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This large disposition to hand over our fellow-creatures to a Teutonic educational system, with "frightfulness" in reserve, to "efficiency" on Wittenberg lines, leaves me hot. The ghosts of the thirst-tormented Hereros rise up in their thousands from the African dust, protesting. This talk of "legitimate expansion" is indeed now only an exploiter's cant.
He began in the taal, with the thick guttural accent that you get in German South West. 'You have heard of me, he said. 'I am the Colonel von Stumm who fought the Hereros. Peter pricked up his ears. 'Ja, Baas, you cut off the chief Baviaan's head and sent it in pickle about the country. I have seen it. The big man laughed.
Thus in September 1904 a Portuguese column lost over 300 men killed, including 114 Europeans, in an encounter with the Kunahamas on the Kunene, not far from the German frontier. The Kunahamas are a wild, raiding tribe and were probably largely influenced by the revolt of their southern neighbours, the Hereros, against the Germans.
Nor did he know until he found the reprimand awaiting him in camp that he had been discussing the ethics of breaking out of camp with the "terror" himself. A soldier of fortune is Lettow. His name is stained with the hideous massacres of the Hereros in South-West Africa.
The German shrugged his shoulders. "A hundred things may have happened," he said "the Hereros or the Bushmen they may be under one of the shifting dunes or they are lost and may be dying of thirst who knows?" The heat was terrific: the vibrant atmosphere over the red-hot sand looked as though it had become molten, and the glare to the eye was almost insufferable.
The record of East Africa was even more terrible for the ferocity with which constant revolts were suppressed. But worst of all was the story of South-West Africa. There were endless wars against the various tribes; but they culminated in the hideous Herero war of 1903-6. The Hereros, driven to desperation by maltreatment, had revolted and killed some white farmers.
There would have been one supreme world-power; and that a power whose attitude towards backward races has been illustrated by the ruthless massacre of the Hereros; whose attitude towards ancient but disorganised civilisations has been illustrated by the history of Kiao-chau and by the celebrated allocution of the Kaiser to his soldiers on the eve of the Boxer expedition, when he bade them outdo the ferocity of Attila and his Huns; whose attitude towards kindred civilisations on the same level as their own has been illustrated before the war in the treatment of Danes, Poles, and Alsatians, and during the war in the treatment of Belgium, of the occupied districts in France, of Poland and of Serbia.
Every one had warned him of the extreme peril from the shifting sand-dunes. Moreover, the war between the Germans and the Hereros was at its height, and the lieutenant in charge of the small garrison at Swakopmund had cautioned him not to venture beyond the limit of their patrols.
Government representatives have told the Reichstag, as Herr Schleitwein did in 1904, that they must pursue a 'healthy egoism, and forswear 'humanitarianism and irrational sentimentality. 'The Hereros must be forced to work, and to work without compensation and for their food only. ... The sentiments of Christianity and philanthropy with which the missionaries work must be repudiated with all energy. This is what is called Realpolitik.
On the 26th there was a small British reverse at Sandfontein, which was followed by the more serious news of Maritz' rebellion in the Cape. Maritz had fought against the British in the Boer War and for the Germans against the revolted Hereros; he now held the ambiguous position of rank in the German Army and command of British forces, but came down on the German side of the fence.
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