No such word as genocide

In Namibia today alluvial diamonds are gathered from ships off the coast by Africans forced into near slave-like conditions. Alluvial means that the diamonds do not have to be mined, they can simply be picked up off the ground or from the water.

When the Germans colonized the land they called South West Africa at the turn of the twentieth century they knew nothing of the diamonds. They made money from fishing, hunting and farmland and saw their African colonies as their “place in the sun,” hoping to eventually rival Britain’s empire upon which “the sun never set.”

The Herero and Nama peoples rose up in 1904 and ‘07 to fight courageously against the German colonizers. With the backing of Deutsche Bank, Germany sent in General von Trotha with orders to exterminate the Africans.

Von Trotha declared: “Any Herero found within the German borders [sic] with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall no longer receive any women or children; I will drive them back to their people. I will shoot them. This is my decision for the Herero people.”

Von Trotha was true to his word, even as the Herero were careful in their resistance to spare German women, children and missionaries.

The Germans machined-gunned the Herero people of all ages, poisoned their wells, killed their cattle, ran human experiments on them and rounded them up in the Kalahari Desert to die a slow, torturous death without food, water or shelter. Eighty percent of the Herero were killed and half of the Nama.

Namibia today has only 1.8 million people in an area bigger than Texas, one of the smallest populations in the world. It is a chilling irony that websites for Namibian tourism targeting Europeans promote its sparse population as one of the country’s selling points.

When Africans throughout Africa were being slaughtered by the millions a century ago; when countless Africans died during the middle passage of the slave trade; when hundreds of millions of Indigenous people were wiped out in the Americas there was no word for “genocide.”

Genocide, as a crime against humanity, as a moral and legal concept in the consciousness of Europeans was only invented following the second world war after white people had inflicted mass murder on other white people. When the Germans were slaughtering Africans in Namibia, Jews were good Germans, happily enjoying the benefits of German colonialism.

It is telling that General von Trotha’s wife, Lucy Goldstein von Trotha, was Jewish.

The survivors of the Herero people have filed a $4 billion lawsuit against the German government and corporations as reparations for the genocide. The Germans have paid over $100 billion to the Israeli government and Jewish people as reparations, while they scoff at the just demand from the Herero people.

Next page: The DeBeers Diamond Cartel—an empire inside of imperialism