What is the Maafa?
The First 'holocaust'

Upon his forced entry into Namibia with 10,000 heavily-armed troops the German commander, General von Trotha declared “'I wipe out rebellious tribes with streams of blood and streams of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge.”

In 1903, after much bloodshed of innocent Hereros, the Nama, under leadership of Hendrik Witbooi, mounted a renewed campaign of resistance. These heroic African revolutionaries engaged in armed struggle against insurmountable odds and succeeded in using guerrilla tactics against the Germans to debilitating effect. However the death toll was high. Before the uprisings, the Herero had numbered 80,000. Afterwards, only 15,000 remained alive with an estimated 9,000 confined in concentration camps.

On 22 April 1904 Trotha, reeling from a long year of humiliating defeats, sent a message to the Nama that they should surrender;

"The Nama who chooses not to surrender and lets himself be seen in the German area will be shot, until all are exterminated. Those who, at the start of the rebellion, committed murder against whites or have commanded that whites be murdered have, by law, forfeited their lives. As for the few not defeated, it will fare with them as it fared with the Herero, who in their blindness also believed that they could make successful war against the powerful German Emperor and the great German people. I ask you, where are the Herero today?"

The Nama responded with more attacks but Trotha had already decided to use deadly force to indiscriminately murder thousands of innocent Herero to get at the Nama resistance. In October 2 1904, Trotha issued his order to exterminate all Herero from the region with the declaration;

"I, the great general of the German troops, send this letter to the Herero people... All Hereros must leave this land. If they refuse, then I will force them to do it with the big guns. Any Herero found within the German borders with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall no longer receive any women or children; I will drive them back to their people. I will shoot them. This is my decision for the Herero people".

German troops murdered thousands of Herero people using machine guns such as the infamous Maxim and the Maschinengewehr. They also poisoned fresh water supplies to decimate large portions of the Herero population too young or weak to fight.

In the aftermath of the attack Trotha claimed; 'To receive [African] women and children, most of them ill, is a serious danger to the German troops. And to feed them is an impossibility’.

The Germans then enslaved and raped African women whilst their children were forcibly removed and left to die.

A German named Eugen Fischer worked in the concentration camps and conducted inhumane medical experiments on African captives. These abuses culminated in the publication of his book 'The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene' which Adolf Hitler read whilst in prison in 1923. He later used this to ferment his ideology of ‘racial purity’ and perfect the methods to be used to perpetrate the Holocaust under the banner of Nazi fascism.

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