‘The money is a token.’ Why Namibia’s peoples feel ignored by reparations.
Laidlaw Peringanda walks solemnly across the sand, where rocks mark the gravesites of victims killed and left unidentified in what is today considered the first genocide of the 20th century.
It was at this site, on the edge of the Namib Desert in Swakopmund, where Mr. Peringanda collapsed the first time he visited.
The genocide, carried out by Germans between 1904 and 1908 when they controlled the colony of South West Africa, was directed at the Herero and Nama people of modern-day Namibia.
Mr. Peringanda’s great-grandmother had told him stories about her time as a prisoner in a concentration camp in this coastal city. But those accounts – how their people’s traditions were stamped out and how their lands and way of life were stolen – suddenly became real in that moment in 2015. They ignited in him an activist’s drive for justice.
“Everything I do is to keep the memory of my family alive,” Mr. Peringanda says.
Ever since, he has been at the forefront of a truth-seeking mission, creating the Swakopmund Genocide Museum, pushing to have
