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Africa during the Scramble: The Herero, the Nama and the Germans Part 1

And says something that the Germans didn't notice that was going or or at least didn't think it mattered.

Actually they did think it mattered but like only in tactical terms. What essentially happened was when Germany claimed South West Africa, the british already had a colony there. Walvis bay, which was an exclave of South Africa and remained as such for a short time even after Namibia won independence.

This was essentially a trading post, run by Cape Town Traders. The Herero, San and Nama would come down, trade goods and crucially use the post bag. They'd send letters to contacts in cape town and put in orders for newspapers etc.

Von Francois initial orders were basically just stay in Walvis bay, send men to patrol the beach occasionally and just check that other Europeans weren't trying anything, that there was no build up of troops there.

What he actually did was build a base a little outside Walvis Bay and act as like a road check for when African traders came down to trade. You known being able to turn around traders, ask for tolls that sort of thing.

His goal was to provoke the Nama into attacking so he'd get reinforcements and it does seem like his first idea of how to do that was to threaten to cut them off from their newspapers, but that didn't work so he decided on war crimes instead.

Whether he didn't realise that this meant the Nama could tell the British about what he was doing there or whether he just correctly assumed they wouldn't really care (the official british response to the Nama was that they didn't believe the germans would commit massacres and so wouldn't investigate) is an open question.
 
Actually they did think it mattered but like only in tactical terms. What essentially happened was when Germany claimed South West Africa, the british already had a colony there. Walvis bay, which was an exclave of South Africa and remained as such for a short time even after Namibia won independence.

This was essentially a trading post, run by Cape Town Traders. The Herero, San and Nama would come down, trade goods and crucially use the post bag. They'd send letters to contacts in cape town and put in orders for newspapers etc.

Von Francois initial orders were basically just stay in Walvis bay, send men to patrol the beach occasionally and just check that other Europeans weren't trying anything, that there was no build up of troops there.

What he actually did was build a base a little outside Walvis Bay and act as like a road check for when African traders came down to trade. You known being able to turn around traders, ask for tolls that sort of thing.

His goal was to provoke the Nama into attacking so he'd get reinforcements and it does seem like his first idea of how to do that was to threaten to cut them off from their newspapers, but that didn't work so he decided on war crimes instead.

Whether he didn't realise that this meant the Nama could tell the British about what he was doing there or whether he just correctly assumed they wouldn't really care (the official british response to the Nama was that they didn't believe the germans would commit massacres and so wouldn't investigate) is an open question.

I think every single sentence from 'Von Francois' just made me want to cry.

Cruelty, evilness and its 'banality'. Pure, undiluted. Because the Namas could be a means to an end for some people.
 
I think every single sentence from 'Von Francois' just made me want to cry.

Cruelty, evilness and its 'banality'. Pure, undiluted. Because the Namas could be a means to an end for some people.

I'm editing part two now and it's so horrifying. Von Francois is the least of it.

@Thande, it's not for another two weeks but I'm going to have to ask you to put trigger warnings on it when you link to it on social media.

Like most of the articles are about comics and space and world fairs and I don't think you should stumble upon 3,000 words about mass killings and rape and concentration camps unaware.
 
I'm editing part two now and it's so horrifying. Von Francois is the least of it.

@Thande, it's not for another two weeks but I'm going to have to ask you to put trigger warnings on it when you link to it on social media.

Like most of the articles are about comics and space and world fairs and I don't think you should stumble upon 3,000 words about mass killings and rape and concentration camps unaware.
I think describing it as 'the bloody and harrowing history of X' lets the reader know what they're in for.
 
The Germans seemed really determined for about a century or so to catch up with the other European Powers in the evil stakes and then some.


Its always been a bit weird to me that Africa was on par with the Conquest of the Americas for brutality, far more determined and semi organised than the conquest of India and far grander in scope than the various missions to the Pacific and the near East. Yet all those efforts produced far more wealth for all concerned (on the Imperialist side) and clearly held the keys to the future. And Africa...is just well war crimes and failed ventures to turn a profit eventually.

Its like people forgot why they got into the Empire business in the first place and just broke all the rules.
 
Its like people forgot why they got into the Empire business in the first place and just broke all the rules.

I think one thing that distinguishes the later part of nineteenth century from early burst of Imperialism is the extent to which it really was just a landgrab.

Rationally speaking, there are good reasons to try and seize the silver and gold of Peru and Mesoamerica. India has always been a lucrative target for foreign conquerors. Egypt, the Cape, the mouth of the Yangtze: Strategically important, hugely profitable.

Even the Spanish expeditions into North America were just that- expeditions, attempts to find the wealth they were sure that was there.

Whereas in Africa, one of the striking things is how a kind of madness seemed to take hold. France needed to regain its honour after 1871. Germans wanted to show they were a great nation of the world. Italian governments need to prove that they they had the enterprising spirit of their ancestors. They each began seizing vast quantities of territory that often had no strategic or commercial value to speak of- and as they expanded, the British public became spooked out of all proportion by the perceived closing of the gap (not unlike the later Dreadnought Race.)

Leopold dreamed his terrible dreams.

And all over the continent, people died. They died, and were enslaved, and were sometimes murdered and enslaved by people who absolutely believed that they were breaking chains.

And less than a century later, most of them were leaving only shattered countries and looted governments behind them.
 
I think one thing that distinguishes the later part of nineteenth century from early burst of Imperialism is the extent to which it really was just a landgrab.

Rationally speaking, there are good reasons to try and seize the silver and gold of Peru and Mesoamerica. India has always been a lucrative target for foreign conquerors. Egypt, the Cape, the mouth of the Yangtze: Strategically important, hugely profitable.

Even the Spanish expeditions into North America were just that- expeditions, attempts to find the wealth they were sure that was there.

Whereas in Africa, one of the striking things is how a kind of madness seemed to take hold. France needed to regain its honour after 1871. Germans wanted to show they were a great nation of the world. Italian governments need to prove that they they had the enterprising spirit of their ancestors. They each began seizing vast quantities of territory that often had no strategic or commercial value to speak of- and as they expanded, the British public became spooked out of all proportion by the perceived closing of the gap (not unlike the later Dreadnought Race.)

Leopold dreamed his terrible dreams.

And all over the continent, people died. They died, and were enslaved, and were sometimes murdered and enslaved by people who absolutely believed that they were breaking chains.

And less than a century later, most of them were leaving only shattered countries and looted governments behind them.


Also there seemed to be a running trend of administrators and soldiers just doing a IJA cosplay and running wild and fucking up and getting rewarded or at least escaping sanction.

Reminder that even the Conquistidors were occasionally put on trial or had armies sent after them because the Crown and its representatives did not like these armed rogues taking its name and resources for private adventures and the 13 colonies were pissed at the British for reining in their indian fighting and various early modern states seemed perfectly happy to land on rogue actors like a tonne of bricks. Its kind of fascinating how the late 19th century states just lost control of their civil services and military organs when the trend of the centuries before that was unheard off centralisation.


The Scramble just seems like bad fiction.
 
I think one thing that distinguishes the later part of nineteenth century from early burst of Imperialism is the extent to which it really was just a landgrab.

Rationally speaking, there are good reasons to try and seize the silver and gold of Peru and Mesoamerica. India has always been a lucrative target for foreign conquerors. Egypt, the Cape, the mouth of the Yangtze: Strategically important, hugely profitable.

Even the Spanish expeditions into North America were just that- expeditions, attempts to find the wealth they were sure that was there.

Whereas in Africa, one of the striking things is how a kind of madness seemed to take hold.
One of the things I've tried to do differently in LTTW is that this just...doesn't happen, except for a bit of nibbling around the edges. So a lot of Africa in 1900 is still just blank space on the map. (Tony Jones also had a different but related take on this in Cliveless World).
 
One of the things I've tried to do differently in LTTW is that this just...doesn't happen, except for a bit of nibbling around the edges. So a lot of Africa in 1900 is still just blank space on the map. (Tony Jones also had a different but related take on this in Cliveless World).

It'll take me probably more than a year to finish writing all the stories about the Scramble I want to, but the current plan is for the very last article to simply be 'what if just none of this happened' because you're right it 100% didn't really have to.
 
It'll take me probably more than a year to finish writing all the stories about the Scramble I want to, but the current plan is for the very last article to simply be 'what if just none of this happened' because you're right it 100% didn't really have to.
Part of the trigger or un-trigger I used is that the resurgent Ottomans sniped Algeria out from under the French's noses, and that whole angle never really got started (they'd also lost Dakar earlier in LTTW) which meant other countries didn't feel the need to emulate them.

Given the bizarrely specific circumstances of how Algeria became French in OTL and its connexions to whichever revolution it is this week, it'd probably be possible to do that with a much later POD.
 
Part of the trigger or un-trigger I used is that the resurgent Ottomans sniped Algeria out from under the French's noses, and that whole angle never really got started (they'd also lost Dakar earlier in LTTW) which meant other countries didn't feel the need to emulate them.

Given the bizarrely specific circumstances of how Algeria became French in OTL and its connexions to whichever revolution it is this week, it'd probably be possible to do that with a much later POD.

Among Charles X's many, many sins.

He was just the absolute worst.
 
I think with regard to Southern Rhodesia, in particular the early days, you have the bleakly amusing phenomenon of the newly acquired land being traded at ever increasingly higher values in Cape Town and London stock exchanges, values which far exceeded what the land was actually worth as the BSAC half-covered up and half tried to find another use for land that as it turns out, wasn't a Second Rand at all. As @SenatorChickpea the dream way outstripped the reality.
 
I think with regard to Southern Rhodesia, in particular the early days, you have the bleakly amusing phenomenon of the newly acquired land being traded at ever increasingly higher values in Cape Town and London stock exchanges, values which far exceeded what the land was actually worth as the BSAC half-covered up and half tried to find another use for land that as it turns out, wasn't a Second Rand at all. As @SenatorChickpea the dream way outstripped the reality.
Land speculation is old as time.
 
Among Charles X's many, many sins.

He was just the absolute worst.
All monarchs with regnal numbers of X or more sound inherently amusing and made-up to British ears, because of the apparent unwritten law that ours have to stop at VIII.

I don't know what the original French dialogue was in that panel of The Castafiore Emerald where she sees the bedroom, but the translator absolutely nails giving a 'vague absurdity' feel to Castafiore's guess.

Castafiore: What delightful old furniture! ...and a four-poster bed. It's...er...Henry the Tenth, is it not?
Nestor: Charles the First, signora.
Castafiore: Precisely what I meant, of course.
 
I guess with Southern Rhodesia in the early day's there's thing train of thought that goes:

a)the reason we said this land was awesome and should be colonised doesn't actually exist
b)we have all this land now
c)shit, now what?
I mean that describes pretty much all colonial histories, it just depends if something else shows up. Reminder that the USA was mostly colonised because people thought North America was much narrower, so it'd only take a dozen days to walk to the west coast and then sail to China and Japan, i.e. the actual reason why Columbus et al were sailing west in the first place.
 
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