Why The Herero Of Namibia Are Suing Germany For Reparations
Twice the targets of systematic racism — an "extermination order" by German colonizers, then brutal segregation by South Africa — they're still fighting to regain what they lost.
Mbakumua Hengari grew up in the 1970s on a farm in southern Africa, in what is today the nation of Namibia. The arid soil around his family's homestead was sandy and grassy, a poor fit for staple crops, so he and seven siblings subsisted on a modest herd of cattle, sheep and goats.
Hengari blames systematic racism for his family's poverty — and he and his people, the Herero, are still fighting for justice.
The first crisis came in 1904. German colonists waged a brutal war of extermination — now considered a precursor to the Holocaust.
Then came apartheid. A half century after the Herero genocide, the all-white government of South Africa extended
