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Paper short abstract:

In 2021, Germany and Namibia announced an accord on compensation for the genocide committed 1904-08 by German colonial troopers. State officials promote the agreement as a strategy for peace between the former colonial power and the colonised. This claim is scrutinized through positions of victims.

Paper long abstract:

In May 2021, the German and Namibian governments announced an accord on compensation for the killings committed 1904-1908 by colonial troopers in the German colony of South West Africa with estimated 80,000 casualties. The accord combines the German acknowledgement of the historical atrocities as meaning a genocide with the commitment to implement a financial aid programme for Namibia (1.1 billion Euro to be invested over the next 30 years). The agreement is promoted by state officials from both countries as a strategy for building peace between a former colonial power and the colonised, and it received keen international attention because it is the first of its kind, attempting to compensate for the colonial past and violence. While it took five years to negotiate the accord, the outcome is not based on any consensus beyond the state-to-state level. Especially representatives of those ethnic groups that had been victimised in the 1904-1908 massacres, i.e. foremost Herero and Nama people, were continuously rallying against the negotiations throughout the years, and they organised protest marches in the Namibian capital upon announcement of the agreement in 2021. Points of criticism are the negotiation format, the composition of the Namibian delegation, the chosen framing for the offered financial compensations and finally also their actual amount and prospective beneficiaries. The case sheds light on the stakeholders‘ different conceptions of peace and of what is needed morally and financially to overcome past violence. It will be analysed with a view to the political implications of these conceptual contestations.