Between 1904 and 1908 an estimated 80% of the Herero and half of the Nama population, in total some 75,000 men, women and children, lost their lives in German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia. They were killed by German soldiers, died in concentration camps, or perished in the desert after being chased away from their homelands. The genocides were a culmination of years of ruthless and forceful German dispossession of Herero and Nama land and property. This chapter focuses on the racial prejudice and fear of the Other at the root of the Herero and Nama genocides. Since the founding of the protectorate in 1884, Germans aimed to brutally subjugate the Herero and Nama peoples. Notions of racial superiority that attempted to justify taking Indigenous land and acts of violence against the colonized had always been balanced by a fear of anticolonial violence. Even prior to the genocide, this led to ever-greater atrocities, including the genocidal Hoornkrans Massacre (1893) and the incarceration of the Khauas-Khoi in concentration camps (1896). The chapter argues that racism and dehumanization shaped the events taking place before, during and directly after the genocide, which was long forgotten as a mere ‘colonial war’.

This chapter interrogates Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to better understand the violence of European imperialism in Africa and its impact on later developments, including the Holocaust. It argues that most readers have failed to properly understand Arendt’s own views of temporality and causation in popular appropriations such as the so-called “boomerang thesis.” Instead, the insights of African historiography and critical theory are used to propose a new reading of Arendt that reveals the contingency and counterintuitive turns of modern violence.

Bushmen are not alone in the Kalahari. They are not even the majority people there. Rather, Bushman communities frequently share their land and its resources with Ovambo, Herero, Khoekhoe, Tswana, whites, ‘Coloured people’, Basters and many others. Even these groups are diverse in several ways, not only in traditional lifestyles (herder, rancher, white-collar worker and so on), but also in terms of social class and education. The Kalahari happens to be one of the least populous regions of the earth. Yet the environments are fragile, water is limited and activities like livestock rearing require lots more land than other existences. My earliest intention as a field researcher had been to study ethnicity, and in this chapter I return to that topic at a theoretical level. There are more than 200 ethnic group names in the literature, and many are synonyms (for example, there are at least 23 labels for the !Xoõ, and one of these, ≠Hoã, is also the name for another small group). My goal here is explore what it means to adhere to any of these labels.