Cash for Genocide?: The Politics of Memory in the Herero Case for Reparations

Legal remedies for historical injustices rely upon the politicization of memory, as current debates about the 1904–1907 genocide of the Herero in German Southwest Africa (contemporary Namibia) demonstrate. Here the author shows how claims for financial reparations obscure historical influences on the Herero community and the Namibian nation-state: German colonial rule and local actors complicit in it, the intervening period of South African rule; and the post-independence context. Bringing into a single conversation historical, ethnographic, media, and legal research, the author argues that the politics of compensation can distort historical narratives, and, more specifically, undermine opportunities for post-apartheid Namibia to come to terms with both distant and recent histories of dispossession.