Colonialism,genocide and International Relations: the Namibian–German case and struggles for restorative relations

Normative inversion and IR

In our discussion of the genocide of Ovaherero and Nama and their struggles for redress, we show that the bedrock of justifications for mandating (then) ongoing colonial rule was based on what we call normative inversion: the expedient construal of victims – those subjected to colonial violence and genocide – as barbarians, and perpetrators of such violence as harbingers of civilisation. Memmi captures this as a political dynamic and identifies the analytical implications: ‘Having founded this new moral order where he is by definition master and innocent, the colonialist would at last have given himself absolution. It is still essential that this order not be questioned by others, and especially not by the colonized’ (Memmi, 1992: 76). ¹⁰ The normative inversion served as the basis to claims of moral authority and political competency as resting exclusively with the colonising powers, in spite of the manifest barbarism(s) of their rule. It is on this basis that they self-authorised themselves as ‘provider of rules and models to the rest’ (Grovogui, 2001: 427), and as the purveyors of civilisation and progress. Thus, the normative inversion served to facilitate the upholding of a certain kind of ‘solidarist’ order among European imperial powers (Grovogui, 1996; Hobson, 2012; particularly 165–181), which they later institutionalised as an international legal and political order via the LoN (see also Morefield, 2004: 146). Following Memmi, such a justificatory strategy suggests a clear attempt at collective self-absolution from the crimes of colonial rule and violence.

Our claim is that without understanding the political significance of this normative inversion, important features of the 20th century international order remain misapprehended, including with regard to ongoing struggles in the 21st century. The politics of maintaining the normative inversion has facilitated the production of silences around events such as the Haitian revolution (see critically Grovogui, 2011; Trouillot, 1995) that challenged colonialism and the edifices of its justifications. In the face of challenges aimed at undoing the injustices of colonialism and imperialism, the normative inversion should thus be understood as a counter-project. Its aim has been to deny the political legitimacy of such challenges, either by comprehensively ‘absenting’ in both theory and historiography such struggles and their significance, or by denying the capacity for political agency, morality and rule of the colonised on the basis of racialised othering and claims to civilisational hierarchy. ¹¹ Indeed, a central feature of the normative inversion has been the ‘absenting’ or trivialising of the violence and injustices of colonial and imperial rule in general (c.f. Grovogui, 2001: 439, and 445; see also Bell, 2019: 8).

This normative inversion, although it continues to be challenged, serves as a highly problematic grammar, structuring dominant intellectual trends in thinking about and justifying world order. From the context of the formation of the LoN (see below), through the differences (and similarities) between realist and liberal international theories, the rise of modernisation theory in the post-1945 context of decolonisation, to contemporary discourses of `failed states’, the normative inversion has been central (critically, see Grovogui, 2011; Shilliam, 2008).

The case of Ovaherero and Nama struggles for restorative relations is instructive because they explicitly confront the construal and implications of the normative inversion. The specificities of the case underscore the political importance of anti-colonial, postcolonial and decolonising struggles more generally against the logic of rule facilitated by the normative inversion and its implications. Such broader connections are brought home emblematically in Uazavara Ewald Kapombo Katjivena’s account of his grandmother’s experiences of the genocide. Mama Penee, as she became known, witnessed German soldiers brutally murdering her parents who were collecting water near their hiding place. She was 11 years old at the time. Mama Penee passed on her recollections and reflections to her grandchildren. Katjivena narrates her understanding of the inverted ethics and morality of discourses of civilisation in the context of the genocide and its aftermath:

And as the white men gave us the Ten Commandments, are they only meant for us? Because if not, how could they come to our country, kill us, misuse our women and even kill our children, our men, and take the country from us? How could they have done that and then continue to talk about the Ten Commandments? ¹²

Ovaherero and Nama’s experiences with colonial violence, and with struggles against it, were in many ways somewhat distinctive. This is also the case for how they experienced the formation and consolidation of the ‘international order’, and the long struggle for decolonisation in Namibia. Their political push to have the genocide recognised, and restorative relations instituted meaningfully, is indicative of broader anti-colonial struggles, while still reflecting the unique context of their experiences. Through the normative inversion, Ovaherero and Nama survivors of genocidal violence were framed as ‘unfit to stand by themselves’ and not entitled to reparation and redress but rather subjected to tutelage and racialised rule. The persistent practice of disarticulating the inherent violence of colonial and imperial European expropriation and domination is counter-caricatured by how the violence and horrors of the Holocaust were rendered as ‘deviant’, and as unrelated to Western modernity. As Barkawi and Laffey note, Germany, despite being a ‘quintessentially Western Society’ (2006: 341), had subsequently to be restored to the ‘West’, in an imagined geography that rendered the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ‘non-Western’. The flip side of this ‘imagined geography’ is the surreptitious re-enactment of the normative inversion: the ‘West’ is rendered again as incapable of such violence and horrors, irrespective of the fact that they were pervasive in colonialism and imperialism. It is against the backdrop of this kind of ‘collective ego-defence’ (see Nandy, 2002: 109) that Fanon’s account of the struggles against colonial rule and its legacies as addressing injustices can be understood (Fanon, 1990).

Struggles for restorative relations: Challenging the politics of normative inversion

The concept of restorative relations is used in our analysis as a way of apprehending the registers and sensibilities through which Ovaherero and Nama contest the injustices engendered by the genocide and its legacies as political struggles. Ovaherero and Nama struggles against these injustices are multi-dimensional: directed at recognition of the genocide, at achieving an official apology, at self-representation, at gaining reparations, at working through issues of ancestry and lineage, at restoration and at enhancing the conditions for recuperation of their communities, not least as polities. ¹³ Recognition and the official apology would seem self-explanatory but involve struggling not only with German official recalcitrance and indifference, but also with the complexities that have prevented the SWAPO government from representing their cause. ¹⁴ Issues of ancestry are frequently cited by activists, as many have some German lineage, often without clarity over whether as a result of loving relationships, or of the egregious sexual violence committed by German settlers or troops. ¹⁵ Into the register of restoration falls, for instance, the issue of the return of the skulls of victims of the genocide from museums and collections in Germany. Reparation is part of the struggle to regain some of the economic status lost as a result of colonial expropriation, and to receive compensation in assistance of continuing efforts to rebuild the communities and polities. ¹⁶

Restorative relations as conceptualised here are cogent to established registers such as ‘restorative justice’ and acknowledgements of historical responsibility and post-colonial repair. ¹⁷ There is also some common cause with issues raised in recent work on politics around victimhood and collective trauma, especially where the latter include socio-economic aspects, and the recently reinvigorated interest in the politics of memory. ¹⁸ However, the concerns of Ovaherero and Nama in current struggles are not framed in terms of either trauma, or a predominant interest in politics of memorialisation, though these clearly matter too. Instead, the campaign and its political thrust are conducted in the register of addressing injustices, which frames the former too. Our focus is hence on Ovaherero and Nama political action, which addresses the implications and consequences of the normative inversion and thus constitutes a demand for restorative relations. ¹⁹ The emphasis is on what the descendants of the victims of the genocide are doing to raise the injustices committed in and after colonial rule in order to have these addressed. Our use of ‘restorative relations’ is closely aligned with Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the politics of decolonial practice, which encompassed working through socio-psychological impacts and implications of the colonial project’s denigration and material expropriation of the colonised. ²⁰

Ovaherero and Nama find themselves in a situation in which, due to the normative inversion, many institutional pathways for advancing their claims to recognition and reparation are obstructed, withheld or made seemingly impossible to traverse. By using the concept of restorative relations in the encompassing sense, we acknowledge the complications entailed in this constellation. These involve not only recuperating as polities by Ovaherero and Nama in Namibia and the diaspora; it has also involved Ovaherero and Nama efforts to change Germany’s relation to and understanding of its colonial history. This also means that public political history in Germany is required to undergo significant changes as a condition towards restorative relations. The case of Ovaherero and Nama, and how the subsequent ‘international order’ (through the LoN) came to be justified, has also more far-reaching implications. Dominant conceptions of what could be called global public history will have to be transformed, with implications for both, political practitioners as well as theorists and historiographers in IR. ²¹

Our conception of restorative relations with reference to this specific case reflects some aspects of the moral-political grammar in which Germany otherwise has worked through the legacies of the Holocaust and also the mass atrocities committed by Germans in the wider context of World War II. These have often involved controversies about the appropriateness and otherwise of commemorations, memorialisation and instantiations of public history and contemporary moral education. However, they are expressions of a political register of engagement. In this context, claims over historical injustices are being taken seriously, processed and made part of a very public political discourse. They are construed as trans-generational and practically effective in the present context. This shows that a register of restorative relations is available in the German context. Ovaherero and Nama are acutely aware of this and have made this fact a significant part of their struggle. This is reflected unambiguously in many speeches and submissions by Ovaherero and Nama representatives; an example of this can be found in the joint statement signed by Paramount Chiefs Vekuii Rukoro (Ovaherero), David Frederick (Nama) and Aletha Nguvauva (Ovambanderu) ahead of a visit by German parliamentarians in 2016. ²² In this context, the normative inversion at the heart of the Eurocentric world order can be seen to show itself as a manifest double standard. It is against this backdrop that our discussion unfolds.

Theoretical and methodological considerations

The analysis below is theoretically and methodologically intersectional. This calls for some clarifications of the approach we have taken to combine different strands from historiography through (international) political theory, post- and decolonial theory and analysis, critical international legal studies and social theorising in IR. Our approach has clear affinities with the processual frame. Reus-Smit (2016) outlines this in terms of the co-constitutive relationship between historical inquiry and theory. Outlining the different orientations towards historical research (on a spectrum from positivist to reflectivist orientations), Reus-Smit identifies process-oriented approaches with strong reflectivism (429-32). He cites Bilgin’s (2016) explication, which she makes in the context of arguing for a deeper appreciation of Ottoman conceptions of modernity: ‘Inquiring into the international as viewed from the perspective of “others” would allow further insights into the ideational structure underpinning international society’ (499). For historically informed critique, this requires stepping beyond ‘internalist’ approaches as characterised inter alia by Schmidt (1998), or Ashworth (2002), though our analysis is clearly informed by such work. Instead we are traversing into a frame such as the one articulated by Bell and some of the contributors to Empire, Race and Global Justice (2019). Clearly echoing Reus-Smit’s concern about the co-constitutive significance of history and theory, this article explores the complementarities of omissions in both, historiography and political theory, by focusing on empire and race. This project resonates with a vast body of work in post-colonial and decolonial thought that has long been premised on understanding the present (and in particular, present struggles) through exploring legacies of the past. ²³ In line with the latter, we focus on injustices, with the case we are discussing constituting a particularly salient and egregious instance. Tracing the struggles of Ovaherero and Nama for restorative relations discloses how institutionalised injustices, facilitated by the normative inversion, are challenged. Both historiographic practices and political theories are called into question in this process, alongside with the institutional, racial and cultural premises with which they operate. We thus complement the project outlined by Bell (2019: 1–21) by entering via an account of colonial injustice on the one hand, and an orientation to connected histories (Bhambra, 2010: 140) on the other. The legacies of past injustices fester in ongoing relations between perpetrators and victims and their respective descendants, effecting also very different outlooks on ‘historicising’: For descendants of victims of the genocide, the ‘past’ very much shapes the present and this is highlighted by the fact that the past injustices have not been addressed. For the descendants of the perpetrators, this ‘past’ is routinely rendered as remote, exotic and irrelevant to the present. This circumscribes (schematically) what is at stake in ‘connected histories’, namely as ‘how history works’ (Trouillot, 1995). ²⁴ In the context of contemporary Namibia, this is refracted also in terms of ongoing patterns of economic inequality that bear the clear imprints of imperial and colonial racialised violence and domination. ²⁵ The historiographies we draw on are in line with the process orientation, deployed in the service of this analytical explication. To discussions of process-oriented theorising in IR (Linklater, 2011; McCourt, 2016) we add a normative dimension, focused on manifest injustice. ²⁶

We draw on historical work about the genocide, its aftermath, and on the efforts by Ovaherero and Nama to recover and rebuild. By way of highlighting examples, we draw on testimonials and statements from Ovaherero and Nama leaders, on scholarly work that has dealt with different registers of their struggles (for example in international and domestic legal settings), and on accounts of their use of African expatriate networks in Germany.

We build on the critical and revisionist research available on the ‘formative’ years of IR, and in particular on accounts of international institution building, the LoN and the lasting imprints of imperialism and eurocentrism. To trace the continuities of the normative inversion, we draw (in episodic fashion) on historical accounts of how Namibia (then Southwest Africa) was inserted into the international order from the LoN through the UN’s Trusteeship system to independence. We complement this with critical research on Namibian–German relations (including the ‘two Germanies’).

At stake is nothing less than the reversal of the normative inversion. As we show in our conclusion, our argument hence has critical implications for IR as well as international law (cf. Koskenniemi, 2016).

German imperialism and genocide

German ‘formal’ colonisation of ‘Southwest Africa’ began with the German tobacco merchant Adolf Luederitz purchasing land around Angra Pequena in 1883 (a former Portuguese anchorage). The deal became known as the ‘mile swindle’: Luederitz had the local Nama chief Frederick II sign off on a deal that would grant him the title to land in a five-mile expansion around the bay, having left it ambiguous which miles, English (1.6 km) or German (7.5 km), Luederitz was to insist he had legally acquired the latter. In this deception, he was supported by representatives of the Rhenish Missionary Society, who also facilitated a second deal that saw the territory expanded further. ²⁷ Relations with the Nama soured, and Luederitz unsuccessfully petitioned for protection by the Prussian State. However, when soon afterwards Luederitz’s company faced bankruptcy, and he made it known that he intended to sell to a British corporation, von Bismarck stepped in. The German Colonial Society for South-West Africa (DKGSA) was founded in Hamburg with the assistance of key representatives of German High Finance with the purpose of buying out Luederitz. The DKGSA would eventually merge with other societies supporting colonisation, leading to the establishment of the DKG, the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, the apex civil society organisation for the promotion of colonisation. Among the founding members of the DKGSA was Adolph von Hansemann, Luederitz’ father-in-law, head of the influential Disconto Gesellschaft (Drechsler, 1980: 21–22). Luminary participants included Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank. The buy-out of Luederitz’s ‘property’ by the Kolonialgesellschaft, and its modest recapitalisation facilitated the formal arrival of German colonial rule in Namibia (Drechsler, 1980: 30). A series of so-called protection treaties were instigated and concluded with local chiefs, specifically, with Nama and Ovaherero representatives because of their geographic locations.

The colonisation of ‘Southwest Africa’ by Germany took the distinctive form of a ‘settler colony’. Support and ideological drive behind this stemmed predominantly from the fragment of East Prussian landed aristocrats, who envisaged an agriculturalist settler colony. Attempts to use the ‘protection treaties’ model to acquire more territory in Southern Africa stalled, though, as German objectives were thwarted by local chiefs who would not sign up. ²⁸

All of this prefigured an incremental rise in repressive violence by the Germans, which engendered acts of resistance against the intolerable colonial rule, eventually culminating in the Herero uprising of 1904. The supreme Chief Samuel Maharero, who had repeatedly petitioned over the wanton acts of violence and mistreatment, as well as the expropriation of Herero land by the German settlers, made an about-turn in his previously cautious stance and moved to open revolt.

The uprising took place against the backdrop of a propaganda campaign by pro-colonial forces in Germany; the real causes of the uprising, such as grievances over land theft and the state of lawlessness with which German troops and settlers behaved towards the locals, were more or less completely supressed and drowned in a barrage of racist vilification. ²⁹ This prepared the ground for justifying the further use of egregious violence by the Schutztruppen (Germany’s ‘Protection Forces’ ³⁰ , i.e. the fragment of the German army serving in ‘Southwest Africa’).

In the middle of 1904, military command of the German forces passed from Governor Theodor Leutwein, to Lieutenant-General von Trotha. Leutwein, who despite his role in often accommodating settler-violence against the local populations, had sought to de-escalate, negotiate and promote a military climb-down. In direct response to the perception at the Colonial Department in Berlin that Leutwein was favouring a negotiated settlement, von Trotha was brought in to take the command. During the subsequent campaign against the Ovaherero, the colonising forces entirely flaunted what international law there was ³¹ ; no discriminations were made between combatants and non-combatants; the campaign was conducted under the premise of ‘no prisoners’, with captured combatants executed in large numbers ³² ; and lynchings and shootings of Africans by settlers went unsanctioned. Under his command, von Trotha put in place a strategy forcing the Herero into the Omaheke desert, an explicit plan to commit genocide. Von Trotha himself wrote:

I ordered the warriors captured recently to be court-martialled and hanged and all women and children who sought shelter here to be driven back into the sandveld, handing them a copy of the proclamation drawn up in Othiherero. . . To accept women and children who are for the most part sick, poses a grave risk to the force, and to feed them is out of the question. For this reason, I deem it wiser for the entire nation to perish than to infect our soldiers into the bargain and to make inroads into our water and food supplies. (Drechsler, 1980: 161)

The Herero were hauled up in the Waterberg region (including women and children), where they were surrounded by German troops from six positions, and attacks with artillery and machine guns commenced on 11 August 1904. One of these six positions had been left deliberately weak by von Trotha, and as the Herero fought towards a way out of the encirclement, this was where they made their breakthrough: towards the Omaheke desert. After driving the Herero from every waterhole, von Trotha set up a ‘250 kilometer cordon in the west and southwest, making it virtually impossible for anyone to escape from the desert’ (Drechsler, 1980: 156).

By December 1904, von Trotha’s policy of extermination was eventually overruled. ³³ The Kaiser ordered the missionaries back into the picture in an attempt to move to a negotiated surrender of the remaining Ovaherero. In this context the use of ‘concentration camps’ was first introduced in ‘Southwest Africa’, with the aim of containing captured Ovaherero in order to prevent them from rejoining the revolt.

The changes in German strategy were driven by another significant event, the beginning of the Nama uprising in October 1904. Hendrik Witbooi, a supreme Nama Captain, not having received a plea by Samuel Maharero for the Nama to join in the uprising against the Germans, had maintained a ‘neutral’ stance. Indeed, some Nama were fighting with the Germans against the Herero, though they were shocked and disturbed by their brutalities, and the slaughter of women and children. Just after the defeat of the Ovaherero in the Waterberg, Witbooi changed his mind, having become convinced that changes in the relationship with the colonisers (for which he had pushed consistently) would not be forthcoming, and that violent repression and expropriation would continue and intensify.

Increasing supplies of troops and weaponry sent from Germany made a military victory for the Nama revolt unlikely. ³⁴ Despite this, Nama resistance continued to challenge and undermine German Schutztruppen. Successful guerrilla attacks, including raids on transport convoys, disruption of rail services, attacks on farms and cattle raiding inflicted casualties on German troops. The latter’s superiority in numbers and supplies, though, meant that over the three years Nama resistance fighters were incrementally caught by rotating troops in constant pursuit. Hendrik Witbooi himself died after he was wounded in a skirmish in 1906, and soon after his death the previously cohesive Nama resistance began to fragment. With the death of Jakub Morenga, an eminent resistance leader himself of both Nama and Ovaherero heritage, in 1907, this phase of resistance ended. Morenga was shot by British troops under the pretext of having failed to report to a police station as ordered under condition of his exile in Botswana, in what was clearly an act of collusion between British and German imperial forces. ³⁵

Captured Nama were, like many surviving captive Ovaherero, initially put to forced labour, particularly in railway construction, and on farms. The concentration camps used for imprisonment initially were eventually continued in a different form. Zeller (2003: 68) cites the telegram, sent by Prince von Buelow (Imperial Chancellor) in December 1904, to von Trotha. In it, the Chancellor ordered the setting up of ‘concentration camps for the provisional accommodation and provisioning of the remnants of the Herero people’. Conditions were horrific in those camps, where ‘50 people (Herero) died each week’ (divisional minister, Schmidt, cited in Zeller 2003: 69). Shark Island in Luederitz Bay (Erichsen, 2003) was so bad it was cited as a threat to prisoners elsewhere.

Shark Island had a mortality rate among Nama prisoners of up to 77.5% (Erichsen, 2003: 95). The island as well as the other main concentration camp sites also became infamous for the practice of ‘collecting skulls’. Heads were severed of the corpses of the dead, with the purpose of sending them back to Germany for research on ‘racial characteristics’. ³⁶

The end of German rule and international colonial administration: Institutionalising rule through normative inversion

After the atrocities associated with the Ovaherero and Nama genocide, German rule in ‘Southwest Africa’ continued until the outbreak of World War I. The time between the end of the genocide and the loss of the colony was characterised by a regime of oppression and forced labour. Germany’s defeat in World War I was mirrored by the capitulation of the Schutztruppen in Namibia who were defeated after a relatively short campaign by the South African colonial forces lead by Louis Botha in 1915. The aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and the creation of the LoN (1920) inaugurated the well-documented revision of the mutual arrangements that had mediated the colonial interests of the ‘Concert of Europe’ (critically, see Anghie, 2004: 115ff; see also Grovogui, 2002). The LoN was set up with the intention to safeguard peaceful relations and settle potentially conflict-conducive disagreements, but only among the imperial powers and their respective nation-state allies. It is thus through the League that Eurocentric claims to moral authority, mapped on to a hierarchical conception of civilisational status, became institutionalised and thus cemented the normative inversion. The LoN and its Mandate System became the key instrument for instituting and working out a ‘new’ balance between the different interests of European colonising states (Wilde, 2008: 212 ff). The vision of international order advanced through the LoN never considered, let alone questioned the legitimacy of colonialism itself. In the recalibration of relations among the warring parties of World War I through the LoN, the question of how colonial powers conducted themselves in the ‘colonies’ became salient. The German atrocities committed against Ovaherero and Nama peoples were central to Britain’s arguments at the League that Germany ought to be considered unfit to hold colonies. The case of the ‘Blue Book’, which was a collection of witness statements about the atrocities committed by the German forces used by Britain to argue this, belongs in this context. ³⁷ Although used for ulterior motives, the statements have nevertheless been held to be accurate. However, this neither absolves Britain from responsibility for its own colonial atrocities (Doty, 1996), nor does it detract from the underlying ‘solidarities’ among European war-time enemies with regard to the normative inversion: The German genocide in Namibia thus became crucial to the justification for establishing the C-mandates under the League’s Article 22 (Grovogui, 1996: 118).

It is at this juncture that we can return to the framing argument we outlined in the beginning. The administration of the Mandate territory of Namibia was transferred to South Africa in a deal sponsored by Britain that went without contestation by the other representatives at the negotiations (Callahan, 2008: 17 ff). C-mandate countries were those categorised unfit to govern themselves and framed as most backward (Article 22). ³⁸

The international ‘settlement’ through the League institutionalised what we referred to above as the normative inversion in international law: It meant that those subjected to colonial violence and genocide were framed as morally and civilisationally deficient, while the perpetrators, returning to Memmi’s point, gave ‘themselves absolution’ and granted themselves the right to rule. The survivors of genocidal violence (as well as other polities in ‘Southwest Africa’) were subjected again to colonial rule based on racial hierarchy, with all the engendered inequalities. There were no provisions to hear their representatives as part of political processes aimed at some form of restorative justice. ³⁹ The Mandate system’s application in the Namibia case had the effect of denying their status as political communities (Koessler & Melber, 2017), perpetuating the implications of the colonial division between citizens and subjects. ⁴⁰ The support of the League for South Africa’s claim to run the public affairs of Namibia thus cemented the entirely untenable normative inversion: communities victimised by European (German) barbaric violence were framed as uncivilised, and as requiring to be under European tutelage. South African administrative rule was based on racial hierarchy: political representation in Parliament in South Africa, and the constitution of the South West African Legislative Assembly, which administered devolved powers for Namibia’s status as an effective province of South Africa, were white only. The upshot of this was that the remaining German settlers, who had overwhelmingly supported genocidal warfare against Ovaherero and Nama, and who had often participated in atrocities against local populations ended up being protected and politically enfranchised. By contrast, the descendants of their victims (along with all other non-whites) were subjected to further denigration.

From the perspective of the survivors of the genocide, the international resolution to the end of German colonialism thus meant more dispossession, and social and political strife, a consequence of the political context created on the grounds of the normative inversion. The latter was intrinsic to how advocates for the League saw in the Mandate system an instrument to ‘prepare’ the former colonies for independence (indicatively, consider the enthusiasm for the League e.g. in Wright, 1930: 68ff). In alignment with the social Darwinist proclivities integral to the justification of trans-colonial European imperialism, they considered the Mandate system crucial to the ‘civilizing mission’ (Ashworth, 2002: 37). This anticipated the reconstitution of ‘the natives’ in accordance with European notions of rationality, commerce, progress and propriety (Angell, 1911: 115–116). ⁴¹ The idea was that once the ‘natives’ ‘qualified’ accordingly, independence would become the pathway to admitting their country to membership in the newly forming international order. The assumptions held by Western architects of the League about the eventual ‘graduation’ into independence of the Mandate territories were firmly tied to racialised hierarchical thinking (Thakur et al., 2017: 22–23). Unsurprisingly, South Africa under the leadership of Jan Smuts made no serious commitment to Namibian independence anyway. Instead, South Africa followed a roadmap towards the intended annexation of the territory as a ‘fifth province’. For this, South Africa garnered international support from its allies in the LoN. Practically, South Africa pursued a policy of integrating Namibia into its domestic system of public administration, including with regard to race relations. Jan Smut’s success in influencing proceedings at the LoN (Mazower, 2009: 28 ff) occurred against the backdrop of significant efforts to disclose and challenge the racist underpinnings of the order it helped to institutionalise. W.E.B. Du Bois was a highly critical observer of and commentator on the injustices that the arrangements spelt for colonised peoples (ibid, 19). Notably, Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) petitioned the LoN to take over the Mandate for South West Africa, though this fell on deaf ears. ⁴²

Throughout the years following the South African assumption of rule over Namibia, the survivors of the genocide did their best to rebuild their communities and economies. As Werner (1998) notes in an extensive study of economic development in Hereroland after 1919, Ovaherero in particular began to work towards a gradual process of buying back their land. ⁴³ Into this period fall the efforts by both Nama and Ovaherero to rebuild pastoralist economies, and to deal with the effects of the genocide. ⁴⁴ Ovaherero’s efforts in this regard are better documented than those of the much smaller Nama nation. They constituted a continuity of practices of resistance and community building that reached back to the experiences under German rule, and involved, among other registers, the famous Truppenspieler displays. That involved marching in restored German uniforms as part of practices of commemorating resistance and suffering (Werner, 1998: 486 ff.).

Namibia, the United Nations and normative inversion

In the wake of the end of World War II, Namibia once again becomes central in international affairs. The newly formed United Nations oversaw the intended transfer of Namibia’s C-Mandate to the trusteeship programme. Trusteeship was a different international legal instrument (Wilde, 2008: 47 ff) meant to put former colonies covered by it under the direct administration of the United Nations, while preserving the territorial ‘integrities’ introduced by European colonial rule. Once more, Trusteeship was meant to be transitory, the aim being to ‘prepare’ for independence. The South African government however resisted the trusteeship idea for Namibia and instead petitioned for annexation. When this did not succeed, South Africa reacted by tying Namibia closer into its own political system, granting Namibian whites six seats in the House of Assembly, and four in the Senate. The post-1945 era then saw the extension of South Africa’s policy of Apartheid to Namibia, and the creation of ‘tribal homelands’, sharpening once more the permanent crisis over land-ownership, residency and racialised inequalities (indicatively, Grovogui, 1996: 153–171). The international status of Namibia was eventually assumed to be settled by the International Court of Justice, which controversially ruled in favour of South Africa’s claim that the territory should not be placed under the UN trusteeship programme but instead be administered in line with the Mandate carried over from the LoN.

Subsequent failures to address this situation through the UN system provided further impetus for the struggle for liberation and independence, which had gathered momentum in Namibia from the late 1950s. SWAPO emerged as the organisational hub of resistance against South African rule, against the backdrop of the Cold War period of African wars of independence.

The above discussion sketches the backdrop of the continuous salience of the implications of the normative inversion. It is clear that the injustices committed against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples by German colonial troops, and by significant parts of the German settler community (Haeussler, 2018: 37ff) in the run up to, during and after the 1904–08 genocide were compounded. These occurred through the governance arrangements that followed under the auspices of first, the LoN and then in the context of the United Nations. In addition to the suffering endured by Ovaherero and Nama, they also lost much of their respective political standing as a result of the genocide. Despite having had governments, laws, institutions ⁴⁵ and a proven formidable capacity for diplomacy, and the creation of negotiated settlements (see Drechsler, 1980; Reinhard, 2017), they ceased to be regarded as polities from the perspective of the newly constructed ‘international’ order, with sovereign states at its centre. ⁴⁶ With the victory of SWAPO, a movement dominated numerically by the Ovambo (who had not come under the sphere of direct German rule, which had completely altered demographic trends), Nama and Ovaherero became minorities in what was to become a new state. The normative inversion, based on untenable claims to supreme moral authority, protected the transgressors and attempted to silence the descendants of the victims. As a result of it, Ovaherero and Nama could not claim the political ‘standing’ required to represent themselves internationally or seek redress through international legal arrangements. ⁴⁷

The genocide and struggles for restorative relations in the context of Namibian–German relations

The struggles of descendants of survivors of the first genocide of the 20th century continued throughout the period until and beyond Namibian independence (1989). It entailed navigating the constellation of two Germanies. The ‘two Germanies’ of post-World War II took very different approaches towards Namibia, expressed in different stances regarding the imperial past. Anti-imperialism was official policy in the GDR, and while the GDR never enjoyed international legal recognition, this stance took the form of significant material support for SWAPO. The sponsorship of academic research was facilitated by official state interest. ⁴⁸ Its differentiation from the ‘Capitalist West Germany’ operated also on the basis of demonstrating continuities of the latter with the imperial and Nazi past. This was not least as a way of sustaining its state-ideological stance of being the part of Germany, which had comprehensively broken with it (Buerger, 2017).

In post-World War II Western Germany the patchwork of de-nazification, the Nuremberg trials and the confrontation of the horrors of the Holocaust took precedence. By contrast, Germany’s colonial past rarely made it into political discourse, let alone public history. This left much room for the surreptitious survival of idealisations of Germany’s civilising mission (Buerger, 2017: 71ff). In fiction, such ideas circulated in ‘explorer and adventurer’ genres, but they also turned up in school books, which often cast German colonial endeavours in glorifying fashion, against the backdrop of a version of the mission civilatrice ( this echoes aspects of ‘Southwester Germans’ political discourse in Namibia, and how ties with the German ‘homeland’ are viewed in parts of that fragment society; see Silvester and Gewald, 2003; also, Koessler and Melber, 2017: 94ff).

The West German government did deal with Namibia, notably through the foreign office, and certainly not under a cloud of ignorance over what had occurred during settler-colonialism. West German–Namibian political relations were managed more or less consistently with the interests of the German–Southwester fragment population at the top of the agenda. During the period of South African rule in Namibia, the West German government supported the apartheid regime. ⁴⁹ It is clear that the foreign policy assistance which South Africa received from West Germany was in part motivated by the latter’s support of the interests of the fragment community in Namibia.

The debates that followed eventually in the context of student movement politics leading up to 1968 remained centred on German historical research and sources. Yet, any de-centring of the ‘self-reflective’ disposition that would have been necessary for considering the concerns of descendants of survivors of the genocide remained sidelined. The epistemic effort was not met, at this stage, with any development on the German side towards ‘restorative relations’. This changed significantly after Namibian independence, with a politics of restorative relations becoming foregrounded in a pronounced way.

From Namibian independence to the present: Towards restorative relations

United Nations Resolution 435 was originally adopted in 1978 with the aim to end the conflict between South Africa on the one hand, and the liberation fighters of SWAPO and their Angolan supporters on the other. Eventually, still under the mandate of that resolution, the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) peacekeeping mission of 1989 supervised the elections that led to Namibia’s formal independence. SWAPO won with a share of 57%. Virtually simultaneously, the Berlin Wall came down, inaugurating German reunification. What followed has been a gradual transformation of Germany’s stance towards its colonial past, brought about by the ceaseless campaigning of Ovaherero and Nama descendants of survivors. German unification meant that the ‘anti-imperialist’ official position of the GDR ended, and that the West German policy stance became exclusive. Immediately after reunification, there was therefore no acknowledgement on the part of the German state that a genocide had occurred, or of its implications for relations between Germany, Namibia, and the descendants of survivors.

The latter, however, used every opportunity to make their case. Official state visits to Namibia by German representatives, which began in the 1990s, were targeted with protests and attempts to petition for recognition of the genocide and to have demands for reparations heard. ⁵⁰ Ovaherero and Nama representatives were forced to make their case as if they were ‘civil society’ groups rather than political communities. Caught in a double-bind, the SWAPO government did not offer support, not least because Germany provided significant development aid to Namibia. ⁵¹ The problems this entailed were compounded by the above noted widespread indifference and absenting of knowledge in the German public with regard to its colonial-imperial past.

The political landscape in Germany after reunification settled on a compromise in dealing with the genocide in Namibia (Koessler and Melber, 2017). Liberal and Conservative parties in the Bundestag, opposed to revisiting Imperial Germany’s historical crimes, and Social Democrats, Greens and the Left Party on the other side, converged on a foreign policy agenda framed through the highly problematic concept of ‘special responsibility’, expressed through development aid (see Roos and Seidl, 2015; Engert, 2016: 132–134). This constellation meant that there was hardly any receptivity in official German politics for the claims and self-representations of Ovaherero and Nama activists. By avoiding any acknowledgement of the historical injustices, the invocation of ‘special responsibility’ expressed continuity with the normative inversion.

Ovaherero and Nama activists dealt with this situation by building as much political pressure as possible through a deliberate strategy aimed at keeping the genocide, as well as German refusals to call it that, in view. Following unsuccessful attempts to get their case heard under international law, they filed claims instead under the 1789 Alient Tort Claim Act in the District Court of Columbia in the United States, at first against German businesses (e.g. Deutsche Bank) who were the legal successors of beneficiaries of colonialism in Southwest Africa (Harring, 2002). Eventually they filed under the same act against the German government itself. Though the legal merits of the cases were deemed insufficient, they had the effect of prompting continuous responses from the German government, and of keeping the issue alive in the public sphere. ⁵²

In the years since independence, this ongoing struggle for restorative relations by Ovaherero and Nama eventually created resonance in the German public sphere. ⁵³ Activists, notably African expatriates organised for example through AfricAvenir in Berlin, various post-colonial campaign groups in major cities, or public political education oriented outfits such as ‘Freiburg Postkolonial’, organised events, news releases and campaigns with increasing public profile. Major cities with colonialist histories such as Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen or Berlin became politicised over street-names and memorials. ⁵⁴

These shifts in public discourse made maintaining double standards over genocidal violence increasingly difficult. In 2004, the Social Democrat German Minister for Development, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, participated in the official centenary commemorations of the beginning of the atrocities in 1904 in Namibia. In her address at the event, she acknowledged Germany’s first genocide and publicly asked for forgiveness. ⁵⁵ Though her line was immediately rebuked back in Germany, it added to shifting the discourse. In 2015, the German Foreign Office officially recognised the genocide. Foreign Minister Steinmeier appointed a special envoy (Ruprecht Polenz) to work towards the still outstanding official apology (which requires an act of parliament). ⁵⁶ These developments have all been outcomes of Ovaherero and Nama struggles. Representatives of the communities have consistently sought to engage directly with German government officials, organising under the slogan ‘Anything about us, without us, is against us’. ⁵⁷ Despite setbacks and continuing concerns over German tactics in the ongoing negotiations, ⁵⁸ there is now clear momentum towards change.

The many shortfalls and deficiencies of Germany performing in accordance with its acknowledged responsibility for the Holocaust and its implications form part of a context in which restorative relations are actualised. A comparable mode has not yet been reached with regard to the first genocide of the 20th century. In the context of the 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durban, the Namibian Minster of Foreign Affairs, Theo Ben Gurirab, pointedly called out the racism behind continuous refusals to engage directly with the grievances of the survivors of the genocide (see Koessler and Melber, 2017: 52). ⁵⁹ It is clear now that the foreign policy position of Germany with regard to this as well as the political culture of remembrance has shifted. ⁶⁰ However, it has shifted not due to official political leadership and certainly not due to support from international institutions, but due to survivor struggles, and the resonance these created among non-state actors for a politics of restorative relations.

Colonialism, the struggle for restorative relations and the challenge for IR

In our critical reconstruction and discussion of the politics of and around the first genocide of the 20th century, we have explicated points of particular relevance to the provocation that has motivated this Special Issue. The editors invited critical engagements with ‘what IR does not see’. We have argued and demonstrated that IR’s founding discourse around conceptions of institutional ordering and balancing ‘for peace’ in Europe (Grovogui, 2002: 317) was based from the outset on a politically expedient normative inversion. Only on the basis of the disarticulation of egregious injustice facilitated by normative inversion could an archive of knowledge be sustained and associated with a deeply problematic conception of progress and civilisational hierarchy among states and peoples. ⁶¹ The normative inversion and its implications are thus deeply aligned with racialised imperialism and its ongoing political legacies (see also Nisancioglu’s contribution to this Special Issue). It continues to sustain foundational myths with profound social and political implications that have lasting consequences (de Carvalho et al., 2011). The liberal international order of the 20th century was constituted on the basis of the normative inversion, of which the case of the genocide against Ovaherero and Nama peoples is but one particularly egregious example. Liberal thought has routinised and normalised discourse about a hierarchy of states and societies based on conventionally shared meanings about civilisational standards, which are used as the basis for comparison, and for instituting ‘development interventions’ (see, critically, Grovogui, 2001). The benchmark of such comparisons has been constructed on the basis of inverted accounts of morality and moral authority, premised on untenable abstractions from the violent and often barbaric history underpinning it.

The political struggle for restorative relations which we have reconstructed highlights not only the scope and potency of the political challenge it constitutes. It is indicative of a problem that is much larger but that has remained comprehensively marginalised in mainstream IR, and in what have been taken to be the discipline-shaping ‘debates’. These debates have been marked by the continuous and consistent absenting of anti-colonial struggles, including challenges to colonial legacies in the post-1945 international institutional order. ⁶² In absenting these histories, the dominant institutional order and the ‘development’ discourse through which it is articulated into practice form the basis of standard analytical routines in IR.

That the political struggles for restorative relations of the Ovaherero and Nama are now refracted through inter-state relations of Namibia and Germany would seem to suggest that there are two distinct kinds of political orders at play: One corresponds with substantive socio-political relations among societies and peoples with entangled colonial histories. The other is firmly indexed to the formal account of inter-state relations, of which IR has built an analytical framework, and international diplomacy a set of routine practices linked with settled expectations of what is possible, legal or appropriate. The epistemic hold of the normative inversion has a double effect in this context. First, it serves to justify a specific international institutional frame, along with the conceptions of hierarchy, leadership and moral authority this enables. And second, in so doing, it facilitates a conceptual disconnect between the international system and its constitution through imperialism, colonialism and genocidal violence. ⁶³ Consequently, claims for redress of injustices based on substantive colonial relations and their legacies are deflected to a system of rule still infused with imperial law and legislation (see critically Grovogui, 2002; Anghie, 2004; Koskenniemi, 2016). ⁶⁴ What we have examined has thus opened a window on better understanding a whole register of political engagement, framed, if in different ways, by the struggle against the normative inversion, and its multiple expressions in the political institutions of the international order. Such struggles over restorative relations are an increasingly more pronounced feature of social and political life globally. ⁶⁵ A critical engagement with this constellation is imperative for disclosing world political dynamics that have been underacknowledged in IR as well as in core accounts of international law, political theory, sociological thought and international political economy. ⁶⁶

The normative inversion was a profoundly political project. It served to justify legal and institutional (international) structures through which Western powers were able to self-authorise their claims to civilisational hierarchy in a register of morality and justice (cf. Grovogui, 2001: 439). This claim to moral authority is, however, untenable as it rests on a fundamental conceit. The double injustice entailed in the normative inversion thus consists first in the attempt to deny the barbaric violence of Western imperialism and colonialism as injustice, and second to deny barbaric violence as internal to Western civilisation. In this inverted justification of morality, those subjected to colonialism and genocidal violence and its consequences were framed instead, as Fanon has argued, as ‘insensible to ethics’ representing ‘not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values’ (Fanon, 1990: 32). The politics of the normative inversion and struggles for restorative relations clearly resonate beyond our specific discussion of the genocide in Namibia. ⁶⁷ What is called for is nothing less than a political project committed to undoing the normative inversion, and addressing its implications and consequences, including its institutional expressions and its epistemic hold on global public political history. This is a necessary condition for addressing historical wrongs in the present en route to realising what Fanon has called ‘a just reparation’ (1990: 81).