Before Auschwitz, Germany perpetrated its first genocide (1904–08) in South West Africa against the Herero and Nama—desert expulsions, poisoned waterholes, concentration camps, starvation, sexual violence, forced labor, identity badges, land seizure, and leadership suppression. This article centers the Namibia genocide, situates it in its colonial background, and traces its mechanisms and enduring legacies in land, memory, and reparations.

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1. Background
2. Colony
3. Genocide
4. Resistance
5. Legacy
6. Postscript
7. Footnotes

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Background

Together with many other groups, the Herero and Nama contribute to Namibia’s diverse heritage—while many individuals choose to identify first and foremost simply as Namibian, given the sensitivities shaped by the apartheid past.

The Herero are a historically cattle-herding society that developed from peoples, cultures, and economies already present in Namibia before European arrival in the 16th century¹. Never a monolith, Herero politics included internal divisions that German colonial authorities later exploited to facilitate conquest². Cattle remain central to social life and concepts of wealth, a symbolism reflected in the distinctive women’s attire—Victorian-influenced gowns and a horn-shaped headpiece often interpreted as evoking cattle horns.³

The Nama are among Namibia’s oldest population groups and one of more than a dozen ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities. Traditionally pastoralist, they historically occupied wide areas in the country’s south and center⁴. Interactions with neighboring Herero included periods of conflict, after which German colonial authorities confined both peoples to reserves. Music, poetry, and storytelling are central to Nama cultural life, sustained by a rich oral tradition⁵.

Among Herero and Nama pastoral communities, land and vital resources like waterholes were held in common under customary authority, with seasonal movement of herds and households between pastures and water sources based on flexible, overlapping use rights. Colonial appropriation imposed private freehold and rigid, officially surveyed property lines, reinterpreting temporary permissions as permanent “sales” and restricting access to those with registered title—often on contested claims. This shift, foreign to local tenure, dismantled seasonal herd mobility and its ecological adaptation, making private ownership central to dispossession⁶.

Initial contact between Germans and the Herero and Nama came via missionaries, followed by traders, concession hunters, and other colonial ventures. Even before formal colonization, these ventures undermined Herero and Nama socio-economic life through fraudulent trading practices, coercive “protection” treaties, and land deals that dispossessed communities⁷. In 1884–85, Bismarck directly convened the Berlin Conference to codify European claims and manage rivalries during the “Scramble for Africa.” Excluding African representatives, the conference legitimized the partition and expropriation of African territories— described as the organized commission of a crime against Africa’s peoples⁸.

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Colony

On 30 April 1885, the German South West Africa Company (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft für Südwestafrika) was founded and soon absorbed earlier private concessions in the territory⁹. Its shareholders included some of Germany’s wealthiest magnates—Hansemann, Bleichröder, the Duke of Ujest, and Count Henckel von Donnersmarck—and finance capital was prominently represented by the Disconto-Gesellschaft, Deutsche Bank, Delbrück, Leo & Co., Dresdner Bank, and Bankhaus Oppenheim¹⁰.

The main factions of the Herero and Nama were led by Samuel Maherero, and Hendrik Witbooi respectively.

After nearly a century of conflict between the Herero and Nama, a peace concluded in November 1892—spurred by the growing threat of German and Boer expansion—realigned forces and, by early 1893, presented a united African front that alarmed German colonial authorities, who could no longer exploit inter-African divisions. In the early hours of 12 April 1893, German troops reached Hornkranz (a Nama encampement)—described by Captain François as tranquil—and, on his orders, opened fire from three directions, expending roughly 16,000 rounds from 200 rifles in about thirty minutes; seventy-eight women and children were killed. When the incident was raised in the Reichstag, the government advanced a fabricated claim that Witbooi fighters had used women as cover to explain the high civilian toll.

Subsequently, Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi waged a vigorous campaign against German forces, inflicting significant losses and contributing to the recall of Major Curt von François, who was replaced in 1894 by Theodor Leutwein¹¹. On 15 September 1894—after roughly eighteen months of fighting and confronted by German superiority in firearms—Witbooi was compelled to sign a “treaty of protection and friendship.” The war left the Witbooi impoverished, a condition Leutwein exploited by lending them 150 head of cattle for three years to bind them more closely to colonial authority¹².

In 1896, the rinderpest epidemic reached Namibia just as colonial pressure was confining the Herero to ever smaller quarters, crowding herds and making them acutely vulnerable¹³; moreover, German vaccination campaigns were misused to hasten the destruction of Herero cattle and to acquire land¹⁴. Socially, rinderpest transformed Herero society: the collapse of the cattle economy forced commoners into wage or indentured labor, while chiefs sold large tracts to traders and land companies, opening more territory to settler occupation and deepening dispossession¹⁵. In its wake the Herero lost land, people, and herds, sank further into debt, and became dependent on the colonial state for reserves, food, and employment; on traders and settlers for credit and work; and on missions for religious guidance^{16 17}.

With an approximate 90 per cent of cattle wiped out by the pandemic many pastoralists in the central and southern parts of the territory were forced into wage labour for the first time. By 1904, Herero communities had become scattered groupings clustered around garrison towns under German control and their associated chiefs—effectively stripped of independence as the colonial state prevailed.¹⁸

In 1904, the Herero, led by Samuel Maherero rose up in resistance¹⁹.

German authorities manufactured atrocity propaganda—especially lurid, unproven claims that Herero had raped or “butchered” white women—to furnish a moral pretext for annihilation; internal cables show pressure on Governor Leutwein to label vague “ill-treatment” as rape despite no evidence, and even after missionary J. Irle publicly debunked named cases the narratives persisted. This drumbeat conditioned soldiers and the public, normalizing calls for collective reprisals, encirclement and destruction by artillery, and even poisoning wells. Amid a jingoistic settler climate—and with the Kaiser Wilhelm II’s endorsement—Berlin ordered an immediate offensive, forbade negotiations with the Herero, removed Leutwein, and installed Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha to prosecute an exterminationist campaign²⁰.

While Leutwein did not “want to see the Herero destroyed altogether”; beyond the practical difficulty of annihilating “a people of 60,000 or 70,000,” he deemed such a course “a grave mistake from an economic point of view,” insisting that “we need the Herero as cattle breeders, though on a small scale, and especially as laborers,” and that “it will be quite sufficient if they are politically dead.” By contrast, Lothar von Trotha set out a different procedure: “to encircle the masses of Hereros at Waterberg, and to annihilate these masses with a simultaneous blow,” then establish stations “to hunt down and disarm the splinter groups who escaped,” “lay hands on the captains by putting prize money on their heads,” and “finally to sentence them to death.”²¹

In early August 1904, von Trotha issued battle orders to his troops. What followed is genocide…

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Genocide

The Herero are no longer German subjects. They have murdered and stolen, they have cut off the ears, noses and other bodyparts of wounded soldiers, now out of cowardice they no longer wish to fïght. I say to the people anyone who delivers a captain will receive 1000 Mark, whoever delivers Samuel will receive 5000 Mark. The Herero people must however leave the land. If the populace does not do this I will force them with the Groot Rohr [Cannon]. Within the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children, I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot at. These are my words to the Herero people.

General von Trotha, Sunday 2 October 1904 (der Vernichtungsbefehl) ²²

Men, women, and children were forced into concentration camps; starved and malnourished; whipped, raped, and compelled to perform backbreaking labor. Many were “tattooed and forced to wear identity badges”; the Herero were coerced to change religion, their land was seized and sold to German settlers, and their ruling structures were banned. Waterholes were poisoned, and people were hunted and lynched. Herero prisoners of war—and later Nama prisoners—were deployed across civilian firms (from laundries and transport contractors to breweries and shipping companies), while military units used prisoners, often children, to maintain livestock—building kraals, pumping water, cutting fodder, and herding—and to build railway lines^{23 24 25}.

it has been and remains my policy to exercise the violence with gross terrorism and even with cruelty. I annihilate the African tribes by floods of money and floods of blood; it is only by such sowings that a [new permanent German state] will be there to stay.

General von Trotha ²⁶

By early 1905, Herero society as it had existed prior to 1904 was destroyed, the majority were confined to camps and left propertyless, landless, and leaderless, and legislation sought to perpetuate this condition; when the camps were abolished in 1908, Imperial Germany aimed to reshape the survivors of the genocide into a single, amorphous Black working class²⁷.

Germany established a network of concentration camps in South West Africa; Shark Island—opened first for Herero prisoners whose forced labor was exploited for colonial infrastructure, including the Lüderitz–Aus railway and harbor—later received Nama inmates in 1906²⁸. Between 1,000 and 3,000 people died there, chiefly from exposure, disease, and exhaustion under brutal conditions, while terror practices included rape, torture, poisoning, medical experiments, and public executions; captive women were forced to clean the skulls of the dead for shipment to Germany for pseudo-scientific research²⁹. Among those who perished was the Nama Cornelius Fredericks, decapitated on 16 February 1907, his skull sent to Germany. When the camp closed in April 1907, survivors were transferred to a “Burenkamp” at Radford Bay³⁰.

Between 75 and 80 per cent of the Herero and about 50 per cent of the Nama were exterminated by the German forces³¹.

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Resistance

From the standpoint of Ovaherero and Nama communities, German rule meant near-total rightlessness. Openly racist dehumanization normalized violence—from routine whipping to killings—often excused as “tropical frenzy.” Courts rarely punished German perpetrators, discounted African testimony (even proposing ratios that devalued it), and imposed only light sentences when cases proceeded at all. Stripped of legal protection and credibility, Herero and Nama experienced life as slavery in their own country³².

All our obedience and patience with the Germans is of little avail, for each day they shoot someone dead for no reason at all. Hence I appeal to you, my Brother, not to hold aloof from the uprising, but to make your voice heard so that all Africa may take up arms against the Germans. Let us die fighting rather than die as a result of maltreatment, imprisonment or some other calamity. Tell all the kapteins down there to rise and do battle.

Letter of Samuel Maherero to Hendrik Witbooi, 11 January 1904 ³³

On 12 January 1904, the Herero rose in arms, swiftly seizing most of their ancestral land—fortified posts excepted, which came under siege—and capturing the bulk of settlers’ livestock; over 100 German settlers and soldiers were killed. In October 1904, the Nama joined the uprising. Employing guerrilla tactics—ambushes, hit-and-run raids, and disruption of lines of communication—the resistance forced German forces onto the defensive and, for a time, severely constrained their operations³⁴.

For further detail on the resistance, see Let us die fighting : the struggle of the Herero and Nama against German imperialism (1884-1915) by Horst Drechsler.

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Legacy

1893–1903 saw a systematic transfer of Herero and Nama land and cattle to German settlers, culminating after the 1904–07 uprisings were crushed. Colonial acquisitions proceeded under colonial legal forms. These sales were completed amid documented protests by Herero and Nama, who contested their legality³⁵. The large scale dispossession of black Namibians was as much intended to provide white settlers with land, as it was to deny black Namibians access to the same land, thereby denying them access to commercial agricultural production and forcing them into wage labour³⁶.

Vast land seizures and the expropriation of more than 205,640 head of cattle (1884–1915) dismantled Herero and Nama livelihoods, entrenched long-term land inequality, and drove dispersal and diaspora, while extractive gains in minerals, diamonds, and forced labor enriched German settlers, companies, and the colonial state. These structures persist today in unequal access to land and the concentration of ownership in the hands of white German-speaking Namibians and foreign nationals, reinforced by ongoing German financial ties and influence. The removal of human remains for scientific and medical research—some still retained in Germany—marks a continuing cultural and epistemic dispossession. Together, the loss of economic and political power, damage to cultural identity, and intergenerational trauma continue to burden Herero and Nama communities, with inadequate land access compounding present-day socio-economic marginalization³⁷.

To quote Edward Said, “To think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them: all of this occurs on, about, or because of land. The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about”³⁸. When you take that quote and the fact that white Namibians still hold most of the privately owned land in the country, you see that the colonial “empire” and its strength have hardly been reduced at all. The structure that empire created remains fundamentally intact. And as long as this remains so, inequality can never be overcome³⁹.

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Postscript

Selecting sources for this article has been unexpectedly difficult. I have chosen to cite only works that explicitly name the events a genocide. More troubling is how little accessible scholarship exists online about Herero and Nama before German colonization; much of the record makes their histories appear to begin with the colonial encounter. This reflects structural biases—digitized collections dominated by colonial archives, scarcity of materials in Otjiherero and Khoekhoegowab, paywalled journals, and search algorithms that privilege widely cited European-language sources. As a result, most available references are authored by Germans or, more broadly, by scholars of European heritage. There are important exceptions, however, and I make a point of foregrounding and citing those works more heavily.

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Footnotes

1. Jan-Bart Gewald. Colonization, Genocide and Resurgence: The Herero of Namibia 1890-1930 ↩︎
2. Ibid ↩︎
3. Ibid ↩︎
4. Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Nama Voices ↩︎
5. Ibid ↩︎
6. Werner. A Brief History of Land Disposession in Namibia ↩︎
7. ECCHR. Colonial Repercussions: Namibia ↩︎
8. Ibid ↩︎
9. Horst Drechsler. Let us die fighting : the struggle of the Herero and Nama against German imperialism (1884-1915) ↩︎
10. Ibid ↩︎
11. Ibid ↩︎
12. Ibid ↩︎
13. Jan-Bart Gewald. Colonization, Genocide and Resurgence: The Herero of Namibia 1890-1930 ↩︎
14. Ibid ↩︎
15. Ibid ↩︎
16. Ibid ↩︎
17. Horst Drechsler. Let us die fighting : the struggle of the Herero and Nama against German imperialism (1884-1915) ↩︎
18. Jan-Bart Gewald. Colonization, Genocide and Resurgence: The Herero of Namibia 1890-1930 ↩︎
19. Horst Drechsler. Let us die fighting : the struggle of the Herero and Nama against German imperialism (1884-1915) ↩︎
20. Ibid ↩︎
21. Ibid ↩︎
22. Ibid ↩︎
23. Ibid ↩︎
24. Kenneth L. Lewis. The Naimibian Holocaust: Genocide Ignored, History Repeated, Yet Reparations Denied ↩︎
25. Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Nama Voices ↩︎
26. Kenneth L. Lewis. The Naimibian Holocaust: Genocide Ignored, History Repeated, Yet Reparations Denied ↩︎
27. Jan-Bart Gewald. Colonization, Genocide and Resurgence: The Herero of Namibia 1890-1930 ↩︎
28. Forensis and Forensic Architecture. Shark Island: An Architectural Reconstruction of a Death Camp ↩︎
29. Ibid ↩︎
30. Ibid ↩︎
31. Horst Drechsler. Let us die fighting : the struggle of the Herero and Nama against German imperialism (1884-1915) ↩︎
32. Ibid ↩︎
33. Ibid ↩︎
34. Ibid ↩︎
35. Werner. A Brief History of Land Disposession in Namibia ↩︎
36. Werner. A Brief History of Land Disposession in Namibia ↩︎
37. Written statement* submitted by Society for Threatened
    Peoples, a non-governmental organization in special
    consultative status ↩︎
38. Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism ↩︎
39. ECCHR. Colonial Repercussions: Namibia ↩︎