As tens of thousands return to the streets for the first national Palestine march of 2026, this movement refuses to be sidelined or silenced, says PETER LEARY
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Namibia: a massacre the world forgot
After Germany lost WWI and with it Namibia, its colonial crimes there were almost buried — until the efforts of the socialist GDR, who in 1974 sent JOHN GREEN undercover to document the nation's past and present struggles
Captured Herero and Nama prisoners circa 1904. The Germans massacred large numbers of the indigenous population: between 24,000-100,000 Hereros and 10,000 Nama were killed in the 20th century’s first genocide.
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IF WE think about the toxic colonial legacy of European countries, we invariably think of Britain, Spain, France or Belgium — but who knows anything about German colonialism? That will certainly be true for many, at least before they read the recent novel, After Lives by last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, who highlights the brutality of German colonialism in Tanganyika.
Germany, just like other colonising nations, has scrupulously evaded examining its colonial past or attempting to come to terms with it.
Before its defeat in World War I, Germany held colonies in what today are 14 separate countries in Africa and among them was South-West Africa (present day Namibia). German South-West Africa had been a colony of the German empire from 1884 until 1915.
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