Who was the real Ernst Luchtenstein? In The Scourge of the Kaiserbird I tell the story of a young boy who arrived in the then German South-West Africa and grew up to become one of the wealthiest individuals in the country. Who was he really?

I tried to remain as close to the truth as possible, but readers must keep in mind that Ernst passed away in 1972, long before I knew of him. The image and character I created was based upon what I could read about him and what I could learn by interviewing two of his children, Margaret van Rooyen and the late Tudi Luchtenstein. The latter was initially reluctant to grant me an interview because he said that his father always shunned publicity. In the end he did give me an interview and told me many stories of his famous father.

Ernst Luchtenstein was born on 3 January 1893 in Schmalkalden, Germany and attended school in Tilsit. He arrived in Lüderitzbucht, now called Lüderitz, in 1906. He was with his mother Therese, sister Charlotte and brother, Ewald, of whom I had no information and left out of the story. When he disembarked from the ship he nearly drowned, a fact which I embroidered upon in order to suit my central plot.

The family was met by his father Joseph Luchtenstein, a transport rider. The family then crossed the Namib Desert in Joseph’s ox wagon. Somewhere along the route they were captured by a band of Nama warriors. Ernst’s mother fell on her knees before the leader and pleaded for their lives upon which the leader said, “Madam, kneel before God alone. We do not make war against women and children.” Later on I figured out that this man was Cornelius Fredericks, leader of the !Aman tribe of Namas of Bethanien.

Ernst’s mother Therese died very soon after their arrival in the country and Ernst was placed in the care of a one-eyed Keetmanshoop farmer, the Scotsman Robert McKay and his Nama wife. He learnt to speak the Nama language fluently and he had a good relationship with the Namas throughout his life. Once, he acted as touleier for one of McKay’s treks which turned out to be a disaster. Ernst was stuck in the desert for three weeks with only one Nama for company and a bag of maize meal as rations. Later on he recalled this time fondly.

During the First World war he was taken prisoner of war by the Union of South Africa forces but he managed to escape. He then lived a secret, solitary life in the Karas Mountains for 18 months. During this time he killed a leopard with a knobkierie and a knife.

Towards the end of the war he was again “captured” by two soldiers. He learnt from them that his flight into the mountains had been unnecessary because as a civilian conscript into the German army he would not have been interned. He was taken to Keetmanshoop to be employed as a hunting guide to a certain captain Tilley.

He became a transport rider, like his father, and started buying land until he eventually owned 500 000 hectares of farming land. He married Regina and they had four daughters and one son. In later years he contracted polio and he then turned to woodworking. Some of his finely crafted work survives to this day.

During his life time he made massive charitable donations, even to Protestant and Catholic churches. Many of the older people in the Keetmanshoop area still speak fondly of him.

I used this man as a symbol of who we could be, if only we decide to live a selfless life.

References

To the River’s End. Lawrence G Green. Howard B Symonds Cape Town: 4th Edition 1950

Lords of the Last Frontier. Lawrence G Green. Howard B Symonds Cape Town: 1952

Touleier to millionaire. Sam Davis. The Windhoek Observer p13.

Early days of a SWA pioneer. SWA Jaarboek. p68-69: 1962

“Touleier” on Trek. Ernst Luchtenstein. SWA Jaarboek  pp 62-65: 1965

The Scourge of the Kaiserbird,” originally published in Afrikaans as “Die Keiservoël Oor Namaland,” is available from all leading bookstores in Namibia, through Namibian Book Market, and in South Africa from Upper Case, formerly Graffiti, in Menlyn Maine. Copies can also be ordered from bestellings@kaiserbird.com

The “Scourge of the Kaiserbird” begins with the arrival by ship in 1906 of the young Ernst Luchtenstein, his little sister Charlotte, and their mother Therese at Lüderitzbucht, later renamed simply Lüderitz.

Their father and Therese’s husband, Joseph was waiting for them. He had been in the country for three years when they came. He was a transport rider meaning he used ox wagons to transport goods from the bay of Lüderitzbucht to Keetmanshoop in the interior, 325 kilometers away. German Southwest Africa was a young colony then having been appropriated by Adolph Lüderitz in a dubious transaction in 1883, a mere 23 years earlier.

Joseph Luchtenstein, like all transport riders in that area, faced a serious challenge. He had to move his family across 125 kilometers of Namib desert without a ready supply of water. In fact Lüderitzbucht had no water of its own. All its water had to be imported from the Cape, by ship. The German colonists built desalination plants but these often were out of service. The thirsty oxen, horses, mules and humans had to share the limited water supply imported from the Cape, or produced by the dodgy desalination plants.

The heavily laden ox wagons then also had to overcome the thick sand, the ferocious east winds in their faces, the scorching heat by day and the freezing cold at night. On top of it all Germany was in the midst of a war against the indigenous Nama people with Nama commandos ever ready to pounce on transport columns.

It often took an ox wagon weeks to cross the Namib desert and to arrive at Aus, a “mere” 125 kilometers from Lüderitz. It was common practice for the oxen to pull the wagons a few kilometers into the desert, then to be outspanned and driven back to Lüderitz to drink some more of that expensive water and then to be driven back to the wagons in the desert for more of the same. When they had crossed the halfway mark between Lüderitz and Aus the animals would be driven forwards towards Aus, then called Kleinfontein, to drink at the big waterhole at Klein Kubub.

The ordeal was a challenge which only the toughest of men and animals would survive. For a long time I struggled to get my mind around the problem. When you view this inhospitable landscape you find it difficult to believe that anybody could succeed in doing it. It cost me a lot of research and many rewrites before I managed to understand how they did it. It was only then when I could present a credible story.

One of the things which helped me to understand was when I discovered an antique map of the ox wagon routes showing the presence of some fountains and collections of water in the desert. The treks between Lüderitz and Keetmanshoop mostly didn’t take a direct route over the Tschaukaib plain where the current tar road and the old railway tracks are. Instead they mostly veered south to make use of the little water at Ukamas, sometimes spelt Ukama, and Kaukasib. Without these sources the treks would have been all but impossible.

In one of the stories I related it took one trek six weeks to trek from Lüderitz to Aus. This was based on documented evidence. It proves how hardy these men were.

Once the ox wagons reached Aus, the rest was easy. There were plenty of fountains and grazing between Aus and Keetmanshoop.

It is another of my personal dreams to visit Ukamas and the Kaukasib one day in the future. At the moment it is impossible because they fall inside the prohibited Sperrgebiet.

“The Scourge of the Kaiserbird,” originally published in Afrikaans as “Die Keiservoël Oor Namaland,” will be available from all leading bookstores in Namibia, through Namibian Book Market, and in South Africa from Upper Case, formerly Graffiti, in Menlyn Maine. Copies can also be ordered from bestellings@kaiserbird.com

Perhaps the most important place I visited during my recent tour on the tracks and trails of “The Scourge of the Kaiserbird,” translated from my book “Die Keiservoël Oor Namaland” was Shark Island in the bay of Lüderitz.

This island was the scene of some terrible atrocities during the Nama War and thousands died there.

I have been accused by certain interested parties of slightly exaggerating these atrocities. Perhaps certain scenes were over emphasised, but perhaps not. The central truth is that none of what I have described can be worse as to what eventually happened in Poland and Germany during World War 2, the Holocaust in which six million Jews and also other “lesser” people were killed.

It was my deliberate intention to describe these atrocities in their horrific detail, because many commentators including myself contend that the Jewish Holocaust of 1939 -1945 really began on Shark Island during the Nama War. It was here that people (Namas and Hereros) were incarcerated, killed and experimented on, because they were considered an inferior race. At least one “researcher” claimed that he had found the “missing link”, the Nama people. This concept of the “Untermenschen,” inferior beings, led to the idea and philosophy of eugenics and racial classification and eventually genocide in the name of science. And it all started on Shark Island, 33 years earlier in 1906 -1907 with the research work of dr Eugen Fischer. Fischer wrote books and published articles which Adolf Hitler read and used for some of his ideas in Mein Kampf. He and Fischer became friends and according to one source Fischer was appointed as head of racial hygiene at Auschwitz with the outbreak of World War 2.

The most damning evidence of these atrocities is the skulls of Nama prisoners sent to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. The heads of the dead Namas were given to the prisoners’ wives to scrape clean with glass shards, cooked and then packed and shipped.

It is well documented with published photographs, and even as a final insult, used as illustrations for postcards. Most of these are still in Berlin.

One of the prisoners whose skull is still in Berlin was Cornelius Fredericks, leader of the Bethanien !Aman during the Nama war. He was also the son-in-law of Hendrik Witbooi. Cornelius is one of the main characters in “The Scourge of the Kaiserbird.” In a strange and ironic twist he is commemorated with a memorial stone on Shark Island.

I have returned to Shark Island many times, but not with pleasure. It is a sad place, made even more so by the presence of, of all things, a modern caravan camp site. The noise and jubilance of weekend revellers and picnic makers sound hollow and out of place when one knows the history.

To my mind a proper museum should be erected or even better a school or college or hospital should be built on this stark, windy and rocky island. It can and should remind us all of the madness that caused so much hardship and tragedy for so many people.

I visited Shark Island again on this trip because I had to.

“The Scourge of the Kaiserbird,” originally published in Afrikaans as “Die Keiservoël Oor Namaland,” will be available from all leading bookstores in Namibia, through Namibian Book Market, and in South Africa from Upper Case, formerly Graffiti, in Menlyn Maine. Copies can also be ordered from bestellings@kaiserbird.com

Due to the vagaries of the weather and the special brand of Namibian Wifi, I was not able to post blogs the past few days, but here goes. I wrote this blog on Thursday 12 April 2018:

Today I had the opportunity to visit Gochas and surroundings with the specific aim of seeing first hand the memorial stones erected in the honour of Captain Friedrich Von Erckert, Lieutenant Oskar Ebinger and the eleven other Schutztruppe who fell on the 16 March 1908 in what many regard as the final battle of the Nama war. This story is covered in a romanticized manner in “The Scourge of the Kaiserbird” my historical novel which was published last month. I have spent the past two weeks travelling “Namaland,” the south of Namibia, in a marketing tour that was a little more than that for me. To me it was once again an emotional pilgrimage of the places I came to revere and respect over the course of the past eleven years, the time it took me to write, publish and translate the book.

In Chapter 37 I tell how more than 300 German Schutztruppe, armed to the teeth, left Gochas and Aranos on 710 camels following the course of the Aoub and Nossob rivers into British territory and deep into Bechuanaland, hot on the heels of the fleeing Nama commando under the leadership of Simon Koper. The battle finally took place near Kaa on the Botswana side of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. Within minutes the leader of the German expeditionary corps, Captain Von Erckert was killed, along with Lieutenant Ebinger and the eleven soldiers, but Simon Koper, the “Füchs aller Füchse” (fox of all foxes) escaped and lived out the rest of his days a free man, even being paid an annual stipend by Germany.

The amazing thing was that the battlefield and the graves of the 13 buried Germans have been lost. Nobody knows exactly where the site is. The herpetologist Wulf Haacke has led no less than five search expeditions to find the site. A German group has also done four searches and will do another one in November. I was on an official search five weeks ago. We have some idea but I cannot divulge the details yet. I have written another short book about the events including our recent search. It has become something of an obsession for me to find this site.

As a result of the battlefield and graves being lost, the German authorities decided somewhere around 1909-1914 to erect the headstones in Gochas, the original headquarters of the expedition, on German territory. I have long known about the headstones but today was the first time I could visit the graveyard myself. It was a stark reminder of the futility and irony of war. Germany won the battle and also the war, but not without losing face to the small group of Namas of Simon Koper.

“The Scourge of the Kaiserbird,” originally published in Afrikaans as “Die Keiservoël Oor Namaland,” will be available from all leading bookstores in Namibia, through Namibian Book Market, and in South Africa from Upper Case, formerly Graffiti, in Menlyn Maine. Copies can also be ordered from bestellings@kaiserbird.com

Today I continue with the story of our recent journey on the tracks and trails of my newly released book, The Scourge of the Kaiserbird.

Once again we had to stop at Bethanien, one of the central locations, not only in my book, but also in Namibian colonial history. The first challenge as an author was to decide on the spelling of the place name. A direct translation of the Afrikaans Bethanie, as spelled on the official sign welcoming you to the little village, or Bethanië, as in the Bible, would have been Bethany, but that just did not seem right. I decided to use Bethanien, the old German spelling. It added some flavour and emphasis to the story.

Bethanien was and still is the seat of the Fredericks dynasty of the !Aman tribe. The most recent leader, Dawid Fredericks, passed away on 12 January this year at the age of 85. I visited him last year and recorded a few video images of him talking about the Nama war of 1904-1908, a central theme in the book. At the time it struck me that he was most probably the last living person who had personally talked with a survivor of the war. Captain Fredericks was one of the two nominated people who are engaged in a 30 billion dollar law suit in the USA against Germany for reparation for war crimes.

Two of the oldest buildings in Namibia are located in Bethanien, one the house of the missionary Hinrich Schmelen, and the other the house of Josef Fredericks the second who in 1883 unknowingly sold most of Namaland for a pittance, in a crooked transaction deliberately designed by Heinrich Vogelsang and Adolph Lüderitz. Today the Fredericks house is a national monument.

Bethanien is a symbol of many things, of injustice, greed, exploitation and even desperation, but to me it will always be a special place, one where I have learnt how complicated life and relationships can be. Things are never simple. One can argue for both sides of the argument without ever coming to a conclusion. Was it a good thing that the missionaries came here? Was that not the reason they lost their land? Or would they all have perished in internecine wars and battles, like the Afrikaners, the descendants of Klaas, Jager and Jonker?

For the moment I have to side with the contention that the work of the missionaries is not complete. Their work must be carried out to its logical conclusion, in practice and reality and not in theory. Something must be done to bring hope, vision, education, training and a positive future to the people of Bethanien.

My personal dream is for tourism to be developed in this area. It has worked in so many other areas of Namibia, but why is there no progress in Bethanien? Why has nobody put up a guest house, hotel or establishment in the traditional way of the Nama, in reed huts (//haru-oms)? Why are there no organised tours with enthusiastic guides? Why is there no restaurant offering traditional fare?

“The Scourge of the Kaiserbird,” originally published in Afrikaans as “Die Keiservoël Oor Namaland,” will be available from all leading bookstores in Namibia, through Namibian Book Market, and in South Africa from Upper Case, formerly Graffiti, in Menlyn Maine. Copies can also be ordered from bestellings@kaiserbird.com