The Holocaust You Never Heard Of
Deadly Violence in Africa
Six of us were sitting around the table at the local brewpub for our regular, Thursday night soiree and the discussion turned to one of my favorite subjects, genocide, but the consensus was that you can’t get bothered by each and every genocide because it’s just a fact of human behavior that started with the first cave men who tried to destroy the neighboring cave men tribe and if you want to talk about every genocide, you’ll be talking forever.
I sensed a collective rising of the eyes from my beer-drinking mates as if to say “there he goes again” and yes, there I went again. I agree that humanity has always savagely tried to eliminate anyone who challenges their food supplies, their families, their property and any other excuse to maintain superiority. But that doesn’t mean we should become hardened and inured to the terror that cultures wreak on others or that we shouldn’t try to repay the victims for the horror they endured.
I brought it up because I had just read about a genocide that I previously knew nothing about, although that could be because the victims were not Europeans. This one was carried out by Germany. No, not that genocide, this one happened from 1904 to 1908, in the country now called Namibia, as white German colonists massacred 80,000 Africans of the Herero and Nama tribes. Like the Nazi bombing of Spain during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 was a dress rehearsal for the coming start of World War II, the attacks against the Africans were a prelude to the Nazi Holocaust.
The genocide against the Africans has attracted news lately because in May, Germany acknowledged the genocidal massacre. It was just 113 years late but you know those Germans, they were busy with mopping up the debris, offering apologies and reparations from their last genocide. You can only deal with one genocide at a time.
It took the Germans more than a century to evince the massacre but just seven years after the end of World War II, West Germany signed an agreement with Jewish organizations and the Israeli government to pay reparations. The German government has developed extensive system to educate its people about the horrors of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.
In addition to officially accepting responsibility for the massacre in Africa, Germany also offered $1.35 billion for reconstruction and development projects and health care and training program over the next 30 years. Coincidentally, that is the same amount the Germans have been providing to Namibia over the past three decades.
The massacre and Germany’s response were outlined in a column in Friday’s New York Times by Kavena Hambira and Miriam Gleckman-Krut. Hambira is an artist and the chair of the Namibia Institute for Democracy. Gleckman-Krut is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan who writes about violence, gender and the state.
History is never old history as the painful impacts of events of the past ripple through the generations and we must learn from the past if there’s any hope of not repeating past horrible mistakes. The massacre of the Hereros and Namas is no different. Hambira is a descendant of Herero survivors and members of Gleckman-Krut’s family were killed in the Holocaust. The massacre also was an early example of white colonizers terrorizing and killing Black Africans, a situation that has parallels in the U.S. with the lynching of African Americans that began in the 1830s and continued through the 1960s.
The Germans negotiated with the Namibian government for the payout in reparations for the massacre. There are Herero and Nama people still living in Namibia but they were not consulted for the agreement, something akin to Germany negotiating with the Israeli government but not with survivors of the Holocaust.
The genocide in Africa was rooted in the Berlin Conference of 1884, when European representatives met to divide up the African continent. Germany claimed regions it renamed German South West Africa, home to 80,000 Herero and 20,000 Nama people.
The Germans said they needed the land to expand “Lebensraum” or “living space” away from their overcrowded homeland. Hitler used the same terminology to justify territorial expansion into Central and Eastern Europe in World War II.
In the U.S., the parallel with “Lebensraum” was the new nation’s “manifest destiny” which was used as an excuse to massacre Native Americans who stood in the path of American expansion. In Africa, the Germans massacred black Africans; in the U.S., the targets were Black slaves and Native Americans but the reasons were the same, the invaders wanted more land and slave labor.
The Nama and Herero people revolted against the new imperialists but they were no match for the superior German military. Gen. Lothar von Trotha, yes his name was Lothar, who with no small amount of irony, was the name of one of the first Black crime fighting heroes in comic book history as well as one of the first Black characters to be treated with respect.
Lothar von Trotha was no comic book hero. To completely shatter the rebellion, Trotha ordered extermination of women, children and men. Families fled to the desert but the Germans fouled the water holes with poison. Survivors were held in slave labor camps, sterilized and injected with various diseases, in another omen of what was to come in the Nazi death camps. Germans also sold the skulls of the natives to research institutions overseas.
Until recently, Germany denied the massacres and Herero and Nama have not been allowed to bury the remains of loved ones. Many Nama and Herero live on unproductive soil, barred from the land taken from their ancestors, not unlike the fate of the Native Americans.
The Germans took extensive actions for the murder of 6 million Jews. Those who lost relatives in the massacre in Africa should also receive the same responses. Perhaps the only reason it has happened yet has to do with pigmentation.