Abstract
In 2004 the German minister of economic cooperation and development, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, a member of the Social Democratic Party, visited Namibia and attended a Herero ceremony at Okakarara that commemorated the beginning of the colonial war that led to what the Hereros call Otjitiro Otjindjandja (a period of time when “many people died in one place”).3 As she invoked parts of the Lord’s Prayer, she argued that “without a conscious process of remembering, without sorrow, without apology, there can be no reconciliation.”4
Now the air is filled with phantom shapes, It’s hard to see how anyone escapes …
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act V1
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed…. The storm irresistibly propels him …. This storm is what we call progress.2
Walter Benjamin
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust Part II, A. S. Kline, Poetry Translation, 2003, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/FaustIIActV.htm.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 257–258.
Karie L. Morgan, “Remembering Against the Nation-State: Hereros’ Pursuit of Restorative Justice,” Time and Society 21 (2012): 21.
A copy of Minister Wieczorek-Zeul’s speech at Okakarara can be found at Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, Windhoek, “Speech by Federal Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul at the Commemorations of the 100th Anniversary of the Suppression of the Herero uprising, Okakarara, on 14 August 2004,” Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany at Windhoek, http://www.windhuk.diplo.de/Vertretung/windhuk/en/03/Commemorative Years 2004 2005/Seite Speech 2004–08-14 BMZ.html. For an online critique of Wieczorek-Zeul’s speech by a history student, see Sasha Romanowsky, Analysis of an Apology: A Critical Look at Genocide in Southwest Africa and Its Effects on the Herero/Nama People, June 9, 2009, http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133p/papers/096RomanowskyHereroGenocide.htm. For a typical journalistic account of this peroration, see Andrew Meldrum, “German Minister Says Sorry for Genocide in Namibia,” The Guardian, August 15, 2004, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/aug/16/germany.andrewmeldrum.
Andrew Meldrum, “German Minister Says Sorry for Genocide in Namibia,” The Guardian, August 15, 2004.
For an analysis of the importance of negotiated histories for the pursuit of economic, social, and political justice, see Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000).
Kendall R. Phillips, “Introduction,” Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004), 9–10.
For more on the relationship between thanatopolitical artefacts and colonial memory wars, see Michael R. Griffiths, Unsettling Artifacts: Biopolitics, Cultural Memory, and the Public Sphere in a (Post)Settler Colony (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 2013).
For overviews of the contested nature of the terms “justice” and “peace” in postconflict situations, see Donna Pankurst, “Issues of Justice and Reconciliation in Complex Political Emergencies,” Third World Quarterly 20 (1999): 239–256.
Ruti G. Teitel, “Transitional Justice Genealogy,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 69–94.
For an example of these postcolonial approaches, see Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust—Toward an Archeology of Genocide,” Development Dialogue 50 (2008): 95–123.
For an excellent overview of how many former colonial powers are being asked for apologies or other forms of retributive justice, see Robert Aldrich, “Remembrances of Empires Past,” Portal 7, no. 1 (January 2010): 1–19.
Jeremy Sarkin and Carly Fowler, “Reparations for Historical Human Rights Violations,” Human Rights Review 9 (2008): 311–360.
Jeremy Sarkin, Colonial Genocide and Reparations Claims in the 21st Century: The Socio-Legal Context of Claims under International Law by the Herero against Germany for Genocide in Namibia, 1904–1908 (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2009).
Academicians can easily get drawn into some of these archival disputes over colonial pasts—especially when we review how authors write about colonial archives and the Mau Mau debates. See Anthony Badger, “Historians, a Legacy of Suspicion and the ‘Migrating Archives,’” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23 (2012): 799–807. Some journalists—perhaps enamored with the idea of objec- tivist researching and reporting—naturally object to some of this politicized usage of historical research.
Cristina Odone, “The Case of the Mau Mau Four Fits All Too Neatly into Self-Hating Britain,” The Telegraph, April 8, 2011.
On the importance of postmemory, note the work of Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Liz Stanley and Helen Dampier, “Aftermaths: Post/memory, Commemoration and the Concentration Camps of the South African War 1899–1902,” European Review of History 12, no. 1 (March 2005): 119.
Gorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).
For a perspectival overview of how one reads along the grain in studies of these archives, see Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Britta Schilling, “Imperial Heirlooms: The Private Memory of Colonialism in Germany,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (2013): 677–679.
See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994).
John-Marshall Klein, Spaniards and the Politics of Memory in Cuba, 1898–1934 (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 2002), 282–283.
Raúl Izquierdo Canosa, La Reconcentración 1896–1897 (La Habana: Ediciones Verde Olivo, 1997)
Franciso Pérez Guzmán, Herida Profunda (La Habana: Ediciones Union, 1998).
Fernando Portuondo del Prado, cited in John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 307.
Yilian Azcuy Ibanez, “Cuba: Memory of Human Mass Extermination,” October 20, 2011, Radio Angulo, paragraph 1, http://www.radioangulo.cu/en/miscelany/history/13041-cuba-memory-of-human-mass-extermination.html.
An example of the usage of visual imagery appears in Yolanda Diaz Martinez, “Reconcentration Policy: A Sad Moment in Cuban History,” Yahoo Groups, October 20, 2010, https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/CubaNews/conversations/topics/118589.
See, for example, Emily Van Stone, “Cuban Reconcentrados,” Cultura, February 11, 2011, http://profe.benjaminearwicker.com/students/blog-main/cuban-reconcentrados.html?blogger=Emily+Van+Stone.
Martin Blinkhorn, “Spain: The ‘Spanish Problem’ and the Imperial Myth,” Journal of Contemporary History 15 (1980): 12.
See Elizabeth Van Heyningen, “Costly Mythologies: The Concentration Camps of the South African War in Afrikaner Historiography,” Journal of Southern African Studies 34 (2008): 494.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War (New York: McClure, 1902), 262–263.
Louis Creswicke, South Africa and the Transvaal War, vol. VI (Edinburgh: T.C. & E. C. Jack, 1901), 146.
Liz Stanley, Mourning Becomes … Post/Memory, Commemoration and the Concentration Camps of the South Africa War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
Bill Nasson, “The Memories and Mythologies of South Africa’s Great War,” South African Journal of Science 105, nos. 5/6 (May/June 2009): 171.
Liz Stanley, “A’secret History’ of Local Mourning: The South African War and State Commemoration,” Society in Transition 31 (2002): 1–25.
President M. T. Steyn, quoted in Johannes Snyman, “Interpretation and the Politics of Memory,” Acta Juridica (1998): 321.
Owen Coetzer, Fire in the Sky: The Destruction of the Orange Free State, 1899–1902 (Weltevreden Park: Covos-Day Books, 2000), dedication page.
See Laurent Licata and Olivier Klein, “Holocaust or Benevolent Paternalism: Intergenerational Comparisons on Collective Memories and Emotions about Belgium’s Colonial Past,” International Journal of Conflict and Violence 4 (2010): 46–47.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 368.
Jenny de Reuck, “Social Suffering and the Politics of Pain: Observations on the Concentration Camps in the Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902,” English in Africa 26, no. 2 (October 1999): 69–88.
Dosia Bagot, Shadows of the War (London: Edward Arnold, 1901).
Johanna Brandt, The Petticoat Commando (London: Mills and Boon, 1913).
Jacoba Elizabeth De la Rey, A Woman’s Wanderings and Trials during the AngloBoer War (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903).
Emily Hobhouse, War without Glamour; or, Women’s War Experiences Written by Themselves 1899–1902 (Bloemfontein: Nasionale Pers Beperk, 1924).
Jennifer Hobhouse Balme, To Love One’s Enemies: The Work and Life of Emily Hobhouse (Cobble Hill, BC: Hobhouse Trust, 1994).
Note, for example, some of the excellent work that appears in Greg Cuth- bertson, Albert Grundlingh, Mary-Lynn Suttie, Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African War, 1899–1902 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002).
Donal Lowry, The South African War Reappraised (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
David Omissi and Andrew Thomson, The Impact of the South African War (Basingstoke, UK: Palsgrave Macmillan, 2002).
See, for example, how this same photograph is captioned and used in Sean Thomas, “The First Holocaust: Horrifying Secrets of Germany’s Earliest Genocide Inside Africa’s “Forbidden Zone,’” The Daily Mail, February 7, 2009, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1138299/The-Holocaust-Horrifying- secrets-Germanys-earliest-genocide-inside-Africas-Forbidden-Zone.html.
Reinhart Kössler, “Sjambok or Cane? Reading the Blue Book,” Journal of South African Studies 30 (2004): 703–708.
Jan-Bart Gewald, “Imperial Germany and the Herero of Southern Africa: Genocide and the Quest for Recompense,” in Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity, ed. Adam Jones (London: Zed Books, 2004), 73.
For just a few key examples of the academic literatures on these reparations activities, see Sidney L. Harring, “German Reparations to the Herero Nation: An Assertion of Herero Nationhood in the Path of Namibian Development,” West Virginia Law Review 104 (2002): 393–417; Jan-Bart Gewald, “Imperial Germany and the Herero of South Africa,” 59–77.
Rachel Anderson, “Redressing Colonial Genocide under International Law: The Hereros’ Cause of Action against Germany,” California Law Review 93 (2005): 1155–1189.
Allan D. Cooper, “Reparations for the Herero Genocide: Defining the Limits of International Litigation,” African Affairs 106 (2006): 113–126.
Reinhart Kössler, “Genocide in Namibia, the Holocaust, and the Issue of Colonialism” Journal of Southern African Studies 38 (2012): 233–238
Gesine Krüger, “Coming to Terms with the Past,” GHI Bulletin 36 (fall 2005): 46. For some specific discussion of reparations in the Herero context, see Kösler, “Genocide in Namibia,” 233–238.
Donald G. McNeil, Jr., “Its Past on Its Sleeve, Tribe Seeks Bonn’s Apology,” The New York Times, May 31, 1998, 3.
Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, quoted in Palash Ghosh, “Namibia: German’s Forgotten Genocide,” International Business Times, March 10, 2012, http://www.ibtimes.com/namibia-germanys-forgotten-genocide-214267.
For more commentary on some of the obstacles placed in the path of those seeking reparations after Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul’s address, see Reinhart Kössler and Henning Melber, “The Genocide in Namibia (1904–08) and its Consequences: Toward a Culture of Memory for a Memory Culture Today— A German Perspective,” Pambazuka News, March 19, 2012, http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/80912.
David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 359.
Dr. Kameeta, quoted in Peter H. Katjavivi, “The Significance of the Repatriation of Namibian Human Skulls,” Pambazuka, March 20, 2012, paragraph 2, http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/80913.
Larissa Förster, ‘These Skulls Are Not Enough’—The Repatriation of Namibian Human Remains to Windhoek in 2011,” Darkmatter, November 18, 2013, paragraph 3, http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2013/11/18/these-skulls-are-not- enough-the-repatriation-of-namibian-human-remains-from-berlin-to-wind- hoek-in-2011/.
Thomas Schnalke, cited in Kay-Alexander Scholz and Nancy Isenson, “Return of Namibian Skulls Highlights German Colonial Brutality,” Deutsche Welle, September 30, 2011, paragraph 4, http://www.dw.de/dw/article/o,15427571,00.html.
Kuiama Riruako and Peter Katjavivi, quoted in “Namibia to Reclaim Herero Skulls,” News24 [Cape Town], September 25, 2011, paragraphs 1–7, http://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/Namibia-to-reclaim-Herero-skulls-20110925.
The Local Editorial Staff, “Joy as Herero Skulls Arrive in Namibia,” The Local, October 4, 2011, http://www.thelocal.de/nationa./2011100-37987.html.
Egon Kochanke, cited in “Namibia: Collectors of Skulls Had Hidden Agenda— German Ambassador,” Namibian, November 17, 2011, paragraphs 2–3, http://allafrica.com/stories/20111121797.html.
John M. Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags: The U.S. Army in the Philippines 1898–1902 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 263.
Colonel Timothy R. Reese, Foreword, Robert D. Ramsey, A Masterpiece of Counterguerrilla Warfare: B. G. J. Franklin Bell in the Philippines, 1901–1902 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2007), iii.
Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860–1941 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1998), 134.
Major Brian McCarthy, BG. J. Franklin Bell and the Practice of Operational Art in the Philippines, 1901–1902 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, 2011), 47.
See the reactions to the claims of Winston Churchill on the Boer camps that appears in Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 152.
Glenn Anthony May, “Was the Philippine-American War a ‘Total War’?” in Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914, eds. Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Forster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 450–451.
Brian McAllister Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 25.
David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 197.
Evan Wallach, “Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts,” Columbia Transnational Journal of Law 45 (2007): 494.
George W. Bush, “Remarks to a Joint Session of the Philippine Congress in Quezon City,” The American Presidency Project, October 18, 2003, paragraph 4, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=63501.
Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Philippine Wars and the Politics of Memory,” Positions 13 (2005): 216.
Arnaldo Dumindin, “The Last Holdouts: General Vicente Lukban Falls, Feb. 18, 1902,” Philippine-American War, 1899–1902, 2006, paragraph 27, http://philippineamericanwar.webs.com/thelastholdouts.htm.
James Brooke, “U.S.-Philippines History Entwined in War Booty,” The New York Times, December 1, 1997, A-14. As Mead Gruver would report four years later, many “American veterans say the bronze church bells on the Grounds of F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo., memorialize 46 soldiers who were massacred by Filipino insurgents on September 28, 1901.” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Asian Week, October 5, 2001, http://asianweek.com/2001_10_news_bells.html.
A trenchant explanation of how Agamben’s work might be used in biopolitical, theoretical discussions of 21st-century camp contexts—such as from Guantanamo to Bagram—appears in Richard Ek, “Giorgio Agamben and the Spatialities of the Camp: An Introduction,” Geografiska Annaler 88 (2006): 363–386.
See an insightful analysis of how this is being done in Australian contexts in Damien Short, “When Sorry Isn’t Good Enough: Official Remembrance and Reconciliation in Australia,” Memory Studies 5 (2012): 293–304.
Michael R. Marrus, Official Apologies and the Quest for Historical Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2006), 8.
Catherine Lu, “Colonialism as Structural Injustice: Historical Responsibility and Contemporary Redress,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (2011): 261–281.
For an interesting exception to this generalization about remembrances of colonial camp practices, note how the Italians and Libyans negotiated what some called Italy’s “Grande Gesto” to Libya. Between 1911 and 1943 many Ethiopians resisted Italian colonization efforts in that part of Africa, and it is estimated that some 100, 000 Libyans may have died during wars, in southern Italian penal colonies, or in desert prison camps. In August 2008, the Italian Premiere, Silvio Burlusconi, expressed regret and apologized to the Libyans in front of their leader, Mu’ammar al Qaddafi, at the same time agreeing to pay $5 billion over the next two decades for the “deep wounds” that had been caused by Italy’s colonial adventure. Yet Claudia Gazzini contends that this treaty was signed not “because Italy has suddenly come to terms with its colonial past and desire to make amends,” but rather because of oil-related considerations. Claudia Gazzini, “Assessing Italy’s Grande Gesto to Libya,” Middle East Report, paragraphs 1–4, March 16, 2009, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero031609.
“Judeocide” is historian Arno Mayer’s preferred term for the Shoah, or Holocaust. See Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
For a fine critique of how colonial victimage stories can be appropriated by colonizers, see Paul Gilroy, “Colonial Crimes and Convivial Cultures,” Rethinking Nordic Colonialism, May 14, May 14, 2006, http://www.rethinking-nor-dic-colonialism.org/files/pdf/ACT2/ESSAYS/Gilroy.pdf.
One of my favorite examples of a defense of the blurring of the old traditional lines that purportedly once existed between detached, objective, historical academic research and public advocacy appears in Caroline Elkins, “My Critics Ignored Evidence of Torture in Mau Mau Detention Camps,” The Guardian, April 13, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/14/torture-mau-mau-camps-kenya.
For an example of some of the speculative discussions of the rhetorical links that may have existed between the Second Reich and the Third Reich, and the similarities that existed between the biopolitical ideologies that circulated during the “colonization” of Eastern Europe and Russia and the earlier colonial periods, see Benjamin Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly 35 (2005): 429–464.
BBC News, “Europe Court Criticizes Russian over Katyn Massacre Inquiry,” BBC.com, October 21, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24605103.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996).
See Jane Croft, “Mau Mau Torture Case Returns to High Court,” Financial Times, July 16, 2012, http://www.ft.com/coms/s/0/1792a0c0-cf47-11e1-a1ae=00144feabdc0.html#axzz20oWuZ4L.
Associated Press, “Slavery Compensation: Caribbean Nations Propose Mau Mau Model,” The Guardian, July 25, 2013, paragraphs 5–8, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/26/caribbean-countries-slavery-compensation-claim.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Hasian Marouf, Jr.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Marouf, H. (2014). (Post)colonial Presents and International Humanitarian Futures: Remembering the Age of the Colonial Camps. In: Restorative Justice, Humanitarian Rhetorics, and Public Memories of Colonial Camp Cultures. Rhetoric, Politics and Society series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437112_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437112_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49374-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43711-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political Science CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)