A COUNTRY OF OUR OWN
The world has become a new place in the years since Hanna and I first planted our roots in Bechuanaland. While the powerful nations of the earth fought the Great War, we built our herds and raised our family, far removed from the bombs and fighting. And when the guns fell silent, I must admit I took some pride in seeing Germany kicked out of South West Africa and Kaiser Wilhelm forced from the throne. The last of the concentration camps would finally be emptied.
Samuel, who had sent his men to fight with the South African troops, saw it as a chance to go home. At first, the South African leaders, the new rulers of the former German colony, gave the ailing chief permission to return to Okahandja. But just as he was preparing to leave, Samuel learned the offer had been revoked.
The chief sits looking westward out over the veld when I come to check on him. “How are you doing?” I ask.
“The pain grows worse,” he says, putting his wrinkled hand over his heart. He waves me away when I pull out my stethoscope. “There is nothing you can do for it,” he says with a look of longing in his eyes. “I had hoped to end my days in the home of my ancestors. Now I know I will breathe my last in a land of strangers.” The chief sighs deeply. “But in death, I will rest with my fathers.”
As I ride home across the veld, I look up into the endless blue sky, musing over the differences between Samuel and me. Although my ancestors have been buried in German soil for nearly a millennium, it is not the land of my fathers. I have no need, no desire, to return to the country of my birth – neither in life nor in death. This place, where Hanna and I have carved out a new beginning for our family, is where I belong.
After dinner, I sit in my favorite chair by the fire. Amichai, our youngest, sits on the floor playing with Papa’s tin soldiers. I can hear Anna and Elise singing in the kitchen as they wash the dishes. David has his nose in Max Bayer’s book. It’s the copy Max sent me before the Great War began – the war that ended his life.
“Don’t believe everything you read in that,” I tell David. “When you’re done reading, we’ll talk about what really happened.”
I smile contentedly as I tackle the pile of newspapers that’s been growing by my chair.
“I don’t know why you bother,” Hanna says, looking up from her knitting. “It’s all old news by time it reaches us. The world has already moved on.”
“That’s no reason to be uninformed,” I tell her as I flip through one of the newspapers.
A headline about the Kaiser living in exile in the Netherlands catches my eye. Wilhelm is trying to denounce his abdication, saying it was forced upon him by Germans who had been “egged on and misled by the tribe of Judah…. Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil.”
He recommends a worldwide pogrom as the “best cure.” The Jews are a “nuisance that humanity must get rid of some way or other,” he says. “I believe the best would be gas!”
Will the hatred never end? I throw the newspaper in the fire, watching as the Kaiser’s words disappear in the flames. My disgust melts as I glance at the mantle and my eyes take in the lavender apothecary bottle I had once given to Petronella. For our family, it has become a symbol of hope, of endurance, of God’s deliverance.
I step outside into the winter chill and look up at the night sky exploding in the light of thousands of stars. The soft lowing of the cattle thunders in the quiet of the veld. I’m reminded once again of God’s promise to Abraham. It is a promise that has been handed down through the generations. But here in this African wilderness, I finally feel the power, and the comfort, of that covenant. My children and my children’s children will grow and prosper in this land, far from the hatred of the kaisers of this world, the dangerous science of the Eugen Fischers, and the greed of the people who feed on that hatred and “knowledge.”
I reflect on the journey that has brought me here to this country where Hanna and I will someday rest in the sands of the Kalahari. The words of the Psalm come to mind:
“They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses. And he led them forth by the right way…. He turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground into watersprings. And there he maketh the hungry to dwell, that they may prepare a city for habitation; and sow the fields, and plant vineyards, which may yield fruits of increase. He blesseth them also, so that they are multiplied greatly; and suffereth not their cattle to decrease.”
Lost in my reverie, I don’t realize anyone has joined me until Hanna drapes a coat across my shoulders. “You’ll catch cold out here,” she says. I smile my appreciation and pull her close. She lays her head against my shoulder and looks up at the sky. “This is home,” she murmurs.
I feel a small tug on my shirt. “Look, Papa! A falling star!” Amichai points to a brilliant streak across the sky. “Can we find where it landed?”
Hanna and I laugh. My son’s zest for life amazes me. He definitely lives up to his name, which in Hebrew means, “My people are alive.”
It is the name Samuel chose for him.
Epilogue
General von Trotha nearly succeeded in his efforts to exterminate the Herero. Over a span of just a few years, more than 60,000 Herero, or 85 percent of the tribe, died. While thousands were killed by German troops, countless more met death in the desert or German concentration camps. The remnants were forced to work for German settlers or condemned to a life of exile in surrounding countries. As for Samuel Maharero, he was allowed to return to the land of his fathers only in death.
Although these events unfolded more than a century ago, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the Herero who survived still live with the consequences of the genocide. Once a proud, powerful force in the land that was to become Namibia, today the Herero make up about 10 percent of the Namibian population. Much of the land their herds once grazed is still farmed by the descendants of the German colonizers. And for more than a hundred years, many of the bones of their ancestors, collected from the death camps or dug up from their graves, have been the “property” of German universities and museums. Twenty skulls gathered for Dr. Eugen Fischer’s research were finally returned to the Herero in October 2011. One was that of a four-year-old boy.
Germany partially apologized in 2004, accepting "political and moral responsibility for the past and colonial guilt." While it has given generously to Namibia in foreign aid, Germany refuses to pay reparations for a genocide it has yet to officially admit.
In 2007, members of the von Trotha family met with Herero leaders to offer their own apology. “We all bear the same family name and that is reason enough to deal with historical facts associated with General Lothar,” Wolf-Thilo von Trotha, chairman of the von Trotha Family Association, said at that meeting. "We, the members of the von Trotha family, are ashamed of the terrible events that took place a hundred years ago. We deeply regret what happened to your people and also to the Nama and Damara – the cruel and unjustified death of thousands of men, women, and children."
Author’s Note
While Kov and his family are the stuff of fiction, many of the people he encounters are as real as the events that shape this story. Take Alexander Lion, for instance. Born into a Jewish banker’s family, he converted to Catholicism at the age of sixteen. He served as an army surgeon in German South West Africa during the Herero uprising. After the war, Alexander and Maximilian Bayer, who was a captain under General von Trotha, joined forces to found the German Boy Scout movement. Alexander continued his military duties in World War I, receiving the Iron Cross for his service. But despite his conversion and service to the Fatherland, Alexander was branded a Jew in World War II and arrested by the Gestapo. He was one of the fortunate ones. He survived.
Returning from Africa with a heart condition, Maximilian
went on the lecture circuit and wrote romanticized books about the Herero uprising. Ignoring his health, he continued his military career. He was killed by a sniper’s bullet on the Western front in World War I.
Jahohora is based on a real Herero girl by that name who survived two years in the desert after her parents were killed when they went for water. Like the girl of this story, the real Jahohora rubbed her body with a poisonous shrub to ensure no Germans would rape her. When she was taken in by a German farmer, she was stripped of her identity and renamed “Petronella.” Years later, Jahohora was reunited with her brother, the only other survivor of her family. Along with their children and grandchildren, they made the trek to the waterhole where their parents were killed. They continued on to the Waterberg and then reignited the holy fire.
After South Africa replaced Germany as the colonial power in South West Africa, Jahohora made it her mission to teach her children and grandchildren the lessons of the ancestors and what it means to be Herero. Such lessons were the seeds that took root against apartheid in South West Africa and grew into demands for independence. In planting and nurturing those seeds, Jahohora and others of her generation truly became the mothers of modern-day Namibia.
Years of research went into the telling of this story, which was first inspired by Kapombo Uazuvara Ewald Katjivena, Jahohora’s grandson. Guided by his grandmother’s life, Kapombo became a SWAPO freedom fighter. He engaged in a war of words to persuade other countries to force South Africa to grant independence to South West Africa, which it had taken over following Germany’s defeat in World War I. Forced into exile during the long struggle for freedom, Kapombo could not be with his beloved grandmother when she died.
Some of Kov’s story follows the flow of Gustav Frenssen’s Peter Moor’s Journey to Southwest Africa, a novel loosely based on a composite of several German soldiers’ experiences in South West Africa. Whereas Frenssen’s fiction, which proved quite popular in Germany in the first part of the twentieth century, was light on research and heavy on racist justifications, my account is heavily researched and argues against those racist attitudes that eventually culminated in the Holocaust.
I would be remiss in not acknowledging all those who helped me with this research. I owe Kapombo a huge debt of gratitude for sharing his grandmother’s story and making me aware of the first genocide of the twentieth century. He spent countless hours explaining the importance of the holy fire, the ancestors, and the essence of being Herero. This book also could not have been written without the help of the Paramount Herero Chief Kuaima Riruako and Dr. Hoze Riruako and his wife, Belinda Veii Riruako. The three of them were my go-to sources on Herero customs and traditions. For Kov’s story, I must thank Martin Berman-Gorvine and Dr. Martin Evers for their insight on Jewish traditions.
Lastly, I thank my family for their encouragement and for putting up with an absentee wife, mother, grandmother, and daughter as I was working on this project. Most of all, I thank my husband, Job Serebrov, for his patience, his willingness to be my sounding board, and his perseverance in tracking down answers to my research questions.
About the Author
AN AWARD-WINNING journalist with a passion for history, Mari Serebrov has authored a variety of books, including The Life and Times of W.H. Arnold of Arkansas, the historical novel Mama Namibia and a children’s book, Jahohora and First Day. She also contributed to The Grandmother’s Bible and has co-authored a number of church resource books with her late mother, Adell Harvey.
Because of her work in calling attention to the first genocide of the 20th century in what was then German South-West Africa, Mari was named the literary laureate of the Herero Tribal Authority in 2013. She and her husband, Job, have two children and six grandchildren.
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Mama Namibia: Based on True Events Page 39
