Germany admits to committing genocide in Namibia

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It began with an extermination order from a German commander, vowing to destroy the Herero people who had rebelled against German colonial rule in South-West Africa.

“That nation must vanish from the face of the Earth,” General Lothar von Trotha told his soldiers in 1904 as they forced the people into the desert to starve. Tens of thousands soon perished from bullets, hunger, thirst or slave labour in concentration camps.

Nearly 120 years later, the government of Germany is officially admitting for the first time that the mass killings were a genocide – and it is promising about $1.6-billion in development aid to Namibia as a “gesture of recognition” of the suffering endured by the victims.

“We will now officially refer to these events as what they are from today’s perspective: genocide,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement on Friday.

The atrocities of the German colonial era must be acknowledged “unsparingly and without euphemisms,” he added. “ … In light of the historical and moral responsibility of Germany, we will ask forgiveness from Namibia and from the victims’ descendants.”

The statement and the financial agreement between the German and Namibian governments was the culmination of six years of negotiations.

But the German government did not promise any individual reparations or formal legal compensation to Namibia. Herero activists said the agreement was far from sufficient, and some launched protests and petitions against it.

About 65,000 Herero people and about 10,000 Nama people died in the German military onslaught from 1904 to 1908 in the country now known as Namibia, after an uprising by those who had lost their land and livestock to the colonial authorities.

In their 2011 book The Kaiser’s Holocaust, historians David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen concluded that the German tactics in South-West Africa had a significant influence on Nazi ideology in the 1930s and 1940s.

Among the parallels in both periods were the use of concentration camps, racial experimentation by scientists, bureaucratized killing with meticulous recordkeeping, and the tactic of working civilians to death in camps. Many of the German military veterans and scientists who began their careers in the genocide became influential leaders in the Nazi era.

Colonial forces took skulls and other human remains from South-West Africa back to Germany for racial experiments. More than a dozen skulls were finally returned to Namibia in 2018 after decades of storage in German universities and museums.

The genocide annihilated about 80 per cent of the Herero population and about half of the Nama population. It also led to land inequities and injustices that have continued to the present day in Namibia, with descendants of German settlers often holding massive tracts of farmland the nearby Herero people live in shacks in impoverished villages.

Under the agreement announced on Friday, the German government said it will provide $1.6-billion in financing over a 30-year period for land reform, agriculture, vocational training, water supply, rural infrastructure and other purposes.

Mr. Maas said the two governments consulted the Herero and Nama people during their negotiations, but several Herero and Nama leaders said they would not sign the agreement. Some opposition leaders called it “an insult.” Other groups protested on Friday in the streets of the Namibian capital, Windhoek, denouncing the agreement and insisting on reparations from Germany.

“Bilateral deals are not necessarily reconciliation between people,” said Henning Melber, a researcher at the Sweden-based Nordic Africa Institute.

He noted that the promised $1.6-billion in aid to Namibia over the next 30 years is almost identical to the amount that Germany has been providing to Namibia over the past 30 years.

In an online petition, three Herero and Nama organizations – including the Ovaherero Traditional Authority and the Nama Traditional Leaders Association – said the descendants of genocide victims had been “completely left out of the negotiations.” They called the deal a public-relations gimmick by Germany and a betrayal by the Namibian government.

There was no formal statement by the Namibian government after the announcement of the agreement, but a spokesman for Namibian President Hage Geingob told the AFP news agency that it was a “first step” and would be the basis for a future apology and reparations from Germany.

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