> Arendt argued..[in]1951 that the concentration camps in.. Namibia.. served as a model for the Third Reich’s bureaucratic organisation of forced labour and systematic murder: to suppress an anticolonial rebellion.. Germans...killed a hundred thousand #Ovaherero and ten thousand Nama. Both Arendt and #AiméCésaire, whose Discourse on Colonialism was published a year before The Origins of Totalitarianism, used the metaphor of the boomerang...
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/kevin-okoth/the-pessimist-s-optimist

#HannahArendt #Arendt #ArendtOnColonialism #ArendtOnImperialism
/HT #RebeccaSolnit FB

»#Namibia marks colonial genocide for first time with memorial day«

Dubbed "#Germany's forgotten #genocide", and described by historians as the first genocide of the 20th Century, the systematic murder of more than 70,000 Africans is being marked with a national day of remembrance for the first time in Namibia.

»The victims, primarily from the #Ovaherero and #Nama communities, were targeted because they refused to let the colonisers take their land and cattle.«

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0jkynyln2o

Heute vor 120 Jahren, am 2. Oktober 1904, verlas General Lothar von Trotha auf einem kleinen Hügel im zentralnamibischen Otjinene seinen berüchtigten Vernichtungsbefehl gegen die #Ovaherero.

#AnDiesemTag 🧵

"By the end of the German campaign, in 1908, more than 65,000 #Ovaherero, more than two-thirds of the population, and 10,000 #Nama, around half the population, had been killed. Their ancestral lands were not returned to the survivors. [..] In 1902, less than 1 per cent of South-West Africa was owned by Europeans; after the #genocide the figure was more than 20 per cent."

#EyalWeizman

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/eyal-weizman/three-genocides
#HereroAndNamaGenocide #Namibia #ColonialViolence #Germany #colonialism #Herero

Germany Needs to Own Up to the Horrors of Its Colonial Past in Africa

Germany’s reckoning with the Holocaust is widely taken as a model of historical accountability — yet it has proven far less willing to confront its colonial past in Africa. Maresi Starzmann writes.

#germany #genocide #GermanSouthWestAfrica #ovaherero #nama #racism #OvahereroGenocide #namibia #colonialism #history #histodon

https://jacobin.com/2020/07/german-colonialism-herero-nama-genocide-court-case