ABSTRACT
This chapter describes aspects of the commemorative practices centered on the funerary regimes of leaders who participated in the colonial war in southern Namibia to demonstrate the genealogy of these practices in Namibia and their iteration in Berlin in 2011. Drawing from Joan Dayan's work on vodou as embodied practices of multi-vocal and layered productions of Haitian history, the chapter also describes these commemorative practices as "rituals of history". The contestations around reburials in Namibia were also foreground by negotiations for the repatriation of bodies found still unburied in institutions in Germany. The use of particular evidentiary regimes resulted in a process steeped in the disciplines of racial science, despite the acts of translation during the handing-over ceremony and the Namibian delegation's reassertion of alternate systems of relations with the bodies at Charite. The significance of the repatriation of bodies was marked by a protracted struggle for the acknowledgment of genocide in Namibia.
