From Germany to Georgetown, the Global North has a lot to learn about reckoning successfully with past human rights wrongs. By Kerry Whigham, The Conversation — Between 1904 and 1908, German soldiers and settler colonists killed about half of all Nama people and over 80% of the Herero ethnic group. On May 28, 2021, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas acknowledged that Germany committed genocide in what is today Namibia. Maas’ statement…
Kansas City groups are talking about reparations as cities such as Evanston, Illinois, either implement or discuss their own programs to address past harm to Black residents. By Jonathan Shorman — Every Congressional session for nearly three decades, the late Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan introduced HR 40, calling for a national commission to study the impact of slavery and discriminatory policies on African Americans and to recommend remedies,…
Germany faced its horrible past. Can we do the same? By Michele L. Norris, The Washington Post — Shortly after the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 on the National Mall, I was speaking to some patrons of a successful nonprofit about the importance of candid racial dialogue in politics and in the places we live, work and worship. One of the participants had recently…
By Reuters — Germany’s offer to fund projects in Namibia worth more than a billion euros ($1.22 billion) over 30 years to atone for its role in genocide and property seizures in its-then colony more than a century ago is not enough, Namibian Vice President Nangolo Mbumba said on Friday. “No amount of money in any currency can truly compensate the life of a human being,” Mbumba told journalists as…
By Zamira Rahim and Rob Picheta, CNN — Protesters have marched in the US for six consecutive nights over the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. Their anger over the killing of the unarmed black man has now spread worldwide. Over the weekend demonstrators gathered in London, Berlin and Auckland, among other cities, to protest against police brutality in solidarity with the US crowds. Britain In London, protesters rallied…
135 years ago today, European leaders sat around a horseshoe-shaped table to set the rules for Africa’s colonization. By Patrick Gathara, Al Jazeera — On the afternoon of Saturday, November 15, 1884, an international conference was opened by the chancellor of the newly-created German Empire at his official residence on Wilhelmstrasse, in Berlin. Sat around a horseshoe-shaped table in a room overlooking the garden with representatives from every European country,…
In the autumn of 1949, with the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in the area occupied by the western Allied Powers, the nascent German state still lacked complete sovereignty in every realm. The laws of occupation were still valid and canceling them depended on a variety of political and financial arrangements. One of the conditions for complete German sovereignty pertained to the reparations to be paid to Holocaust…
By Victor Grossman, Portside — The wise priest Laocoön, old legends say, vainly warned against the famous “Trojan horse”. A hostile god sent giant serpents which strangled him and the big wooden present was opened. The soldiers hidden inside opened Troy’s gates so the Greek battalions could rush in, kill the men, enslave the women and destroy the city. Its ruins are still being uncovered. In Germany it is worth…
The author, Burt Neuborne, is one of America’s top civil liberties lawyers, and questions whether federal government can contain Trump and GOP power grabs. By Steven Rosenfeld — A new book by one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America’s constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler’s extremist propaganda and policy template from the…
By Susan Neiman, Los Angeles Times — Born as a white girl in the segregated South, I’ve spent most of my adulthood as a Jewish woman in Berlin. This double perspective has fueled my resolve to explore America’s fraught relationship with its history. It is easy to point to the differences between the Holocaust and the enslavement and abuse of millions of Africans. When examining possible responses to these crimes,…
A Namibian delegation has received the remains of Indigenous Herero and Nama peoples killed during the Namibia Genocide. By teleSUR — A Namibian Government delegation, in Berlin, has received bones and skulls of Indigenous Namibian peoples killed during the “first genocide in the 20th century,” on Wednesday. The bones were in Germany for “scientific” experiments in order to prove the racial superiority of white Europeans during the German colonial and…
By Daniel A. Gross — Mbakumua Hengari grew up in the 1970s on a farm in southern Africa, in what is today the nation of Namibia. The arid soil around his family’s homestead was sandy and grassy, a poor fit for staple crops, so he and seven siblings subsisted on a modest herd of cattle, sheep and goats. Hengari blames systematic racism for his family’s poverty — and he and…
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