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Namibia: a massacre the world forgot
After Germany lost WWI and with it Namibia, its colonial crimes there were almost buried — until the efforts of the socialist GDR, who in 1974 sent JOHN GREEN undercover to document the nation's past and present struggles
Captured Herero and Nama prisoners circa 1904. The Germans massacred large numbers of the indigenous population: between 24,000-100,000 Hereros and 10,000 Nama were killed in the 20th century’s first genocide.
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
RAMZY BAROUD decries the rats of Gaza, the rodent and human type. Both abound as profiteering from tragedy reaches obscene levels
IF WE think about the toxic colonial legacy of European countries, we invariably think of Britain, Spain, France or Belgium — but who knows anything about German colonialism? That will certainly be true for many, at least before they read the recent novel, After Lives by last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, who highlights the brutality of German colonialism in Tanganyika.
Germany, just like other colonising nations, has scrupulously evaded examining its colonial past or attempting to come to terms with it.
Before its defeat in World War I, Germany held colonies in what today are 14 separate countries in Africa and among them was South-West Africa (present day Namibia). German South-West Africa had been a colony of the German empire from 1884 until 1915.
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