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ABSTRACT
In 2015, for the first time in 111 years, top German government followed postcolonial historical scholarship, literary production, and political activism in recognizing part of the German-Herero-Nama Colonial War of 1904-1908 for what it was: the first genocide of the twentieth century. Against the backdrop of Didier Fassin's genealogy of classical definitions of “witness” and Judith Butler's theorizing the wartime rationale of differentiating between lives worth protecting and lives that can be destroyed with impunity, this article investigates diverse German, HereroFootnote and related African written and oral testimonies to explore: the spectrum of witness accounts—referred to as “multiperspectivity” in this article—and the attendant perspectives and agendas; the value or lack thereof placed on the life or death of members of witnesses’ own or their enemy's race in the colonial context; and the significance such witness accounts have for today's views on the Herero genocide.
Notes
1. The Herero refer to themselves as Ovaherero and Omuherero as in Otjiherero the prefixes “ova” and “omu” indicate plural and singular forms. In the interest of clarity and in agreement with most international scholarship, this article uses the term Herero for singular and plural nouns and adjectives. I thank Dr. Jekura U. Kavari, Head of the Otjiherero Section of the Department of Language and Literature Studies at the University of Namibia, Windhoek, for his valuable input.
2. Lammert refers to article 2 of the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide according to which “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part [...]” (United Nations). The Citation1985 United Nations Whitaker Report lists among the examples of genocide “the German massacre of the Hereros in 1904” (Whitaker, paragraph 24).
3. The colonial war officially ended in 1907 but the captivity in prison camps and thus the genocide continued into 1908. Because combat and camps cannot be separated, I follow Joachim Zimmerer in setting the period of war from 1904 to 1908 (Zimmerer 58).
4. This official Citation2015 wording followed a parliamentary motion rejected in 2012. For NGO-Bündnis,Völkermord verjährt nicht!/No Anmesty for Genocide, the wording does not go far enough. In 2004, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, German Development Minister at the time, had already deliberately used the indicative form “the atrocities [...] are today termed genocide” as opposed to the government-approved subjunctive “would today be termed genocide” in her speech at the 100th commemoration of the Herero genocide in Namibia.
5. While the German parliament had not voted on acknowledging the genocide of the Herero by the time this article was printed, German and international press have interpreted the statement of the Speaker of the Parliament and the new guideline of the Foreign Office as indicators of change in the German government's official attitude toward the Herero genocide. Negotiations are in progress.
6. Historians agree that the exact numbers are uncertain, see Hull 88-90, Lau 43-46, Okupa 191-92, Zimmerer 62.
7. Because the archival material I use is not easily accessible, I quote primary sources more frequently than usual. Not being an expert in history but in critically interpreting texts, I gratefully turn to historians like Effa Okupa, Jürgen Zimmerer, and especially Isabel Hull for some of their excellent archival work and English translations of German documents.
8. See critical publications by German Horst Drechsler, U.S.-American Isabel Hull, Namibian-Swedish Henning Melber, South Africa- and U.S.-based Jeremy Sarkin and German Jürgen Zimmerer/Joachim Zeller to name a few. Women's and Herero perspectives are included among others in the studies of Norwegian Kerstin Alnaes, German Gesine Krüger and Larissa Förster, Dutch Jan-Bart Gewald, Namibian-Swiss Dag Henrichsen, and Namibian Brigitte Lau and Effa Okupa.
9. In this article, I deliberately do not emphasize gender or age as factors of witnessing as I focus specifically on white and black women's voices on the German-Herero War in my contribution to Women Writing War, ed. Katharina von Hammerstein, Julie Shoults, Barbara Kosta (in progress).
10. Schutztruppe [“protection” force] is a euphemism used in the colonial era for the German colonial occupation troops.
11. In this project of interviews conducted by Alex Kaputu and Caspar Wulf Erichsen and compiled by the latter, translations from Otjiherero to English were provided by interpreters. See also Förster for cultures of remembering the German-Herero Colonial War among contemporary German-speaking and Herero-speaking Namibians.
12. See, for example, Else Sonnenberg's recollection in Wie es am Waterberg zuging: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Hereroaufstandes [What Happened at the Waterberg: A Contribution to the History of the Herero Uprising] (1905), the analysis of which will be subject of my upcoming publication (see note 9).
13. The inability to bury the dead properly may have been particularly painful for a culture that places great care on decorating graves perceived as testimony to past lives and believes in communicating with the ancestors.
14. The term “concentration camp” was first used by the British for camps for men, women and children in the context of the 1900 Boer War in Transvaal.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Katharina von Hammerstein
Katharina von Hammerstein is Professor of German Studies at the University of Connecticut, USA. The focus of her eleven book publications include: literature and art in relation to human rights and war; postcolonial approaches to representations of Blacks in German-language literature around 1900; and gender in literary, social and political discourses from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. She is currently co-editing a volume on Women Writing War.