【The Great War】鑽石或自治 - 西南非洲民族主義

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In southwest Africa, one of Germany's former colonies has high hopes for the future, but its powerful neighbor has some ideas of its own. Hi, I'm Jesse Alexander and welcome to The Great War. In the late 19th century, Germany had entered the colonial scramble for Africa later than its European rivals. But by the outbreak of the First World War, it had established several colonies. Troops from neighboring British and French possessions attacked in 1914, and soon captured most German territory, although some German forces did hold out in the east until even after the armistice. In diamond-rich German southwest Africa, which is today's Namibia, British and South African forces had begun occupation in July 1915. With the war over, in early 1920, the fate of the colony rested with the newly established League of Nations. Wilson's idea of ethnic self-determination did not go unnoticed in Africa, but native Africans soon learned that the great powers had no intention of applying it to colonial peoples. Germany had lost the southwest African colony for good, and the League decided in early 1920 that German southwest Africa would become a Class C mandate, under the oversight of the League of Nations. Our Class C mandate categorization was given to those colonies thought least able to govern themselves. It would be placed under the formal control of South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire. From now on, South Africa would administer southwest Africa on behalf of Britain, with the League overseeing the arrangement. But the situation was not as simple as it seemed. The wartime occupation of German southwest Africa by South African troops since 1915 had not been an easy one. One local magistrate recalled in March 1920, When one looks back on the past four and a half years and with what we have had to contend, dealing with a hostile population, wholly insufficient and inefficient staffs, incompetent and almost useless police, a complete change of native policy, the disorder following on active warfare, and above all, an administration which was necessarily unstable and to a certain extent temporary and uncertain. It is not to be wondered at that conditions today are still far from ideal or even satisfactory. It was during the turbulent 1915-1918 occupation that the Union of South Africa commissioned a report into the condition of the colony, including the misdeeds of the former German colonial regime and their record as colonizers. Published in 1918, the Report on the Natives of Southwest Africa and their Treatment by Germany is better known as the Blue Book. The Blue Book consisted of over 200 pages of accusations against the German colonial system, and it contained a catalogue of evidence of German atrocities, which were often backed up by interviews with native Southwest Africans. Now especially important was the war and genocide that the Germans waged against the Herero and Nama-speaking peoples of the colony between 1904 and 1908. This period, according to even conservative estimates, resulted in the death of over half of the African Herero population and one third of the Nama-speakers in the colony. As many as 100,000 people are thought to have died. Although some of these were killed in battle with the German military during a Herero-led uprising, most perished when the Germans forced them into the barren deserts or into harsh labour and concentration camps. Today, this genocide is recognized as the first of the 20th century, and by highlighting these abuses, the Blue Book's authors wanted to show that the Germans were unsuited to be colonizers. But they also wanted to make the case that the South Africans, who were occupying Southwest Africa when the Blue Book came out in 1918, should receive the coming mandate. The Blue Book presented German colonization unfavourably compared to British colonization, which, it claimed, was carried out with a greater degree of justice and competence. This was further supported by claims of ignorance about German crimes in its colony. Coming here full of British ideas of the administration of justice, with echoes of German vaunts of superior civilization in our ears, despite hints from Belgium, and not suspecting that that civilization carried with it views of the exercise of the law in regard to natives utterly different from those with which it was carried out in regard to Europeans, for some time it did not occur to anyone to make serious investigation into the manner in which the German government had fulfilled its obligations in this respect toward its coloured subjects. Now, at this point it should be noted that Germany was not alone in committing terrible crimes in Africa. Africans suffered brutally in British and French colonies, while King Leopold's Belgian colonies in Central Africa witnessed atrocities even greater in scale than those of German Southwest Africa. But by 1918, Germany had lost the war, and now its policies were up for scrutiny by those who had defeated it. So, in many ways, the Blue Book served as South African propaganda to support claims for its expansion after the war. Although recent historians have concluded that its evidence against the Germans was not false, it also provided South Africans at the peace conference, like soon-to-be Prime Minister Jan Smuts, with ammunition to get what they really desired – Southwest Africa as a colony of the Union of South Africa in all but name. Now, on paper, the status of Southwest Africa as a mandate meant that South Africa would only administer the colony until self-rule was thought feasible. But the 1920 mandate fit with a long-standing idea of a South African sub-empire. For South African Prime Ministers like Jan Smuts and Louis Botha, both of whom oversaw South Africa's war effort, the idea predated their leadership, and even predated the formation of the Union of South Africa back in 1910. British imperial expansion had long been pursued in southern Africa, especially since the efforts of British businessman and imperialist Cecil Rhodes in the 1880s and 1890s. Rhodes used his business ventures and his position as Prime Minister of the British Cape Colony to extend an informal Greater South Africa at the expense of native Africans and independent Boer states, and he even had his eyes set on Portuguese Mozambique. Now Rhodes firmly believed in the righteousness of his cause. I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race. If there be a god, I think that what he would like me to do is paint as much of the map of Africa British Red as possible. Once the Germans arrived in southwest Africa in the 1880s, Rhodes tried to infiltrate the colony by proxy business deals. But eventually, his zeal for conflict with the Boers caught up with him, and his plots in the German colony were soon exposed as well. So, by the late 1800s, South Africa's influence in German southwest Africa was stifled. However, Rhodes's failure would foreshadow a coming conflict connected to the expansion of South Africa. Tensions between the Dutch-speaking colonists known as Boers and the more recently arrived British colonists in the southern part of the continent led to the two Boer Wars. The second of these ended with a British victory in 1902, and the defeated Boer states were integrated into South Africa. But the British were exhausted after a tough guerrilla war which saw the introduction of concentration camps to control the Boer population, in which thousands perished. Now, it was the Boers who would turn their defeat into political advantage. They united the various British colonies and Boer states into the Union of South Africa in 1910, which became a large and powerful British dominion. The new government, led by Prime Minister Louis Botha and his fellow former Boer General Jan Smuts, now made common cause with the British. Though they had just fought two wars against each other, the Boers and British had one thing in common. They were white communities in Africa, and solidarity brought them advantages in the colonial context. Here's what Jan Smuts had to say on the issue. At the southern corner of a vast continent, peopled by over 10 million barbarians, about half a million whites have taken up a position, with a view not only to working out their own destiny, but also of using that position as a basis for lifting up and opening up that vast dead weight of immemorial barbarism and animal savagery, to the light and blessing of ordered civilization. Unless the white race closes its ranks in this country, its position will soon become untenable in the face of the overwhelming majority of prolific barbarism. When it came to South African conquest of German southwest Africa in 1915, and then as a mandate in 1920, this same racial logic also applied to the few thousand Germans who were allowed to stay in their former colony after the war. In a region that was sparsely populated and had a relatively small white population, integrating German settlers into the new white ruling class allowed the South African government to have more stakeholders who were interested in maintaining the system of colonial oppression. The local Germans essentially had little choice but to join with their former enemies. They basically made the same decisions as many Boers had done 20 years earlier. It was a decision of self-interest, designed to preserve their position at the top of the colonial society and economy. As part of the eventual alliance between these groups, almost all copies of the 1918 Blue Book were destroyed, since the German settlers felt that it sullied their reputation. The South African government also sought to bolster the white population in southwest Africa with immigration. Boer farmers, who had been rendered unemployed due to the rapid industrialization of South Africa, were provided with farmland in southwest Africa, and encouraged to settle across the border. So the white settler populations in southwest Africa had made common cause to preserve their dominance after wars with each other. But the native population did not sit idly by. As the 1920s began, the people of southwest Africa looked for new ways to push back. In the early years following the German defeat in 1915, many Africans living in the settler region of colonial Namibia, the so-called police zone, thought that the South African occupiers would give them more freedom. At the top of their wish list was improved access to land and livestock, and perhaps the opportunity to self-govern. Eventually, some of these African aspirations would be realized, but not because they aligned with the goals of the occupying administration. They were either temporary measures, or occurred more by accident than by design. Following the end of German control in 1915, the native population left the police zone and took back crown lands as well as abandoned German farms. Even the decimated Herero people were able to rebuild their communities and cattle herds – for a time. But the colonists from South Africa, now arriving in southwest Africa, did not share the same intentions for the colony as the local population. This created tension, as natives did not see why they should be deprived of their lands. One Herero community member, Fridolin Kazombiaze, later recalled the differences in understanding between the native Africans and white settlers in the immediate post-war period. What we don't understand is that when two nations have been at war, such as Britain or Germany or Italy, and when one or another of those nations is defeated, the lands belonging to that nation are not taken away from them. That nation remains a nation, and their land belongs to them. The African people, although they have always been on the side of the British people and their allies, yet have their lands taken away from them and are treated as though they have been conquered. So it became painfully clear to the native population of southwest Africa that South African colonial control did not mean freedom, but instead would see another group of whites replace the Germans and strive to expand their ownership and control. By the time the mandate became official in 1920, the colony's African population was looking at ways to spread resistance and create their own sense of identity that would also transcend borders. In southwest Africa, two organizations in particular provided outlets for growing African frustrations. The Garveyite Movement, also known as the Universal Negro Improvement Association or UNIA, and the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union, the ICU. Even though the Garveyite Movement originated in the United States and the ICU in South Africa, they were used by Namibian locals to voice discontent, to fight for better conditions, and to envision self-rule. These movements were especially strong in Lüderitz, the center of the lucrative southwest African diamond mining business. For a period, German southwest Africa had provided 21% of the world's diamonds, resulting in an industry that brought Africans all over the continent to the German colony in search of work, often in extremely poor conditions. However, the outbreak of war led to the closure of the mines, and many workers were pushed into German military service. The reopening of the mines in 1916 by the De Beers Consolidated Mines Company originally established by Rhodes back in 1888, saw the workers return, but this time they began to demand better conditions, better pay, and political representation. This was fertile ground for the ICU, which campaigned mostly for the improvement of working conditions and rights. It was the UNIA, however, that led to a mass movement and created a truly radical vision of a new southwest Africa. Founded in July 1914, it advocated for a quote Africa for Africans, at home and abroad, and created a pan-African movement not limited to the European-defined borders on the continent. In fact, it became the largest black-led organization in history, and at its height, had around 300,000 dues-paying members, 1,000 chapters, and a million more supporters around the world. The organization gained momentum in 1920s southwest Africa, just as its powerful neighbor was tightening its imperial grip on the region. The UNIA also had a mix of goals that allowed it to adapt to the situation on the ground in the colony. For example, while on a grand scale, the UNIA argued for a pan-African state, on the local level, it fought for everyday liberation from imperial rule. UNIA membership was also quite diverse, and no single ethnic group was in control. The Herero and Nama peoples and other groups all participated. This was a major development in a continent often divided on ethnic and tribal grounds. From its base in Lüderitz, new branches soon spread across the colony. This rapid increase in membership across a wide swath of southwest Africans was benefitted by UNIA's emphasis on practical improvements within the context of its wider political goals. It worked to develop an early form of health insurance, known as SIG funds, as well as spreading education and information for native Africans by native Africans. This all contributed to creating an alternative vision for the future, one of African self-determination and independence. Often, this was communicated via the official UNIA newspaper, The Negro World. In 1921, the leader of the UNIA in Lüderitz, Fritz Hiedli, wrote an article in the paper outlining the problems the native population were facing. We are segregated, discriminated, disenfranchised, Jim Crowed in cattle trucks, coal boxes, and last but not least, butchered by the other fellow with rifle and machine gun bullets. But what we are dealing with mostly is segregation wholly in its aspects, in the former regime of our oppressors, the Germans. Now, the UNIA did eventually petition the League of Nations calling for southwest African self-rule, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. In 1922, dissatisfaction with South African imposed restrictions led to an uprising of the Bondelswads, an ethnic group in the colony. But this revolt was soon crushed by South African forces, with the help of combat aircraft. The UNIA's popularity had peaked in 1923, but attempts at regaining control by native Africans had led to violent reactions from settlers and from South Africa. This sent a stark message to any native Africans considering military revolts or revolution. With colonial rules seemingly re-established for the foreseeable future, by 1925 the UNIA's popularity had declined, chapters had closed, and hopes for the future of self-determination had dried up. So, far from the European battlefields of the Great War, the outcome of the conflict had a profound impact on the people of southwest Africa. The hopes awoken by Wilson's idea of self-determination had been dashed. The 1920 League of Nations mandate had allowed South Africa to keep control of Namibia and crush opposition to its role. But the dawning of a new era in the world had awakened new hopes of the peoples in the region, and their drive to organize and resist their new colonizers was a sign of things to come on the continent that the Fourteen Points forgot. So we want to thank Will Lyon and Mark Newton for their help with this episode. Will's research was made possible by the Gerda Henkel Project as part of his doctoral work at Humboldt University. And as usual, you can find all our sources for this episode in the video description, including links to our Amazon stores. To get access to all our podcast episodes with expert interviews and other perks, you can also support us on Patreon or by clicking the button below. I'm Jesse Alexander, and this is The Great War 1920, a production of Real Time History and the only YouTube history channel that rises like an Olympus above the Serengeti.