The Kaiser's Holocaust

by Casper Erichsen

  In 1883 Angra Pequeña looked almost exactly as it had done when the Portuguese had ‘discovered’ the Skeleton Coast in the 1480s. In the intervening centuries, it had occasionally harboured ships seeking shelter from Atlantic storms, and the Dutch had established a whaling station in the early years of the century. Since the 1850s, traders had arrived there from the Cape before heading inland to the settlements of the southern Nama clans, and from time to time the odd missionary had landed in the harbour.2 If there was any sight likely to test a man’s faith it was Angra Pequeña. It was almost completely without vegetation, a landscape of giant, half-buried boulders, their seaward faces pitted and sculpted by the South Atlantic winds. The bay itself was bitterly cold, refrigerated by Antarctic currents, while just over the stone hills loomed the burning-hot dunes of the Namib Desert. Yet this austere harbour was to become the first conquest of the German colonial empire. Few empires can have begun with such an inauspicious acquisition.

  In 1883 the population of Angra Pequeña consisted of a handful of guano collectors and the English trader David Radford, the bay’s only permanent resident. Radford had been living in Angra Pequeña for an unimaginable twenty-one years, making a living by hunting cat sharks and harvesting the precious oil from their livers, which was then used in the treatment of wounds. The shallow seas around Angra Pequeña swarmed with Radford’s prey, especially off Shark Island, a long thin island that protected the bay from the full force of the South Atlantic. When Heinrich Vogelsang landed, David Radford’s shack was the only permanent building in Angra Pequeña, but the young German quickly added his own feature to the landscape: a prefabricated hut brought down on the Tilly to which he gave the grandiose name ‘Fort Vogelsang’.

  His plan was to conduct a treaty with a local chief and thereby purchase this strange speck on the map in the name of Germany and his employer, Adolf Lüderitz. Vogelsang intended to set up a trading post in the harbour and then more inland, in the hope that they would eventually become the foundations for a future German colony. But first, Vogelsang had to reach the Nama settlement of Bethanie 120 miles inland.

  Bethanie was home to one of the twelve Nama clans, the Bethanie Nama. The settlement had been named by members of the London Missionary Society after a neighbourhood of biblical Jerusalem. After the British missionaries abandoned Bethanie in 1828, it had been taken over by the Rhenish Missionary Society, and in 1883 the local German missionary in Bethanie was Johannes Bam. The Bethanie Nama were led by their Kaptein, Joseph Fredericks, then in his fifties. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Fredericks’s people had abandoned their lands in the Berg River area of the Cape Colony and moved to Bethanie. On his father’s death Joseph Fredericks had inherited Bethanie and the burden of responsibility for his 1,200 people.

  Vogelsang was a sallow youth from a far-off land, and with his long fleshy face and dark curly hair he must have looked an unimpressive sight as he arrived exhausted from his desert journey. But, despite his appearance and despite his years, he was experienced in the methods of colonial trade and, importantly, the duplicity of colonial treaties. Vogelsang had worked as a trader on the West African coast, where unfair treaties with Africans and their leaders were commonplace. Assisted in his task by Missionary Bam, who acted as interpreter and adviser, he entered into negotiations with Fredericks and applied all the lessons he had learned.

  By 1 May a treaty had been agreed. Fredericks would receive two hundred rifles and £100 sterling – all trading near the Cape was carried out in the British currency. For this he agreed to sign away his rights to Angra Pequeña and the surrounding area to a radius of 5 miles. As Joseph Fredericks signed he could not possibly have realised that this sale of a small patch of desert around a desolate harbour would set in train the complete takeover of south-western Africa by European colonialists and disaster for his own people.

  With Fredericks’s signature on the contract, Heinrich Vogelsang trudged across the desert to ‘Fort Vogelsang’. Back at the bay he dispatched a message to Germany reporting to his employer that the deal had been done; Angra Pequeña was his. On 12 May, Vogelsang raised the German flag over the empty harbour.

  Vogelsang’s employer, Adolf Lüderitz, was the son of a tobacco merchant, brought up in Bremen, a port city full of sailors, exotic goods and the whiff of adventure. Rather than follow his father and become an office-bound merchant, Lüderitz decided to trace the tropical goods that flowed into his hometown back to their source. He was twenty years old, the same age as Vogelsang in 1883, when he first left home. Between 1854 and 1859 Lüderitz lived and travelled in the United States and Mexico, where he became a rancher, breeding cattle and horses. One account claims that he was involved in armed confrontations with bandits, but little is known for sure. What is certain is that through his travels Lüderitz came to understand the scale of the wealth that was accumulated through colonial trade. He began to realise that, despite their efforts, German traders stood outside this mercantile revolution. The British civil servant Sir Eyre Crowe, writing decades later, captured exactly the awakening that inspired traders like Adolf Lüderitz:

  The young [German] empire found open to its energy a whole world outside Europe, of which it had previously hardly had the opportunity to become more than dimly conscious. Sailing across the ocean in German ships, German merchants began for the first time to divine the true position of countries such as England, the United States, France and even the Netherlands, whose political influence extends to distant seas and continents. The colonies and foreign possessions of England especially were seen to give to that country a recognised and enviable status in a world where the name of Germany, if mentioned at all, excited no particular interest.3

  In 1878 Lüderitz had inherited his father’s company. He was forty-four years old and his travelling days should have been behind him. The settled life of a Bremen merchant might have suited his years but not his temperament. His company traded in guano and tobacco, but when the introduction of a tobacco tax threatened to ruin him, Lüderitz diversified. He began trading with West Africa, a tactic that had the added benefit of allowing him to indulge his seemingly undimmed lust for travel. By 1881 he owned a trading post in the British-run port of Lagos, in modern Nigeria.

  Since the middle of the century German companies had been bartering European goods for palm oil, ivory and other tropical products all along the West African coast and down into the Congo. In 1881 the key port of Lagos was under British control, but of the 112 Europeans based there, forty-five were German nationals.4 Just as the lone traders who travelled the deserts of south-western Africa inflated the value of the rifles, gunpowder, liquor and clothing that they exchanged for cattle, the trading houses of Hamburg and Bremen exaggerated the worth of the European goods they brought to the West African coast and undervalued the palm oil, ivory and ostrich feathers that the Africans gave them in exchange. West Africa also became a vast dumping ground for substandard European goods, often made especially for the trade. One of the most powerful trading houses, C. Woermann of Hamburg, specialised in exporting cheap alcohol to West Africa, and trade factories had sprung up around Hamburg specially to churn out hooch that was described to the Africans as ‘rum’ or ‘liquor’, but was in fact cheap potato spirit. In 1884, 64 percent of Hamburg’s trade with Africa was paid for by alcohol exports.5

  What Germany got from these treaties was merely the same exploitative advantages the British, French and Americans had already secured by similar means. The merchants of Hamburg and Bremen had begun to taste the exaggerated profits of colonial trade and were hooked. But while the trade with Africa was profitable, it was hardly secure, and the merchants were painfully aware that their continued wealth depended on access to the African coastal markets under the informal colonial rule of Britain or France. The fear that those powers might close the African coast to German ships led to calls for Germany to secure her own colonies and guarantee her access to the African markets.

  Adolf Lüderitz f
ound himself the victim of exactly the sort of restrictive tariff that the traders had long dreaded: in the 1880s, the British introduced an export tax and he was forced to close his West African trading station. It was around this time that he first learned of South-West Africa through the young Heinrich Vogelsang. Here was a place where he could trade with the local Africans free from the interfering reach of the British. In preparation for his new venture, Lüderitz bought 150,000 marks’ worth of trading goods and sent Vogelsang to the south-west to find a bay that might become their foothold. Lüderitz knew that the Namib coast and the offshore islands were rich with guano and was in possession of a report that claimed that the region had deposits of copper. He hoped for more, perhaps gold or diamonds. After all, only a decade earlier diamonds had been found in Kimberley in South Africa.

  The more Lüderitz invested his money and his hopes in South-West Africa, the more his ambition swelled. He imagined a network of trading posts and enormous mineral wealth ripped from the earth. He also dreamed (though perhaps less vividly) of a German colony of farms and German settlers. The first step in achieving this grand vision was to wrest ownership of the land from the local African leaders, which, as Vogelsang had shown, was the easy part. The greater challenge would be for Lüderitz to have his new territories recognised and offered consular protection by the German government. This would involve an encounter with the most formidable statesman in Europe: the Chancellor of the German Reich, Prince Otto von Bismarck.

  Throughout the 1870s, Bismarck’s view on colonies, in public at least, had been consistently negative. As long as German traders could sell their goods in British and French colonies, Bismarck saw little reason for Germany herself to claim colonies. He was acutely aware that Germany lacked a navy large enough to protect far-off territories, and to create such an armada would be an enormous expense. Moreover, if Germany were to become a colonial power, the administration of these foreign possessions would be another unwelcome cost. Bismarck had long been willing to send gunboats across oceans to intimidate and bombard Africans or Asians, or force them into unequal treaties. He was even open to the establishment of naval bases and coaling stations on foreign shores to make this sort of trans-global intimidation more efficient, but he remained resolutely opposed to formal colonies, stating, ‘As long as I am Reichkanzler, we shall not pursue a colonial policy.’6 So when in January 1883 Adolf Lüderitz came to Berlin to request consular protection for his planned trading post, he cannot have been too surprised that Bismarck responded, ‘Sovereignty over this country now lies either with the Negro prince concerned, or with Lüderitz, but not the Reich.’7

  Despite this apparently emphatic rebuttal, Bismarck was secretly biding his time to see if Lüderitz’s acquisition became viable. Most importantly, he wanted to see how the British, with their possessions in the Cape Colony and at Walvis Bay on the Namib coast, would react to the presence of Germans in southwestern Africa. Bismarck’s customary anti-colonial stance was beginning to buckle under the weight of popular pressure. Germany in the 1880s was in the grip of what became known as the ‘colonial fever’.

  Ever since unification in 1871, organisations had been formed to promote the idea that the young nation should acquire colonies. The earliest movements were created by merchants who wanted to secure new markets for German goods, and during the severe depression that followed unification, their economic arguments for colonial expansion gathered increasing levels of support. Then, on the eve of the 1880s, in the midst of an economic recession, a book was published that set in motion a full-scale national debate on the colonial question: Does Germany Need Colonies? by Friedrich Fabri, the inspector of the Barmen Rhine Mission. The immediate acquisition of overseas colonies, claimed Fabri, had become ‘a matter of life or death for the development of Germany’. Despite Germany’s military power – four times that of Great Britain in Fabri’s estimation – without colonies she would remain a second-class nation. Although Fabri would never set foot in Africa, he set himself up as an African expert and in the 1880s helped found the Westdeutsch Verein für Kolonialisation und Export (West German Society for Colonisation and Export). Unlike earlier organisations, Fabri’s society campaigned not for overseas markets, but for colonies to which German farmers might emigrate. In 1882 another movement was formed through the amalgamation of several smaller groups. The Deutsche Kolonial Verein (German Colonial Society) became the most influential pro-colonial movement.

  In the Germany of the 1880s popular enthusiasm for empire, especially for empire in Africa, was stoked by the dramatic accounts of the great explorers and, despite having no colonies, Germany was at the forefront of tropical exploration. Long before unification, German explorers had proved their mettle by reaching lands bewilderingly distant and remote. Perhaps the greatest German explorer was Heinrich Barth, who had crossed the Sahara as a member of a three-man British-led expedition. After the deaths of both his colleagues, Barth had carried on alone, eventually reaching Timbuktu. By the time he left Africa he had travelled 12,000 miles during five years of unbroken exploration. The account of his journey, Discoveries in North and Central Africa, ran to five volumes and was published in English and German simultaneously. A decade later Friedrich Röhlfs became the first European to cross Africa from north to south, and in the 1870s Gustav Nachtigal added his name to this national roll of honour by exploring previously unknown parts of the central Sahara. During one expedition Nachtigal was given up for dead, only to escape the clutches of the jungle and dramatically reappear at Khartoum.

  Germany could also claim a role in the most glamorous (and most stage-managed) African adventure of the age – Henry Morton Stanley’s epic struggle to build an empire in the Congo for Leopold II, King of the Belgians. In Germany, some of the genuine excitement surrounding Stanley’s exploration of the ‘dark continent’ stemmed from the fact that two German explorers were working alongside him. The German army lieutenant Hermann Wissmann had made his name exploring the Tushelango area, where he had ‘virtually discovered’ Lake Munkamba.8 Another German, Curt von François, had worked alongside Wissmann until 1885, after which he had set off on his own to explore the Lulengo and Uruki tributaries of the Congo. Stanley later thanked von François for discovering 1,000 miles of navigable waterways that were added to Leopold’s empire.9

  By the time the ‘colonial fever’ was reaching its crescendo, German explorers had hacked their way through some of the continent’s most impenetrable forests and trekked across its most desolate wastelands. They had endured appalling privations and encountered unimaginably exotic peoples, but for the ordinary millions caught up in the ‘colonial fever’ this was no longer enough. They longed to see Germany’s representatives in Africa plant flags and claim new lands for the Reich – as Pierre de Brazza had done for France and Henry Morton Stanley had done for King Leopold. Writing on German public opinion at the end of 1884, a correspondent of the London Globe reported that, ‘So deeply are the people imbued with a vague but nonetheless enticing vision of the wealth to be won in Africa that thousands of young men are longing and waiting for an opportunity to seek their fortune in the new El Dorado.’10

  As the dream of a German colonial empire – once the fixation of a middle-class minority – spread across German society, it became increasingly intertwined with the issue of national prestige. If Leopold II of the Belgians, acting as a private citizen, could build a colony seventy-six times the size of his own realm, then surely Germany, fast becoming the greatest military power in Europe, had not only a right but a duty to take a slice of the colonial cake. The fear grew that if Germany continued to delay her arrival at the colonial feast she might find the door slammed in her face. By the middle of the decade ‘colonial fever’ was giving way to Torschlusspanik – ‘door closing panic’. This national paranoia was stoked by the nationalist, conservative press and manipulated by the German Colonial Society. Bismarck himself acknowledged that ‘public opinion in Germany so strongly emphasises colonial policy t
hat the position of the German government essentially depends upon its success’.11

  In March 1883, just a month before Heinrich Vogelsang landed in Angra Pequeña, Adolf Woermann, the owner of the Woermann trading house, wrote to Bismarck warning him that the British, French and Portuguese were combining to take control of much of Africa and push the German traders out. Just weeks later Bismarck received similar warnings from Heinrich von Kusserow of the Foreign Office, and in July the Hamburg traders added to the clamour for African colonies by again calling for the annexation of the coast of Cameroon. This time Woermann warned Bismarck that if Germany wanted colonies in Cameroon, ‘now, so to speak, is the last moment to acquire them’.12

  On 25 August 1883, as the pressure on Bismarck was increasing, Heinrich Vogelsang negotiated a second treaty with Joseph Fredericks of the Bethanie Nama. Even by the low standards of European colonialism, it was exploitative and one-sided. It is even suggested that Vogelsang may have plied Joseph Fredericks with liquor during the negotiations. Whatever his tactics, the substance of the deal was this: Fredericks would sell to Lüderitz a strip of coastal land stretching from the Orange River in the south up to a latitude of twenty-six degrees in the north. For this Joseph Fredericks and his people would receive £500 and sixty Wesley-Richards rifles. The treaty defined the coastal strip as a ribbon of land twenty ‘geographical miles’ in width. This ‘geographical mile’ was a German measurement that will have meant nothing to Fredericks, but is almost five times the distance of a normal (or English) mile. Fredericks had been tricked into selling off the bulk of his people’s land. In a letter to Vogelsang, Lüderitz ordered his agent to ‘Let Josef Fredericks believe for the time being that the reference is to 20 English miles’.13 So outrageous was this second treaty that a later German administrator was dispatched to investigate it, but he died on his way back to Germany and the Bethanie Nama lost their land for ever.