(His body, presumably swept into the frigid waters of the South Atlantic, was never recovered.) Over the next two decades, the governments of Bismarck and his successors didn’t focus on diamond hunting they built railroads and tried to entice German farmers to settle the largely waterless territory. Instead he died penniless after his boat capsized during an expedition to find the mouth of the Orange River in 1886. Lüderitz dreamed of a diamond strike that would make him the German counterpart of the mining magnate and Cape Colony prime minister Cecil John Rhodes. In 1884 German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, enticed by the possibility that diamonds and other minerals lay beneath the sands, recognized Lüderitz as the ruler of a new German possession called Lüderitzland. By the time he got wise to the duplicity, it was too late. (Frederiks’s European name was probably bestowed on him by a missionary from the Rhenish Mission Society, a German Protestant group that had been active in the territory since the 1830s.) Three months later, the agent paid Frederiks an additional £500 and sixty rifles for a 10,000-square-mile sweep of land between Angra Pequeña and the Orange River, which formed the northern border of Great Britain’s Cape Colony.įrederiks was barely literate, and he also had grievously misunderstood the size of the territory he was selling: Lüderitz’s agent had drawn up the contracts using German square miles, thirty times larger than the English square miles familiar to Frederiks. After trekking 124 miles through the bush to a settlement called Bethanie, the agent persuaded Josef Frederiks, a chief of the Nama people, to sell the scorpion-infested desert around Angra Pequeña for gold valued at £100 and two hundred loaded rifles. In 1883 Adolf Lüderitz, a tobacco merchant and adventurer from Bremen, dispatched an agent to Angra Pequeña, a desolate natural harbor on Africa’s South Atlantic coast and the gateway to one of the last territories on the continent that hadn’t been claimed by European powers. The colony known as German Southwest Africa (now the nation of Namibia) was born out of a monumental swindle. Ovambos working in a diamond field under the supervision of a German foreman on horseback, German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), early 1910s ![]() ![]() ![]() Image Collection of the German Colonial Society/University Library, Frankfurt am Main
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