We pay tribute, I pay tribute in the name of the German government, to those brave women and men, particularly from the Herero, the Nama, the Damara, who fought and suffered so that their children and their children’s children could live in freedom. I honour with great respect your ancestors who died fighting against their German oppressors. Even at that time, back in 1904, there were also Germans who opposed and spoke out against this war of oppression. One of them, and I’m proud of that, was August Bebel, the chairman of the same political party of which I am a member. In the German Parliament at that time, Bebel condemned the oppression of the Herero in the strongest terms and honoured their uprising as a just struggle for liberation. I am proud of that today.
A century ago, the oppressors – blinded by colonial fervour – became agents of violence, discrimination, racism and annihilation in Germany’s name.
The atrocities, the murders, the crimes committed at that time are today termed genocide – and nowadays a General von Trotha would be prosecuted and convicted, and rightly so.
We Germans accept our historical and moral responsibility and the guilt incurred by Germans at that time. And so, in the words of the Lord’s Prayer that we share, I ask you to forgive us our trespasses and our guilt.
A staggering moment, as Wieczorek-Zeul’s words went into the ears of her Namibian listeners, into the sky, at the precise place where, a hundred years before, her predecessor General Lothar von Trotha began the extermination of the Herero people. A moment as powerful as Willy Brandt kneeling at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. A moment which, like that action, finally opened up the possibility of reconciliation and justice – though, of course, these processes take many, many years.
Some in the crowd, still wary of their old colonial adversary, shouted that they wanted a clear apology – Wieczorek-Zeul replied, ‘Everything I have said in my speech was an apology for crimes committed under German colonial rule.’ However (and it was a big however), she explained there would be no financial compensation from the German government, though economic aid would increase. Also, bizarrely, although this speech had seemed to accept German responsibility in uncompromising terms, according to the German government afterwards it did not constitute either an official German apology nor a formal recognition of genocide; her speech would not be adopted as government policy. Reaction to her words divided the Namibian government and the Herero people. Hifkepunye Pohamba, Namibia’s minister of land, welcomed her remarks, saying, ‘That is what we have been waiting for, for a very long time.’ But the Herero representative Kuaima Riruako, said that although the apology was appreciated, ‘we still have the right to take the German government to court’.
Pressure continued to build on the German government – both within Germany and in Namibia. The South African law professor Jeremy Sarkin made a significant contribution to the debate around reparations claims, working closely with Herero representatives, and publishing his work Colonial Genocide and Reparations Claims in the 21st Century in 2008. Demands grew for the return of bones and skulls of Herero and Nama victims kept in German museums and institutes, which began to be returned in 2011. There were repeated initiatives in the Bundestag for the genocide to be formally recognised, led by the Green Party and the Social Democratic Party, and in the Bundestag debate on 1 March 2012 Wieczorek-Zeul criticised the government strongly for delaying its lack of action over real reconciliation in Namibia, but the motion was defeated. Cultural and historical representation continued to multiply – in October 2004 David Olusoga’s BBC documentary Genocide and the Second Reich had been broadcast to widespread acclaim, and six years later, he and Casper Erichsen published the greatest work yet on the genocide – The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide.
The demand for action continued to grow. In May 2015, the Social Democratic Party launched another campaign in the German Parliament, with a contribution from Dr Karamba Diaby, the first African-born elected member of the Bundestag, who quoted Elie Wiesel’s warning to the German Parliament in 2000 about the dangers of those who want to move on, to ‘turn the page’ of the past, who want to forget difficult histories: ‘by conspiring to obliterate the victims’ memory, those who want to turn the page are killing them a second time.’ In 2015, the German Foreign Ministry began referring to the mass murders as ‘genocide’ in its internal guidelines, and special envoys were appointed in November 2015 to facilitate an agreed new policy between Germany and Namibia. With the German Bundestag’s recognition in June 2016 of the Armenian genocide by the Turks, calls to recognise the Namibian genocide grew even louder. A Green Party MP, Cem Özdemir, who had been one of the key players in the Bundestag vote, commented that ‘it is the duty of our house quickly to recognise this genocide as well’.
And so, as I return to this chapter today – 14 July 2016 – a slightly humid, summer’s afternoon on Pen Llŷn, the sea enveloped by mist – I return to this chapter, after months of working on other sections of the book, as I’m about to finish the section on how the silence surrounding the Herero and Nama genocide was eventually broken. I google ‘German apology Namibia 2004’ and I’m astonished by what appears on the screen in front of me:
Germany to recognise Herero genocide and apologise to Namibia.fn11
Germany is to recognise as genocide the massacre of 110,000 of the Herero and Nama people …
I check the link, and yes, the news came through at 1.57 p.m. today from Berlin! I avidly read the article. It’s happened … finally.
In a landmark admission of historical guilt, Germany is to recognise the massacre of 110,000 of the Herero people of Namibia by German troops between 1904 and 1908 as genocide. A spokesman for Angela Merkel’s government said Germany would formally apologise to Namibia.
I double-check the German government website, and there it is in black and white – a statement from a deputy spokesperson of the Federal Foreign Office, Mrs Sawsan Chebli, at a press conference held yesterday. In response to an enquiry as to why the government have used the word ‘genocide’ for the first time about the murder of the Hereros, she says, rather disingenuously, ‘There is no change of heart’, the questioner should know that from ‘very early on, we have spoken explicitly of genocide’. This is simply not true. I go back here to my notes, and find an interview with Dr Wolfgang Massing, who was the German ambassador to Namibia in 2004. He talks about ‘a very dark chapter’ in history, he talks about how Germany ‘deeply regret’ what happened, but he absolutely denies there was a genocide. In fact twice he talks about ‘so-called extermination’ of the Herero, and von Trotha’s ‘so-called extermination order’. Although thousands of Herero were killed, ‘[he] wouldn’t talk about a systematic extermination of Hereros’. In her statement, Chebli also emphasises that although both governments seek a common policy statement about historical events, the German apology and its acceptance by Namibia, these developments will ‘not have any legal consequences’, i.e. the German government will continue to reject calls for reparations and compensation.
Nevertheless, the significance of this moment is impossible to dispute. Not only for the Herero and Nama people in Namibia and for Germany, but for the wider world. It demonstrates that a century-long silence can be broken. It shows that the crimes of the past can never be eradicated.