Namibia: The price of genocide

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2021

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

More than a century after its brutal colonisation of Namibia, including what it now accepts was the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples, Germany is negotiating with the country’s government to heal the wounds of the past. The eventual deal may set a precedent for what other nations expect from former colonisers. But how do you make up for the destruction of entire societies? Germany has agreed to apologise - but Namibia also wants some form of material compensation. What should that be, and who should benefit? Namibians are now divided about how the talks are being conducted - and some in the country’s German-speaking minority, descendants of the original colonists, question the very idea of compensation. Tim Whewell travels to Namibia to ask how far full reconciliation - with Germany, and within the country - is possible.

Producer and presenter: Tim Whewell Editor: Bridget Harney

(Image: Laidlaw Peringanda at the Swakopmund Genocide Memorial. Credit: Tim Whewell/BBC)

Transcript

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0:00.0	We've come to see Rosa Guillerwa. She's living in a fairly simple house with a metal roof.
0:12.0	She's a big woman with a very broad smile.
0:15.0	Rosa, tell me what you're going to sing.
0:17.0	For her, I'm going to sing.
0:20.0	She's going to sing about this historical mountain of Watabec, where the decisive
0:27.4	battle took place on the 11th of August, 1904, phrasing the letters who were leading our people in this resistance against the Germans. ahead of us then just kind of rising out of the
0:57.0	ahead of us then just kind of rising out of the flat land is this huge mountain like a table, the waterberg. Yeah, it's a mountain that is stretching a long distance.
1:01.0	They have all the German forces here and we lost that battle but then what
1:07.2	happened to the hearer's genocide? It was really a strategy to destroy the he. My name is Varioka Festus Chigua. I'm one of the people
1:18.7	who are involved in this negotiation process with the German government for reparations for the genocide.
1:25.0	Yes, yes.
1:27.0	Welcome to assignment on the BBC World Service.
1:30.0	I'm Tim Huell.
1:32.0	More than a century after German colonial forces brutally suppressed a revolt by the Herrero people of Namibia,
1:38.0	they're known as South West Africa. Germany and Namibia are locked in talks about healing the wounds of what Germany accepts
1:46.5	would now be called genocide. Germany won't use the term reparations but it does talk of
2:01.4	compensation for the Herrera and another people who also rebelled and were crushed the Nama.
2:07.0	Namibia wants the deal to include a huge financial payout to help descendants of the victims like Rosa.
2:14.4	She's a single mother who struggles to make a living
2:17.7	sewing her rarer traditional costumes.
2:20.3	How many children?
2:22.3	I have four children.
	...

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