the Germans started their attempted administration of the country under unusual difficulties. The situation needed firmness and tact in dealing with the natives, and an iron hand over settlers and speculators guilty of oppression and crime. Leutwein was a well-meaning man—so much even the Blue Book allows—who made himself unpopular in the Dependency by refusing to go as far as the settlers wished him to go, but who lacked efficient home support and the necessary strength of character to grasp with firm hands the nettles of muddle and misrule. His assistants were young and totally inexperienced officials and officers trained in the art of Prussian regimentalism, utterly unfitted for the task of administering African peoples, and many of them of indifferent reputation. An impartial account, published in 1908, of the vices of the German colonial system at that time contains the following instructive passages:
Tradition proved too strong even for Prince Bismarck, and gradually the whole system of Prussian bureaucracy was introduced into each of the Colonies… The Germans never went to school in colonial matters They light-heartedly took upon themselves the governing of vast territories and diverse races in the confident belief that the "cameral sciences," which had for generations proved an efficient preparation for local administration at home, would qualify equally well for Africa… Instead of studying native law and custom systematically, and regulating administration in each colony according to its peculiar traditions and circumstances, all Colonies alike were governed on a sort of lex Germanica, consisting of Prussian legal maxims pedantically interpreted in a narrow, bureaucratic spirit by jurists with little experience of law, with less of human nature, and with none at all of native usages… Worse still, the choice of colonial officials has not, in many cases, been a happy one… The Colonies were for a long time looked upon as a happy hunting ground for adventurers who could not settle down to steady work at home, or a sort of early Australia to which family failures might conveniently be sent.
The trouble with the Hereros began in 1890 upon the death of Kamaherero, the chief of the Okahandja clan of the Herero tribe. With their usual passion for centralisation, the Germans had treated Kamaherero as the paramount chief of all the Hereros, to which position he had no title in native law. When he died the Germans supported, the claim of his younger son, Maherero, to the headship of the clan, as against that of the rightful heir. Nikodemus. Worse still, they persisted in their policy of investing the head of the Okahandjas with the paramount chieftainship, with the idea, apparently, of dis-
