杏MAP导航

By Federico Piana 

Today is a historic day in Namibia.

One could say this because the Southern African country is, for the first time, commemorating the victims of the genocide perpetrated against the local Herero and Nama peoples by the German Empire during a period between 1904 and 1908, years in which the so-called African partition by European nations took place.

Shared memory

Moreover, it is also historic since today's commemorative ceremony in the gardens of downtown Windhoek, in the presence of the highest State authorities, marks the first step toward the peaceful processing of a collective memory upon which those atrocities still weigh heavily.

Among the Herero, 65,000 out of a total of 80,000 members of the ethnic group were killed, while the Nama counted 10,000 victims, exactly half of their population.

All were killed because they dared to rebel against colonization, with a brutality that spared not even thousands of children, women, the elderly, and the sick, who were left to die, even of hunger and thirst, in concentration camps.

Path of unity

Namibia's Minister of Information, Emma Theofelus, said, "We invite all Namibians, all citizens, to come and commemorate this day with us. May the courageous souls of the victims continue to rest in eternal peace."

While Gaob Dawid Gertze, a representative of a Nama community clan, interviewed by local media, reiterated the need to "never take for granted the privileges that democracy offers."

"However," he continued, "the beauty of democracy lies in the fact that today the whole society joins in this celebration."

'Moral and political" commitment

Only in 2021 did Germany officially recognize those massacres as genocide, announcing, as a "moral and political commitment," an investment of over 1 billion euros over 30 years for the development of the African country, while denying compensation to individual descendants of the victims.