Enduring Injustice: Memory Politics and Namibia's Genocide Reparations Movement

693668 MSS0010.1177/1750698017693668Memory StudiesHamrick and Duschinski research-article2017 Article Enduring injustice: Memory politics and Namibia’s genocide reparations movement Memory Studies 1–18 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698017693668 DOI: 10.1177/1750698017693668 journals.sagepub.com/home/mss Ellie Hamrick The City University of New York (CUNY), USA Haley Duschinski Ohio University, USA Abstract This article examines post-colonial memory politics in contemporary Namibia. It analyzes the ways in which ethnic Nama and Herero genocide reparations activists struggle to include Germany’s colonial-era genocide of their communities in the national narrative of the contemporary Namibian state. In this article, we explore the extent to which the dominant political party, SWAPO, defines the state through the production of a hegemonic narrative about the Namibian past. We examine how this political context shapes the reparations movement’s strategies and tactics, with attention to how different activist groups position themselves and their historical narratives with respect to the state. We then consider the importance of memorialization for the reparations movement and the multiplicity of meanings associated with state monuments. By highlighting the importance of memory for reparations activists, the article examines the way in which reparations claims shape and are shaped by the politics of memory production in the post-apartheid memory state. Keywords genocide, memorialization, memory, Namibia, reparations, transitional justice Introduction In March 2014, Namibia’s then-president Hifikepunye Pohamba and founding president Sam Nujoma together inaugurated the nation’s first Independence Memorial Museum on the eve of Namibian Independence Day in the heart of the capital city of Windhoek. Funded by the North Korean government, this distinctive architectural structure features three towering pillars, tiled in metallic gold and black, supporting a cylindrical gold center adorned with a sun figure.1 It stands on the site of Orumbo rua Katjombondi, one of the German concentration camps where thousands Corresponding author: Haley Duschinski, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Ohio University, Bentley Annex 131, Athens, OH 45701, USA. Email: duschins@ohio.edu 2 Memory Studies of indigenous Herero and Nama people were held, tortured, and killed as prisoners of war during the German colonial period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Sarkin, 2011). The museum is mainly devoted to Namibia’s apartheid liberation struggle for freedom from South African rule through the 1980s, with exhibitions such as a replica of a Robben Island prison cell and a mural depicting a massacre of refugees at the hands of the South African military in 1978. It also contains an exhibit called the Chamber of Horrors devoted to the colonial-era genocide. Adjacent to the museum stands a mural depicting the Nama and Herero experiences of genocide during the colonial era—the first national memorial of its kind in Namibia. Despite the gravity of the crimes committed at Orumbo rua Katjombondi, no museum, monument, or memorial marked the site as historically significant until the opening of the Independence Memorial Museum and its adjacent genocide memorial in 2014. Visitors to Windhoek found their options for sightseeing clustered on Robert Mugabe Avenue, at the top of a gentle hill in the clean and pleasant city center—the same spot, in fact, where the concentration camp once stood. Robert Mugabe Avenue featured the prominent landmark of the Christuskirche, a gothic revival Lutheran church built in 1910; Parliament, surrounded by lush gardens dotted with statues of national heroes; Alte Feste, a German military fort converted into a national history museum in 1963; the Reiter Statue of a German colonial soldier on horseback; and Windhoek High School. Only one photograph, tucked inside a small glass case inside Alte Feste, made reference to the site’s past as a concentration camp where Herero and Nama people once died at the hands of a genocidal regime. It showed several emaciated prisoners standing in chains in front of Alte Feste, with a caption making reference to Orumbo rua Katjombondi. The majority of the Alte Feste museum remained devoted to the apartheid liberation struggle. How and by whom the story of Namibian history should be told are highly contentious questions that have been central to the emergence and consolidation of the post-apartheid Namibian state. Genocide reparations activists from the Nama and Herero communities raise these questions by pushing the state to commemorate the genocide in various ways across the contemporary memorial-political landscape. Against this background, the construction of the new Independence Museum struck some Herero and Nama as an opportunity to mark the Orumbo rua Katjombondi site’s past. In 2011, Usutuaije Maamberua, a Herero leader of the main national opposition party, introduced a motion in Namibia’s Parliament calling for the planned Independence Memorial Museum to be renamed the Genocide Remembrance Center. In his lengthy speech, he recounted the history of the Herero and Nama genocide and presented a passionate plea for acknowledgment of the crimes committed where the Independence Museum now stands. Addressing Parliament, Maamberua made the case that denial is a predictable stage of genocide and one that still is being perpetrated in Namibia: All through history the perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses … In Namibia the colonizers have erected the Windhoek High School, the Alte Feste Museum, the Reiter, Christuskirche, and the very beautiful and aromatic gardens being a desperate attempt for that environment to look innocent, holy, humane, and sober … Twenty-one years after independence, still no symbol reminding us and the world about the genocide committed on our territory. Maamberua elaborated to say that while he rejoices in Namibian independence, surely the naming of streets, stadiums, and a plethora of other commemorative symbols and institutions already ensures the remembrance of the national liberation struggle. An Independence Museum, he claimed, would be redundant. Maamberua’s speech calling for state memorialization of the colonial-era genocide represents one component of a broader Herero and Nama genocide reparations Hamrick and Duschinski 3 movement seeking German reparations to the communities of survivors as a form of restorative justice. Maamberua’s efforts are important because they highlight how the Herero and Nama genocide has been excluded from the state’s narrative of the Namibian past, as well as how reparations activists have challenged this erasure by seeking a specific kind of public state acknowledgment. The state narrative of the past is written across the “memoryscape” of the capital city (Bickford, 2005: 97). Historian Jan-Bart Gewald (2009) offers a case study of “the manner in which city planning, being the manipulation of urban landscape, can be used to obliterate history” in Windhoek—and, in so doing, used to “inscribe upon the landscape a specific understanding and interpretation of the historical past” (p. 256). Specifically, he discusses the SWAPO government’s destruction of churches and graveyards at the site where Namibians lived prior to their forced relocation to segregated townships during apartheid and the construction of luxury housing there. This transformation beyond recognition of the landscape where key historical events unfolded is paradoxically correlated with an increase in monuments that write national memory onto the landscape, expressing a common desire in Namibia and other post-colonial states “to focus their history on a small and specific people who … embody the aims and aspirations of the incipient nation-state, and to transfer this abstract thought into a physical embellishment of the landscape” (Gewald, 2009: 270). A similar and related political process of landscape transformation and erasure has occurred in the case of the Herero and Nama genocide. For example, the state recently permitted commercial construction on the site of mass graves of the German-era genocide in the coastal town of Swakopmund (Gewald, 2009: 269). German tourists who camp on Shark Island, the site of the most infamous concentration camp, encounter no memorialization of the island’s violent history. While Gewald’s apartheid-era examples involve a sequence of destruction and replacement, these examples involving the Herero and Nama genocide involve destruction of the original and a conspicuous lack of state commemoration. Louis Bickford (2005) comments on the importance of memorializing events on the site where they occurred, noting that “by themselves and isolated from their context, monuments, memorials, and museums have little effect. Their power is generated by place, by the meaningfulness of their location” (p. 102). In this case, the communities affected by the genocide pressure the state to establish permanent monuments that will continue to mark the meaning of key sites of violence in the future. This article draws on 2 months of fieldwork conducted in Windhoek in the summer of 2012 to examine and interpret Nama and Herero genocide reparations activists’ struggles to include the genocide in the national narrative of the contemporary Namibian state.2 From their perspective, Namibia’s monuments, memorials, and museums suppress the genocide from national memory, leading to a “willful national amnesia” of the role of the genocide in the nation’s history (Balfour, 2003). In this article, we analyze Nama and Herero activists as what sociologist Elizabeth Jelin (2003) calls “memory entrepreneurs,” political actors who perform “the labor of memory” production to “seek social recognition and political legitimacy of one (their own) interpretation or narrative of the past” (pp. 33–34; italics in original). As in other sites of political struggles over memory, Namibian memory entrepreneurs engage in “political enterprise of memory” by demanding legal redress for past wrongs, inclusion in the national memoryscape, and political recognition and legitimation (Jelin, 2003). These entrepreneurs include opposition political parties, activist groups, land reform activists, human rights organizations, and other civil society networks who define and negotiate memory, and thereby challenge the hegemonic narrative produced by the SWAPO memory state (Kössler, 2007; Saul and Leys, 2003; Zuern, 2012). Such counter-hegemonic memory projects also include everyday labors of memory such as oral storytelling, praise songs, and local commemorations of historical events at the local community level (Erichsen, 2008). In all their 4 Memory Studies varied forms, these memory entrepreneurs do not just express memory, but rather give meaning and form to the past through active engagement in generative work of memory production. In this article, we first explore the extent to which SWAPO defines the state through the production of a hegemonic narrative about the Namibian past. Recognizing that “public memory practices are essentially political” and are central components of the process of building and legitimizing the nation-state (Arnoldi, 2006: 55–56; see also Manning, 2011), we analyze Namibia as a memory state in which the ruling party defines itself primarily through reference to the anti-apartheid past. Next, we examine how this political context shapes the reparations movement’s strategies and tactics, with attention to how different activist groups position themselves and their historical narratives with respect to the state. We then consider the importance of memorialization for the reparations movement and the multiplicity of meanings associated with state monuments, including the Reiter Statue in Windhoek. By highlighting the importance of memory for reparations activists, this article examines the way in which reparations claims shape and are shaped by the politics of memory production in the post-apartheid memory state. The post-apartheid memory state In order to understand why projects of memory are so important in contemporary Namibia, it is necessary to first consider the political and economic context of the post-apartheid Namibian state. In this section, we consider how the political and economic character of the contemporary Namibian government has established memory as the dominant arena for contestations over recognition and legitimation. Since Namibian independence from South Africa, Namibia has been a dominant party democracy under SWAPO leadership, with Sam Nujoma, the leader of the guerrilla resistance movement, holding office as President of Namibia from 1990 to 2005. SWAPO promotes a “One Namibia, One Nation” slogan that rhetorically unifies all of the country’s ethnic communities, including the Ovambo majority and the many ethnic minorities such as the Nama and Herero, even as it actively mobilizes its Ovambo voter base through preferential allocation of development aid and other resources. Over time, SWAPO has established strong loyalties across generations of party activists and voters and has institutionalized itself in the apparatus of state governance. During the period of the national liberation struggle, SWAPO was a left-wing militant group in opposition to the apartheid state. As a member of the global Non-Aligned Movement, SWAPO enjoyed broad support from around the world during the apartheid liberation struggle, with United Nations recognizing it as “the sole authentic representative of the Namibian people.” Left parties and governments were particularly important partners in solidarity. The Soviet-aligned Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), for example, offered SWAPO military bases in Angola after it came to power. Similarly, Cuba sent some 350,000 troops to support MPLA, SWAPO, and other leftist movements in Africa. Former Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba was among the SWAPO independence fighters to receive guerrilla training in the Soviet Union. As a result of these historical ties, Namibia today continues to enjoy close diplomatic and economic relations with former Soviet allies. Ostensibly aligned with the global left, SWAPO remains a full member of Socialist International, a global coalition of parties and organizations devoted to democratic socialism. After independence, SWAPO began to change its social, political, and economic commitments by implementing free market neoliberal economic policies that have exacerbated social and economic inequality throughout society. For example, Namibia’s Foreign Investment Act of 1990 consists of measures intended to create a friendly economic climate for foreign direct investment and multinational corporations, including guarantees against nationalization and the freedom to remit capital and profits out of Namibia. SWAPO periodically attempts to privatize Namibia’s few Hamrick and Duschinski 5 state-owned enterprises, prompting resistance from labor unions. Namibia has been highly successful in mobilizing foreign aid from, and maintaining close diplomatic ties to, proponents of economic liberalization in the Global North, such as the United States and Germany.3 Because of these policies as well as the legacies of apartheid, Namibia has the highest rate of inequality in the world, as measured by the decile dispersion ratio, which presents a ratio of the average income of the richest 10% to the poorest 10% (United Nations Development Programme, 2009). Land reform has proceeded slowly in the post-independence period, with extreme racial disparities in landholdings persisting 25 years after the fall of apartheid (Von Wietersheim, 2008). This is why memory matters for the Namibian state. SWAPO’s pursuits of free market capitalism are at odds with its rhetorical claims to socialism and left-wing populism. It must actively consolidate and disseminate the official memory of its former position as a left-wing liberation force in order to legitimate its claim to power and maintain its international solidarities with former Soviet allies. The memory of the anti-apartheid liberation struggle, thus, becomes the ideological basis of the Namibian state. As Melber (2007) argues, SWAPO as “national liberators used their power of definition in a hegemonic public discourse to reinvent themselves within the heroic narrative which was already being reconstructed during the anti-colonial struggle” (p. 7). But this hegemonic memory does not go unchallenged. In the Namibian memory state, narratives of the past establish the terrain for public struggles over identity, representation, equality, and justice in the present. Reparations as a transitional justice mechanism The central political struggle in which Herero and Nama claims to alternative national histories play out is through the movement for genocide reparations from Germany. As a core transitional justice mechanism, reparations can refer to a broad range of actions and processes—including monetary compensation to victims as well as other forms of social, legal, and symbolic redress such as social, health, and educational services, memorials, apologies, public art, and memorials— intended to “repair, make amends or compensate for gross violations of fundamental human rights” (Johnston, 2009: 13; see also Minow, 1998: 91–117). Reparations may be individual or collective, monetary or symbolic, but they are always moral. “Reparation … refers to those social political and economic actions mechanisms and processes that allow for meaningful remedy in all its forms and thus, the restoration of human dignity” (Johnston, 2009: 15). As transitional justice scholars have shown, there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to transitional justice (McEvoy and McGregor, 2008; Shaw and Waldorf, 2010), just as there is no unitary effective approach to reparations. Reparations movements and policies take many different forms in transitional societies. Victims’ associations may reject state reparations programs (see Moon, 2012, on Argentina) or vigorously embrace them as central elements of popular struggles for recognition and legitimation (see Elkins, 2005, on Kenya). Reparations packages may exacerbate existing tensions by intensifying hierarchies of victimhood (see Lundy and McGovern, 2001, on Northern Ireland), and they may reproduce impunity if not accompanied by substantial political reforms (see Slymovics, 2009, on Morocco). The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights, and the hybrid Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia have all incorporated various forms of reparations in their victim-centered approaches to criminal justice for mass atrocity. In Namibia, reparations claims shape and are shaped by the politics of memory production in the post-apartheid memory state, highlighting the mutually constitutive relationship between justice and memory (Savelsberg and King, 2007). In her analysis of the case for slavery reparations, Lawrie Balfour (2003) argues that reparations movements cannot succeed as long as the memory of wrongdoing continues to be excluded from hegemonic memory and historical narrative. Arguing 6 Memory Studies that “the story of reparations is centrally a story of memory’s suppression,” Balfour (2003) suggests that public-political struggles over memory are a necessary precursor to legal reparation (p. 40). This is especially the case in situations where decades or even centuries have passed between the historical injustice and the present day, such as in cases of transatlantic slavery and colonial genocide. Through this “culpability gap,” a series of factors—weak legal cases, absence of clearly identifiable perpetrators, or the impossibility of attributing responsibility to parties that lack standing in international law—mean that the case for reparations must be made first not in a court of law, but in “a court of public opinion” (Johnston, 2009: 18–19). In the Namibian case, reparations claims are a strategy for the resurrection of memory, a vehicle through which to bring forgotten histories into public attention and political debate. Nama and Herero reparations activists seek what W. James Booth (2006) calls “memory-justice”: Faced with the power of the process of becoming, and of a concernful comportment toward the future, memory-justice, as the voice insisting on keeping the past present, must seek to prevent the effacement of the memory of the crime. Justice thus becomes the memory of injury, and it fights against the forgetfulness that must always threaten to engulf it, to give sanctuary to the perpetrators and a voice to injustice. (p. 123) For reparations activists, then, remembering is a vehicle to achieve justice, but it also represents a form of justice in itself. The Namibian genocide reparations movement The particular history that Herero and Nama reparations activists seek to remember and promote took place over a century ago, during the German colonial era. Germany established control over Namibia as a settler colony by 1884, concentrating their colonial administration and land dispossession in the central and southern portion of the country inhabited by Nama and Herero.4 In January 1904, war broke out between the Herero and the Germans, prompting German General Lothar von Trotha to declare, “I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country” (quoted in Gewald, 2009: 284). In October, von Trotha issued an extermination order against the Herero. While no explicit extermination order exists for the Nama, they too were exterminated systematically between 1904 and 1908. Eventually, the Germans began accepting the surrender of unarmed Herero and Nama and sending survivors to concentration camps, where the genocide continued by other means (Zeller, 2008: 78).5 Although war officially ended in March 1907, imprisonment in the camps continued until January 1908, when prisoners were released in celebration of the birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Although the mortality figures are contested, the figures cited by most reparations activists, which correspond to middle-range academic estimates, indicate that around 80% of Herero and 60% of Nama were killed in the genocide. In 2003, Herero communities began to organize under the auspices of the Ovaherero Genocide Committee (OGC) in preparation for the upcoming centennial of the genocide in 2004. Today, there are three main genocide committees in operation: the OGC, the Ovaherero/Ovambanderu Council for the Dialogue on the 1904 Genocide (OCD-1904), and the Nama Genocide Technical Committee. The OGC and OCD-1904 are both composed of Hereros and share very similar goals, but have formed separate committees and have a tense relationship with each other because of their political differences, as we describe below. The Nama Genocide Technical Committee seeks to maintain a distance from Herero politics but works much more closely with the OGC than with the OCD-1904. There have also been other, shorter lived organizations, such as the Chief Hosea Hamrick and Duschinski 7 Kutako Foundation, which unsuccessfully brought a lawsuit against Germany and three German companies in US courts in 2001 (Sarkin, 2008). Reparations activists highlight the ways that the German genocide still affects them today. By tracing their community’s small numbers and lost wealth back to the genocide, they challenge SWAPO’s position that the pain of colonialism ended with Namibian independence in 1990. Activists’ emphasis on continued suffering undermines SWAPO’s triumphalist narrative as well as the “One Namibia, One Nation” mantra because it serves as a reminder that different ethnic communities had different experiences with colonialism. Activists articulate several goals moving forward: efficient and effective land reform processes that acknowledge pre-colonial land claims, financial compensation for stolen cattle and other losses, access to mental and physical health services, repatriation of all human remains and cultural artifacts still in Germany to Namibia following culturally appropriate protocols,6 development aid in areas populated by affected communities, and apologies and other forms of symbolic acknowledgment, including monuments, memorials, and museums. Despite political obstacles, reparations activists have achieved several key, if partial, victories. For example, the German Development Aid Minister offered a personal acknowledgment and apology for the genocide in 2004, and von Trotha’s family formally apologized to the descendants of survivors in 2007.7 In 2008, Germany responded to activists’ complaints that SWAPO was funneling German development aid away from Herero and Nama communities and toward Ovambo communities. They launched the German Special Initiative (GSI) to give Namibia development aid slated specifically for use in predominantly Herero and Nama communities to which it owed a “special historical responsibility.”8 However, the GSI has been fraught with problems, as communities affected by the genocide have complained that they were not consulted, and very little, if any, of the money has actually been distributed for its intended purpose. One Nama activist accused the German government of conspiring with the Namibian government to steal money that rightfully belonged to Herero and Nama communities, and a Nama land rights organization that applied for GSI funding was told it had all already been allocated—only to find a call for proposals in the newspaper months later. The most noteworthy achievement of the reparations movement to date has been the repatriation of 20 Herero and Nama skulls from Germany to Namibia in 2011. The three committees sent a large delegation to Germany, accompanied by the Namibian Minister of Youth, Sport, and National Culture Kazenambo Kazenambo, a Herero. They were disappointed with the welcome they received in Germany, especially because Germany failed to send a delegate to the handing over ceremony of equal stature to Minister Kazenambo and because the trip to the university holding the skulls was scheduled when no students were on campus. Nonetheless, 4000 Namibians turned out to greet the skulls upon their return to Windhoek in an emotional reunion and were subsequently placed on temporary display at the Alte Feste Museum.9 For reparations activists, the process of negotiating and implementing a reparations package is as important as its content. Most activists call for a “trialogue” among the German government, the Namibian government, and elected representatives of the affected communities in order to negotiate a reparations program. Some would prefer direct talks with Germany, but Germany has made it clear that they will only pursue state-to-state negotiations. In this case, a Board of Trustees composed of elected members of the affected communities would be elected to manage the money and oversee development projects. Reparations activists in interviews unanimously agreed that cash handouts to individuals would do little long-term good and would not serve to advance restorative justice. When it came to the role of the Namibian state, views were more mixed. Reparations activists often are heavily skeptical of SWAPO’s motives, but Germany will not negotiate without the 8 Memory Studies Namibian state. There is some tension within the activist community about the degree to which SWAPO support could lead to it co-opting the movement. Due to broad Herero opposition to SWAPO during the apartheid liberation struggle and continuing today,10 the official story of the liberation struggle does not consider Herero en masse to have participated in the struggle for Namibian independence—even as the independence struggle is described as a national movement, by and for the entire Namibian nation. Rather than including all Namibians in the liberation struggle, this state narrative essentially defines the nation as independence fighters and independence fighters as SWAPO members. Since SWAPO’s popularity and legitimacy spring from its image as the liberator of the Namibian people, the hegemonic national narrative leaves little room for non-SWAPO independence movements in the history of the Namibian nation. However, Herero reparations activists are quick to point out the sacrifices their people made for national liberation during the German colonial war. As they see it, their ancestors died so that all Namibians could be free—but their ancestors’ deaths ironically limited Hereros’ viability as a force on the Namibian political landscape, ushering into power a party that allows Hereros’ suffering to continue while claiming exclusive credit for bringing independence. As reparations activists emphasize, the dramatic decline in their population has meant far less electoral power in post-colonial Namibia than Herero or Nama otherwise would have had. Herero and Nama minority groups typically support opposition parties, while the Ovambo majority groups tend to support SWAPO. Consequently, SWAPO funnels development aid including aid paid by Germany in lieu of reparations—to predominantly Ovambo areas. Reparations activists point to many other ways in which SWAPO expresses favoritism for its Ovambo clientele, including corruption, memory politics, and lukewarm support, at best, for reparations efforts. The sheer number of lives lost in the genocide, then, has meant that the affected communities lack the political weight to obtain reparations. Not all reparations activists fit neatly into this division. In fact, one of the two main Herero organizations fighting for reparations is associated with SWAPO supporters. One reparations activist who was also a SWAPO member, Mukuene, spoke about the early days when Herero began calling for justice for the genocide: Many people would want to argue that this process only started after independence, and in my argument that would be a historical misrepresentation … Assisting Britain to invade Namibia [in World War I, ending German rule] was the first call for justice … When SWAPO started in the liberation war, quite a lot of Namibians, especially Otjiherero-speaking who were in Botswana, assisted in the struggle. [SWAPO leader] Sam Nujoma, when he went into exile, those who received him and assisted him to go through Botswana were the Hereros based in Botswana. What they were looking for was justice. When the war of liberation started, quite a number of young [Herero] people who were born in exile in Botswana who had never set their foot in Namibia, immediately joined the struggle. Why? Because they were looking for justice. So I would say that’s when that whole process started.11 By narrating the apartheid liberation struggle as a continuation of the Herero struggle against the Germans, highlighting examples of Herero support for SWAPO, and connecting Herero support for SWAPO to the Herero fight for reparations from Germany, Mukuene is challenging both the hegemonic national narrative and Herero who would dismiss SWAPO as a party of and for Ovambos. This is significant because there is not always space for Herero SWAPO supporters in either hegemonic or mainstream counter-hegemonic narratives of the liberation struggle, much less on the Namibian political landscape. Mukuene is carving out such a space by connecting the Herero–German war to the efforts of Herero SWAPO fighters and to the reparations movement itself. The conclusion he came to in the interview was that SWAPO must support the fight for reparations in acknowledgment of Herero contribution to national independence. 9 Hamrick and Duschinski Table 1. Namibian reparations activist groups. Riruako group Maharero group Genocide committee affiliation Ovaherero Genocide Committee (OGC) National political affiliation Traditional authorities affiliation Opposition Parties, including NUDO Unrecognized traditional authorities, including Paramount Chief Riruako Genocide as primary defining historical event Ovaherero/Ovambanderu Council for the Dialogue on the 1904 Genocide (OCD-1904) SWAPO Historical narrative Legal imagination Domestic law as by and for Ovambos, tool to suppress Herero and other minority groups Recognized traditional authorities Genocide as connected (but not secondary) to apartheid liberation struggle Domestic law operates unfairly, but Hereros are part of the “one Namibia, one Nation” for which it works OCD-1904: Ovaherero/Ovambanderu Council for the Dialogue on the 1904 Genocide; NUDO: National Unity Democratic Organization. The politics of Herero groups There are two main factions within the Herero community, the Riruako group and the Maharero group.12 They are culturally indistinguishable, but diverge on key political questions, creating a rivalry between the OGC and the OCD-1904. It is important to distinguish between these two groups because they relate to the state in different ways and consequently have different ways of talking about the past and the past’s relevance to the present. This shows memory’s entanglement with questions of state, nation, and identity within the reparations movement. The Riruako and Maharero groups are divided on three levels: Herero Royal House allegiance, national political party affiliation, and genocide committee allegiance. The Riruako group supported Kuaima Riruako’s claim to the paramount chieftaincy of the Herero before his death in 2014 and now support his successor, Vekuii Rukoro, while Maharero group members support SWAPOaffiliated sub-chiefs of various Royal Houses (see Table 1). Membership in, and support for, the OGC and OCD-1904 correlates with support for the Riruako group and the Maharero group, respectively. Members of both committees consistently indicated in interviews that the only difference between the two committees was “politics.” These divisions within the Herero community are not simply a matter of internal politics, but rather are closely tied to, and exacerbated by, state law and policy. State bureaucracy offers formal recognition to some Royal House leaders and chiefs, who are dubbed “traditional authorities” in the language of state law, on the basis of their affiliation, or lack of affiliation, with SWAPO. Since Riruako was a leader of the political opposition party National Unity Democratic Organization (NUDO), the SWAPO-controlled government never recognized him as Paramount Chief of the Herero. The Riruako and the Maharero groups, and the activist committees associated with each one, share a common vision of reparations. However, their differing affiliations have produced different theories of change—that is, different assumptions and understandings regarding the tactical and strategic steps that will ultimately result in their shared objective of obtaining reparations. Significantly, Herero with the Riruako group who identify with Paramount Chief Riruako are very skeptical of state law as biased and politicized. In their legal imagination, state law exists by and 10 Memory Studies for Ovambos and is deployed as an active tool of suppression against the Herero. By contrast, the minority of Herero affiliated with the Maharero group who identify as SWAPO members or supporters may share concerns about SWAPO favoritism of Ovambo communities, but feel included and invested in SWAPO’s “One Namibia, One Nation” ideology, perhaps even as former liberation fighters themselves. They connect the Herero–German war, the SWAPO-led liberation struggle, and the reparations movement in an overarching narrative of the anti-colonial quest for justice. For them, state law is a contentious political arena that offers limited possibilities for legal redress. These contrasting forms of legal imagination inform the work of the reparations activists. The OGC is skeptical of the state’s likeliness to be persuaded through dialogue and is generally more willing to pursue confrontational tactics, while the SWAPO-aligned OCD-1904 is more inclined to put faith in dialogue with SWAPO and works to move SWAPO toward championing reparations from within the party. Although the groups have collaborated in the past, such projects have been marked by significant tensions, and past attempts to merge into one committee have been short lived.13 Monuments, memorials, and museums as political memory projects As indicated by the controversy over the naming of the Independence Museum, reparations activists are fighting for official commemoration of the genocide by contesting the way in which the state inscribes hegemonic memory on the national landscape. The OGC has a subcommittee on monuments and memorials that focuses on erecting plaques, statues, and other markers at key historical sites. At many of these sites, the Herero already gather on key historical anniversaries to commemorate what happened. A subcommittee member, Wilbur, talked about why it was important to him to have permanent, official markers in addition to community gatherings at the sites: If you have a site like this that is so important to our people culturally, if you do not put a physical structure and fence it off, in years to come, you might not find this site again because maybe then cattle have been grazing there, and therefore you want to put something so that people can always know where exactly. If you are going to tell the people that the extermination order was issued at this site, then people will have a thing, a visual thing that they will recognize, they see a physical thing rather than say, “It was almost there, here,” and so on. That’s why we erect this thing in conjunction with the activities that we hold there.14 Wilbur was emphasizing the importance of state moral, political, and economic support for the subcommittee’s projects to instantiate and materialize memory of the genocide and inscribe meaning at particular historically significant sites. Many interviewees, especially Nama, expressed a concern that youth are moving to the city and building careers and may not have the same interest in their history as previous generations. One Nama man insisted that the Nama were going “extinct” and would not exist as a community within 50 years.15 By contrast, “because of the seeming permanence of many memorials, whether they are small gravestones or large monuments, they project their presentation of the past into the future” (Zuern, 2012: 495). For those losing faith in the ability of their own community to act reliably as guardians of memory, the need for official commemoration is urgent. However, the OGC subcommittee on monuments and memorials has had a great deal of difficulty getting government approval and funding for historical markers. Often, it finds its proposals lost in bureaucracy for years on end. Wilbur voiced suspicions that the process is politicized and that it is harder for actual or suspected opposition party supporters to gain approval for monuments. The subcommittee has found that working with recognized traditional authorities from the Hamrick and Duschinski 11 communities where they are proposing monuments speeds up the process as compared to working with unrecognized traditional authorities, as the latter generally are identified with opposition parties. However, this sometimes means that the subcommittee’s efforts lose legitimacy among the local population, which may respect the authority of the unrecognized leader more. Wilbur also emphasized the need for the physical markers and monuments to take on social meanings through the activities that take place there, including speeches that teach about the past and rituals. This enables some measure of democratic control over the markers: While monuments can and do suggest certain narratives and interpretations, they are always vulnerable to the discretion of their viewer. In the summer of 2012, the subcommittee was working on plans for the unveiling of a new monument they had fought for to mark the spot in Hereroland where von Trotha had read out his infamous extermination order against the Herero. The monument incorporates an elevated platform from which reparations activists and other community leaders will deliver speeches. “This is where von Trotha stood,” Wilbur said, circling the hilltop on the drawing he had made. “Now our people will be standing on top of him.”16 The monument itself matters, but community interactions with it will give it meaning and lasting relevance. The political life of the Reiter statue On the grounds of Orumbo rua Katjombondi, just in front of the Alte Feste fort, stood a 31-foot-tall granite and bronze statue of a German soldier on horseback, gazing out onto the city atop a plaqued plinth (see Figure 1). In 1912, German Governor Theodor Seitz inaugurated the Reiter Statue by declaring, “The brazen Rider of the Schutztruppe, who from this site overlooks the country, announces to the rest of the world that here we are the masters and will remain so.”17 While the statue ostensibly was a simple memorial to the German soldiers and civilians who died during the colonial war of 1904–1907, historian Joachim Zeller convincingly argues that the statue also served to promote German claims to indefinite sovereignty in Namibia and to celebrate its victory over the Herero and Nama.18 In the post-apartheid memory state, the Reiter statue also stands as a testament to how the meaning of monuments—even those deliberately designed to convey a specific message—can change over time along with changing historical contexts and physical surroundings and according to the meanings that communities choose to project onto them. Since independence, the Reiter statue has presented a challenge to the new Namibian state: Memorials such as the Reiter “tend to outlast the power of those who constructed them, leaving post-colonial or post-authoritarian states with the question of what to do with monuments honouring their former oppressors” (Zuern, 2012: 495). Removing colonial monuments and memorials can be a powerful way for post-colonial states to mark a new historical era and to signify a break with the past by reshaping the public landscape. But as the case of the Reiter statue illustrates, removing these monuments can also serve to obscure the fact that colonial rule happened and to erase the suffering of colonialism’s victims along with it. A triumphalist approach to post-colonial nationalism means highlighting certain continuities of the past (in this case, SWAPO as resistors and liberators) while erasing others (in this case, Herero and Nama as oppressed groups resisting rule by both German colonizers and the Ovambo majority). There is no room in this narrative for suffering—especially when its effects are still felt. In 1959, Herero activists anonymously covered the statue’s head with a sack and decorated the statue with flowers to protest the South African regime’s mandate of forcible relocation to segregated townships (Zeller, 2000). In 2008, anonymous activists set up 51 wooden crosses around the statue to draw attention to the indigenous deaths not recognized in the statue’s plaque (Zuern, 2012: 507). In 2009, the government moved the statue a few yards in order to accommodate the construction of the new Independence Museum (Zuern, 2012: 495). The move generated enormous 12 Memory Studies Figure 1. The Reiter Statue, with Alte Feste in background. Photo by Ellie Hamrick. controversy, due to the activists’ well-founded fears that the statue would be removed rather than relocated (Zuern, 2012: 507). Each of these changes has sparked debates about the changing meaning and appropriateness of the statue. The statue has inspired graffiti art, a short film, political cartoons, and a growing number of letters to the editor. These publicly circulated pieces speak to the changing symbolism of the statue in changing political climates. While the statue once stood as a celebration of victorious German imperialism, the artistic interpretations point to Germany’s subsequent defeat and the statue’s ability to adapt to life in independent Namibia. For example, the short film Rider Without a Statue anthropomorphizes the statue, as the rider comes to life and explores the town. In the film, the rider encounters Black police officers, interracial couples, and many achievements of people he once believed incapable of self-governance. Ultimately, he reconciles with the new reality and remounts his horse with a changed perspective and a changed meaning. The political cartoon aligns closely with reparations activists’ critique of the statue’s proposed removal (see Figure 2). It depicts the plethora of symbols already paying homage to SWAPO leader Sam Nujoma and the SWAPOled independence struggle, including street names, museums, monuments, and Nujoma’s face on the N$20 bill, which until 2012 had depicted Nama resistance leader Hendrik Witbooi. The cartoon pointedly depicts a haloed Nujoma standing on the literal and metaphorical pedestal that once Hamrick and Duschinski 13 Figure 2. A political cartoon in The Namibian dated 1 August 2012, reacting to the rumored replacement of the Rider with a statue of Sam Nujoma. (The N$20 bill previously had held an image of Nama resistance leader Hendrik Witbooi.) belonged to the German Reiter. Segments of the German population in Windhoek take pride in the statue as a marker of their heritage. Many interpret the statue as a symbol of German victory and German domination and consider it insulting to a nation whose independence was so hard-won.19 Others take comfort in the anthropomorphized rider’s fate: He is forced to look out eternally on a Windhoek ruled by the Black majority. The statue has taken on a plurality of meanings that its commissioners never intended, and through its interactions and interpretations, it serves as a reference point for debates about writing the colonial past onto the landscape. At the time of fieldwork in the summer of 2012, the statue again faced the possibility of relegation to storage. Rumors abounded that the Reiter would be replaced with a statue of Sam Nujoma, in a move reminiscent of the controversial decision to change the name of Swakopmund’s Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse to Dr Sam Nujoma Avenue in 2001 (Kössler, 2007: 365). Reparations activists objected strenuously to the Reiter’s removal. Although Alte Feste and the Christuskirche both date back to the German period, the Reiter statue was the only item on the grounds of Orumbo rua Katjombondi—and on the entire public landscape of Windhoek—that made specific reference to the war against the Herero and Nama. In the words of one reparations activist, Every German statue … is a testament to what happened here. … If my child grows up, and he or she sees that horse, I must tell, what does that horse mean to us as Hereros? Now, if you remove everything German for that matter, then you are not going to tell a history to your children. So therefore, we are not really in favor of removing the German statue at all, because for us that is history.20 To remove the symbol of German imperialism, in other words, was not so much to reject on normative grounds the crimes the Germans perpetrated as to deny that the crimes were perpetrated. 14 Memory Studies For reparations activists, the statue served as a way to keep their history alive both within their own community and projected outside it. They embraced its status as a permanent marker on the landscape, a way of including the history of the genocide in an urban landscape otherwise dominated by monuments and memorials to heroes of the apartheid liberation struggle. However, reparations activists emphasized that the statue does not substitute for memory projects of their own creation. Taking partial control over the meaning of a statue through interpretation and interaction does not mean taking ownership of it. They pointed out that Namibia’s German population would still gather at the statue to commemorate its own losses during the war against the Herero and Nama.21 As one activist remarked, We wouldn’t want to see a situation whereby the German descendants or nationals want to give an upper hand of their stuff, like their statues and so on, and maybe disregard ours. So let us have all these things on an equal footing, so that you go and commemorate your things if you want to, but let us also commemorate our things.22 As he suggests, reparations activists want the Reiter Statue to remain, but they also want monuments of their own creation that tell the story of their community’s history from their own point of view. Reparations activists’ fears materialized in late 2013, when the Reiter Statue was removed from its location in front of the Alte Feste overnight on 25–26 December . This decision was not announced beforehand, and journalists and observers were denied access to the area during the removal.23 Confirming reparations activists’ earlier suspicions, a larger-than-life statue of Sam Nujoma, presenting a copy of the Namibian constitution in his raised hand, was erected atop the Reiter’s former location. In response, reparations activists denounced the statue replacement as part of an orchestrated effort to erase Herero and Nama history, in accordance with the larger trend of canonizing the heroes of the liberation struggle while muting the history of the genocide. As the above cartoon humorously points out, Nujoma’s place in Windhoek’s landscape is well established by a plethora of symbols and names. Unlike the genocide, Nujoma appears to be in no danger of being forgotten. Conclusion While inaugurating the Independence Museum in March 2014, then-president Pohamba also unveiled an adjacent genocide memorial—a bas-relief mural of soldiers overseeing the hanging of three Herero or Nama victims. Atop the mural, a bronze statue depicts a man and a woman of undefined ethnicity standing arm in arm, their fists raised in victory to reveal broken chains. Raised lettering between the mural and the statue reads, “Their Blood Waters our Freedom.” The raised fists and broken chains of the statue make visual reference to the apartheid liberation struggle. In his speech at the statue’s unveiling, Pohamba reflected on the significance of the recent changes to the landscape of the former Orumbo rua Katjombondi concentration camp: Our people, from the turn of the 20th century, to the modern liberation struggle, resisted and fought bitter wars to dislodge the colonialists from our country. We fought with determination until final victory was achieved on 21 March 1990.We became the masters of this place, now and forever. Not the colonialists. Never again will our Motherland be colonised.24 Through his speech, Pohamba expressed an aim to project a particular vision onto the past and the future through the monument—a vision that holds the SWAPO liberation struggle as Hamrick and Duschinski 15 the paramount turning point in Namibian history and the ultimate manifestation of a spirit of resistance held to be a defining characteristic of Namibians. Even as Pohamba recognized the violence enacted against Herero and Nama people a century before and even as he commended their resistance to colonialism, he streamlined their history into the dominant “One Namibia, One Nation” narrative. The installation of a memorial on the site of Orumbo rua Katjombondi represents a degree of success on the part of reparations activists associated with the OCD-1904 who are also SWAPO members. But many activists, especially those affiliated with the OGC and Nama Genocide Technical Committee, criticized the new monument because it was designed hastily and without consultation from the OvaHerero Traditional Authority or broader Herero and Nama communities. After initially threatening a boycott, Riruako not only attended the unveiling and expressed pride in the memorial but also reminded reporters that his group, the OGC, had struggled for years to make the monument possible.25 Herero and Nama descendants of survivors of the colonial-era genocide fight their battles for political recognition and legitimation on the terrain of memory. Their memories challenge the hegemonic memory state’s triumphalist narrative of national liberation, which is a key element of SWAPO’s strategy of legitimation, authentication, and consolidation of power and popular support. The contrasting forms of memory establish the foundations for competing ideologies of the nature of the contemporary Namibian state. SWAPO state memory establishes the anti-apartheid struggle as the key reference point defining the form of the contemporary post-apartheid state, while Nama and Herero activist memory canonizes the colonial-era genocide as the key reference points of the post-colonial state. Their demands exceed a narrow legalistic framing to operate as what Wole Soyinka calls a “structure of memory and critique” (quoted in Balfour, 2003: 39–40). In Namibia as in other post-genocide, post-colonial, or post-apartheid societies, memories of past injury and harm are produced, negotiated, and contested across social, political, and legal registers in the present, as hegemonic state historical narratives are challenged by historically disenfranchised groups who issue legal and political demands for acknowledgment of their own versions of the past. During these “moments of political opening” associated with political transitions, “memory, truth, and justice blend into each other, because the meaning of the past that is being fought about is, in fact, part and parcel of the demand for justice in the present” (Jelin, 2003: 29). These struggles over power, legitimacy, and recognition constitute fraught contestations over the formation and substantiation of “memory justice”—a form of justice that is inextricably linked to, but moves beyond, the possibilities of restitution afforded by legal and quasi-legal instruments, institutions, and expressions. Booth (2006: 112–163) frames these struggles for memory justice as modes of bearing witness. Reparations activists as memory entrepreneurs bear witness to the past on behalf of the dead, seeking to fulfill “a duty both of filiation and of resisting the power of violence to destroy the person and erase the memory of him” (Booth, 2006: 99). Their demands call for a commitment to a new geography of law and power, one that traces violence and its legacies, that names those whose lives and memories have been destroyed and forgotten, and that gives substance and form to the enduring community and its obligations to the past and its future. This new geography transforms the landscape into a vibrant and generative field of memory justice, mapped across memorial sites that themselves bear witness to the past and, in the process, project alternative constellations of political identity, community, and possibility in the future. Notes 1. North Korea invests in Namibia state-sponsored projects of memorialization because they have a longstanding relationship of solidarity with SWAPO going back to their shared commitment to socialism 16 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. Memory Studies and alliance to the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Today, North Korea continues to invest in state-sponsored projects of memorialization partially because Namibia is a major exporter of uranium, which is attractive to those with an interest in nuclear technology. One of the authors (E.H.) collected 30 semi-formal, open-ended interviews (in addition to many short, informal interviews) of Herero and Nama reparations activists based primarily in Windhoek. Most of these interviewees were professionals such as lawyers and university professors, and most were members of the three main organizations advocating for reparations: the Nama Genocide Technical Committee, the Ovaherero/Ovambanderu Council for the Dialogue on the 1904 Genocide (OCD-1904), and the Ovaherero Genocide Committee (OGC). She or he also engaged in participant observation, attending committee meetings and commemoration events. Finally, she or he made observational visits to Windhoek’s monuments, memorials, and museums. Global North countries are also eager to support Namibia because its relative stability makes it an alluring strategic partner in the African context. Namibia enjoys broad international support as “a success story in the transition from war to peace, from apartheid colonialism to harmonious national reconciliation, and from racial authoritarian rule to multi-party democracy” (Du Pisani et al., 2010: iv). For more on German colonial rule and the genocide in Namibia, see Gewald (2003), Hillebrecht (2008), Kössler (2007), Olusoga and Erichsen (2010), and Sarkin (2011). The concentration camps played an important role in the development of German racial ideology, as the decapitated heads of Nama and Herero prisoners were shipped to German scientific institutions and private collectors as curios or for anthropometric measurements (Olusoga and Erichsen, 2010: 245–251). There were rumors that Germany, in an effort to avoid more of the international press attention that surrounded the first skull repatriation, plans to ship the next group of skulls back on an airplane rather than having activists coming to collect them in a formal ceremony again. Activists counter that such treatment of human remains would be insensitive and culturally offensive. In March 2014, more skulls were returned to Namibia, but the OvaHerero Traditional Authority, led by Paramount Chief Kuaima Riruako, was not consulted or included in the reparations process. The OGC and the Nama Genocide Technical Committee joined the Traditional Authority in boycotting the welcoming ceremony. “Germany Asks for Namibians’ ‘Forgiveness,’” Deutsche Welle, 11 August 2004. “Namibia: Situation and cooperation,” German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development,” accessed 25 January 2014, http://www.bmz.de/en/what_we_do/countries_regions/subsahara/namibia/zusammenarbeit.html By the time of fieldwork in 2012, the skulls had been removed from public display and placed in museum storage. During the war, the South African government went to great lengths to portray SWAPO as Ovambos whose aim in seeking independence was to oppress Hereros (Friedman, 2011: 65–66). Personal interview, 6 July 2012. Interviewees’ names have been changed in order to protect their anonymity. Although “Riruako group” and “Maharero group” are shorthand for more complex coalitions, we here refer to them as such for the sake of simplicity. For instance, the committees participated jointly in the repatriation of Herero and Nama skulls to Namibia in 2011. However, there was much contestation over the number of representatives that each committee would receive government funding to send to Germany. In the end, each group sent 27 representatives. Personal interview, 13 July 2012. Personal interview, 24 August 2012. Personal interview, 13 July 2012. Quoted in Joachim Zeller, letter to the editor, The Namibian (Windhoek), 12 September 2008. Ironically, Germany ceded formal control over Namibia only 6 years later. Quoted in Joachim Zeller, letter to the editor, The Namibian (Windhoek), 12 September 2008. See J. Veii and S. Cloete, letter to the editor, The Namibian (Windhoek), 10 February 2012. Personal interview, 11 July 2012. For instance, representatives of Namibia’s German community gathered at the statue in 2012 to commemorate their “victory” over the Herero and Nama. See J. Veii and S. Cloete, letter to the editor, The Namibian (Windhoek), 10 February 2012. Hamrick and Duschinski 17 22. Personal interview, 11 July 2012. 23. “Reiterdenkmal gallops again on Christmas” The Namibian, 26 December 2013. 24. Quoted in “From Despair to Victory,” Namibian Sun, 23 March 2014; and Nashuuta, Lahja, “Namibia’s quest to dismantle colonial legacy,” Southern Times, 28 March 2014. 25. Haufiku, Edson, “Monument War,” Informante, 13 March 2014; Haidula, Tuyeimo, “Pohamba unveils new statues and memorial museum,” The Namibian, 24 March 2014. References Arnoldi MJ (2006) Youth festivals and museums: the cultural politics of public memory in postcolonial Mali. Africa Today 52(4): 55–76. Balfour L (2003) Unreconstructed democracy: W.E.B. Du Bois and the case for reparations. American Political Science Review 97(1): 33–44. Bickford L (2005) Memoryscapes. In: Bilbija K, Fair JO, Milton CE, et al. (eds) The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule. Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, pp. 96–102. Booth WJ (2006) Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Du Pisani A, Kössler R and Lindeke WA (2010) Introduction. In: Du Pisani A, Kössler R and Lindeke WA (eds) The Long Aftermath of War: Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia. Freiburg: Arnold Bergstraesser Institut, p. xi. Elkins C (2005) Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Erichsen C (2008) ‘What the Elders Used to Say’: Namibian Perspectives on the Last Decade of German Colonial Rule. Windhoek, South Africa: John Meinert Printing. Friedman JT (2011) Imagining the Post-Apartheid State: An Ethnographic Account of Namibia. New York: Berghahn Books. Gewald J (2003) Herero genocide in the 20th century: politics and memory. In: Abbink J, Bruijn M and Van Walraven C (eds) Rethinking Resistance: Revolt and Violence in African History. 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McEvoy K and McGregor L (2008) Transitional justice from below: an agenda for research, policy, and praxis. In: McEvoy K and McGregor L (eds) Transitional Justice from below: Grassroots Activism and the Struggle for Change. Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, pp. 1–14. Lundy, P and McGovern M (2001) The politics of memory in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Peace Review 13(1): 27-33. Manning P (2011) Governing memory: justice, reconciliation and outreach at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Memory Studies 5(1): 165–181. Melber H (2007) Transitions in Namibia—Namibia in transition. In: Melber H (ed.) Transitions in Namibia: Which Changes for Whom? Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, pp. 7–12. Minow M (1998) Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 18 Memory Studies Moon C (2012) “Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?” Compensation, social control, and social suffering. 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In: Shaw R and Waldorf L (eds) Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 3–26. Slymovics S (2009) Reparations in Morocco: the symbolic dirham. In: Johnston BR and Slymovics S (eds) Waging War, Making Peace: Reparations and Human Rights. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 95–114. United Nations Development Programme (2009) Human Development Report 2009: Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Von Wietersheim E (2008) This Land Is My Land! Motions and Emotions around Land Reform in Namibia. Windhoek, South Africa: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Zeller J (2000) Kolonialdenkmäler und Geschichtsbewußtsein: Eine Untersuchung der Kolonialdeutschen Erinnerungskultur. Frankfurt: IKO Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation. Zeller J (2008) “Ombepera I Koza-the cold is killing me”: notes toward a history of the concentration camp at Swakopmund. In: Zimmerer J and Zeller J (eds) Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 and Its Aftermath. Monmouth: Merlin Press, pp. 64–83. Zuern E (2012) Memorial politics: challenging the dominant party’s narrative in Namibia. Journal of Modern African Studies 50(3): 493–518. Author biographies Haley Duschinski is associate professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Law, Justice & Culture at Ohio University. Her research focuses on law and society in global contexts, especially in relation to conflict. She conducts fieldwork in Kashmir, India, with comparative field research in Northern Ireland and Cambodia. Ellie Hamrick is a PhD student studying motherhood and incarceration at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She carried out research for this project through two months of ethnographic fieldwork in Namibia in summer 2012.