Kaiser's Holocaust (12 page)

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.’
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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.
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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:

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.’
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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 encourage 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:

In another part of the letter he warned Hendrik Witbooi,

In one of his replies to Leutwein, Hendrik Witbooi defiantly wrote:

Still unwilling to attack, Leutwein informed Hendrik Witbooi on 20 May that he had not yet commanded his troops to storm the Naukluft as his ‘conscience still whispers that you may one day accuse me of having allowed you too little time’. Three months later, in a remarkably candid letter, Leutwein told Hendrik Witbooi that if he were to allow the Witbooi to keep their autonomy, ‘I should be blamed not only by my Lord the
German Emperor but by all the German people. You are more spoken about in Germany than you suppose … Incidentally, our letters are forwarded to Berlin, and are also communicated to my men.’
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Leutwein’s decision to postpone the attack was not motivated exclusively by his desire to avoid bloodshed, nor his growing respect for Hendrik Witbooi. He was equally eager to avoid being defeated, and it was only after reinforcements had arrived from Germany that he finally, and perhaps reluctantly, launched his assault. It is, however, some measure of his determination to use diplomacy, and his appreciation of the Witbooi Nama as a military force, that the attack came on 27 August, almost four months after the Germans had first arrived in the Naukluft Mountains.

Despite his caution, Theodor Leutwein still underestimated the military skill and resolve of the Witbooi. The German attack began with a ponderous advance through the narrow gorges of the Naukluft during which they were ambushed by Witbooi fighters firing down on them from virtually invisible positions. Ludwig von Estorff, an officer who had recently arrived in the colony but who was to stay in South-West Africa for the next seventeen years, had his first encounter with the Witbooi in the Naukluft. Writing afterwards he admitted that the Witbooi were ‘Far superior to us when it came to marching, enduring deprivation, and knowledge of and ability to use the terrain i.e. their agility. It was only in weaponry, courage, perseverance and discipline that the [German] troops surpassed the enemy.’
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Of these four factors it was their ‘weaponry’ that saved the Germans in the Naukluft. After suffering heavy casualties, Leutwein abandoned efforts to outfight the Witbooi and set about battering them into submission with artillery. Having fought against the Germans for a year and a half, and with his people on the verge of starvation, Hendrik Witbooi finally accepted German offers of a peace treaty on 9 September after an unrelenting artillery barrage.