THE PRE-HISTORY OF APARTHEID

Senator Franz Ginsberg (1862-1936)

In the 1960s, my late mother used to mention her grandparents Franz and Hedwig, and often remarked that theirs were an odd pair of names. For a long time that was all that I knew about them. My late uncle Sven Rindl gave me an ingeniously designed family tree of our Ginsberg family many years ago, and I kept it as a curiosity. It assumed a great significance when, in about 2000, I began to become interested in the history of the families into which I was born. Soon after this, I learnt that Franz was a South African Senator and that he was held in high regard by my mother’s family. After investigating the lives of other members of my extended family, I began including Franz amongst those whom I researched. Several members of the extended Ginsberg family were kind enough to supply me with much interesting material, but at first I was unable to put them together to form a ‘big picture’ of Franz’s life. As I began to do so, I realised that not only was I discovering a great deal about his life, but also about a fascinating and important period during the history of South Africa.

I obtained a British Library Reader’s Ticket, and that was the key to unravelling Franz’s story. My great-grandfather Franz Ginsberg (1862-1936) left his birthplace in Prussia in 1880, and shifted to King Williams Town (‘King’) in the Eastern Cape of what is now South Africa. He lived there for the rest of his life. The British Library is home to a more or less complete run of one King’s newspapers, the Cape Mercury (the ‘Mercury’). When the newspapers were stored at Colindale, I used to drive there and spend several hours every Saturday morning leafing through the huge bound volumes of the paper. As I did so, fragments of the crumbling paper used to float down off the pages, which I imagine had hardly ever been looked at since they were printed in King and then bound by the library in London. I scoured every page from 1880 onwards looking for mentions of ‘Ginsberg’. Before 1885, there were no mentions of Franz because there was little reason for him to appear in the news. But, from 1885 onward both he and, to a lesser extent, his future brother-in-law the photographer Jakob Rindl began to appear at ever increasing frequency in the pages of the Mercury. For, it was in 1885, that Franz opened his own factory. It made matches. The match factory was followed by an ink factory, and then a candle factory, and later a soap factory.

Mentions of Franz in the Mercury became even more frequent after about 1890, when he entered local politics. First, he was elected a Town Councillor, then the Mayor for a while. Soon, Franz entered national politics, and became elected a Member of the Cape Parliament, a position that he held until 1910 when the Cape Colony and the three other colonies of southern Africa united to become ‘South Africa’. After unification, Franz became King’s member of the newly formed Cape Provincial Council. He remained on this until 1927, when he became the first elected Jewish Senator in South Africa. Franz’s name began appearing in the Mercury with ever increasing frequency until he became a Senator. After his ascent to the exalted position of Senator, he did not disappear from the pages of the Mercury, but mentions of him became less frequent because his civic duties in King occupied less of his time than the affairs of the Senate.

From 1885 onwards, the information that I gleaned from the pages of the Mercury, which is now stored in Yorkshire but made available in the British Library in Kings Cross, gave me a good idea of what Franz and his family were up to. The newspaper entries included detailed reports on the proceedings of the Town Council of King as well as what happened in meetings of other organisations, such as the town’s School Board, in which Franz participated actively for many years. From these reports, I began to build up a picture of how Franz functioned as a politician. The newspapers also included details of his comings and goings as well as a wealth of information about his and his family’s involvement in the life of King.

There are two other important sources of information about Franz, which I consulted. These were the reports of both the Cape Parliament and also of the South African Senate. Both of these publications reported the debates in the two legislative assemblies in great detail. The Cape Parliament reports recorded the debates as reported speech, whereas the Senate was reported more or less verbatim. Therefore, what is reported in the Senate debates is what the speakers actually said, rather than someone else’s summary. In the absence of any known recordings of Franz’s voice, what is preserved in the reports of the Senate’s debates is all that remains of the authentic voice of my great-grandfather.

In addition to the above mentioned, there was a host of other material that I consulted whilst preparing Franz’s biography. Some of this, including much interesting material about Franz’s diamond mining activities in German South West Africa (now ‘Namibia’) and his brother Gustave’s life, were from the National Archives of South Africa. Accessing this material remotely from the UK involved employing locals in South Africa to look up the documents (that I had identified in the archives’ on-line catalogue), and then photographing them to send to me. This was always most satisfactory. Books from the British Library and material sent to me by relatives provided more pieces to complete the jigsaw puzzle.

I have been researching Franz’s life for well over 10 years. Several times I tried to write his biography, but had to give up because although he achieved a great deal in many fields, his story did not seem to me to be of general interest. That was the case before I began looking in detail at what he did and said whilst he was a Member of the Cape Parliament, and then later a Senator in the Parliament of the Union of South Africa.

Franz was a Member of the Cape Parliament between 1905 and 1910. He was a Senator from 1927 until his death in 1936. Between 1910 and 1927, he was involved in provincial, rather than national, politics, representing King on the Cape Provincial Council. During the first 4 decades of the 20^th century, much legislation was passed that diminished what few rights the non-Europeans ever possessed. One can safely say that this legislation paved or eased the way towards the establishment of apartheid in 1948.

Arriving in South Africa aged 18, Franz did not have a university education. His father Nathan was an accomplished academic. For religious reasons, as I explain in my book, Nathan had to turn down offers of academic positions in German universities. So, despite not having attended university it is likely that Franz was well-educated when he arrived in South Africa. When he was involved with national politics, he debated with politicians, many of whom had attained a high level of formal university education: lawyers, clerics, and so on. Yet, the reports of the debates in which he was involved demonstrate that Franz was easily able to hold his own with his highly educated colleagues in the Parliament and the Senate.  Always an opponent of the Nationalists, he was able to see through the deviousness and disingenuousness of their arguments. And, being able to do so, he attempted to combat or at least to mitigate the unfair legislation that they were promoting. Sadly, he was one of a few lone voices crying out in the wilderness.

When I began to see what my investigations into Franz’s political life were revealing, I realised that writing about his life would result in something with greater interest than a simple biography. Franz’s biography opens a ‘window’ into the history of the evolution of apartheid.

Prejudice against non-Europeans in South Africa began as soon as the Dutch first dropped anchor in the waters lapping the Cape of Good Hope. During the 19^th century, under British rule, things did not improve for the non-Europeans. By the beginning of the 20^th century, ensuring the submission of the non-European population became an ever-increasing concern of legislators. The ending of the 2^nd Boer war in 1902, and the desire to unify the 2 former Boer republics (the Orange Free State and Transvaal) with the 2 British colonies (Cape Colony and Natal) led to a further reduction in the political status of the non-Europeans. This was because in order to achieve unification, the British felt obliged to acknowledge, or at least not challenge, the firmly held views of the Boers that non-Europeans were to be regarded as inferiors with no rights at all.

Franz’s role in the politics of this interesting era was that of trying to ensure that non-Europeans were fairly treated. However, this is an oversimplification as I explain in my book. His approach was complex, and at times unusual. Trying to explain his activities to today’s readership in the context of his times was one of the challenges of writing his biography. I feel that this is what gives my narrative interest to a wider audience. One reader in South Africa has already written:

“Your studious unravelling and compilation of Franz’s remarkable life … gave me a sense of the evolution of our country …”

It is this ‘sense of the evolution’ of modern South Africa that I had hoped to convey when I published my biography of Franz Ginsberg, “Soap to Senate: A German Jew at the dawn of Apartheid.” (By Adam Yamey)

Available on Amazon Kindle and from www.lulu.com (paperback edition) by typing “Soap to Senate” in the appropriate places on these websites.

HOW THE SOUTH WEST WAS WON

Review of The Kaiser’s Holocaust, by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen (published in 2010 by Faber & Faber in London.)

One of the great stumbling blocks during the lengthy, eight year process leading up to the Union of South Africa in 1910 was whether or not to give non-Europeans the right to vote, or any political rights at all. In 1909, JBM Hertzog, whilst discussing the draft constitution of the proposed union in the Transvaal Parliament, is recorded as having said that, “the native was undeniably a human being, but he was not yet entitled to political rights because he was still a child, ‘in matters of civilisation … thousands of years behind the whites.’”.  Earlier on in that debate, Abraham Fischer had questioned, “whether the people of South Africa had done any act of injustice to the natives”, before adding that, “…the overriding law was ‘the law of self-preservation’” For, he said, “The black man’s rights were not the rights of the white man, who had no intention of acknowledging that they were such now.” (All of these quotes come from The Unification of South Africa 1902-1910, by LM Thompson, published 1960 in Oxford). At least, the most ardent opponents of giving black people the franchise in South Africa recognised that the Africans were human, and were willing to discuss whether they had any rights to self-representation.

This was definitely not the case across the border in German South West Africa (‘SWA’, now ‘Namibia’), as is eloquently described in The Kaiser’s Holocaust, a book written by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen.

JC Smuts, in his 1952 biography of his father Jan Christian Smuts (South Africa’s Prime Minister from 1939 to 1948), summarises the history of German SWA succinctly: “The German flag was hoisted on the 6^th August, 1884, at Lüderitzbucht… Nine years later a ruthless series of wars began which went on till 1908. The German ideal of colonisation was the same as in the old Americas - extermination. Thereafter there was no Red Indian problem. In South-West Africa Germany determined there would be no Herero problem…”

The Kaiser’s Holocaust describes how, to quote Smuts, the Germans ‘determined there would be no Herero problem’ in SWA, and shows effectively how the genocide of the Herero and many of the Nama people can be considered to have been a prototype for the Holocaust orchestrated by the Germans during the Second World War in their quest for Lebensraum and racial purity.  This alone would have made me want to read the book, but I had an additional personal interest in the subject matter.

Newspapers across South Africa noted the discovery of alluvial diamonds in SWA in 1908. In November of that year, The Cape Mercury, published in King Williams Town, carried a detailed report about the extremely rich alluvial diamond field discovered in the immediate vicinity of Lüderitzbucht. The diamonds were easily accessible, lying just beneath the surface of the dust on the floor of the desert. The writer of the article expressed surprise that this remarkable discovery had not been made earlier, as, “… it is understood that during the recent struggle between the German Troops and the Hereros, detachments of troops camped in the immediate vicinity, if not even upon the actual ground where the stones are now being picked…”. It is this ‘struggle’ against the Hereros and also against the other ‘black’ or ‘coloured’ inhabitants of SWA, which is described in detail by Olusoga and Erichsen. This ‘struggle’ that began as an attempt to suppress native attacks on the recently arrived German settlers rapidly deteriorated into blatant genocide.

On the 28^th December, 1908, a writer in the Mercury wrote: “Attention is directed to the advertisement appearing in another column regarding the prospectus of the Kolmans-Kop Diamond Mines Ltd., near Lüderitzbucht, German South West Africa … One of the directors is Mr Franz Ginsberg, MLA”. Mr Ginsberg, Member of Parliament for King Williams Town, was one of my ancestors. As I read The Kaiser’s Holocaust, I wondered how much my ancestor knew about what had been going on in SWA until a few months before he trod the diamond-bearing sands near Lüderitzbucht (upon which the Imperial German Army had camped whilst executing their ‘struggle’), and what he thought about it.

The ‘struggle’ alluded to above began in earnest 1904, when the Hereros, fed up with the unfriendly activities and false promises of the recently arrived colonists from Europe, began their attacks on the Germans. At first, they were very successful, but later when Germany sent out reinforcements, their defeat became inevitable. The arrival of General Lothar Von Trotha (1848-1920) in SWA marked the beginning of the ruthless destruction of the Hereros. Von Trotha wrote of the situation in SWA in 1904, “I know enough tribes in Africa. They all have the same mentality insofar as they yield only to force. It was and remains my policy by absolute terrorism and even cruelty I shall destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood and money.” And he did, even employing ‘Cleansing Patrols’ to kill any natives who had managed to escape his murderous forces. This was a forerunner of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’, such as disfigured the Balkans not so long ago.

Many Africans, who were not killed immediately, were herded together and imprisoned in concentration camps (such as were pioneered by the Spanish in Cuba in the late1890s, and used with devastating effect by the British during the 2^nd Boer War of 1899-1902), with the idea of killing them off by exposure to inhospitable living conditions and forced labour. One of these camps was on Shark Island, an island next to the town of Lüderitzbucht, and only 13 kilometres from Kolmanskop, where Mr Ginsberg’s diamond ‘mine’ was to be established in 1908.

Closed in 1907, Shark Island was a forerunner of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other equally notorious places. It was undoubtedly a concentration camp.  However, as is well-described by Olusoga and Erichsen, Shark Island was not simply used to separate the Africans from the Europeans, but it was part of a systematic attempt to exterminate the Africans. Many unfortunates were killed by the cruelty of their captors, starvation, and exposure to the harsh elements. Others were worked to death. Working to death, which was to become a feature of the Nazi concentration camps, was pioneered in the many concentration camps of SWA including Shark Island. The only thing that distinguished these camps from those set up by the Nazis a few years later was the absence of industrialised methods of mass murder (i.e. the use of carbon monoxide and Zyklon B).

According to Martin Gilbert in his book Auschwitz and the Allies, very little was known outside the Axis territories about the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews and others before 1944. Even between 1944 and the end of the war, knowledge of the existence of what is now called ‘The Holocaust’ was limited to a very few politicians. The converse was true forty years earlier in German SWA. If my ancestor, Mr Ginsberg, had been a reader of the Cape Argus, a newspaper published in Cape Town, he would have read about the horrific suffering that was happening in camps like Shark Island. Olusoga and Erichsen quote from a series of articles published in 1905 in this paper. These contained reports on the camps supplied by a German trader who had witnessed them first-hand. The excerpts, which they reproduce in the book, are too horrific to be included in this review.

What had the Africans done to inspire such cruelty as was inflicted upon them by the Germans in their colony?

Was it their failure to trust their German invaders and their false promises of protection? Was it the heavy blows that the Africans rained on the initially ill-prepared German military forces? Or, was it the result of a belief in Social Darwinism? All three of these were important in determining the Germans’ behaviour in SWA. However, the authors of The Kaiser’s Holocaust consider that the major driving factor in the genocide in German SWA was strong belief in the concepts of racial supremacy and Social Darwinism. The evidence that they present to support their views is impressive.

They describe, for example, the writings of Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), who was inspired by Social Darwinism and ‘invented’ the Lebensraum concept. He believed, according to Olusoga and Erichsen, that, “Colonial peoples disappeared because they were persecuted, enslaved and exterminated” because some “inner cultural weakness of the native races of Africa, America and Asia made them passive, and therefore incapable of withstanding the European assault. All this was acceptable because the people the Europeans were destroying were what he termed ‘inferior races’”.  A few years later in 1912, Paul Rohrbach (1869-1956) wrote, “No false philanthropy or race-theory can prove to reasonable people that the preservation of any tribe of nomadic South African Kaffirs… is more important for the future of mankind than the expansion of the European nations, or the white race as a whole.” Horrific as this may sound today, it was perfectly reasonable to those who ordered, and carried out the genocide in SWA.  The same kind of reasoning was applied by the Nazis a few decades later in Europe. They believed that Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs, all of whom were to be regarded as being sub-human were suitable only for use as slave labour before being exterminated.

The authors of the Kaiser’s Holocaust devote many pages to describing the genocide of the Africans in German SWA and comparing it with what was to follow later in Nazi Occupied Europe. The comparisons are frightening. They include the use of prisoners in scientifically questionable medical experiments, and their corpses for anthropological studies, whose aims were to attempt to prove scurrilous, pseudo-scientific theories of racial supremacy. However, what is more frightening is the gradual evolution from the Imperial Germans’ justification of genocide to that of the Nazis.

Whilst most of the Kaiser’s Holocaust is dedicated to the German treatment of the Africans in German SWA, a largish part of the second half of the book deals with the development of Nazi ideas, and the regime that resulted from them. Many of the Nazi’s views on race and how to deal with ‘inferior people’ (Untermenschen, the translation of a derogatory term coined by the American eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard in 1922) were, as is well demonstrated by Olusoga and Erichsen, derived from the ideas believed by those whose racial theories justified the African genocide, and also those persons who carried it out in SWA and then later lived in Germany.

Some readers may consider that too much space in the book has been devoted to development of the Nazi’s genocidal plans, everything that is contained in this book is fascinating, and contributes to a greater understanding of the basis of Hitler’s dreams and their ghastly realisation.

Anyone with even the faintest interest in twentieth century history should spend a few hours reading this fascinating, well-written book. And if you don’t have any interest in this aspect of history, this book will certainly change that!

AFTERTHOUGHT

Lest we should become complacent, we must not forget that the German elimination of the ‘natives’ in SWA was not without precedent. Olusoga and Erichsen mention that Ratzel cited the ‘displacement’ of indigenous people in North America, Brazil, Tasmania, and New Zealand, as being models for future colonialism, wars of extermination, and, dare I say it, genocide. 

Remember, “History is written by the victors”, or as George Orwell put it, “He, who controls the present, controls the past. He, who controls the past, controls the future.”

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