The Herero-Nama genocide couldn't be ignored by the Jewish population that fled pogroms and persecution. But its discovery by Holocaust survivors from the Lithuanian ghettos of Vilnius and Kovno, the writers and poets Avrom Sutzkever and Dovid Wolpe, who emigrated to South Africa in 1951, opens new perspectives.

The police force in German Southwest-Africa - the so called berittene Landespolizei für Deutsch Südwest - was created in the midst of the ongoing war of annihilation which the German army waged against the African population living there. Most of its 600 to 700 members had fought as soldiers in the war or had been involved in it, on either side. These men were both African and German, and they were charged with the task to bring a new order to a colonized and colonizing society marked by extreme violence, suffering, and fear.

My paper investigates into the practices of policing in the emerging urban areas of German Southwest-Africa towards the end of the war. I claim that the police built on the war and on the military - both on its physical remainders as well as on its non-material legacies - in order to fulfill its mission. Yet, the paper will also show that these policing practices were no longer inscribed into a logic of war and absolute destruction, but rather made up a culture of everyday, run-of-the-mill violence in which all inhabitants of the colonial settlement sought an elusive stability through the regularized ways in which they built individual lives, formed and reformed communities, and organized social life.

Taking the Lüderitz Bay area and its various camps as example, the paper discusses dynamics of infrastructure, sanitation and labour policies in order to chart urban trajectories of modernity and death in southern Namibia between 1905 and 1909. The paper is exploraory and makes use of the private letters of a Swiss medical camp doctor reporting on the area and themes of concern.

In stark contrast to their sheer number, the concentration camps in German South-West Africa, installed during the German-Namibian War (1904–1908) remain mostly undocumented. The development of the town of Luderitz is strongly connected to the war and the Shark Island concentration camp I will discuss Shark Island as a place of remembrance and oblivion and contrast the lack of remembering the island’s past with a recent project by the Namibian visual artist Nicola Brandt.