Jahohora Petronella Inaavinuise, who came to be known as Mama Penee, was a young girl of eleven when her parents were shot in cold blood before her during the 1904–1908 genocidal war in Namibia. Waved away from the scene by a German soldier, she realised that it was her destiny to live. Finding water and food for herself and learning to avoid danger, she spent several months in hiding. Courageous and self-sufficient, she learned lessons in wisdom, calm, and what is truly important in life, lessons which she later imparted to her grandchildren in ways both ingenious and challenging. Her extraordinary personal qualities and influence shine from this story, told by one of her grandsons with the insight and understanding gained over a lifetime of reflecting on his grandmother.
Jahohora Petronella Inaavinuise, who came to be known as Mama Penee, was a young girl of eleven when her parents were shot in cold blood before her during the 1904-1908 genocidal war in Namibia. Her extraordinary personal qualities and influence shine from this story, told by one of her grandsons.
Mama Namibia is based on the compelling, true story of an innocent Herero girl whose life portrays the suffering, perseverance, and resilience of the Herero and Nama people as they faced their most daunting test - a genocide that proved to be the training grounds for the Holocaust."
A rich collection of captivating and remarkable chapters, Writing Namibia Coming of Age presents research of senior academics as well as emerging scholars from Namibia. The book includes wide ranging topics in literature written in English and other Namibian languages, such as German, Afrikaans and Oshiwambo. Almost thirty years after independence, Namibia literature has come of age with new writers experimenting with different genres and varied aspects of literature. As an aesthetic object and social phenomenon, Namibian literature still fulfils the function of social conscience and as new writers emerge, there is ample demonstration that, pluri-vocal as they are, Namibian literary texts relate in a complex manner to the socio-historical trends shaping the country. The Namibian literary-critical tradition continues to paint some versions of Namibia and what we find in this new and highly welcome volume is a canvas of rich voices and perspectives that demonstrate an intricate diversity in terms of culture, language, and themes.
From 1884 to 1914, the world's fourth-largest overseas colonial empire was that of the German Kaiserreich. Yet this fact is little known in Germany and the subject remains virtually absent from most school textbooks. While debates are now common in France and Britain over the impact of empire on former colonies and colonising societies, German imperialism has only more recently become a topic of wider public interest. In 2015, the German government belatedly and half-heartedly conceded that the extermination policies carried out over 1904-8 in the settler colony of German South West Africa (now Namibia) qualify as genocide. But the recent invigoration of debate on Germany's colonial past has been hindered by continued amnesia, denialism and a populist right endorsing colonial revisionism. A campaign against postcolonial studies has sought to denounce and ostracise any serious engagement with the crimes of the imperial age. Henning Melber presents an overview of German colonial rule and analyses how its legacy has affected and been debated in German society, politics and the media. He also discusses the quotidian experiences of Afro-Germans, the restitution of colonial loot, and how the history of colonialism affects important institutions such as the Humboldt Forum.
In 1948, the United Nations established the Genocide Convention to legally define genocide as actions intended to destroy a particular group of people based on race, religion, ethnicity, and other defining characteristics. The goal was to prevent and punish future acts of genocide, but a number of mass killings have followed since its establishment, and in some situations whether these executions qualify as genocides is surprisingly unclear. The viewpoints in this volume explore what genocide is and isn't, and provide historical and contemporary examples of genocide. Readers will examine potential political and social solutions to prevent future genocides.
The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. The chapters consider diverse generational perspectives—survivor writing, second and third generation—and genres—memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. In turn, these perspectives create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. The volume also participates in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion that represent an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.
Germany developed a large colonial empire over the last thirty years of the 19th century, spanning regions of the west coast of Africa to its east coast and beyond. Largely forgotten for many years, recent intense debates about Africa's cultural heritage in European museums have brought this period of African and German history back into the spotlight. German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings much-needed context to these debates, exploring perspectives on the architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture of German colonialism in Africa, and its legacies in postcolonial and present-day Namibia, Cameroon, and Germany. The first in-depth exploration of the designed and visual aspects of German colonialism, the book presents a series of essays combining formal analyses of painting, photography, performance art, buildings, and space with the discourse analysis approach associated with postcolonial theory. Covering the entire period from the build-up to colonialism in the early-19th century to the present, subjects covered range from late-19th-century German colonial paintings of African landscapes and people to German land appropriation through planning and architectural mechanisms, and from indigenous African responses to colonial architecture, to explorations of the legacies of German colonialism by contemporary artists today. This powerful and revealing collection of essays will encourage new research on this under-explored topic, and demonstrate the importance of historical research to the present, especially with regards to ongoing debates about the presence of material legacies of colonialism in Western culture, museum collections, and immigration policies.
This edited collection re-examines the long history of Finnish-Namibian relations through the lens of colonialism without colonies as well as anti-colonialism. The book argues that although Finland never acquired colonies, Namibia was once treated in the areas of culture and knowledge formation in a manner now recognised as colonial. Namibian people’s ways of being in the world was transformed when the Finnish Missionary Society started its work in Owambo in 1870 and introduced Christianity and European modes of education, medicine, material culture and social practices. In time, cultural colonialism faded and during the Namibian struggle for independence from South African rule in 1966–1990 Finns took an actively anti-colonial approach. The book was written as a collaborative effort of Namibian, Finnish and South African scholars.
The first full-length examination of the archaeology and history of the Namib Desert.This is a story of human survival over the last one million years in the Namib Desert - one of the most hostile environments on Earth. Namib reveals the resilience and ingenuity of desert communities and provides a vivid picture of our species' response to climate change, and ancient strategies to counter ever-present risk. Dusty fragments of stone, pottery and bone tell a history of perpetual transition, of shifting and temporary states of balance. Namib digs beneath the usual evidence of archaeology to uncover a world of arcane rituals, of travelling rain-makers, of intricate social networks which maintained vital systems of negotiated access to scarce resources. Ranging from the earliest evidence of human occupation, through colonial rule and genocide, to the invasion of the desert by South African troops during the First World War, this is the first comprehensive archaeology of the Namib. Among its important contributions are the reclaiming of the indigenous perspective during the brutal colonial occupation, and establishing new material links between the imperialist project in German South West Africa during 1885-1915 and the Third Reich, and between Nazi ideology and Apartheid.Southern Africa: University of Namibia Press/Jacana are the reclaiming of the indigenous perspective during the brutal colonial occupation, and establishing new material links between the imperialist project in German South West Africa during 1885-1915 and the Third Reich, and between Nazi ideology and Apartheid.Southern Africa: University of Namibia Press/Jacana are the reclaiming of the indigenous perspective during the brutal colonial occupation, and establishing new material links between the imperialist project in German South West Africa during 1885-1915 and the Third Reich, and between Nazi ideology and Apartheid.Southern Africa: University of Namibia Press/Jacana are the reclaiming of the indigenous perspective during the brutal colonial occupation, and establishing new material links between the imperialist project in German South West Africa during 1885-1915 and the Third Reich, and between Nazi ideology and Apartheid.Southern Africa: University of Namibia Press/Jacana
