Namibia and the Germany Story

One of the rarer pieces of Germany history....involves the German arrival into Namibia....and the colonization effort.

What can be basically said is that no real colonization effort occurred until you get to 1883, when a commercial 'station' is established there in Namibia. A year passes, and the Prussian government goes and establishes Deutsch-Südwestafrika (their first African colony).  The key player in this effort?  Not the Kaiser, as you'd expect, but Bismarck (the Chancellor).

What you can generally say for the next twenty-five years....is that only a marginal number of Germans show up (some historians say by 1886....they were still at the 2,000 level).

So in 1887, this odd unpredictable event occurs, which has a dramatic affect on the future of native relations and German stability in the region.  A cattle plague starts up (rinderpest).  The local big-name tribe (the Herero group)....has a major stake in cattle operations in the region and are the ones mostly hit by the plague.  In the end, they are desperately selling off cattle left and right.....to the Germans.....at a low exchange rate.

This plague and cattle exchange situation leads onto a negative relationship between the Germans and the Herero folks.  By 1904, the relationship has reached a point where civil war is going to occur.  The Herero tribe decides to settle the affair by killing off a mass of male Germans....leaving women and children alone.  Most historians settle upon 100 Germans dead.

As you can imagine, Prussia doesn't take this well....with the Kaiser (William II) deciding upon military action, and picking General Lothar von Trotha to lead a German retribution.

Von Trotha arrives and decides to push the Herero tribe into the desert....with their remaining cattle.  Numbers vary, but you can figure between 5,000 and 10,000 tribal folks die in this desert 'push'.

By late into 1904, a new order by von Trotha comes out.....any Herero member alive in the region, will be shot upon contact.  It's a public order, and the commentary gets back to Berlin rather quickly.  In simple terms, the Kaiser now has a public problem to settle, and orders the general to dismiss the shoot on sight order.

At this point, another odd thing occurs....the traditional enemy of the Herero folks....the Nama tribe (up until this point a non-enemy of the Germans).....have made a decision to stand by the Herero tribe.  There's not a lot written over this decision or the discussion by the tribal leadership....but the Nama tribe now conducts raids against the Germans.

By 1905, there's 15,000 armed German soldiers in Namibia, and their focus has been enlarged to focus upon the Nama tribe as well.  By the end of 1905....the Germans have detained what's left of both the Herero and Nama tribes, and put them to work as slave-labor....mostly on railway expansion projects.

Around five or six years will pass after this military 'solution' period, and a census will occur.  What can be said over the Herero tribe is that they lost around 75-percent of their population, with the Nama tribe being cut into half.  Between the two....they number now only at around twenty-five thousand.

So we approach 1914 (WW I).  While some troops are there....they end up facing the British troops of South Africa, and somewhere in the spring of 1915....the German 'state' of Deutsch-Südwestafrika surrenders.

After WW I, a number of Germans (probably in the range of 15,000) are given papers to exit Namibia, and return to Germany.  Roughly 5,000 to 7,000 Germans get papers to stay (basically becoming British citizens).   For the most part, it's now incorporated into South Africa.

From the late 1940s until the mid 1960s....there are continual confrontations between South Africa and the tribal groups there in Namibia.  There's independence coming but it's not fully engaged until 1990. 

So when you view the whole story.....if this cattle plague had not occurred, and if the German 'solution' had not been so brutal.....the Germans would have likely been in some successful relationship with the local tribes and a lot of this negative history would have been avoided.