Remembering the Herero-Nama Genocide in Namibia

Abstract

The mass killing of Herero/Ovaherero and Nama/Namaqua peoples carried out by German colonial forces between 1904 and 1908 in Namibia (then German South West Africa) is often described as a “forgotten genocide” (e.g., Erichsen and Olusoga 2011).1 When this kind of rhetorical trope gets employed in the art world, it often casts the artist as what Okwui Enwezor calls an “agent of memory,” a figure who rescues forgotten historical traces from a mausoleum-like archive and then presents them to a hitherto ignorant public (2008: 46). Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005) by the South African artist William Kentridge is perhaps the most well-known artwork to address the genocide. It operates within the understanding of the relationships among artist, archive, and audience outlined by Enwezor (Dubin 2007: 130). Commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, the installation takes the form of a miniature proscenium with mechanized figures and an animated film. Visual motifs such as cameras, typewriters, newspapers, and written ledgers draw attention to how colonizers collected and communicated information (Fig. 1). Animation sets these archival materials into motion while animatronic figures move across the stage. Although the artwork offers few specific details about the historical events it references (labels provide these in some exhibition venues), it conveys the calculated brutality of colonialism and calls on viewers to engage in Trauerarbeit, the work of mourning (Baer 2018: 100–102). By animating the archive, it summons the ghosts of Germany's forgotten colonial past to haunt contemporary viewers (Demos 2013).The visual inventiveness and conceptual depth of Black Box allow it to hold up to the exhaustive attention paid to it by critics and art historians in Europe and North America, but it is worth noting that part of its success derives from how well the artwork meets the expectations of those audiences (Baer 2018; Buikema 2016; de Jong 2018; Dubin 2007; Kentridge and Villaseñor 2006). It assumes a societal amnesia against which it can perform “acts of remembering” (Enwezor 2008: 47). However, as Kevin Brazil notes, “For something to be rediscovered in a present, it first must be assumed to belong to a past, because only then can it serve as a reminder of what a present has forgotten” (2020). Assuming that the genocide is forgotten, thus allowing it to be rediscovered via contemporary art, is a privilege of the former colonizer, not the colonized. Likewise, taking written documents or photographic images to be the primary evidence of the genocide assumes a Western archive. While these assumptions are reasonable given the German patron and primarily non-Namibian audience for Black Box, they should not be taken as universal. Recent artworks made with Namibian viewers in mind engage with how the genocide is remembered, by whom, and why. They go “beyond the rhetoric of revelation” (Brandt 2020: 123). A brief synopsis of the events of 1904–1908 and how different constituencies frame them helps to position these artworks within the contemporary politics of memory in Namibia.During the nineteenth century, groups of Herero and Nama pastoralists lived across central and southern Namibia, often competing over prime grazing areas. After Germany established a colony in 1884, individual groups alternately fought and compromised with the colonial government, which presented itself as a peacemaker between them. However, as German settlers acquired more and more land, tensions came to a head, and in 1904 the Herero and Nama rebelled against colonial rule. Governor General Lothar von Trotha issued extermination orders for both groups, leading to the first genocide of the twentieth century.2 Those who remained after the orders were eventually rescinded were rounded up and sent to concentration camps in Windhoek, Swakopmund, Lüderitz, and other sites, where they were used as forced laborers by settler-owned businesses and farms. Estimates of those killed during direct hostilities or by privation, disease, and overwork in the camps range between 65,000 and 110,000, constituting approximately 80% of Herero and 50% of Nama, as well as San and Damara swept up in the conflicts. The remaining prisoners were not released until 1908. German rule ended in 1915 after an invasion by British South African troops during World War I. This new colonial regime held power until independence in 1990.3Various ethnic groups and political constituencies within Namibia have framed these events in different ways. German settlers constructed monuments such as the Reiterdenkmal [Equestrian Statue] (1912) and Christ Church (1910) in Windhoek to mourn their dead and commemorate victory. During the South African period, they also wrote history books and founded most local museums, presenting their own story of settlement and survival as national history (Schildkrout 1995; Niezen 2017: 554). Today, some German Namibian groups and individuals continue to oppose efforts to remove colonial monuments and contest the use of the term “genocide,” preferring instead to characterize the events as a regrettable, but unexceptional, colonial war (Kössler 2015: 117-46; Niezen 2017: 556-57; Steinmetz and Heil 2006: 157; Zuern 2012: 499).4 Many White Namibians do acknowledge and condemn the genocide, but most would prefer to have all parties just “move on” in the interest of reconciliation.5 These attitudes emerge both in informal conversations and in attempts to limit discussions of the genocide. For example, a critical review of Nicola Brandt's exhibition The Earth Inside (to be addressed later), published under a German Namibian pseudonym, takes umbrage at the artist's claim that Namibians are not talking enough about the genocide. By insisting that the issue is already being sufficiently addressed, it tries to shut down the very conversation that Brandt was trying to instigate (Kleinschmidt 2014).Herero and Nama communities have transmitted memories of the genocide in oral histories passed down in families and through commemorations and reenactments organized by communal groups (Biwa 2012; Förster 2008; Kössler 2015). While these memory practices are directed within their respective communities, traditional authorities and activists have also instigated a broader public debate in Namibia and Germany around the genocide since the late 1990s. For example, the paramount chief of the Ovaherero, the Nama Traditional Leaders Association, and various activist groups inside and outside Namibia have pressed Germany for official apologies, financial reparations, and the return of human remains held in research institutions (Kössler 2015). This public activism has helped to foster collective identities as Herero or Nama, in addition to the primary connection individuals and communities have to a specific clan, royal house, or other subgroup (Kössler 2015: 269; Gewald 2003: 303; Förster 2008: 176-77).Led by SWAPO (South West African People's Organization) since independence, the Namibian government views Germany more as a generous development partner than as a historical oppressor. The first president, Sam Nujoma, explained in 2002 that, “The new Namibia and the new Germany are no longer concerned with the past. We are leaving the sad history behind us and are working progressively together” (Niezen 2017: 555). The government has been reticent to pursue reparations for specific ethnic groups or engage with ancestral land claims, as they might complicate both diplomatic relations and domestic politics. Since South Africa promoted “ethnic difference as the basis for political representation” during its rule, SWAPO has long espoused an “antitribalist” ideology, despite having its own support base among the majority Ovambo/Aawambo (Miescher, Rizzo, and Silvester 2008: 119; Becker 2015: 31). However, the government has begun to take a more nuanced position in regard to Herero and Nama claims since 2006 (Kössler 2015: 268). This is evident in recent efforts to shape a postcolonial version of national history by building new museums and memorials. These highlight the SWAPO-led Namibian War of Independence (1966–1989) and enshrine Nujoma as the founding father, but they also incorporate histories of oppression and resistance during the German period into an overarching story of national liberation.While the first artworks in Namibia to address the genocide appeared around the time of the centennial commemorations, this study focuses on three cohesive bodies of work that have been presented in Windhoek since 2014.6 The Namibian government commissioned the North Korean state art firm Mansudae Overseas Projects to produce artworks depicting the genocide for the Independence Memorial and Museum and the nearby Genocide Memorial, both completed in 2014 (Fig. 2). They draw on the indexical power of historical photographs to provide grim evidence of German atrocities, but they also translate them into emotionally charged, social realist artworks that ask viewers to identify with the victims. Artworks in a socialist realist idiom then present Namibian independence as having resolved these past traumas.Solo exhibitions at the state-run National Art Gallery of Namibia (NAGN) have also offered German Namibian and Herero perspectives on the genocide. In her 2014 exhibition The Earth Inside, Nicola Brandt calls attention to physical traces of the genocide found in Namibian landscapes and reads the Herero long dress as a material record of the Herero-German encounter. When worn by Herero collaborators in her artworks, the dress marks sites of historical trauma and claims contested landscapes. When worn by the artist, it negotiates an uncomfortable reckoning with her own German Namibian identity (Fig. 3). Isabel Tueumuna Katjavivi's 2018 exhibition They Tried to Bury Us gives visual form to indigenous ways of remembering the genocide (Fig. 4). By appending Herero oral histories to seemingly banal landscapes, she asks viewers to experience them as sites of ongoing trauma. Viewers become witnesses, not just of past events, but of the ways that those events continue to live on in the present. Although the commissioned murals and sculptures created by Mansudae have very different aesthetic and ideological underpinnings compared to those of Brandt and Katjavivi's artworks, they all address the following questions with Namibian viewers in mind: What counts as historical evidence of the genocide? How can that evidence be visualized for contemporary viewers? What demands does the past make on the present and future?The Namibian government commissioned Mansudae Overseas Projects to design and build Heroes’ Acre (2002), a national cemetery and war memorial, the Independence Memorial and Museum (2014), and the Genocide Memorial (2014). These have reshaped the commemorative landscape of Windhoek, which had been dominated by colonial-era statues and architectural monuments. Outsourcing both their design and construction to a foreign firm may seem surprising, but Mansudae is a popular contractor among African states wishing to give monumental form and didactic clarity to official histories (Kirkwood 2013: 548-49). The firm offers its clients a tested narrative template for how to understand and represent revolutionary change, which Meghan Kirkwood summarizes as, “great leadership restores sovereignty to an oppressed citizenry through armed struggle” (2013: 556). Heroes’ Acre offers the simplest version, centered on the Independence War and rendered with naturalistic figures engaged in heroic actions. The Independence Museum offers a more nuanced version of this history and employs a wider range of aesthetic strategies. The Genocide Memorial distills the story presented in the museum into a freestanding public sculpture. While other studies have addressed the iconography of Heroes’ Acre, the architecture of the museum, and the fraught removal of old monuments and siting of new ones within Windhoek, less attention has been paid to how the Mansudae paintings, sculptures, and murals function, as artworks, to frame historical events and shape viewer experiences (Becker 2018; Brandt 2020; Elago 2015; Kirkwood 2013; Zuern 2012).The Mansudae artworks have ideological and aesthetic affinities with the visual imagery produced by SWAPO and its allies during the liberation struggle. North Korea, along with other socialist countries, provided financial and tactical support to SWAPO and its armed wing, the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), from the 1960s through the 1980s. Posters created by SWAPO's Department of Information and Publicity, as well as those produced by solidarity organizations around the world in support of Namibian independence, employed a socialist-inspired iconography of broken chains, raised fists, armed mothers, united masses, and visionary leaders, along with formal elements such as collage, saturated colors, and dynamic compositions (Fig. 5). These were widely shared among national liberation movements, anti-apartheid groups, and trade and student organizations in Southern Africa at the time (Miescher and Henrichsen 2004; Miescher, Rizzo, and Silvester 2008: 117-19; Miescher, Rizzo, and Silvester 2009). SWAPO artists, based first in Dar es Salaam and then Lusaka, drew visual inspiration from regional allies, as well as from Cuban and Soviet posters (Miescher, Rizzo, and Silvester 2008: 112-19; Miescher, Rizzo, and Silvester 2009: 28-29, 168-69). Although SWAPO largely abandoned this aesthetic after independence, for President Nujoma and the other senior government officials who instigated the commissions, socialist art likely seemed a suitable period style with which to represent the independence struggle (Miescher and Henrichsen 2009: 131-33). Notably, SWAPO imagery was targeted to an exile and international audience, and its circulation within Namibia was very limited prior to 1989 (Akawa 2009). Thus, when an aesthetic that felt familiar, perhaps even Namibian, to SWAPO leaders and former PLAN fighters appeared in Windhoek a decade after independence, it was viewed by some Namibians as foreign and out of place (Kisting 2010).7The Mandudae artworks are typically described as exemplifying either socialist realism or social realism, but the distinction between these art practices is critical to understanding the ideological program of the museum (Becker 2018: 7; Brandt 2020: 133; Kirkwood 2013: 549; Niezen 2017: 556). The concept of socialist realism was first formulated in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s to describe artworks that conveyed socialist content in a visual form that was legible to the masses. Its goal was to convey the reality of life under socialism. While it offered an idealized version of life, its naturalistic rendering of form implicitly equated realism with reality. Kim Il-sung formulated his own version, known as juche or self-reliance art, in the 1960s (Portal 2005: 20-30, 77-79). This remains the official state art philosophy and the basis of artistic training in North Korea. Social realism also emerged in the early twentieth century and shared the leftist politics of socialist realism, but it first developed outside of socialist countries and aimed to reveal how capitalism and colonialism exploited and disenfranchised the masses. Of particular note here is that its goal was not to affirm but rather to agitate against the sociopolitical order it depicted. The dynamic compositions, expressionist distortions, and dramatic content that characterize some versions of social realism, particularly Mexican muralism, aim to engage viewers emotionally and, in so doing, transform them politically. Later, SWAPO and other liberation movements in Southern Africa drew freely from both socialist traditions. Mansudae artists, in contrast, employ them systematically in the museum. Social realism evokes the experience of colonial oppression while socialist realism depicts anticolonial resistance and postcolonial unity.The museum frames the independence struggle as consisting of two waves. Indigenous leaders rally their people to fight against German and South African colonizers at the beginning of the twentieth century but suffer tragic defeats. Then, SWAPO leads the fight against South Africa and secures victory, fulfilling the hopes of the earlier generation. This continues a strategy of incorporating various anticolonial actions into a “long struggle for liberation,” an idea already promoted in SWAPO posters of the mid-1970s (Miescher and Henrichsen 2009: 130). The museum relies on historical photographs drawn from the National Archives of Namibia to tell the story of the earlier wave. The first gallery to deal with colonialism contains dozens of black-and-white photographs. One wall showcases indigenous leaders and fighters while another documents colonial atrocities. These photographs depict men hanging from improvised gallows, chained prisoners, decapitated heads, and concentration camps (Fig. 6). Many of them have been widely reproduced, not just in academic studies of the genocide, but on activist websites, banners, and even t-shirts. In the museum the photographs have brief, clinical captions. This reinforces their status as documents, whose only function is to establish the objective reality of the events shown. However, recognizing that photographs alone do not shape an ethical position in regard to the events they depict, the next gallery reinterprets them in social realist paintings and sculptures (Sontag 2001: 23-24).To enter this gallery, visitors must pass through a low, jagged doorway covered in red velvet. They emerge in a dark, claustrophobic “Chamber of Horrors” (Mupetami 2014). The first wall has a painting of a sinister-looking Lothar von Trotha rendered in grayscale (Fig. 7). He is surrounded by relief sculptures of men hanging from a tree and corpses littering the ground. The date, written in a jagged font above him, refers to the extermination order he signed for the Herero. The artworks reference photographs just seen in the previous gallery, but they juxtapose von Trotha and the victims killed in response to his order in a way no photograph ever recorded. It also merges the historical evidence offered by the photographs with the emotional immediacy and ideological clarity offered by social realism. Other artworks use diagonally oriented compositions to depict a mother crying out, workers toiling away in mines, and figures engulfed in flames (Fig. 8). While the photographs also depict terrible events, they were originally made and circulated in tacit acceptance, if not outright support, of German actions (Zeller 2004). If the ethical commitments of the archival photographs are ambiguous, the artworks and exhibition design demand identification with the victims.A large mural just outside the gallery combines dozens of vignettes drawn from images in the previous galleries into one sprawling, chaotic composition (Fig. 9). German soldiers, colonial officials, and indigenous leaders, drawn from historical photographs, are rendered in monochromes while scenes of shackled prisoners and flames are rendered in vivid color. In the center is a wild-eyed man who runs from the direction of the previous gallery. He is an expressive, yet unresolved figure—desperate to escape but not yet free. The intense emotions elicited by the photographs and artworks are, likewise, left unresolved. This is appropriate as the exhibition picks up with South African forces invading and ushering in a new era of oppression. Social realism is employed later in the museum to represent South African military aggression, especially in a set of enormous murals depicting the 1978 attack by South African Defense Forces on the Cassinga Camp in southern Angola, which SWAPO used to galvanize international support for independence (Borer 2009).Near the end of the museum, a multistory panorama of interlocking paintings and relief sculptures lays out the arc of the independence struggle (Fig. 10). Keeping the established pattern, it assigns different visual styles to represent moments of oppression versus resistance and liberation. The final section of the panorama uses socialist realist paintings to depict a utopian vision of present-day Namibia rendered in carefully delineated figures and placid compositions (Fig. 11). The top band represents independence with symbols such as flags, doves, and fireworks. The middle depicts a variety of ordinary people engaged in work, study, and leisure. The bottom band offers a view of modern Windhoek from above. Together, they ask viewers to connect abstract concepts of independence and unity to their everyday lives and experiences, including as visitors to the museum. After all, a visit will likely end with a drink at the top floor restaurant, which offers the exact same view over the city as depicted in the panorama. Having vicariously experienced the terrors of colonialism, they can better appreciate their lives in an independent Namibia.Located next to the museum and in front of the German-era Alte Feste (old fort), the Genocide Memorial consists of a bronze sculpture and reliefs on a stone plinth (Fig. 2). Both relief sculptures are inspired by historical photographs. One depicts executed prisoners hanging from the branches of a tree while German soldiers look on. It seems to be a composite of several photographs that depict mass hangings, including one exhibited in the museum. The other shows a group of emaciated Herero surrendering after having fled into the Omaheke Desert (Fig. 12), reproducing, with only minor cropping, a photograph that has become a symbol of the genocide (Förster 2008: 186-87; Zeller 2004: 319-20). On top of the plinth is a sculpture of a stoic man and woman raising their arms to reveal broken chains. They stand, oddly, atop a scaled-down version of a traditional Nama dwelling. Inscribed on the memorial is “Their Blood Waters Our Freedom,” a slogan associated with SWAPO and the modern independence struggle.While a few Herero political figures spoke at the dedication of the museum and memorial in 2014, including Kuaima Riruako, the paramount chief of the Ovaherero at the time, some activists felt that the memorial was a meaningless gesture, given how the government was, at the very same moment, sidelining Herero and Nama representatives in its ongoing reparation negotiations with the German government (Haidula 2014; Kössler 2015: 317-29; Niezen 2017: 556). Mostly, the memorial has been met with indifference. Less than two years after the unveiling, Vekuii Rukoro, the paramount chief who succeeded Riruako, would ignore it completely when he complained that “there is still not a single monument to the Hereros—nothing about our ancestors who actually started the liberation struggle” (Clark 2016). This disregard perhaps stems from the fact that the memorial, like the museum, never actually names the Herero or Nama, despite requests by community representatives for it to do so (Kössler 2015: 227-28). It continues a pattern across the state commissions of generalizing historical events in order to nationalize them. Asking all Namibians, regardless of their own ethnicity, to identify with the past suffering of the genocide victims is admirable, but by insisting that independence has rectified past injustices, the government refuses to acknowledge how the lingering impacts of German colonialism are borne unevenly by different ethnic groups today. The goal of the museum and memorial is not just to promote national unity but to offer historical closure, something that both Brandt and Katjavivi withhold in their artworks (Kössler 2015: 324-25).Nicola Brandt is a multidisciplinary artist who explores how traumatic histories lurk within monuments, landscapes, and everyday objects in Namibia. Her first major photographic series tracked the multiple removals and resitings of the controversial Reiterdenkmal statue in Windhoek (which the Genocide Memorial eventually replaced) while other projects have focused on the Mansudae commissions, family photographs, and even toy soldiers. A visual motif that appears across several of her projects is the Herero long dress. The distinctive appearance of the dress is shaped by up to eight layers of concealed petticoats, making it an apt metaphor for how historical events shape the present in ways that are not immediately apparent (Fig. 3). Both the long dress and the military uniforms worn by Herero men act as material archives of “the various cultural entanglements between the former colonizers and the colonized that trade, missions, colonization and decolonization have left behind” (Förster 2008: 182). By using a contemporary article of clothing to access the past rather than a historical photograph or artifact, Brandt stresses the ongoing presence of the past. She puts the dress to two distinct uses in her artworks. As a recognized symbol of Herero identity, she uses it to mark fading material traces of German colonialism. As a record of German and Herero relations, she uses it to illuminate how her own German Namibian community often uses silence and selective memory to deal with that history. These uses of the dress come together most poignantly in her three-screen video installation Indifference (2014), which was shown, along with related photographs and an installation, in her exhibition The Earth Inside at NAGN.The Herero began to adopt Western-style dress made from imported fabric in the mid-nineteenth century (Hendrickson 1994: 51). Following the end of German rule, specific types of Western clothing became defining markers of ethnic identity, rather than of social status or religious conversion, as they had been previously. Male members of the Otruppe paramilitary benevolent societies that emerged in Herero communities after World War I modified German military uniforms to wear during their meetings and public events (Werner 1990). Herero women developed a distinctive dress based on a Victorian style that had been introduced by German missionaries in the 1840s. It consists of a form-fitting bodice with full sleeves and long skirt worn over multiple petticoats, to which an apron and shawl may be added. A folded fabric headpiece with two long protrusions, referencing cattle horns, completes the outfit. The dress is expected on special occasions but is also worn by many adult women in everyday life. Over the last century, the uniforms and dresses have come to be seen as traditional Herero clothing, supplanting the leather aprons and headdresses and ostrich shell and iron jewelry previously worn.An indigenous group adopting the clothing of a colonizer is often a matter of survival amid cultural, religious, and economic upheavals, but it can also be a strategy for reclaiming power. Otruppe uniforms, for example, have long been understood as a way of appropriating German military power through mimicry (Förster 2008: 181-83). Scholars and individual Herero ascribe various motivations to the adoption of the long dress, ranging from religious (a sign of conversion), aesthetic (its appeal as a garment), and political (a symbolic act of appropriation or emblem of cultural resilience) (Hendrickson 1994: 45-51; Durham 1999: 399-402; Förster 2008: 189-92). The aesthetic and political readings merge at certain points. For example, the dress enhances the Herero ideal of a full-figured female body and in so doing offers a dramatic counterpoint to the emaciated bodies in the well-known photographs of the genocide (Durham 1999: 393). The beauty and implied fecundity of the woman wearing the dress likewise becomes a symbol of cultural resilience (Förster 2008: 190). Some Herero now recast its nonindigeneity and unsuitability for the local climate as indices of resistance to colonization. As one individual explains, In this reading the dress attests to the tenacity of the Herero but also mocks the failures of the Germans. When it appears in Brandt's artworks, it carries this range of meanings.Brandt describes Indifference as “near documentary” in that it conveys realistic scenarios and sentiments but includes fictional elements (2020: 165). She uses the three-screen format to weave together the memories and experiences of two women. A younger woman also appears in the video but does not speak. The dress functions as a historical witness that confronts colonial monuments and histories. The video opens and closes with panoramic landscapes that are both beautiful and ominous. The first is of a stretch of rocky coastline at dawn, its horizon studded with a lighthouse, broken causeway, and boarded-up wooden structure (Fig. 13). This is Cape Cross, the place where the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias erected a stone cross to mark his landing in 1488. It is located near Lüderitz, the first German foothold in Namibia and, later, the site of the infamous Shark Island concentration camp. The scene distills those histories into these overdetermined ruins. The final shot in the video is of whale skull atop a cracked, concrete plinth at sunset in nearby Sturmvogelbucht, an abandoned European whaling station. In the context of the video, it also reads as a kind of monument. Between these seemingly abandoned colonial markers, the video intercuts the experiences of a middle-aged Herero and an elderly German Namibian as they encounter the past in their everyday lives. The artwork draws a contrast between ruined monuments and the Herero dress. If the ruins hold a melancholy fascination for many German Namibians as sites to recollect their former power and mourn its loss, the dress acts as a living witness to the catastrophic effects of colonialism on indigenous peoples and a reminder of its ongoing impacts (Steinmetz 2008: 216).The Herero woman, the artist's longtime collaborator Uakondjisa Kakuekuee Mbari, recounts the intertwined histories of the dress and gen