German Colonial Genocide in Namibia: The Hornkranz Massacre

On 12 April 1893, German colonial troops attacked the Nama settlement of ||Nâ‡gâs, known today as Hornkranz. Their intent was to destroy the settlement and its people, after its leader, Hendrik Witbooi, refused to sign so-called ‘protection’ treaties—tools of the German colonial administration for controlling sovereign indigenous nations and their lands. As their presence in what they declared in 1885 as ‘German Southwest Africa’ grew, the German regime was increasingly unwilling to tolerate the independence and agency exercised by Hendrik Witbooi and his clan in the face of the encroaching German empire.

In their attack on Hornkranz, the Germans wanted to both make an example of the Witbooi clan and to punish them for their defiant rejection of German rule. Curt von Francois, who led the attack, made his objective clear: ‘to exterminate the Witbooi tribe’ (Bundesarchiv, R 1001/1483, p. 46). In this premeditated act of erasure, his troops massacred almost eighty women and children before capturing another hundred, burned what remained of the settlement to the ground, and established a garrison, rendering it impossible for survivors to return.

Though the genocide of the Nama, Ovaherero and other peoples indigenous to what is now modern-day Namibia is widely recognised to have taken place between 1904 and 1908, the Nama people remember this massacre as the true first act in the genocide against them. This is substantiated not only by the clarity of the German objective to destroy the |Khowesin as a people, but also by the retrospective reading of Hornkranz as a clear precedent of the systemic tactics of dispossession and destruction that would be used by the Germans against the Nama, the Ovaherero, the San, and others in the years to come.

Outside of the descendant communities, the events at Hornkranz have until now been overlooked and underrepresented, as has the cultural significance of the settlement itself within the dominant historiography, broadly based on the German visual and narrative record. The site of the former Witbooi settlement was expropriated and today constitutes a private farm, access to which is possible only with special permission from its owner. The descendants of Hornkranz are rarely able to visit their own cultural heritage sites and commemorate the struggle of their ancestors.

The faint extant traces of the Witbooi settlement at Hornkranz can be identified today only with the guidance of the descendants and the historians that learned from them. Two plaques on the site are the only indications of the Nama presence on that land. One plaque was inaugurated by the community in 1997, the only occasion on which they were able to gather to commemorate the massacre at the site where it took place. The other plaque (date unknown) glorifies the German troops, even going so far as to include an offensive slur for the Nama; the massacre is described as a ‘battle’, conveying little of the atrocities perpetrated there.

The descendants of Hornkranz and the wider Nama community continue to struggle for justice and for opportunities to correct the historical record and tell the story of Hornkranz on their own terms. In support of their efforts to resist this erasure, we worked with descendants, who have inherited knowledge of their community’s history through oral transmission over multiple generations, to reconstruct the lost settlement and produce a new body of visual evidence about the massacre and its aftermath. Led by their testimonies, we used modelling and mapping techniques along with our own field research and a very limited archival record to situate their accounts and rematerialize Hornkranz.

Our reconstruction of the Witbooi settlement at Hornkranz aims to underscore the vitality of oral tradition in the act of reconstituting the colonial archive and testifies to the oral transmission of inherited knowledge as an ongoing act of resistance in itself.

The |Khowesin (Witbooi) people, a semi-nomadic subtribe of the wider Nama peoples, settled around the perennial spring at Hornkranz in 1884-1885, the very period during which the Berlin Conference, formalising the fragmentation of Africa into colonies and protectorates, was taking place. The chief of the Witbooi clan, Hendrik Witbooi, later went on to become one of the most prominent figures of anti-colonial resistance in Southwest Africa, uniting all Nama clans and later forming a coalition with the Ovaherero to fight against the German colonial regime.

Following the establishment of their settlement in Hornkranz, the Witbooi Nama lived relatively undisturbed until 1892, when first attempts to compel Hendrik Witbooi into signing a protection treaty began. Hendrik Witbooi, aware that the true objective of the so-called ‘protection treaties’ was nothing short of subjugation, was the last leader to refuse to comply:

What are we being protected against? From what danger or difficulty, or suffering can one chief be protected by another? […] I see no truth or sense, in the suggestion that a chief who has surrendered may keep his autonomy and do as he likes.

The German attempt to secure control over the peoples inhabiting the colony and their land is manifested in their mapping efforts. The first map we found featuring Hornkranz dates to 1892, the same year that the Germans began demanding the Witbooi sign such treaties. Despite Witbooi’s refusal to sign, Hornkranz is labelled in these German maps as ‘proposed Crown Land’ already six months before the attack—the very act of cartographic representation prefiguring the expulsion and massacre to follow less than a year later.

After the Germans attacked Hornkranz, the Witboois were finally forced to concede and sign one of the protection treaties they had so long been resisting.

A decade later, in 1904, the Nama joined the Ovaherero in an anti-colonial struggle against German rule. In response, the Germans issued an extermination order against the Ovaherero and later, another against the Nama. Hendrik Witbooi died in battle on 29 October 1905. Following his death, the Nama tribes surrendered. The extermination order against the Nama was never revoked.

The German troops approached the settlement in the early hours of 12 April, planning to attack under the cover of night without any warning. They then split into three contingents—a recounting of this strategy is recorded in the diary of Kurd Schwabe, one of the perpetrators of the attack. Von Francois led the attack from the northern side, entering the village first, while Schwabe approached from the east.

Hendrik Witbooi, who was allegedly sitting outside of his house when he noticed the approaching troops, ordered all Nama fighters to retreat and take up defensive positions along the riverbed, where he expected the ensuing battle to take place. Instead, the German troops stopped when they reached the sleeping village and proceeded to target the defenceless population that had stayed behind. The brutality of the onslaught came as a shock to Hendrik Witbooi, who had not expected the Germans to unleash such ‘uncivilised’ tactics upon another sovereign nation.

Sixteen thousand rounds of bullets were reportedly discharged by the Germans in the span of just thirty minutes. According to the testimony of descendants and corroborated by Schwabe’s diary, some victims were burned alive in their homes.

The canisters recovered from the site during our fieldwork in September 2023 indicate where some exchange of fire may have taken place while the Witbooi fighters were retreating. While the found bullets were identified as those used by the Witbooi Nama, their location and distribution also corroborates written descriptions of the massacre unfolding in the inhabited area of the settlement, with stored ammunition exploding from inside the burning houses.

The massacre yielded 88 victims: ten men, including one of Hendrik Witbooi’s sons, and 78 women and children.

The following day, the German troops returned to raze what remained of the settlement to the ground. Promptly after, a garrison was established on the ashes of the Witbooi settlement, reinforcing the Germans’ clear intention to claim the land and prevent the Witboois from ever returning.

Over the next year, the Witbooi Nama made several attempts to return to Hornkranz, resulting in four more skirmishes on the site. Eventually, they were forced to sign a protection treaty in Naukluft in August 1894, which cemented the dispossession of their land.

The treaty meant that the Witbooi Nama were now obliged to assist the Schutztruppen in their battles against other tribes, most devastatingly at the Battle of Waterberg in August 1904 (see our Phase 1 investigation of this event). Once the Nama realised the true genocidal intent of the Schutztruppen, they united with the Ovaherero against colonial rule. The extermination order against the Nama was issued on 22 April 1905.

After the genocidal war ended in 1908, Hornkranz was sold off to a private owner and a police station was established on its premises. Today, the police station building is the main farmhouse.

Diagrammatic map showing the formation of the German attack (orange arrows) and the partial retreat of the Witbooi fighters toward the river, where they expected the German soldiers to follow them. Descendants narrate that instead, the Germans attacked the defenseless women and children of the settlement. (Forensic Architecture/Forensis)

Nama descendants are seeking to establish the 1893 massacre as the first act of genocide against the Nama, and 12 April as the official Genocide Remembrance Day in Namibia.

This investigation—part of a larger collaboration between Forensic Architecture, Forensis, Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA) and Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA)—seeks to support the community’s broader efforts to make the site accessible for commemoration and preservation.

The project seeks to demonstrate what the descendant communities have always known: that colonial violence and environmental collapse are deeply entangled.

To understand the full extent of the violence inflicted by the massacre and displacement of the Nama from Hornkranz, we interrogated the environmental change that ensued as a consequence of their expulsion and subsequent expropriation of their ancestral land.

Nama oral history allows us to learn about what the environment was like at the time of the 1893 attack, and reconstruct the approximate vegetation cover for that period. (Forensic Architecture/Forensis)

The Nama’s ancestral ways of life were attuned to the environment’s rhythms, dictated by the availability of water and long-term recovery of grazed vegetation. These practices, and the lifeworlds that supported them, were obliterated by the colonial genocide and the expropriation of ancestral land, along with its cattle.

The reconstruction of the environment in 1893 reveals that the environment has suffered dramatic changes since the dispossession of the Nama and conversion of land into private property. (Forensic Architecture/Forensis)

To understand the environmental changes the land has undergone and been subjected to between 1893 and the present and reconstruct the vegetation cover at the time of the attack, we deferred to the oral history transmitted by the Nama descendants with whom we were collaborating.

Using machine learning, the team analysed the change of vegetation cover in the Hornkranz area since 1967 until present-day. The analysis indicates that the area has been subject to bush encroachment, a phenomenon whereby woody vegetation, such as thorny bush, spreads uncontrolled at the expense of grasses. (Forensic Architecture/Forensis)

We then tracked the change in vegetation between 1967—when the earliest aerial photograph of Hornkranz was captured—and today. To analyse the 1967 image, we used a machine learning algorithm to classify pixels on the grayscale range into distinct categories, reflecting the presence of grasses, woody vegetation (such as thorny bush) and bare ground. Conducting a similar process on a contemporary satellite image reveals a stark difference in the presence of woody vegetation.

The process whereby thorny bush cover spreads across the landscape at the expense of grasses is known as bush encroachment. Across Namibia, this phenomenon is exacerbated by overgrazing, with devastating consequences for the biodiversity of grassy savannas.

The transition of Hornkranz from indigenous habitation to colonial habitation is underscored by two main factors: the introduction of private property and fencing, as well as the presence of dams to sequester previously freely accessible water sources for use on individual farms.