The Revolt of the Hereros

By Jon M. Bridgman

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520339163

Jon M. Bridgman

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PERSPECTIVES ON SOUTHERN AFRICA

1 The Autobiography of an Unknown South African, by Naboth Mokgatle (1971)

2 Modernizing Racial Domination: South Africa’s Political Dynamics, by Heribert Adam (1971)

3 The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912-1952, by Peter Walshe (1971)

4 Tales from Southern Africa, by A. C. Jordan (1973)

5 Lesotho 1970: An African Coup Under the Microscope, by B. M. Khaketla (1972)

6 Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa, by A. C. Jordan (1972)

7 Law, Order, and Liberty in South Africa, by A. S. Mathews (1972)

8 Swaziland: The Dynamics of Political Modernization, by Christian P. Potholm (1972)

9 The South West Africa/Namibia Dispute: Documents and Scholarly Writings on the Controversy Between South Africa and the United Nations, by John Dugard (1973)

10 Confrontation and Accommodation in Southern Africa: The Limits of Independence, by Kenneth W. Grundy (1973)

11 The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion, by T. Dunbar Moodie (1975)

12 Justice in South Africa, by Albie Sachs (1973)

13 Afrikaner Politics in South Africa, 1934-1948, by Newell M. Stultz (1974)

14 Crown and Charter: The Early Years of the British South Africa Company, by John S. Galbraith (1975)

15 Politics of Zambia, edited by William Tordoff (1975)

16 Corporate Power in an African State: The Political Impact of Multinational Mining Companies in Zambia, by Richard Sklar (1975)

17 Change in Contemporary South Africa, edited by Leonard Thompson and Jeffrey Butler (1975)

18 The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique: The Zambesi Valley 1850-1921, by Allen F. Isaacman (1976)

19 Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology, by Gail Gerhart (1978)

20 Black Heart: Gore-Brown and the Politics of Multiracial Zambia, by Robert I. Rotberg (1977)

21 The Black Homelands of South Africa: The Political and Economic Development of Bophuthatswana and KwaZulu, by Jeffrey Butler, Robert I. Rotberg, and John Adams (1977)

22 Afrikaner Political Thought, by Herman Giliomee and André du Toit (1977)

23 Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality, by Gerald Bender (1978)

24 Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia, by Robin Palmer (1977)

25 The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa, edited by Robin Palmer and Neil Parsons (1977)

26 The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe, by Paul Berliner (1978)

27 The Darker Reaches of Government: Access to Information About Public Administration in England, United States, and South Africa, by Anthony S. Mathews (1979)

28 The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry, by Colin Bundy (1979)

30 The Revolt of the Hereros, by Jon M. Bridgman (1981)

The Revolt of the Hereros

The Revolt

of the Hereros

Jon M. Bridgman

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY • LOS ANGELES • LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1981 by

The Regents of the University of California

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Contents

Maps

Credits for Photographs

Introduction

1 South West Africa: The Land and the People

2 South West Africa Before the Uprising

3 The Initial Blow

4 The March and April Disasters

5 The Battle of Waterberg

6 The Hottentot Revolt

7 The Reckoning

Appendix: The Peace of Okahandja

Bibliographic Essay

Index

Maps

Map 1. Bantu Migration Patterns, 1600-1800 15

Map 2. The Tribes of South West Africa 27

Map 3. Livestock Areas in South West Africa 79

Map 4. German South West Africa 82

Map 5. German Ranches along the Swakopmund-

Windhoek Railroad, January 1, 1902 83

Map 6. The Campaign of March-April 1904 93

Map 7. The Battle of Waterberg, August 1904 116

Map 8. Battle Sites of the Hottentot Revolt, 1905-1907 133

Credits for Photographs

Numbers 1, 9, 13, 14 and 15 are from H. Bley, South-West Africa under German Rule (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1971). Numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, and 12 are from Grosse Generalstab, Die Kämpfe der deutschen Truppen in Südwestafrika, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1906). Number 8 is from Theodor Leutwein’s Elf Jahre Gouverneur in Deutsch Südwest Afrika (Berlin, 1906). Numbers 16, 18, and 19 are from Union of South Africa, Report on the Natives in South West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany (London, 1918; a Command Paper). Number 10 is from Illustrated London News, February 6, 1904. Number 17 is from Illustrierte Zeitung, August 22, 1907.

Introduction

FROM 1904 to 1907 the tribes in South West Africa, especially the Hereros, fought a heroic but futile war against their German masters. For all practical purposes this war has, in a little more than two generations, disappeared from history. To be sure, it is recorded in histories of Imperial Germany, but generally only as a footnote on imperial politics. Some mention of it is also made in histories of Western colonialism and imperialism, but even reasonably detailed histories of South West Africa give no more than a page or two to the war.1 From the standpoint of the Germans and other Europeans the war was not important. It was an incident, and no more, in an imperial adventure which has now ended.

But if for a moment we look at these events through the eyes of the tribes that took part in them, and in particular the Hereros, then the war is not a mere incident but rather the greatest historical event which the tribes ever experienced. It was their Marathon, their Cannae, their Sedan, their Hiroshima. Even using the normal criterion by which wars are rated, that is, total casualties, the Herero Revolt is no minor affair. Though casualty figures are notoriously inaccurate, the total dead was probably greater than in the Boer War, the Crimean War, the Spanish American War, the Seven Weeks War, and a dozen or more other conflicts that were fought between 1815 and 1914.² So, if for no other reason than its size, one might argue that the Herero Revolt deserves greater recognition than it has received. But the whole issue of size is relatively unimportant. More to the point is that we take much away from a people when we deny them their history, and it is not a mystical exaggeration to say that we thereby remove part of their essential humanity. Few Hereros today have more than a hazy idea about their national past, and even fewer Africans know anything about the Herero Revolt.

Against almost insuperable odds, the Hereros, and later the Hottentots, repeatedly defeated and humiliated German forces which, in terms of training, equipment and numbers, were a quantum leap ahead of the tribes. The reasons for the tribal victories are not difficult to discern. In the first place, they were armed, and consciously armed, with a sense of moral superiority. They were fighting for their land, for their gods, for their traditions, for their women. Aside from their conviction of fighting for a just cause, the tribal leadership showed a high degree of military sophistication which, when combined with their knowledge of the terrain, produced a measure of flexibility and mobility that the Germans could never match. Ultimately, of course, the superior resources and firepower of the Germans wore the tribes down and led to their destruction, but for three long years the Germans had to suffer almost continuous humiliation at the hands of what they regarded as inferior, half-naked black men.

In the Herero War the technology of the West encountered the stark elemental forces of nature, and Western technology initially proved to be deficient, although no one in Europe seemed to comprehend the implications. After all, the war took place thousands of miles away from Germany and attracted the interest of the German public only for brief moments when some spectacular reversal had to be explained. Yet there were profound lessons for the Germans and for other Europeans as well from this obscure war. The failures of the military in South West Africa strongly suggested that the training and education of the professional officer class, the pride of the Empire, was in some basic ways wanting. When the enemy failed to respond as the officers had been taught he would, a sense of confusion and bafflement seemed to come over most of the officers, coupled with a dull instinct to try the old formulas once again even in the face of repeated failure. And when the military maxims that the officers had been weaned upon were obviously and manifestly prescriptions for disaster, the only alternative that anyone could think of was to kill, to kill and destroy without pity and without any concern for the costs in terms of treasure or human life. The response of the European officer class in the opening weeks of the First World War was nothing more than the response of those few dozen German officers in South West Africa writ large.

To a sensitive observer the war might also have raised serious questions about the new technology and its impact on warfare. The cost of technological advances proved to be disconcertingly high. The firepower of the German army in 1904 was probably ten times what it had been in 1870, and a hundred times greater than it had been at the time of the Napoleonic wars; yet while all this new ability to kill was in theory an advantage, in practice it tended to burden the army with a vast liability, for it crippled its power of movement and maneuver. Modern weapons that could fire tons of ammunition in a day raised the problem of appeasing the voracious appetite for shells. But in a greater sense, technology tended to create technological soldiers who were more and more removed from nature and humanity. All problems were held to have a technological solution. If Africans refused to accept the blessings of European civilization peaceably then they must be forced to do so by arms; if military force did not convince them, then they must be extirpated, for they had shown themselves unworthy, or perhaps better, unwilling to live in the twentieth century. Such brutal ethnocentricity might well have warned those who had eyes to see that something was amiss in the heart of Europe.

Although the war is worth studying, it does pose special problems of historical analysis. We have a mass of German written records, but from the Herero side no more than a handful of letters, written for the most part in bastardized Dutch.3 Beyond the official records there are a few journalists accounts, a few memoirs; in all, no more than bits and pieces. Still, the problem of reconstructing Herero history is far from hopeless, largely because the Germans were inveterate recordkeepers, and they published long and detailed accounts of the fighting. To be sure, these accounts were written to explain and justify German actions, but when properly discounted they are extremely useful. Their accuracy can be tested against other contemporary accounts, some friendly, some not, and when put to the test the German accounts of the war present a reasonably exact, if one-sided, picture of the events.

What can we learn of the Hereros and other tribes from the German accounts? At first glance the answer seems to be disappointingly little, but after a few moments’ reflection it becomes clear that they yield a significant store of information concerning the motives, plans, and actions of the tribes. This is so because the German accounts at a bare minimum supply us with the movements of the enemy and his numbers (or at least German estimates of his numbers). To the editors of the German history, the movements of the black men are essentially irrational, animal-like responses to stimuli, but such an interpretation , though possible, is suspect for two reasons. First, the few actual documents which we have from the tribal side suggest that the leaders had a clear idea of what they were doing, and furthermore their movements make very good military sense indeed. So we can construct an account of African tactics and strategy which, though admittedly speculative, still conforms to all the known facts and is a good deal more plausible than the stimulus-response theory.

But the documents yield us more than straight military history, for they give us some insight into the motives of the tribal leaders. In recent years Africanist scholars have paid particular attention to events during the period 1885-1914, when African societies began movements of resistance and rebellion directed against European conquest and rule.4 There are studies of societies in neighboring South Africa and Rhodesia whose immediate preconquest history is similar to that of the Herero tribe and other African societies of Southwest Africa.5 Somewhat further away, in the German colony of Tanganyika, an extremely important Bantu resistance movement called maji maji occurred during the years 1904-1907 and was, as in the Herero case of the same period, violently suppressed by German arms.6 Therefore, a comparative framework exists in which African responses to German conquest and colonial rule can be assessed in order to shed some light on the Herero War.

These studies have emphasized two phases of African resistance, both of which apply directly to South West Africa. Initially, African societies sought to deal with European coloni zation by employing traditional means of warfare or diplomacy. When these strategies failed in the face of overwhelming European superiority in armaments, African leaders sought to deal with the fact of European occupation in other ways. The first phase has been called primary resistance and the second phase, after the establishment of European power, secondary resistance. The Revolt of the Hereros is clearly revealed as a movement of secondary resistance in which the call to violent rebellion was raised. Its leaders developed a more effective ideology of rebellion and made skillful use of their knowledge of the terrain upon which the rebellion was waged in order to pursue guerrilla tactics. While they failed to dislodge their German rulers—just as the maji maji rebellion had failed to do in Tanganyika—it remained clear that the seeds of a new political consciousness had been sown among those who survived the holocaust of rebellion and its ruthless suppression. One irony is that the German military leaders in Tanganyika apparently learned from and put to use this new political consciousness bred from the maji maji experience, and were able to recruit a potent guerrilla force from among their former adversaries that held out against a major British and South African army until 1919.7

In South West Africa the results were far different. The devastating suppression of the Herero and Hottentot rebels meant that no German allies were available among them when South Africa invaded, conquered, and held this colony from 1915 to the present day. On the other hand, the new political consciousness that developed during the Herero rebellion has made its appearance in various ways since then, despite the equally authoritarian South African regime under which the survivors of that revolt have lived. In 1972 a general strike took place in South West Africa which included a pronounced element of Herero leadership. And, in the most recent series of developments, the Hereros have constituted one of the main parties seeking political independence for the country now named Namibia. While there is, of course, no direct provable connection between the ideology of rebellion that animated Herero secondary resistance in the first decade of this century and the present aims of Namibia’s African nationalists, the same people continue to wage a struggle with the same central purpose: to reassert their control over a land they claim as their own.

The story of the Herero Revolt has the elements of both a past and a continuing story. In the early years of this century a few thousand poorly armed Africans held the world’s greatest military power at bay for three years, to succumb only after overwhelming forces were put in the field against them. But the destruction of the Herero tribes on the desert, their suffering in the labor camps, the thousands upon thousands of deaths without purpose or dignity, rob the story of any element of triumph.8 The end was pure tragedy, unrelieved by any hope for the immediate future. It is not a pleasant story. But the heroism of yesterday’s rebels is remembered by today’s nationalist leaders as an important chapter in a people’s struggle to achieve human dignity in the modern world, and in this sense, it is both timely and worth our attention.

1 In the best recent book on South West Africa—John H. Wellington, South West Africa and Its Human Issues (Oxford, 1967)—the whole history of the fighting is covered in eight pages.

2 In Lewis Richardson’s classic study, The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (Pittsburgh, 1960), only three wars from 1815 to 1914 are clearly of a different order of magnitude, to wit: the Taiping Rebellion, the American Civil War, and the Great War of La Plata, all of which had more than 300,000 killed in action. The Herero War is in the same general order of magnitude as twenty some wars fought during this century of peace.

3 There are four major letters of Samuel Maharero: one to Hendrik Witbooi, undated but probably written a month before the outbreak of the rebellion; one to Hermanus van Wyk, also undated but probably written sometime in late 1903; a third to Hendrik Witbooi, dated January 11, 1904; and a fourth to Leutwein, dated March 6, 1904. The first two letters are in the Imperial Colonial Archives in Potsdam and have been published in Horst Drechsler’s Südwestafrika unter Deutscher Kolonialherrschaft (Berlin, 1966). The other two letters have been published in a slightly shortened form by Theodor Leutwein in Elf Jahre Gouverneur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Leipzig, 1912). I. Goldblatt presents a translation of the second letter in its entirety in his History of South West Africa (Cape Town, 1971); the original of that letter was in the possession of Clemens Kapuo, who was chief of the Hereros in 1969.

4 The major theoretical statement that focuses attention on African resistance to European conquest may be found in T. O. Ranger, Connexions between ‘primary resistance’ movements and modern mass nationalism in East and Central Africa, Journal of African History, Vol. IX, nos. 3-4 (1968), pp. 437-453, Part I, and 631-641, Part II. For comparative examples of resistance movements in West Africa, see M. Crowder, ed., West African Resistance (London, 1968).

5 On South Africa, see M. Hunter (Monica Wilson), Reactions to Conquest (London, 1936); on Rhodesia, see TO. Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-7 (London, 1967).

6 J. Iliffe, Tanzania Under German and British Rule, in B. Ogot, editor, Zamani: A Survey of East African History (Nairobi, new edition, 1974),