Anyone have any idea what year these Luderitz Celebrations might have been happening? I recognise the BRitish and ZA flag, but the 3rd one?
The flag on the 3rd from right is from Germany
Quote from: Michael Alexander on July 04, 2008, 07:43:15 PM
Anyone have any idea what year these Luderitz Celebrations might have been happening? I recognise the BRitish and ZA flag, but the 3rd one?
Mike,
This photo was taken on the opening of the Adolf Luderitz mamorial on the Shark Peninsula, with the Light house in the back, the flag is Black, Red, Gold and is the German flag. Do not know the year.
Thanks Guys, would be nice to put a year to the pic....
Going by the dress code, I would say some time in the 50s.
That place has very bad history, as far as I can remember?
Is there anything you can tell about the history Richard?
Hi Georg,
I have below a bit of what we were taught and some articles off the net which will make the history of Shark Island more clear and give a better understanding of where this sad part of Namibia's history originated
Some time back on the History channel on DSTV here in South Africa they had a documentary about the Herero Wars and the concentration camps in the then German South West Africa.
It is a part of history we as children of the 60s and 70s all touched on and only learned about what the then SA government wanted us to know.
As we were taught, the war was between the then German rulers and the Herero nation. We learned that the Herero started the war and the German colonial troops ended the war by driving many of the Herero into the Kalahari Desert, where many of them died and some of them that survived still live today.
This bit about the Herero War is from the History World site on the internet:
The early years of the German presence are relatively calm. Only about 2000 traders and farmers are in the region by 1896, and their relations with the dominant local tribe, the Herero, are for the most part peaceful. However, in 1897 a natural disaster gives the settlers an unexpected advantage.
In 1897, South West Africa is reached by a previously unknown cattle plague, the rinderpest. Deriving originally from an outbreak in 1889 in distant Somaliland, the plague is not carried across the Zambezi until 1896. Now it devastates the flocks of the Herero, exclusively a cattle-raising people. In desperation, they sell for very little, to the German settlers, much of their pasture and half their surviving cattle.
The catastrophe seems to have benefited the Europeans. However, it prompts the Herero to attempt, in 1904, a desperate uprising against the German intruders.
During a few days, in January 1904, Herero warriors kill every German they can find whom they consider capable of carrying arms. Methodically they spare women and children, German missionaries and Europeans of other nationalities. The total number of German deaths is not much above 100. However, the event is brutal and terrifying. It prompts over-reaction in Berlin, where the emperor William II selects for the task of reprisal an officer known for his severity, General Luther von Trotha.
Von Trotha is sent out to Africa with instructions to put down the uprising 'by fair means or foul'. He selects the foulest imaginable.
During the summer of 1904, inconclusive warfare continues between the Herero and the German forces already in the region. By the time von Trotha is ready for action with his reinforcements, in August, the main body of the Herero are grouped on the Waterberg plateau, adjacent to an extension of the Kalahari desert. Von Trotha surrounds them with his German detachments, leaving only one exit from the circle - in the direction of the desert.
When the tribesmen have fled into the desert, von Trotha places a line of German guard posts to prevent their return. With no water, in oven-like temperatures, some 8000 men perish together with their women, children and remaining cattle, 80 % of them perished.
Von Trotha follows this action with a Vernichtungsbefehl ('extermination order') issued in October. It announces that any Herero found living within the borders of the German territory would be shot. His proclamation makes chilling reading, as an unusually blunt statement of the concept of 'ethnic cleansing'. It is the century's first example of its most shameful characteristic, genocide.
News of von Trotha's action profoundly shocks Germany and the rest of Europe. Berlin countermands the extermination order. In 1905, von Trotha is removed from his command and recalled home. Nevertheless, the emperor decorates him on his return, for devotion to the fatherland.
What we were not taught is that many Herero (men, women and children) were captured and put in concentration camps established at Swakopmund and Luderitz. The one at Luderitz was on the Shark Island peninsula, which consists mainly of rocks and barren ground.
Many died in these camps of hunger, thirst and exposure to the elements - heat of the sun during the day, the cold of night in the desert and Atlantic Ocean.
Another Article from the net:
The Concentration Camp
There were five concentration camps in all in Namibia, then German South West Africa, between 1904 and 1908. They were called Konzentrationslager in reports and succeeded South African camps by two years.
The anti-colonial struggles of 1904 to 1908 were characterised by two major uprisings: the Herero uprising in northern and central Namibia and the Nama uprising in the south. In January 1904 war broke out between the Herero nation and the German colonial administration in Namibia. The colonists were caught by surprise and suffered many defeats in the early stages of the sporadic and uncoordinated war.
After about six months the picture changed. The battle at the Waterberg, in the north-east, on August 11 1904, marked the beginning of the end for the Herero, who fled in their thousands into the Omaheke sandveld, perishing in high numbers. The Herero nation was literally uprooted as an entire people spread across the Kalahari, trying to flee German punitive patrols. Those who did not reach Bechuanaland, now Botswana, either succumbed to the desert or were picked up by German patrols and put in concentration camps.
In 1904 camps had been set up in Windhoek, Okahandja and at the coastal town of Swakopmund. In 1905 two new camps were opened in Karibib and Lüderitz.
In terms of mortality statistics, the Namibian camps were horrific. An official report on the camps in 1908 described the mortality rate as 45,2% of all prisoners held in the five camps. The prisoners were typically fenced in, either by thorn-bush fences or by barbed wire. As the word concentration implies, thousands of people were crammed into small areas. The Windhoek camp held about 5 000 prisoners of war in 1906. Rations were minimal, consisting of a daily allowance of a handful of uncooked rice, some salt and water. Rice was an unfamiliar foodstuff to most, and the uncommon diet was the cause of many deaths. Disease was uncontrolled. An almost total lack of medical attention, unhygienic living quarters, insufficient clothing and a high concentration of people meant that diseases such as typhoid spread rapidly. Beatings and maltreatment were also part of life in the camps as the sjambok was often swung over the backs of prisoners who were forced to work.
The concentration camp on Shark Island, in the coastal town of Lüderitz, was the worst of the five Namibian camps. Lüderitz lies in southern Namibia, flanked by desert and ocean. In the harbour lies Shark Island, which then was connected to the mainland only by a small causeway. The island is now, as it was then, barren and characterised by solid rock carved into surreal formations by the hard ocean winds. The camp was placed on the far tip of the relatively small island, where the prisoners would have suffered complete exposure to the gale-force winds that sweep Lüderitz for most of the year. The first prisoners to arrive were, according to a missionary called Kuhlman, 487 Herero ordered to work on the railway between Lüderitz and Kubub. The island soon took its toll: in October 1905 Kuhlman reported the appalling conditions and high death rate among the Herero on the island. Throughout 1906 the island had a steady inflow of prisoners, with 1 790 Nama prisoners arriving on September 9 alone. In the annual report for Lüderitz in 1906, an unknown clerk remarked that "the Angel of Death" had come to Shark Island. German Commander Von Estorff wrote in a report that approximately 1 700 prisoners had died by April 1907, 1 203 of them Nama. In December 1906, four months after their arrival, 291 Nama died (a rate of more than nine people a day).
Missionary reports put the death rate at between 12 and 18 a day. As much as 80% of the prisoners sent to the Shark Island concentration camp never left the island. Fred Cornell, a British aspirant diamond prospector, was in Lüderitz when the Shark Island camp was being used. Cornell wrote of the camp: "Cold - for the nights are often bitterly cold there - hunger, thirst, exposure, disease and madness claimed scores of victims every day, and cartloads of their bodies were every day carted over to the back beach, buried in a few inches of sand at low tide, and as the tide came in the bodies went out, food for the sharks." During the war a number of people from the Cape, strapped for money, sought employment as transport riders for German troops in Namibia. Upon their return to the Cape some of these people recounted their stories, causing debate in the local media.
On September 28 1905 an article appeared in the Cape Argus, with the heading: "In German S. W. Africa: Further Startling Allegations: Horrible Cruelty". In the article, Percival Griffith, "an accountant of profession, who owing to hard times, took up on transport work at Angra Pequena [Lüderitz]", related his experiences. "There are hundreds of them, mostly women and children and a few old men ... when they fall they are sjamboked by the soldiers in charge of the gang, with full force, until they get up ... On one occasion I saw a woman carrying a child of under a year old slung at her back, and with a heavy sack of grain on her head ... she fell. "The corporal sjamboked her for certainly more than four minutes and sjamboked the baby as well ... the woman struggled slowly to her feet, and went on with her load. She did not utter a sound the whole time, but the baby cried very hard." These atrocities did not go unnoticed by the Germans, who wrote reports, articles and letters about the camps. Shark Island came up in a German Parliament debate in 1906, when the Social Democrats demanded to know what was going on there. It seems, however, that generations since then have tried hard to forget this history. The South African camps have memorials and written histories, the Namibian camps do not. On the site where Shark Island once lay now lies a caravan park. Even worse, at the entrance of the park is a monument to the German soldiers who died between 1905 and 1908 a monument to the victor and not the victim. The centenary of the 1904 war is just around the corner; perhaps Namibians will take the opportunity to reflect, not so much on what is remembered but rather on what is not.
I believe Shark Island today is a advertised holiday resort – how things change!
Spoke to my cousin in Lüderitz. Interesting that it used to be an island, but rocks and soil was dumped there to make it a peninsula during the German time. To the left (in background) on the photo there's a grave and cross (memorial) of the Nama head Captain Fredericks as well. Must have been a "herdenking", not unveiling going by the drums used to hold the flags.