‘People Died There Like Flies that Had Been Poisoned’: Remembering the First German Genocide in Namibia

This chapter investigates the history and memory of the first German genocide on the African continent. From 1904 to 1908 Imperial Germany increased violent combat and terror to subjugate local African people living in what is now Namibia. This brutal colonial violence spiked after the Herero launched a rebellion which was later joined by the Nama people to resist their suppression, and the theft of their lands and cattle. The colonial violence that ensued to suppress this uprising left an estimated 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama population dead. The chapter interrogates the dynamics of the Herero-Germany war, and the extermination order that was issued in the wake of this war. It also probes the usage of concentration camps, colonial science, enslaved labour and cultural genocide in the aftermath of the war to address the amnesia that seems to shroud the genocide. The chapter primarily centres on the fate of the Herero people who were the primary targets and subjects of an official extermination order issued through General Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha, the then head of the Imperial German military campaign.