CONTENT
GERMAN MISSIONARIES
On 23 September 1828, the Rhenish Missionary Society was founded in Elberfeld (the town is now part of Wuppertal).
The missionaries who belonged to it played an important role in Germany’s later colonial history.
As early as the 1830s, the first missionaries were active in the region of present-day Namibia. Their mission was to convert the people of Namibia, who had had their own religious practices for thousands of years, to Christianity. This means that the people were supposed to forget their own religions and adopt the Christian faith instead.
This was not always voluntary, many people were forced to adopt the religion of the white missionaries, giving up parts of their own identity.
Missionaries, are people who have a mission – namely the mission to promote a religion.
The word missionary comes from Latin and means messenger. It means that a person travels to different places on behalf of a congregation or on his own initiative in order to inspire people there about his or her faith.
GERMAN SOUTH WEST-AFRICA 1884 - 1919
In 1983, Adolf Lüderitz, a tobacco merchant from Bremen, bought the bay that is now named after him, as well as other land, from the Nama.
Lüderitz had hopes that he would find gold and diamonds in this area.
On 24 April 1884, the then Chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck, declared that “Lüderitzland” would henceforth be under the protection of the German Empire.
It was a region about one and a half times the size of the German Empire.
About 200,000 people lived here – Herero, Owambo, Damara and Nama (called Hottentots by the German settlers). They lived mainly from cattle breeding and moved from grazing area to grazing area with their large herds of cattle.
In the beginning, only a few German settlers lived in the colony, which was then called “New Germany”. They were given land that had been “bought” from the Herero and Nama.
However, since the Herero and Nama did not regard land as property at all, these “purchases” were not fair. In their eyes, land could not be bought.
The Germans forced the Herero to cooperate in the construction of railway lines. In addition, the German settlers pushed them back more and more from their grazing areas. Due to a cattle plague, the Herero lost about 75% of their herds in 1897. A plague of locusts destroyed large parts of the harvests a few years later.
In order to survive, many Herero were forced to work for the German settlers under extremely harsh conditions.
In 1904, they managed to organise an uprising, i.e. a protest.
In the summer of 1904, the government of the German Empire sent Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha to German Southwest Africa as the new commander-in-chief.
Soon after, von Trotha published the following appeal: “I, the great general of German soldiers, send this letter to the Herero people. The Hereros are no longer German subjects. Within the German frontier every Herero will be shot, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle.”
The result is genocide. In just 4 years, until 1908, 80,000 Herero and Nama are brutally murdered. On the German side, about 1400 settlers die.
From 1908 onwards, large diamond deposits were discovered. By 1914, the German settlers had extracted diamonds worth 150 million Reichsmarks. These riches were not shared with the Namibian population.
When the First World War began in Europe in 1914, troops of the South African Union, which was allied with England, occupied Lüderitz Bay. The German military finally capitulated in 1915.
The history of the colony of German Southwest Africa ends with the so-called Versailles Peace Treaty of 28 June 1919.
“When the missionaries arrived, we had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land, and we had the Bible- Jomo Kenyatta
OUR ADVISOR
I am Edna Awaras of Damara descent. I was born and raised in Namibia, finished my tertiary education through the Cambridge System. Went on a Working Holiday to England 2002-2004. I obtained a diploma in Holistic Massage Therapy from the City of Bristol College-Uk. For seven years I managed a successful film company in Namibia, that specialized in documentary film making. In August 2013 I moved to Austria and I have been living here since. In Namibia, most of my work is to facilitate on behalf of the film crews, as a facilitator, field producer, and production managemer.
I met my wonderful friend Banza through our children who are going to the same school.
When Banza introduced me to Global New Generation (GNG), I was very intrigued by the website and how multinational it is. I met Sonja, the founder of GNG, at Banza’s birthday and later started being involved in GNG’s activities.
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