Kaiser's Holocaust (4 page)

Behind the fog banks of the Skeleton Coast and the sand fields of the Namib Desert, there was a world that the Portuguese explorers and British colonialists could not have imagined. Hidden from the gaze of the Europeans was a land of enormous beauty. This realm of tall grasses, waterholes and hot springs was home to an array of African peoples. High on a great central plateau that lay sandwiched between the Namib and Kalahari deserts, tens of thousands of people lived in relative affluence. Some subsisted by hunting the vast herds of springbok, kudu, wildebeest and zebra that swarmed across the land in incalculable numbers. Others had forged a way of life and a culture centred on their precious long-horned African cattle. Unknown to generations of those pastoralists, these wonderful animals were not in fact their greatest asset. Rather, it was the 1,200 miles of the treacherous
shoreline and impenetrable desert that had insulated them from European colonialism.

The word ‘Namib’ itself hints at some deeper understanding of the role the desert played in the long history of Africa’s southwest. It comes from the language of the Khoi, one of the many peoples of southern Africa, and means to ‘shield’. It was due to the great shield of fog, sand and heat that this region of Africa was able to progress free from outside influence. Empires were built, whole peoples had made treks, fought epic battles and displaced their enemies.

The earliest inhabitants of the region had been the San, a people otherwise known – even today – as the ‘Bushmen’. For the San, south-western Africa was merely one part of a vast territory, stretching from the Cape all the way to the Great Lakes of East Africa, over which they had roamed and hunted for millennia. In the Herero language the San were known as the
Ovokuruvehi
, meaning the oldest of the earth, and, judging from their rock paintings and engravings, they had lived in the region since ancient times. Their art, that still adorns mountains and caves across modern-day Namibia, is both complex and stunning. Some paintings depict scenes of everyday life and mystical religious ceremonies; others are abstract expressions so vivid and imaginative that the white South Africans, who ruled over the mandate of South-West Africa from 1919 to 1990, convinced themselves they were the work of some lost white civilisation.
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Sometime around the start of the seventeenth century a wave of migrants arrived in the south-west. They were Bantu-speakers, members of a huge language group that links the deep histories of peoples from across Central Africa, from Kenya to Cameroon. The newcomers were pastoralists and they travelled south with their herds of cattle in search of new pastures. One theory is that they were refugees fleeing wars in their homelands. About half their number settled around the banks of the Kunene and Kavango, the rivers that today form the border between Namibia and Angola. This group, who became known as the Owambo, grew crops by harnessing the waters of the
Cuvelai floods that swell the Kunene and Kavango with waters from Angola each year.
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The rest of the Bantu invaders headed further south, into the fertile grasses of the central plateau. This second wave, the Herero, largely eschewed agriculture and remained devoted pastoralists. They found what little water there was by digging deep stone-lined wells into the network of dry seasonal rivers found across the central plateau. They settled over an area roughly the size of Holland. Over generations, they subdivided into numerous clans, but the Herero were a people who held their lands in common. The meter and rhythm of their lives was determined by the needs and movements of their herds and by the seasons of the plateau.

At the core of their identity as a people was their all-powerful deity Ndjambi.
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So awe-inspiring was Ndjambi that no direct communication could take place between him and living men. The dead, the Herero’s holy ancestors, were able to intercede on their behalf, being closer to Ndjambi than the living, and all prayers and requests were channelled through them. In every one of the hundreds of Herero settlements, holy fires were lit. These were left permanently burning to symbolise the connection between the worlds of the living and the dead. Each morning and every evening the elders sat by their fires and spoke at length to the ancestors.

Due to their ancestral religion most Herero could trace their families back several generations, but theirs was not a patriarchal society: the rights of inheritance were nuanced and complex. The Herero were a people without a king, a fact that convinced the first Europeans who encountered them that they were the scattered remnants of a once great empire, now fallen into a steep and terminal decline. They were governed by a series of local chiefs. When a chief died, a council of elders was assembled to elect a successor from among his maternal nephews and uncles. Bound by kinship and religion, Herero society, despite the great distances between their settlements, was tight-knit and conflict between the various clans was rare.

By the 1780s, as the British were contemplating building a penal colony on the Namib coast, the Herero had established themselves as the dominant force on the central plateau. One estimate, made at the end of the eighteenth century, suggests their population had reached between thirty and forty thousand. With their power seemingly assured, few among the Herero, the San or the Owambo could have dreamed that south-western Africa’s age of isolation would end.

When change arrived, it did not come from the sea and it was not in the form of white colonisers. In the early years of the nineteenth century, a wave of African invaders, many of them of mixed-race, moved up slowly from the Cape in the south, bringing with them trade, new ways of life and a new method of warfare. They were the Nama, a people who became known across much of Europe by the derogatory term ‘Hottentot’.
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The Nama sprang from the genetic and cultural whirlpool that was the Dutch Cape Colony in the eighteenth century. Most were the product of unions between Dutch colonialists and the local Khoisan peoples, the original inhabitants of the Cape. Others were escaped Khoisan slaves or the descendants of the Malay slaves brought to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company.

The Nama were a people whose culture was as mixed as their blood. Alongside Khoekhoegowab, the distinctive clicking language of the Khoisan, most also spoke the Cape Dutch of the Boers. Many were Christian, some devoutly so. In the Cape, they eked out an existence as small-scale farmers living as far from white settlement as possible. Others became outlaws, surviving by raiding cattle from the Boers and other Khoisan peoples.

The Nama were men and women who had rejected the status of slaves or landless labourers offered to them by Boer society. Yet it was the aspects of Dutch culture that they appropriated, rather than those they rejected, that made them a unique and
powerful force. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Nama had begun to acquire the two tools that lay at the heart of Dutch power – the gun and the horse. Some, notably a subgroup known as the Oorlams, copied the Boers and formed armed, mounted bands known as commandos.

In 1833 the Abolition Act was passed by the Westminster Parliament, prohibiting slavery in Britain’s dominions across the globe. It followed ‘Ordinance 50’, a law of 1828 that guaranteed ‘free peoples of colour’ rights to land and labour contracts in the Cape. Many Boers regarded these laws as unacceptable interferences by the British, and in 1836 several thousand abandoned their farms and settlements in the Cape to embark upon their famous Great Trek. While most of the ‘Trek Boers’ moved to the future Boer republics, some pushed north into lands occupied by the Nama. The Nama were forced to move further north and, one by one, various bands slipped over the Orange River and into the south-west.

The terrain into which the Nama moved was, at the time, uncharted and very different from the more fertile plains of the Cape. Here two great deserts – the Namib to the west and Kalahari to the east – come together, forming a thick belt of shrub desert. The southern deserts are pitted with deep canyons and pockmarked with mountains and extinct volcanoes. Human life is made possible only by the existence of underground water. As the Nama trekked north into this unknown territory, they were guided by dogs trained to sniff out hidden waterholes. Where the dogs stopped the Nama dug their wells and built their settlements.
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By the end of the century, twelve separate Nama bands had settled north of the Orange River. Although unified by their two languages and bound together by a common culture, each Nama band occupied its own territory. There they formed clans under the leadership of their
Kapteins
– a term borrowed from the Boers. The wonderful lyrical names of the Nama clans also come from the Dutch. The Veldskoendraers took their name from their
veldskoen
, their distinctive leather field shoes. The Rooi
Nasie, or Red Nation, were named after their copper-red skin colour, a distinctive and much-prized feature of the mixed-race Nama. The Witbooi, meaning White Boys, one of the most powerful Nama clans, were named after the white bandanas they wrapped around their wide-brimmed hats.

Another aspect of Boer life that the Nama appropriated and carried with them over the Orange River was Christianity. Once settled in an area, they built a simple church and called for a European missionary to join them. The missionaries of the south-west, incredible as it seems, secured their position in Nama society not just by offering salvation but by becoming the suppliers of a key frontier commodity: gunpowder.
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With scripture and black powder they bought souls and exercised huge cultural influence, pressuring the Nama to abandon what was left of their traditional festivals and ceremonies. They encouraged them to draft local constitutions and enshrine marriage. As the Namibian historian Klaus Dierks has remarked, ‘The missionary campaign to Christianise Africa not only converted “heathens” into Christians but also tried to convert Africans into Europeans.’

The missionaries also opened schools, and the ruling elites of both Nama and Herero society began to send their children and their wives to the classrooms. In these early days the missionaries, despite their undoubted influence, remained guests and the Africans kept a tight hold of the commodities that really mattered: land and cattle.

These were the years before the arrival of cameras in the south-west, and yet a picture of this world is clear enough. It was mainly scrub desert, green and fertile in the short dry winter, baked golden yellow in the long wet summer. Between the canyons and mountains were small settlements of mud-brick huts, clustered around whitewashed churches from which missionaries distributed barrels of gunpowder, struggling to interest their flocks in scripture more than trade. During these decades of change, whole societies vacillated between ancient traditions, recently borrowed Boer customs and new ideas from Europe.
The local elites – both Herero and Nama – took to wearing tailored jackets and Boer-style military tunics, while the ordinary Herero still wore traditional leather skirts and covered their skin with red ochre and cow fat to block out the sun.

Between the settlements were endless fields of sand, littered with giant rocks. These great distances were covered by sturdy wagons, pulled by teams of oxen, fourteen, sixteen or even eighteen strong. At night the landscape was pinpricked by a constellation of campfires, as white traders, missionaries, Nama, Herero and San sought comfort from the cold of the desert night. The whole nation clustered around thousands of fires, telling ancient stories or dreaming of cattle, wealth or power.

The peace of this enormous landscape was regularly punctured by the thunder of gunfire as commando bands fought local wars, making and breaking treaties. At times they headed out on enormous hunting expeditions, often hundreds strong. The profits to be had selling hides and ivory in the markets of the Cape meant that the wildlife of the area was decimated, almost as ruthlessly as the buffalo of the American Great Plains would be two decades later. Elephants and rhinos completely disappeared from the south and centre of the territory.
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By the last decades of the nineteenth century the economies of the Nama and Herero were becoming coupled to the markets of the Cape. Large herds of cattle were marched south, and traders brought guns and powder in exchange. We know little of the lives of the traders, but they were often men on the fringes of society – prospectors, dreamers or conmen. Today, their abandoned wagons lie in the inaccessible parts of the southern deserts, and the bleached bones of oxen and men can be found beneath the sand.

The traders’ inflated prices introduced a European blight to the land – debt. The potent Cape brandy they hauled north – literally by the barrel load – brought alcoholism. As society changed, the old knowledge that had guaranteed self-sufficiency, such as digging for wells, was increasingly set alongside newer skills: those of the gunsmith, blacksmith and sharpshooter. By
the 1880s south-western Africa was on its way to becoming a fully functioning frontier capitalist society, and the Africans were as much capitalists as the white traders with whom they shared their campfires. It was a world that looked in many respects like that other frontier society, an ocean away in the United States. But in the south-west, the Africans – armed, mobile and fluent in the language of the whites – played the roles of both the cowboys and the Indians. The obsession with cattle was common to both the ‘natives’ and the whites, all of whom understood the significance of owning the land that could rear livestock. But since there were no railways and few harbours, there were still only a tiny number of white faces in the lands behind the Skeleton Coast. The region remained a backwater, one of those blank spaces on the map of Africa, outside the control of any European empire. To the people of London, or even Cape Town, life in the south-western interior of Africa was as mysterious as life in the deep oceans.
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