Europeans have committed atrocities in just about every continent and yet there still seems to be very little recognition or remorse. Not only is there little recognition or remorse, there is sometimes even celebration –eg. Columbus day or thanksgiving....
Some may want to consign history to the past and forget, but it is in reality embedded in the present. The consequences of atrocities committed in the past are still present and people all over the world continue to suffer various forms of violence & exploitation committed or initiated by Europeans. When I watched this documentary I was reminded again of the politics of genocide. I wonder how many people in Europe know that Germans committed genocide, created concentration camps and began racist medical experiments in Namibia approximately 30 years before Hitler came to power. We may learn about genocides that occur in Europe, but genocides committed by Europeans in just about every other continent are given relatively little attention.
Namibia became a German colony in 1884 and remained so until the end of World War I. “In 1920, the League of Nations mandated the country to South Africa, which imposed its laws and, from 1948, its apartheid policy.”(Wikipedia)
Namibia gained independence as recently as March 1990. “Upon independence, the country inherited a colonial division of land in which 3,500 farmers, who were almost entirely white, owned approximately 50% of the country's agricultural land. These farmers constituted about 0.2% of the total national population” (Wikipedia)
Land reform has only just begun, over a century later. Some of the skulls sent to Germany for racist experiments were only just returned to Namibia in 2011.