The German national narrative around colonialism is one of minimization, if not of outright denial. Such a minimization is supported by the exceptionalization of the Shoah, and the consensus around the idea that the German state has been making the proper amends around its genocidal history. If the 1904-1908 genocide of the Nama and the Ovaherero in present-day Namibia is acknowleged, it is often presented as temporally and spatially distant, in comparison with the temporal and spatial proximity with the Nazi holocaust. Fatou Sillah and Abdur Rehman Zafar challenge such a narrative and allow us to perceive the ghosts of German colonialism, from Namibia to Papua-New-Guinea, as transcending a specific time or place.
We write these words from Bremen and Hamburg, two cities that are profoundly shaped by their roles as major colonial trading ports. As we think about colonial continuums, we do so in a surrounding that testifies to colonial violence. Walking through the Old Elbpark in Hamburg, we can never overlook the daunting stone statue of Otto von Bismarck, towering over the trees, casting its long gray shadow into the distance. The Chancellor is celebrated for unifying the German Empire in the 19th century after decades of war, and also hosted the Berlin Conference in 1884-1885 with the primary purpose of negotiating with other European colonizers about how to best carve up the African continent. When one considers the history of European colonial empires, Germany is often considered as a ‘lesser’ colonizer, if at all. An empire that lasted a ‘meager’ 30 years, beginning with the Berlin Conference and ending definitively with the ‘dispossession’ of colonial territories through the 1918 Treaty of Versailles, can hardly be considered worth mentioning, worth remembering.