In the spring of 1904, while the Germans were otherwise occupied with rebellious Hereros, Hendrik Witbooi, grand chief of the Witbooi Hottentots, came under the influence of a mysterious self-appointed Christian prophet named Sturmann. Of mixed Dutch and African blood, Sturmann had lately smuggled himself into German South West Africa from the British Cape Colony across the Orange River. He believed Jehovah had appointed him to preach a gospel of extirpation—that is, he sought to rouse native tribes in a jihad that would drive all white men from the continent forever. To this end, he preached massacre and fire. Africa by God’s grace for the Africans! Such was the slogan of this ragged mystagogue, cut from the same cloth as other violent prophets through the ages, God’s instruments all: Think of Savonarola in Florence, submitting Renaissance masterpieces to the bonfires; of John Brown’s massacres in Bloody Kansas; of the Mahdi at Khartoum, directing his dervishes to cut down the brave but unfortunate British general Charles George Gordon.
Since, as Scripture has it, God has chosen those the world deems absurd to shame the wise (1 Cor. 1:27), Sturmann’s apocalyptic preaching found ready purchase in the wise old brain of Hendrik Witbooi. Hendrik was eighty-three. He had carefully shepherded the Witbooi Hottentots through war and diplomacy for the past fifty years and had long been a German ally. During the brutal struggle between the Kaiser and the Hereros he had directed his people to remain neutral—acutely aware of both the fighting capabilities of modern European armies and the technology gap between industrialized European civilizations and tribal African cultures. When Governor Leutwein repeatedly reminded Hendrik of his relative helplessness vis-à-vis the Kaiser, hoping to impress upon him the necessity of staying out of any Herero-German disagreement, the Hottentot chief replied testily: “I know very well that the German emperor is more powerful than I, but you don’t need to keep telling me about it.”
Leutwein was mollified, but shouldn’t have been. In other words, the certainty of defeat, Hendrik believed, was no reason not to start a fight in the first place. For God directed the outcome of battles and would protect His people with military miracles.
Since early youth, Hendrik Witbooi’s brain had been readying itself for the implantation of the kind of apocalyptic visions peddled by Sturmann: Hendrik—educated by Rhenish missionaries and a devout Christian of the Calvinist variety—forbade the consumption of alcohol among his subjects, vigorously enforced the sanctity of the Sabbath, and meted out the death penalty for fornication and adultery. His own daughter, pregnant from an extramarital affair, gave birth in secret and killed the baby rather than face her father’s biblical wrath. Inevitably, Hendrik discovered his daughter’s transgression and sentenced her to death; only the timely intervention of the German authorities, in the person of District Officer Captain von Bergensdorff, saved the girl’s life. All ended well, with parent and offspring reconciled—a happy outcome reminiscent of the bit in Genesis between God and Abraham over the fate of Isaac, with von Bergensdorff playing the part of God.
Then, in August 1904, as the Hereros perished on the dry escarpments of the Waterberg and upon the Omaheke’s burning wastes, Sturmann’s ravings convinced Hendrik the time had come to act. “God the Father,” Sturmann announced, eyes blazing with righteousness, “will free the earth.” It is probable that Hendrik—part biblical patriarch, part Machiavelli—had been waiting for the Germans to destroy his hereditary enemies, the Hereros, before going to war. In any case Hendrik wrote an open letter to the chiefs of the other Herero tribes, explaining his decision to attack the victorious Germans in phrases redolent of Holy Writ:
“I have now stopped walking submissively,” he wrote. “I have put on the white feather of war. . . . The time is over when I will walk behind [the Germans] . . . and the Savior himself will now act, and he will free us through his grace and compassion.”
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On October 3, 1904, while the German Army dug in at the edge of the Omaheke, District Commissioner von Bergensdorff rode into Hendrik’s main camp nearly 1,000 miles away at Marienthal in Namaland—the home turf of the Hottentots—to reason with his old friend. Word of Hendrik’s bellicose letter had reached him; he also had it from informants that the Witbooi Hottentots were about to revolt. How could this be true? Time and again, the Witboois had made common cause with German forces to put down local squabbles; a state of peace had existed between Chief Hendrik Witbooi and Kaiser Wilhelm for twenty-five years. But Bergensdorff was shot out of the saddle by a Hottentot named Solomon Sahl moments after he entered their camp and hit the hard-packed, dry earth of Namaland dead.
Whether Hendrik Witbooi had ordered the death of his friend von Bergensdorff—who had made fair dealing with the Hottentots a point of honor—or whether his death was a bloody whim of Solomon Sahl’s is beside the point: It was the first act of the Hottentots’ general uprising. Over the next few days, rampaging Hottentot war parties killed every German soldier and civilian they could get their hands on, in a few bloody afternoons throwing off the yoke of European civilization they had worn for a generation.
This time, German settlers in Namaland, in a high state of anxiety since the Herero rebellion and thus on their guard, had managed to reach the security of local German blockhouses before the main attack, and the massacre failed in its primary objective. The German Army of the North under von Trotha, though still hunting down Herero stragglers, responded immediately. Colonel von Deimling headed south with six companies and two batteries of artillery. As the new year rolled around, about 5,000 German troopers were on the ground in Namaland, along with about 3,000 horses; everyone expected a speedy resolution to the crisis.
But the local terrain was even more waterless, more remote, and more hostile to German endeavors than Hereroland had been. And Herero territory, bisected by the Swakopmund-Windhoek Railway, had been far more accessible to arms and supplies from Germany. A railroad spur to Namaland, proposed by von Trotha, had been nixed by the Reichstag—too expensive and too hard to build. Only a single road, the Baiweg Trail, linked Namaland to Lüderitz Bay, the nearest “coastal indentation” where supplies could be brought ashore via lighters. The Baiweg Trail hardly merited the name; more of a general direction than a trail, it crossed the fearsome Namib Desert, its path continually obscured by shifting sand and marked only by the half-buried carcasses of the horses and oxen that had died along the way. Clearly, a German Army operating in a region as remote as Namaland would experience critical shortages of vital supplies. Everything, including water and down to the last bullet, would have to be trekked across the desert from the sea—a journey that took at least twenty-five days.
The Hottentots, though perhaps not as overtly warlike as their enemies the Hereros, were nonetheless cleverer and famously skilled in bushcraft. They proved, over three years of fighting, nearly impossible to catch and kill. Like the Hereros before them, they counted on the remote and forbidding nature of their homeland as a natural ally against the Germans. But they had an even greater ally they hadn’t counted on and didn’t understand: the Rickettsia bacteria, the infectious agent responsible for typhus. Rickettsia belongs to the obligate intracellular parasitic type of bacteria, which is to say it cannot live for long outside a host cell and makes the jump from animal to animal and from animal to human and from human to human and back again with relative ease, transferred via the excrement of the common body louse. Discovery of this louse-poop vector was still some years away, though medical authorities knew outbreaks could be controlled by frequent bathing and changes of clothes—preventative measures not available to men fighting in hot, waterless climates. Thus, typhus swept through the German Army in Namaland like a scythe.
On the march with von Deimling’s forces, von Lettow tells us, “water was so scarce that . . . there was not enough for washing. We had neither doctor nor thermometer. . . . I didn’t know I had typhus.” Patients crammed together in oxcarts heading for hospitals in Windhoek, he says, “died unnoticed.” Meanwhile, Schain, the surgeon general of the German Army in GSWA, faced with an overwhelming number of new cases and helpless to control the spread of the disease, went mad and had to be transported back to Germany—leaving in his place a handful of undertrained company physicians. For von Lettow’s company there was only a veterinarian named Moll. Moll, quickly infected, quickly died.
Typhus is characterized by a painful blotchy rash, high fevers, weakness, vomiting, and a certain fuzziness of thinking. A powerful immune system and an iron will to live were von Lettow’s only weapons in the fight. He survived the worst of the disease, he says, while in the saddle, and given his resistance to other infectious parasites later in East Africa, this is not beyond the realm of the probable. Von Lettow’s batman, a tough, hulking German peasant named Droste, came down with typhus and, reduced to skin and bones, wept with helplessness—though dehydrated as he was, only dust fell from his eyes. Von Lettow barely made it to Windhoek alive. He recuperated there for a while, thought himself cured, then suffered a relapse and became so weak he could barely raise a hand or hold a pencil. At last they evacuated him to Swakopmund, which, after a few months, sea air and ocean bathing, effected the cure at last.
When von Lettow returned to Namaland in late 1905, he found a countryside afire with war. A cumbersome, bumbling German Army had suffered many small defeats and a few middling catastrophes at the hands of a much smaller force of highly mobile Hottentots.
“Although the Hottentots were not as physically robust as the Hereros, they needed far less for survival,” von Lettow observed. “They were entirely armed with modern weapons and were excellent shots. We faced an opponent who was hard to come to grips with, and who would slip through our fingers and disappear, sometimes to regroup in our rear without us being aware of it. Their leaders were very able tacticians. Anyone who had to deal with old Hendrik Witbooi had to be extremely alert.”
Also, in von Lettow’s absence, Hendrik had been joined by a half-Hottentot/half-Herero desperado named Morenga, who commanded a large band of skilled cattle thieves. Morenga quickly proved himself just as difficult to defeat as Hendrik Witbooi—he was known for his intelligence and was notably humane to a defeated enemy. He spoke five languages, had worked the copper mines of the Cape Colony, and—it was said—had lived briefly in Europe. He refused to kill women and children and even forbade looting. Forced to live off the land, taking the livestock and produce of native herdsmen, he presented them “with a precisely itemized requisition that guaranteed the recipient a period of immunity” from further such depredations. He possessed, so the Germans reluctantly admitted, Grossmut, Umsicht, and Tatkraft (magnanimity, prudence, and energy), traits that in the end made him the most dangerous enemy of all.
Shortly after Morenga joined the fight, von Lettow, who had yearned for an independent field command, got it at last: von Deimling put him in charge of the 8th Company of the 2nd Field Regiment—80 riders, 160 horses, 4 ox wagons, 140 oxen, and 4 mules with carts and drivers—all tasked with the capture or killing of Morenga. Von Lettow then quickly assembled a staff of his own. They were capable officers and underofficers experienced in guerrilla warfare, “men who never missed a Hottentot track, could find their way on the land, knew the natives and their fighting methods, and were immediately aware when there was any danger of ambush.” Among these were a former trick rider from an American circus, a young Boer intimately familiar with the hills and canyons of Namaland, who, with his blond hair and blue eyes, looked like a Teutonic knight in the saddle; and von Lettow’s old batman, Droste, who had made a full recovery from the typhus that had killed so many of his comrades and had now become “a capable guerrilla fighter.”
The 8th penetrated Morenga’s territory at Ukama Station, not far from the Orange River, in February 1906. The sight of the river’s brown-orange flow, colored with the red mud of the region, gave von Lettow’s men pause. Most of them, except for von Lettow himself, fresh from the beach at Swakopmund, hadn’t seen a body of water larger than a puddle in more than two years. But despite the best efforts of the men of the 8th and others, the wily Morenga proved elusive. Still free, he had destroyed a dozen isolated German encampments, emerging seemingly out of nowhere and disappearing again into the bush. He had pulled off one of his greatest victories in this manner at Hartebeestmund the previous October, overrunning the entrenched German lines and killing forty-three officers and men in a matter of minutes.
“The whole German position in the southern part of the colony was shaken by a few score men,” as Bridgman puts it, “who were outnumbered at least twenty to one.”
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In the spring of 1906, von Lettow and his new command finally tracked Morenga to Ondermaitje, a flyspeck of a place, not far from the water hole at Duurdrift. It was evening. The sun dropped behind the sandveldt and a bright moon rose. Von Lettow did not abandon the pursuit, but rode on and on, the trail lit by bright moonlight. Around midnight, they saw the glow of campfires on the horizon in the direction of Duurdrift. They approached this ephemeral light stealthily, crawling to the top of a hill overlooking the watering hole, and were grimly elated by what they saw below: Down there Morenga and his men carelessly relaxed around two or three campfires over the remains of their evening meal. Von Lettow ordered his troops to surround the position under cover of darkness. At first light, when the Hottentots made better targets, they would attack.
Dawn broke at last. Von Lettow’s men took aim with their new bolt-action Mausers; at his signal they would open fire. Then, to his horror, he saw that one of his platoons had worked itself into an exposed position within the perimeter of Morenga’s camp during the night. Morenga’s men, just now aware of the Germans in their midst, were already scrambling for their weapons.
“My plan was ruined at the last minute,” von Lettow later lamented. “Now there could be no hesitation. I fired the first shot, which, at 400 meters, hit near a large man, making a dust devil on the cliff face. Firing became general, Morenga’s brother made a great leap and fell, shot in the head.”
But the Germans had lost the critical element of surprise. Soon, von Lettow’s company found themselves pinned down by the extremely accurate fire of Morenga’s Hottentots. We all deem ourselves immortal in our secret hearts; no soldier—indeed, no human being, no matter how experienced—could be truly prepared for what happened next:
“Suddenly, a large bang went off in front of my face,” von Lettow continued. “Everyone around me shouted, ‘Explosive shell!’ in astonishment. I felt a heavy blow to my left eye, which seemed to slosh in my head like a red soup with black dumplings.”
Critically wounded, von Lettow attempted to fight on but could not. The horses drifted toward the watering hole, where some of them were taken off by Morenga’s men. Fighting continued all day. When it grew dark, the Hottentots simply slipped off into the bush. It rained that night. Lightning rent the sky; each bolt felt like a saber slash against von Lettow’s damaged eye. The right eye had meanwhile become dangerously infected; von Lettow feared he was going blind. In pain, in a state of tightly controlled panic, unable to see anything but shadows and led by Droste, his loyal batman, he made the dangerous seventy-kilometer journey to the dressing station at Ukama.
There, to his great good fortune, the military doctors on duty had both done early training in ophthalmologic surgery in Berlin. After several dangerous procedures during which a quantity of pus and “lenticular matter” was cleaned from his left eye, and after periods of enforced darkness with both eyes bandaged, von Lettow managed to retain full use of the right one. The left, though not glass as rumor later had it, was essentially dead. With his good eye closed, he could only make out the faintest gradations of light and dark.
After three more months of recuperation in Windhoek, several more surgeries, and several more weeks spent in total blindness, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was judged fit for evacuation back to Germany. The Hottentot War, now over for him, ground on in his absence. More German soldiers died along with uncounted numbers of Hottentots. Hendrik Witbooi himself was killed during a raid on a German supply train; Morenga escaped across the Orange River into British territory and was heard from no more. At last, on December 21, 1906, the surviving Hottentot chiefs and Colonel von Estorff, representing the Imperial German Government, signed a treaty of peace. The Hottentots, through clever fighting and sheer obstinacy, had managed to secure far better terms of surrender than the unfortunate Hereros. They were allowed to remain on their lands and in many cases retained their arms—as long as they accepted German suzerainty. They had been beaten but not defeated.
But a modern German Army, equipped with the latest armaments, had nearly been driven out of Africa by one tribe of “half-naked savages” at the Waterberg; and after years of bloody, inconclusive fighting, they had been forced to make peace with another. Lothar von Trotha, the man regarded in some quarters as a Hero of the Fatherland and in others as a butcher and an architect of genocide, returned to Germany under a cloud. The Kaiser, as if to defend the rightness of the struggle in South West Africa against its liberal detractors in the Reichstag, awarded him the Pour le Mérite.
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Even in von Lettow’s state of temporary blindness, the Herero and Hottentot Wars presented a series of lessons he could not fail to see. Lessons that would seep into the very marrow of his bones: Military bungling on a grand scale was only possible with grand armies, replete with layers of hierarchy and mired in red tape and politics. Traditional military strategies did not work in Africa, where distance, disease, inhospitable terrain, and the difficulty of obtaining supplies were as much an enemy as the enemy. Smaller, tighter forces worked much better in such an environment. And most important, by using mobile hit-and-run tactics, by fighting with the terrain and the weather and not against it, a small army, even a very small army, could harass, incapacitate, and perhaps eventually defeat an army many times its size.
In the end, von Lettow realized he owed a great debt to South West Africa and its inhabitants, a debt he never failed to acknowledge:
“It was from these brilliant and fantastic Hottentots that Lettow-Vorbeck learned the bushcraft that was to prove of such value to him in his war against the British in East Africa,” wrote the great English popular historian Leonard Mosley. “When [Hottentot guerrilla leader] Samuel Izaak was captured and brought in for questioning, it was von Lettow who conducted the interrogations. . . . His questions were about how to live off a country which offers no apparent sustenance, how to run in conditions when most men have barely the strength to walk, how to condition the body to go without food or water, and most important of all, how to become so much a part, so absorbed into an unfriendly wilderness that survival is possible as the snakes and land crabs and lizards survive.”