Kaiser's Holocaust (5 page)

It was claimed in the 1880s that there were three ways to build an empire: ‘The English [way] which consists in making colonies with colonists; the German, which collects colonists without colonies; the French, which sets up colonies without colonists.’
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There was much truth in this barbed comment. By 1887, the year the British celebrated Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, ‘the greatest empire the world has ever seen’ extended over 3½ million square miles of territory. Thousands of Britons had become the administrators and soldiers of the empire. Millions of others had settled in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, creating dominion states that were umbilically linked to the mother country through trade, culture, language and government.

Germany, the new great power of Europe, had followed a different path. Millions of Germans had left their homeland and settled in all corners of the earth. Across North and South America German emigrants had come together to form highly productive and self-contained farming communities; elsewhere German traders and merchants wandered the globe staking a claim in new markets and seeking out a share of the riches of empire. They occupied remote trading posts on the banks of the Niger and the Congo rivers; they bought and sold from trading ships moored off the Gold Coast and Cameroon. In Germany the port towns of Hamburg and Bremen were growing rich on the back of colonial trade – but this meant trade with the colonies of Germany’s European neighbours and competitors.

At the beginning of the 1880s, Germany still had no colonies and no frontiers of her own. Yet within the space of just one year she acquired the fourth-largest empire in Africa. This
remarkable transformation began on 10 April 1883, the day the
Tilly
, a two-masted sailing brig, cruised silently into Angra Pequeña, the southernmost bay in south-western Africa. The passenger on board the
Tilly
was an unknown twenty-year-old trader named Heinrich Vogelsang, and the chain reaction he initiated embroiled Bismarck, Gladstone and the leaders of Portugal, France and Belgium. It mobilised and electrified the German public, and shaped the destinies of millions of Africans.

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:

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.
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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.
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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 found 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.