Description
HERERO UPRISING / HERERO AND NAMAQUA GENOCIDE:
Paul SPRIGADE (1863 – 1928) & Max MOISEL (1869 – 1920).
Berlin: Dietrich Reimer (Ernst Vohsen), 1904.
During the early 1880s, Germany, a new country united only in 1871, scrambled to claim its own colonial empire in Africa. At the Berlin Conference (1884-5), the other European powers recognized Germany’s title to Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Namibia), Kamerun (Cameroon), Togoland (Togo), and Deutsch-Ostafrika (modern mainland Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi).
Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Namibia), officially classified as a ‘protectorate’ (although it was de facto a colony), was initially governed by a private commercial entity, the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft fur Südwestafrika (German Colonial Society for Southwest Africa), supported by German bankers, industrialists and the mayor of Frankfurt, who sought to exploit the colony’s considerable mineral wealth. Deutsch-Südwestafrika became a crown colony in 1890, as the Kolonialgesellschaft found the burden of administration too much to bear, although it retained some of its mineral rights. Germany then invited numerous foreign investors, including British interests, to help develop the colony, which was bolstered by as many as 10,000 European settlers.
Within only a generation of establishing the colony, Germany succeeded in developing an impressive network of infrastructure, agricultural ventures and a series of mines that made Deutsch-Südwestafrika economically productive, even if every venture was hard-earned in what was an unforgiving desert environment.
However, Germany’s ‘progress’ in developing Deutsch-Südwestafrika was built on the backs of the indigenous Herero and Nama peoples, who the Germans brutally exploited.
The Herero people are of a Bantu ethnic group and reside in what is today central and northern Namibia, as well as southern Angola and western Botswana. They were traditionally nomadic pastoralists, who required a large amount of grazing land to sustain their herds.
The Nama people, native to central and southern Namibia, as well as northwestern South Africa, are of a Khoisan ethic group and while traditionally nomadic pastoralists, since the 1840s, some communities had settled villages from which they tended their herds. Many of the Nama had long converted the Christianity, as the first European missionaries arrived in their territories in the 1830s.
During the first two decades of their colonial rule, the Germans removed the Herero and Nama, either by trickery or force, from a large proportion of their traditional cattle grazing lands, causing tremendous suffering. They also brutally exploited thousands of indigenous workers in systems of corvée labour that closely resembled slavery. However, this was only a prelude the unspeakable horrors that the Germans would inflict upon the Herero and Nama.
The Hero Wars and the Genocide of the Hero and Nama Peoples
At the dawn of the 20th century, the German oppression and harassment of the Herero and Nama peoples intensified, making their lives virtually intolerable. In 1903, tensions broke out into the open, when a group of Herero and Nama warriors brutally tortured and murdered between 120 and 150 German settlers.
In January 1904, in an unprecedented move, the main Herero chiefs, led by Samuel Maherero, and the Nama chiefs, led by Captain Hendrik Witbooi, formed an alliance to mount a mass armed rebellion against German rule, instigating a conflict known as the Herero Wars (1904-8), or the Herero Uprising (German: Herero-Aufstand).
The Scutztruppe (the German ‘security force’ in Deutsch-Südwestafrika) were initially caught off guard, seemingly unable to contain the unrest. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s government soon flooded the colony with 19,000 regular German troops (an overwhelming force in a country that had a total population of maybe 110,000).
The German forces, led by Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha (1848 – 1920), who was famed for his ruthless conduct during the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900-1), was an ideological white supremacist and genocidal fanatic (a mindset shared by many of his colleagues). He saw his mission as not merely suppressing the uprising but annihilating the Herero and Nama peoples altogether. Trotha famously wrote:
“I believe that the nation [of the Herero and Nama] as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country …This will be possible if the water-holes [in the desert] are occupied. The constant movement of our troops will enable us to find the small groups of this nation who have moved backwards and destroy them gradually”.
After defeating the main Herero-Nama army at the Battle of Waterberg (August 11, 1904), the conflict turned into a brutal guerrilla war, whereupon small, highly mobile native units, taking advantage of their superior knowledge of the desert, ambushed German troops. However, Trotha’s men (aided by examples of the present map) proceeded to simply overwhelm the countryside, hunting down the Herero and Nama warriors, slaughtering many (even those who surrendered after being promised civil treatment), while banishing the civilians (women and children) to remote parts of the desert void of working wells, where almost all perished due to thirst or starvation.
The Herero and Nama that the Germans decided to bring into captivity were sent the concertation camps (the most infamous being Shark Island), where most died from the maltreatment, starvation and disease. Perhaps even more disturbingly, the Germans, conducted horrific, deranged scientific experiments on the captives seeking ‘to prove the racial superiority of Europeans’, while taking their remains to Germany as gruesome trophies.
In the end, Germany utterly crushed the Herero-Nama revolt, granting them total control of Deutsch-Südwestafrika. However, they killed as much as 80% of the indigenous population, as 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama had died (the exact numbers will never be known). While Europeans killing Africans for their land was nothing new, the ideological and scientific approach that the Germans took to the Herero-Nama Genocide, with its disgusting racial experiments, reached a new level of depravity. Many modern scholars have sought links between the Herero-Nama Genocide and The Holocaust of World War II.
As it turned out, the Germans’ efforts were all for nothing, as Germany would lose control of Southwest Africa (then a largely depopulated, ravaged land) to Britain, in 1915, during World War I. The Herero and Nama, who were to suffer further under the Apartheid regime of the Republic of South Africa (which ruled Southwest Africa from 1948 to 1990), have taken generations to recover for the genocide. Fortunately, now they have their own independent country, Namibia, which is enjoying something of renaissance buoyed by a commodities boom and tourism.
The Present Map: Guide for Guerilla Warfare, Blueprint for Genocide
Upon the outbreak of the Herero Wars, the Schutztruppe were alarmed by the fact that they were expected to fight a guerilla insurgency in a country which to them remained largely an enigma. Indeed, Deutsch-Südwestafrika had never been systematically mapped, and much of its largely desert landscape had never even been visited by Europeans, while other areas were known only by rough sketches. In many places, the Germans had to rely upon local guides, as no maps existed. On the plus side, the colony’s coastlines had long been perfectly charted, and many areas near the key German towns and agrarian colonies, Christian missions and the corridors along railways and major roads had been mapped to a high standard, while other areas were covered by sketches of lesser but still viable quality.
In January 1904, the General Staff of the German Army made an emergency request to the Kolonial-kartographischen Institut to create what would be the first accurate general map of the Deutsch-Südwestafrika to scale that could inform operation military use. The Institut, the German colonial mapping agency, was funded by the Colonial Ministry, but operated out of the premises of the esteemed Berlin commercial cartographic publisher of Dietrich Reimer. The Insitut was led by its director, Max Moisel, and his top lieutenant, Paul Sprigade, who were the foremost German authorities on the cartography of Africa. For this project, Sprigade assumed the lead role, while Moisel acted as second chair.
For some time, the Institut shelved all other projects, and worked 24/7 on assembling the best available geographic sources on Deutsch-Südwestafrika, raiding the archives of the colonial, foreign and war ministries, mining, trading and construction firms, commercial map houses, as well as any maps held by private citizens, in addition to their own vast corpus of manuscript and printed material. While Sprigade and Moisel and their associates worked with great speed, they were careful to sort the ‘wheat from the chaff’ and their achievement in creating the Kriegskarte von Deutsch-Südwestafrika was truly impressive, especially given the stressful circumstances under which they operated.
Sprigade and Moisel used the best available general map of the protectorate, Paul Langhans’s Sudwest-Afrikanisches Schutzgebiet in 4 Blattern (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1896), done to scale 1:2,000,000, as their template but increased it scale to 1:800,000, creating a mid-scale map fit for military operational use. On the map, areas of elevation are shown by thick lines of shading (to enable them to be viewed over a campfire or by moonlight), while all rivers, wadis and dried lakes are carefully charted.
As explained in the key, in the lower margin of each sheet, symbols identify railway lines in service (bold black lines; namely, the Bahnstrecke Swakopmund–Windhoek, built 1897-1902, the 1654 km link that connected the sea with the colonial capital); railway lines under construction (hollow tracked lines; namely, the Otavibahn, which from 1906 connected Swakopmund to the mining districts in the far northeast); the locations of wells (a ‘u’ shape, of vital importance in a desert land); settlements with white inhabitants (block dots); mission stations (hollow dots with a cross); places with German military posts (underlined in orange); post offices (orange horns); telegraph lines (bold orange lines); routes of the Woermann steamship line in the seas (dashed orange lines); while numerous roads and desert trails are marked by black lines. Countless indigenous settlements and encampments, as well as European farms are also labeled, with many places featuring their elevations in metres. Notably, the map is today an important documentary source, as it preserves many original Herero and Nama placenames that subsequently disappeared due to Germanization.
While the map was far from perfect, a contemporary review captured the spirit of its public reception:
“The achievement contained in this large eight-sheet map, born out of necessity, so to speak, deserves every recognition… [Sprigade and Moisel] created a map suitable for both military and geographical purposes from heterogenous material, with extraordinarily rich, critically examined content and beautifully combined with clarity… It is by no means a sketch map, as one might assume given the speed with which it was produced, but a fully-fledged work” (Globus: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde, LXXXV. Band (1904), p. 213).
The map had obvious use as a masterplan for planning military operations in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, but also had a far more ominous purpose – as a blueprint for genocide. It was employed by Schutztruppe and army patrols to locate indigenous villages/encampments and the associated wells, whereupon they would kill, capture or banish the residents (mostly civilians) into the desert. They would then guard or poison the wells to ensure that those who remained in the area died of thirst.
How the Kriegskarte was Produced and Distributed
Importantly, the Kriegskarte consists of 8 individually titled sheets featuring 9 map sections that could be trimmed and joined to form a single map of irregular dimensions with maximum measurements of approximately 170 x 177.5 cm. The sheets are [1]. Zeesfontein; [2]. Owambo; [3]. Otawi; [4]. Windhuk; [5]. Rehoboth; [6]. Keetmanshoop; [7]. Warmbad; and [8]. Andara with Linjanti (with this sheet containing 2 maps sections). However, the map was not produced in ‘one go’. Under pressure to rush the map out as quickly as possible, the individual sheets were issued separately and serially from the Reimer workshop, with the first sheet Windhuk relaeased in very short order, followed by the Otawi and Rehoboth sheets, which all depicted especially important combat theatres. The first states of all 8 sheets were completed by end of February 1904, only 5 weeks after the Institut was given the order the start work on the project. The first shipments of the map sheets arrived in Deutsch-Südwestafrika aboard a Woermann line steamer in late March 1904.
The publisher issued the sheets in two forms. Some were issued without backing and folding into printed paper wrappers, bearing a small key map, the ‘Übersichsblatt zur Kriegskarte von Deutsch-Südwestafrika’ showing how the sheets could be connect, and sole for the price of 1 Mark each. Otherwise, as is the case here, the sheets were mounted upon linen by the publisher with printed labels on the verso. They sheets were intended for active use in the field and would have been more expensive that the other (flimsy) format. In this case, the publisher did not include the small key map anywhere, as it would have been considered cumbersome and unnecessary.
Notably, Sprigade and Moisel, after completing the first states of the sheets, obsessively searched for new and better sources, while taking note of suggested corrections that were submitted to them by interested parties. As such, they soon ran off an “improved” second, and even a third edition of some of the sheets. The second edition of the Windhuk sheet was issued in February 1904, even before many of the first editions of the other sheets were completed. As such, many complete sets of the map (such as the present example) are composed of sheets from a variety of editions, as people would replace the outdated sheets with those of the revised edition.
Specifically, the preset set of the Kriegskarte has 6 of its sheets as being of the first edition, while the Windhuk sheet is of the ‘Third edition improved and supplemented based on newly received materials, April 1904’, while the Warmbad is of the ‘Second improved edition, July 1904’, so allowing the user to have the most up-to-date view of the country possible.
The present example of the map is remarkable, as it is an authentic artifact of the Herero Wars, as its sheets, all mounted upon original linen, are all slightly worn and stained from being carried (likely on mounted patrol) through the desert. The versos feature evidence of provenance, including the handstamp of the ‘Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Südwestafrika / Feldintendantur’ [‘Imperial Protection Force for Southwest Africa / Field Directorate’]; the handwritten label of “Walther Rasch / Sergeant 3. Proviant Kolonne / II Abteilung” [“Walther Rasch / Sergeant of the 3rd Provisional Column / II. Department”]; and the name “Jeske” penned in manuscript. Additionally, the Windhuk and Rehoboth sheets feature numerous places underlined in contemporary blue crayon, indicating that the map users were likely operating in the central part of the protectorate (which was the main theatre of the war), while all the sheets bear tack marks in their corners, revealing that they were likely at one point mounted to the wall of an army outpost.
Max Moisel, Paul Sprigade and the Cartography of Germany’s Colonies
Germany, a country that became unified only in 1871, did not possess any overseas colonies prior to the 1880s. However, Germany possessed about the most technically sophisticated land surveying and map publishing capabilities in the world. Moreover, many Germans, either on their own commercial initiative, or working for foreign governments had, during the 18th and 19th centuries, created many of the most important maps of the Middle East, South Africa, Indonesia, Latin America and the United States.
In the 1880s, Germany acquired several overseas colonies, including German East Africa, German Southwest Africa, Togoland, Cameroon, Eastern New Guinea, and the Caroline Islands; many of these lands were hitherto not well mapped. New surveys needed to be commissioned and the resulting maps edited and published. In the early years of their colonial era, the German State Colonial Office, the Reichs-Kolonialamt, had to decide whether to set up its own mapmaking agency (expensive and technically difficult) or to find a more innovative approach.
The firm of Dietrich Reimer (founded in 1845) in Berlin, was one of the world’s most esteemed cartographic publishing houses, long associated with Heinrich Kiepert, the foremost modern cartographer of Turkey and the Middle East. Since 1891, the firm was led by Ernst Vohsen, an old Africa hand who was a director of the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft. Under Vohsen’s influence the Reichs-Kolonialamt increasingly turned to the Reimer firm to fulfil its map drafting and publishing commissions.
Enter Max Moisel (1869 – 1920), a cartographer who had joined the Reimer firm in 1888. Moisel was so gifted at analyzing and editing sources from the field, and drafting them into finished maps, that he brought the firm’s colonial mapping up to an entirely new level of excellence.
Working closely with Moisel was his long-time colleague, Paul Sprigade (1863 – 1928), a native of Silesia, who had worked for the Reimer firm since 1883, while specializing in colonial cartography since 1892. He managed many important projects, including, from 1895, serving as the editor of the Kleinen Deutschen Kolonialatlas, a continually updated series of pocket atlases of the German colonies. He was also instrumental in the production of the Karte von Deutche-Ostafriaka, a monumental survey of the colony, published in a series of 29 sheets (Berlin: Reimer, 1895-7).
In 1899, in good part due to Vohsen’s lobbying and Moisel and Sprigade’s talent, the Reichs-Kolonialamt decided to create the Kolonial-kartographischen Institut, that would operate as part of the Reimer firm, working out of their premises and manned by their employees, but would funded entirely be the minstry. The Institut would be given a monopoly on official cartographic work relating the German colonies. Moisel was appointed as the first director, and of the Institut, with Sprigade as his deputy.
Moisel and Sprigade published the Grosser deutscher Kolonialatlas (1901) and drafted several fine large format maps of individual colonies. The Kriegskarte von Deutsch-Südwestafrika project, led by Sprigade, stands out, as an especially impressive achievement, accomplished under the most challenging circumstances.
Notably, Sprigade became the foremost authority on the mapping of Togo, overseeing the creation of the first large scale general map of the protectorate, the Karte von Togo / 1:200 000 (10 Sheets, 1902-10). In 1907 he toured Togo, which permitted him to make many important corrections to the map.
In 1908, Moisel travelled to Cameroon, where he learned first-hand about the countryside and the nature of surveying in African frontier environments. This led to the publication of his colossal Karte von Kamerun (31 sheets, completed 1910).
On the eve of the World War I, the Kolonial-kartographischen Institut employed over 60 mapmakers and support staff and played a major role in informing the German military effort in Africa. However, Germany lost the war and with it all her colonies, so compelling the Institut to close in 1920.
A Note on Rarity
The present map is rare as complete with all 8 sheets. While we can locate around 10 or so complete examples in institutions (ex. Staatbibliothek zu Berlin; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Harvard University, Cambridge University Library), they very seldom appear on the market. Apart from the present offering, the last complete example of the map offered for sale, of which we are aware, appeared at a German auction in 2012.
References: Staatbibliothek zu Berlin: Mapp. XX,81; Bibliothèque nationale de France: GE DD-954; Harvard University Library: MAP-LC G8620 s800 .S6; Cambridge University Library: Maps.d.506.90.1-; OCLC: 175010462, 762053826, 642972196, 48899937, 1252311368; Geographische Zeitschrift, zehnter jahrgang (Leipzig, 1904), pp. 183, 236, 238; Globus: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde, LXXXV. Band (1904), pp. 145, 213; Jana MOSER, Untersuchungen zur Kartographiegeschichte von Namibia: Die Entwicklung des Karten- und Vermessungswesens von den Anfängen bis zur Unabhängigkeit 1990, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Dresden (2007), pp. 164-6.
