Namibia: how did the Herero and Nama genocide happen?

For a long time, it was “the forgotten genocide”.

Eclipsed by the Holocaust and Germany’s role in it, the mass killings of Herero and Nama people in Namibia from 1904 to 1908 have only recently been moved into the spotlight and become the subject of reparations negotiations between Germany and Namibia.

Namibia was a German colony from 1884 to the end of the First World War in 1918. Clashes erupted between German settlers and the local…