Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Herero

The Herero were traditional occupants of the temperate high plains of central Namibia. A Bantu people, they had moved south into this region from Angola, arriving about 1750. A series of nineteenth-century wars with the Nama, to the south, destabilized the entire region. Herero chiefs were autonomous, presiding over a decentralized tribal government, with extended families and their cattle herds spread over hundreds of miles. Germany first arrived in Africa in 1884, using the dubious private land claims of a businessman, Adolf Luderitz, as the legal basis for establishing a protectorate over a vast desert hinterland, making South West Africa its first African colony.

The first German treaties did not concern the Herero because they lived well-inland from the Atlantic Ocean. Chief Kamaherero negotiated a worthless agreement of protection with the British, who were unwilling to live up to its terms. Germans were everywhere in his country. It is, however, also clear that the Herero did negotiate Schutzvertrags (treaties of protection) in Okahandja and Omaruru in October 1885.

Germany had entered the race for African colonies long after its major European rivals. South West Africa was to be a model colony, showing the world what the new Germany, fresh from its victory in the Franco-Prussian War, was capable of. The brutality of the Herero War can be understood within the context of this need to perfect such a colonial ideal in order to establish modern Germany as the equal of other European powers. Indeed, evidence exists that the virulent racism characterizing the Holocaust was also partially formed there. Germany began experiments with sterilization on Herero prisoners of war in the name of the science of eugenics shortly after the turn of the century.

The Herero War

The Herero War of 1904 and 1905 killed at least 60,000 of the 80,000 Herero and resulted in the seizure of all their lands and cattle. The central region of South West Africa—now Namibia—was swept clean of black occupants, setting the stage for the creation of a white-dominated agricultural economy that has prevailed since. Although one can draw a number of meanings from the war, the central outcome in terms of land is clear: Germany terminated by conquest all Herero land rights in South West Africa. The details of the war are well known. Led by the aging Chief Samuel Maherero, offended by the increasing white occupation of their lands, and subjected to demeaning and inhuman treatment by colonists and traders, the Herero rose in revolt. Once the uprising was under way, the colonial administration refused all attempts to negotiate a resolution, instead adopting a policy of genocide to sweep the Herero off their lands.

German Genocide

Nothing in the origins of the Herero War is in any way unique to colonial practice. Other European powers forced African peoples off their lands in other colonial wars. What distinguishes the Herero War, and makes it an act of genocide, was a clearly announced military policy to destroy the Herero nation by killing all its members. This action seems to have developed in the upper echelons of the colonial hierarchy, born of acute frustration at the inability of troops to quickly win the war. The entire colonial enterprise was, in this group's view, endangered, and Germany's defeat in one of its colonies would be a disgrace in the eyes of its European competitors. Kaiser Willem II dispatched General Lothar von Trotha to take over control of the war from the discredited local administration. In a proclamation, issued at Osombo-Windimbe after church services on Sunday morning, October 2, 1904, he ordered all Herero men killed, and all their lands and cattle seized:

I the great General of the German troops send this letter to the Herero people.

The Herero are no longer German subjects. The Herero people must, however, leave the land. If the populace does not do this, I will force them with the cannon.

Within the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children, I will drive them back to their people, or I will let them be shot at.

These are my words to the Herero people.

The great General of the mighty German Kaiser.

There can be no doubt that genocide was the unambiguous intent of this action. Von Trotha personally read the proclamation to Herero prisoners and then proceeded to hang a number of warriors. After distributing copies of the document printed in the Herero language, he drove any remaining women and children into the Kalahari Desert.

Those Herero who fled were denied access to water holes, or their water supply was either poisoned or guarded, and they died. Few casualties of the war—several hundred at most—were due to military actions: Mass starvation over a period of months killed most Herero men, women, and children, and starvation and death occurred for several years afterward as stragglers tried to find their way across the Botswana border. Thousands of prisoners, most previously captured and held under inhuman conditions in prison camps where they were forced to work as slave laborers, also died. Their land was seized by the colonial state. To the extent that Germany needed to win the Herero War at all costs in order to protect its international position as a colonial power, the effort was successful. In the early twenty-first century central Namibia still functions as a model German colony. German colonial architecture remains evident in the cities, and a well-developed colonial infrastructure survived until South West Africa fell to invading British and South African forces in 1915, during World War I.

Herero Claims to Reparations

A few thousand Herero survived both genocide and exile only to face the imposition of apartheid by South Africa, which assumed the British mandate for South West Africa in 1919. Having taken refuge in northern Namibia, Angola, and Botswana, the Herero gradually returned to their traditional lands. Some labored as farmworkers, but others simply occupied unused desert land and rebuilt their herds. Namibian independence, in 1989, set the stage for the assertion of Herero claims for reparations, a legal claim that would have been impossible under apartheid.

In 1995 Herero Paramount Chief Kuaimi Riruako, on behalf of the Herero nation, demanded reparations of $600 million. In a related move, Chief Riruako filed a lawsuit against three German companies in the District of Columbia, asking for $2 billion in reparations, claiming that the companies had engaged in a "brutal alliance" with imperial Germany during the Herero War. Now numbering about 125,000, the Herero have persisted in pursuing their claim. The claim is based expressly on the belief that Herero War was an act of genocide, which links their claims to those of Jews and other European peoples seeking reparations for Nazi genocide later in the same century.

SEE ALSO Namibia (German South West Africa and South West Africa)

Sidney L. Harring