Reiter no Reflection of White Namibians’ Heritage

I STRONGLY disagree with some of the claims made about the moving of the horse and rider statue (the Reiterdenkmal) contained in your newspaper of 7 January 2014.

• Hugh Ellis

Filemon Iiyambo claims that the removal of the Reiterdenkmal is a “blotting out” of history. I couldn’t disagree more. It is the correction of a misrepresentation of history. Namibia’s colonial history was incredibly brutal. It involved the slaughter of thousands of Namibian men, women and children, whose only crime was to resist the wholesale robbery of their country.

The Reiterdenkmal does not portray these people; it is not a memorial to them. It only shows the “acceptable” face of colonialism, the man on a horse in a smart military uniform. It does not show the Herero and Nama prisoners of war who died in concentration camps like Shark Island. It does not show the German soldiers posing for photographs next to the corpses of Herero war dead (many of these pictures can still be found in Namibia’s national archives). It does not show the skulls of victims of colonial war which were shipped off to Europe for dubious ‘scientific’ tests. If we are to deal with the skeletons of the past in Namibian society, the Reiterdenkmal is not going to help us do it, because it only shows one side, the so-called “good” side, or at least the sanitised side, of our colonial past. Where I agree with Iiyambo, is that a genocide monument to replace the Reiterdenkmal must be constructed by Namibians so that it represents all those victims of colonialism, and truly deals with our historical skeletons. Koreans or Chinese, despite no doubt having our best interests at heart, simply do not have the depth of feeling on this issue to get it right.

Andreas Vogt claims the Reiterdenkmal is the German community’s heritage, and they have a right to have it preserved. What he does not say is that German-Namibian heritage is so much more than the colonial soldier. It is also the German-Namibian lawyers who defended freedom fighters in court. It is the young men (admittedly few in number) who bravely refused military service in the SADF [South African Defence Force], knowing that the alternatives were prison and exile.

What about the Germans who spoke out against colonialism in the Imperial Reichstag, and those who later denounced apartheid in the West German federal parliament? The group of German and Afrikaans Namibian businesspeople who in the 1980s publically called for a South African withdrawal in line with UN resolutions? If Vogt is so concerned about “preserving German heritage” I fail to understand why does he not also want some of these people remembered in bronze.

More broadly, I cannot comprehend why a section of Namibian white society is so concerned about honouring those of its members who were, it must be said, on the wrong side of history. Nor why it sees its “heritage” only in terms of colonial conquerors and not any other members of this very diverse community.

As Iiyambo rightly points out, changing statues by itself will not provide education, health care or jobs. But neither can we expect to develop a country on the basis of mental slavery. Referring to paintings of white, blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesuses, Malcolm X once said, “a black child will never respect a black father as long as he has a white father on the wall”.

In the same way, I’d argue that by only showing Namibian children the “acceptable” face of colonialism that the Reiterdenkmal represents, we are setting them up to be in thrall to white European conquerors (whether colonial soldiers or officials of the International Monetary Fund), and to be unaware of the human cost of these conquests. Those who don’t know their history – their real history, not a sanitised version – are, after all, in danger of repeating it.

* Hugh Ellis is a lecturer in journalism and communication technology at the Polytechnic of Namibia. The views he expresses are personal views.

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