It would seem that Angelina Jolie or no, I just can’t get Namibia out of my hair. Or is it that Namibia simply refuses to get out of my hair?
This year marks the centenary of an extraordinary event that the world doesn’t seem to care much about. In 1904, after many years of conflict with the invading German army, the Herero people of Namibia decided that enough was enough. They were called together by their paramount chief, Samuel Maharero, and summoned to go to war.
There had been an ongoing series of skirmishes with the Germans — and not just with the military might of imperial Germany adventuring into the desert wastes of Africa.
It had started with the missionaries — the front line of colonial incursion in every case.
The missionaries had seeped in like water dripping slowly on a rock and imperceptibly breaking it down. Like Africans elsewhere, the Herero had looked on, amazed, impressed, dejected by turns, but finally unable to find a good reason to resist this determined, soft-spoken, haranguing onslaught.
Behind the missionaries came the white traders — rhino horn, elephant tusks, cows, goats and sheep, semi-precious stones, iron-ore, copper, gold — whatever was sitting around beneath Africa’s feet, they wanted it. In return they turned the natives on to cheap trinkets, java cloth, glass beads, wooden hair-combs, laxatives, schnapps, whisky, toothbrushes, piano accordions and lots of other things they didn’t need. Nevertheless, up and down the Third World, the natives became addicted.
The German traders, now backed up by the German administration that had subtly sidled itself into place and set up bomas and jails and forts and magistrates courts, began to devise ways to get the natives to give them even more of what they wanted for free.
What the traders really wanted was the land and the juicy cattle of the Hereros, who were at that time a wealthy people with a highly developed political and social system. Cattle were the foundation of their wealth. The Germans stood around and looked at these people, who seemed to dress themselves in nothing but clay and the odd piece of leather in the odd strategic place, and wonder why the God that they read about in the Bible had given all this to heathens rather than to them.
So they persuaded the natives to buy even more of the useless stuff that they had brought with them from Germany. When the Herero objected that they didn’t want to spend all that money on useless stuff, the traders, backed up by the missionaries, who were in turn backed up by the full might of the German army, told the people that they mustn’t worry about money. They shouldn’t think about how much stuff cost. They could simply buy on credit.
”Credit?” said the Herero. ”What in the name of donder is that?”
”You take as many piano accordions, toothache pills, bowler hats, women’s umbrellas, brassieres, leather belts and beads as you want, and pay me next month.
”Oh, and if you can’t pay in cash, just give me a piece of your land and a cow or two. It doesn’t matter.”
You can see where this was going. The Herero, like the rest of Africa, got hooked. More and more useless stuff was piling up in their homesteads, and more and more of their land and cattle was going out of the window as a result.
But that wasn’t enough. The German traders and soldiers started taking a serious fancy to the Herero women, brassieres or no brassieres, as well. Incidents of violation, rape and abduction started to become intolerable to the strong moral laws of the Herero. When women who resisted their advances were summarily shot in a fit of pique by the rejected, dejected, unattractive newcomers — and the much trumpeted universal laws of God and the Kaiser seemed to have no effect whatsoever in calling the perpetrators to book — the Herero leaders decided enough was enough.
So, like I say, Maharero called his people to war — to regain their land, which was rapidly slipping out of their control, and to regain their dignity. There was a big war from 1904 to 1907. The Herero didn’t stand a chance. They had pride and courage and a few old rifles that some gleeful trader had sold them, knowing they didn’t really work — and certainly couldn’t stand up to the Gatling gun, the repeat revolver, the Krupp cannon and the new-fangled, iron-sided tanks that had begun to be imported into the country.
So the valiant Herero were slaughtered in impressive numbers.
Then came the real trouble. The Kaiser objected to the fact that the Herero had stood up for themselves at all. The order came through that they should be taught a lesson no one would ever forget. Every Herero man, woman and child was to be hunted down and exterminated.
Space doesn’t allow me to go into further detail of the horror that followed over the next 10 years. It only stopped when Germany was defeated on the battlefields of Europe in World War I, and lost all its African colonies as a result. The few Hereros who were left could almost breathe a sigh of relief.
But then came apartheid.