26 - ‘Rivers of Blood and Rivers of Money’

Summary

Between 1904 and 1908 an estimated 80% of the Herero and half of the Nama population, in total some 75,000 men, women and children, lost their lives in German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia. They were killed by German soldiers, died in concentration camps, or perished in the desert after being chased away from their homelands. The genocides were a culmination of years of ruthless and forceful German dispossession of Herero and Nama land and property. This chapter focuses on the racial prejudice and fear of the Other at the root of the Herero and Nama genocides. Since the founding of the protectorate in 1884, Germans aimed to brutally subjugate the Herero and Nama peoples. Notions of racial superiority that attempted to justify taking Indigenous land and acts of violence against the colonized had always been balanced by a fear of anticolonial violence. Even prior to the genocide, this led to ever-greater atrocities, including the genocidal Hoornkrans Massacre (1893) and the incarceration of the Khauas-Khoi in concentration camps (1896). The chapter argues that racism and dehumanization shaped the events taking place before, during and directly after the genocide, which was long forgotten as a mere ‘colonial war’.