Rinderpest, credit and treaties: explaining the 1890s in one district
A learner is given a reconstructed file for a district meeting at Okahandja in March 1898. The Herero leader's councillors report that rinderpest has killed most of the herds since 1896. A German trader's ledger shows he has advanced goods against cattle that no longer exist and now demands payment in land or labour. A missionary's letter notes that about 60 per cent of the cattle in the district have died and that wagon-transport contracts have collapsed. At the same time, more settler applications for farms are arriving, and the colonial administration is pressing for a boundary commission. One councillor argues that the community should sign a further protection agreement to gain help against Nama raids. Another says the treaties are the trap and that the real threat is debt. A third says drought and disease are temporary and nothing should be conceded. The learner must judge what the meeting reveals about the causes of colonial conquest, weighing long-term and short-term factors.
1. Which factor best explains the loss of Herero independence in the 1890s: rinderpest, the debt system, or the protection treaties?
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Sorting the factors. The rinderpest was a catastrophe but not, by itself, a cause of conquest: it destroyed the herds that made an independent cattle economy possible. The treaties provided the legal machinery - a recognised 'protection' relationship that outsiders could use to claim land, jurisdiction and labour. Debt was the transmission belt between the two: once cattle died, advances could only be settled by land, labour or further concessions.
The judgement. The deepest cause is structural. The treaties and the traders' credit converted a catastrophic shock into permanent dispossession. Had rinderpest not struck, the pressure would have been slower; had the treaties not existed, the shock might have been survived. The best answer therefore treats 1896–97 as a trigger acting on structures built in the previous decade, not as a self-sufficient explanation.
A complication the file forces on us. The meeting shows the community divided, so 'Herero decisions' were contested. The councillors are reasoning rationally under pressure, not simply capitulating, and any explanation that treats the community as a single actor will misdescribe how conquest actually worked.
2. The missionary's '60 per cent' figure: useful or unreliable?
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Useful. A missionary in a district often had the widest network of informants - schools, converts, travellers and correspondence with other stations - and could see wagon contracts and stock numbers that a single household could not. He has no obvious incentive to inflate the loss; if anything, mission societies used such figures to argue for relief.
Unreliable. '60 per cent in the district' is an estimate, not a count. We are not told the base: 60 per cent of whose cattle, and by what method? The missionary may be repeating what the trader told him, in which case the two figures are not independent and their agreement proves nothing. He may also attribute to rinderpest deaths that were partly caused by drought or Nama raiding.
How to use it. Treat the figure as an order of magnitude, check it against the trader's ledger - which records credit, not herd totals - and ask whether the two chains of information actually differ. Where they do, agreement raises confidence in 'severe' without settling '60'. The methodological point is that a plausible witness is not the same as a corroborated one.
3. The councillor who advises another protection agreement - what does he assume, and how would a historian test those assumptions?
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His assumptions. (i) That a treaty is a source of protection rather than a transfer of sovereignty; (ii) that the colonial administration is a neutral arbiter between Herero, Nama and settlers; (iii) that a written agreement will be enforced by the other party even when it inconveniences them; (iv) that time is on his side.
Testing them. Historians test by looking at what followed earlier agreements: who occupied land, who adjudicated disputes, who commanded labour, and whether the terms were enforced. If treaties were regularly followed by land sales and loss of jurisdiction, the first assumption fails empirically. The text of the earlier agreements and the record of settler occupation supply the test.
Fairness to the councillor. He is not naive. He is choosing between bad options under pressure, and the alternative - Nama raiding and settler encroachment without any legal cover - was real. Judging him by hindsight misreads the decision. The historian's task is to reconstruct the option set he faced, not to score his choice.