Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/80

 the Germans started their attempted administration of the country under unusual difficulties. The situation needed firmness and tact in dealing with the natives, and an iron hand over settlers and speculators guilty of oppression and crime. Leutwein was a well-meaning man—so much even the Blue Book allows—who made himself unpopular in the Dependency by refusing to go as far as the settlers wished him to go, but who lacked efficient home support and the necessary strength of character to grasp with firm hands the nettles of muddle and misrule. His assistants were young and totally inexperienced officials and officers trained in the art of Prussian regimentalism, utterly unfitted for the task of administering African peoples, and many of them of indifferent reputation. An impartial account, published in 1908, of the vices of the German colonial system at that time contains the following instructive passages:

The trouble with the Hereros began in 1890 upon the death of Kamaherero, the chief of the Okahandja clan of the Herero tribe. With their usual passion for centralisation, the Germans had treated Kamaherero as the paramount chief of all the Hereros, to which position he had no title in native law. When he died the Germans supported, the claim of his younger son, Maherero, to the headship of the clan, as against that of the rightful heir. Nikodemus. Worse still, they persisted in their policy of investing the head of the Okahandjas with the paramount chieftainship, with the idea, apparently, of