Map of German South-West Africa

A History of German South-West Africa: 100 Years On.

The Viceroyalty of German South-West Africa, or more officially, the German Empire-in-exile, is a small nation located in the south-western portion of the African continent with a population of around 3.4 million as of 1984 A.D. The constitutional monarchy borders the rogue state of South Africa to the south, the nations of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and the Kingdom of Bechuanaland to the east plus the Portuguese province of Angola and the People’s Republic of Zambia to the far-north. Its capital and largest city is Walvis Bay on the coast of the state and is administered in a similar way to Washington D.C., as that of a semi-independent city state. South-West Africa is a member of the League of Nations, the International Monarchist League and the Non-Aligned Movement.

--

The history of this quasi-successor state stretches back to the 1880’s, when the once-mighty German Empire straddled the European continent, from the Rhine to Memel Rivers, to the jungles and deserts of Darkest Africa. The German people at that time were clamouring for their own colonial empire, as to emulate their French and British rivals. Despite the Germans leading the 1884 Berlin Conference and requesting what seemed to be (in their eyes, at least) “fair and equitable demands”, Bismarck and his ilk ended up receiving a smaller portion of the African continent than what they’d hoped. The Germans, however, proved to be very resourceful with their new colonial holdings and strived to get the most out of the land by opening them for settlement.

Despite being mostly desert with disparate amounts of arable land on the coast and northern half of the state, South-West Africa wasn’t immune from this wave of German migration as hundereds of thousands of Imperial German citizens made their way down to the continent from 1884 to 1914. Small numbers of Boers, Polish Jews, Czechs and Danes also emigrated down on their own accord in the post-First Great War years, further bolstering the population. The native Herero and Namaqua peoples were slowly accepted by the colonial administration as farmhands and cultural attaches, as long as they converted to the Lutheran Church and knew enough German to pass a basic fluency test. The colony of S-W Africa would slowly become a beacon for progressive thought, despite the harsh conditions, as many disaffected/exiled politicians from Europe were forced to flee from Bismarck’s kulturkampf. Many have compared the colony to the British colonisation of Australia, wherein the worst of society were dumped in near-inhospitable conditions and were expected to eke out an existence, and much like their Anglophone equivalents that were an entire continent away, the madmen did it.

By the time the Great War broke out in Europe in 1914, South-West Africa and specifically the (now former) capital city of New Berlin (referred to as ‘Windhoek’ by foreigners) were booming in not only size, but also population with the capital holding at least 45,000 people, while the entire colony was home to at least 320,000. The only thing standing between an Entente invasion via British-owned South Africa and Bechuanaland was the vast Namib Desert and a Colonial Militia that was understaffed, wielded out-of-date armaments and subjected their Heroro-majority ‘Coloured Battalions’ to indiscriminate and disproportionate amounts of punishment when compared to the regular militias.

The outbreak of the Great War was a shock to the colonial officials as South African forces marched into the colony, quickly occupying the heavily populated southern coast, while forces from the Bechuanaland Protectorate (British policy in OTL Botswana took a different turn here) took the Caprivi Strip. The Colonial Militias fought against the well-trained and numerically superior British forces with a level of ferocity and knowledge of the environment that gave them enough of an edge to keep the Entente forces from taking Windhoek. A combination of trench-warfare in some areas and full-on irregular fighting kept the British from advancing as far as the small mining town of Helmeringhausen. The day that the Siege of Helmeringhausen was lifted – October 7^th – is now a national holiday in the modern Viceroyalty. The slow trickle of updated equipment and men from the German Empire further bolstered the resolve of the Militas, as the British exclave of Walvis Bay fell in 1916 and the British were pushed back across the Orange River by the end of the war in 1918. With the Boer Revolt and the subsequent establishment of the short-lived Second South African Republic plus the general fatigue and lack of supplies ended in the South African government suing for peace with the colonial officials, handing over the port city of Walvis Bay and the Penguin Islands to the Germans.

Despite such a miraculous victory over the British in West Africa, the situation in both the other side of the continent and in Europe was dire for the Kaiser and his generals. Wilhelm II had taken a little too much interest in the affairs of his military, constantly meddling in affairs in which he had little-to-no knowledge of. These tactical failures led to a short-lived revolt from the major port-city of Kiel, which quickly spiralled into nation-wide mass-desertions, food riots and civil disobedience. Instead of abdicating and handing over power to his son, Kaiser Wilhelm and the remaining loyalist generals saw the writing on the wall and commandeered whatever naval and army forces they could before setting off to Walvis Bay on the 30^th of November, 1918. The bulk of the German Royal Family and their possessions also set off to the colony under their own means.

The resulting power vacuum in the German state led to the innumerable kingdoms, duchies and free cities declaring independence or an allegiance to larger national entities. The Kingdoms of Saxony and Bavaria aided in the stabilisation of southern and central Germany, whilst the Entente-controlled Free German Army held the Rhineland together. A prototype Anarcho-Capitalist commune arose in Berlin and expelled the remnants of Imperial German forces, who quickly hopped onto the nearest boat they could find for the South West. By 1921, the majority of the violence had subsided and the surviving successor governments, namely SW-Africa, Bavaria, the Rhineland Republic and the Berliner Free Commune ratified the armistice, which, for all intents and purposes, officially ended the Great War on the 14^th of February – a.k.a the Valentine’s Armistice.

The other former colonies of the once-mighty German Empire, which now exist in the form of Togoland (now the People’s Republic of Togoland), Tanganyika (now the British Dominion of East Africa), Kamerun (now the Republic of Kamerun) and German New Guinea (now the Australian Territory of Northern New Guinea) only recognised the Kaiser-in-exile until going their own way as Franco-British Protectorates.

The post-Great War years were tough for both Europe and SW Africa. Hundreds of thousands of Germans, Poles, Hungarians and Czechs fleeing the crumbling Austro-Hungarian and German Empires made their way down to South-West Africa as a part of various emigration schemes that were hastily passed by the Reichstag. The Imperial Titles and Claims Act of 1922 established Kaiser Wilhelm and his successors as the Imperial Viceroys of South-West Africa and the Kaiser-in-exile of Germany proper. The successive Kaisers have since Wilhelm II’s passing have played up their claims to the German nation, but the recent actions of current Kaiser Frederick Wilhelm IV have signalled that the ruling household is starting to finally go native.

The Russian Civil War raged on throughout Europe and ended in a victory for the Communists under Vladimir Lenin in 1922. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics became the de-facto successor state to the old Russian Empire, with two competing governments-in-exile contesting that claim under Tsar Nicholas II and Provisional President Alexander Kerensky. The two figureheads would be eventually forced to co-operate on certain issues (at the behest of the British government and King George V’s urging), leading to the creation of the United Russian Government-in-exile as the Tsarist and Republican factions merged into one in 1942. The USSR also started to promote its Communist ideology throughout the world under the guidance of Lenin’s successor, Leon Trotsky. Lenin’s (later Trotsky’s) aborted invasion of Poland that ran from 1919-1923 ended in a massive defeat for the Communists via the Miracle at the Vistula and subsequent battles at Karkov and Minsk respectively. The Treaty of Krakow in 1924 ended in the Polish forming the Intermarium Union (the de-facto successor to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) with the Baltic states and the portions of Soviet territory that they’d annexed. The German-established monarchy in Finland survived the end of the war and managed to net Karelia and Murmansk from the Soviets during the fighting as well. These two pivotal events set the stage for the Second Great War against the Continental Entente and the Trotskyist USSR.

Meanwhile in the Far East, the Japanese Empire had managed to fight off a military coup by the skin of their teeth and spent most of the post-Great War years and the ensuing Great Depression in an economic recovery mode. The rise of the Trotskyists in the USSR and the collapse of the Chinese Republic scared the Japanese enough that a rapid militarisation was necessary of the democratic state was to survive. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was reaffirmed in 1927 as a bulwark against Soviet aggression in the Far East. The Empire took the chance to intervene in the crumbling Chinese front on behalf of the League of Nations, setting up a democratic Manchurian state under Emperor Puyi and liberating Mongolia from the teeth of a Communist Revolution. The Chinese Intervention began in 1938 and ran concurrently with the Second Great War (1939-1948) The occupation even surpassed the end of the wider conflict, with Japanese troops not fully leaving the rump Third Chinese Republic until 1972.

The post-Great Depression years for South-West Africa, meanwhile, went along swimmingly as the influx of settlers from both Europe and Africa led to a boom in infrastructure and social cohesion. Black Africans fleeing persecution in the nascent Third South African Republic, Jews from National Socialist (later Strasserist after Herr Hitler was overthrown in 1942) Bavaria and Chinese from the East-Asian hellhole made their homes along the coast, either in areas like Luderitz or Walvis Bay, or founded their own settlements where they eventually integrated themselves into the frontier lifestyle. It has been said that these new arrivals have since become more German than the Germans themselves, contributing to the food, architecture and wider culture of South-West Africa over the decades.

The Second Great War kicked off on October 8^th 1939, as Soviet forces crossed into both Japanese-occupied Manchuria and Intermarium territory. The forces of the hastily-assembled Continental Entente ended up forcing a quick stalemate that stopped just shy of the Vistula and went down as far south as the Carpathian Mountain range. The Soviet invasion of the rump Ottoman Empire opened up yet another front as the Caucasian states that were under the purview of Constantinople were overran. The occupied zones would be home to some of the most determined guerilla fighters in the history of warfare, as the Caucasian and Carpathian mountains would host multinational contingents of ‘Free Armies’ as they sniped at Soviet soldiers and blew up the odd convoy or two in order to disrupt supply lines.

The South-West Germans remained committed to a form of armed neutrality, as did the bulk of the German successor states with some exceptions. The Continental advance began in earnest throughout the summer of 1942 after the Soviet forces were stopped short of the borders of the Berliner Commune. The ad-hoc Japanese-Chinese alliance made quick work of the skeleton crew of soldiers in the Far-East and a Provisional Russian Government was set up, albeit with Prime Minister Kerensky, the newly coronated Tsar Alexei and their cabinet remaining in London until the end of the war.

The combination of a two-front war, various mutinies, military purges and an attempted coup by a mysterious Strasserist known only as ‘Jughashvili’ ended in the Trotskyist government attempting to sue for peace multiple times, but the Entente knew better than to allow the Soviet Empire to continue its existence. The long, hard slog through the Siberian tundra and the relatively temperate weather of European Russia ended in 1946 when the first atomic bomb was detonated on the outskirts of Leningrad. The sudden assassination of Trotsky and the announcement that Tsar Alexei was the true ruler of the Russian Imperium bought the war an an official end in early 1948, but the conflicts that came after in China, Persia and the Middle East did not truly end until 1950 or so.

The post-Second Great War world led to the complete restructuring of the global order. Alliances have shifted significantly as the world became split along ideological lines. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance blossomed into the Twin Oceans Alliance, while the semi-authoritarian, monarchist French State took most of continental Europe with it and created the European Entente. The Russians and Intermarium governments restored ties and pursued an alliance of conservative states in Eastern Europe and the non-Anglo-Japanese controlled Orient. The neutral Americans came out of their period of splendid isolation by intervening in the Second Brazilian Civil War and restoring the Emperor to power, forming the American Security Pact. The rest of world treads the thin line between neutrality and aligning themselves with any number of blocs. While there is significant ideological rivalry between the world’s nations, the tensions of the OTL Cold War are either heavily subdued or completely non-existent as the threat of fascism is non-existent and communism was thoroughly defeated. Although it must be noted that ‘moderate’ forms of Communism persist in the Third World such as the *Maoists in Peru, mainline Leninists in Africa and Indian-style Ghandists (Stalinists) in Eastern India. Rumours of the South Vietnamese having nuclear weapons are currently just that, rumours.

The neutral dictatorships of Europe, such as the Strasserists Bavarians, the Hungarian Regency, the ultraconservative Greek Kingdom or the southern Italian Syndicalists trade openly with each other and the West, much like how any OTL state would trade with Saudi Arabia, Iran or the Chinese. But there are still moral condemnations in the Geneva-bound League of Nations like that of the OTL UN. The old colonies and Dominions of the British Empire still persist to this day in a pseudo-Imperial Federation. India was let go for obvious reasons and is now a balkanised, ethnic-cleansed hellhole that will probably produce some Western-hating Hindu-extremists if the Japanese intervention into Pondicherry continues.

The Middle East is split between the secular Ottomans, the multi-ethnic Levantine Federation and the old-fashioned anti-Western, uber-conservative Saudis who threaten their erstwhile Turkish owners with war and destruction. Thankfully they don’t have any nukes, yet. Iran remains a bastion of tolerance as well and is home to a decent population of Zoroastrians, most of which are Western converts thanks to an alternate counterculture. The Mid-East is decidedly neutral in world affairs.

The former USSR turned into hell-in-a-handbasket for the bulk of the 1950’s and 60’s. The Tsarist claims on the entire Soviet Union were scaled back to European Russia as the Japanese, Brits and Ottomans saw to the division of the former Trotskyist state into its ethno-religious constituents. Tsar Alexander III is currently fine with the current arrangement and has restored ties with their ‘frenemy’ British. Numerous disagreements between London and Tokyo are starting to show the cracks in the Anglo-Japanese alliance as the Japs begin to move further into the Indian states as to subdue the neo-Trotskyist states and bring freedom and democracy to the region. The more socially-liberal British have been accused of spreading ‘decadent Western culture’ into the highly conservative Japanese sphere, with the number of Anglo-Japanese diplomatic incidents being logged at the League of Nations HQ can potentially fill an entirely library. An Anglo-Japanese Split seems to be on its way, arriving in the autumn of 1984 in an embassy near you...

Coming back to the United States, the great powerhouse of the New World remains a major power, albeit not the cultural and military one it is IOTL. The Civil Rights era was bloodier this time around as the moderates within the movement were quickly disposed of by pro-Trotskyists. The Nation of Islam and other African-American supremacist movements are known for duking it out in the streets with the KKK in portions of the Deep South, while Anarcho-Syndicalists fight against their supposed Trotskyist/Leninist/Ghandist brethren elsewhere in the nation. The Civil Rights Act is a watered-down piece of law that gets flaunted on occasion by the Dixiecrats, who now run Southern Values Party under the benevolent guidance of Strom Thurmond. President William F. Buckley has just won his second term in a landslide against a divided Democratic Party and is looking to bring socially conservative Democrats to his side, as to keep the Libertarians, American Labour and Southern Values at bay.

The mid-1980’s has led to much change in the global order. The potential collapse of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance will send shockwaves throughout the political landscape. Marxist groups continue to threaten the Imperial Commonwealth and their allies on the Dark Continent. The South African Apartheid regime is on the verge of a civil war, with the crazier Ghandist factions being led by one Nelson Mandela. Their pluralistic, racially tolerant South-Western and Zimbabwe-Rhodesian (Ian compromised with the moderate Social-Democrats as opposed to Mugabe and his ilk. Both the Rhodesian state and Smith’s image is now better off than OTL) neighbours have taken in their fair share of Afrikaner and Black African refugees to no avail, as the situation continues to spiral out of control. The Egyptian military recently took power from their abusive monarch in a relatively bloodless coup, but threats from a myriad of parties and special interest groups may tear the entire North African region apart as well. All someone needs to do is light the match and throw it onto the African tinderbox.

It seems that a Pan-African War is on the horizon, with the Kaiser and his lackeys being right in the middle of it all…