Namibia has marked colonial genocide with a memorial day for the first time in history after years of pressure on Germany to pay reparations.
Termed as “Germany’s forgotten genocide”, and deemed by historians as the first genocide of the 20th Century, the murder of more than 70,000 Africans is being commemorated with a national day of remembrance for the first time in Namibia.
About four decades before their use in the Holocaust, concentration camps and pseudoscientific experiments were adopted by German officials to torture and have people brutally murdered in what was then dubbed as South West Africa, per the BBC.
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Most of the victims were primarily from the Ovaherero and Nama communities and were targeted because they opted not to allow colonists to take their cattle and land.
According to the government, the new national holiday will be marked every year as part of Namibia’s “journey of healing” including a minute’s silence and candlelight vigil outside parliament in Windhoek.
Namibia’s government says it picked the date of 28 May, because it was on that day in 1907 that German officials announced the closure of the concentration camps after international criticism.
Dominance over South West Africa – along with Togo, Cameroon and other colonial territories – was stripped from Germany by other world powers after the first world war.
Germany did not publicly acknowledge the mass slaughter that took place between 1904 and 1908 for many years until 2021, when it formally recognised that German colonisers had committed the genocide, and offered €1.1bn (£940m; $1.34bn) in development aid to be paid out over 30 years – with no mention of “reparations” or “compensation” in the legal wording.
Displeased with the intention, Namibia turned down that offer, labeling it “a first step in the right direction” that nonetheless had failed to include the formal apology and “reparations” it was seeking.
Clearly, Namibians were not impressed by what they saw. “That was the joke of the century,” Uahimisa Kaapehi told the BBC at the time. “We want our land. Money is nothing.”
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A group that represents families of genocide victims was also far from pleased about the 2021 offer, deeming it evidence of a “racist mindset on the part of Germany and neo-colonial subservience on the part of Namibia” in a joint statement.
Since then, a draft deal has been reached between the two nations that would include a formal apology from Germany, and which would increase the overall sum by an extra €50m, per reports.
Nonetheless, campaigners from Ovaherero and Nama say the deal is an insult to their ancestors’ memory and that they were unfairly excluded from the negotiating table.
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In Namibia, news of a national day of remembrance has been met with cynicism from some, with community activists indicating that restorative justice is still a long way off.
