More than a century after the Herero-Nama genocide, Namibian communities are seeking compensation, land redistribution, and a seat at the table.
By Nosmot Gbadamosi
March 13, 2024
A general view of land reclaimed by a Namibian farm worker is seen on November 26, 2019 on the outskirts of Ovitoto settlement in the Okahandja district area, Namibia. GIANLUIGI GUERCIA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Namibian leaders from the Herero and Nama communities have called for fresh talks with Germany over the return of ancestral land seized more than a century ago.
In the early 1900s, German settlers pushed locals off their lands in what was then named German South West Africa—now Namibia—driving some into what were then the British territories of modern-day Botswana and South Africa. Members of two ethnic groups—the Herero and Nama—resisted and were starved to death or put into concentration camps. Namibian women were made to boil the severed heads of their dead so that the skulls could be sent to Berlin for research.
An estimated 80 percent of the Herero and 50 percent of Nama population were killed between 1904 and 1908—with the total number of those killed estimated at as many as 100,000 people. Historians have described it as the first genocide of the 20th century.
Germany was the third-biggest colonial power in Africa after Britain and France, at one point controlling 30 percent of the world’s diamonds through its exploitation of Namibia’s resources. But awareness of its colonial-era crimes against humanity has been largely overshadowed by the Holocaust, during which Germany’s Nazi government killed 6 million European Jews.
Some Namibians have pointed to double standards in the reaction to these genocides. Germany has paid about 82 billion euros in reparations to Israel—including direct payments to victims—but has refused to directly compensate the Herero and Nama.
Ancestral land claims in Namibia are a long-running dispute, although fresh tensions have erupted between Namibia and Germany since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Germany’s backing of Israel in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice prompted an angry response from the Namibian government. Germany’s foreign ministry did not respond to Foreign Policy’s request for comment before this newsletter went to press.
Today, white Namibians make up 6 percent of the country’s population of 2.5 million but own more than 70 percent of prime farmland. Analysts say that disparity prevents much-needed variation in the country’s agricultural production and a lack of know-how in certain fields.
The most fertile land and commercial knowledge is concentrated among white farmers, who largely rear livestock, while the agriculturally unsuitable “communal land” is primarily used by Black subsistence farmers. Persistent and worsening drought conditions have seen the profits of livestock farmers decline—yet, due to the disproportionate focus on livestock production, 80 percent of food consumed by Namibians is imported.
“The levels of food insecurity are exceptionally high for Namibia’s GDP per capita and compared to peer countries” concluded one 2023 Harvard University study. “[I]deally the most fertile land would be allocated to the most productive land use types.”
To strike a balance, the Namibian government sought to redistribute about 43 percent of fertile land to landless Black communities by 2020, doing so through purchases from white farmers willing to sell. However, by 2018, the government had only succeeded in buying 3 million out of a target of 15 million hectares.
The program ended up raising prices, and land was acquired by Russian billionaires and the Namibian elite. Many small-scale Black farmers were also not supported with the commercial training or equipment needed to succeed.
“The biggest problem with the land [reform] is that it is not going to the descendants of the survivors of the genocide, but it is going to rich politicians and rich foreign individuals because of the market prices,” said Ina-Maria Shikongo, a co-founder of the Windhoek chapter of the climate justice group Fridays for Future.
Germany agreed in May 2021—when it officially recognized the Herero-Nama genocide for the first time—to fund 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) worth of Namibian projects. The money was to be disbursed into existing aid programs over 30 years.
However, many Indigenous leaders said they were excluded from the talks, regarded the amount as too small, and did not back the deal. Protests broke out in the capital, Windhoek, denouncing the plan, and the affected communities sued Namibian authorities. A United Nations report published in February 2023 concluded that the joint declaration between Namibia and Germany lacked “meaningful participation” from descendants of genocide victims and did not meet international standards.
The original joint declaration from the two governments did not call the payout funds as “reparations” or “compensation” but described them as “grants” over fear of legal claims from other African nations.
A class-action lawsuit brought by members of the Herero and Nama communities against Berlin was dismissed by a U.S. court in 2019 because Germany had sovereign immunity. Survivors cited incidents such as a victims’ bones being sold by the wife of a German anthropologist to the American Museum of Natural History as evidence of a U.S. link to the genocide. Germany’s lawyer, however, argued that the country was not obligated to atone because the Genocide Convention did not exist when the atrocities occurred.
The German parliament reiterated that position last March, saying that “in the absence of a legal basis, there would be no individual or collective compensation claims of individual descendants of victim groups such as the Hereros or Namas.”
Germany and Namibia are co-hosting the U.N. Summit of the Future in New York City in September. That is why Germany “should really think and be able to say what they are going to do for the future generations of the Herero and Nama people” Shikongo said.
“Even if they have to redo the whole process, it has to be transparent and not behind closed doors.”
“If nothing works out, the only thing that we can lay our hands on is the land because we know where that is,” Mutjinde Katjiua, the leader of a faction of the Ovaherero Traditional Authority, told Reuters. “We know the names of the rivers, we know the names of the farms.”
©2024 Graham Digital Holding Company