Germany is apologising for crimes a century ago in Namibia

TUCKED AWAY in a military cemetery in the Berlin suburb of Neukölln you eventually find it: a small plaque dedicated to “the victims of German colonial rule in Namibia…in particular the colonial war”. Berlin has no shortage of memorials to the crimes of Germans. Yet this is the country’s only commemoration of the genocide it inflicted in 1904-08 on the Herero and Nama peoples in what was then German South-West Africa. The plaque was laid in 2009 by locals anxious to counter the symbolism of the that looms behind it: a rock bearing a memorial dating from 1907 to seven German soldiers in the imperial force who died in the Herero uprising that triggered the killings. The rock is scarred with rivulets of dried red paint, having been defaced last year during Berlin’s Black Lives Matter protests.This scene sums up Germany’s complicated attitude to the killings, in which at least 75,000 Herero and Nama were slain in battle, executed, starved in the Oma heke desert or worked to death in labour camps. It was not until 2015, after years of tongue-twisting, that the German government accepted the term genocide and embarked on negotiations with its Namibian counterpart over how to acknowledge and compensate for the actions of its forebears.