Genocide and the Politics of Memory in the Decolonisation of Namibia

This article examines how Namibians recalled colonisation by Germany (1884–1915) under subsequent South African colonial rule (1915–90). Focusing on Herero communities and political leaders between 1915 and the beginning of an armed struggle in 1966, it argues that invoking the first colonial occupation became an idiom that allowed the Herero to challenge the continued depredations of settler colonialism, negotiate the colonial encounter, and advance particularistic interests. Drawing on hitherto neglected documentary sources and newly collected oral histories, I illustrate how Herero petitioners to the United Nations intertwined memories of the genocide of the Herero and Nama (1904–08) with those of what came to be understood as the Holocaust during the 1960s to criticise South Africa’s imposition of apartheid in Namibia. In this way, I demonstrate the ways in which remembering the first colonial occupation shaped the emergence of modern Namibian political discourse as well as post-colonial restorative justice campaigns. The article thereby underlines the importance of memory making in the decolonisation of Namibia and contributes to a long history of the end of empire and restorative justice in Africa that reaches back to the First World War.