Over the weekend, Geoffrey York, the Africa correspondent for the Canadian Globe and Mail (and apparently also the only correspondent for a major Canadian publication on the African continent) wrote, from Namibia, about the current Herero struggle for land, dignity, and reparations. The 1904–1908 German genocide against the Herero is considered by many to have […]
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 […]
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. […]
Adam Hochschild, in the New York Times Book Review, writing about Jason K Stearns’ new book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa: Stearns is somewhat easier on Rwanda here than he has been elsewhere, for example, in a United Nations report he contributed to. […]
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 […]
“… 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 […]
