The Politics of Apology: Germany’s Dialogue with Namibia on Colonial Crimes

The Holocaust was not the only genocide that Germany committed in the 20th century. In 1904/05 German colonisers started a war of extermination against the insurgent ethnic groups of Ovaherero and Nama in what was then called “German South West Africa”, today’s Namibia. Conservative estimates assume that German colonisers killed around 100,000 Ovaherero and Nama through massacres and starvation between 1904 and 1908. The few survivors were forced to work in German concentration and labor camps where many of them died. Their remains were sent to Germany for public display or medical experiments.   

Fast forward 120 years: Germany and Namibia are negotiating an agreement to address what happened.  

How did we get here?

For most of the 20th century, Germany did not acknowledge its colonial atrocities, and no concerted efforts were made to recognise or atone for them. When Germany eventually acknowledged its historical and moral responsibility for the genocide in 1989 and 2004, this never extended to any admission of legal accountability.  In public statements, Germany referenced the 1948 Genocide Convention but stressed that it did not apply retroactively. Instead, Germany intended to fulfil its “historical, moral and political responsibility” for its past atrocities through increased development cooperation. In the 2010s, Germany started to make efforts to repatriate some of the human remains of victims of its colonial violence to Namibia. The recurrent demands for direct reparations from representatives of Ovaherero and Nama, however, were left unaddressed. It was only in 2014 that Germany and Namibia (finally) agreed to commence a “reconciliation dialogue”. Negotiations started in 2015 and, after six years of closed-door negotiations, a Joint Declaration (JD) was presented in 2021. According to the declaration, Germany would spend 1.1 billion euros over 30 years on development aid in Namibia. The declaration constitutes a formal apology but does not contain any mention of reparations. Importantly, the declaration is not a legally binding document but a political declaration.      

The reactions from Namibia to the JD were clear: protests, a lawsuit against the Namibian government, in the hope of having the declaration declared unconstitutional. Nonetheless, both governments announced in 2024 that the JD was in the final stages of negotiations and they were hoping to sign it before March 2025. As of July 2025, the lawsuit is still pending.  

What’s wrong with the agreement?   

In the following, the three main points of critiques of the agreement will be pointed out. Most prominent are the question of meaningful participation of the affected communities and the demands for compensation. As one of the first agreements of its kind, the JD also raises more general concerns about how countries can and should address past crimes. 

Meaningful participation of the affected communities 

The main critique of the agreement is that the Ovaherero and Nama did not get to participate meaningfully in the negotiations. The framework of what should become the JD was negotiated bilaterally between representatives of the Namibian and German governments without the participation of the two main representative organisations of the affected communities, the Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA) and the Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA).    

The bilateral and highly secretive mode of negotiations has been widely criticised. Already in 2017 , the UN Working Group on the Rights of People of African Descent stressed the need to include the affected communities in the negotiations. In the same year, Ovaherero and Nama representatives tried to sue Germany in front of a US court for failing to include them meaningfully in negotiations – unsuccessfully, the case was dismissed in 2019. A joint communication of several UN Special Rapporteurs (UN Joint Communication) refers to the right of indigenous communities to participate in “any important decision-making process that may have an impact on one’s way of life and on one’s cultural rights.” (Quelle: S.18, para 49(e) Special Rapp bericht). A Namibian parliamentary resolution clearly demanded a tripartite negotiation process between Namibia, the victim communities, and Germany. At the core of the resolution was the demand for reparations as a way of taking accountability and restoring justice.

The German Federal Foreign Office, in its response to the UN Joint Communication, claimed that the representatives of OTA and NTLA had decided from the outset not to engage in dialogue and had been rejecting repeated invitations to participate in the talks. German sources also point out that that affected communities were allowed to participate to some degree. According to these reports, the negotiations included “extensive consultations” with representatives, a “dialogue process”, the appointment of a special envoy of Ovaherero descent supported by a technical committee and the “direct involvement of five representatives of all affected communities in the negotiations as delegation members.”

However, these roles seem to have been primarily consultative rather than constituting real influence over, and participation in, the negotiations. As the UN Joint Communication pointed out, several representatives of affected communities that initially decided to participate in the inter-state negotiations eventually pulled out of the process, citing the unavailability of information and limited modalities of the consultations. In light of the strict confidentiality surrounding the negotiation of the JD, it is difficult to reconstruct the extent to which victim organisations were invited to participate in the negotiations. Yet it seems unlikely that the OTA and NTLA rejected to take part in the dialogue on principle, as Germany claimed. Rather, the role that they were given most likely did not allow for the kind of meaningful participation expected from the main representatives of the affected communities.   

The lack of victim representatives’ effective participation is evident throughout the declaration. Many of the demands of the affected communities have not been addressed; chief among them: reparations for the injuries suffered during the genocide, which do not form part of the agreement. It is worth bearing in mind that direct compensation of victims is not, in fact, unheard of. In the case of the Holocaust, victims were compensated financially, rather than through negotiations with the state. Apologising to, and compensating, survivors of genocide, even when there is no legal imperative to do so, is thus not unthinkable.  

The German and Namibian governments state in the JD that the path taken in the negotiations was one of “political bilateral negotiations with the participation of the affected communities.” What is left of this aspiration is a Joint Declaration which is opposed by the Namibian Parliament, the OTA, and NTLA.   

Compensation through development cooperation 

With the signing of the JD, Namibia, representing the affected communities, also would agree to give up all future claims for compensation. Germany sees the 1,1 billion EUR in development cooperation as settling “all financial aspects of the issues relating to the past.” This sum includes a “support program” to address Germany’s “historical, moral and political responsibility” that is “deliberately targeted at the current settlement areas of the affected communities and at spheres in which they are disadvantaged to this day.” At first glance, this approach seems reasonable. However, it seems unclear whether these funds given to the Namibian government will, in fact, benefit the affected communities. The regions mentioned in the JD cover 82% of Namibia’s territory and about half its population. Furthermore, the priorities mentioned in the JD are consistent with the existing “core areas” of German development cooperation with Namibia. The amount of 1,1 billion EUR, allocated over a period of 30 years, is approximately the same amount Germany has contributed within the last 30 years. It seems, therefore, as though Germany is using existing development cooperation plans to also address specific historical grievances. An exception is the 50 million EUR dedicated to the establishment of a programme for reconciliation, remembrance, research, and education.

Germany’s approach raises the broader question of whether development cooperation can ever compensate for past crimes. As articulated by representatives of the affected communities and the UN Special Rapporteurs, “the question at hand is not a demand for assistance but a demand for accountability and reparation for the harm inflicted”. Development aid projects seem like an unsuitable means of addressing colonial crimes since they do not effectively acknowledge accountability. Moreover, they carry the risk of perpetuating colonial dynamics since donor countries often impose strict conditions on the recipients regarding the use of funds. In short, it seems unlikely that development cooperation will address questions of justice.   

Dealing with the past   

The concerns with the agreement are not solely related to its content. Rather, how Germany has conducted itself throughout and after the process raises several questions about its attitude towards dealing with the past.    

In 2021, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in response to a parliamentary inquiry about the declaration: “This deal is exclusively done on a voluntary basis. There are no legal grounds on the basis of which this payment is being made or promised.” Such statements convey the impression that Germany is making a generous concession by agreeing to this “deal”, rather than finally owning up to past crimes. Along similar lines, representatives of Ovaherero and Nama have called Germany’s apology a farce. In their view, the apology should have been issued upfront rather than being negotiated. According to them, a sincere apology is arguably one freely and proactively given rather than as the transactional part of a negotiated deal. As Sima Luipert, who sits on the Technical Committee on Genocide of the NTLA in Namibia, one of the groups suing the government, puts it: “You cannot say, ‘I apologize,’ without talking to me. You cannot say, ‘I apologize,’ without specifically stating what you are apologizing for.”

The nature of Germany’s apology is even more important given that it will never be held to account for its actions legally. The Genocide Convention only applies to crimes committed since 1948; previous crimes fall outside its temporal scope. Evidently, the mere fact that the concept was not yet coined legally in no way detracts from the magnitude and severity of the crime. If anything, it increases the need for Germany to apologise properly and make up for the fact that will perhaps never face legal repercussions. And, in a broader sense, it does raise some fundamental questions about the concept of intertemporality in international law. According to this principle, a legal situation must be judged according to the law in force at the time the situation occurred (non-retroactivity). In the case of Namibia, German colonial crimes are judged according to the legal system in place at the time, which did not yet recognise genocide as a crime. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights uses this example to point out the flaws of international law in protecting the victims of colonization. 

Finally, Germany appears to try and “close the chapter” on this gruesome part of its past. However, as Olivette Otele, Research Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), points out: “It’s not a case of doing one gesture, and then everything’s forgotten, because that wouldn’t work in terms of reconciliation and bringing communities together.” For many people living in Namibia, the colonial past is far from forgotten. Namibia remains one of the most unequal countries in the world – and the inequalities ran along racialised lines (with the descendants of white settlers, many of German descent, much better off). Amongst other colonial legacies, the distribution of land is still highly unequal. 70% of the land is owned by white farmers who make up 7% of the population. In response to a parliamentary inquiry from the Left, the Foreign Office had “no insights” as to whether German support for Namibian land reform programs was enough to address colonial harms. One of the demands of indigenous communities is for Germany to buy back ancestral lands and return them to the Ovaherero and Nama descendants. In this context, German (private) investments in green hydrogen production in southern Namibia, the ancestral land of the Nama people, have been particularly controversial. At the centre of the debate is Shark Island – the memorial site of a concentration camp under German colonial rule, where a bigger port is supposed to help scale up the hydrogen trade. In light of such ongoing colonial legacies, trying to “close the chapter” is not the right way to address Germany’s colonial past. On the contrary, now would be the time to push for more critical public debate, curricular reform in schools and universities, and structural support for civil society initiatives that confront colonial history and its present-day consequences.  

What now?

When it comes to colonial crimes and accountability, “better late than never” holds undoubtedly true. The negotiations taking place and Germany issuing a formal apology are certainly a step in the right direction. And yet, as the protests and resistance of affected communities‘ attests, there remains significant room for improvement. So, what now? Affected communities are asking the German and Namibian governments to re-negotiate the agreement in a transparent and inclusive manner. Whether or not that request is granted, there needs to be more engagement with civil society and public debate on this topic, rather than keeping the negotiations strictly confidential and out of the public eye. If Germany wants this dialogue with Namibia to “serve as a model for addressing colonial injustice,” as it states in its response to the UN Joint Communication, a more transparent and inclusive process would be a necessary start.