Son of Adam.Born of Eve. Created by God. Corrupted by Devil. I am Good, I am Evil, I am HUMAN.
October 23, 2012 at 6:47pm
Reblogged from dynamicafrica
In 1903, after 20 years of colonization, 712 European women lived among 3,970 European men in German South-West Africa. What to do? Rape. Although rape by German men of Herero and Nama women was common, prior to 1904 not a single case of a white man raping an African woman came before a German court. This became particularly acute in the attempted rape, and then murder, of Louisa Kamana.
Louisa Kamana was married to the son of Chief Zacharias. The two gave a ride to a German settler, who, that night, “made sexual advances” on Louisa Kamana. She refused. He killed her. The Court acquitted him. The case was appealed, and the settler was given three years in prison. Rape and murder of Herero women were common occurrences. The case only went to trial because a Chief’s family was involved, and no one among the Herero thought three years made up for a Herero woman’s life and dignity.
That’s the story of the genocide as well. Women and children were targeted. When the Herero were ‘allowed’ to escape into the Kalahari Desert, it was assumed most would die. It was also assumed more women and children would die. That assumption was correct. The German authorities explained that Herero women and children had to die because they carried dangerous diseases. Meanwhile, the German press shrieked that Herero women were ‘black amazons swinging clubs and castrating their foes’.
“Before the Middle Ages, public baths were very common, as was the general public regularly taking time to bathe in one way or another… However, over time, more and more restrictions appeared. Eventually, Christians were prohibited from bathing naked and, overall, the church began to not approve an “excessive” indulgence in the habit of bathing. This culminated in the Medieval church authorities proclaiming that public bathing led to immorality, promiscuous sex, and diseases…
For most lower class citizens, particularly men, this resulted in them completley forgoing bathing. During this time, people tended to restrict their hygienic arrangements to just washing hands, parts of the face, and rinsing their mouths. Washing one’s entire face was thought to be dangerous as it was believed to cause catarrh and weaken the eyesight, so even this was infrequent…
Amazingly, this complete lack of personal hygiene in most of Europe lingered until around the mid-19th century.”
Thirty years before Hitler came to power in Germany, and about forty years before Raphael Lemkin authored the word genocide, there had already been one at the hands of Germany. This genocide did not take place in Europe. This ‘forgotten’ genocide took place in Southwest Africa, or what is today, Nambia.
In the early 1900s, Germany invaded Namibia. This documentary from the BBC outlines the events that lead up to the deaths of at least three-quarters of the population of Herero people, and at least half of the population of Nama people.
This systematic form of ethnic-cleansing was done to create Lebensraum for German settlers, where space was running out in the over-crowded cities of urban Germany, and create a satellite state for Germany interests and prosperity.
“The dark racial theories that helped inspire the Nazis run much deeper into German and European history than most people want to acknowledge”
