Namibia Calls for Reparations Talks With Germany

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Namibian leaders call for talks with Germany over reparations for the Herero and Nama genocide, Nigerian security forces search for nearly 300 kidnapped children, and Kenya puts its mission to Haiti on hold.

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Namibian leaders from the Herero and Nama communities have called for fresh talks with Germany over the return of ancestral land seized more than a century ago.

In the early 1900s, German settlers pushed locals off their lands in what was then named German South West Africa—now Namibia—driving some into what were then the British territories of modern-day Botswana and South Africa. Members of two ethnic groups—the Herero and Nama—resisted and were starved to death or put into concentration camps. Namibian women were made to boil the severed heads of their dead so that the skulls could be sent to Berlin for research.

An estimated 80 percent of the Herero and 50 percent of Nama population were killed between 1904 and 1908—with the total number of those killed estimated at as many as 100,000 people. Historians have described it as the first genocide of the 20th century.

Germany was the third-biggest colonial power in Africa after Britain and France, at one point controlling 30 percent of the world’s diamonds through its exploitation of Namibia’s resources. But awareness of its colonial-era crimes against humanity has been largely overshadowed by the Holocaust, during which Germany’s Nazi government killed 6 million European Jews.

Some Namibians have pointed to double standards in the reaction to these genocides. Germany has paid about 82 billion euros in reparations to Israel—including direct payments to victims—but has refused to directly compensate the Herero and Nama.

Ancestral land claims in Namibia are a long-running dispute, although fresh tensions have erupted between Namibia and Germany since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Germany’s backing of Israel in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice prompted an angry response from the Namibian government. Germany’s foreign ministry did not respond to Foreign Policy’s request for comment before this newsletter went to press.

Today, white Namibians make up 6 percent of the country’s population of 2.5 million but own more than 70 percent of prime farmland. Analysts say that disparity prevents much-needed variation in the country’s agricultural production and a lack of know-how in certain fields.

The most fertile land and commercial knowledge is concentrated among white farmers, who largely rear livestock, while the agriculturally unsuitable “communal land” is primarily used by Black subsistence farmers. Persistent and worsening drought conditions have seen the profits of livestock farmers decline—yet, due to the disproportionate focus on livestock production, 80 percent of food consumed by Namibians is imported.

“The levels of food insecurity are exceptionally high for Namibia’s GDP per capita and compared to peer countries” concluded one 2023 Harvard University study. “[I]deally the most fertile land would be allocated to the most productive land use types.”

To strike a balance, the Namibian government sought to redistribute about 43 percent of fertile land to landless Black communities by 2020, doing so through purchases from white farmers willing to sell. However, by 2018, the government had only succeeded in buying 3 million out of a target of 15 million hectares.

The program ended up raising prices, and land was acquired by Russian billionaires and the Namibian elite. Many small-scale Black farmers were also not supported with the commercial training or equipment needed to succeed.

“The biggest problem with the land [reform] is that it is not going to the descendants of the survivors of the genocide, but it is going to rich politicians and rich foreign individuals because of the market prices,” said Ina-Maria Shikongo, a co-founder of the Windhoek chapter of the climate justice group Fridays for Future.

Germany agreed in May 2021—when it officially recognized the Herero-Nama genocide for the first time—to fund 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) worth of Namibian projects. The money was to be disbursed into existing aid programs over 30 years.

However, many Indigenous leaders said they were excluded from the talks, regarded the amount as too small, and did not back the deal. Protests broke out in the capital, Windhoek, denouncing the plan, and the affected communities sued Namibian authorities. A United Nations report published in February 2023 concluded that the joint declaration between Namibia and Germany lacked “meaningful participation” from descendants of genocide victims and did not meet international standards.

The original joint declaration from the two governments did not call the payout funds as “reparations” or “compensation” but described them as “grants” over fear of legal claims from other African nations.

A class-action lawsuit brought by members of the Herero and Nama communities against Berlin was dismissed by a U.S. court in 2019 because Germany had sovereign immunity. Survivors cited incidents such as a victims’ bones being sold by the wife of a German anthropologist to the American Museum of Natural History as evidence of a U.S. link to the genocide. Germany’s lawyer, however, argued that the country was not obligated to atone because the Genocide Convention did not exist when the atrocities occurred.

The German parliament reiterated that position last March, saying that “in the absence of a legal basis, there would be no individual or collective compensation claims of individual descendants of victim groups such as the Hereros or Namas.”

Germany and Namibia are co-hosting the U.N. Summit of the Future in New York City in September. That is why Germany “should really think and be able to say what they are going to do for the future generations of the Herero and Nama people” Shikongo said.

“Even if they have to redo the whole process, it has to be transparent and not behind closed doors.”

“If nothing works out, the only thing that we can lay our hands on is the land because we know where that is,” Mutjinde Katjiua, the leader of a faction of the Ovaherero Traditional Authority, told Reuters. “We know the names of the rivers, we know the names of the farms.”

Wednesday, March 13, to Saturday, March 23: Tom Perriello, the new U.S. special envoy for Sudan, visits East Africa and the Middle East. Perriello’s tour, which began on Monday, will cover Uganda, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The latter has been accused of funding the Sudanese paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

Thursday, March 14: U.N. Security Council discusses the potential renewal of its mission in South Sudan. The mission’s mandate ends March 15.

Friday, March 15: Nigeria releases inflation data for February amid cost-of-living protests.

Tuesday, March 19: The 13th anniversary of the 2011 Egyptian referendum on constitutional reforms.

Wednesday, March 20: Report due on the U.N. stabilization mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Nigeria kidnappings. Nigerian security forces continue to search forests for hundreds of schoolchildren kidnapped in northern Nigeria. More than 280 children aged between 7 and 18 were taken from a school in Kuriga, Kaduna State, on Thursday. Days later, a further 15 children were abducted from a school in Sokoto on Saturday. The infamous abduction of schoolgirls from Chibok almost a decade ago in April 2014 by Islamist group Boko Haram has inspired a kidnapping-for-ransom business; 98 Chibok girls are still missing.

As covered in Foreign Policy, between 2011 and 2020, more than $18.3 million in ransom money was paid to Nigerian criminal gangs, often with no political or religious affiliations. More than 3,600 people were abducted between July 2022 and June 2023, according to Nigeria-based SBM Intelligence.

Haiti mission delayed. Kenya announced on Tuesday that it would be pausing its planned policing mission to Haiti until a new government is formed in Port-au-Prince, following an announcement that Prime Minister Ariel Henry will soon resign. As recently as Monday, Kenyan Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki had said that the policing mission was “in pre-deployment stage” and would go ahead despite reports of further legal challenges.

Kenya had planned to deploy at least 1,000 police officers to Haiti to tackle the gangs that have overrun the country. The United States has committed a further $100 million to the U.N.-backed and Kenyan-led security force, which was also set to include 2,000 soldiers from French-speaking Benin.

Rwanda-Congo tensions. Rwandan President Paul Kagame has agreed to meet with his counterpart from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Felix Tshisekedi, to resolve the ongoing violence in eastern Congo, the Angolan government said on Monday. The Office of the President of Rwanda said on X that the two leaders “agreed on key steps towards addressing the root causes of the conflict.”

Although a date for the meeting has not been set, the decision followed a meeting in Angola’s capital, Luanda, between Kagame and Angolan President João Lourenço, who is the African Union’s mediator. Fighting between the Congolese army and rebels from the March 23 Movement, which Congo accuses Kigali of funding, forced more than 100,000 people to flee their homes last week, according to the U.N.

Turkey-Somali deal. Turkey and Somalia signed an agreement last week in Istanbul to begin offshore natural gas and oil exploration off the coast of Somalia. Last month, Somalia also announced a defense pact with Turkey to boost Mogadishu’s naval capabilities amid escalating tensions with Ethiopia over the breakaway region of Somaliland. Landlocked Ethiopia recently agreed to recognize Somaliland as a sovereign state in exchange for Somaliland granting it port access to the Red Sea via a naval base in the Gulf of Aden.

Over the past decade, Turkey has become a major security player in Africa. Turkey signed a similar deal with Djibouti last month. Its newest deal is not merely about aiding Somalia against Ethiopia, but also about one day securing Ankara’s own long-held ambition for a Turkish naval base on Somalia’s Red Sea coast. Since 2017, Turkey has operated a training base for Somali troops in Mogadishu.

In recent weeks, M23 rebels have seized more territory in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The United Nations said more than 100,000 people fled their homes last week when M23 rebels captured the town of Nyanzale in North Kivu, adding to the record-breaking nearly 7 million people internally displaced in the country. Last year, M23 overtook the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) as the most active militia in the eastern DRC, where more than 120 armed groups seek control of the country’s natural resources. The ADF—an Islamic State-linked militia with Ugandan roots—is one of the deadliest and was responsible for 40 percent of the more than 2,690 civilian fatalities recorded in 2023 by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.