German South West Africa

On the arid Atlantic coast of south-western Africa, Germany held a colony from 1884 until South African troops conquered it in 1915. Covering what is now Namibia, it was the only German colony to attract settlers in large numbers. It is remembered above all for the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904–1908, in which German forces destroyed most of the Herero people and around half of the Nama.

Missionaries and traders had worked in the region for decades, and in 1840 the London Missionary Society handed its stations to the German Rhenish Mission. In 1882 the Bremen merchant Adolf Lüderitz asked Chancellor Otto von Bismarck for protection, and his agent then bought land at Angra Pequena from a local chief. The German flag was raised on 7 August 1884, and the claim was confirmed at the Berlin Conference. A law of 1886 created separate legal systems for Europeans and Africans. Britain kept the port of Walvis Bay, and in 1890 Germany gained the narrow Caprivi Strip reaching east towards the Zambezi.

As settlers and companies acquired land, mining rights and grazing, tensions with the Herero, Nama and other peoples grew. The Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi fought the Germans in 1893–1894 before agreeing to a treaty and becoming a German ally for a decade. From 1896 a veterinary cordon against rinderpest, later called the Red Line, divided the more tightly controlled centre and south from the north, including Ovamboland, which was ruled indirectly.

On 12 January 1904 the Herero leader Samuel Maharero launched an uprising; around 150 German settlers were killed in early attacks on farms. Reinforcements under General Lothar von Trotha surrounded the Herero at the Waterberg and defeated them on 11 August 1904. Many fled into the waterless Omaheke, part of the Kalahari, where German troops guarded or poisoned water holes. On 2 October Trotha issued an order that every Herero within the colony would be shot. Although the order was later withdrawn, survivors were held in concentration camps, where around half of prisoners died, many in forced labour. In late 1904 Witbooi, alarmed at the treatment of the Herero, switched sides and most Nama rose with him; Witbooi was killed in 1905, but Nama guerrillas under leaders such as Jakob Marengo and Simon Kooper fought on until 1908. Estimates of the dead vary: commonly 40,000 to 80,000 Herero, perhaps 80 per cent of the people, and about 10,000 Nama, around half, though wider ranges have been given. Some Herero, including Maharero, escaped to British Bechuanaland. Mainstream scholarship, and since 2015 the German government, call these events the Herero and Nama genocide.

Survivors faced dispossession, forced labour, pass documents and strict segregation; mixed marriages were banned from 1905. Settlement grew: by 1913 the colony had about 14,830 white residents, of whom some 12,292 were German, among a total population estimated at around 213,000. Diamonds were found in 1908, and more than 2,100 kilometres of railway were built, partly with the forced labour of Herero and Nama prisoners.

In the First World War, forces of the Union of South Africa invaded in September 1914, and the German commander Victor Franke surrendered near Khorab on 9 July 1915. South Africa then governed the territory under a League of Nations mandate as South West Africa, later extending apartheid to it, until independence as Namibia on 21 March 1990. In 2021 Germany agreed to provide 1.1 billion euros in development aid, a controversial deal in which it rejected legal responsibility for the genocide.

Our 1914 map labels the colony German South-West Africa, with the Union of South Africa to the south and east and Portuguese Angola to the north.