The recent controversy around Günter Grass’s criticisms of Germany’s arms trade with Israel is an interesting post-script to the Namibian genocide controversy. The Nobel prize-winning author has written a poem – called ‘What needs to be said’ – which argues that historical guilt is the reason for the sale of arms to Israel, a monstrous form of reparation for the Nazi genocide. As with the government response to Namibian claims for an official acknowledgement of the genocide, this controversy suggests Germany’s post-war guilt is being channelled in the wrong direction. The poem has elicited a spectrum of furious response, from a ban on travel to Israel (which you can’t imagine will dismay the elderly poet), to condemnations within his own country, and seems to have opened up new debates around the responsibilities of post-imperial countries. [Read more...]
Germany’s Namibian Legacy

So the Bundestag have once again refused to acknowledge that the systematic murders of four ethnic groups in Namibia between 1904 and 1908 wasn’t genocide. Late last month, March 22, the German parliament debated a motion proposed by the Left party to officially recognise the genocide which took place in Namibia between 1904 and 1908. The Namibian confirmed that the motion has been overturned. It is not a coincidence that in a review of Sebastian Conrad’s book German Colonialism: A Short History, Richard J. Evans notes that evidence of this history can be seen in present-day Namibia: “If you go to Windhoek in Namibia, you can still pick up a copy of the Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper which caters for the remaining German-speaking residents of the town. … In Tanzania, you can stay in the lakeside town of Wiedhafen. If you’re a businessman wanting to bulk buy palm oil in Cameroon, the Woermann plantations are still the place to go. In eastern Ghana, German-style buildings that once belonged to the colony of Togo are now advertised as tourist attractions.” (London Review of Books) German colonialism in Africa, obscured by the comparatively more substantial colonies of other European countries and numerically superior crimes of the Nazi genocide, occupies a diminished place in German national guilt.
Photography: Rape Survivors of the Rwandan Genocide and Their Children
An estimated 200,000 children were conceived as a result of mass rape during the genocide in Rwanda in mid-1994. The Interahamwe, the Hutu militia, went around deliberately raping minority Tutsi women. Photographer Jonathan Torgovnik–working with editors and a cameraman–chronicled the experiences of some of these women (they now face rejection from fellow Tutsis) in his project, “Intended Consequences”. The multimedia project that resulted–first put online in 2008–was awarded a prestigious duPoint Columbia Journalism Award this past week.
It was the first web-based production to win a duPont Award.
The video, above, is an excerpt from a video slideshow that you can watch in full (14 minutes) here.
FILM / DADDY RUHORAHOZA
“Confession” is a 17 minute long short film by Rwandan filmmaker Daddy Ruhorahoza, about a rape that happened during the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, told through the perspective of the rapist 13 years later. (See a clip here.)
“THE TYPICAL AFRICAN EXPERIENCE”

“… The share of the African population dying in wars (including genocides) every year is on the order of .01% over the past four decades, and the percentage of the population composed of refugees was about 0.5% in 2005. This is of no comfort to Africans today who are victims of still much too frequent horrors; bless anyone who can stop the horrors or help the victims, but no one should make Africa-wide policy as if this were the norm…”
HT: Caitlin Chandler

