The Nama and Ovaherero Genocide – Memory and Retraumatising Interpretations

The colonial era during the German South West Africa period is narrated as a brief spell, without due consideration to how remarkably it shaped present day Namibia.

Particularly, the period’s legal, economic, political and social landscape formed the foundational premise of Namibia’s governance.

The official narrative in Namibia often positions the oppressive apartheid regime to bury the memory of German colonial brutality, forgetting that Germany laid a firm foundation for racial oppression and institutional dispossession, which was continued by apartheid.

In Germany, the memory of the Holocaust, likely due to the scale of targeted mass murder, has overtaken any other extreme form of violence sanctioned by the state.

Furthermore, in the case of the Nama and Ovaherero genocide, the memory culture has largely been dictated by Eurocentric narratives.

Throughout the German and South African colonial period, the mass murder of Nama and Ovaherero communities was interpreted and, therefore, justified as self defence against rebellious natives by the settler communities and the education system.

Descendants of German and South African white settlers maintain that their forebears bought the land they still occupy today. This discards the historical fact that land was expropriated by both racist colonial regimes from Namibians through genocide, and racial policies and legal systems.

False narratives continue today, through the racialised European lens of experience and interpretation.

This is so evident in the outcome of the negotiation process between the German and Namibian governments. What vividly emerges as a profound consequence of the German colonial period is how the economic and resource plunder of the colony has led to a seemingly unbridgeable memory gap between the beneficiaries and victims of colonisation.

Therefore, in the outcome document widely referred to as the Joint Declaration, the legal obligations of Germany towards the Nama and Ovaherero people are denied, and the voices and memory of the descendants are suppressed using the false illusion of community consultations and token representation, while a higher authority has the final say.

In recent short forensic documentaries created by the descendants of the victims of the Nama and Ovaherero genocide, in collaboration with Forensic Architecture and Forensis, the communities reconstruct the horrors of the German colonial period through their own memory and experience.

When juxtaposed with the content of the outcome of the negotiation process between the two governments, it becomes clear how the erasure of the memories of the descendants of victims has a retraumatising effect.

Celebrating the outcomes of the process, in itself, is traumatising for the descendants because it is experienced as seeing no value in the Nama and Ovaherero person specifically, and community in general.

Equally, reducing the impact to mere voluntary development aid is a slap in the face of the ordinary Nama and Ovaherero person. It is further traumatic and rather violent on the part of the Namibian Cabinet to approve a document which insults its own citizens.

Shark Island and many similar sites countrywide where German imperialists established extermination concentration camps are places of life-threatening tragedies and unparalleled human suffering. Yet, these memories are little known, albeit through the work of the victim communities.

The efforts of the Nama and Ovaherero people, who by default have become human rights activists by birth, symbolise the nuance point from where revealing memory emerges of the experiences and harsh conditions, as well as the lasting transgenerational and inherited impacts.

One would hope that the emergence of these memories will lead to a new historiography of decolonised knowledge production less tainted by biases of current scholarship on people of colour.

Hopefully, these memories will give due consideration to the psychosocial factors derived from the lived experiences of German colonialism, precisely because these experiences have profoundly shaped the psychological conditions and social agency of the Nama and Ovaherero people.

Such community centred, Afrocentric knowledge production will go a long way in addressing the present conditions of the descendant communities, which are a product of their colonial history.

The real actions should be to heal the wounds and stigma, as well as improve the people’s conditions in every respect, based on the enormous losses they suffered.

This includes psychological well-being, access to services, political voice and access to power, which was demographically destroyed by the genocide, as well as their economic ability to satisfy their material needs and their right to access the very natural resources and assets brutally stripped of them through German colonial savagery.

Community centred memory will add significant value to the process of decolonising memory and the way memory is transmitted.

If, at all, the German and Namibian governments truly respected the knowledge, memory and transgenerational experience of the Nama and Ovaherero people, the bilateral negotiations would not have been the lost opportunity it has become. It is, therefore, important to put effort into overcoming the biases of scientific disciplines dominated by bodies of knowledge anchored in the Global North.

African collective knowledge must provide clues to our joint past and how we have evolved. Such information must help us examine our stories and enable us to develop an awareness about ourselves.

Western and Eurocentric civilisation has greatly contaminated the traditional value systems of Africans. African ancestry had established, well before colonialism, a pattern of home grown political systems and governance processes.

They ensured there was progression in the pace and dynamics of our own civilisation in Great and Little Namakhoeland, as well as a self-styled tempo of technological development.

It is, therefore, a delight to observe that new networks of people of African descent, though being defunded, are doing rounds in the community of social movement literature and working on ontological pluralism, which highlights the costly and inherited psychological impact of colonialism upon both the coloniser and the colonised.

These critiques and memory envision a future of global racial equality and equity through transformative and redistributive socio-economic, political and legal systems, in order to project a world beyond the white imperial gaze, which keeps gaslighting Global South knowledge systems.

We must cultivate new knowledge systems which transcend rather than authorise and reproduce imperialistic ways of knowledge.

*Sima Luipert is a fourth generation survivor of the Nama and Ovaherero genocide and serves as a patron for International Affairs on the Nama Traditional Leaders Association technical committee on genocide.