Remembering the Herero-Nama Genocide in Namibia

| african arts SPRING 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 1 The mass killing of Herero/Ovaherero and Nama/Namaqua peoples carried out by German colonial forces between 1904 and 1908 in Namibia (then German South West Africa) is often described as a “forgotten genocide” (e.g., Erichsen and Olusoga 2011).1 When this kind of rhetorical trope gets employed in the art world, it often casts the artist as what Okwui Enwezor calls an “agent of memory,” a figure who rescues forgotten historical traces from a mausoleum-like archive and then presents them to a hitherto ignorant public (2008: 46). Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005) by the South African artist William Kentridge is perhaps the most well-known artwork to address the genocide. It operates within the understanding of the relationships among artist, archive, and audience outlined by Enwezor (Dubin 2007: 130). Commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, the installation takes the form of a miniature proscenium with mechanized figures and an animated film. Visual motifs such as cameras, typewriters, newspapers, and written ledgers draw attention to how colonizers collected and communicated information (Fig. 1). Animation sets these archival materials into motion while animatronic figures move across the stage. Although the artwork offers few specific details about the historical events it references (labels provide these in some exhibition venues), it conveys the calculated brutality of colonialism and calls on viewers to engage in Trauerarbeit, the work of mourning (Baer 2018: 100–102). By animating the archive, it summons the ghosts of Germany’s forgotten colonial past to haunt contemporary viewers (Demos 2013). The visual inventiveness and conceptual depth of Black Box allow it to hold up to the exhaustive attention paid to it by critics and art historians in Europe and North America, but it is worth noting that part of its success derives from how well the artwork meets the expectations of those audiences (Baer 2018; Buikema 2016; de Jong 2018; Dubin 2007; Kentridge and Villaseñor 2006). It assumes a societal amnesia against which it can perform “acts of remembering” (Enwezor 2008: 47). However, as Kevin Brazil notes, “For something to be rediscovered in a present, it first must be assumed to belong to a past, because only then can it serve as a reminder of what a present has forgotten” (2020). Assuming that the genocide is forgotten, thus allowing it to be rediscovered via contemporary art, is a privilege of the former colonizer, not the colonized. Likewise, taking written documents or photographic images to be the primary evidence of the genocide assumes a Western archive. While these assumptions are reasonable given the German patron and primarily non-Namibian audience for Black Box, they should not be taken as universal. Recent artworks made with Namibian viewers in mind engage with how the genocide is remembered, by whom, and why. They go “beyond the rhetoric of revelation” (Brandt 2020: 123). A brief synopsis of the events of 1904–1908 and how different constituencies frame them helps to position these artworks within the contemporary politics of memory in Namibia.