I have always enjoyed history. Reading about it in books, going to museums and talking to and listening to my elders as they recollect their memories and experiences of a bygone era.
As a child, I remember being excited the first time we went to the Alte Feste as a class. I was always fascinated by how people lived before us, what they ate, what they wore, how they went about their daily lives.
When I saw statues of the Reiterdenkmal or of Curt von Francois, I didn’t see the scores of uncounted dead on the Nama or Herero side of these wars. I didn’t see them as symbols of oppression. I just saw white men, with big hats, towering over me. I simply never put much thought into what they represented.
They were just old dead men who used to wear funny clothes, and someone obviously thought they were important enough to put on a statue.
At school, the concept of colonialism is something we touched lightly on. More attention was paid to teaching us about Namibia’s prehistoric history, and anti-apartheid struggle – without much emphasis on what happened in between.
Our teachers would speak about key Namibian leadership figures like Samuel Maharero or Kaptein Jan Jonker Afrikaner but the rest of our history was explained as nothing more than facts, random dates and statistics.
When my teachers and school books taught me about colonialism, they didn’t really paint it as the terrible thing that it was. The overlaying message I got from my teachers about the colonialists was they brought us ‘education, clothes and Jesus’ .
And it kind of downplayed the masses of people that were murdered, bayoneted, starved and worked to death. And that’s just during the three-year Herero and Nama genocide.
When I looked at these images of emaciated women and children, there was a complete disconnect to the image I had of Namibians. It didn’t click that these people in the photos had anything to do with me or my history because the images of their emaciated bodies were nothing I had ever seen a Namibian having.
The moods in these photos were often solemn, there was no brightness in their eyes while colonial soldiers flanked them on either side, watching over them and in an almost poetic way symbolising their oppression.
Yes, the stats were there, and so were the captions, but it was hard for me to associate black Namibians with such hardship and dehumanisation and white Germans as the perpetrators of that.
I had grown up in a multi-cultural household. I learned how to speak German at school, I watched German cartoons and only knew some TV characters by their German names, like Pippi Langstrumpf (Pippi Longstocking).
I remember running out with my friends into the streets excited as the WIKA floats would drive by, topped by people wearing old German costumes and throwing sweets into the crowd. German culture, heritage and history, as a young black Namibian girl, was never something I associated with something bad or sinister, beyond the occasional German child who would call me a ‘black ape’ every now and then.
I simply took their racist remarks as signs of a bad upbringing, not as part of their heritage. And I’d still like to believe the same. I try to judge people by their characters and actions, not by where they are from or the colour of their skin.
It wasn’t until I was 16 that I can truly say I fully understood how horrific German colonialism had been in Namibia. It was on a class trip to Luderitz, where we camped on Shark Island, that I learnt of the site of the German concentration camp filled with Herero and Nama Namibians.
When I thought of concentration camps, my first association was always the images and films of the Jews in Nazi Germany, not images of the Nama and Herero people, yet here I stood, camping on a ground on which many met very hard and brutal ends. To be honest, I even thought that the Germans were interning local Jews in these concentration camps, because the Holocaust was something I had learnt about in school abroad as being one of the harshest and cruellest times in history. It simply never registered that its inception and the idea of starving and working people to death had started in my own country.
I had read ‘King Leopold’s Ghost’ by Adam Hochschild, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ and other books about the American slave system and understood the brutality but I was never really given the unfiltered version of my own colonial history. This inspired me to learn more about it, research it for myself and not just so that I could pass my exams.
It could be that some of the gaps in my knowledge of Namibian history were due to the fact that I studied abroad for much of my schooling but even classmates who took History in Grade 12 attested to the fact that if it wasn’t for their very frank teacher who went beyond the sanitised version found in our text books, they too wouldn’t grasp the full brutality of what happened.
While at university, I scoured articles about Sara Bartman and how she was displayed across Europe for her ‘peculiar’ body shape. I read about how Namibian skulls were taken to Germany to be studied to prove the ‘inferiority of blacks’ or that their brains were smaller than white ones. I learnt about how Namibians were still fighting to get those skulls repatriated home and waiting in vain for an apology from the German authorities.
Countless Germans have come to Namibia to learn more about their history, and many have come to apologise for what their ancestors did but only recently, after the 100th year anniversary of the end of German colonial rule, could it be that the German authorities might finally officially recognise the genocide.
Which was something that some say has been avoided in the past for the fear of having to pay high repatriations.
With the wave of people across the world toppling over old regimes and symbols of oppression like the removal of the Rhodes Statue in South Africa, or getting rid of the Confederate Flag in South Carolina, and following the mass shooting at a black church, one can understand people’s frustration with these old symbols and why they want to get rid of them.
Even two years after removing the Reiterdenkmal statue that once overlooked the city, talks have come up again about removing the statue of Curt von Francois that stands next to the City of Windhoek.
Statues have always been made to commemorate something important and what the people think is worth remembering. Larger than life, they glorify a part of history. In the case of the Reiterkendmal, it was to honour German soldiers who died during the Herero and Nama war, as well as “those who died by the hands of the ‘indigenous’. While on the ‘indigenous’ side between 24 000 to 100 000 people died, both from the war and the Herero and Nama genocide.
Curt Von Francois has been hailed as the founder of ‘modern day Windhoek’ for laying the foundations of the Alte Feste in 1890, despite the fact that Kaptein Jan Jonker Afrikaner was the first to settle in Windhoek in 1849 when Windhoek was called /Ae//Gams.
So one might understand why some would argue for the removal and destruction of these historical statues because they seem to glorify German colonialism of Namibia.
“They are part of who I am. My colonialists were German. My view of the West is German. The Western norms in me are German. If they remove that, they deny those aspects of me who make me who I am.”
She does have a point. So much of our architecture, cuisine, lifestyle and even our breweries are made in ‘German- style’. Even if we removed all these German statues, we would still have cities like Swakopmund that have German names, and even if we changed those names, we would still have streets that end in ‘strasse’ or neighbourhoods like Klein Windhoek and Kleine Kuppe.
Practically, it would be hard to remove all traces of German influence and colonialism in Namibia because it is part of our history, and it would also alienate the numbers of German Namibians who were born and bred and Namibia and know no other home.
