The Concentration Camp
There were five concentration camps in all
in Namibia, then German South West Africa, between 1904
and 1908. They were called Konzentrationslager in reports
and succeeded South African camps by two years.
The anti-colonial struggles of 1904 to
1908 were characterised by two major uprisings: the Herero
uprising in northern and central Namibia and the Nama
uprising in the south. In January 1904 war broke out
between the Herero nation and the German colonial
administration in Namibia. The colonists were caught by
surprise and suffered many defeats in the early stages of
the sporadic and uncoordinated war.
After about six months the picture
changed. The battle at the Waterberg, in the north-east,
on August 11 1904, marked the beginning of the end for the
Herero, who fled in their thousands into the Omaheke
sandveld, perishing in high numbers. The Herero nation was
literally uprooted as an entire people spread across the
Kalahari, trying to flee German punitive patrols. Those
who did not reach Bechuanaland, now Botswana, either
succumbed to the desert or were picked up by German
patrols and put in concentration camps.
In 1904 camps had been set up in Windhoek,
Okahandja and at the coastal town of Swakopmund. In 1905
two new camps were opened in Karibib and Lüderitz.
In terms of mortality statistics, the
Namibian camps were horrific. An official report on the
camps in 1908 described the mortality rate as 45,2% of all
prisoners held in the five camps. The prisoners were
typically fenced in, either by thorn-bush fences or by
barbed wire. As the word concentration implies, thousands
of people were crammed into small areas. The Windhoek camp
held about 5 000 prisoners of war in 1906. Rations were
minimal, consisting of a daily allowance of a handful of
uncooked rice, some salt and water. Rice was an unfamiliar
foodstuff to most, and the uncommon diet was the cause of
many deaths. Disease was uncontrolled. An almost total
lack of medical attention, unhygienic living quarters,
insufficient clothing and a high concentration of people
meant that diseases such as typhoid spread rapidly.
Beatings and maltreatment were also part of life in the
camps as the sjambok was often swung over the backs of
prisoners who were forced to work.
The concentration camp on Shark Island, in
the coastal town of Lüderitz, was the worst of the five
Namibian camps. Lüderitz lies in southern Namibia,
flanked by desert and ocean. In the harbour lies Shark
Island, which then was connected to the mainland only by a
small causeway. The island is now, as it was then, barren
and characterised by solid rock carved into surreal
formations by the hard ocean winds. The camp was placed on
the far tip of the relatively small island, where the
prisoners would have suffered complete exposure to the
gale-force winds that sweep Lüderitz for most of the
year. The first prisoners to arrive were, according to a
missionary called Kuhlman, 487 Herero ordered to work on
the railway between Lüderitz and Kubub. The island soon
took its toll: in October 1905 Kuhlman reported the
appalling conditions and high death rate among the Herero
on the island. Throughout 1906 the island had a steady
inflow of prisoners, with 1 790 Nama prisoners arriving on
September 9 alone. In the annual report for Lüderitz in
1906, an unknown clerk remarked that "the Angel of
Death" had come to Shark Island. German Commander Von
Estorff wrote in a report that approximately 1 700
prisoners had died by April 1907, 1 203 of them Nama. In
December 1906, four months after their arrival, 291 Nama
died (a rate of more than nine people a day). Missionary
reports put the death rate at between 12 and 18 a day. As
much as 80% of the prisoners sent to the Shark Island
concentration camp never left the island. Fred Cornell, a
British aspirant diamond prospector, was in Lüderitz when
the Shark Island camp was being used. Cornell wrote of the
camp: "Cold - for the nights are often bitterly cold
there - hunger, thirst, exposure, disease and madness
claimed scores of victims every day, and cartloads of
their bodies were every day carted over to the back beach,
buried in a few inches of sand at low tide, and as the
tide came in the bodies went out, food for the
sharks." During the war a number of people from the
Cape, strapped for money, sought employment as transport
riders for German troops in Namibia. Upon their return to
the Cape some of these people recounted their stories,
causing debate in the local media.
On September 28 1905 an article appeared
in the Cape Argus, with the heading: "In German S. W.
Africa: Further Startling Allegations: Horrible
Cruelty". In the article, Percival Griffith, "an
accountant of profession, who owing to hard times, took up
on transport work at Angra Pequena [Lüderitz]",
related his experiences. "There are hundreds of them,
mostly women and children and a few old men ... when they
fall they are sjamboked by the soldiers in charge of the
gang, with full force, until they get up ... On one
occasion I saw a woman carrying a child of under a year
old slung at her back, and with a heavy sack of grain on
her head ... she fell. "The corporal sjamboked her
for certainly more than four minutes and sjamboked the
baby as well ... the woman struggled slowly to her feet,
and went on with her load. She did not utter a sound the
whole time, but the baby cried very hard." These
atrocities did not go unnoticed by the Germans, who wrote
reports, articles and letters about the camps. Shark
Island came up in a German Parliament debate in 1906, when
the Social Democrats demanded to know what was going on
there. It seems, however, that generations since then have
tried hard to forget this history. The South African camps
have memorials and written histories, the Namibian camps
do not. On the site where Shark Island once lay now lies a
caravan park. Even worse, at the entrance of the park is a
monument to the German soldiers who died between 1905 and
1908 a monument to the victor and not the victim. The
centenary of the 1904 war is just around the corner;
perhaps Namibians will take the opportunity to reflect,
not so much on what is remembered but rather on what is
not.
(© Transcript taken from Prevent
Genocide International)
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