Thus perished the Hereros—a vigorous, intelligent people, like all the Bantus: to-day a miserable, broken remnant. "The late war, wrote the missionary Schowalter in 1907, has reduced the Herero tribe by more than a quarter. After the battles on the Waterberg the rebels disappeared in the sandy desert, and here the bones of 12,000 to 15,000 men who fell victims to hunger and thirst lie bleaching." Wholesale executions and forced labour on the Coast completed the work of destruction.
The moral of it all—the old, familiar, ghastly story, in all its futility and short-sighted greed, is stated with fluent veracity in the record of a conversation between one of the earlier settlers and some newly arrived German soldiers:
Children, how should it be otherwise? They (the Hereros) were ranchmen and landowners, and we were there to make them landless working-men, and they rose up in revolt … this is their struggle for independence. They discussed, too, what the Germans really wanted here. They thought we ought to make that point clear. The matter stood this way: there were missionaries here who said you are our dear brothers in the Lord, and we want to bring you these benefits—namely, faith, love, and hope: and there were soldiers, farmers, and traders, and they said we want to take your cattle and your land gradually away from you and make you slaves without legal rights. These two things didn't go side by side. It is a ridiculous and crazy project.
"How should it be otherwise?" The question is easily answered. There is room in colonisable Africa for the White man and the Black. There is no necessity for these robberies, these brutalities, these massacres. They are the product of lust, of greed, of cruelty, and of incompetence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
"The Life of Lord Granville." Fitzmaurice. (Longman & Co.).
"The Evolution of Modern Germany." Dawson. (Fisher Unwin).
"Germany." Alison Phillips and others. (Encyclopaedia Britannica Co.).
"The Colonisation of Africa." Sir Harry Johnston. (Cambridge Press).
