Water and War: German Colonialism in the Southwest African Desert

When the young German state joined the Scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century, it declared sovereignty over vast territories on the continent. In the 1880s and 1890s, Southwest Africa, East Africa, Cameroon, and Togo became German protectorates. Deutsch-Afrika, however, was German only in name. The African rainforests, savannahs, steppes, and deserts, its countless flora, fauna, and “exotic” diseases, were all wholly alien to the central European eyes of the German missionaries, soldiers, officials, and settlers.
Using the example of Southwest Africa – the largest settler colony of the German Empire – this paper examines how the German encounter with the colonial environment changed the physical make-up of the protectorate and its ideological conception. With what social, political, and economic functions was colonial nature endowed and how did it assume or resist these roles? How did old “mythic” preconceptions and new scientific theories of the desert interact to influence the colonial project? And why did so many attempts to transform Southwest Africa into a profitable and “blooming” landscape not succeed?
In the desert environment of Southwest Africa – dominated by the Namib in the west and the Kalahari in the east – the German colonial administration was faced with particularly daunting conditions.  Access to fresh water, the most basic and indispensable precondition for any human activity, came to be a central issue for the colonizers. The scarcity of the most basic element of life affected the life of all inhabitants of the territory and set considerable – if dynamic – limits to the extent and character of German colonialism. This paper will address in particular how Germans perceived, regulated, and used water in the colony. Against this background of “water politics,” it will attempt a reevaluation of the 1904 Herero War focused on the environmental dimension of colonial violence and its legacies.