South-West Africa

by William Eveleigh

There is no doubt that the main causes of the native risings were the bureaucratic methods of the colonial administration and the behaviour of the white traders. “Germany has nothing to learn from England,” said the colonial party’s official organ in Africa at the beginning of the enterprise, “or any other colonising nation, having a method of handling social problems peculiar to the German spirit.” Beginning in this temper, it is hardly a matter for surprise that their policy in South-West Africa has been marked by all the defects of the “German spirit.”

They failed utterly to appreciate the significance of the fact that England had achieved her success as a great colonising Power by adopting the twin principles of liberty and diversity in her dealings with subject or conquered races. With characteristic arrogance the Germans proceeded to apply the typical Prussian principles of compulsion and uniformity to all their methods of administration, and the “mailed fist” became the most appropriate symbol of German colonial rule. A ready-made system of Prussian bureaucracy was established; Berlin and Potsdam had their replicas on a small but exact scale in the little settlements where officialism flourished, and the cast-iron rules “made in Germany” were applied to the peculiarly flexible problems of colonial administration. The “system” was infallible! It had wrought miracles with home administration. It had only to be applied in Africa, and it would inevitably work the miracle of colonisation. Little regard was paid to native customs and traditions of life. Officialism rode roughshod over the ancient ways of life, tribal laws, and native susceptibilities in a manner that aroused the keenest resentment among the people. In a word the attempt was not to colonise but to Germanise.

“We started with a wrong conception of colonial possibilities,” said Professor Bonn, of Munich University, in a striking address before the Royal Colonial Institute on “German Colonial Policy,” early in 1914. “We wanted to concentrate on Africa the emigrants we were losing at the beginning of the colonial enterprise. We wanted to build up on African soil a new Germany and create daughter states as you have done in Australia and in Canada. We carried this idea to its bitter end. We tried it in South-West Africa and produced a huge native rising, causing the loss of much treasure and many lives. We tried to assume to ourselves the functions of Providence, and we tried to exterminate a native race whom our lack of wisdom had goaded into rebellion. We succeeded in breaking up the native tribes, but we have not yet succeeded in creating a new Germany.”

Worse still, some of the officials sent out were guilty of excesses and crimes which left a most evil odour. There were not wanting, of course, men who brought to their posts a sense of public duty and a high standard of personal honour, but “stories of slavery, violence, cruelty, illegality, and lust, committed both by officials and planters, were sent home too frequently by missionaries and clean-handed men in the colonial service, who could not see these things and be silent, and disciplinary proceedings at home generally confirmed the imputations of report, and frequently proved that the half had not been told.”[17]

Among the traders there was little or no sense of obligation towards the native races; their policy was entirely one of exploitation. No stronger words of condemnation of the ill-treatment of the people have been written than those which have come from German writers. At the time of the Herero insurrection the Cross Gazette stated: “Unscrupulous traders have been allowed to exploit the inexperience and the recklessness of the Hereros. The debts contracted with the white traders had enormously increased during recent years, while villages had mortgaged their cattle and their entire land with their creditors.”

A white resident who wrote home from Outjo did not hesitate to affirm that “most of the white traders are said to have been murdered, and in their fate one can only see a not unjustifiable act of vengeance on the part of the natives, who have avenged the unscrupulous outrages and plundering of the traders. The traders plundered the natives systematically. Every one took what he wanted.”

Pastor Meyer, a missionary, stated that “the traders took from the Hereros their land, though they had paid their debts four or five times over, since no receipts were given, and 400 per cent. was charged.”

In 1904, Herr Schlettwein, a Government expert who has had the honour of being called in to instruct the members of the Budget Committee of the Reichstag on the principles of colonisation, wrote in a pamphlet a characteristic German exposition of the policy of “frightfulness” as applied to the colonies. “In colonial politics,” states this disciple of Nietzsche and Bernhardi, “we stand at the parting of the ways—on the one side the aim must be healthy egoism and practical colonisation, and on the other exaggerated humanitarianism, vague idealism, irrational sentimentality. The Hereros must be compelled to work and, to work without compensation and in return for their food only. Forced labour for years is only a just punishment, and at the same time it is the best method of training them. The feelings of Christianity and philanthropy with which the missionary works must for the present be repudiated with all energy.”

These words are a sufficient commentary on an emphatic statement made in the Speech from the Throne with which the Reichstag was opened sixteen years before, when colonial enthusiasm was at fever heat, when it was affirmed that it must be a solemn duty of the Empire to “win the Dark Continent for Christian civilisation.”

The use of force as the method of civilisation has had its inevitable result on the natives. In some districts it is not safe for a German to venture to-day, and no German settler who valued his life would presume to make a home anywhere near these areas without the protection afforded by the presence of armed soldiers. There has also been a steady exodus of Hereros into British territory for many years, for, as one of the Hereros wrote to his kinsmen, “the land of the English is a good land.”