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Quartz: Another former colony wants Germany to pay for its atrocities in Africa

Mwinyi said he was encouraged by the Mau Mau in Kenya and the Nama and Herero in Namibia, who achieved post-colonial justice. In 2013, a lawsuit brought by five elderly victims of colonial-era torture and forced labor saw the British government award £19.9 million ($24.8 million) to over 5,000 Kenyans. That led to as many as 40,000 Kenyans launching a similar lawsuit in 2016.

Last year, Germany finally acknowledged that its first genocide was in fact in Namibia at the turn of the century, and committed to compensation in the form of aid. Then in January this year, the descendants of the murdered Herero and Nama people filed a class action lawsuit against the German government.

While Germany’s colonial record was already cruel, it was in Tanzania where their extreme tactics led to the highest fatalities. An estimated 75,000 people died, but some believe it could be as many as 300,000. The African population in the region decreased by as much as three quarters (pdf).

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The Telegraph: Germany to recognise Herero genocide and apologise to Namibia

Germany is to recognise as genocide the massacre of 110,000 of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia by German troops between 1904 and 1908 in a landmark admission of historical guilt.

A spokesman for Angela Merkel’s government said Germany would formally apologise to Namibia.

The systematic extermination of up to 100,000 Herero and some 10,000 of the Nama people by German colonial troops is widely regarded as the first genocide of the 20th century, and a precursor to the Holocaust. [...]

Foreign ministry guidelines started referring to the killings as a “genocide” a year ago, but only this week has the government confirmed in a written answer to a parliamentary question that this is now official policy.

“The federal government has been pursuing a dialogue with Namibia on this very painful history of the colonial era since 2012,” Sawsan Chebli, a spokesman for the German foreign ministry, said on Wednesday. [...]

In remarks that now seem chillingly to prefigure the Holocasut. General Lotha von Trotha, the commander of German forces, wrote in 1904 of his policy towards the Herero:  “I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this is not possible by tactical measures, expelled from the country”.

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