THE SOUTH-WEST AFRICA CAMPAIGN: Brits order Boers to kick Germans out of their favorite African colony

One of the first actions taken by the British Empire in Africa after hostilities had broken out in World War I was to get their South African client government to attack the German's South West African colony, in the area now known as Namibia. In August 1914 Louis Botha, the Prime Minister of modern South Africa's predecessor nation, The Union of South Africa, said he could send some troops to France. London asked him if he could invade German South West Africa instead, and Botha gave the order to invade to his armed forces.

However, this wasn't what many of his Generals or other soldiers of the Boers wanted to do. Only 12 years before, the Boers had been at war with Britain, and Britain had been responsible for a terrible scorched earth campaign against the Boers, finally sending tens of thousands of them to concentration camps (this is where the name actually comes from, they were concentrated in small areas). Some 27,000 whites and 14,000 blacks or more died of starvation and disease. Other blacks, maybe as many as 600,000 or so, were killed by the Boers during this time, as the oppressive Boers thought the Blacks were allying or might ally with the British. Well that's off the point, the real issue was that Germany had been their ally during this 'Second Boer War' of 1899-1902. Many of the Boers had escaped across the border and never signed the peace agreement and fealty to the British government that Britain had made the Boers sign as a condition of peace after defeating them.

And so it was that when the call to arms came, some Boer Generals were conspiring together to protest, resign, rebel -- some combination of these. But what really set off the Maritz rebellion was the death of Koos de la Ray, General and war hero of the Second Boer War, when the car he was riding in was gunned down after riding through a government roadblock. The driver probably thought the government set up the roadblock to arrest the General, who was on his way to meet up with other conspiring war leaders opposed to the British. In reality the roadblock was set up to stop a group of murderous bandits known as the Foster Gang. His death on September 15, 1914 triggered the rebellion -- which was quashed pretty quickly by the Union of SA forces, who stayed true to their oath to the British Government.

The Boers weren't kind to the indiginous people of South Africa, as we know. But the Germans who they had kicked out by 1915 were actually worse. The first Genocide of the 20th century was not the Armenian genocide, as I suggested in an earlier post. It was actually the attempted German extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples -- specifically singled out for their race and identity for destruction, after they rebelled against the German colonists (The Germans had been enslaving their people to work on farms and in diamond mines, expropriating their land and settling the area). By 1907 there were only a small fraction of their original population left.