30 years of concentration camps, executions, rape and looting: Germany's colonial era in Africa was neither short nor peaceful. While Germany has historically shied away from revisiting its colonial history, recent efforts have been made to recognize the brutality that happened in Cameroon, Togo, Tanzania, Namibia, and other territories.
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00:00Between 1884 and 1919, Africans fought German colonial rule on the continent, in the West,
00:13East and Southwest.
00:16For over 30 years, Africans resisted racist and exploitative treatment by the Germans.
00:25Union society is totally traumatized by its colonial history.
00:32It would be a hypocrisy if we could forget their sacrifice.
00:43Even though it's a very ugly history, we need to preserve it and people need to learn from it.
00:53If free activists are convinced, important lessons can be learned from this violent shared history with Germany.
01:03Marilyn Douala Mangabel has made it her mission to shed light on the German colonial period in Cameroon.
01:09Her organization, Douala Art, promotes an artistic exploration of the subject.
01:18Union society is totally traumatized by its colonial history.
01:24It was a period of great rapture and violence against traditions.
01:30It introduced a completely new mode of being, politically, administratively, religiously, spiritually, economically and in society.
01:46German colonial rule created modern-day Cameroon.
01:52And it was at the Berlin Conference that, little by little, the name Cameroon emerged to define a territory.
02:12Hamburg-based merchants were the drivers of colonialism in Cameroon.
02:17They were already there when Consul General Gustav Nachtigall arrived in 1884 to sign treaties with leaders of the coastal elite, the Acqua and Douala families.
02:29Adolf Wöhrmann, together with other merchants like Janssen and Thormalen, had lobbied Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to acquire German colonies.
02:38At the Berlin Conference in 1884-85, European leaders carved up the African continent into European colonies.
02:47Cameroonian coastal elites signed so-called protection treaties to secure their own trading interests.
02:55But the Germans interpreted those treaties as a transfer of control from coastal elites to Germany.
03:02In Namibia, it was German merchant Adolf Lüderitz who began acquiring land through intermediaries.
03:08Protection treaties, often misleading or signed under duress, started the transition of land ownership from indigenous people to Germans.
03:19Here, in southwest Africa, Germans came not only to exploit, but to settle.
03:26In Tanzania, the center of German colonial history is found in the coastal city of Dar es Salaam.
03:35Bernharden Terhondi is part of an initiative that saved an important historic building here, the old Boma, from demolition.
03:45So the building at the back is where the city of Dar es Salaam started.
03:49Built in 1860 by Sultan of Zanzibar, and later used by the Germans for administration.
03:54Started to be used for administration from 1887 to 1903.
03:59And from here, this is where all the German colonial administration expanded.
04:09The natural harbor at Dar es Salaam convinced the German colonial administrators to move their headquarters to the city.
04:17It was Kai Peters who had long before dreamt of a grand East African empire for Germany.
04:22He had signed the first few so-called Protection Treaties with local leaders, even before getting the backing of then-Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
04:31But coastal communities and the Zanzibari Sultan resisted Germany's attempt to seize lucrative trade routes,
04:37leading to the Abushirin-Kingdom, which is now the capital of Germany.
04:42In response, Germany sent Hermann von Wisman to form a Schutztruppe, or Protection Force,
04:48using mostly African mercenaries, or Askaris, and German officers.
04:56A deal with the British Empire followed.
04:58German East Africa included modern-day Burundi and Rwanda and reached all the way up to Lake Victoria.
05:05In Namibia, the colony was 835,000 square kilometers, roughly one-and-a-half times the size of the German Empire at the time.
05:14Local leaders like Hendrik Wittboi and later Samuel Maharero initially tried to cooperate with the German colonial administration,
05:22but local Nama and Herero groups suffered increasingly from the influence of the British Empire.
05:27In Cameroon, German colonial officers formed a police corps, too, again mostly composed of men from other African countries.
05:34They started a brutal reign and conducted expeditions to the hinterlands,
05:38subjugating local people and stealing resources, especially palm oil.
05:43In Togo, too, the German imperialists were forced to flee the country,
05:47and the German imperialists were forced to flee the country,
05:51subjugating local people and stealing resources, especially palm oil.
05:55In Togo, too, which Germany promoted as a model colony, violent and racist rule was not random, but rather systematically imposed.
06:05In East Africa, Karl Peters, who governed in the Kilimanjaro region for some years,
06:11gained notoriety for arbitrary executions of locals who resisted German rule.
06:17The German protection force was feared for its practices of hanging leaders publicly, raiding villages and burning lands.
06:24During this time, bones or skulls of victims were shipped to Germany for research into scientific racism.
06:32Germany introduced punishing taxation and forced indigenous people to build infrastructure to extract African wealth for Germany.
06:47In East Africa, this led to the Maji-Maji War, in which several different groups united and fought German colonialism.
06:55It lasted from 1905 to 1907. It is estimated to have cost 300,000 lives and decimated communities.
07:04They lost their lives because they wanted to protect their communities, which are our communities today.
07:11They wanted to protect the resources, they wanted to protect land and everything.
07:15So it would be hypocrisy if we could forget their sacrifice.
07:19It's very important for us as a younger generation to also know our own history, to better determine the future.
07:26In Namibia, in around 1900, German colonialists tried to marginalize the Nama and Ova-Herrero.
07:33More conflicts followed, and in 1904, war broke out between Germany and the Ova-Herrero, culminating in the decisive Battle of Arterberg.
07:42German General Lothar von Trotter issued his extermination order which spared no Ova-Herrero found in German-occupied territory.
07:50Men, women and children were forced into the waterless Omaheke Desert, where many of them died of thirst and starvation.
07:57The remaining Ova-Herrero and Nama people were put into concentration camps in Swakopmund and Shark Island near Lüderitz.
08:06The concentration camps were part of a genocidal system that was set in place during German colonial rule in Namibia.
08:15Today, in Swakopmund, a well-maintained graveyard for German soldiers is to be found near a much bigger gravesite where Herrero and Nama victims are buried.
08:27In 2015, Laidlaw Perenganda started teaching about the cruelties that happened here.
08:33His Swakopmund Genocide Museum is small, but full of lessons.
08:38Most of the prisoners that wanted to run away, their heads were decapitated in Swakopmund.
08:44And then women were forced to boil their heads, you know.
08:47And then they were taking off the skin of pieces of broken glasses.
08:52So that is a very famous postcard of soldiers picking skulls.
08:56It was during the genocide in Germany.
09:00So this skull, 787, you see here, it came from Germany, around 52 skulls.
09:07So most of these skulls are still in Germany.
09:12Laidlaw is a descendant of an Ova-Herrero leader.
09:16His grandmother suffered and survived the appalling conditions in Swakopmund.
09:21Until not so long ago, this burial ground was not even properly cordoned off.
09:26People walked on it, children played on it.
09:30Laidlaw Perenganda put up a fight for the site to be preserved and remembered.
09:35Sometimes when the wind blows, human remains are always coming out.
09:40It's a very special place to me.
09:43I always come here to give homage to our people.
09:46Most of our people were buried in shallow graves here.
09:50That's why I'm very much attached to this place.
09:54And I'm making sure that it's been restored four times per year.
10:00When the camps were closed down in 1908,
10:03the remaining Nama and Herrero communities were left in a very fragile and vulnerable state.
10:09Meanwhile in Cameroon, the local elites had sent their children to be educated in Germany,
10:14among them young Rudolf Mangebel, Maria Mandessi-Bell and Mpundu Aqua.
10:21In 1914, Rudolf Mangebel, King of the Douala,
10:25formally protested against colonial cruelties at the German Parliament and demanded equality.
10:32His great-granddaughter, Marilyn Douala Mangebel, is honouring his legacy today.
10:39He was the victim of a false trial, right here, in this place.
10:44All the other resistance fighters in Cameroon, and there were many,
10:48disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
10:51Rudolf Douala Mangebel and Adolf Ngozudin were assassinated right over here.
10:59The Germans left the bodies there for three days as deterrence.
11:04But instead of being deterred, many Cameroonians sided with the Allies
11:08and turned against the Germans when the First World War broke out in 1914.
11:14After the war ended, Cameroon was divided into British and French colonies.
11:21Independence was attained in 1960, and the country unified a year later.
11:27But the division created a problem.
11:30In German East Africa, German Askari units under Pau von Lettow-Vorbeck
11:35fought with Allied British and Belgian soldiers.
11:39A large number of African soldiers died here.
11:42The fighting only stopped in 1918, after the war in Europe ended.
11:50The war in Cameroon was not over yet.
11:53The fighting only stopped in 1918, after the war in Europe ended.
12:00Tanganyika became a British mandate. Rwanda and Burundi came under Belgian rule.
12:06Independence was attained in 1961 and 1962.
12:11In Namibia, during World War I, South African troops had expelled
12:15the German colonial administration by 1915.
12:18However, many settlers stayed.
12:24Though Laidlaw Perenganda is facing a lot of adversities,
12:28he's optimistic that a better future is possible.
12:34When we are restoring the grave, we are having a few German Namibians,
12:37young people that are helping us.
12:40I'm pretty much sure that we are moving in the right direction.
12:45We need to preserve the history from both sides.
12:48It's part of our history, even though it's a very ugly history.
12:51We need to preserve it and people need to learn from it.
12:55These three are putting up a fight against forgetting these painful memories.
13:00So they can serve as powerful memorials and educational spaces
13:04for present and future generations.