A decade ago, while researching a book about Chinese migration to Africa, I made an extended stay in Namibia, then one of a small number of African countries I had never visited in a lifetime of writing about the continent.
To get to know the place as well as I could, I rented a car and drove with my brother, James, throughout much of the country, a land more than twice the size of Germany. The reference here is appropriate, because it was Germany, a relative latecomer to European imperialism in Africa, that colonized Namibia toward the close of the 19th century.
One route took us far to the north, all the way to the border with Angola, but it was two other trajectories—first west and then east of the capital, Windhoek—that connected us with the terrible but little-discussed history of this country, once known as Southwest Africa, as the site of the first genocide of the 20th century.
As we drove west approaching the South Atlantic coast, where ocean currents cool the climate, we passed through one small town after another that looked as if they had been carved out of the German countryside in some bygone era and magically transplanted to these parts. In these little gemlike burgs, white people predominated, and German was the main language of both signage and speech, even though Namibia is overwhelmingly Black and officially English-speaking.
On our trip in the opposite direction, to the east, we drove across a seemingly endless expanse of desert whose rock-strewn sands were punctuated only infrequently by towns of an altogether different kind: desolate little affairs with a handful of streets carved out of the wastelands that hugged the highway. A clue to their terrible history and their connection to the coastal west could be seen in the getup of some of the women who sold goods by the roadside. They wore vaguely Victorian dresses—billowing, structured and brightly colored—with matching hats that resembled painters’ pallets.
This was the characteristic wear of Namibia’s Herero people, who were targeted for elimination by the Germans in 1904. This began with attempts to militarily encircle them and wipe them out in their ancestral territories near the clement coastlands my brother and I had visited. When that effort fell short of its grim goal because of stout Herero resistance, members of this ethnic group were pursued eastward across one of the world’s most forbidding deserts, with an aim to kill them via thirst. When even that failed its objective, the surviving Herero and members of two other ethnic groups were placed in concentration camps where they were underfed and worked to death. And after that, many of their bodies were used in experiments to further the Germans’ “race science.”
The fate of the Herero entered the news ever so briefly last week when, more than a century later, Germany officially recognized these acts as genocide. But rather than paying reparations to the Herero, who not only lost their lives in large numbers, but also their lands, Berlin offered $1.3 billion in development assistance lending to Namibia instead.
If the methods employed by the Germans between 1904 and 1908 sound familiar, they should. Historians have increasingly come to see the atrocities against the Herero in Namibia as a direct precursor to the strategies employed against Jews and other disfavored groups by Germany in Europe a generation later, and we are wrong to let the news of Berlin’s attempt to settle this issue pass by so quickly.
Resolving its terrible history in Namibia will require more of Germany, meaning dealing directly with the Herero people and compensating them for their loss of lives and land.
“Death registers of the people who died in the concentration camps were produced in Germany, printed in German,” the British historian David Olusoga recently told the BBC. These registers had “columns for the name, the age, the gender of the person who has died, and cause of death,” which was universally listed as “death through exhaustion.” As Olusoga noted, if the Germans were preprinting the cause of death of the people held in their concentration camps, “there can be no question they knew what they were doing.”
As it happens, the Namibia genocide was not the only such event in the news last week. Rwanda, site of the final genocide of the 20th century, saw France fitfully acknowledge its shared responsibility for, if not complicity in, the killing of hundreds of thousands of members of that country’s Tutsi minority by remnants and followers of the country’s former Hutu government, which Paris supported in the years prior to the genocide.
The work of Olusoga and other scholars has gone beyond the mere establishment of Namibia as a precursor to the Holocaust, but even more broadly to the links between the 20th century’s bloodlettings and the history of settler colonialism in the 19th century and earlier.
Few remember that one of Hitler’s driving obsessions was the establishment of colonies in Europe, which he declared was Germany’s right. In this pursuit, he was an ardent and explicit admirer of Jacksonian America’s project to eliminate native populations to open the way for resettlement by white Americans—or so-called pioneers.
As the historian Claudio Saunt wrote in his 2020 book, “Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory,” “‘The Indian question’ was the U.S. counterpart to Europe’s ‘Jewish question,’ two formulations that invited paternalistic measures at best, expulsion or extermination at worst.” In the 1830s, he adds, Americans frequently compared Imperial Russia’s invasion of Poland in the late 18th century to the expulsion of the Cherokee Nation from their lands in the Eastern and Southern U.S.
Alexis de Tocqueville, whose “Democracy in America” was also published in the 1830s, saw the U.S. treatment of its Indigenous population as a model for France to apply in newly occupied Algeria, where the original inhabitants were called indigenes, in imitation of the marginalizing naming conventions applied to natives in the New World.
A century later, as he conquered Eastern Europe, Hitler also drew from this history, equating conquered populations to “Indians” and enthusing that “the Volga must be our Mississippi.”
Resolving its terrible history in Namibia will require more of Germany, meaning dealing directly with the Herero people and compensating them for their loss of lives and land. But it also requires more of publics throughout the West who have scarcely reckoned with the densely interwoven histories of atrocity that colonialism wrought throughout the Atlantic world.
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