In Ireland too over recent years there has been a remarkable breaking of silences about the Famine. In 1995 John Killen wrote in his introduction to The Famine Decade: Contemporary Accounts, 1841–1851 that ‘the trauma of the famine struck a deep blow to the psyche of the Irish people then and in ensuing generations. Anger, hatred, fear and compassion have mixed with shame to produce a reluctance, possibly an inability, to address the enormity of that … tragedy.’ But the last two decades have seen a huge shift here, akin to the breaking of a conceptual dam of silence and trauma. Far more books and articles have been published about the Famine in the last two decades than the preceding 150 years. There has been particularly fascinating new research in the specific area of post-Famine trauma, and the impacts these million deaths had on subsequent generations. Work done by Chris Morash, Cathal Póirtéir, Peter Gray, Kendrick Oliver, Emily Mark-FitzGerald and Margaret Kelleher has all contributed to this ongoing debate about the legacy of the Famine in Ireland today.fn7 I feel that all of these developments are indicative of a significant shift in how the Famine is now being represented in far broader cultural, psychological and philosophical terms than the narrow historical approach that dominated up until about the mid-1990s.
There are certain parallels here between the original silence surrounding the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period, and then the trickle of published testimonies, documentaries and academic studies that began to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s, becoming a flood by the 1980s and 90s when Norman Finkelstein wrote his intentionally provocative attack on what he saw as The Holocaust Industry (2000). Although in Ireland the initial period of relative silence was longer – more than a century before the first major study of the Famine was published, The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, in 1956 – there has been a similar deluge of Famine-related writing and cultural representation since the mid-1990s. Although, curiously, not yet in the medium of film, but this will surely come in time.
As with the development of Holocaust memorials and museums throughout the world, there has also been a dramatic increase in public memorials and artworks commemorating the Famine in the last two decades, particularly in Ireland, the USA and Canada. The fact that some of these are of questionable aesthetic quality (just as is the case with Holocaust memorials) is far less significant than the fact that they exist at all. The best known is probably Rowan Gillespie’s Famine, unveiled in 1997, a powerful group of six emaciated bronze figures, walking along Custom House Quay in Dublin. Also in 1997, the National Famine Memorial of a famine ship was inaugurated at Murrisk, in Mayo. There followed many other artworks and commemorations all across Ireland, and then diaspora communities commissioned further Famine memorials in Boston (1998), Sydney (1999), New York (2002), Philadelphia (2003) and Toronto (2007). And since 2008, the Irish government have organised a National Famine Commemoration Day.
14 July 2016, Pen Llŷn
Perhaps the most remarkable breaking of silences in my lifetime, is by an extraordinary coincidence, happening as I’m editing the words on this page. It is now almost two decades since I first read Sven Lindqvist, and learnt about the annihilation of the Herero and Nama in Namibia. As I researched further into the genocide it haunted me more and more. But I also grew angrier, because it seemed that this genocide was barely known about – even my well-educated friends, knowledgeable about history, looked nonplussed when I raised the subject. The disparity in historical and cultural representation between the vast amount published on the genocide of the Jews in Europe and the paucity of work about the genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia was overwhelming, and disturbing. The casual racism behind this under-representation was clear for anyone with eyes to see. And one particularly disturbing dimension to the Namibian genocide was that not only were the vast majority of the Herero and Nama exterminated, but their lands were then stolen and handed over to German settlers. A situation that still continues to this day, where 4,000 predominantly white farmers own 95 per cent of the territory.
In the late 1990s, as we’ve seen, something began to stir. It is hard to identify the exact moment, but gradually more and more was published in English about the Herero and Nama genocide – Mark Cocker published his powerful work Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold in 1998, and J. B. Gewald’s Herero Heroes came out the following year.fn8 There followed important new research coming to light, particularly about the post-von Trotha period, and the brutality of the concentration camps established in South-West Africa. And in Namibia itself the question of German compensation to the Herero and Nama began to be raised. When German President Roman Herzog visited Namibia in 1998, the Herero handed over a formal request, which was rejected. Soon afterwards, the Herero People’s Reparations Committee was established, and in 2001 they filed two lawsuits under the Alien Tort Claims Act – the first, a $2 billion case in June 2001 against three German corporations who had funded, and profited from, their colonial activities in South-West Africa – Deutsche Bank, the Woermann Line and the Terex Corporation. And then, in September 2001, a $2 billion case against the German government.fn9 These cases were later rejected by the courts, but there was now a growing momentum which could not be halted.
14 August 2004 was a momentous day for the Herero people. It marked the centenary of the Battle of Waterberg, and the beginning of the principal phase of extermination of the Herero by General von Trotha and his soldiers. A large commemoration was planned, over several days on a site at Okakarara, near the Waterberg, and most significantly, the German government were invited to the ceremony. They accepted the invitation and the minister for economic co-operation and development, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, was sent on behalf of the government.
When she stepped up to the microphones, she, understandably, looked nervous. It later emerged that there had been strong disagreement between her and the German Foreign Ministry regarding the exact wording of her speech; she wanted to make the acknowledgement of genocide as powerful and unambiguous as possible – which explains the fact that the words she actually said differed, in certain critical aspects, from the official record of the speech later released.fn10 I have underlined all of these differences in the speech below.
There was a hush, as if the vast weight of a hundred years of terror and injustice was being concentrated on that single moment; nobody in the large and expectant crowd knew what she was going to say. She spoke slowly, in English, at times her voice close to breaking – these are the exact words she used on 14 August 2004, in the first half of her speech, dealing with the Herero–Nama genocide – the first time that any German government representative had used the word ‘genocide’:
Since I have been in the country I have listened. I have met yesterday the Herero representatives and the Nama representatives, and I think it is good also to listen. But I am also happy to be able to speak, to be invited to speak to you.
Today I want to acknowledge the violence inflicted by the German colonist powers on your ancestors, particularly the Herero and the Nama. I am painfully aware of the atrocities committed a hundred years ago and in the late nineteenth century, the colonial powers drove the people from their land and when the Herero, when your ancestors, resisted, General von Trotha’s troops embarked on a war of extermination against them and the Nama. In his infamous order General von Trotha commanded that every Herero be shot – with no mercy shown even to women and children. At the Battle of Waterberg in 1904, the survivors were forced into the Omaheke desert, where they were denied any access to water sources and were left to die of thirst and starvation. And following this, the surviving Herero, Nama and Damara were interned in camps and put to forced labour of such brutality that many did not survive.