Review of 'The Kaisers Holocaust Germanys Forgotten Genocide And The Colonial Roots Of Nazism' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I recently spent a few weeks in Namibia. Namibia is one of the least densely populated places in the world and it is strikingly beautiful. Before I go, I knew only a few things about its history, mostly about Namibia’s anti-apartheid struggle. I had read in the past a few articles about colonialism, but they didn't paint it as the terrible thing that it really was. The overall message was that the colonialists brought Namibians, education, development, and of course, Jesus. Even today, for part of the population, this is the prevailing message.
One of the books in my reading list about Namibia was David Olusoga’s and Casper Erichsen’s The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. It was by reading this brilliantly researched and well written book that I learned about the three-year Herero and Nama genocide and I fully understood how horrific German colonialism had been in Namibia, the masses of people that were murdered, starved and worked to death in concentrations camps, especially the one on Shark Island, just outside Luderitz.
Germany annexed Namibia, then known as South-West Africa, in 1884-1885 and for the next 20 years, german settlers plundered the lands, houses and livestock of the Herero tribal inhabitants. Racism was rife. David Olugosa, an Anglo-Nigerian historian, argues that the pseudo-science that was practised in the field in Namibia inspired Nazis’ belief in their own racial superiority and it was an important driver in their later expansionist policies in Eastern Europe. Nazism embraced anti-Semitism, anti-Marxism, Völkisch Romanticism (Volk translates to people as in an ethnic group or nation), Nordic mysticism, anti-capitalism, eugenics and colonial imperialism. Nazis skillfully exploited the nostalgic longing for the lost colonies in South-West Africa to great effect.
Olusoga and Erichsen have written a vivid, powerful and painful narrative of the Namibian genocide. It was not until 2004 (a century after the massacre) that Germany formally apologized for the atrocity.