On this exact date eighty four years ago (16 February 1907), Cornelius
Fredericks died in a prison camp on a rocky, wind-swept outcrop off the coast of
Luderitz known locally as ''Haifisch'' (Shark) Island.
Cornelius Fredericks is still remembered and revered as one of the most
prominent guerrilla leaders of the 1904 - 1908 war. But the camp where he was held
in captivity, and where so many of his contemporaries shed their blood, is now
largely forgotten.
Forming part of Luderitz harbour and laying host to the Luderitz campsite,
Shark Island carries few clues to its murky past. Between 1905 and 1907 the
island was used by the German military as a prisoner-of-war camp. Only a few
years earlier, in the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa, the British had introduced
what was referred to as ''concentration camps''.
The cruel concept was adopted by the German military, who interned
prisoners-of-war in concentration camps in Swakopmund, Windhoek, Okahandja and
Luderitz. With soaring high death rates, the concentration camps in South Africa
were brutal and merciless and today are commemorated by memorials to those who
died.
Shark Island was little different than its South African predecessors, and
yet it is as if the history of the Shark Island concentration camp has been
erased from the Namibian memory.
Death on Shark Island
The Shark Island camp contained the captured survivors of the guerrilla units
that had been led by Cornelius Fredericks and Hendrik Witbooi (after Witbooi`s
death in 1905, Samuel Isaak took over the command of Witbooi's people). When
these 1 795 prisoners arrived in Luderitz on 9 September 1906 they found
several hundred Herero prisoners already there.
The Herero prisoners had been brought down from Windhoek and Okahandja
earlier in the year, as labourers for the construction of the railway line to
Aus. There were therefore more than two thousand prisoners in the camp towards
the end of 1906.
The six months that followed the initial arrival of the people of Samuel
Isaak and Cornelius Fredericks could only be described as horrific. In the
annual report for Luderitz in 1906, an unknown clerk remarks that the ''Angel of
Death'' had come to Shark Island.
Huddled together in tents on the far end of a cold and barren island,
suffering from malnutrition, the prisoners soon began to die. According to a
report by the local German commander, von Estorff, 1 032 of the Nama
prisoners alone had died by April 1907. Of those that were still alive it was
reported that another 123 were in such poor health that they were likely to die
soon. Samuel Isaak, who was one of few survivors, was described as too weak to
walk. Such statistics suggest that as many as 80 % of the prisoners sent to this
concentration camp, were never to leave the island again.
An eyewitness' account from the Shark Island
survivor
The following statement was made by
Edward Fredericks, the son of Joseph Fredericks (who had signed an agreement
with Adolf Luderitz) in 1917.
In 1906 the Germans took me a prisoner after we
had made peace, and sent me with about a thousand other Hottentots to Aus,
thence to Luderitzbucht, and finally to Shark Island. We were placed on the
island, men, women, and children. We were beaten daily by the Germans, who used
sjamboks. They were most cruel to us. We lived in tents on the island; food,
blankets, and lashes were given to us in plenty, and the young girls were
violated at night by the guards. Six months later we went by boat to Swakopmund,
and thence by train to Karibib. Lots of my people died on Shark Island. I put in
a list of those who died. (Note. This list comprises 168 males, including
the chief, Cornelius Fredericks, 97 females, 66 children, and also 18 Bushman
women and children) ... but it is not complete. I gave up compiling it, as I was
afraid we were all going to die. We remained at Karibib for a six months, and were
returned to Shark Island for a further six months, when we were again removed by
sea to Karibib and thence to Okawayo, where we remained till 1915, when the
British sent us back by train to Bethany.
Unfortunately a copy of the list of names
compiled by Edward Fredericks has not yet been located.
The forced labour that built Luderitz
Ongoing research by the History Department at the University of Namibia shows
the extent to which the early development of the town of Luderitz can be linked
to the prison camp on Shark Island. Despite the fact that German business
interests in the coastal port dated back to the negotiations carried out by
Vogelsang in 1883, the town only really expanded during the 1904 - 1908 war. One
visitor reported that, as late as November 1904, the ''town'' consisted of just
five buildings. As the port became an important supply centre for German
military operations in southern Namibia it grew rapidly.
The forced labour of the prisoners on Shark Island was used to build the
growing harbour town. Prisoners worked on the construction of the railway line
from Luderitz to Aus and then to Keetmanshoop. A new harbour, started by prison
labour, was built on the eastern side of Shark Island. However, the Annual Report
from 1907 remarked the use of prison labour had to be abandoned in April as
there were only twenty-three people left in the camp who were still fit enough
to work.
Fred Cornell, a hopeful British diamond prospector, found himself in Luderitz
shortly after the closure of the camp and spoke to local residents. He wrote:
"Cold - for the nights are often bitterly cold there - hunger, thirst,
exposure, disease, and madness claimed scores of victims every day, and cart
loads of their bodies were every day carted over to the back beach, buried in a
few inches of sand at low tide, and as the tide came in the bodies went out,
food for the sharks." Cornell's comments add a sinister new twist to the
name of Shark Island. The token funeral of the Shark Island dead was but one way
that the people of Luderitz disposed of the dead. In Europe bodies and body
parts of people were in demand as the racial ''sciences'' sought to prove their
Eurocentric theories. In 1912 a study on the ''racial anatomy of 17 Hottentot
heads'' was published in a German morphology and anthropology journal.
These heads were all taken from the bodies of Shark Island prisoners ranging
from a baby of two years old to a forty five year old women. Beyond the morbid nature of
the study it added further insult by comparing the decapitated heads with those
of apes.
It is difficult to say whether any graves from the Shark Island camp still
exist in or around Luderitz. In Swakopmund, although apparently not officially
acknowledged by the Swakopmund municipality, a huge area of unmarked graves
bears silent testimony to the many Herero prisoners-of-war who died in the
local camp. One can speculate that the Swakopmund graves still exist because of
their close proximity to the more official (former all-white) Swakopmund
cemetery. In Luderitz the town's first cemetery was removed, erasing all traces
of a prisoner-of-war cemetery - if indeed it ever existed. Notably, the graves
of German soldiers who died locally during the 1904 - 1908 war were also
relocated. Ironically a memorial listing their names now stands at the point
where the Shark Island concentration camp once lay.
As the centenary of the 1904-1908 war approaches, it seems that now would be
a good time for Namibians to reflect on a national heritage - in the form of
monuments and memorials - that still celebrates the colonial conquest of Namibia
by German forces and forgets the sacrifices of those that led the anti-colonial
resistance.
The Boer War camps have their memorial, the concentration camps of the
Holocaust have theirs; where are the commemorations of the Namibians who
succumbed to man's most terrifying invention, the concentration camp?
