In 1884, as European powers scrambled to carve up
Africa, Berlin moved to annex a new colony on the south-west coast of the continent. Land was confiscated, livestock plundered and native people subjected to racially motivated violence, rape and murder. In January 1904, the Herero people – also called the Ovaherero – rebelled. More than a hundred German civilians were killed. The smaller Nama tribe joined the uprising the following year.
Colonial rulers responded without mercy. Tens of thousands of Herero were forced into the Kalahari desert, their wells poisoned and food supplies cut. Gen Lothar von Trotha, sent to quell the revolt, ordered his men to shoot “any Herero, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle”.
“I do not accept women or children either: drive them back to their people or shoot them,” he told his troops. The order was rescinded but other measures were employed that were equally lethal.
Those who had survived were rounded up and placed in concentration camps, where they were beaten and worked to death in squalid conditions. Half of the total Nama population were also killed, dying in disease-ridden death camps such the infamous site on Shark Island, in the coastal town of Lüderitz. By 1908, only 16,000 remained, historians say.
As many as 3,000 Herero skulls were sent to Berlin for German scientists to examine for signs that they were of racially inferior peoples.
“We are talking now about the lives that were lost, the land that was taken, the cattle that was killed, the rape, the lost dignity, the culture that was destroyed. We cannot even speak our language,” said Esther Muinjangue, a Herero activist and social worker at the University of Namibia, in Windhoek, the capital.
Thousands of women were systematically raped, often taken as “wives” by settlers. “My great-great-grandfather was German. This relationship was not of love, but a product of force,” Muinjangue added.
14 African countries still pay France's 'Colonial tax' to this day