, Jobst had no jurisdiction over affairs between Africans, and the chief ignored the summons. Jobst’s response was to gather a group of his men and confront Jan Christian. A series of interviews recently conducted among the elders of the Nama community in Warmbad reveal how the event is remembered in the Nama’s traditional oral history:

Within seconds Lieutenant Jobst, his sergeant and another soldier were gunned down by the Bondelswarts just yards from the dead chief’s house.

Although lives had been lost, what had happened at Warmbad posed no real threat to the colony. Yet the reaction in both Windhoek and Berlin escalated wildly. Governor Leutwein privately condemned the behaviour of Lieutenant Jobst, but his
public response was to issue a blood-curdling declaration of war against the Bondelswarts. Anything less would have risked incurring the ire of the settlers, the German colonial societies and his superiors in the Colonial Department in Berlin. The Kaiser’s reaction to a minor incident, in a one-horse town in the southern wastelands of an economically defunct colony, can only be described as hysterical. He demanded that military reinforcements be immediately dispatched, not just to South-West Africa, but to all German territories, ‘lest we lose all our colonial possessions’.

In late November, a force of
Schutztruppe
began the long trek south from Windhoek to Warmbad, a journey of 500 miles. Governor Leutwein himself headed the column, personally taking command of the crushing of the Bondelswarts. He left much of northern Hereroland in the hands of Lieutenant Ralph Zürn, a young officer as belligerent and impetuous as the late Lieutenant Jobst.