A colony in South-West Africa, now Namibia, was home to several different tribes of people, one of them being the Herera. Ibis area was under German rule as a result of European colonization, and the native people had difficulty adjusting to the new rulers. There were land and cattle disputes between them, and this caused huge problems because the main source of income for the Herera was the cattle they owned. Upon hearing of the German plans to put them into reservations, the Herera decided they had enough and formed a rebellion made up of the tribes in the area. The Herera were the first to attack in January 1904; the leader Samuel Maherero formed a militia to lead the surge, which was successful in killing about 150 Germans. After this attack, General Lothar von Trotha was brought into the colony along with 14,000 troops, in order to combat the Herera.

Von Trotha's forces proceeded to carry out his master plan of annihilating all defiant Herera troops, which led to his order to dispose of them as a people. He later proclaimed,

I, the great General of the German soldiers, address this letter to the Herera people ... The Herera are no longer German subjects ... Within the German borders every Herera, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children, I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot at. These are my words to the Herera people.

German troops then proceeded to push all Herera people in the area out into the desert, where they hoped to reach a British colony, but fewer than 1,000 Herera reached it. An estimated 65,000 of the Herera people died in this genocide, and the ones that were left were starved and forced into labor camps.

This tragedy took place before the current legal definition of genocide was created, and this heartbreaking massacre was pushed to the shadows for generations, but in 1985 it was finally classified as the first genocide of the 20th century. In 2004 the German leaders finally made the long-awaited, 100-years-later apology and accepted responsibility for the pain and suffering caused in this ethnic cleansing, but for most of the Herera population left it was not enough.

Text by Abigail Willcoxon