gates skeletons
John Grobler
Namibia’s Central Intelligence Services (NCIS) this week took the unusual step of asking for public assistance to identify 57 skeletons discovered in the desert outside the southern harbour town of Lderitz.
In a rare public appearance, Director General of the NCIS Peter Sheehama said the skeletons were discovered as long ago as 1996 by a South African television crew in an area called Charlottentahl, 5km inside the so-called Sperrgebiet (forbidden area) of the De Beers mining concession area.
“This is not the only site with human remains,” said Sheehama, adding that a local archaeologist told them there may be as many as 30 other sites along the western margin of the Sperrgebiet.
Sheehama refused to be drawn on the possible origin of the skeletons, saying that a team of archaeologists, historians, law enforcement agents and forensic experts would make extensive excavations, and carry out DNA testing and dating.
However, the German colonial authorities had one of several prisoner of war camps in Lderitz Bay on Shark Island. Of the several concentration camps set up to hold thousands of Nama and Herero people in the aftermath of the uprisings of 1904, Shark Island proved to be the deadliest of them all.
Historian Horst Drechsler, citing German colonial records, estimated that 1 032 Nama men, women and children out of the about 1 795 prisoners kept at Shark Island died of malnutrition, typhoid and dysentry.
“It’s the most likely explanation, that the bodies came from Shark Island’s concentration camp,” said Dr Jeremy Sylvestre of the Univeristy of Namibia’s history department. “But you also have to remember that there were many [diamond] mining operations in that same area, and it could also be that these bodies were buried there in the aftermath of the 1918 flu epidemic, in fear of contamination.”
However, the underlying question remains why Namibia’s chief spy would get involved in an archaelogical dig – especially if the skeletons had been discovered four years ago.
Sheehama, who has been President Sam Nujoma’s intelligence chief for 20 years, declined to discuss this, saying only that he had been tasked by Nujoma to direct the investigation.
But with general elections looming later this year, and Namibians increasingly fed- up with an apparently self-serving and corrupt Swapo government, cynics have suggested that Nujoma and Sheehama are keen to uncover evidence of yet another colonial atrocity – preferably one of apartheid-era South African Defence Force vintage.
“It’s a bit odd, because Swapo would like to claim they were the only real liberators and don’t like to hear talk of the Herero and Nama uprisings,” said a government- employed archaeologist. “Their only real claim to fame, after all, is that they defeated the racist Boer regime – and it would not hurt to find evidence of more South African atrocities, real or not.”