Prof. Dr. Job Shipululo Amupanda
What later became the first genocide of the 20th century was enabled by the software of racism that W.E.B du Bois correctly captured as the operating system of the 20th century stating, in 1903, that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line”. Du Bois wrote this one year before the first genocide of the 20th century was committed against our people, in Namibia. He was analysisng the psychosis of those who later became the perpetrators of genocide. In the 20th century, white people and Europeans drew what Frantz Fanon called ‘the line of the human’. This line divided human beings into two zones – the zone of being and the zone of non-being. Whites and Europeans were hitherto located in the zone of being. The rest of humanity in general, and the blacks and non-whites in particular, were located in the zone of non-being. Only the lives of those in the zone of being mattered.
Their humanity mattered for they were regarded as the only humans. In contrast, those in the zone of non-being are those whose humanity did not matter. They were (and are) seen as half or sub-humans. From the beginning, racism dismembered black people from the human family. When Europeans sat in Berlin from December 1884 until February 1885, dividing the African amongst themselves, their orientation and point of departure was that they were not dealing with human beings. Colonialism, simply understood as the occupation, control and domination of a sovereign space by the foreign other, owes its existence to the ideology of racism that is underpinned by the cartographies of the zone of being and the zone of non-being.
To all those dismembered from the human family, Europeans chose to do whatever they wanted. The man’s inhumanity to man followed. Towards the late 1890s, Europeans went to other continents to kill and plunder the resources of those they regarded as sub-humans. In 1901, when China was under the Qing Dynasty, Europeans formed an alliance to fight the Chinese who were resisting colonial occupation in northern China. The alliance consisted of the Germans with about 1 000 troops under Alfred von Waldersee, the British with about 12 000 troops under Claude MacDonald, the Americans with about 3 500 troops under Adna Chaffee, the French also with about 3 500 troops under Henri-Nicolas Frey, the Russian with about 14 000 troops under Nikolai Linevich, the Italians with about 2 600 troops, Japanese with close to 21 000 troops under Fukushima Yasumasa and the Austran-Hungary with about 300 known troops.
This uprising known as the ‘Boxer rebellion’ in western text was really an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist rebellion by the Chinese in northern China. It resulted in several deaths and looting of Chinese resources by these European powers. Of interest to us is that Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha formed part of the German troop as a brigade commander during this so-called ‘Boxer Rebellion’ in 1901. Because he was a known killer of the ‘sub-humans’, the Germans appointed him to extend his killing skills to the Namibian soil, targeting black communities who were actively fighting the German colonial forces several months before his arrival on 11 June 1904. When he issued an extermination order against our people, including women and children, he was doing so informed by an ideology of racism that dismembered the Africans from the human family.
The whites were always united in the dismemberment of the blacks and the Africans from the human family. It is for this reason that once our people were rounded up in concentration camps, European academics such as Eugen Fischer and others, with racism and dismemberment software, collected the human skulls in 1906, sometimes requiring fellow blacks to remove the skin to reach the skulls, for exportation to Germany. Fischer studies, using our people as subjects, concluded that black blood is apparently inferior. There is no difference between Von Trother and Fischer.
Once this important aspect is lost, as is the case in contemporary ‘welcoming remarks’ discourse on genocide, one is trapped in bilateral and conflict resolution beuracratism. The argument that ought to center the genocide discourse is that there was always Genocide continuity. Eugene Fischer moved from examining Namibian skulls and anti-racial mixing theories using Namibian bodies in 1913 to anti semitic policies and training Schutzstaffel (SS) doctors in the 1930s. Before the Auschwitz concentration camp established in the 1940s, there was a concentration camp called Shark Islandconcentration camp established by the Germans between 1904 and 1905 in Namibia. Before Final Solution of the 1940s, there were Extermination Orders of 1904 and 1905 in Namibia.
The Genocide continuity approach is an undisputable armament that would lead to one conclusion that the only difference between the 1904 Genocide and the Jews Holocoust is the numbers. The current theatrics and televised approach of ‘masters of ceremonies, keynote address and vote of thanks’ would prove fatal in the fullness of time. Granted, it is a good start. But to pass through the eye of a needle requires astute architectural minds beyond ethnonationalist and political triumphalism.
*Job Shipululo Amupanda is a professor of political studies and a Member of the Namibian Parliament. He is the Activist-in-Chief of the Affirmative Repositioning (AR) movement and an Associate Scholar at the Friedrich-Alexander University.
