An apology for genocide is not enough
Global Eye
ANY time now we can expect Chancellor Angela Merkel to issue a formal apology to Namibia for the genocide exacted on the Herero and Nama people by German colonial authorities from November 1904.
It was the first genocide of the 20th century, and it is only recently that the official line of the German government has been that “the war of annihilation in Namibia between 1904 and 1908 was a war crime and genocide.”
While an official apology will be over a century too late, it will nevertheless be welcomed – but it is not enough.
If Germany paid billions of dollars to survivors of the Jewish holocaust, then there is an existing precedent for reparations, and it would be nothing short of racist to deny the Herero and Nama people financial reparations. The significant expanses of land which the Germans took from the Herero and Nama people during the genocide was good farmland as most of it is in grazing country. Even if enough time has passed that the 16000 survivors of the genocide are no longer alive, reparations could be made to the community directly, empowering them to buy some of their own land back. The communities today live in dire poverty, and cattle and land are historically very important to them.
But the official response time and again has been that the German government will not even entertain the idea of reparations. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Germany fears reparations will open up a Pandora’s box which may lead to their nationals in Namibia being forced to sell their massive farms (many as large as 20-30000 hectares) at market-related prices, or it is mere stinginess.
The German government defends its position by emphasising the amount of development aid that it has given to the Namibian government over the past decade. But it’s hard to point to how this aid has benefited the Herero and Nama people directly. These communities are increasingly resentful of the huge properties of the German farmers, whose ancestors arrived after the genocide from 1908 to 1913 to carve up the 46 million hectares of expropriated land.
It is widely recognised that 80% of Namibia’s farmland is currently owned by Germans, and many of the land owners do not even live in the country but only visit once a year, often to go hunting. With the remaining Herero and Nama populations living in a sea of poverty, it’s hard to stomach the fact that absentee German landlords still control massive expanses of land which were actually stolen to begin with.
Maybe the German government should consider the fact that if they do not extend some significant financial largesse alongside the olive branch they plan to extend to the Herero and Nama people, their nationals may find themselves on the receiving end of Zimbabwean-style land invasions.
The historical memory of the Herero and Nama people is not something that will fade any time soon. Each year the older generations stand beside the youth on the 26th of August to commemorate “red flag day” and their ancestors who died at the hands of the German colonial invaders. They remember and re-enact the scenes of naked bodies hanged by the neck from trees – the revenge of the Germans to the rebellion of the Herero and Nama people to colonial subjugation.
Even though the 1904 uprising was put down almost immediately, on November 4, General Lothar von Trotha read out his extermination order, saying “within the German borders, every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot… the nation as such should be annihilated.” Von Trotha had boasted that they would finish all the Herero by 9am.
The people were pushed into the desert and then gathered into concentration camps where they were starved and abused. Many died from poison which was put into waterholes and dams. Within a few years half the Nama and 80% of the Herero were killed, with over 100 000 people having lost their lives. These are the types of scenes the world would come to recognise nearly 40 years later, but the infancy of Nazi death camps was in Namibia, where the Nama and Herero were brutally suppressed.
Bizarre racial experiments, like those of the Nazi concentration camps, were performed on Herero and Nama prisoners. Thousands of their skulls were sent to Germany for experiments in race research institutes.
New research suggests that the German racial genocide in Namibia from 1904 to 1908 was a significant influence on the Nazis in the Second World War. Many of the key elements of Nazi ideology, such as racial science and eugenics were promoted by German military veterans and scientists who had begun their careers in South-west Africa, now Namibia, during the genocide.
If Germany is to finally make peace with the sins of its past and enable the communities it decimated to recover and move on to a more profitable future, it does have an obligation to put its money where its mouth is. An apology is imperative, but so are reparations and re-distributive justice.