A Decolonial View

By Dimitris Diamantis

In the 19th century, conquering colonies was an indicator of power for European states. As a newly established state, Germany was slow to enter the colonial struggle, by the mid-1880s they became interested in acquiring colonies in Africa in an attempt to compete with established colonialists like Great Britain and France^[i]. One of the colonies they acquired was in Southwest Africa, today’s Namibia. The main goal of Germany was settling the area where the Herero and Nama indigenous tribes lived. However, the tribes resisted the occupation^[ii] and despite the resistance German settlers took control of a quarter of the region and planned to develop a railway line that would further divide the region in two.

The resistance of the indigenous population hurt the ego of Germany and strength of their military apparatus– the German forces resorted to extensive use of violence against the indigenous population to maintain their supremacy at all costs.^[iii]They showed vengeful behavior against their enemies by killing women and children, going so far as poisoning the course of water to force them to die of thirst. Sadly, the fate of the survivors was bleak since they constituted the slave labor in the cities of German settlers in Africa^[iv]. As a result, in the three years 1904-7, a robust population of 80.000 Hereros’ turned into a starving populous of 15,000^[v]. The consequences of the Herero and Nama Genocide had such an impact on the German political scene that it resulted in the dissolution of parliament on the 13^th of December 1906 after the calling of elections prompted by the Center Party’s rejection of a request for 29 million marks in supplementary funding for the expedition in Southwest Africa^[vi]. So, it is unsurprising that Germany’s colonial policy (Weltpolitik) was the main issue^[vii] in the political conflict between the two parties. On the one hand, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD)  argued for the unprofitability of colonial expenses^[viii]. On the other hand, it created a political alliance that supported German colonial policy that won the election. Notably, the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (DKG)^[ix] used cinema as a propaganda medium to show the suffering and privation of German soldiers during the Herero War^[x].

The colonial alliance drew their arguments from social Darwinism^[xi] in order to justify their policy and the genocide. The phrases “non-human” and “bloodthirsty beast”^[xii] were evidence that the Herero rebellion and Nama resistance were not the only factors in which German forces used such extensive violence and how racism and European superiority motivated their actions.

The line of racist reasoning allowed proponents of the genocide to present the actions of the German forces as a response to the crimes committed by the indigenous populations by targeting European civilization^[xiii]. The Germans resorted to a common practice of presenting themselves as defenseless^[xiv] in order to be able to justify the atrocities they committed against the Herero and Nama. A typical example of how the German settlers portrayed the situation in the colonies was that they believed the surviving indigenous were a danger to them, when in fact the German authorities were oppressing the Herero and Nama^[xv] leaving them to live in miserable conditions.

---

^[i] Norman M. Naimark, Genocide: A World History, The New Oxford World History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017). P. 66.

^[ii] Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). P. 381.

^[iii] Kiernan. P. 382.

^[iv] Kiernan. P. 385.

^[v] Naimark, Genocide. P. 68.

^[vi] John Phillip Short, Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). P. 135

^[vii] Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Imperial Projections: Screening the German Colonies, First paperback edition, Film Europa, Vol. 17 (New York Oxford: Berghahn, 2017). P. 83.

^[viii] Short, Magic Lantern Empire. Pp. 136-7.

^[ix] Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society)

^[x] Fuhrmann, Imperial Projections. P. 86.

^[xi] Naimark, Genocide. P. 64.

^[xii] Short, Magic Lantern Empire. Pp. 133-4.

^[xiii] Kiernan, Blood and Soil. P. 388.

^[xiv] Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, Oxford Handbooks in History (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). P. 105.

^[xv] Kiernan, Blood and Soil. P. 389.