Lüderitz is arguably the prettiest town I have ever been to. After a 10 hour bus ride to get there from Windhoek, it was worth the wait. We stayed at a quaint place called Kratzplatz, complete with dogs, cats, and bird friends! Unfortunately, amidst this gorgeous backdrop there is a dark history of imperialism, foreign occupation, and concentration camps.
The town is named after a German colonist, Franz Adolf Eduard Lüderitz, who founded the town in 1883. From 1904-1908, there was a war with the native Herero and Nama people over land as more Germans came to colonize. They were following a theory called “Lebensraum”, or “living space.” It means that in order for a country to be successful they need to have space to grow and live their lives. Typically, this is used as a reason to acquire other territories, so that your people have “enough” space to live. The Germans were running into issues in Namibia, which was known as German South West Africa at the time, where the local people did not want to give up their land or resources, which were their own livelihood.
The war was conducted in an inhumane way. German General Lothar von Trotha said that “A humane war cannot be waged against those who are not human.” Since he did not consider the local people human, he called for a vicious war that exterminated them. The German strategy was to chase the Hereros into the Kalahari desert and to poison the water sources of those who had survived. The rest of the people were put into concentration camps in 1905 and many died there. By the end of the war, “65,000 Herero, about 80% of the Herero population, and 10,000 Nama, about 50% of the Nama population, perished.” These numbers are drastic, yet it is not a widely known event. Even after the genocide, the survivors were forced to perform labor as they lacked the land and resources that had been taken from them.
This was clearly a terrible event and reparation talks with Germany are still happening today. Many skulls of the Herero and Nama people were sent to Germany for testing about theories of racial inferiority. Recently, some of these skulls have been found in the collection of the American Natural History museum in New York. The remains were sent for testing by an Australian anthropologist who worked as a professor in Berlin, Felix von Luschan, who believed in racial hierarchy. He made a very detailed chart of skin color rankings in order. It is quite disturbing if you look it up. After he died, his wife sold the collection to the National History museum. The point is that this genocide is still being dealt with today because it was not after it occurred. In Lüderitz, the land where the camps used to stand is now a camping ground. There is no marking for where people were murdered and the only reference to it throughout the entire town is a small sign/gravesite that has been placed near the grave for Lüderitz, the man the town was named after, so that people hopefully notice the memorial to the local people.
The story of the genocide of the Herero and Nama people gets even more disturbing as there are strong connections to the Holocaust that occurred under the rule of the Third Reich in Germany. Some of the same ways of thinking and even people were involved in both genocides. There was a pursuit of land justified by creating a sense of superiority over other people and labeling them as “not human.” General Franz Ritter von Epp, who was a general in the Herero wars, was a mentor to Hitler. He taught him about these concepts of needing “living space” and racial superiority. The Second Reich’s genocidal tactics laid the groundwork for the Third’s Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews. The genocide in Namibia was covered up so well that people did not even know and even today it is a mostly forgotten part of history. You can camp by the beautiful water with its rushing waves without knowing that people were murdered there by foreigners in an effort to gain land in a country that was not theirs.
Sources: Documentary we watched in class, Namibia Genocide and the Second Reich. I highly recommend it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhOOPVdRQk
http://combatgenocide.org/?page_id=153
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