In both cases, the story begins with embarrassment and rage.
The German Army would shortly grant their wish. Nevertheless, the German press-making up its own facts in the face of an extremely tight-lipped German military and government-printed lurid tales of atrocities against white women and children, and an outraged German public demanded immediate and decisive reprisal. All but five of the dead were adult men, and none were children.
Although unable to expel the Germans entirely, they briefly threw off German authority and killed approximately 158 Germans in the first few weeks. As historian Isabel Hull details in her magisterial work on the South West Africa genocides, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, in 1903, the Herero, fed up with enforced social inferiority to and abuses by German settlers, rebelled. How the first genocide happened can inform our understanding of the second-and of the colonial dynamics that increasingly shape China’s actions on its imperial periphery. Starting in 2014, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has forcibly imprisoned, enslaved, and even sterilized hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China. Now, as then, a preeminent rising power is unashamedly and directly enacting a genocide in its imperial periphery. But the killing of 34,000 to 111,000 people in South West Africa would prove prologue to a raft of similar atrocities in World War I and even worse horrors in World War II. It was not Europe’s worst action in Africa: The Belgians were devastating what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo to South West Africa’s north, torturing, murdering, and starving up to 10 million people. Between 19, imperial Germany all but destroyed the Herero and Nama people in their South West African colony.
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