It is a sign of Rosa Luxemburg’s prescience and far-sightedness as a scholar and intellectual that a genocide that was ignored by most of the world, the German genocide of 80% of the Herero population of South-West Africa (now Namibia) of the early 20th century, did not escape her analysis. 

At the time of Luxemburg’s most prolific writing, towards the end of WW1, the question of war reparations was high on the international political agenda. Luxemburg was, after all, preoccupied with the barbarity of the First World War and the ways in which the war damaged the proletariat. As a writer highly in tune with her time, she mentioned reparations at various points in her writing, foreshadowing the Treaty of Versailles and its world-changing effects. For example, in her anti-war pamphlet colloquially called The Junius Pamphlet that was written from a German prison she wrote ‘the most victorious state cannot expect any reparations that would even come close to healing the wounds inflicted by this war’.

It was in the Junius Pamphlet, the pamphlet in which she described how imperialism led to the oppression of people from Persia to China, that she highlighted the plight of the Herero. She wrote of a ‘civilised world’ looking on passively as ‘imperialism ordained the cruel destruction of ten thousand Herero tribesmen and filed the sands of the Kalahari with the mad shrieks and death rattles of men dying of thirst’. She wrote that the Kalahari ‘shuddered with the insane cry of the thirsty and the rattling breath of the dying.’

But Luxemburg’s awareness of the Herero genocide of 1904-1908 was not unusual in itself. The German public was aware of the German conquest of South-West Africa and the ‘wars of conquest’ against the Herero. As Olesuga and Erichsen write in The Kaiser’s Holocaust: ‘Throughout much of the twentieth century empire building was portrayed as a noble crusade, as an act of charitable paternalism. The colonial massacre clashed with his fiction and were hidden from the public gaze…What is also forgotten is how easily and how often conflicts in the colonies became genocidal’.

Luxemburg was unique in linking the Herero genocide to the capitalist underpinnings of Germany’s imperial ambitions in South-West Africa. The genocide was but an instrument of Germany’s expansion to the non-capitalist countries of the world. Luxemburg further connected militarism and capitalism. She wrote ‘militarism can only be abolished from the world with the destruction of the capitalist class state’. (Luxemburg 1970: 251). Germany’s behaviour in South West Africa is an example of its early 20^th century brand of  militarism. 

This blog piece will refer to German ‘reparations’ even though the German government explicitly refused to call the payments it undertakes to make to the Herero ‘reparations’. In the following sections the word ‘reparations’ should be understood as compensation that might have some of the formal attributes of reparations but lacks the essential quality of consciously repairing that which has been broken. The German unwillingness to engage in a debate about reparations as such is one of the key shortcomings of the German attempt to finally address the issue.

Reparations

Whereas Holocaust reparations were discussed and negotiated as early as the 1940s, it took more than 110 years for the German government to apologise for the Herero and the Nama genocide. Even then the reparations came begrudgingly, like wringing blood out of a stone. In May 2021 the German government agreed to pay €1.3 billion in reparations to the Herero and Nama people. On this occasion German foreign minister Heiko Maas said: ‘In light of Germany’s historical and moral responsibility, we will ask Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness’ (https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-recognizes-colonial-herero-nama-genocide/). In light of Germany’s failure to take deeper responsibility (as is clear from its unwillingness to call reparations reparations), this sentence by Maas cries out to be unpacked and deserves a blog post of its own.

How can Luxemburg’s views be applied to the German government’s 2021 offer of reparations to the Herero? As I wrote in a 2021 Al Jazeera article (https://liberties.aljazeera.com/en/mixed-reactions-to-germanys-reparations-offer-to-herero/), the reparations elicited mixed reactions. Whereas the German and Namibian governments were both happy with the outcome of the agreement, the Herero groups themselves have largely rejected the offer. International lawyers have largely praised the reparations whereas those closer to the ground in Nambia have been intensely critical, with some calling it an ‘insult’ (https://www.newframe.com/german-deal-an-insult-to-ovaherero-and-nama/).

The Herero’s main points of criticism can be summarised as (i) the timing of the agreement, (ii) the exclusionary nature of the negotiations process, (iii) the staggered nature of the reparations payments, (iv) the government’s refusal to call the payment reparations, calling it development aid instead. 

Timing of the agreement

Herero and Nama activists have been calling for reparations since the mid 1990s. (https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/45028/apology-and-reparations). It took more than 6 years to come to an agreement. But in a broader historical sense, it took 113 years for Germany to pay reparations. Prominent Namibian human rights lawyer Norman Tjombe comments on the long delay: 

‘The German government never wanted to pay reparations, even though it is paying reparations for the Holocaust. There are a lot of theories why: one of them being that the Ovaherero and Nama communities are black, and within the racist dogma, not entitled to payment. Another is that there were no living survivors of the genocide once Namibia became independent.’

Rosa Luxemburg might have thought that there could be no greater vindication of her argument than the timing of the agreement. By waiting until all living survivors had died, Germany ‘exterminated’ the Herero in more than one way. Besides the physical extermination, it exterminated the possibility of any direct victim’s voice in the negotiations.

The exclusionary nature of the negotiations process

The negotiations agreement is exclusionary in two senses: it excluded the participation of important victim groups and the confidential nature of the agreement excluded public participation. Many Herero and Nama chiefs were not consulted. The exclusion of marginalised groups can be said to be a continuation of the racially discriminating policies that existed before the genocide, found its high point in the genocide and continued after the genocide, giving concrete expression to what Luxemburg wrote in Chapter 2 of The Junius Pamphlet: ‘Bestiality of action must find a commensurate bestiality of thought and senses; the latter must prepare and accompany the former’. The Herero example shows that, since a significant number of Herero with strong voices in and on the negotiations died during the 2021 coronavirus pandemic, the exclusionary nature of the process is now ‘complete’.

The staggered nature of the reparations payments

The reparations payment will be made over 30 years and the money will not be paid directly to the Herero. Demanding that the reparations be staggered is paternalistic. The underlying assumption is that poor, marginalised people need guidance on how to spend money and that left to their own devices, they will ‘waste’ the money, a refrain I remember all too well from growing up in Apartheid South Africa. 

No-string payments made to the Herero directly would give them the greatest degree of autonomy. In light of the overall condescension, racism and paternalism surrounding German-Herero relations over more than a century, there is a historical continuity between the terms attached to the reparations and the ideas leading to German hegemony in South-West Africa.

Development aid rather than ‘reparations’

The German government’s preference for ‘development aid ’ over ‘reparations’ arguably shows that Germany views the atrocities in financial terms and not human terms. The idea of ‘development’ harks back to the colonial powers’ ideas of their civilising mission in Africa.

Luxemburg wrote of dynamic capitalism’s expansion into underdeveloped parts of the world. At the start of the 20^th century there could have been few better examples of a remote underdeveloped country than South-West Africa, its barren soil a tabula rasa for Europeans to fruitfully experiment on. 

In late October 2022 the Namibian government indicated that it would seek a re-negotiation of the reparations agreement. At this stage of the offer, it is clear that German reparations to the Herero is but a cold comfort, leaving the descendants of the victims high and dry. In the end, the reparations amount to yet another example of charitable paternalism. What the German negotiators might not have realised was the multiple ways in which the ‘reparations’ agreement replicates and reinforces the fin-de-siecle European prejudices that ripened the ground for the Herero genocide, the same ground that now hosts the mass graves of the Herero.