The Land God Made in Anger. John Davis Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ from their primitive homes to new conditions, where the food has frequently been different from what they were accustomed to, kept at strenuous labour from early morning till late at night; herded together in insanitary surroundings; goaded by the brutalities of their taskmasters; flogged for the slightest offence: the unfortunate natives frequently have died after a few months …

      On certain plantations in the Cameroons and Tanganyika the death rate was admitted to being between fifty and seventy per cent within six months. There was an eye-witness account by a South African, describing the harbour-building at Lüderitz:

      I have seen women and children … at Lüderitz dying of starvation and overwork, nothing but skin and bone, getting flogged every time they fell under their heavy loads. I have seen them picking up bits of bread and refuse thrown away outside our tents and being flogged when caught.

      Another witness, writing in the Cape Argus newspaper in 1905, described seeing a woman, carrying an infant on her back, and a sack of grain on her head, when ‘she fell … The corporal sjamboked her certainly for five minutes and the baby as well.’ And the result of all this was depopulation, the harvests could not be reaped, or even sown, because the men had been dragooned away for forced labour and there was famine in many places. And the overall consequence of all this brutality was rebellion and thirty years of bloody warfare, punitive expedition after punitive expedition, warfare moreover that seemed to be regarded as a kind of sport. He read a verbatim report by a German soldier writing in a Strasbourg newspaper describing a battle in Tanganyika:

      … we surprised the rebels as they were attempting to cross the river. There was a long narrow bridge, which they had to cross, so that we could pop them off comfortably. There were seventy-six dead, besides those torn to pieces by crocodiles … In the middle of the river was a sandbank where they wanted to rest, but here too our shots caught them. That was a sight! I stood by the river behind a felled tree and shot 120 rounds. The prisoners were always hanged!

      And in the Cameroons there was a Captain Dominck who permitted his soldiers to drown fifty-two children who were survivors of a massacre of a village. The children were put into baskets and hurled into the river for sport. But the most ruthless of all was the war of extermination against the Hereros of South West Africa, when General von Trotha issued this infamous proclamation in 1904:

      I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Herero nation … The Herero nation must now leave the country. If the people do not do it, I will compel them with the big tube. Within the German frontier, every Herero, with or without a rifle … will be shot. I will not take any more women or children, but I will either drive them back to your people or have them fired on. These are my words to the nation of the Hereros.

      There was no mercy: the wounded were killed, women and children were shot and hanged. There was a quotation from a book written by a German pastor who witnessed the dreadful campaign:

      We found some old water holes and near them hundreds of new ones dug by the enemy the day before … It was now reported that there was still a last water place about five hours further on and that great numbers of the enemy were there. It was decided that we must drive them away; and we wanted to, for if we hunted them out of that place nothing remained to them but the wilderness. From a hill we saw two mighty clouds of dust moving towards the north and north-east, towards death from thirst … (Later) I saw people sitting in crowds, shoulder against shoulder, quite motionless. The heads of some drooped on their breasts and their arms hung down, as if they were asleep. Others sat leaning against a bush or neighbour, breathing fast and hard, their mouths open; they regarded us with stupid eyes …

      Punitive expedition after punitive expedition, rule by the whip and the gun and the noose, to the point where a parliamentarian called Bebel cried out in the Reichstag:

      ‘Gentlemen, you do not come as deliverers and educators but as conquerors, as oppressors, as exploiters … to rob the natives with brute power of their properties! You make helots of them, force them into strange service, into villainage for strange purposes! That is your colonial policy!’

      McQuade read through the unreal night. He was appalled – and this was part of his own family history: the van Niekerk part of his name was his mother’s maiden name, which ostensibly made him half-Afrikaner (though not half-Hairy-back), but her mother was born Kessel, of pure German immigrant stock before she married grandfather van Niekerk, making McQuade in fact one-quarter German. Yet he’d had no idea of this awful recent history, and bet that most people of his generation had equally little idea. Yet, shocking though it all was, he would have put it down to the unenlightenment of the times, had it not been for what he had seen on the Schmidt ranch – after all, had not the British, at the same time, conducted a scorched earth policy in the Boer War to starve the Afrikaners into submission, burning homesteads and crops and driving Afrikaner women and children into concentration camps where twenty-six thousand of them died of disease and malnutrition? Did not the Australians drive the Aborigines out of their traditional homelands? Were there not verified reports of hunting them down for sport? Had not the New Zealanders waged bloody war against the Maoris? Had not the Americans butchered Red Indian resistance? Was it not the American settlers who had introduced the barbaric practice of scalping so that they could claim a bounty for every Indian they killed? There was, however, that threatening telephone call echoing in his mind during that unreal fogbound night, the vivid image of the swastikas at the Schmidt ranch, and there were the photographs of the Third Reich he had seen in the library that afternoon, and it was not so easy to relegate the brutality of German colonial policy to history: there was a pattern of behaviour, a national susceptibility towards aggression and domination. It was because of the coincidence of all these circumstances that he read on, despite his tiredness, and learned things that changed the course of this story; about Hitler’s grand plan for Africa, which Roger Wentland had mentioned.

      It was spelled out in the book published by the Daily Telegraph, Germany’s African Claims, in Britain and Germany in Africa, published by Yale University, and in Hitler Over Africa, by Benjamin Bennett. Nor was Hitler’s grand blueprint for Africa a new one: it was as old as the original Scramble for Africa, as old as the Boer War when German agents were planted in South Africa to stir up the Afrikaners against Great Britain. The extermination campaign that General von Trotha waged against the Herero in 1904 was part of it, for the troops that were brought out from Germany for that war were to be used against South Africa after the Herero were crushed. And after Germany lost the First World War, Hitler resurrected the grand plan for Africa: one of the first things he demanded in his sabre-rattling speeches was the return to Germany of her former colonies to provide Lebensraum.

      But Hitler’s grand plan embraced much more than that: not only would his warships based in South West Africa and Tanganyika have dominated the Indian Ocean, Suez and the Cape sea route, thus strangling the British Empire; by controlling Suez, the Persian Gulf and its oil would have come under German control and then the whole Far East would have fallen under German domination, even Japan, for they were all dependent on Persian Gulf oil – and the whole of Europe would have been held to ransom for oil; Europe would have ground to a shattered halt under one blitzkrieg. But not only that: German bombers from Tanganyika and South West Africa would be in easy reach of the South African goldfields, and South Africa would fall to Germany, and then the Rhodesias and the Congo with their copper mines would fall, until finally the whole of Africa would be one vast German colony, with a massive army of black soldiers, and the whole vast treasure-house would be Germany’s, with its vast reservoir of black slave labour, with autobahns and railways connecting it all. Truly it would have become the Reich To Last A Thousand Years.

      That was Hitler’s grand plan for Africa, and for the world; and it all depended on his getting back South West Africa, now called Namibia, this desert land where McQuade sat reading. And there was open talk here about the ‘Aryanization of South Africa’, racial purification, the confiscation of Afrikaner farms and Jewish СКАЧАТЬ