It has become known as the first genocide of the 20th century: tens of thousands of men, women and children shot, starved, and tortured to death by German troops as they put down rebellious tribes in what is now Namibia. For more than a
century the atrocities have been largely forgotten in Europe, and often in much of Africa too.
Now a series of events – and a policy U-turn by Berlin – is raising the international profile of the massacre of Herero and Namaqua peoples and bringing justice for their descendants a little closer. Negotiations between the German and Namibian governments over possible reparation payments are expected to be completed and result in an official apology before next June.
In Berlin a major new exhibition about the country’s bloody colonial history opened earlier this winter. It features letters from missionaries expressing their concerns about concentration camps and killings in Germany’s south-west African colony.
In the US activists have hired lawyers to pressure the United Nations. Elsewhere there are plays exploring the tragic story and displays of photography at high-profile contemporary art fairs.
In 1884, as European powers scrambled to carve up Africa, Berlin moved to annex a new colony on the south-west coast of the continent. Land was confiscated, livestock plundered and native people subjected to racially motivated violence, rape and murder. In January 1904, the Herero people – also called the Ovaherero – rebelled. More than a hundred German civilians were killed. The smaller Nama tribe joined the uprising the following year.
Colonial rulers responded without mercy. Tens of thousands of Herero were forced into the Kalahari desert, their wells poisoned and food supplies cut. Gen Lothar von Trotha, sent to quell the revolt, ordered his men to shoot “any Herero, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle”.
“I do not accept women or children either: drive them back to their people or shoot them,” he told his troops. The order was rescinded but other measures were employed that were equally lethal.
Those who had survived were rounded up and placed in concentration camps, where they were beaten and worked to death in squalid conditions. Half of the total Nama population were also killed, dying in disease-ridden death camps such the infamous site on Shark Island, in the coastal town of Lüderitz. By 1908, only 16,000 remained, historians say.
As many as 3,000 Herero skulls were sent to Berlin for German scientists to examine for signs that they were of racially inferior peoples.
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