A tale of two genocides: Why Namibia has taken a stand against Germany

On a recent afternoon, as people hurried along Windhoek’s busy Post-Street Mall shopping avenue, Meme Aletha was selling cigarettes, sweets, and mobile phone credit vouchers from her roadside stall.

She was wearing a traditional Victorian dress, with puffy sleeves and a large petticoat, which is a remnant from the time when German colonists ruled this small African country on the Atlantic coast more than a hundred years ago.

The German colonial era in Namibia ended in 1915 when Windhoek fell to South African and British soldiers during World War I. But the legacy of the brief period of brutal German colonisation that began in 1885 still echoes in all spheres of Namibian life.

From the architecture and design of buildings to the dresses women wear and the spatial planning of the city - the German footprint is still visible.

What’s also apparent in the flea market near the Post-Street Mall where Meme Altetha runs her small business is a deep-seated anger at the injustice done by the German colonisers.

“We have no land, the little cattle we have at the reserves are always at the risk of facing droughts so we have to make a living selling these small things to survive”, Aletha tells TRT World.

“The Germans took everything.”

So it came as little surprise when Namibian President Hage Geingob issued a strongly worded statement condemning Berlin’s decision to side with Tel Aviv at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) where Israel is facing a case of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.

Between 1904-1908, German soldiers killed an estimated eighty-five thousand ethnic Ova-Herero and Nama people in Namibia.

Although Germany’s foreign ministry has officially recognised its conduct during Namibia’s occupation as genocide and offered compensation, it has so far refused to make reparations as it did to Israel for the killing of Jews during World War II.

The suffering of the Palestinians resonates in Namibia where many people say that Germany has yet to compensate for its actions.

The deafening silence of the nations that boast about democracy and human rights on the continuing massacre of Palestinians means countries like Namibia, which have faced subjugation, have to be louder in condemning Israel, says Suzie Shefeni, a Namibian researcher and academic.

Israel’s war on Gaza has left more than 26,000 people dead, many of them women and children.

According to the UN, at least two mothers are killed in Gaza every hour, and the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor says at least 10,000 children have been killed since the war began on October 7th.

Relief agencies are warning about impending starvation as Israeli troops have blocked aid to more than 2.2 million people trapped in Gaza.

Besides siding with Israel at the ICJ, Germany has also joined a band of rich countries that have announced a controversial decision to stop funding the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees.

Germany’s continued support for Israel is the result of the politics around the Holocaust, which has inextricably intertwined the two, says Shefeni.

“Through incomplete readings of the vergangenheitsbewältigung philosophy, the Holocaust has been constructed as an anomalous historical event to which nothing can compare; neither a past genocide nor a future one.”

Germany has tied the word genocide to one specific event of the genocide during the period of National Socialism (Nazism) while Israel has markedly constructed itself as a purely Jewish state, she says.

“These three factors have worked in conjunction to motivate Germany’s compulsion to constantly defend Israel’s actions both within their borders and internationally, lest they be seen as not atoning for their genocidal crimes.”

Germans have built a perception about their country’s colonial past in which some atrocities deserve more consideration and emotional weight than others, experts say.

Sweden-based Namibian historian Henning Melber says for Germany the Holocaust and the genocide committed on Namibian soil fall into different categories.

“They (the Germans), have a hierarchical view. For them the Holocaust is singular. That the genocide committed in GSWA (Namibia) is from the perspective of the victims and their descendants also singular, does not cross their mind,” says Melber.

“The solidarity with the Israeli government despite its violation of international law is an overcompensation of guilt and a result of the equation that the state of Israel and its government represents all Jews.”

The German President or Chancellor is expected to visit Namibia this year to tender a formal apology to the Namibian people and the affected communities.

Charles Eiseb, part of the Namibian government team that negotiated the matter of reparations with Germany, says Berlin did not want to explicitly acknowledge genocide or even use the word because the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into effect on December 9, 1948.

“Germany did not want to explicitly acknowledge genocide. They were trying to use other words such as brutality, atrocities, and so on.”

But overwhelming evidence is stacked against Germany. German colonial commander, Lother von Trotha, explicitly called for eliminating the Herero and Nama people, which constitute genocide under the UN Convention, he says.

A matter of contention between the Namibian and German negotiators was the monetary amount that Berlin would pay as compensation which was referred to as development aid instead of reparations.

Germany has agreed to pay Namibia $1.3 billion over thirty years as a grant to the reconstruction and development support for the benefit of the descendants of affected communities.

Many Namibians have opposed the deal struck by the government’s negotiators, calling it paltry and a slap in the face of the victims.

But for Meme Aletha justice will be served only when large tracts of land owned by Germans and White South Africans in Namibia are returned to the Herero people.