Namibia German RuleThe Namibia German Rule started during Bismarck’s outrages declaration, resulting from the imperialist, infamous and racist Berlin Conference (1884-1885), for the scramble of Africa, to seize Namibia as a so called protectorate of the Imperial Germany has gone down in history as the beginning of the most brutal and distractive colonial experience suffered by the people anywhere in the world.
Germany, under Bismarck declared on 24 April 1884 at a stroke of a pen for, my beautiful Namibia to be a German ‘protectorate’, establishing the Namibia German Rule. In a move to consolidate its colonial domination over the country, Germany immediately dispatched Heinrich Goering to Namibia, as the Governor of the first German colony, thus making his name infamous amongst those who have been associated with both imperialism and fascism. Heinrich’s son, Herman Goering was later to become a leading Nazi General, thereby adding even more notoriety to the name. The governor’s prime colonial task was to entice the African kings and Chiefs to accept so called German protection. Bismarck’s initial colonial policy was merely to extend the ‘protection’ of the German Reich over all the land ‘acquisitions’ by the German merchant capitalists in the territories which at that time were not yet claimed by other European states. This policy of ‘the flag follows the merchants’ led, after Namibia to the German colonisation of the Cameroon, Togo, Tanganyika, Rwanda, Burundi, New Guinea and the so-called Bismarck Archipelago in the Pacific. Arriving late on the scene of colonial conquest and trying to quickly catch up with its fellow competitors, Germany was hastier and more brutal than most other colonial powers. Following the initial five years of unsuccessful attempts to impose colonialism on our people through a series of deceptive ‘protection treaties’, by which the German sought to wheedle traditional Namibian leaders into accepting the Namibia German Rule , Germany unleashed a series of brutal military campaigns to suppress the Namibian people and to force them to submit to foreign domination. By 1889, the first German expeditionary force arrived in the country, under the command of one Captain von Francois, who proceeded to establish a network of army and police posts. This set the stage for the suppression of our people, the expropriation of their land and the establishment of an exploitative colonial economy, based on the theft of land and forced cheap labour. Furthermore, another racist, mass murderer, General von Trotha, who was responsible for ruthlessly suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in China and similar uprisings in Tanganyika, during German occupation was sent to Namibia to execute the imperial ‘Extermination Order’ against the Namibian patriots. Under General Lother von Trotha, in the period between 1903-1907, (particularly in the southern and central parts of Namibia) the Herero group of Namibians was literally reduced from 80 000 people to a mere 15 000 wretched and starving captives of German colonialists. More than half of the Namas and at least a third of the Damaras were slaughtered in cold blood. The remainder were dispossessed of their land and cattle and then banished to disolate, out-lying districts of Namibia. Some 1 500 of the Herero survivors were driven into exile into Botswana. More than 17 000 Hereros, Namas and Damaras became prisoners of war. Some 7 682 of these people died in concentration camps. Those who survived were leased out to work as vitual slaves on the newly acquired German farms, building of the railway, and in the other white settler business projects. Hundreds of Namas were deported to the German colonies of Togo and Cameroon where a majority of them perished as a result of unfamiliar and adverse climatic conditions and gross neglect. The majority of the surviving Hereros, Namas and Damaras were radically transformed from being pastoral peasants into labourers via a process of telescoped, far reaching exploitation, spanning a period of the first 31 years of colonialism. By the time Namibia German Rule came to an end, much of the Namibian people’s land was already parcelled out to some 15 000 settlers, divided up into 1 331 commercial farms. All in all, the German imperialists killed 60% of the Namibian population in central and southern parts of Namibia. Resulting in less than 2 millions Namibians today in a country covering 824 295 square kilometres with about 1 300km coast line. It is worth restating the well-known fact that, Lenin’s monumental classic: “Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism” remains a definitive study on the subject of imperialism. In this penetrative study, Lenin’s definitions as follow: Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the domination of monopolies and finance capital has taken shape; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance, in which the division of the world by the international trusts has begun and in which the partition of all the territory of the earth by the greatest capitalist countries has been completed.
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