The first time Laidlaw Peringanda visited the edge of the Namib Desert in Swakopmund, he collapsed at the location of what is today considered the first genocide of the 20th century.
The genocide, carried out by Germans between 1904 and 1908 when they controlled the colony of South West Africa, was directed at the Herero and Nama people of modern-day Namibia.
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An apology for a colonial-era genocide came with an offer of reparations. But descendants of the victims say they were ignored during negotiations, and the lack of respect did more harm by reinforcing their powerlessness.
“Everything I do is to keep the memory of my family alive,” Mr. Peringanda says.
Germany and Namibia announced they’d reached a joint declaration on the genocide in 2021: Germany apologized and offered to pay €1.1 billion over 30 years. One would think that Mr. Peringanda would be among the first to support the deal. Instead, he is one of thousands of Herero and Nama people who have rejected it – and are suing the Namibian government.
The attempts at restitution come when Europeans have faced calls for more accountability for colonial injustice. But for many descendants, the negotiation between the governments of Germany and Namibia failed at reconciliation because it was signed without the approval of the Herero and Nama peoples.
“You cannot say, ‘I apologize,’ without talking to me,” says Sima Luipert, a representative of one of the groups. “And therefore, the money is a token in order for Germany to cleanse itself from its colonial guilt. It is not meant for me, the descendant. It is meant to soothe the ego of Germany.”
Laidlaw Peringanda walks solemnly across the sand, where rocks mark the gravesites of victims killed and left unidentified in what is today considered the first genocide of the 20th century.
It was at this site, on the edge of the Namib Desert in Swakopmund, where Mr. Peringanda collapsed the first time he visited.
The genocide, carried out by Germans between 1904 and 1908 when they controlled the colony of South West Africa, was directed at the Herero and Nama people of modern-day Namibia.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused on
An apology for a colonial-era genocide came with an offer of reparations. But descendants of the victims say they were ignored during negotiations, and the lack of respect did more harm by reinforcing their powerlessness.
Mr. Peringanda’s great-grandmother had told him stories about her time as a prisoner in a concentration camp in this coastal city. But those accounts – how their people’s traditions were stamped out and how their lands and way of life were stolen – suddenly became real in that moment in 2015. They ignited in him an activist’s drive for justice.
“Everything I do is to keep the memory of my family alive,” Mr. Peringanda says.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Ever since, he has been at the forefront of a truth-seeking mission, creating the Swakopmund Genocide Museum, pushing to have the graves investigated with radar-penetrating technology, protesting replicas that glorify Germany’s colonial past, and defacing those that still stand in this town.
So when Germany and Namibia announced they’d reached a joint declaration on the genocide in 2021 – Germany apologized and offered to pay €1.1 billion over 30 years – one would think that Mr. Peringanda would be among the first to support it. Instead, he is one of thousands of Herero and Nama people who have rejected the deal – taking the Namibian government to court over it this year.
The attempts at restitution come when Europeans have faced calls for more accountability for colonial injustice. But for many descendants in Namibia, the process of negotiation between the governments of Germany and Namibia failed at reconciliation because it was signed without the approval of members of the Herero and Nama peoples, in some ways doing more harm in reinforcing their powerlessness.
“You cannot say, ‘I apologize,’ without talking to me. You cannot say, ‘I apologize,’ without specifically stating what you are apologizing for,” says Sima Luipert, who sits on the Technical Committee on Genocide of the Nama Traditional Leaders Association in Namibia, one of the groups suing the government. “And therefore, the money is a token in order for Germany to cleanse itself from its colonial guilt. It is not meant for me, the descendant. It is meant to soothe the ego of Germany.”
The “scramble for Africa,” and what it wrought
Between 1870 and World War I, European colonization of Africa increased from 10% to 90%, in what is known as the “scramble for Africa.” German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, in his imperial pursuit, acquired South West Africa in 1884. But that left the Herero people, ancient cattle herders who revere the animals, destitute. They and the Nama farther south rebelled for their pastureland, killing about 150 Germans.
Colonial forces quickly quelled the rebellions. On Oct. 2, 1904, the German supreme commander in the colony, Gen. Lothar von Trotha, issued his first “extermination order” against the Herero.
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Over the following four-year period, up to 100,000 people were massacred or left to starve in the deserts across Namibia – including 80% of the Herero and half the Nama. The concentration camps of forced labor that Mr. Peringanda’s great-grandmother endured are now widely considered among historians to be the precursor to those used in the Holocaust.
Yet although the country has offered reparations for atrocities the Nazis committed against Jews during World War II, modern-day Germany has not as fully grappled with its role in Africa. It’s a double standard that some believe German society must examine more closely.
“The plan for the Holocaust, the model of the concentration camps, was invented [in Namibia] during the German colonial period,” says Alexander Karn, a Holocaust historian at Colgate University. “And, so, if that violence is understood to be compensable in the case of the Nazi Holocaust, then surely we should think about addressing it in its first instance, its originary context.”
In 2021, the German government, already among Namibia’s largest bilateral donors, agreed to compensation over three decades to help fund projects in communities affected by the killings. Yet in the agreement language, Germany tempered the wording, calling the events “what they were from today’s perspective: a genocide,” and left out the words “reparations” and “compensation” to avoid setting a legal precedent that would open the door to similar claims elsewhere.
How the two sides see negotiations
There is a chasm between the German negotiators of the 2021 agreement, and the Herero and Nama who want to be at the table. While the governments sought descendants’ voices through an advisory committee for the negotiations, members of the Herero and Nama traditional leadership say they seek direct dialogue. Instead, they feel Germany is just trying to quickly close the chapter.
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has condemned the negotiations for lack of transparency, leading to the gap in perception about whether justice was served.
Germany has stood firmly by its process toward restitution. Ruprecht Polenz, the lead negotiator appointed on the German side, participated in all nine rounds of negotiations and visited Namibia four times.
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Mr. Polenz says Germany had no choice but to negotiate directly with the government of Namibia.
“As a former colonial power, as the country who wants to beg” for forgiveness, Germany cannot make prescriptions for how Namibia “should behave. This is a no-go,” says Mr. Polenz. “If we would not negotiate with the Namibian government, we would have behaved like former colonialists, because we would pick and choose whatever we think are the legitimate representatives of Herero and Nama.”
Ms. Luipert, of the Nama Traditional Leaders Association, categorically rejects this line of argument. She maintains that under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Nama and Herero have the right to dialogue with any government.
“They make themselves subjects and make us objects, forgetting that we are subjects,” she says. The process denied Indigenous people their agency. “A subject thinks; a subject interprets. A subject is conscious – and understands and cries and laughs and mourns and feels.”
Opposition leaders and representatives of the Herero and Nama have sued the government in Namibia’s high court. A key issue is that many Herero and Nama distrust Namibia’s ruling party, South West Africa People’s Organization led by Namibian President Hage Geingob. They feel that the country as a whole doesn’t understand the generations of marginalization they’ve endured because of the genocide.
Germany’s forgotten genocide
In parallel, while Germans have grappled with issues around reparations for the Holocaust for decades, too few Germans even know what happened during colonial rule in Africa – a space overshadowed by the violent historic acts of France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.
Filmmaker Lars Kraume recently set out to set the record straight with “Measures of Men,” a haunting film about a young German ethnologist’s conflict in his role in the study of human skulls, one of the darker chapters in the genocide.
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Historic photos from the genocide era hang on the wall of the Genocide Museum of Swakopmund, July 20, 2023, in Namibia. During the German colonial era, thousands of Herero and Nama people died in concentration camps from starvation, slave labor, sexual abuse, disease, fatigue, and weather, and were buried in unmarked graves.
Mr. Kraume was a history major, but he says he never once learned of German colonialization in class. The genocide is “completely underrepresented in our cultural world,” says Mr. Kraume, whose first impressions of Namibia came when he was a teenager traveling with his father. The lanky Italian-born German with light hair realized, “They’re everywhere, people who look like me. We left a big footprint there – the shape of the country, the water supply, the architecture, the street names.”
Yet educating the German public about yet another genocide is tough when the historical canon has what he categorizes as near-amnesia about the Herero and Nama. That’s partly because Germany lost its colonies in 1919. Namibia was colonized by South Africa and later subject to its system of apartheid. Africa’s famous liberation struggles that began in 1960 against colonial rule – which ultimately led to independence for a number of countries including Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, Ghana, Guinea, Somalia, and Nigeria – thus missed Germany.
Namibia was instead trying to liberate itself from South Africa. “The Germans could say, ‘You know the South Africans have this racist system. What do we have to do with it?’” explains Mr. Kraume. “No one recalled that [apartheid] was the offspring of German colonialism.
“The Germans have dealt [with] so much, to such a great extent, with the guilt of the Holocaust, the Third Reich, and the Second World War,” says Mr. Kraume, “and somehow blocked their view [of] things that happened before that.”
“The money is not enough”
Claudia Kavita, a Herero woman selling bone and beaded bracelets in the center of Swakopmund, says her life is a testament to what happened before. The mother of three is not from the city, but with no way of making a living in the rural northwest, she was forced to move here to make ends meet. Far from the quaint colonial architecture of this city along the Atlantic coast, the family lives in an informal settlement where thousands of homes made of corrugated steel sit precariously in the desert with no electricity or running water. “We want more. The money is not enough,” she says.
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Ever since German colonialization, the arable land the Herero used to graze cattle has been privatized. Today, those of German descent own 53% of private agricultural land in Namibia although they comprise just 2% of the Namibian population. “What we want is land, and to buy cattle,” she says, “to have a better life to survive. I’d go anywhere that I can farm. That’s the better way of life.”
In Swakopmund, Norbert Sadlowski, a Namibian of German descent, expresses frustration at the “woke” politics of Germany driving this debate in his homeland, he says. He is an owner of the popular Altstadt Restaurant, where he erected in 2019 a replica of an equestrian monument honoring German soldiers and civilians killed between 1904 and 1908. That monument, originally put up in 1912 in the capital, Windhoek, but taken down in 2013, has stirred controversy.
But he says it’s a monument of war, not a celebration of genocide. His intention, he says, is to preserve history. “Germans in Germany have distorted history,” he says. “It’s all liberal shouting.”
Mr. Peringanda, who says he is personally offended by that replica, says that most of the opposition he faces in his work indeed comes from those of German descent at home. However, he says that the international community is starting to pay attention.
Many Germans – and other Europeans – visit his budding museum, built on the side of his house. Academics from Germany and the U.K. have supported his efforts to have artifacts returned and graves identified.
“Things are changing,” he says. “The pressure is becoming too much.”