In the colonies the fate of those other ‘savages’, the dark races of the world, seemed to be governed by the same laws of natural selection. Surely their disappearance was a result of their inability to adapt to the arrival of stronger, more capable races and the civilisation they brought with them? The annihilation of the Tasmanians, the Patagonians, the Native Americans and perhaps soon the Africans all testified to their innate weakness, their unfitness for the future.
While imperialism could be justified by a number of arguments – economic self-interest, European rivalry and the white man’s duty to spread civilisation and the Gospels – the extermination of whole races was more difficult to explain. Yet Social Darwinism, along with a range of racial theories taken from the older Scientific Racism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was able to recast both historical and contemporary events, and in this capacity it took on the twisted logic of a witch trial.
The white races had claimed territory across the globe by right of strength and conquest. They had triumphed everywhere because they were the fittest; their triumphs were the proof of their fitness. Whole races, who had been annihilated long before Darwin had put pen to paper, were judged to have been unfit for life by the very fact that they had been exterminated. Living peoples across the world were categorised as ‘doomed races’. The only responsibility science had to such races was to record their cultures and collect artefacts from them, before their inevitable extinction.
The spread of Europeans across the globe came to be regarded as an almost sacred enterprise, and was increasingly linked to that other holy crusade of the nineteenth century – the march of progress. Alongside the clearing of land, the coming of the railways and the settlement of white farmers, the eradication of indigenous tribes became a symbol of modernity. Social Darwinism thus cast death itself as an agent of progress. The notion that the strong were destined to overcome the weak in the struggle for life became almost a mantra, repeated thousands of times in memoirs, speeches, biographies and scientific tracts. Any last spasms of Christian morality or guilt could be allayed by the fact that all this was inevitable.
Of course there were those who strongly opposed every aspect of this form of colonialism. In the early nineteenth century, millions of people across Europe, including Charles Darwin’s own family, had mobilised to confront the brutality and iniquity of slavery. When slavery was finally abolished, the same organisations turned their energy and compassion to the fight against imperialist violence. Liberals in Britain, France and Germany condemned the mistreatment of native peoples and spent decades writing reports, publishing pamphlets and holding public meetings to draw to public attention the aspects of imperialism that were otherwise little discussed. But by the time Africa was divided up at the Conference of Berlin, advocates of an unbridled colonialism had learned to harness a distorted version of Social Darwinism in order to dismiss the views of the humanitarians as hopelessly outdated and unscientific. After all, there was no humanitarianism, compassion or brotherhood in nature.
The British explorer William Winwood Reade, writing in the 1860s, captured the growing consensus of his age. The last chapter of his book Savage Africa, entitled ‘The Redemption of Africa’, concluded with a prophecy of the continent’s future. Reade’s vision was founded upon his unshakeable belief that Africa belonged to the white man.
Africa shall be redeemed. Her children shall perform this mighty work. Her morasses shall be drained; her deserts shall be watered by canals; her forests shall be reduced to firewood. Her children shall do all this. They shall pour an elixir vitae into the veins of their mother, now withered and diseased. They shall restore her to youth and to immortal beauty.
In this amenable task they may possibly become exterminated. We must learn to look on this result with composure. It illustrates the ben e ficent law of Nature, that the weak must be devoured by the strong.2
Reade fervently believed that in the not-too-distant future European noblemen would build their estates in Central Africa and ‘young ladies on camp stools under palm-trees will read with tears “The Last of the Negroes”, and the Niger will become as romantic a river as the Rhine.’3
Although Germany came late to the colonial table, her scientists had been among the first to accept the logic of Social Darwinism. In 1868, while working on The Descent of Man, Darwin, in a letter to Wilhelm Preyer, Professor of Physiology at the University of Jena, reported that ‘The support I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.’4
Germany was particularly receptive to Darwin, partly because his ideas attracted the support of a number of well-respected German scientists. Chief among them was Ernst Haeckel, one of Germany’s most esteemed intellectuals. Haeckel began to explore what very quickly became known as Darwinism soon after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Over the next forty years he wrote a stream of highly influential books on evolution, some of which became among the most popular works of non-fiction published in Germany during the age of the Kaisers. A generation of German scientists and intellectuals came to know Darwin partly through the filter of Ernst Haeckel, and one of the key characteristics of Haeckel’s work was the way in which he applied Darwin’s theories to human racial difference. The extreme caution that Darwin had exercised when making links between his central theories and the struggles between the human races was not practised by Haeckel.
While Germany’s scientists stood at the forefront of the Darwinian revolution, in her African empire – particularly in South-West Africa – her colonialists were confronted with a situation that was at odds with the fundamental racial suppositions at the heart of imperialism. Germany’s only African colony suitable for large-scale white settlement remained dominated by tribes of Africans who had, in almost every respect, failed to accord with colonial theory. The Nama and Herero had not retreated into the hinterland in the face of the white man, nor had they fallen prey to introduced disease. The continuing military and economic independence of the South-West Africans was profoundly unsettling to the German pro-colonial lobby, and by the 1890s a deep-seated frustration with German colonialism had taken hold. Before the Hoornkrans massacre, armchair imperialists in Berlin, and agitators in the Missionary and Colonial societies, had accused the Colonial Department of failing to apply military force properly in South-West Africa. Some interpreted the massacre at Hoornkrans and the removal of Bismarck from office as portents heralding a new era in the colonies. From now on, they hoped, the Nama and Herero would be put in their place by German military might. Yet, as events quickly demonstrated, all that von François had achieved at Hoornkrans was to start a war he was incapable of winning.
After fleeing Hoornkrans, Hendrik Witbooi and his people found refuge in the Khomas Mountains on the fringes of the Namib Desert. There, Kaptein Hendrik wrote letters to the leaders of the other Nama tribes, whom he beseeched to join him in an alliance against the Germans. In April 1893 he wrote again to John Cleverly, the British magistrate in Walvis Bay whom the Witbooi rightly deduced was a channel through which he could alert the outside world to the massacre at Hoornkrans. He hoped to outmanoeuvre the Germans by appealing directly to public opinion in Europe. After describing in detail the attack his people had suffered, Hendrik Witbooi concluded his letter to Cleverly:
Please let these miserable and frightful events be quickly known to all the great people in England and Germany. I cannot think that such a war as the Germans have now made is done by such a mighty and civilised people – is it a straight forward or usual way of making war?5
To ensure Cleverly reported the massacre to his superiors Hendrik sent his own son, Klein Hendrik, and one of his most trusted lieutenants, Petrus Jafta, to deliver the letter personally. Since both had been at Hoornkrans when von François had attacked, they were also able to corroborate Witbooi’s account. Five days later Cleverly replied: ‘I cannot understand how there could have been a killing of women and children such as you tell me
of. European nations do not make war in that way.’6
Cleverly’s response was disingenuous. As an official of the British Empire he knew exactly how European nations made war against ‘savages’. But he wrote a report based on Hendrik Witbooi’s letter for the Under Secretary of Native Affairs in Cape Town, and took sworn affidavits from Petrus Jafta and Klein Hendrik.
Sometime later reports of the German ‘exploits’ at Hoornkrans began to appear in the British press, specifically stating that the victims had been mainly women and children, and intimating that what had taken place there was a massacre. They stood in stark contrast to earlier reports, published in the German press, that had hailed Hoornkrans as a victorious battle fought solely against the military forces of a savage tribe. The alternative version of events was reprinted in several German newspapers, directly challenging the veracity of the official account.7
As Berlin’s political classes debated whether the destruction of the Witbooi Nama had been achieved with too much or too little ferocity, Hendrik Witbooi and three hundred of his men launched a series of raids against the Germans in Windhoek. In one, the Witbooi drove off around forty horses belonging to the German garrison. When von François arranged to purchase replacement animals from a local trader, the Witbooi captured the new horses before the Germans could take possession of them. With only seventy horses to the Witbooi’s three hundred, von François’s garrison was temporarily immobilised and the writ of German colonial power in South West Africa extended only to the limits of Windhoek. In June the Witbooi attacked again. Beyond the range of German rifles, they galloped their horses back and forth and waved their hats in full view, mocking their enemy’s inability to give chase.
Hendrik Witbooi then turned his attention to the road between Windhoek and Walvis Bay, attacking a German convoy twenty wagons strong and effectively severing Windhoek’s supply lines. Throughout the conflict, the Witbooi focused their attacks solely on von François and his garrison. The German farmers around Windhoek were left unharmed. When Gustav Voigts, an early settler who later became one of the colony’s leading businessmen, made a trek through Namaland with about five hundred oxen, he turned to Hendrik Witbooi for permission, and later wrote:
Witbooi knew full well that we were Germans with whom he was at war and that he might have captured the 500 oxen without a shot being fired; but we, for our part, knew just as well that Hendrik would keep his word whatever happened, and we were not disappointed.8
For seven months the Witbooi held von François’s forces at bay. Young men of other Nama clans left their settlements and rode off to join them in avenging the Nama blood spilled at Hoornkrans. Yet throughout 1893 Curt von François, now promoted to the rank of major, sent a series of dispatches to Berlin that played down the seriousness of the military situation. While appealing for artillery and more soldiers, he repeatedly attempted to reassure his superiors that final victory was close at hand. But over the course of the year, officials in the Colonial Department pieced together the reality.
Following several unsuccessful offensives against the Witbooi, demands for the removal of Curt von François reached the floor of the Reichstag. One speaker summed up the situation: ‘Major François is not the right man in the right place and must be replaced by someone else … [Hendrik] Witbooi is the real master of the country and François is no match for him.’9
In November 1893, apparently oblivious to the precariousness of his position, Curt von François sent a letter to the German Chancellor, Count Leo von Caprivi, confidently outlining the campaigns he was planning for 1894. In doing so he effectively brought his own career to an end. These ill-conceived and overambitious expeditions would almost certainly have brought Germany into conflict with three more of the South-West African tribes, including the Herero. The man who had been charged with making South-West Africa safe for German settlement had dragged the colony into a potentially disastrous era of permanent war and instability. At the end of 1893 a new commander was dispatched to save German South-West Africa from Curt von François.
Theodor Leutwein arrived in the newly founded port of Swakopmund, 20 miles north of Walvis Bay, on 1 January 1894. He was serious-minded, calculating, a realist – in many respects the antithesis of von François. German South-West Africa’s third colonial master was the son of a pastor who had studied law before entering the army. At forty-four he was as much a diplomat as a soldier, and his overriding aim as governor was to draw a line under the first chaotic decade of German colonialism in South-West Africa.
Leutwein understood the limits of German power in the colony and the relative strength of the Africans. The inability of Dr Göring and Curt von François to grasp these basic realities stemmed, in large part, from their misconceptions of the Herero and Nama as backward or ‘undiscovered’. Leutwein was unburdened by such stereotypes, and his ambitions in South-West Africa were limited, in the short term at least. In the first stage of his wider plan he merely sought for the Germans – both settlers and soldiers – to establish themselves permanently in the colony. To achieve this he was willing to use military force, but unlike von François he did not consider the garrison the only available option.
Theodor Leutwein had studied the British colonial experience in depth and sought to colonise German South-West Africa using the same principles. He set great store by the imperial maxim ‘divide and rule’, and his long-term strategy was to isolate and then confront each of the territory’s ethnic groups, one by one. At the conclusion of each small war, Leutwein planned to foist upon the defeated Africans a treaty that would divest them of a little of their tribal land and strip them of a little of their independence. He planned to turn the Africans against each other whenever possible, to erode traditional clan unity and undermine the power of chiefs. Leutwein’s first aim was to pressure the tribes who had refused to sign protection treaties under Heinrich Göring or Curt von François.
Just weeks after his arrival, Leutwein marched out of Windhoek with one hundred troops and headed for the settlement of the Khauas Nama, 100 miles to the south-east. In a surprise raid he captured Andreas Lambert, the chief of the Khauas, along with the bulk of his people’s rifles and horses. When Lambert attempted to escape, Leutwein had him put on trial. Acting as both prosecutor and judge he sentenced the chief to immediate execution. The next day he appointed a puppet ruler and forced the Khauas to sign a treaty accepting permanent German sovereignty.
He then turned to the Franzmann, one of the older Nama clans, who lived on the edge of the Kalahari to the south of the Khauas. When the Germans arrived at the Franzmann’s camp, Leutwein ordered his troops to take up positions on a hill overlooking the settlement. The Franzmann chief, Simon Kopper, along with the elders, was then forced to sign a treaty under the barrels of the Germans’ guns. Once again they were made to accept the Kaiser as their overlord.
Like most colonial treaties, those imposed upon the Khauas and Franzmann Nama were unwarranted and destructive interventions into sovereign societies. But what is most striking about these treaties is how relatively lenient they were. There was, for example, no attempt to seize their land. Although Leutwein had under his command a force stronger than that with which von François had attacked Hoornkrans, he sought merely to bind the various African nations closer to Germany, in economic, military and cultural terms. This is not to say that Leutwein was a benign imperialist: his policies were a measure of his pragmatism, not his liberalism. But they were also proof that his arrival had ushered in an age of more ‘professional’ colonialism.
After overwhelming the Khauas and Franzmann Nama, the new governor felt strong enough to move cautiously against the Witbooi, the only Nama clan still outside the ‘protection’ of the German Empire. In 1894 Hendrik Witbooi had gathered his people together in a new settlement high in the Naukluft Mountains. Appreciating the strength of the Witbooi and the considerable difficulties of fighting in the mountains, Leutwein did not launch an immediate attack, but instead attempted to enco
urage Hendrik Witbooi to accept German protection through negotiation.
Between May and August, Leutwein dispatched a remarkable series of letters to Hendrik Witbooi. Many are astonishingly frank and, in contrast to the bombastic edicts issued by Heinrich Göring, Leutwein’s tone was measured and respectful. In a letter written on 9 April 1894 he attempted to describe the wider forces that had brought the Germans and the Witbooi to war with one another:
Developing events have brought about that His Majesty the German Emperor is now paramount sovereign of Namaqualand, and there is nothing to be done about it. All other Captains of the country have resigned themselves to it, you are the only one who has refused and must fight us to destruction …10
In another part of the letter he warned Hendrik Witbooi,
Should I succeed in killing you and all your men, the war would be at an end, but should you succeed in killing me and all my men, the war would be no means be at an end, for the Emperor of Germany would, from his vast army, send double or treble the numbers of men, and many more field-guns, and you would have to start over … His Majesty the German Emperor has sent me with specific orders to carry on the war to your destruction, unless you surrender. I do not know you and I have no personal enmity against you at all, but shall of course carry out my orders and fight you to the death …11
In one of his replies to Leutwein, Hendrik Witbooi defiantly wrote:
I have never met the Emperor [Kaiser] and therefore cannot have offended him by word or by deed. God has given us different realms on Earth, and through that I know and believe that it is neither a sin nor crime for me to want to remain the independent chief of my country and people. If you want to kill me for this without any fault of mine, there is no harm done, nor is it a disgrace: I shall die honestly for that which is my own.12
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