Restituting Evidence: Genocide and Reparations in German Colonial Namibia

These eight short videos present the preliminary findings of a multiyear, multiphase investigation conducted by Forensic Architecture/Forensis in partnership with the Ovaherero/Ovambanderu Genocide Foundation. At the initiative of ECCHR, we undertook a process of collaborative modelling and mapping of key sites in the genocide and other as-yet-unaccounted-for atrocities committed by Germany against the Ovaherero and Nama people of Namibia between 1904 and 1908. Further materials related to the investigation are forthcoming.

Germany’s colonial crimes against the Ovaherero, Ovambanderu, and Nama in South West Africa (present-day Namibia) have for too long evaded international public scrutiny and legal redress. While Germany has in recent years accepted moral responsibility for the genocide, they disclaim legal responsibility, avoiding the obligation to pay reparations and facilitate restitution. Across Namibia, monuments honour the perpetrators of genocide, mass graves of victims are unmarked, and sites of atrocity fall into ruin. The majority of the country’s viable land is owned by white descendants of European colonists while Black descendants of genocide victims live in intergenerational poverty.

As artefacts of a colonial gaze, archival photos pose and fragment the life-worlds of the country’s Indigenous peoples to legitimise and advance the colonial project. Spatialising such images evidences the colonial strategy of dominating and supplanting longstanding indigenous settlements. Using our methodology of ‘situated testimony,’ we merged archival photographs and oral testimony within 3D models of sites of genocide and other colonial atrocities in order to locate ancestral Indigenous homesteads and burial grounds; to locate concentration camps used to incarcerate Herero people; to document German and later South African theft of Indigenous land, which has set the unbreakable foundations of land distribution in Namibia today; and to begin to investigate colonialism’s intertemporal degradation of the environment. The preliminary result is a new body of digital evidence that can be leveraged by local communities and their legal advocates in support of long-standing demands for land restitution and reparations.

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The Berlin Africa Conference of 1884–1885, organised by first chancellor of Germany Otto von Bismarck, formalised the partition of Africa among a handful of white, Western nation-states. Arbitrary lines drawn by alien powers became the borders of African colonies (and later independent states). Their borders cut violently through the complexity of African social organisation.

‘South West Africa’, now Namibia, was home to numerous indigenous peoples, including the Ovaherero. German missionaries, followed by colonial troops (Schutztruppen), mining corporations, and settler colonists initiated a violent process of land theft brokered through forged and broken treaties, extrajudicial killings, and massacres. Time and again, this colonial violence was met with the resistance of the Indigenous populations.

Okahandja was the historic capital of Hereroland, a place where the Herero people regularly pay homage to their fallen leaders, heroes, and heroines, and the ancestral homestead of the Maharero clan. Some of the first colonial photographs of what was then called ‘South West Africa’ were captured here in 1876. While such archival images are artefacts of a colonial gaze, we use them in support of Indigenous land claims to identify the locations of Ovaherero settlements that once straddled the omuramba (seasonal riverbed) of the Okahandja River and to weave a chronology of the process of German colonisation.

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Now known under its colonial name of ‘Waterberg’, Otjozondjupa – meaning ‘place of the calabashes’ in Otjiherero, the language of the Herero people – is the site of what was to be a decisive historical turning point. Otjozondjupa, where the Indigenous uprising known to Herero people as the War of Anti-Colonial Resistance took place, is also where the German colonial strategy turned decisively toward genocide. Around thirty thousand Ovaherero people sought refuge there, joining existing settlements of the Kambazembi clan under the leadership of Samuel Maharero. German colonial troops formed a bulwark to prevent the Herero from fleeing west, forcing them instead into a region known to colonists as the ‘waterless’ Omaheke Sandveld (‘sand field’ in Afrikaans).

The abundance of water that inspired Waterberg’s European name made the occupation of the plateau a critical goal for German colonisers. Colonial photographers captured a handful of the area’s myriad Indigenous settlements. Yet these photographs have never been properly dated and located, presenting the Indigenous people as part of an ahistorical ‘state of nature’. Using the face of the rock as an anchor and interweaving testimony from Herero oral historians, we ‘restitute’ the photographs within their wider environmental, historical, and social context.

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After the expulsion of the Ovaherero from Otjozondjupa, the German military weaponised the region’s harsh environmental conditions to perpetrate genocide against the Ovaherero. Having pushed them into the ‘waterless Omaheke’, the German army poisoned many of the water wells dug by fleeing Herero. During our research visit to Ozombu Zo Vindimba – Otjiherero for ‘wells of skin disease’ – we were shown several historical wells. In one of them, reopened as part of a legal claim in 2018, human remains were recovered.

It was here that, in December 1904, Lothar von Trotha, the commander of the Schutztruppe (German ‘protection force’), issued his infamous extermination order, which stated that ‘[…] every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children, I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot at.’

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Those Ovaherero who crossed the border with British Bechuanaland (contemporary Botswana) as refugees or survived in the Omaheke until the retraction of the extermination order in December 1905 managed to subsist through their intimate knowledge of the environment. The Omaheke receives between 200 and 350 millimetres of rainfall per year, making it arid but not truly ‘waterless’. To survive during the dry season, the Herero had to know where and how to look for water. Local residents and oral historians showed us Indigenous techniques for finding groundwater. Despite these remarkable survival skills, by the end of the genocide, the Herero population of 80,000 had been reduced to just 15,000.

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Working with Ovaherero community members and oral historians, we employed a technique we refer to as ‘situated testimony’. This involves the re-configuration of a navigable game engine such that it serves as a digital platform in which traditional and collective forms of memory can be enacted. The result, in this instance, is a series of immersive models of historically important locations within the wider landscape, collaboratively reconstructed to appear as they were prior to the early 20th century period of German colonisation, and during the genocide of 1904-8.

This segment documents the process of collectively reconstructing the plant cover as it previously existed around a water pan in the Omaheke region. Several species of trees, bushes, and grasses were recreated and placed within the digital landscape as part of an effort to capture something of the nature of this environment and the climatic conditions at the turn of the 20th century, data and loci otherwise lost to time.

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Ngauzepo was one of many trees across Namibia used to hang captured Herero during the War of Anti-Colonial Resistance and the genocide. It is a site of annual commemoration for the Herero people. For years, Ovaherero activists and government representatives in the municipality of Otjinene have struggled for the recognition of this tree as a national heritage site. In the meantime, the tree has collapsed. While countless monuments glorifying the German perpetrators of genocide stand strong across Namibia, neglect and a lack of funding allows such humble monuments to the victims of genocide to fall into ruin.

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When Lothar von Trotha’s extermination order was revoked in December 1905, Ovaherero survivors were rounded up, imprisoned in Konzentrationslager (concentration camps), and exploited for slave labour in order to build the colony’s logistical and economic infrastructure, as well as private homes and businesses. Windhoek was only one of several cities across South West Africa to host concentration camps.

Using the technique of photo-matching, we determined the location of two concentration camps in Windhoek, noting that there are no signs to commemorate their existence. Germany’s genocidal strategy—the issuance of an extermination order and the use of concentration camps—represents a clear precursor to the genocides committed during World War Two. During the second phase of our research, we will investigate the infamous concentration camps at Swakopmund and Shark Island.

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The German colonial genocide cleared the ground for a massive land grab by European settler colonists. Imperial forces saw themselves engaged in a race war that demanded the elimination and containment of Indigenous people to clear the ground for Lebensraum—‘living space’ for the white German people—another precursor to the Nazi crimes that would be perpetrated less than forty years later.

The racialised stratification of land ownership begun under German rule remains solidly in place to this day. Today, 44 percent of Namibia’s total land area (and 70 percent of the country’s commercial agricultural land) is owned by 4,500 European farmers who make up 0.3 percent of the population. The Herero people who were dispossessed of their lands were forced into ‘ethnic homelands’ in the Omaheke, where they had to compete for scarce water resources. There, they established towns bearing the names of their ancestral homesteads. Through oral tradition, they can retrace their lineages and articulate clear claims for the right to access and return to their ancestral lands and burial grounds.

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During our visit to Otjinene, Hon. Erwin Katjizeu, Councilor for Otjinene Constituency spoke about land issues and environmental degradation. Not only do locals suffer from the depletion of water resources in the area, they are also prohibited by the government from making their land viable for grazing.

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The transgenerational effects of German colonialism are everywhere seen, heard, and felt across Namibia. Colonialism brought death and destruction not only to Namibia’s people, but also to the country’s wider environment. Bush encroachment – a process by which woody vegetation overtakes perennial grasses, increasing soil aridity and leading to desertification – is yet another legacy of a century of colonial land use practices. Desertification is the result of the elimination and expulsion of the Indigenous populations, the imposition of European-style sedentary commercial farms, the near-eradication of wildlife, and the containment of the formerly pastoral and migratory Indigenous populations in homesteads a fragment of the size of their original territories.

If the land has been degraded by colonialism and can no longer support the life-world of a people, is the restitution of land enough? What other forms of reparation are owed to the Herero people?