Kaiser's Holocaust (53 page)

Just as there were connections, both personal and historic, linking Germany’s colonial empire in Africa and the Nazi regime, South African Apartheid had its own links to German South-West Africa. Several young Boer nationalists who studied in Germany in the 1930s were at one time or another the house-guest of Oskar Hintrager, the former Deputy Governor of German South-West Africa. A vocal supporter of Boer Nationalism, Hintrager, assisted by General von Epp, wrote a regular column in support of the Boers in the Nazi colonial press. In the 1950s, as the Apartheid system was being established, he wrote the book,
Geschichte von Südafrika
, in which he claimed that the Boers were not Dutch, but of Germanic racial descent. As members of the virile Germanic
Volk
, Hintrager suggested, the Boers had quite naturally risen to power over the other, lesser races of South Africa.

Hintrager had been one of the principal authors of the race laws passed in German South-West Africa. The similarities between the legislation he helped devise and the laws passed by the South Africans in the Mandate of South-West Africa meant that, for many German South-West Africans, the transition from German colonial rule to South African Apartheid was effortless. In 1948 two South-West African senators were selected to represent ‘the reasonable wants and wishes of the coloured races’ in the South African Assembly. One was Dr Heinrich Vedder, the former missionary who had witnessed the suffering of the Herero in the Swakopmund concentration camp. In a speech to the South African Senate, Vedder claimed that the separation of the races had been pioneered not in South Africa but in South-West Africa under German rule, where ‘from the very beginning the German government carried out that which has unfortunately not yet been attained in South Africa – namely Apartheid’.
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During the 1950s the intricate architecture of Apartheid was put in place, piece by piece, on both sides of the Orange River. On Human Rights Day 1959, thirteen Africans were killed by police armed with sten-guns while demonstrating in the ‘Native Location’ on the outskirts of Windhoek. Five months later, sixty-nine black South Africans were shot – again by police armed with sten-guns – at a demonstration in the Sharpeville township near Johannesburg. Both South Africa and her colony became pariah states.

For South-West Africa, political ostracism compounded her geographic isolation and exacerbated the cultural gulf between the white population and a fast-changing Europe. Many German South-West Africans, like their British and Boer neighbours, became increasingly culturally disconnected from the continent of their birth or their ancestry. For some, this was deliberate. Post-war South-West Africa became a bizarrely backwards land in which small German communities, living in isolated settlements on the endless grasslands of the fertile plateau, lamented the defeat and collapse of both the Second and Third Reichs. Alongside the last of the ageing
Schutztruppe
veterans, another
community was washed onto the South West African shore by the tides of German history. Well into the 1990s, South-West Africa was renowned among journalists and travellers for the ‘Bush Nazis’: Germans, some veterans of Hitler’s armies, who defiantly celebrated Hitler’s birthday in the local
Biergarten
or flew the swastika flag above their farmhouses.

In the small town of Omaruru, one baker celebrated the Führer’s birthday by marking his bread rolls with the swastika. In 1987, on the death of Rudolph Hess, a group of German Namibians placed an advertisement in the Windhoek newspaper the
Allgemeine Zeitung
describing Hitler’s deputy as ‘the last representative of a better Germany’. As late as 2005, a Windhoek magazine published an article paid for by a group calling themselves International Action Against Forgetting, celebrating the death of the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. ‘With joy and satisfaction’, it read, ‘we take notice of the death of the big monster. On September 20th, the earth and its inhabitants were delivered from Simon … His biggest crime was to live 96 years.’

Pro-Nazi statements such as these have been repudiated by many German Namibians in recent years, and the Nazi-sympathising and neo-Nazi elements within the community are no doubt small, and getting smaller with each passing year. But the refusal of that minority to condemn the Nazi past tends to go hand-in-hand with a rejection of Namibia’s own history. A culture of denial has developed, that regards attempts by the Herero and the Nama to uncover and commemorate the extermination of their ancestors as an attack on Germany and German Namibians in particular.

Supporters of this position dismiss the genocides as a historical ‘theory’ and tend to be most defensive on the subject of concentration camps. In early 2009 the Windhoek-based
Allgemeine
Zeitung
published a letter by a German Namibian condemning the use of the word ‘concentration camp’ (
Konzentrationslager
) on a memorial erected by the Herero, near the site of one of the Swakopmund camps. Yet
Konzentrationslager
was the term used by von Schlieffen in the order he sent to von Trotha to establish
the camps and was used by the
Schutztruppe
themselves.
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The issue of forced labour is similarly vexed, but is more usually ignored than denied. Another article published in 2009, in a supplement of
Die Republikein
, the main Afrikaans newspaper, contrasted the slow pace of work on Namibia’s new southern railway line with the lightning speed by which a similar line had been constructed between 1905 and 1906. The article claimed that the original Aus–Lüderitz railway line had been completed in a matter of months by one hundred German soldiers. It made no mention of the thousands of prisoners, most of them Herero women and children, who actually built that railway, or of the almost two thousand of them who died of exhaustion in the southern deserts.
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The story of the Herero and Nama genocides is not of consequence only as an unheeded augury of the calamities that were to befall Europe in the twentieth century. Neither is it a historical cudgel with which to beat Germany and the German population of Namibia, or force them to accept guilt for the crimes of their forefathers. It is of consequence in and of itself. To the descendants of its victims, the genocides are not a distant memory but an open wound that shapes their day-to-day existence.

South-West Africa was the continent’s last colony, only achieving independence in 1990, after the collapse of Apartheid South Africa. Pretoria’s grip on the colony she had seized in 1919 was broken only after a bitter and protracted war, fought by the forces of SWAPO (The South West African People’s Organization) and her Angolan and Cuban allies. That final and emphatic rejection of white colonial rule is regarded by many Namibians as a direct continuation of the wars fought against German rule at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Herero, Nama and others. Among the Namibian leaders who confronted the South Africans in the 1950s and 1960s was the Herero chief Hosea Kutako, a veteran of the battle of the Waterberg and a survivor of the Omaruru
concentration camp. One of the Nama leaders who worked alongside him was Hendrik Samuel Witbooi, the great-nephew of Hendrik Witbooi.

Among the freedoms that were opened up to the black citizens of the new nation of Namibia in 1990 was the freedom to challenge the Official History that had been established by the white minority. Over the course of the twentieth century, South-West Africa had become a nation assured of its own creation myth: a distorted frontier fantasy that had hardened into a state mythology, underwritten by Pretoria and underpinned by the pact of racial unity between Boer, Briton and German that had been consecrated in 1927 on the pyre of the Blue Book.

Yet the black majority – Herero, Nama, Owambo, San, Damara and many others – had kept their own histories alive, handing both stories and artefacts down through the generations. The old had shown the young where their ancestors where buried, and told them of the ‘holy ground’ where blood had been spilt. Survivors of the camps and the forced-labour regime had given their children the brass identification tags they had been forced to wear, physical tokens of their family’s part in their people’s calamity. Even today the very last Herero and Nama people born into post-genocide German slavery can recount the stories passed on to them by relatives and elders. Ms Unjekererua wa Karumbi, an elderly Herero woman, lives on a former reserve on the edge of the Omaheke Desert. Now in her eighties, she can still recall the names of all eight members of her family who were ‘taken to Lüderitz’ during the war. Only one of the eight survived. Throughout the years of South African rule, she dreamed of travelling to Lüderitz in order ‘see for myself how they died’. The South Africa Pass Laws and crippling poverty made this impossible. Elderly and bed-ridden, her memory is fading and she is beginning to stumble over the list of names told her by her uncle.
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For many Herero, the victims of the war and the camps live on as more than names. Despite the catastrophes that have befallen them and the sustained efforts of the missionaries, the Herero
have managed to maintain their ancient religion, with its visceral connection to the spirit world of their ancestors. To a people for whom the land can become the embodiment of the dead, the whole country, pockmarked with graves, is a memorial to the genocides. When the Herero town of Otjimanangombe was established in the 1920s, the local community refused to build their homes on two low hills that lie just to the east. In late 1904 a German patrol had encountered a group of Herero on the hills and in the skirmish that followed several German solders and Herero fighters lost their lives. For the Herero, the hills of Otjimanangombe became a place in which the living have no business.

In the 1990s the taboo was broken when a tree from one of the hills was felled and used to build a fence. A week later the town’s main well stopped flowing. When government engineers were unable to solve the problem, the Herero elders took matters into their own hands. After communicating with the ancestors of the Oseu family, two of whom had fallen in the skirmish of 1904, they slaughtered a cow and buried its bones on the hill. The next week, to the satisfaction of the elders, the water returned. A few years later when the engineers of Namibia’s Mobile Telecommunications Company considered erecting a mobile phone mast on one of the hills they were prevented by the people of Otjimanangombe.
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Despite their recent calamities and persistent poverty, the Herero are a highly organised people. Each year, they come together to mark the anniversary of their holocaust. In the last weekend in August, thousands converge on Okahandja, still nominally the Herero capital. The women wear long Victorian-style dresses and hats shaped like the horns of a cow, the men a military uniform based on that of the South African army which brought German rule to an end in 1915. Together they march from the Apartheid-era township on the edge of Okahandja. Passing the site of the old German fort where their uprising began, the procession makes its way to a small cemetery in which stand the graves of Samuel Maharero and his son
Friedrich. Silently circling the graves, running their fingers along the perimeter walls, the mourners pay their respects.

Colonialism left the Herero their memories and the spirits of their ancestors but little else. The war that exterminated 80 percent of the 1904 population cost them almost all of their land. Although some land redistribution has taken place since Independence, the vast majority of commercially viable farmland in Namibia is owned by around four thousand white commercial farmers. Around one hundred thousand Herero still live on the former ‘native’ reserves, onto which their grandparents were driven in the 1920s by the South Africans. Trapped by grinding poverty, they subsist by farming on communal land so overgrazed and under-watered that much of it can barely sustain goats, never mind cattle. A further two hundred thousand black Namibians work as labourers on the white-owned commercial farms. Conditions on some are a throwback to another age. Many farm labourers live in debt to their employers, who run farm shops selling basic supplies. The debt problem is in some cases exacerbated by an affliction that ravages isolated communities of repressed former colonial peoples across the world: alcoholism. The US State Department’s
Country Report on
Human Rights Practices
for Namibia, published in 2008, stated that ‘Farm workers and domestic servants working on rural and remote farms often did not know their rights, and unions experi enced obstacles in attempting to organize these workers. As a result, farm workers reportedly suffered abuse by employers.’
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Modern Namibia is one of the most unequal societies on earth. The concentration of wealth, land and privilege in the hands of a tiny racial minority remains entrenched. Yet some black Namibians, especially in the north and among the younger, post-Independence generation, have managed to escape the poverty trap and form an emerging black middle class. Black social mobility is centred on Windhoek, which has become one of the most racially and ethnically integrated cities in southern Africa. But although there are reasons to be optimistic about the possibility of change and development in the capital and the
north, southern Namibia – seemingly frozen in time – is a cause for concern.