During a late afternoon parliamentary session on 8 April 2026, Namibian lawmakers sat up and took notice when opposition MP McHenry Venaani, the ethnic Herero leader of the Popular Democratic Movement, told them, ‘The Germans are paying the Jews every year one billion [euros]. [Over] the last 80 years, they have paid 90 billion. Every year they pay a billion to Jews, and they want to pay Namibians one billion for the next 25 years.’

Between 1904 and 1908 around 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama (80% and 50% of their populations) in what was then German South West Africa were killed by German troops under the command of governor Lothar von Trotha, after rebelling against colonial occupation and the confiscation of their lands. Most died in the fighting; others perished in five concentration camps – some of the first of the 20th century – across the colony. Many Herero who fled into the Kalahari desert died there after the Germans poisoned wells and watering holes. For both peoples, the unresolved issue of reparations remains fundamental.

Beyond the dunes of the Namib desert, jutting out into the Atlantic near the fishing port of Lüderitz, is a small peninsula known as Shark Island, where, in 1905, one of the deadliest concentration camps opened. Now, on a sunny afternoon, voices rose in chorus as the first notes of the Negro spiritual ‘Kum Ba Yah’ sounded over two small speakers. The song marked the close of an annual commemoration of the genocide organised by Nama community representatives.

The commemoration site is surrounded by plaques in memory of individual German colonists, and the pitch markers of what was until recently a tourist campsite. (Under pressure from the Herero and Nama communities, the culture ministry closed it to campers in August 2025.)

Genocide as a footnote

Joshua Castellino, a professor of law at Brunel University in London, who first learned of the Namibian genocide in a footnote to a text he (…)

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(4) Maximilian Rischer, ‘Development for whom? A case study of the Hyphen Hydrogen Project in Namibia’, Namibian Journal of Social Justice, vol 4, Windhoek, November 2024.

(5) Evaluation of the ‘Development Bank of Namibia’ project, African Development Bank, December 2024, www.afdb.org/.

(6) Kira Alberts and Haylene Bossau, ‘Legacies of power: A comparison of post-colonial party dominance in Namibia and South Africa’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, vol 61, no 1, 2026.