Burden-tag to Bundestag: Evaluating Ovaherero, Nama interventions in Berlin

The German Bundestag finally debated motions explicitly addressing the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama peoples and its enduring consequences. This debate did not simply happen in our presence; we helped make it happen, in our own words, through our own advocacy, and with ink drawn from our own history.Our traditional leaders did not arrive as representatives of an abstract historical question. They arrived as living embodiments of a history that has travelled across generations, borders, and political systems. Their presence challenged the distance that often separates parliamentary language from the people whose lives are at stake.I was born in Botswana because the genocide and its aftermath scattered my people beyond our ancestral homeland. Consequently, I do not approach this history as a distant observer. I approach it as someone whose own geography was shaped by displacement, whose inheritance carries the unfinished business of survival, and whose artistic practice is inseparable from the responsibility to make that history speak.The Bundestag considered two opposition motions. Die Linke called for full recognition of the German genocides against the Ovaherero and Nama and for reparatory justice, including direct reparations, land-related mechanisms, and the return of cultural belongings and human remains. The Green Party called for German-Namibian reconciliation, an apology and a more comprehensive engagement with colonial history. Both motions were referred to the Foreign Affairs Committee for further consideration. The debate therefore opened a parliamentary process; it did not conclude it.This distinction matters. We must acknowledge the significance of having our demands spoken about in the Bundestag without mistaking parliamentary attention for the achievement of justice.The interventions also revealed that Germany is not speaking with one voice about its colonial past. Different political positions emerged concerning historical responsibility, the language of genocide, the meaning of reconciliation, and the relationship between recognition and material redress. TheseDifferences demonstrate that the struggle is taking place not only between descendants and institutions but also within German public and political life.For me, the immediate lesson is that our presence matters. The next task is to ensure that our presence has consequences beyond a single parliamentary evening.Interventions The interventions demonstrated that the genocide can no longer be treated merely as a matter for bilateral diplomacy or as a closed chapter in German colonial history. The demands for recognition, apology, restitution, and reparations have returned to the center of parliamentary discussion.Yet the fundamental question remains: what kind of justice is being contemplated, and who has the authority to define it?The disagreement surrounding the German-Namibian Joint Declaration, ‘Dishonor,’ or ‘Joint Dishonor,’ has long exposed this question. For us, the affected descendants and our representative organizations, a government-to-government arrangement cannot substitute for meaningful participation by the communities whose ancestors were targeted. Nor can development cooperation automatically be treated as equivalent to reparations for genocide.These are not simply disagreements over terminology. They concern the distribution of authority, the recognition of historical injury, and the conditions under which reconciliation might become meaningful.The distinction between recognition and repair is especially important. Recognition acknowledges what happened. Repair requires institutions to confront what the injustice took away, how its consequences continue, and what responsibilities arise in the present. This includes questions of land dispossession, human remains, cultural belongings, historical education, and the participation of descendants in decisions affecting their heritage.The debate also raised the challenge of historical specificity. The wider German colonial war and its violence affected several communities, including the Damara and San communities. A comprehensive historical account must acknowledge these realities. At the same time, recognition of the experiences of different communities must not dissolve the particular histories and claims of the Ovaherero and Nama into a generalized narrative that is currently being used to obscure the targeted character of the Ovaherero and Nama genocides.For this reason, I understand the principle guiding our work as unity of purpose and specificity of history. It cannot be about us without us. TheThe debate is therefore neither a final victory nor an insignificant gesture. It is an opening that now requires sustained public engagement, parliamentary follow-through, and a continued insistence that the descendants must have a meaningful voice in determining the terms of justice.The response from German society was equally significant. The presence of young and older people around the parliamentary interventions suggested that there is an audience willing to engage with this history. The task now is to cultivate that interest beyond the immediate attention generated by the visit. Public awareness must become durable knowledge, and knowledge must create space for institutional responsibility.My contribution to this struggle is not confined to political advocacy. I approach it as a poet, writer, cultural practitioner, and descendant of survivors. For me, literature is not an ornament placed around political work. It is one of the ways through which historical knowledge is carried, contested, and returned to public life.The archive preserves documents. Parliament records speeches. Museums hold objects. But literature can bring the human consequences of history into a different kind of encounter. It can connect what appears distant to the intimate realities of names, families, displacement, inherited silence, and unfinished grief.My understanding of this responsibility is rooted in Ovaherero culture: storytelling, praise poetry, ceremonial speech, and other forms through which communities transmit knowledge, memory, and identity. These are not merely cultural remnants. They are living systems of historical understanding.My literary practice therefore asks what happens when the descendants become narrators rather than subjects of somebody else's account. What happens when those historically represented through colonial categories begin to name themselves, interpret their inheritance, and speak directly to the institutions that preserve the traces of their dispossession?This question connects my work to the broader meaning of The New Germany: the de-mentioned colony. The colony may be discussed in museums, universities, and parliamentary chambers, yet it can remain de-mined in the sense that its continuing consequences are separated from the lives of the people who inherited them.My interventions seek to reconnect these fragments. I am a child of survivors, but that survival is not simply a biological fact. It is also a cultural andintellectual inheritance. We carry stories that were never fully heard, names that were displaced from public memory, and questions that political agreements have not resolved.In this context, my poetry operates as a form of testimony. It does not replace historical research, legal argument, or political negotiation. Rather, it brings another dimension of knowledge into conversation with them: the knowledge of what it means to inherit an unfinished history.Nama, Ovaherero in BerlinThe presence of the Ovaherero and Nama leadership in Berlin also made visible a tension that runs through my work: the difference between being remembered and being heard. Communities can be commemorated while their demands remain unanswered. Their ancestors can be represented in exhibitions while human remains and cultural belongings remain outside their custody. Their suffering can be acknowledged while their descendants remain excluded from decisions that concern them.This is why I resist the idea that remembrance, on its own, constitutes repair. My literary interventions seek to unsettle the comfortable distance that can develop between historical recognition and contemporary responsibility. They ask audiences to encounter colonial history not as a finished story about people who are no longer present, but as an unfinished relationship involving institutions, descendants, and the choices available today.This also requires a careful understanding of solidarity. German artists, researchers, students, activists, and cultural institutions can play valuable roles in making space for these conversations. But solidarity must not become another form of authority. The task is not to speak over the affected communities or to determine in advance what their history should mean. It is to help create conditions in which they can speak, disagree, define their demands, and participate in decisions that affect them.Not subjects of historyThe descendants have entered the parliamentary room. Their voices have entered the public record. The challenge now is to ensure that the conversation continues beyond the room and that recognition becomes a pathway towards meaningful repair.We are not merely the subjects of history. We are its living descendants, its interpreters, and its claimants. The past is not finished simply because a parliament has discussed it. And the work of justice is not finished while the consequences remain unresolved. We fight to the finish line!*Prince Kamaazengi Marenga is a poet, cultural practitioner, advocate for Ovaherero restorative justice and Ovaherero people’s envoy to Deutschland.

Burden-tag to Bundestag: Evaluating Ovaherero, Nama interventions in Berlin

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Namibian Sun 2026-10-30

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Burden-tag to Bundestag: Evaluating Ovaherero, Nama interventions in Berlin

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Namibian Sun 2026-10-30

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