The glamour of prospecting : $b wanderings of a South African prospector in search of copper, gold, emeralds, and diamonds — John Shaqi
The glamour of prospecting : $b wanderings of a South African prospector in search of copper, gold, emeralds, and diamondsCornell, Fred C. (Frederick Carruthers)
History
The glamour of prospecting : $b wanderings of a South African prospector in search of copper, gold, emeralds, and diamonds
Cornell, Fred C. (Frederick Carruthers)
Mines and mineral resources -- South Africa; Prospecting; South Africa -- Description and travel
Herero prisoners captured in the north for internment to Luderitzbucht,
where they were strangers to the country and where escape was hopeless,
whilst the Hottentots captured in the south were sent north to
Swakopmund.
There is a small low-lying promontory in Luderitz Bay known as Shark
Island, and here the Herero prisoners were crowded in thousands,
shelterless, with no proper supply of food or water: and here, huddled
together like penguins, they died like flies.
Often on a blazing day, such as is common in Luderitzbucht, they
received no water whatever, either having been forgotten, or the
supply having failed; the food(?) supplied them was never sufficient
for a tithe of them, and they often fought like wild animals and killed
each other to obtain it. There were also a large number caged in a wire
enclosure on the beach; these were slightly better off, as, although
they received no rations from the military in charge of them, a few of
their number were let out each morning and went ravenously foraging
in the refuse-buckets, bringing what offal they could back to their
starving fellow-prisoners. Cold--for the nights are often bitterly cold
there--hunger, thirst, exposure, disease, and madness claimed scores of
victims every day, and cartloads of their bodies were every day carted
over to the back beach, buried in a few inches of sand at low tide, and
as the tide came in the bodies went out, food for the sharks.
Now, Stuurmann and the other men who told me these things were no
negrophiles (a Boer as a rule has an excellent idea as to how to keep
a native in his place as the white man’s inferior), but so terrible
had been the treatment of these natives by the Germans that even these
case-hardened transport-drivers spoke of what they had seen with the
utmost horror and abhorrence. Yet these men are looked down upon as an
inferior race by the Germans, who themselves, as far as the troops and
officials in German South-West are concerned, are utterly devoid of
all humanity when dealing with natives. I saw much of the trait myself
later; it is unpleasant and distasteful, and bodes but ill for the
future relations of white and black in the German colonies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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