![]() Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. If it refuses, I shall compel it do so with the. The Herero are no longer German subjects must now leave the country. In what historians now refer to as his “Annihilation Order,” Trotha decreed that: The most destructive German effort began in 1904 during the so-called Herero-Aufstand (Herero Uprising), when soldiers under the command of General Lothar von Trotha instigated the first genocide of the twentieth century. ![]() Several colonial administrators remarked in documents that these efforts provided the imperial government an “effective means of controlling the local populations.” German list of “dead” Africans in the aftermath of the genocideĪfter the arrival of German settlers in Namibia in 1884, colonial officials moved quickly to displace Africans from their traditional lands, first through negotiations and the establishment of so-called “protection treaties.” When these policies failed, German imperial leaders increasingly sanctioned the use of armed aggression to drive local African communities from positions of regional influence, most notably the Ovaherero and Namaqua. In most cases, officials simply wrote “dead” ( tot) with no additional information. In a folder of “native passports” ( Paßmarken), I found several lists of “employed prisoners-of-war.” These records include a person’s name, age, “tribal” affiliation, and the last-known location of their parents. Īnother collection exposes the bureaucratic extent of German settler-colonial practices in Namibia. It concludes that “she ran after her parents since she belongs with her Omaruru family.” Emma’s fate remains a mystery to the present day. A dispatch to the Omaruru District Commander, for instance, details the separation of Emma, an 8-year-old Herero girl, from her parents as they departed from the capital city of Windhoek. In vivid detail, these documents reveal how the German colonial administration in Southwest Africa (DSWA, present-day Namibia) split-up African families to enhance its political authority in the colony. ![]() In a previously unknown collection at the National Archives of Namibia in Windhoek, I discovered new evidence confirming that German settler-colonists were no different. Regimes seeking to exercise power over a segment of the population, past and present, have used child separation as a mechanism of social control. ![]()
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