On the afternoon of May 29 1922, two De Havilland DH9 bombers equipped with mounted machine guns flew low over Guruchas, the largest settlement in a “native reserve” occupied by the Bondelswarts people of southern Namibia. Their decades-long dispute with successive colonial governments had flared up again — this time in response to an annual tax on hunting dogs, among other things.
Since dawn there had been “a profound anxiety everywhere”, Richard Freislich writes in The Last Tribal War. When the planes appeared, the women and children in the village, and the fighters in the hills, turned to watch “a few small black objects fall from the sky”.
“When the bombs burst with echoing crashes among the wagons and stock, a terrible confusion seized the village,” Freislich writes.
By the time night fell, the planes had returned twice. In all, “nine of the villagers, women, children and old folk, had been killed outright by a bomb which had fallen through the roof of a hut and burst inside, scattering fragments of the victims over a large area”.
[Marengo] had a vision of broad African nationalism which transcended narrow ethnic loyalties and he was therefore designated as ‘the man of the future’
— Sam Nujoma
They numbered among the more than 100 Bondelswarts who would die before the end of the rebellion.
After completing “the gruesome task of assembling and burying the remains”, Freislich continues, the Bondelswarts’s recently returned talisman, the half-Nama, half-Scottish Abraham Morris, called a council of war. While several leading figures said the Bondelswarts should cut their losses and surrender immediately, others advocated that they head to the gorges surrounding the Gariep River and fight on until the government was ready to negotiate again.
After hearing everyone out, Morris explained calmly that while each family should choose for themselves, “for himself, he could only say that he would never be taken alive by the enemy and he intended to fight on so long as he had breath in his body”.
Namibia’s ‘Black Napoleon’
“The Bondelswarts were not a tribe but an anticolonial political movement,” former Western Cape top cop Jeremy Vearey tells the FM.
Vearey has taken time off since his controversial dismissal to visit the Northern Cape and Namibia to conduct research into the Bondelswarts for a novel he’s writing.
The term “bondel” (literally “bundle of different things”) was first used in 1904 by the group’s legendary leader, Jakob Marengo. The “swart” was a racial epithet added by the German and Afrikaans settlers.
Marengo attracted an astonishingly diverse group of people who wanted to break free of the tyrannies of German colonial rule. Many, including Marengo himself, were of mixed ancestry, with at least some Nama or Herero blood. But Marengo also had several European and Afrikaner devotees, and at least one Australian put himself among the Bondelswarts ranks.
The Bondelswarts rejected the borders imposed on them by the colonial powers. “To them, Namaland extended from Windhoek in the north to Piketberg in the south,” says Vearey. “Political borders were irrelevant to them.”
Together, they launched a very successful guerrilla warfare campaign against the German Schutztruppe, who at the time were engaged in the Herero and Nama genocides that killed about 35,000 people.
Between 1904 and 1906, Marengo and his men engaged the Germans in at least 50 battles. Marengo’s immense bravery and tactical acumen — he used his superior knowledge of the terrain to set lethal ambushes for the unsuspecting Germans — led the Schutztruppe to nickname him Der Schwarze Napoleon (The Black Napoleon).
Under the terms of a peace treaty signed at Ukumas on December 21 1906, the Bondelswarts were confined to a reserve of 175,000ha (down from more than 10-million hectares before the uprising), banned from owning firearms or ammunition, and given only a limited number of livestock.
Marengo — who’d slipped across the border to SA before the treaty was signed — was killed by combined German-SA forces on September 20 1907.
The Bondelswarts were not a tribe but an anticolonial political movement
— Jeremy Vearey
Almost 100 years later, during his inaugural address as Namibia’s first president, Sam Nujoma paid tribute to Marengo’s legacy: “Born of a Herero mother and a Nama father, Marenga [alternative spelling] had a vision of broad African nationalism which transcended narrow ethnic loyalties, and he was therefore designated as ‘the man of the future’. He employed scientific guerrilla tactics with the multi-ethnic troops under his command … To his revolutionary spirit and his visionary memory we humbly offer our honour and respect.”
The taxing year of 1922
After the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914, SA’s Union Defence Force invaded German South West Africa. After the Germans surrendered on July 9 1915, SA assumed control of the territory under a League of Nations mandate that purported to safeguard the rights and interests of the indigenous people.
Instead, SA administrators slashed government spending on “natives”, dispossessed communities and tightened the legal noose on indigenous peoples. The Bondelswarts were particularly aggrieved when, in 1921, SA administrator Gysbert Reitz Hofmeyr decided to enforce an obsolete tax on hunting dogs — and to apply a sixfold increase at the same time.
Hofmeyr complained about the “vast numbers of dogs” used to hunt game, when the local population should instead be earning a living through “honest labour”.
This, of course, meant the black population had to work for white farmers to earn money to pay the dog and other taxes.
In addition to this, the Bondelswarts also objected to the Cattle Brands Proclamation of 1921, which made branding of large stock compulsory.
The situation was further inflamed when Morris, one of the heroes of the 1904 rebellion, returned from exile in SA.
Morris crossed the Gariep River on April 16 1922, bringing with him 18 men, 16 rifles and an assortment of livestock and dogs. He even had a permit for the Lee-Enfield rifle that had been issued to him by the Union Defence Force when he served with distinction as a scout in the campaign against the Germans.
When they reached the Bondelswarts reserve, Morris and his companions declared their presence and he “reluctantly” surrendered his rifle and ammunition.
Over the next weeks the government engaged in half-hearted negotiations with the Bondelswarts — but it seemed only the group’s complete subservience could have prevented a war. As Vearey notes: “The issue about crossing the border was a technicality, as both territories were governed by SA. And the rifles were legally owned.”
This was about much more than a dog tax; the South Africans were spoiling for a fight. As Vearey tells it, an official called De Jager said: “The only thing these people understand is power and lead.”
Desperate and unprepared, the Bondelswarts robbed a few farmers of their weapons.
Second time not so lucky
At first, Hofmeyr hoped to quell the uprising without SA aid. But upon realising how scant his reserves were, he “reluctantly” telegrammed a friend. On May 26 1922 two planes, two mountain guns and four Vickers machine guns were delivered.
The Bondelswarts, meanwhile, had four times as many men as they had rifles (and the weapons were almost all museum pieces), not to mention a severe shortage of ammunition. Their only hope lay in capturing arms from vanquished government soldiers. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as they’d hoped, and — despite their best efforts — the larger and better-armed government forces soon brought them to heel.
The moral low point of the campaign was the aerial bombing of women and children. But the use of weapons of mass murder against men fighting for the right to traverse the hills and valleys their ancestors had always called home was itself deeply distasteful.
Over the course of the 1922 rebellion, at least 110 Bondelswarts men were killed and 53 wounded. All their livestock were confiscated.
After the conflict, those who had not participated in the rebellion were given back only half their livestock, because, in SA prime minister Jan Smuts’s words, “to restore all their captured property would only serve to make them think they can go into rebellion”.
The legacy of the massacre
As this writer found out while researching Spoilt Ballots: The Elections that Shaped SA, from Shaka to Cyril, the massacre was used — completely disingenuously — by SA’s arch-segregationist, JBM Hertzog, as proof that Smuts’s “footsteps dripped with blood”. This played a significant role in Smuts’s loss to Hertzog’s nationalists in the 1924 general election.
Hertzog would go on to lay many of the foundations of apartheid in the decade that followed.
SA’s response to the Bondelswarts rebellion broke the ‘sacred trust’ placed in the country by the League of Nations to protect black interests in then South-West Africa
— What it means:
It goes without saying that the Bondelswarts themselves were all but ruined by the assault. But the rebellion would also have a long-lasting impact on the reputation of SA, which was seen to have abused the “sacred trust” placed in it by the League of Nations to protect black interests in South West Africa.
Not only would the legacy of the rebellion ensure that the country was never incorporated into SA, but it would also be used as a stick to beat SA governments, first at the League of Nations, and later the UN General Assembly.
In his 1961 analysis of the affair, Prof AM Davey had the following to say: “In many quarters, the Union [of SA] was thenceforth suspect as a ruler over nonwhite peoples … In retrospect, it must be concluded that the [Bondelswarts] affair was a grave setback for SA.”
And rightly so.
Mandela and the Bondelswarts
At his 1962 trial, Nelson Mandela displayed a crystalline understanding of the history of white-black relations in SA, even mentioning the Bondelswarts by name.
He said: “We have been conditioned by the history of white governments in this country to accept the fact that Africans, when they make their demands strongly and powerfully enough to have some chance of success, will be met by force and terror on the part of the government.
“This is not something we have taught the African people, this is something the African people have learnt from their own bitter experience. We learnt it from the government of Gen [Jan] Smuts at the time of two massacres of our people: the 1921 massacre in Bulhoek, [where] more than 100 men, women, and children were killed; and the 1922 massacre — the Bondelswarts massacre in South West Africa — in which [about] 200 Africans were killed.
“We have continued to learn it from every successive government.”
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