The Herero and Nama genocide or the Namibian genocide[3] was a campaign of ethnic extermination and collective punishment waged against the Herero (Ovaherero) and the Nama people in German South West Africa (now Namibia) by the German Empire between 1904 and 1908.[1] Between 40,000 and 80,000 Hereros (80 percent of their prewar population) and 10,000 Nama (half of their prewar population) died.[2]
In January 1904, the Herero people, who were led by Samuel Maharero, and the Nama people, who were led by Captain Hendrik Witbooi, rebelled against German colonial rule. On 12 January 1904, they killed more than 100 German settlers in the area of Okahandja.[4] In August 1904, German General Lothar von Trotha defeated the Ovaherero in the Battle of Waterberg and drove them into the desert of Omaheke, where most of them died of dehydration. In October 1904, the Nama people also rebelled against the Germans, only to suffer a similar fate. The first phase of the genocide was characterized by widespread death from starvation and dehydration, due to the prevention of the Herero from leaving the Namib desert by German forces. Once defeated, thousands of Hereros and Namas were imprisoned in concentration camps, where the majority died of diseases, abuse, and exhaustion.[5][6]
In 2004, the German government recognised the events in what a German minister qualified as an "apology" but ruled out financial compensation for the victims' descendants.[7] In July 2015, the German government and the speaker of the Bundestag officially called the events a "genocide"; however, it refused to consider reparations at that time. In May 2021, the German government apologized and agreed to pay €1.1 billion over 30 years to fund projects in communities that were impacted by the genocide.[1]
Background
The Bantu-speakingHerero people migrated to present-day Namibia from the north as early as the twelfth century.[8] They lived mainly as pastoralists, with cattle central to their culture and economy, indicated by the name Herero meaning "possessor of cattle". For much of the nineteenth century, they were embroiled in conflict over grazing land and water with neighboring Khoikhoi groups, including the Nama people, to the south.[8] From the 1840s, the region began to be drawn into global commercial networks with the arrival of Rhenish missionaries and expansion of the Cape Colony to the south.[8][9]San peoples were also displaced from the Cape Colony and driven northwards into Namibia, increasing conflicts.[10]
Theodor Leutwein (seated left), Zacharias Zeraua (2nd from left) and Manasseh Tyiseseta (seated, fourth from left), in 1895Theodor Leutwein toasting Hendrik Witbooi in 1896
In 1884, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck claimed Namibia to combat British expansion into the region.[11][12] German rule was initially nominal,[12] with the first soldiers arriving in 1889.[13] Significant numbers of settlers did not begin to arrive until the mid-1890s.[13] The German presence was so minimal that the two main tribal groups in the area, the Herero and the Nama, viewed each other as the primary threat, while for the Germans an alliance between the two warring tribes could have threatened the existence of Germany's only settler colony.[14]
The territory's third governor, Theodor Leutwein, ruled from 1894 to 1904.[15] He used pragmatic methods[16] to achieve the destruction of the indigenous peoples' way of life and their replacement by German colonists. Because military conquest would have cost more than the German government was willing to spend, he minimized outright warfare and preserved a subjugated indigenous labor force.[17] This depended on a divide and rule strategy[18][13] where indigenous tribes were forced to accept protection treaties against each other.[19]
When these were broken, Leutwein would use his remaining allies to defeat the rebellious tribe and take their land and cattle, which could be sold to settlers for a profit.[19] In 1896 and 1897, he led campaigns that ended with the virtual extermination of the Khaua and Afrikaners (ǀAixaǀaen).[20] Leutwein focused on expanding the colonial infrastructure, such as roads, railways, and forts, to open the land for more economic development and European settlement.[13] Due to lack of success with prospecting, many colonists instead switched to accumulating land and cattle[11] placing them in direct competition with Herero. Large amounts of land were bought up by speculators and European cattle farmers.[13] The Herero were further weakened by a rinderpest epidemic that killed the majority of their cattle and exacerbated intertribal conflicts, while forcing many Herero to starvation, indebtedness, or becoming migrant laborers.[21][22]
Grievances
The Herero's key grievance and the structural condition which led to the outbreak of the war was the existence of an unfair judicial system. If a white person was killed, multiple Africans would be executed as punishment, but settlers could kill natives with effective impunity because the judicial system would find a way to exonerate them or it would only issue minimal punishments.[23] African lives were deemed worthless, as evidenced by one case where a soldier was sentenced to seven weeks' imprisonment for the murder of James, a teamster and British subject.[24] The result was widespread murder and rape against Africans by settlers, which weakened the colonial administration's monopoly on violence and overall authority. The victims were powerless to get redress for these crimes because police and soldiers were among the perpetrators.[25] German employers were legally allowed to beat and flog indigenous employees.[26]
At the same time, Leutwein began to implement a strategy to concentrate indigenous people on reserves.[21] Although some studies have emphasized struggle over land as the central cause of the uprising, the colonist population was not quickly increasing in 1903 and other research has shown that the land question was not urgent.[27]
The Herero uprising
The Herero uprising was an act of desperation to retake their land, cattle, and political independence; as well as exact revenge.[26] Matthias Häussler writes that the war was limited in means but not ends; the Herero wanted the permanent end of German colonization.[28] On 25 December 1903, a company of Schutztruppe had been diverted to the far south of the colony to quell an unrelated uprising by the Bondelswarts Nama, leaving the north stripped of troops[29]—there were only 770 German soldiers in the entire colony.[30]
The Herero clans seized the opportunity to rebel on 12 January 1904.[26] The uprising caught the colonists by surprise[31] and saw a stunning success at first: farms and businesses were plundered, and 123[26] or as many as 160 Germans were killed.[30] Most of those killed were farmers and traders; German soldiers were only one-tenth of the dead. The rebels generally spared women, children, missionaries, and white people who were not German.[31][30] Individual attacks were planned to take advantage of deception and surprise, and the Herero seized weapons and supplies.[31] The Herero killed men, took anything useful, razed buildings, and attempted to destroy everything else, in an attempt to destroy colonists' economic existence and force them to depart Namibia forever.[28] The occurrence of mutilation, particularly castration, was in revenge for the sexual violence that had previously been visited on Herero women.[32]
Many aspects of the war are poorly understood due to lack of sources dealing with the Herero perspective.[27] Conventional wisdom holds that the attack was planned long in advance, perhaps at a 1903 tribal meeting.[33] However, historian Jan-Bart Gewald has instead argued that it was provoked by Ralph Zürn, a German officer stationed in Okahandja, where Maherero also had his headquarters, and that other Herero gradually joined in as Maherero persuaded them to.[33][34] Regardless, some Herero hesitated to join in the uprising and this doomed the effort, if it had any chance of success to begin with.[33] Häussler argues that the uprising failed in the first few hours as there was no serious effort to seize German forts (which had a much larger quantity of valuable supplies) or towns (which were essential to the occupier's government).[31]
Settler response
Hanging of Hereros, February 1904
In response to the attacks, the German settlers declared themselves victims and demanded full compensation of their losses from the imperial treasury. Public opinion in Germany, however, held them partly responsible for provoking the war.[29] Exaggerated and fabricated atrocity propaganda[35] portraying Herero as animal-like sadists spread widely[36] with settler newspapers such as the Deutsch-Südwestafrikanische Zeitung[de] playing a significant role in inciting violence.[37] However, many colonists also welcomed the opportunity to decide the disputes over land and property in their own favor.[38] Many colonists supported anything from the disarmament and dispossession of all Herero, to their imprisonment or even mass extermination.[38][36] Leutwein, who argued against more radical proposals, believed that the Herero had to be rendered "politically dead".[38] At the beginning of the uprising, captured Herero were subjected to hasty trials and quickly executed by shooting for cattle thievery.[26] Women and children were also killed.[39] From February, lynching was more common, and their naked bodies were strung up.[26]
Many Germans were lucky to escape with their lives and huddled in improvised shelter, watching their possessions and businesses be destroyed and uncertain as to the fate of family and friends.[32] The society mobilized quickly and reportedly even women carried arms.[40] A large number of men volunteered for the militia, far outnumbering regular soldiers.[41] Although they were later replaced by regular reinforcements, locals continued to be employed as guides and advisers, and the newly arrived soldiers adopted the same values.[42] Panicked settlers started to round up any Hereros they could find, jailing all the women in Swakopmund in concentration camps and sending 550 men to Cape Town. Some were later sold to Cape Colony mine labor recruiters.[43] An extreme desire for revenge took hold among most colonists, which missionaries unsuccessfully tried to quell. Even years later, after any threat had long since been crushed, the colonists' media continued to complain about the supposedly lenient treatment of the few remaining Hereros.[44]
Response from Germany
Central figure Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, the Oberbefehlshaber (Supreme Commander) of the protection force in German South West Africa, in Keetmanshoop during the Herero uprising, 1904
As news of the first atrocities against Herero reached Germany, socialists raised the matter in parliament. Demanded an explanation, Leutwein admitted that August Bebel was mostly correct in his assessment, but professed that he was unable to stop the violence that was demanded by the public and his soldiers, nor was he able to condemn it under the circumstances.[39] With the German authorities unwilling and unable to control their own forces, violence escalated further on both sides.[45] Leutwein's efforts to parley with Maherero in February failed after an angry backlash from both colonists and his superiors.[36] Even after the arrival of reinforcements in March, Leutwein was unable to defeat the Herero's guerrilla tactics, and endured a series of defeats.[36] The defeat of a great power by African tribes considered inferior was a great humiliation for Germany's leaders.[36]
Deemed too soft on the Herero, Leutwein was replaced by the general Lothar von Trotha, who arrived on 11 June with orders from Kaiser Wilhelm II to "crush the rebellion by all means necessary".[46][47] Reinforcements had been steadily arriving and Trotha now had around 5,000 German soldiers.[48]
Defeat of the Herero
The terrain near Waterberg mountain in Namibia where the decisive battle was fought
After April[49] perhaps hoping to help himself maintain control over the Herero chiefs, Maherero concentrated his forces—around 60,000 people and their cattle—at the base of Waterberg, a mountain with abundant food and grazing land.[50][49][47] The Herero forces and supplies were running lower and lower, while the colonists received an influx of manpower and supplies from Germany.[50] Maherero expected that he could stay until at least February; most of the Herero still hoped for a negotiated solution to the war.[49] The concentration allowed the Germans to surround them and defeat them in a conventional battle on 11 August, negating the Herero's strengths at guerrilla warfare and amplifying their weakness in numbers and armament.[51][52] After a day of battle, the Herero broke away to the southeast, which the Germans did not anticipate.[52][53] Trotha initially did not order a pursuit, assuming that they would not be able to travel far into the desert. He ordered that Herero men would be killed, while women and children were to be spared, but the latter part of the order was ignored.[53]
Pursuit into the desert
A German socialist magazine (1906): "Even if it hasn't brought in much profit and there are no better quality goods on offer, at least we can use it to set up a bone-grinding plant."
After the battle Trotha realized that he had an excellent opportunity to eliminate what remained of the Herero, who were mostly fleeing via the Eiseb and Epukiro riverbeds that led to Bechuanaland. For four months, his soldiers chased the Herero down the dry riverbeds and set up a series of military posts 155 miles (249km) long between Gobabis and Grootfontein to prevent their return westwards. Some water sources were guarded by Germans and others were poisoned to deny water to the fleeing people. Although the orders said to shoot over the heads of women and children to drive them away, in practice all Herero were killed. Hardly any prisoners were taken, and a lot of these were later murdered. During this phase of the genocide, around 40,000 Herero died in the desert, many of dehydration.[55]
On numerous occasions, Trotha stated an intention to exterminate the Herero, most notoriously in his extermination order of 2 October, stating that "Within the German boundaries, every Herero, with or without firearms, with or without cattle, will be shot. I won’t accommodate women and children anymore."[56][52] He refused any and all pleas to reconsider the extermination policy from missionaries, settlers, and even some senior officers. Mohamed Adhikari argues that his extreme stance was motivated by several conditions: lack of supplies to feed prisoners, the risk of disease spreading to Germans, his desire that the Herero should never again pose a threat to the colony, and Social Darwinist ideology that placed the racial struggle over practical considerations such as the value of indigenous labor. His policy was openly stated because it was the norm for colonial warfare; furthermore, both Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German General Staff approved of his actions.[56]
Nevertheless, popular support for the war evaporated both in the colony and Germany, with socialist and Christian groups opposing it on humanitarian grounds and many colonists against the wasteful destruction Herero cattle and labor.[57] Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow's government initially supported the war, but wavered as financial and reputational costs piled up.[57] In November, the head of the General Staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, recommended rescinding the order, although it took until 6 December before the kaiser could be persuaded to withdraw it. Reportedly, Trotha was enraged and initially refused to carry it out.[57]
The Nama uprising
The Nama and their chief Hendrik Witbooi had fought alongside the Germans at Waterberg. However, they switched sides in September and fought their own uprising, which dragged out over years. German soldiers began to occupy water sources in their territory and rounded up any Nama that they could find. Trotha issued a second extermination order against the Nama on 22 April 1905. At the height of the war, 2,000 Nama fighters occupied 14,000 German soldiers.[58] His failure to subdue the Nama led to his recall in late 1905, when he was replaced by Friedrich von Lindequist.[59] After the death of Witbooi in battle on 29 October 1905, Simon Kooper continued the battle from bases in British-controlled Bechuanaland where the Germans could not pursue him. The British tolerated this guerrilla activity. Kooper refused to sue for peace and rejected its official announcement by the kaiser on 31 March 1907.[60] At the same, despite a partial peace hastily conduced by Leutwein after the outbreak of the Herero rebellion, many of the Bondelwarts under the leadership of Jakob Marengo and other chiefs continued to trouble the occupiers.[61] After Marengo's death in late 1907, the Germans focused their efforts on eliminating Kooper.[60] In 1908, he finally accepted a peace settlement in which he was paid to go into exile.[62]
Herero prisoners of war, around 1900Herero chained during the 1904 rebellionCover of the 1918 British Blue Book
After the withdrawal of the extermination order, the remaining survivors were instead to be imprisoned in concentration camps as prisoners of war.[57] Many Herero and Nama died of disease, exhaustion, starvation and malnutrition.[63][64][65] Estimates of the mortality rate at the camps are between 45%[66][67] and 74%.[68]:196–216[66][67]
Food in the camps was extremely scarce, consisting of rice with no additions.[69]:92 As the prisoners lacked pots and the rice they received was uncooked, it was indigestible; horses and oxen that died in the camp were later distributed to the inmates as food.[70]:75Dysentery and lung diseases were common.[70]:76 Despite those conditions, the prisoners were taken outside the camp every day for labour under harsh treatment by the German guards, while the sick were left without any medical assistance or nursing care.[70]:76 Many Herero and Nama were worked to death.[63]
Shootings, hangings, beatings, and other harsh treatment of the forced labourers (including use of sjamboks) were common.[70]:76[71]
Shark Island was the most brutal of the German South West African camps.[72] Lüderitz lies in southern Namibia, flanked by desert and ocean. In the harbour lies Shark Island, which then was connected to the mainland only by a small causeway. The island is now, as it was then, barren and characterised by solid rock carved into surreal formations by the hard ocean winds. The camp was placed on the far end of the relatively small island, where the prisoners would have suffered complete exposure to the strong winds that sweep Lüderitz for most of the year.[73]
German Commander Ludwig von Estorff wrote in a report that approximately 1,700 prisoners (including 1,203 Nama) had died by April 1907. In December 1906, four months after their arrival, 291 Nama died (a rate of more than nine people per day). Missionary reports put the death rate at 12–18 per day; as many as 80% of the prisoners sent to Shark Island eventually died there.[73]
There are accusations of Herero women being coerced into sex slavery as a means of survival.[74]:12[75]
Head of Shark Island prisoner used for medical experimentation
Benjamin Madley argues that although Shark Island is referred to as a concentration camp, it functioned as an extermination camp or death camp.[76][77][78]
Prisoners were used for medical experiments and their illnesses or their recoveries from them were used for research.[79]
Experiments on live prisoners were performed by Dr. Bofinger, who injected Herero who were suffering from scurvy with various substances including arsenic and opium; afterwards he researched the effects of these substances via autopsy.[80]:225
Experimentation with the dead body parts of the prisoners was rife. Zoologist Leonhard Schultze[de] (1872–1955) noted taking "body parts from fresh native corpses" which according to him was a "welcome addition", and he also noted that he could use prisoners for that purpose.[81]
An estimated 300 skulls[82] were sent to Germany for experimentation, in part from concentration camp prisoners.[83] In October 2011, after three years of talks, the first 20 of an estimated 300 skulls stored in the museum of the Charité were returned to Namibia for burial.[84][85] In 2014, 14 additional skulls were repatriated by the University of Freiburg.[86]
Number of victims
Between 40,000 and 80,000 Hereros (80 percent of their prewar population) and 10,000 Nama (half of their prewar population) died.[2]
Aftermath
Reiterdenkmal in Windhoek before its relocation in 2009
With the closure of concentration camps, all surviving Herero were distributed as labourers for settlers in the German colony. From that time on, all Herero over the age of seven were forced to wear a metal disc with their labour registration number,[74]:12 and banned from owning land or cattle, a necessity for pastoral society.[69]:89
About 19,000 German troops were engaged in the conflict, of which 3,000 saw combat. The rest were used for upkeep and administration. The German losses were 676 soldiers killed in combat, 76 missing, and 689 dead from disease.[70]:88 The Reiterdenkmal (English: Equestrian Monument) in Windhoek was erected in 1912 to celebrate the victory and to remember the fallen German soldiers and civilians. Until after Independence, no monument was built to the killed indigenous population. It remains a bone of contention in independent Namibia.[87]
The campaign cost Germany 600 million marks. The normal annual subsidy to the colony was 14.5 million marks.[70]:88[88] In 1908, diamonds were discovered in the territory, and this did much to boost its prosperity, though it was short-lived.[89]:230
In 1915, during World War I, the German colony was taken over and occupied by the Union of South Africa, which was victorious in the South West Africa campaign.[90] The earlier genocide was investigated by the British as a justification to keep the territory for themselves. Published in 1918, the Blue Book contained a detailed record of the genocide[91] and became instrumental in the stereotype of violent German colonizers that prevailed in the ensuing decades.[92] After the German Revolution, Germany's new government published a White Book, which mainly argued that since similar atrocities had occurred in the British Empire, the genocide was no reason to strip Germany of its colonies.[93] Although the White Book was not accurate in portraying the relative scale of German and British atrocities, its argument that the Herero uprising was the natural reaction of indigenous people under settler colonialism is the predominant view among historians today.[94] In 1926, Britain recalled and destroyed copies of the Blue Book as part of a rapprochement with Germany, indicative of the fact that any concern for the victims of colonial violence was political rather than humanitarian.[95] South Africa received a League of Nations mandate over South West Africa in December 1920.[96]
Cultural impact
The genocide is memorialized in Namibia through:
Annual Commemorations: The Herero commemorate Heroes’ Day (August 26) with ceremonies at the Waterberg Battle site, where survivors were driven into the desert. Participants wear colonial-era military uniforms to honor resistance leaders.[97]
Museums and Art: The Owela Museum in Windhoek displays artifacts from the genocide era, while contemporary artists like Nicola Brandt critique colonial amnesia in installations.[98]
Oral Traditions: Herero communities preserve narratives of the genocide through songs and poetry, such as the Omurari lamentations recorded by anthropologists.[99]
Historiography
Horst Drechsler, working in East Germany, authored the first comprehensive study on German colonialism in Namibia in the 1960s. Although his study was influenced by Marxist historiography and the desire to expose German imperialism, which he believed to be operating in West Germany, he was the first to argue that the colonists committed genocide, and his work remains influential in the twenty-first century. More recent studies have often placed the blame on specific actors, such as Trotha or the Kaiser.[100] Matthias Häussler criticizes much of the historiography for teleological assumptions and vilification of the German perpetrators, rather than looking for bottom-up influences on violence.[101]
Links between the Herero genocide and the Holocaust
The Herero genocide has commanded the attention of historians who study complex issues of continuity between the Herero genocide and the Holocaust.[102] It is argued that the Herero genocide set a precedent in Imperial Germany that would later be followed by Nazi Germany's establishment of death camps.[103][104]
According to Benjamin Madley, the German experience in South West Africa was a crucial precursor to Nazi colonialism and genocide. He argues that personal connections, literature, and public debates served as conduits for communicating colonialist and genocidal ideas and methods from the colony to Germany.[105] Tony Barta, an honorary research associate at La Trobe University, argues that the Herero genocide was an inspiration for Hitler in his war against the Jews, Slavs, Romani, and others whom he described as "non-Aryans".[106]
Mahmood Mamdani argues that the links between the Herero genocide and the Holocaust are beyond the execution of an annihilation policy and the establishment of concentration camps and there are also ideological similarities in the conduct of both genocides. Focusing on a written statement by General Trotha which is translated as:
I destroy the African tribes with streams of blood... Only following this cleansing can something new emerge, which will remain.[111]:174
Mamdani takes note of the similarity between the aims of the General and the Nazis. According to Mamdani, in both cases there was a Social Darwinist notion of "cleansing", after which "something new" would "emerge".[74]:12
Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski have questioned the supposed link with the Holocaust, finding it to be lacking in empirical evidence, and argue that Nazi policy represented a distinct turn away from typical European colonial practice. Additionally, they write that studies supporting the link completely ignore the influences of World War I, the German Revolution, and the activities of the Freikorps in the inurement of extreme violence as a method in the German political consciousness.[112]
Patrick Bernhard writes that the Nazis, including Heinrich Himmler, explicitly rejected the colonial experience of the German Empire as an "appallingly outdated" model; when they did draw inspiration from colonialism for Generalplan Ost, it was from the contemporary work of Italian fascists such as Giuseppe Tassinari in Libya, which they viewed as a shining example of fascist modernity.[113]
Reconciliation
Recognition
In 1985, the United Nations' Whitaker Report classified the massacres as an attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of South West Africa, and therefore one of the earliest cases of genocide in the 20th century.[114]
Memorial in Swakopmund (2020)
In 1998, German President Roman Herzog visited Namibia and met Herero leaders. Chief Munjuku Nguvauva demanded a public apology and compensation. Herzog expressed regret but stopped short of an apology. He pointed out that international law requiring reparation did not exist in 1907, but he undertook to take the Herero petition back to the German government.[115]
We Germans accept our historical and moral responsibility and the guilt incurred by Germans at that time.[116]
She ruled out paying special compensations, but promised continued economic aid for Namibia which in 2004 amounted to $14M a year.[7] This number has been significantly increased since then, with the budget for the years 2016–17 allocating a sum total of €138M in monetary support payments.[117]
The Trotha family travelled to Omaruru in October 2007 by invitation of the royal Herero chiefs and publicly apologised for the actions of their relative. Wolf-Thilo von Trotha said:
We, the von Trotha family, are deeply ashamed of the terrible events that took place 100 years ago. Human rights were grossly abused that time.[118]
Beginning in 2025, Namibia has marked 28 May, the date when the Germans closed their concentration camps in 1907 following international criticism, as Genocide Remembrance Day.[119]
Negotiations and agreement
The Herero filed a lawsuit in the United States in 2001 demanding reparations from the German government and Deutsche Bank, which financed the German government and companies in Southern Africa.[120][121] With a complaint filed with the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in January 2017, descendants of the Herero and Nama people sued Germany for damages in the United States. The plaintiffs sued under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 U.S. law often invoked in human rights cases. Their proposed class-action lawsuit sought unspecified sums for thousands of descendants of the victims, for the "incalculable damages" that were caused.[122][123] Germany seeks to rely on its state immunity as implemented in US law as the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, arguing that, as a sovereign nation, it cannot be sued in US courts in relation to its acts outside the United States.[124] In March 2019, the judge dismissed the claims due to the exceptions to sovereign immunity being too narrow for the case.[125]
In September 2020, the Second Circuit stated that the claimants did not prove that money used to buy property in New York could be traced back to wealth resulting from the seized property and therefore the lawsuit could not overcome Germany's immunity. In June 2021, the Supreme Court declined to hear a petition to revive the case.[126]
Germany, while admitting brutality in Namibia, at first refused to call it a "genocide", claiming that the term only became international law in 1945. However, in July 2015, then foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier issued a political guideline stating that the massacre should be referred to as a "war crime and a genocide". Bundestag president Norbert Lammert wrote an article in Die Zeit that same month referring to the events as a genocide. These events paved the way for negotiations with Namibia.[127][128][129]
In 2015, the German government began negotiations with Namibia over a possible apology, and by 2016, Germany committed itself to apologizing for the genocide, as well as to refer to the event as a genocide; but the actual declaration was postponed while negotiations stalled over questions of compensation.[129][130][131]
On 11 August 2020, following negotiations over a potential compensation agreement between Germany and Namibia, President Hage Geingob of Namibia stated that the German government's offer was "not acceptable", while German envoy Ruprecht Polenz said he was "still optimistic that a solution can be found."[132]
On 28 May 2021, the German government announced that it was formally recognizing the atrocities committed as a genocide, following five years of negotiations. The declaration was made by foreign minister Heiko Maas, who also stated that Germany was asking Namibia and the descendants of the genocide victims for forgiveness. In addition to recognizing the events as a genocide, Germany agreed to give as a "gesture of recognition of the immeasurable suffering" €1.1 billion in aid to the communities impacted by the genocide.[133][134]
Following the announcement, the agreement needs to be ratified by both countries' parliaments, after which Germany would send its president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to officially apologize for the genocide. The nations agreed not to use the term "reparation" to describe the financial aid package.[133][134]
The agreement was criticized by the chairman of the Namibian Genocide Association, Laidlaw Peringanda, who insisted that Germany should purchase their ancestral lands back from the descendants of the German settlers and return it to the Herero and Nama people. The agreement was also criticized because negotiations were held solely between the German and Namibian governments, and did not include representatives of the Herero and Nama people.[133][134]
Further criticism of the agreement came in 2024 with the filing of the South Africa v. Israel case at the International Court of Justice. After President Geingob criticized Germany's decision to back Israel in the case, Nandi Mazeingo of the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation called on Namibia to go further, saying "What South Africa did for Palestine is what Namibia must do for us as Hereros and Namas. They must go to that ICJ also, for us."[135]
Repatriation
Peter Katjavivi, a former Namibian ambassador to Germany, demanded in August 2008 that the skulls of Herero and Nama prisoners of the 1904–1908 uprising, which were taken to Germany for scientific research to claim the superiority of white Europeans over Africans, be returned to Namibia. Katjavivi was reacting to a German television documentary which reported that its investigators had found more than 40 of these skulls at two German universities, among them probably the skull of a Nama chief who had died on Shark Island near Lüderitz.[136] In September 2011, the skulls were returned to Namibia.[137] In August 2018, Germany returned all of the remaining skulls and other human remains which were examined in Germany to scientifically promote white supremacy.[138][139] This was the third such transfer, and shortly before it occurred, German Protestant bishop Petra Bosse-Huber stated "Today, we want to do what should have been done many years ago – to give back to their descendents the remains of people who became victims of the first genocide of the 20th century."[138][139]
On 17 May 2019, as a part of the repatriation process, the German government announced that it would return a stone symbol which it took from Namibia in the 1900s.[140]
Modern activism
Herero and Nama activists have organized globally to demand justice. Key groups include:
The Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, which filed a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. (2017) invoking the Alien Tort Statute. The case was dismissed but drew international attention to the issue.[141]
#RememberHereroNama, a social media campaign pressuring Germany and Namibia to include descendant voices in negotiations.
In 2023, Herero representatives petitioned the UN Working Group on People of African Descent, accusing Germany of "historical erasure" by refusing to return stolen land and human remains held in Berlin’s museums.[142]
In Swakopmund, the privately run Swakopmund Genocide Museum, founded in 2015 by Laidlaw Peringanda, the great-grandson of a survivor of the genocide, is the only institution in Namibia dedicated exclusively to preserving the memory of the genocide and campaigning for the restitution of artefacts and human remains.[143][144]
↑Gewald, J. B. (2000). "Colonization, Genocide, and Resurgence: The Herero of Namibia, 1890–1933". In Bollig, M.; Gewald, J.B. (eds.). People, Cattle and Land: Transformations of a Pastoral Society in Southwestern Africa. Köln, DEU: Köppe. pp.167, 209. hdl:1887/4830. ISBN978-3-89645-352-5.
↑Olusoga, David [unspecified role] (October 2004). Namibia – Genocide and the Second Reich. Real Genocides. BBC Four.
12Lyons, Clare; etal. (14 August 2004). "Germany Admits Namibia Genocide". BBC News. Archived from the original on 1 July 2024. Retrieved 30 December 2016. 'Germany has offered its first formal apology for the colonial-era massacre of some 65,000 members of the Herero tribe by German troops in Namibia. (...) "We Germans accept our historic and moral responsibility," Ms Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany's Development Aid Minister, told a crowd of some 1,000 at the ceremony in Okokarara. "Germany has learnt the bitter lessons of the past." But after the minister's speech, the crowd repeated calls for an apology. "Everything I said in my speech was an apology for crimes committed under German colonial rule," she replied.'
↑Zimmerer, Jürgen; Zeller, Joachim (2008). Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War (1904-1908) in Namibia and Its Aftermath. Merlin Press. p.137. ISBN978-0-85036-573-3.
123Clarence Lusane (2002) Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of European Blacks, Africans and African Americans During the Nazi Era (Crosscurrents in African American History), pp. 50–51, Routledge, New York ISBN978-0-415-93121-2
↑Gewald, J. B. (2003). "Herero genocide in the twentieth century: politics and memory". In Walraven, Klaas van (ed.). Rethinking Resistance: Revolt and Violence in African History. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. p.282. hdl:1887/12876. ISBN978-1-4175-0717-7.
↑Thomas Pakenham (1991) The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912, page 615, Random House, New York ISBN978-0-394-51576-2
↑Benjamin Madley (2005) "From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe", European History Quarterly Vol. 35, pp. 429–432: "Operational from 1905 to 1907, Haifischinsel, or Shark Island, was the twentieth century's first death camp. Though referred to as a Konzentrationslager in Reichstag debates, it functioned as an extermination centre."
↑Madley, p. 446: "Colonial Namibia's death camp at Shark Island was different from Spanish and British concentration camps in that it was operated for the purpose of destroying human life. Thus, it served as a rough model for later Nazi Vernichtungslager, or annihilation camps, like Treblinka and Auschwitz, whose primary purpose was murder."
↑Isabel V. Hull (2006) Absolute Destruction: Military, Culture And the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY ISBN978-0-8014-4258-2; see footnote #64, pp. 81–82:"'Sterblichkeit in den Kriegsgefangenlargern', Nr. KA II.1181, copy of undated report compiled by the Schutztruppe Command, read in Col. Dept. 24 Mar. 1908, BA-Berlin, R 1001. Nr. 2040, pp. 161–62. The other annual average death rates (for the period Oct. 1904 to Mar. 1907) were as follows: Okahandja, 37.2%; Windhuk, 50.4%; Swakopmund, 74%; Shark Island in Lüderitzbucht, 121.2% for Nama, 30% for Herero. Traugott Tjienda, headsman of the Herero at Tsumbe and foreman of a large group of prisoners at the Otavi lines for two years, testified years later to a death rate of 28% (148 dead of 528 labourers) in his unit, Union of South Africa, 'Report on the Natives', 101."
↑Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History, p. 129. Cambridge University Press, 2008
↑Zimmerman, Andrew, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London: 2001, p. 245: "The zoologist Leonard Schultze happened also to be on a collecting trip in Southwest Africa when the war broke out. He found that, although the fighting made the collection and preservation of animals difficult, it presented new opportunities for physical anthropology: 'I could make use of the victims of the war and take parts from fresh native corpses, which made a welcome addition to the study of the living body (imprisoned Hottentots [Nama] were often available to me).'" This translates the original German: "Andererseits konnte ich mir die Opfer des Krieges zu nutze machen und frischen Leichen von Eingeborenen Teile entnehmen, die das Studium des lebenden Körpers (gefangene Hottentotten [Nama] standen mir häufig zu Gebote) willkommen ergänzten." Leonhard Schultze, Zoologische und anthropologische Ergebnisse einer Forschungsreise im westlichen und zentralen Südafrika ausgeführt in den Jahren 1903–1905, Gustav Fischer: Jena 1908, S. VIII.
Bomholt Nielsen, Mads (2022). Britain, Germany and Colonial Violence in South-West Africa, 1884-1919: The Herero and Nama Genocide. Springer International Publishing. ISBN978-3-030-94560-2.
Faber-Jonker, Leonor (2023). "'Rivers of Blood and Rivers of Money': The Herero and Nama Genocides in German Southwest Africa, 1904–1908". The Cambridge World History of Genocide. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1-108-76548-0.
Fitzpatrick, Matthew P. (2022). "Paramountcy in German South West Africa". The Kaiser and the Colonies. Oxford University PressOxford. pp.244–270. ISBN978-0-19-289703-9.
Häussler, Matthias (2021). The Herero Genocide: War, Emotion, and Extreme Violence in Colonial Namibia. Berghahn Books. ISBN978-1-80073-024-3.
Melber, Henning (2024). "Colonialism, Genocide and Reparations: The German‐Namibian Case". Development and Change. 55 (4): 773–799. doi:10.1111/dech.12840.
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