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Germany has to agreed to pay Namibia €1.1bn (£940m) to fund projects among communities affected by the Herero-Nama genocide at the start of the 20th century, in what Angela Merkel’s government says amounts to a gesture of reconciliation but not legally binding reparations. Tens of thousands of men, women and children were shot, tortured or driven into the Kalahari desert to starve by German troops between 1904 and 1908 after the Herero and Nama tribes rebelled against colonial rule in what was then named German South West Africa and is now Namibia. Since 2015, Germany has negotiated with the Namibian...

Herero genocide by Marc Ambler Like most visitors to Namibia,1 one of the memorable pictures I carried away was of the noble-looking Herero people. Their women wear colourful, voluminous Victorian-style dresses and hats, and the men wear uniforms on ceremonial occasions. How terribly sad it was to learn that 100 years ago, their great-grandparents had been the victims of the first genocide of the 20th century. ... That the German settlers and a high-ranking officer like General von Trotha would hold to these ‘superior race’, ‘survival-of-the-fittest-through-“cleansing”-of-the-weakest’ views is hardly surprising. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (which is subtitled By...

The speaker of the German parliament on Wednesday said the slaughter of indigenous Namibians a century ago constituted a “genocide” that stemmed from a “race war”. Norbert Lammert, writing in a guest column for news weekly Die Zeit, said the Herero and Nama peoples had been systematically targeted for massacre by German imperial troops. “Using today’s standards of international law, the crushing of the Herero revolt was genocide,” he wrote. …

A Namibian tribe that came close to being exterminated by Germany's colonial forces nearly a century ago is suing the German government and two companies for £2.6 billion. The Herero People's Reparation Corporation, based in Washington, claims that the Deutsche Bank and a shipping company, the Woermann Line, now known as SAFmarine, assisted the Berlin government "to relentlessly pursue the enslavement and genocidal destruction" of the Herero people between 1904 and 1907. Germany had colonised the territory of South West Africa, a parched, sprawling land made up largely of two deserts and rocks, in 1884, encouraging white settlers to farm...