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Namibia: Ovaherero Community Urges Action Against Desecration of Ancestral Graves At Swakopmund Heritage Site

todayOctober 4, 2024 3

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The Ovaherero community is concerned about the continued desecration of ancestral graves at a heritage site at Swakopmund.

Community members are accusing both the Swakopmund municipality and developers of disregarding the historical significance of the land where their ancestors’ remains lie.

Ovaherero Traditional Authority (OTA) paramount chief Mutjinde Katjiua said this while speaking at a genocide commemoration event at Swakopmund yesterday.

“We are standing on one of the many dumping grounds of the remains of our ancestors who died in the Swakopmund concentration camp. The size of this sacred ground has shrunk over the years as housing development has encroached on the graves,” he said.

Katjiua said the row of houses at the northern side of the area are built on these graves.

He said more than 2 600 people were either murdered, starved, or worked to death and dumped in shallow graves at the site.

“This is a gross desecration of the sanctity of the souls of our ancestors and a deliberate attack on the memory of the genocide,” he said.

The event marked the anniversary of the extermination order German colonial leader Lothar von Trotha issued on 2 October 1904, calling for the annihilation of the Ovaherero people.

This order led to the systematic slaughter of thousands of Ovaherero and Nama between 1904 and 1908, in what is now known as the Ovaherero-Nama genocide.

Katjiua said for German people, these cemeteries simply represent the culmination of their successful campaign to exterminate the Ovaherero and Nama people.

“The intergenerational wealth built from this land, the mineral resources and livestock they expropriated from our ancestors, the wealth further generated through slave labour and blood of our ancestors all represent the undue wealth accrued to Germany and its citizens at our expense – the genocide victims,” he said.

Katjiua criticised the Namibian government, stating that not a single government official has ever paid tribute to the victims of the genocide at the various sites where the atrocities were committed or where the remains of the victims are.

“The absolute disregard of places like Ozombu zOvindimba and Hornkranz, where the Ovaherero and Nama extermination orders were issued, respectively, epitomises the government’s denialist posture towards these crimes which continue to haunt the Ovaherero and Nama people to this day,” Katjiua said.