Civilization: The West and the Rest (32 page)

The original French civilizing mission had been based on the revolutionary idea of universal citizenship. But even as the French Empire expanded, that idea retreated. In theory, a West African
sujet
could still become a
citoyen
. In practice, few were considered eligible (for example, practising polygamy was considered a disqualification). As late as 1936, out of French West Africa’s total population of 15 million, there were only 2,136 French citizens outside the four coastal communes.
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Residential segregation became the norm (separating the European ‘Plateau’ from the African ‘Medina’ in Dakar, for example), on the ground that Africans were the bearers of infectious disease. Education, too, was restricted to a tiny elite of ‘intermediaries’.
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Once the French had aspired to racial assimilation.
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Now medical science recommended separation. This accorded with the
prevailing view that ‘association’ was a more realistic goal than assimilation because, as the colonial theorist Louis Vignon put it, of the ‘opposition between the principles of 1789 and the conservatism of non-European populations’.
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The battle against tropical disease was not just fought in Petri dishes. It was fought in African towns and villages. When bubonic plague struck Senegal, the French authorities were ruthless in their response. The homes of the infected were torched; residents were forcibly removed and quarantined under armed guard; the dead were unceremoniously buried in creosote or lime in violation of Muslim traditions. This was a battle in which Africans felt themselves to be more victims than beneficiaries. In Dakar there were mass protests, riots and the first general strike in Senegalese history.
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The imperatives of medical science required harsh measures to contain the epidemic. Yet the science of the day also provided a spurious rationale for treating Africans brutally. They were not merely ignorant of medical science. According to the theory of eugenics, they were an inferior species. Nowhere did the pseudo-science of eugenics, the mutant half-brother of bacteriology, have a more pernicious influence than in the new and rapidly growing German Empire.

As the twentieth century dawned, Germany was in the vanguard of Western civilization. It was German professors who won the lion’s share of Nobel science prizes: 33 per cent of the total awarded between 1901 and 1910 and 29 per cent in the following decade. It was German universities that led the world in chemistry and biochemistry. Ambitious graduates flocked from all over Europe to Göttingen, Heidelberg and Tübingen to tremble before the titans of German
Wissenschaft
. After Pasteur, Robert Koch had emerged as the dominant force in bacteriology. Another German, Emil von Behring, was one of the developers of the tetanus and diphtheria antitoxins, for which he was awarded both the Nobel Prize and the Iron Cross. Two other German scientists, Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann, identified the spirocheta pallida
as the cause of syphilis, and a third, Paul Ehrlich, was one of the inventors of Salvarsan, the first effective treatment for the disease.

Yet there was a shadow side to this extraordinary scientific success. Lurking within the real science was a pseudo-science, which asserted that mankind was not a single more or less homogeneous species but was subdivided and ranked from an Aryan ‘master race’ down to a black race unworthy of the designation
Homo sapiens
. And where better to test these theories than in Germany’s newly acquired African colonies? Africa was about to become another kind of laboratory – this time for racial biology.

Each European power had its own distinctive way of scrambling for Africa. The French, as we have seen, favoured railways and health centres. The British did more than just dig for gold and hunt for happy valleys; they also built mission schools. The Belgians turned the Congo into a vast slave state. The Portuguese did as little as possible. The Germans were the latecomers to the party. For them, colonizing Africa was a giant experiment to test, among other things, a racial theory. Earlier colonizing powers had, of course, been bolstered by a sense of innate superiority. According to the theory of ‘social Darwinism’, Africans were biologically inferior, an inconvenient obstacle to the development of Africa by more advanced white ‘Aryans’. But no one turned that theory into colonial practice more ruthlessly than the Germans in South-West Africa, today’s Namibia.

The Germans first laid claim to the bleak shores of South-West Africa in 1884. A year later Heinrich Ernst Göring – father of the more famous Hermann – was appointed Reich commissioner. By the time Theodor Leutwein was appointed the colony’s first governor in 1893, German intentions were becoming clear: to expropriate the native Herero and Nama peoples and settle their land with German farmers. This was the policy that would be openly advocated by Paul von Rohrbach in his influential book
German Colonial Economics
(1907).
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It was a project that at the time seemed as scientifically legitimate as the ongoing European campaign against tropical disease.

In 1851 Charles Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton had come to this arid yet lovely country under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society. On returning to London, Galton reported that he had seen ‘enough of savage races to give me material to think about all the rest
of my life’. Galton’s observations of the Herero and Nama would later inform his thinking about human evolution. It was Galton’s anthropometric work on human heredity that laid the foundation for the discipline he christened ‘eugenics’ – the use of selective breeding to improve the human gene pool.
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Here was the ultimate solution to the problem of public health: a master-race of superhumans, bred to withstand the attacks of pathogens. The crucial point to note is that a hundred years ago work like Galton’s was at the cutting edge of science. Racism was not some backward-looking reactionary ideology; the scientifically uneducated embraced it as enthusiastically as people today accept the theory of man-made global warming. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that eugenics and the related concept of ‘racial hygiene’ were finally discredited with the realization that genetic differences between the races are relatively small, and the variations within races quite large.

A century ago hardly anyone in the West doubted that white men were superior to black. Hardly anyone white, that is. Racial theory justified flagrant inequality of the sort that would later be institutionalized in the American South as segregation and in South Africa as ‘apartheid’ – apartness. In German South-West Africa, blacks were forbidden to ride horses, had to salute whites, could not walk on the footpaths, could not own bicycles or go to libraries. In the colony’s rudimentary courts of law, the word of one German was worth the word of seven Africans. Settlers got fined for crimes like murder and rape for which Africans were summarily hanged. As a missionary commented, ‘the average German looks down upon the natives as being about on the same level as the higher primates (baboon being their favourite term for the natives) and treats them like animals.’
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The British and the French had made a point of abolishing slavery in their colonies during the nineteenth century. The Germans did not.
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There was only one small problem. The Herero and Nama were not the childlike creatures of racial theory. The Herero were tough herdsmen, skilled at maintaining their cattle in the sparse pastureland
that lay between the Namib and Kalahari deserts. The Nama were raiders every bit as skilled as horsemen and marksmen as the Boers to the east.
⁷⁷
Having seen the Dutch and British in action in South Africa, they knew full well what the Germans were up to. The economic position of the Herero had been severely weakened at the turn of the century by a devastating outbreak of rinderpest. As a result, the process of selling land to German settlers was already under way. There was also mounting tension between the Herero and German merchants, whose debt-collection methods were less than subtle.
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But flagrant robbery the Herero were bound to resist, especially after a succession of egregious acts of violence, including the murder (and attempted rape) by a German settler of the daughter-in-law of one of their chiefs.
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It was the forgery by a young district chief lieutenant named Zürn of Herero elders’ signatures on documents setting the boundaries of new native reservations that put the match to the powder keg.
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On 12 January 1904, under the leadership of Samuel Maharero, the Herero rose in rebellion, killing every able-bodied German man they could find in the area around Okahandja, though pointedly sparing women and children. More than a hundred settlers were killed.
⁸¹
In response, the German Kaiser, William II, sent General Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha with instructions to ‘restore order … by all means necessary’. He chose the foulest means at his disposal.

German theorists of colonization already went further than their French or British counterparts when they spoke of the need for ‘actual eradication’ of ‘bad, culturally inept and predatory [native] tribes’. Now Trotha resolved to put this theory into practice. He resolved to use ‘absolute terrorism’ to ‘destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood’.
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In a chilling decree addressed to the Herero, he spelled out in rudimentary Otjiherero what German racial theory meant in practice:

I am the great General of the Germans. I am sending a word to you Hereros, you who are Hereros are no longer under the Germans [that is, are no longer German subjects] … You Hereros must now leave this land, it belongs to the Germans. If you do not do this I shall remove you with the
Groot Rohr
[big cannon]. A person in German land shall
be killed by the gun. I shall not catch women or the sick but I will chase them after their chiefs or I will kill them with the gun.

These are my words to the Herero people.

The great General of the mighty German Kaiser.

Trotha.
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The Battle of Hamakari near the Waterberg Plateau on 11 August 1904 was not a battle. It was a massacre. The Herero were concentrated in a large encampment, where, having seen off an earlier German force, they were awaiting peace negotiations. Instead, Trotha encircled them, unleashed a lethal bombardment and proceeded to mow men, women and children down with Maxim guns. As he seems to have intended, the survivors fled into the arid Omaheke desert and, in his words, ‘their doom’. Waterholes on the edge of the desert were tightly guarded. In the words of an official report by the South-West African General Staff: ‘The waterless Omaheke should finish what German guns had started: the extermination of the Herero people.’ Trotha was equally explicit: ‘I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated.’
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The Germans did not just rely on the desert. Herero who had not participated in the uprising were hunted down by ‘Cleansing Patrols’ of settler
Schutztruppen
, whose motto was ‘clean out, hang up, shoot down till they are all gone’.
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Those not killed on the spot, mostly women and children, were put in five concentration camps. They were later joined by the Nama clans who made the mistake of joining the anti-German revolt and the even bigger mistake of laying down their arms in return for assurances that their lives would be spared. These concentration camps differed from the ones set up by the British in South Africa during the Boer War. There, a guerrilla war was still raging and the intention was to disrupt the Boer lines; the appalling mortality rates were the unintended consequence of abysmal sanitation. In German South-West Africa the war was over and the concentration camps were intended to be death camps. The most notorious was on Shark Island, near Lüderitz.

The camp was located at the far end of the island to maximize its exposure to the wind. Denied adequate shelter, clothing and food, the prisoners were forced to build jetties, standing waist-deep in the ice-cold water. Those who faltered in their labours were mercilessly whipped by the
sjambok
-wielding guards. A missionary named August
Kuhlman visited the island in September 1905. He was horrified to see an exhausted woman fatally shot in the thigh and arm simply for crawling in search of water. Between September 1906 and March 1907, a total of 1,032 out of 1,795 prisoners on Shark Island died. The final mortality rate was close to 80 per cent. Before the uprising, the Herero had numbered 80,000; afterwards only 15,000 remained. There had been 20,000 Nama; fewer than 10,000 were left when a census was conducted in 1911. Only one in ten Nama prisoners survived the camps. With all Herero and Nama land now confiscated, under an imperial decree of December 1905, the number of German settlers trebled to nearly 15,000 by 1913. The surviving Herero and Nama were little better than slave labourers, liable to brutal corporal punishment for the most trivial insubordination.
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