11INSIGHTCAPE TIMES MONDAY, JUNE 15, 2015

Equality of genocides neededONLY SOME OF THE PAST IS MEMORIALISED

T L Andrews

“HOW many Jews were killed inthe Holocaust?” I ask Kai Splitthoff,a video editor from Berlin. “Fourmillion… no, six million.” Theright answer is six. Splitthoffknows the answers to many of myquestions about the Holocaust.State education in Germanyensures everyone rehashes this his-tory many times during theirschool career – complete with avisit to a concentration camp.

Germany’s acknowledgement ofthe Holocaust stands in stark con-trast, however, to their silenceregarding their atrocities in Africa.I ask Splithoff what he knowsabout killings by Germans inNamibia. “Didn’t we have a colonythere?” he asks.

Most Germans do not knowabout the rebellion among theHerero and Nama of Namibia inthe early 1900’s. They also don’tknow the name of general Lotharvon Throtha who attempted toquash it by banishing the localpopulation to the Kalahari Desert.Those who tried to return wereshot. The few water holes in thearea were poisoned. An estimated60 000 people died. Historians saythis was the first genocide of the20th century.

There is very little about theseevents in German school textbooks,newspapers and even museums.Until now. The controversial re-con-struction of the Prussian royalpalace in Berlin promises toreshape public consciousness onthe issue. An Africa exhibition isplanned inside that will, amongother things, address the Namibiangenocide.

The exhibition raises importantquestions about public history.Who is remembered and why? Howdoes one even begin to broach thetelling of a history so brutal andwhat does doing so, or not, meanpolitically?

There is widespread reticenceby German authorities to recognisewhat happened in Namibia as geno-cide. Professor Juergen Zimmererof Hamburg University said: “Thenational government is hesitant toacknowledge it, I believe, primarilyout of fear of calls for reparations.”

Calling it a genocide and begin-ning to pay out would set a verycostly precedent for other Euro-pean powers with blood on theirhands, Zimmerer said. Ironically,the very same German parliamentthat refuses to acknowledge theNamibian genocide is pushingTurkey to acknowledge its own.

Germans do not really have“white guilt” as it is commonlyexperienced in the US, Britain orSouth Africa. The typical discom-fort that manifests when white people are confronted with theirprivilege.

Their consciences are clear asfar as Africa is concerned. Theextermination of the Jews has leftsuch a large mark of shame ontheir souls that there is almost nospace left for other guilt. “The Holo-caust overshadows almost every-thing else,” Zimmerer said. “Ger-mans are afraid that publiclycalling anything else a genocidewould relativise the Holocaust. Inthe collective German conscious-ness, genocide and the Holocaustare almost synonymous.”

According to Zimmerer thedenial also has an obvious racialdimension. That the white Jewishvictims are acknowledged whilethe black African ones are not ishard to overlook. But the racismgoes a level deeper.

While the consensus is that theHolocaust was thoroughly “bad”, abelief persists that colonialismserved humanity in some way, mitigating German compunctionon the issue. “The Western beliefthat it (colonialism) was a ‘civilis-ing mission’ is still present,” saidZimmerer.

Arguably more globally influen-

tial events took place in Berlin persquare kilometre than anywhereelse. The site on which the Prussianpalace is being built, for instance, iswhere the former East Germanparliament stood.

I walk 300m westwards fromthere to the Brandenburg Gate,where the Berlin wall divided a city,a nation, a continent and the world.

Around 200m from there I passHitler’s bunker. Today it is an unas-

suming parking lot. If it were notfor a small sign one would walkpast the place where Hitler devel-oped military strategies, hid fromthe allies and, finally, took his life.

I walk just 50m from the bunkerto reach Wilhelmstraße 77, whereEuropean powers met in 1884 tocarve up Africa.

The German Kaiser, Otto vonBismarck, hosted the meeting inwhich colonial powers arbitrarily

called “shotgun” for chunks of acontinent.

The building later ended up onthe communist side of the Berlinwall. There it was converted intoapartment blocks for the elite,“more equal” party members.Today it is a restaurant.

In a city saturated with historicsights how does one go about creat-ing an exhibition that, for many,will be their first impression of theGerman presence in Africa?

The curators of the exhibition,Paola Ivanov and Jonathan Fine,are aware of this large responsibil-ity and hope to make a lastingimpact while being careful to notperpetuate problematic images ofAfrica.

“It would be a big mistake if theonly impressions people got ofAfrica were the stereotypical ones.Africa as a victim, solely as a victim of mass murder, oppression,slavery etc. It is clear that we needto include these issues. But merelyrepresenting Africa as a victim isnot the goal of our exhibition,”Fine said.

The curators are planning toexhibit artefacts from the culturaland social history of diverseAfrican regions including Benin,Cameroon and parts of East Africa.“We would like to revise this imageof Africa as an ahistorical place,

isolated in time and space. We wantto present Africa as an agent withinglobal history,” Ivanov said.

Despite the exhibition’s broadaims, Ivanov realises there is inher-ent value in frankly addressingEurope’s mistreatment of Africa –in breaking silence.

“It is important to us to recountthe brutality that began in the 19thcentury with colonialism, whichformed the roots of the brutalitythat continued in the 20th century.We want to really show that it wasnot something peripheral that happened,” Ivanov said.

In that respect understandingcolonial Germany becomes key tounderstanding Nazi Germany.

“The idea of the ‘pure Germannation’ was first put into practicein Namibia,” said Zimmerer. “Itwas interrupted in 1915 but wastaken up again in 1933 in a new geo-graphical location and with newvictims.”

The racist root remains thesame and as such the Third Reichcan be seen as an extension of colo-nial thought.

The details of the exhibition arestill uncertain. It is only set to openin 2019. Till then the curators aregarnering inspiration from othermuseums and exhibitions that havedealt with genocide: specificallyJewish museums.

I walk just 50 more metres fromWilhelmstraße 77 to the “Memorialto the Murdered Jews of Europe,”commonly known as the Holocaustmemorial. It is an intimidatingstructure made up of concreteslabs that form a maze across a cityblock. The monoliths tower aroundme, causing me to lose my orienta-tion in a grey haze.

Intuitively I understand that myfeeling of being lost is just a glim-mer of the disorientation the Jews

must have felt being sent off to concentration camps in a Europegone mad.

The architect tasked withmemorialising this dreadful event,Peter Eisenman, intended to createthe experience of disorientation,choosing to avoid literal represen-tations in the design.

“The Holocaust is beyond repre-senting, beyond symbol,” Eisen-man said. Besides the feeling ofbeing lost, he is quick to add that hedid not have a set meaning or interpretation in mind when con-structing the memorial.

“I wasn’t trying to do anythingthat had to do with the preservationof memory, I was trying to do some-thing that would make an experi-ence in the present.”

I ask Eisenman how he woulddesign a memorial to the Hereroand Nama killed in Namibia. Heseems uncomfortable with thepremise of the question, wonderingwhether a memorial would be theright approach at all. He sighs,overwhelmed by all the massacresin history that would theoreticallyneed memorials.

“I don’t think we should becomea culture of memorials. We shouldbuild for the future, rather thanremember past.”

The fact remains that someparts of the past are memorialisedwhile others are not. Deciding whois worthy of remembering and whoshould be forgotten is a politicalendeavour.

Until Germany, and indeed therest of Europe, take an honest lookat the politics behind their selection and omission, theinequality among genocides willremain a manifestation of broaderinequality in the world.

● Andrews is a South African

journalist living in Berlin.

SOUTH AFRICA seems to have reached amoment of truth with its decision to allowSudan’s President Omar al-Bashir to visitthe country to attend the African Union(AU) summit in Sandton.

In doing so, South Africa disregardedits obligation to the InternationalCriminal Court (ICC), which has indictedBashir for war crimes, crimes againsthumanity and genocide.

The ANC government has beenbalancing on a knife-edge for a long timebetween its often competingcommitments to African solidarity and tointernational law – and South Africa’sown constitution. The dilemma has beenacutely illustrated by South Africa’sposition on the ICC. It was a foundingmember of the court. But as the AU hassteadily parted ways with the ICC, SouthAfrica has been stretched ever widerbetween its two competing interests.

After the ICC indicted Bashir, the AU,angered both by the court’s indictment ofa sitting African head of state and by afeeling that it was picking on Africans (allof its cases so far have been againstAfricans), issued an instruction to all AUmember states not to co-operate with thecourt. South African presidents attendingAU summits were implicitly party to thisdecision. And it was pretty much duringthe same period that the South Africangovernment twice stated publicly that itwould have to arrest Bashir under its ICCobligations, if he set foot in South Africa.The first time was when he was due tovisit for the first inauguration ofPresident Jacob Zuma in 2009 and thesecond time was in 2010 when due to visitfor the World Cup.

Then the ICC indicted Kenyan UhuruKenyatta – before he was elected president– for alleged complicity in orchestratingpolitical violence after his country’s 2007elections. That further infuriated the AU,which launched an attempt to persuadethe ICC to exempt sitting presidents. Thistime Zuma explicitly backed thatinitiative. But it failed.

Now we have seen Pretoria apparentlytaking sides clearly between the ICC andthe AU. That has large implications,diplomatically and constitutionally.Yesterday, the Pretoria High Court issuedan interim order to the authorities not toallow Bashir to leave South Africa,pending the court’s decision on whetherto issue an order to them to arrest Bashir.That latter judgment is expected today.

At time of writing, there were strongrumours that Bashir was likely to fleebefore the Pretoria High Court issued itsfinal order. Whatever happened, SouthAfrican officials were adamant that theywould neither prevent Bashir fromleaving nor arrest him if he tried to leave.In either case South Africa would be inbreach of its obligations to the UN, to theICC – and, more importantly, to its ownlaw. That introduces the most alarmingaspect of this saga, that Pretoria may haveprovoked something like a constitutionalcrisis by flouting its own law.

For the Rome Statute of the ICC hasbeen incorporated into South Africa’sown law as the ICC Implementation Actwhich imposes a domestic obligation tothe government to honour its ICCobligations. And if it ignores the interimorder of the Pretoria High Court, or anorder that might still come to arrestBashir, that would aggravate its offence.

Pretoria met the ICC in The Hague onFriday to try to persuade it to give SouthAfrica an exemption from its obligation toarrest Bashir, on the grounds that heshould enjoy diplomatic immunitybecause he was attending an AU summit.

The ICC rejected this request. Thisprompted the ANC NEC to say that theICC was no longer serving a usefulpurpose. This suggests that South Africamay pull out of the ICC. That would marka critical parting of the ways withinternational justice.

Criticalparting ofways withinternationaljustice?

I GOT zero for my first English Lan-guage oral test in Standard 6 back in1992. There was no way in hell I wasgoing to stand up in front of whitekids and speak in my terriblecoloured accent, mangled Englishgrammar and be the butt of jokes. Isimply refused, sitting at my desk,and the teacher let me off the hook,mercifully.

This fear of speaking with anaccent that might be mocked, ormaking grammatical mistakes thatmay result in boys laughing at me,haunted me during my first year atGraeme College Boys’ High. Model-C schools had basically just beenestablished and I had gone from anAfrikaans primary school to an Eng-lish school despite hardly being able

to speak the Queen’s language.Other boys from the township

had similar experiences. I’ll neverforget a confident boy debating withthe history teacher whether theteacher was wrong about how to sayand spell “barbed wire” or whetherthis black boy was right. I cringed atmy classmate’s mistake, but secretlywished I had his confidence to be soloudly wrong in front of the class.

Harold insisted that Mr Grantwas wrong and that the proper word

is “bob” and not “barbed”! I didn’tknow whose side to pick. Mr Grantwas very clever and my hero whointroduced me to academic philoso-phy at that young age. So he must beright, I thought. On the other hand,I knew that my dad is clever too and,like Harold, when dad erected newfencing at home he had called it “bobwire”’ too!

I was extremely competitive andset out to deal with this accent-embarrassment. I joined the debateclub for the sole purpose of learningto speak better English and to neverget zero again for a class oral. I wasalso determined to beat the whitekids at English, and that goal wasachieved by matric when I got theprize for English and a distinction in

the subject.But it was a long journey. Mrs

Whitehead, the librarian, helped meget rid of my flat vowels. At the backof the school library after schoolwas out. I had to attend lots ofdebate classes and tournaments.And I had to practise the colloquialspeech not found in books, like“sarmie”, “oke”, and other bits ofcultural grammar.

But, dammit, you can’t guaranteeyour real self won’t betray itselfwhen you’ve had too much to drinkor when you’re not on your accent-guard! It is tough worrying abouthow to speak like others whoseaccents seem to have social valueworth tapping into.

I’m recalling this horrible South

African reality of learning to speakthe grammar of whiteness in thelight of Willie Madisha mockingNaledi Pandor’s accent with hisbizarre “HONG! HONG! HONG!”-outburst in Parliament. The onlything scarier was the facial contor-tions he put on display while per-forming this poor imitation. It wasless funny than just bizarre, to behonest, and rather stupid looking.

It is also why those of us wholearnt the grammar of whitenessknew that there were no guaranteesthat such fluency would make youlook cool at home. I dreaded, in thedays before cellphones allowed you torun away from the scene to speak outof earshot, getting a call from whitefriends and being told by a cousin

there’s someone on the landline whowants to speak to me. That meanthaving to speak English in our bed-room where the phone was and mycousins or granny listening to mespeaking “like a white person”.Accent-policing is a cruel business.

What’s interesting both aboutWillie Madisha’s “HONG!’-madnessand the president’s now (in) famous“NKAAAAANDLA!”-mock of thosewho can’t pronounce African wordsaccurately is that mocking is clearlya South African sport across class,linguistic and political lines.

This is a dangerous game we areplaying. It represents the worstattempt to deflect attention awayfrom argument and on to the personwho is making the argument. It is

simply an obsession with playingthe person as substitute for evi-dence-based reasoning and logicaldeconstruction on what they have tosay. It aims to demean, to delegit-imise and to silence. It is cruel,ungenerous and contributes to animpoverished public discourse.

We have such a rich history oflaughing in the face of adversitythat one doesn’t want to reduce thespace for laughter.

But we must distinguish inno-cent laughter from poisonousattempts to halt conversation aboutserious matters like Nkandla.

When President Zuma mockedhis critics, he wasn’t aiming tomerely poke fun. He was rejectingaccountability. And that’s not funny.

Mocking those who can’t pronounce ‘Nkandla’ really rejecting accountability

INTIMIDATING: The Field of Stelae Holocaust Memorial is a 19 000m2 memorial covered with 2 711 concrete slabs located at the edge of Tiergarten. Picture: MARKO PRISKE

WINDOWON AFRICAPeter Fabricius

ON THATPOINTEusebius McKaiser

It is important to us to recount the brutality that began in the 19th centurywith colonialism, which forms the rootsof the brutality in the 20th century

TOUCHING: The Room of Dimensions has diaries, letters, postcardsand the last news received from the victims, written during thepersecution. Picture: MARKO PRISKE

LANDMARK: View of the Berlin Palace from the northwest side. Picture: BERLIN PALACE–HUMBOLDTFORUM FOUNDATION