Home » What is the price of a genocide? Clash between Namibia and Germany over repairs

What is the price of a genocide? Clash between Namibia and Germany over repairs

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Many in Africa have their eyes fixed on Namibia. They want to see how the battle for compensation from Germany will end: between 1904 and 1908 – in response to revolts against the colonizers – German soldiers massacred tens of thousands of people of the Herero and Nama peoples.

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by our correspondent Tonia Mastrobuoni


“We are ready to pay for what has happened,” says Ruprecht Polenz, the German envoy who deals with this practice. However, he adds, “Namibia must not speak of revenge for the wrong suffered. For us it is a moral question and a political responsibility ”.

In 1883 a German merchant bought a plot along the coast and founded the first German city in what is now Namibia – Nabim, ‘vast land’ in the Nama language. From 1884, Germany appropriated everything. The Herero and the Nama, two people who tried to oppose, were decimated, pushed towards the desert where many died of starvation and starvation. Others were placed in prison camps and used as slaves. Between 65,000 and 80,000,000 Herero and between 10,000 and 20,000 Nama died in a real genocide.

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In Swakopmund, one of the most popular locations for tourists near the beaches where surfers compete, there are 703 tombs: those of the Herero and Nama, discovered with painstaking work. “For me, and many like me, restoring dignity to the fallen is important, we must respect them properly,” says Laidlaw Peringanda, president of the Namibian Fallen Association. “Today the Herero and the Nama are crammed into an area that the municipalities have given them, 40% in shacks, the so-called ‘informal settlements’ as they say today with an anodyne term,” says Peringanda. Swakopmund gives the idea of ​​what you see from all the other parts: hovels made of boards and sheets a stone’s throw from the ocean sand where there is no water, sewer and services, and in the city you can breathe a German air pastel and painted houses. “Germany must give back what it has taken”.

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The German-Namibian population controls 70% of the land. The government negotiator, Zad Ngavirue, from Windhoek, notes that “the Germans are ready to give an agreement to help us rebuild our society even after more than a century”. But it is not enough: “They must make a remedy for the stolen land” and six years after the apology they did nothing. A Namibian group sued Germany in an American court but lost. And someone quietly says that the two governments are negotiating behind the scenes, for reasons that do not concern the Herero and the Nama. There are also historians who espouse the version that there was no genocide because the Herero also killed Germans, as Andreas Vogt says pointing to what happened in 1904, when the Herero killed 120 Germans, but were defeated in the Battle of Waterberg, in north of the country.

“Politics is the art of the possible,” says Ngavirue, with a slightly stale adage and Swakopmund tells the opposite. There is no dialogue between the descendants of the Germans who used slaves and us. Peringanda says that “young people are fed up, they want to take the land by force. Maybe the German government should think about it a bit ”.

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