Kaiser's Holocaust (15 page)

Back in Treptow Park, the behaviour of the Africans continued to diverge from the expectations of the organisers. The show was a farce. By day the organisers struggled to maintain an air of authenticity, cajoling the human exhibits to occupy themselves making supposedly traditional handicrafts or preparing authentic food. But by night those same Africans sat by fires, drinking and singing the German folk songs they had learned as youths, and as the temperature dropped they slipped back into their warm European clothing.
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This scene of conviviality, hidden away in a closed park in the dead of night, was a far more accur ate reflection of the way many of the peoples of Germany’s empire lived than anything seen during opening hours. Yet each morning the European clothes and empty bottles were hidden away and, after von Luschan had negotiated for his callipers
and slide rules to be fixed to a few more unwilling heads, the public were allowed back into the park, and the fantasy version of colonial life began once again.

The highlight of each day for the Berlin audiences (though clearly not for the ‘exhibits’) was the cultural performance. The exhibition organisers noted with pride that ‘whenever dance routines were carried out by the blacks, the ring of spectators grew massively, so that the officials had difficulties keeping order’.
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The South-West African delegation refused to take part in the cultural performances, just as they had refused to abandon their clothes or submit to anatomical examinations. The best the organisers were able to achieve was to persuade them to pose grudgingly in front of their makeshift village.

Had he attended the Berlin Colonial Show, Theodor Leutwein would not have been surprised by the refusal of Friedrich Maharero and his colleagues to submit to the demands of their German hosts. Leutwein’s long-term strategy was rooted in his firm appreciation of their strident independence. Yet in the autumn of 1896, as the mock African villages in Treptow Park were dismantled and the Nama and Herero delegations steamed home, a plague was sweeping south across their continent. The pestilence was the first in a series of calamities to befall the Herero (and, to a lesser extent, the Nama), which allowed the Germans to slowly undermine the defiant independence of the Africans that had so impressed the Berlin crowds.

Rinderpest
was the term the Boers had given to a highly infectious virus that was fatal to cattle. The British called the disease ‘Steppe Muraine’ or, more literally, ‘cattle plague’. The most deadly strains of the
Rinderpest
are capable of entirely wiping out infected herds. The virus first arrived in Africa in the late 1880s, possibly carried by Indian cattle imported into Eritrea by the Italian colonialists. By the mid-1890s it had become a continental pandemic. First, the horn of Africa was devastated, then,
as the pestilence swept down through Eastern and Central Africa, the Masai of Kenya suffered catastrophic losses. In 1895 reports from German East Africa indicated that some herds had been reduced to only 10 percent of their original number. Across Africa the missionaries evoked fiery passages from the Old Testament to explain the apocalypse. Some warned their congregations that the pestilence was the work of a wrathful God, angered by their continued devotion to heathen practices.

Throughout 1896 the
Rinderpest
inched its way towards the borders of South-West Africa, and in April 1897 news reached Windhoek of the first infections within the colony.
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The Herero, owners of the largest herds, had the most to lose. There are no precise figures, but the German Commissioner for Settlement later estimated that half of the entire Herero herd, perhaps thirty thousand cattle, perished within the first six months. By the end of the epidemic the missionaries were reporting that some Herero communities had lost 95 percent of their livestock. The scene on the central plateau in the last months of 1897 was apocalyptical. Thousands of putrefying animal corpses were littered across the landscape. Unable to gather enough wood to build pyres, the Herero attempted to bury the carcasses. In some places the internment of such a vast number of decaying animal bodies led to the contamination of ground water and the poisoning of the precious wells.

With only a fraction of their animals still alive, thousands of ordinary Herero were suddenly destitute. As committed pastoralists they had few crops to fall back on and little experience of agriculture. Their traditional diet was based almost entirely upon milk and meat, and very quickly they began to suffer from malnutrition. In desperation whole communities were forced to abandon their settlements and ancestral lands. While still reeling from the calamity of the
Rinderpest,
the Herero were visited by a series of subsequent plagues. In the spring and summer of 1898 epidemics of both typhoid fever and malaria swept through their territories. Thousands who had been weakened by the effects of malnutrition now succumbed. The same year their lands were
devastated by a plague of locusts that consumed the crops the Herero had desperately planted in the hope of sustaining themselves while their herds slowly recovered. The plague of locusts was followed by a severe drought that withered the remaining crops and killed off yet more of their cattle.

The first indication of how the calamities of the late 1890s were to change the relationship between the Herero and the Germans was the arrival of thousands of impoverished Herero at the European settlements and the mission stations, places they had until now avoided. In the immediate aftermath of the
Rinderpest
, the missionaries reported a sharp rise in conversions as traumatised Herero abandoned their culture, along with their homes. Huddled around the mission stations, they appealed to the charity of the German missionaries and called for the protection of a new god. Others, who believed their land to be cursed, took the last of their cattle and crossed into the British territory of Bechuanaland in search of new pastures and a chance to rebuild their stocks of cattle.

The Herero’s cattle were not only a source of sustenance, but also an economic commodity. Cattle were the currency of the south-west and the engine of the Herero economy: the commodity with which they bartered for horses, rifles, ammunition and many of the luxuries and necessities of daily life. The herds that the Herero ushered across the central plateau had been an enormous reservoir of wealth, which had permitted the Herero to remain independent of the Germans and their colonial economy. Under Samuel Maharero’s leadership the Herero had been forced into a series of compromising treaties with the Germans, and Governor Leutwein had managed to interfere egregiously in tribal affairs, but few Herero had submitted to working for the German administration or labouring on the farms of the white settlers. In late 1897, the unprecedented sight of Herero men and women doing precisely this sharply illustrated the enormity of their plight. In some of the worst-hit areas, Herero women went into service in the homes of settlers, while their men laboured for the
Schutztruppe
, helping to construct the network of forts and
garrison houses the Germans were busy developing throughout the late 1890s.

Although many of the poorer Herero had no choice but to work for the Germans during the
Rinderpest
epidemic, most were able to return to their homes and their traditional ways of life as their herds began to recover. But the
Rinderpest
had given both the missionaries and the colonial authorities a tantalising glimpse of how the colony might be developed, if only the Herero could be induced to abandon their land altogether, sell off their cattle and become the labouring underclass of the whites. Moreover, the temporary poverty of the Herero permitted the Germans to alter the map of Hereroland permanently.

For centuries the Herero had owned their lands in common. Their chiefs had traditionally not considered their pastures a form of property that could be sold or bought. As the
Rinderpest
cut swathes through their herds, saddling the ruling elite with considerable debts, the chiefs were increasingly pressured by German traders to settle their accounts through the sale of land. Samuel Maharero had broken the taboo of selling land some years earlier, but the bulk of the land sold before the
Rinderpest
was south of Okahandja. Samuel had disposed of this land in the hope that the Germans who settled there would act as a buffer against the Witbooi, whose own territory lay to the south. The land sales conducted during the
Rinderpest
epidemic were of a different order. To pay their debts the chiefs sold tracts that were not only prime grazing land, but also in the heart of Hereroland. Although it was not apparent amid the turmoil and misery of the late 1890s, the sale of land was the most serious long-term consequence of the
Rinderpest
, as it allowed the Germans their first real foothold in Hereroland itself.

Although the amounts of land transferred to German ownership during the
Rinderpest
were relatively small, German ambition was great. Prevailing opinion, among both the settlers in Windhoek and the colonial societies in Berlin, considered the
Rinderpest
a unique opportunity for Germany to accelerate the settlement of German South-West Africa. Even Leutwein
abandoned his caution and saw the
Rinderpest
as a chance to speed up the transfer of land from African to German hands.

However, the moment the epidemic subsided the Herero dashed the dreams of many settlers by abruptly ending the sale of their remaining cattle. Seeking to regenerate their herds, they rejected the offers of the traders, many of whom were in fact would-be settlers seeking to acquire enough livestock to establish a ranch. In their frustration the traders began to engage in unscrupulous practices: ludicrously exaggerating the value of their goods, demanding cattle in payment, and valuing the Herero and Nama’s livestock at about half their real worth. Officially Theodor Leutwein condemned such practices, but he did little to stop them, accepting that the long-term settlement of South-West Africa was predicated on the transfer of cattle to the whites.

The colonial authorities themselves grasped the opportunities presented by the impoverishment of the Herero to try to establish themselves as the arbitrators of land in the colony. In the years immediately following the epidemic, the prospect of eventually forcing the Herero off the land and into native reserves was discussed as a realistic future prospect.

By the end of the 1890s the position of the Germans in South-West Africa was undoubtedly stronger than it had been in 1896, the year of the Berlin Colonial Show. Not only had the settlers established their presence in Hereroland, the
Schutztruppe
guarding them had been enormously strengthened. Of the 780 whites reported as residents of Windhoek in the colonial census of 1896, six hundred were soldiers. The army had also expanded its network of fortresses and garrison stations, establishing outposts across Hereroland and the Nama territories in the south.

Although the accelerated pace of German colonial penetration during the 1890s caused flashes of excitement in the settler bars of Windhoek and the colonial societies of Berlin, when examined from a distance progress was modest. Not only did the Herero withstand the
Rinderpest
, typhus and malaria epidemics, and hold the line against further German encroachments on their
land, they were also able to rebuild their herds and their wealth. At the dawn of the twentieth century Windhoek and the other white settlements were like base-camps from which the colonisation of the territory might theoretically be attempted at some future date. South-West Africa remained largely in the hands of the Africans. What was questionable in the year 1900 was not the resilience of the Africans in the face of colonial encroachment, but Germany’s long-term commitment to the task of forging a viable colony in the southern African deserts.