Memorialising Gender and Childhood Under the Throes of von Trotha’s Extermination Order: Trauma, Agency and Survival in Serebov’s Mama Namibia

Abstract

This chapter provides a nuanced and qualitatively driven analysis of the Herero/Nama-German conflict which took place from 1904 to 1908, by particularly examining the gendered dimensions of the genocide as presented through the girl-child as both a victim and a survivor. The aim is to demonstrate the literary manifestations of conflict by using fiction which seeks to offer creative/imaginative presentations of reality. What is central in the chapter is how the creative arts aptly capture the qualitative facets of life, the unspeakable and the unrepresentable horrors of conflicts. The chapter made use of one historical novel set in colonial Namibia as source material to speak to ways in which conversations can be built around areas where erasure and silence have been evidenced; and how the girl-child got traumatised, demonstrated agency and managed to survive. The chapter contributes to discourses on children’s experiences of conflict, memory and reconciliation, and broadens scholarly insights into what has been termed the first genocide of the twentieth century. The selected novel, Mama Namibia by Mari Seberov (2013), provides “multiple memories” of the Herero genocide and demonstrates how cultural artefacts and/or artistic creations narratively act as vehicles of memory and provide a resuscitation of conflict, atrocity and race-thinking in the postcolonial era. The writer memorialises, through the girl-child, Jahohora, “how” the genocide took shape and provides an aesthetic that fictionalises history as a basis for peaceful negotiation, healing and above all the valorisation of salient resources that enabled the girl-child victim to survive. The chapter, thus, explores the often overlooked dimensions of the Herero/Nama genocide, which is their agency, particularly through examining a special group with multiple “victim” susceptibility points—being a child, a girl, alone and unarmed, except only with indigenous knowledge systems: a factor that allows the girl-child to utilise resilience and thereby survive. These are qualities which have been silenced in the discourses of colonial genocide and postcolonial wars, and the chapter argues that in order to build democratic futures of equality and humane considerations, such positive qualities of the victims, particularly the girl-child, need to be registered. The chapter uses trauma theory, resilience theory and postcolonial ecocriticism to argue how modes of representation help in the reflection of genocidal historiography and above all, how global futures of peace can be imagined and conceived through these experiences and representations of children who did not only experience but also survived the genocide.