The Paris peace conference, discussed in the spring of 1919, the future of the colonies. However, the independence is not achieved, the African States are still the colonies of the defeated Germany.
The hope was enormous: After the end of the First world war, the former colonies are observed to see whether U.S. President Woodrow Wilson would prevail in his plans for a new world order – the occupied territories, the independence would be a step closer. His ideas had, in fact, Wilson already several months before the end of the war in 1918, in his famous “fourteen points”.
The tone of the text was also new, as are its contents. Such a decisive rejection of power politics old style, you had not heard until then, at least not from the pen of one of the most important politicians of his time.
Thus, the fifth of the “fourteen points speech” of a “free, unbiased and totally impartial settlement of all colonial claims”. For future negotiations, the principle should apply, “that when the decision is made in such a sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned questions as to the weight to decide how the legitimate claims of the government whose right to claim is”. In other words: Now also the voices of the Colonized were finally heard.
Of colonialism, the history of Africa, specialized in Hamburg historian Jürgen Zimmerer, “is, generally, a racist, a structural system of Injustice. This applies to all of the European colonial powers. Without being invited, you went to foreign countries and regions, and claimed it as their own. Then you took what you needed.”
Africans fought in the First world war – how these Moroccans in the French army
This System, it seemed, could be overcome with the fourteen-point Plan, the Paris peace conference of 1919 and the ensuing Treaty of Versailles permanently. Worldwide, the enthusiasm for Wilson was great. “He ceased to be a statesman,” wrote the writer H. G. Wells about the U.S. President. “He was a Messiah.”
German colonies as League of Nations mandates, to be
Sensation also Wilson’s proposal to create a new international authority that should govern the relationship of States to each other fairly and impartially: provided the League of Nations. The establishment of which was described by the President as one of the most important goals of the international peace conference in Paris, 1920 the Federal government began its work.
The majority of the conference was devoted to the new order in Europe. On the program of the future Status of the colonial state, but the territories of the European powers, above all the war losers – and thus also those of the German Empire. The former German colonies would, in theory, independent States.
Africans learned quickly that the Western powers continued their struggle for independence, continue to be limits. Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa (later the Republic of South Africa) said that the former German colonies, were regions “of barbarians inhabited”. That’s why you had to manage in a fiduciary capacity. The participants of the peace conference finally came to an agreement to transform the German colonies, mandate territories of the League of Nations.
However, all of the formerly colonized territories have not enjoyed the same rights. Smuts was, the mandates, with different powers depending on the “development of the territories and their inhabitants defined” – of course, the victorious Western powers.
Arbitrary borders – with devastating consequences
One of the Central legacies of European colonialism in Paris gathered diplomats: dared, in any case, the arbitrary boundaries, the powers, the colonial-primarily in the 19th century. Century had drawn. They were transverse to the entire historical development in many regions of the continent.
German soldiers in German southwest Africa, a German colony from 1884 to 1915
“This drawing made States, with serious consequences,” the Afrikanist Jürgen Zimmerer. “Because of these limits in the rule, no account of local structures. Companies that were traditionally friends have to be related or to each other, were split by colonial borders.”
Conversely, groups that have traditionally been in competition with were suddenly in a state. “The minority problem in many African countries is, therefore, no small Share as a result of colonialism,” says Carpenter. “This is a heavy mortgage. Because even now, no one wants to make the colonial boundaries in question. Fear can no longer control.”
Thus, the Power of the League of Nations was limited from the outset. The often violent consequences of arbitrarily-drawn colonial state boundaries to deal even today, the United Nations, since the end of the Second world war, the successor organization of the League of Nations.
The ungesühnte German genocide in Namibia
To the non-mastered legacy of German colonialism also outstanding acts of violence. So the German Emperor perpetrated Empire in German South West Africa, today’s Namibia, between 1904 and 1908, the genocide of the Herero and the Nama, who fought against the foreign rule. Up to 70,000 people were killed.
In addition, the German Reich also changed the property relations in the colony radically. It expropriated the entire Land of the Herero and Nama and sold, successively, to German settlers. Since then, most of the Herero and Nama land lots are up to today.
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Fashion against Forgetting
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Namibia: a fashion reminiscent of the genocide
The attitude of the Federal government to be unsatisfactory and dangerous, says Jürgen Zimmerer. “There won’t be any serious reconciliation, if you find ways to overcome the repercussions of historical wrongs, especially the impoverishment of broad layers.” That’s why it was a mistake that the Federal government is negotiating with the Namibian government and financial compensation exclude. Germany must speak with representatives of the Herero and Nama directly.
“Don’t do this you risk the moderate to lose forces for both groups. In their place, then groups could occur, which call for a more radical solution, or even a land occupation. This is very dangerous.”