Herero people

And you've seen that Africa has repeatedly experienced devastating conflicts.

So if we think even about the Herero, the genocide that was committed against the Herero people by the Germans, Um, you know, it's, it's not even, it doesn't register as, as a blip on the Western, uh, political consciousness.

Um, whereas you have, of course, uh, you know, the, the example of the Holocaust is constantly given, uh, through mainstream media.

So we see that there is definitely a hierarchy of humanity.

They had nowhere else to go.

In 1904, a couple of those tribes had had enough, the Herero and the Nama, and they rose up, and they were, I think this is accurate, pretty scrupulous about what they did, not trading atrocity for atrocity, but restricting their guerrilla attacks to soldiers and male settlers.

As you can imagine, that didn't make a huge difference to the Germans.

They didn't like any of it.

Maybe we ought to change our ways." But no.

They called in a general with a name that you couldn't make up, Lothar von Trotha.

Von Trotha's solution was to maneuver the Herero such that they were backed up against the desert and couldn't get out without running back into the German soldiers.

He left them there to starve.

The Nama were heavily employed as servants by the Dutch, and thus were quite westernized.

The Herero and Ovambo weren't.

In her dissertation for the University of Canterbury, Susan Schumacher just summarizes his impressions of these different peoples.

Galton was unimpressed with the Nama, and felt superior to them as he outsmarted the current chief, Jonker Afrikaner, and managed to secure both passage for himself and convince the chief to sign up to a Western-style legal code, which prescribed Jonker's behavior, particularly against the Herero, whom they were murdering and stealing cattle from at the time.

Galton also disliked the Herero.

While he considered them to be aesthetically pleasing, magnificent models for sculptors, he was critical of their moral and intellectual attributes.

Describing the Herero, or Damaras as he called them, he writes, "There is hardly a particle of romance or affection or poetry in their character or creed, but they are s- a greedy, heartless, and silly set of savages.

The Damaras have a s- vast number of small superstitions, but they are all stupid and often very gross, and there's not much that is charismatic to, that is characteristic in them." So again, he doesn't speak their language.

Every single one of us.

It's not something that's exclusive to the Vambus or the Hereros or the Africanas or the Busters.

It's all of us.

And if we're not going to be tribalists along the lines of traditional lines, we'll be tribalists in some other way.

And those active modes of violence, in a sense, there's this saying, first they came for the communists and then they came for us.

We could also say, first they came for the Heredo and the Namaa.

It would maybe be more accurate, but that's a topic for another time.

But what we see is basically that when those kind of resistances succeed, it gives a lot more breathing space for the rest.

That announcement did mention that Wilhelm Frick, the Reich's Minister of the Interior, had been chosen as the honorary president for the event, and Dr. Eugen Fischer would serve as chair.

But I doubt the British economists who saw the announcement had any idea that Dr. Fischer's theories about racial hygiene were based on his study of the skulls of Herero and Nama prisoners killed in German concentration camps in Namibia 30 years earlier.

How could they have known? Anthropologists, thumbing through an issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, got a few more details about the event.

Members of their organization would enjoy a 60% fair discount on German railways if they attended.

That's not really a people at all, it's just a mixture of different migrants.

You can go down the list here, Herero, so these are people from Namibia, Pedi people from southern Africa.

There's other...

Tswana people here, Tswana people here, people from other Tswana polities.

valuable.

There's wealth in people.

Why did all those Swarna people, why did they want those Kalaka and Herero and Pedi in Nguato land? Because people are valuable.

So they wanted to attract them.

I mean, I shared my roommate in res was like this...

Guy from Namibia, you know, so learning from like Herero culture and all like it was just like a culture and language.

It was fantastic.

Yeah.

Not to you.

How dare you compare this other, like the Herero genocide to that? Right? Not as in...

We're not affirm- affirming this, but like, no, that's how this functions, right? You are, you on the outside are in no position to tell me as a member of the inside, or rather to us as the insiders, how this does or doesn't organize our identity.

Now, that's not to say that we won't internally question it, but yeah, that...