Namibia’s Genocide Fight Is Moving From Apology to Reparations

Germany has acknowledged that its colonial war against the Herero and Nama peoples in what is now Namibia amounted to genocide. But for many descendants of the victims, recognition without reparations has become a new source of conflict rather than the end of an old one.

The pressure intensified again in September 2026, when Amnesty International told the UN Human Rights Council that Germany should provide full reparations for colonial crimes in Namibia instead of treating development aid as a substitute. The intervention sharpened a demand that Herero and Nama representatives have made for years: the question is not whether Germany has a moral responsibility, but what material repair that responsibility requires.

Berlin’s own position shows why the dispute remains open. In a March 2026 review of relations with Namibia, the German Foreign Office said that the 2021 Joint Declaration on the colonial genocide had only been initialled and that bilateral negotiations, including involvement of affected communities, were still continuing. Germany says reconciliation and development cooperation are central to the process. Critics argue that the framework still avoids the legal and political meaning of reparations.

The historical record is not in dispute. Between 1904 and 1908, German colonial forces waged a war of extermination against the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa. Survivors were driven into the desert, confined in camps and subjected to forced labour. The violence destroyed communities and transferred land and wealth into settler hands, leaving social effects that outlived formal colonial rule.

The argument is about power, not wording

The 2021 declaration was supposed to create a path toward reconciliation. Germany agreed to recognise the genocide and proposed more than €1 billion in long-term development funding. But some Herero and Nama traditional authorities and activist groups objected that they were not treated as equal negotiating parties and that development assistance cannot be equated with reparations owed to specific peoples dispossessed by colonial violence.

That distinction matters. Development aid is discretionary: donor governments decide its scope, conditions and delivery. Reparations begin from a different premise—that a wrong created an obligation to those who were harmed. For descendants of the Herero and Nama, the difference is not semantic. It determines who has standing, who participates in negotiations and whether land loss, cultural destruction and intergenerational dispossession are addressed directly.

The dispute has also moved into Namibia’s legal and political institutions. In August 2025, responding to questions about a challenge to the declaration in Namibia’s High Court, the German Foreign Office confirmed that opponents of the deal were contesting it. Berlin maintained that its moral obligation remains, while separating that from the formal legal question of reparations. That separation is exactly what many activists reject.

For them, colonialism was not only a period of racist administration that ended when Namibia became independent in 1990. It was a process that reorganised ownership, labour and political power. If the descendants of people expelled from their land are still fighting over the terms of restitution, then the colonial relationship survives in material form even after the flag changes.

A broader African test

Namibia’s struggle is therefore larger than one bilateral agreement. Across Africa and Europe, governments are being pushed to return human remains, repatriate stolen cultural objects, open colonial archives and confront the financial consequences of conquest. The Namibian case goes further because it forces a former colonial power to answer a harder question: what does justice look like when historical recognition collides with present-day property and wealth?

The answer will not be produced by apology ceremonies alone. A durable settlement would require affected Herero and Nama communities to have real negotiating power, transparent control over any funds or restitution mechanisms, and a process capable of addressing land and loss rather than converting genocide into another development programme designed in Europe.

That is why the reparations demand has survived every attempt to narrow it. Germany can acknowledge the crime, fund projects and speak of reconciliation. But until the people whose ancestors were targeted have meaningful power over the terms of repair, Namibia’s colonial past will remain an unfinished political question in the present.