“We wanted to apologize, but for what? We first needed to reach a common understanding of what happened in 1904 to 1908,” he said in an interview.
Ruprecht Polenz, a retired lawmaker who negotiated the deal for Berlin, said that this initial agreement was necessary before Germany could make a formal apology. The German foreign minister plans to travel to Namibia in coming weeks to sign an agreement between the two governments that their leaders hope will establish the language for a common narrative of their shared history. On May 28, Germany formally announced that it recognized that the brutal killings constituted a genocide. In Namibia today, monuments and cemeteries commemorating dead German soldiers, including the Schutztruppe, still outnumber those honoring the Herero and Nama victims of genocide.ĭistrustful of their own government, the Herero and Nama had pushed to negotiate directly with the German government, convinced that any compensation would never reach them. In a country with a small economy long dominated by a white Afrikaner and German minority, the Swapo-led government depended greatly on foreign aid - especially from its biggest donor, Germany - and had little incentive to bring up the genocide. The Herero and Nama remain marginalized, often living in remote, unproductive areas on reservations that were originally set up by the German colonizers. Swapo is dominated by the country’s main ethnic group, the Ovambo. Namibia’s liberation party - South West Africa People’s Organization, or Swapo - took over and governs to this day. Talk of the genocide became taboo in Namibia until 1990, when the end of the Cold War and the impending end of apartheid in South Africa brought independence to Namibia.īut even after independence, the Herero and Nama were frustrated that their country’s new rulers were just as uninterested in examining the past. Namibia effectively became another colony, this time of neighboring, white-ruled South Africa.
Germany’s defeat in World War I led to its losing Namibia and its other African colonies. In recent years, some have been returned to Namibia in one of the most emotional and contentious aspects of the history of the genocide. Hundreds of skulls of victims were sent to Germany for examination. In their African colony, German colonial officers studying eugenics, a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding, are believed to have developed ideas about racial purity and the mixing of races. German experts believe that the genocide of the Herero and Nama foreshadowed Nazi ideology and the Holocaust. Prisoners were held, and died, in concentration camps.Ībout 10,000 people from the Nama ethnic group - about half the total population at the time - are also believed to have died. German soldiers shot Herero, hanged them, drove them into the desert and sealed off watering holes to stop survivors from returning. Of a population totaling 100,000, about 80 percent of all Herero are believed to have died, according to historians. He issued a warning in 1904 that “Every Herero, with or without rifles, with or without cattle, will be shot.” He also warned that he would no longer take in women or children, but “drive them back to their people or have them shot.” The following year, he issued a similar warning to the Nama, the second ethnic group targeted for extermination. While Germany indicated early on that it was ready to recognize the atrocities as a genocide, there was a stumbling block: money, not only the amount to be given, but what any payment would be called. In recent years - with researchers and left-leaning politicians pushing Germany to come to terms with its rarely examined colonial history - the process gained momentum.
Descendants of the Herero and Nama, marginalized groups within Namibia itself, kept alive the stories of their genocide through oral tradition and cultural events.Ī push to recognize the genocide began after Namibia’s independence in 1990, and grew stronger with the 100th anniversary of the atrocities in 2004. Africans were shot, hanged, abandoned in the desert and died in concentration camps. German soldiers targeted people of two ethnic groups - the Herero and the Nama - because they had resisted land grabs by German settlers. Tens of thousands of Africans were killed between 19 by German soldiers in what is now Namibia, a vast, arid country northwest of South Africa. It has been called the first genocide of the 20th century, the “forgotten genocide’’ and the genocide that was the precursor of the Holocaust.
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