ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how women have been represented in Namibia’s national memorialisation initiatives as well as in the demands for reparations from Germany. It explores how narratives of the Ovaherero/Nama genocide often neglect the gendered experiences of women or reduce women’s roles to those of victims and/or nurturers. To understand the gendered dimensions of the genocide, it is important to understand how race and patriarchy intersected at that time. The competing narrative is a continuation of pre-war and conflict imagery, in which indigenous men are portrayed as warring, rebellious, and vicious, whereas the German settlers were merely acting in self-defence against these ‘savages’. The traumatic legacy of the genocide inevitably shaped the lives of those who survived the concentration camps. The physical and psychological torture experienced by Ovaherero and Nama women in these concentration camps was exacerbated by sexual violence and assault, often referred to in missionary documentation as 'dirty business'.
