Kaiser's Holocaust (27 page)

In the last days of September 1904, six weeks after the battle of the Waterberg, nineteen Witbooi Nama soldiers galloped through the Auas Mountains of southern Hereroland. They wore armbands in the German colours and desert-brown German uniforms, ripped and torn by thorn bushes. They were part of a contingent of one hundred Witbooi men, sent north earlier in the year, to fight alongside von Trotha’s men, in accordance with the treaty of protection Hendrik Witbooi had signed with Governor Leutwein back in 1894. In the aftermath of the battle of the Waterberg, they had slipped away from their German commanding officers and rushed south.
1

At the Waterberg, the Witbooi had watched as the Germans bombarded and machine-gunned Herero women and children. As part of the patrols sent out towards the Omaheke, they had been ordered to execute captured Herero and had come to understand that the ultimate aim of von Trotha’s army was not the defeat of the Herero, but their annihilation.
2
Although supposedly the allies of the Germans, they had been routinely abused and threatened. German officers had pointed to Herero corpses and told them that they were next.
3

After a week in the saddle and a journey of almost 200 miles, the nineteen Witbooi finally reached the small village of Rietmont in the Urigab Highlands. It was here, during the summer months, that Hendrik Witbooi and his key lieutenants resided. By coincidence Carl Berger, a German missionary from the nearby town of Gibeon, the Witbooi’s main settlement, was with Hendrik Witbooi in Rietmont when they arrived. According to Berger, the nineteen men were unusually reserved
and insisted on speaking with their leader in private. After their meeting, Hendrik Witbooi called a council of the Witbooi elders, who gathered on wooden stools under a tree by their
Kaptein
’s house. Berger was allowed to attend and later wrote an account of the meeting,

Despite Berger’s protestations, Hendrik Witbooi had good reasons to believe the reports from the Waterberg. Since the start of the Herero-German War, many settlers in the southern Nama lands had begun to call openly for the disarmament of the Witbooi and the other Nama clans. Dark mumblings that had once been restricted to the bars and clubs were now flowing freely from the mouths of soldiers and farmers. Some suggested that the position of
Kaptein
should be forcibly dissolved. In a letter of August 1904 Lieutenant Schmidt, the German District Commissioner in charge of the southern town of Keetmanshoop, warned Governor Leutwein that ‘Even the least observant among the natives have a feeling that once the Government has finished with the Herero, they will come down on the people of Namaland.’
5

Not only did settlers make such remarks openly, often directly to the Nama; some of their most inflammatory utterances were printed in the newspapers. On 14 December 1904 Georg Wasserfall, the editor of German South-West Africa’s largest newspaper, the
Deutsch Suedwestafrikanische Zeitung
, wrote an editorial in which he openly stated, ‘The Herero should not be exterminated – the Nama, yes – the reason being that the Herero are needed as labourers, and the Nama are an insignificant tribe.’
6
In May, Baron von Nettelbladt, a South African regarded
as an expert on events north of the Orange River, penned an article for the
South African News
in which he claimed that while the Herero ‘belong to the industrious and healthy Bantu races’, the Nama ‘appear to be no good for any kind of labour, and … belong to the dying nations’.
7

Hendrik Witbooi, the other leaders of the smaller Nama tribes, and a significant number of their people, were fully literate and able to read these articles. They were left in no doubt that the mood in the south was darkening. Throughout 1904 there had been other portents: in April, for example, the German garrison in the south had doubled and the implementation of a previously agreed land settlement was repeatedly postponed. It was in this climate that Hendrik Witbooi received news of the battle of the Waterberg and the massacre of Herero prisoners.

On 2 October, the day before von Trotha issued the Extermination Order at Osombo zoWindimbe, Hendrik Witbooi dictated a series of letters to the leaders of the other Nama clans declaring his intention to rise up against the Germans. One of the greatest tragedies in the story of Germany’s rule over South-West Africa is that the letters to the Nama chiefs were written only after the Herero had been defeated and driven into the Omaheke. In January 1904, when the Herero War had begun, Samuel Maharero had attempted to forge a grand anti-colonial alliance with his former Nama enemies. He had written to Hendrik Witbooi asking him to join the fight. In what must be Samuel’s most elegant and passionate letter, he wrote:

Samuel Maharero’s letter never reached Hendrik Witbooi. His messengers were intercepted south of Windhoek by Hermanus van Wyk, leader of the Rehoboth Basters, who confiscated the letter and handed it over to Governor Leutwein. When Hendrik
did call upon the Nama
Kapteins
‘to rise and do battle’, all hope of a grand African alliance had been lost, and with it any realistic chance of some sort of victory.

A leader of almost irresistible charisma, Hendrik Witbooi was revered as a holy man by many of the Nama. By 1904 he was in his seventies and had come to believe that his last mission in life, as ordained by God, was to expel the Europeans from the African continent. Despite the seeming impossibility of this endeavour, Hendrik was able to draw much of the Nama nation to him. Within a month the Witbooi were joined by Chief Manasse Noreseb of the so-called Red Nation, Simon Kopper of the Franzmann Nama and the Veldschoendragers under Kaptein Hans Hendrik. The Bethanie Nama were split down the middle. Half sought to remain neutral, but the rest joined the Witbooi under the leadership of Cornelius Fredericks, the nephew of Joseph Fredericks, the chief who had been duped by Heinrich Vogelsang into signing Adolf Lüderitz’s fraudulent treaty twenty years earlier. Some of the Nama clans rejected Witbooi’s call to arms. The Tsain Nama of Keetmanshoop, the Hai Khauan of Berseba and the Baster people of Rehoboth chose not to fight, seeking to save their people from the horrors of war. The Topnaar Nama from around Walvis Bay and the Swartsboois who lived among the Herero in the north-east were all taken prisoner by units of von Trotha’s army before they had the opportunity to join Hendrik Witbooi’s alliance.

Despite everything he had heard of German treatment of the Herero at the Waterberg, and in the Omaheke Desert, Hendrik Witbooi and his allies were determined that the war in the south would be fought according to the rules and conventions that were a central part of Nama tradition. Hendrik’s declaration of war reveals that his aim was to drive the Germans out of Nama territory and not to annihilate them. The declaration was personally delivered by Hendrik’s deputy
Samuel Izaak and addressed to Sergeant Beck, the District Commissioners of Gibeon and the representative of German power in the Witbooi’s own territory. It read: ‘I leave it at your discretion to transport all women and children to Lüderitz Bay in ox wagons so that they may return to Germany … Men without weapons … are also free to join them. They will not be molested.’
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The Nama uprising, like that of the Herero nine months earlier, began with a wave of attacks against the centres of German settlement and isolated farms. Despite having spent the previous months demanding the army be let loose against the Nama, most German settlers were completely taken by surprise when the war arrived on their doorsteps.

The first casualties of the war were the Gibeon District Commissioner von Burgsdorff – killed while trying to accost Hendrik Witbooi – and Ludwig Holzapfel, one of the settlers who had most vocally demanded the total disarmament of the Nama, even suggesting to the colonial government that they be ‘punished for their sins’. On the orders of Hendrik Witbooi, both Ludwig Holzapfel and District Commissioner von Burgsdorff were given proper Christian burials. Holzapfel’s wife and children, who were with him when he was intercepted by Witbooi fighters, were left unharmed.
10

The sparing of Frau Holzapfel and her children was in fact quite normal throughout the German-Nama War. While around forty male German settlers and soldiers were killed in the initial weeks, Hendrik Witbooi went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the safety of women and children. It was so widely understood that the Witbooi and other Nama would not attack women and children that, in the town of Gibeon, only German men took refuge in the local fortress, leaving the women and children in their homes. On 8 October, the same day that the Germans blew up Hendrik Witbooi’s family church, a column of Witbooi soldiers escorted a group of German women and children from the surrounding towns through the war-ravaged county and delivered them safely to Gibeon.
11

While Hendrik Witbooi was willing to have his men escort German women and children to safety, he harboured no illusions as to what treatment his own people might expect from General von Trotha. As the Nama men prepared for war, many of the women were sent across the borders to the British Cape Colony or Bechuanaland. Hundreds of others, along with their children and even the elderly, had no choice but to stay with their men. In October 1904 whole Nama clans abandoned their settlements and travelled into the deep desert. There they set up remote encampments to house the women and children, while the men rode off to attack the Germans.
12

For all their sabre-rattling, the colonial authorities, like the German settlers of the south, were shocked by the sudden rising of the Nama. When General von Trotha was informed of the uprising, he used it as an opportunity to call for further reinforcements, but with the vast bulk of his army on the fringes of the Omaheke or protecting the settlers around Okahandja and Windhoek, only around two hundred German soldiers could be mustered in the south.
13

Only when his forces had reached the settlement of Otjimanangombe on the Bechuanaland border on 9 October, completing the cordoning-off of the Omaheke, did von Trotha turn his attentions to the situation in Namaland. On 24 October, the general arrived back in Windhoek. He then placed Colonel Berthold von Deimling in command of the campaign against the Nama.

Like Franz von Epp and Maximilian Bayer, Colonel von Deimling had been among the first officers to arrive in South-West Africa in the winter of 1904. Unlike his comrades, Deimling was not a veteran of the Boxer Rebellion, having spent the year 1900 frustrated behind a desk in the General Staff. Command of the southern army was an enormous opportunity for a man already in his fifties to prove his mettle. Deimling was another advocate of von Moltke’s principles of concentric encirclement, upon which the battle of the Waterberg had been fought. While officers like Ludwig von Estorff had openly
criticised von Trotha’s strategies, Deimling had been in full agreement. Confident that ‘war is not a matter of knowledge, but of talent’, he set out to apply the same principles against the Nama.

It was not until the first week of December 1904 that Deimling began offensive operations. His first action was to march on the Witbooi who were then encamped in Rietmont. Although the Witbooi did not make a stand at Rietmont, they were forced into a hasty evacuation of the settlement, and it was during the attack on Rietmont that Hendrik Witbooi’s diaries – invaluable to later historians – were captured.