Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
Aimé Césaire states in his Discourse on Colonialism that colonialism decivilizes the colonizer, brutalizes him, degrades him, "to awaken him to buried instinct, to covetous violence, race hatred, and moral relativism" as "universal regression" (p. 35). As Césaire observes: "the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treat him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal." (p. 41)
Almost in parallel to Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Césaire locates the roots of fascism in colonialism. For Arendt, colonialism as "laboratory of modernity" was the cradle of a mentality, which a few decades later culminated in the Holocaust. As Pascal Grosse pointed out, "by focusing on the implications of European colonialism for Europe itself", Arendt understood colonial regimes as the prototype of totalitarianism.
From the Omaheke to Gaza
Not by coincidence, Raphael Lemkin who initiated the Genocide Convention referred to the extermination strategy of the German empire in its colony South West Africa. As suggested by Dirk Moses in his Preface to Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, by "uncovering the colonial roots of the genocide concept itself", one can "operationalize Raphael Lemkin's original but ignored insight that genocides are intrinsically colonial and that they long precede the twentieth century".
While there is no direct route from Windhoek to Auschwitz, there is a trajectory linking the German colonial mindset to mass extinction by the Nazi regime. A mindset which, to a certain extent, remains virulent in German society. It is alive - albeit in decline - in colonial amnesia. As I document in The Long Shadow of German Colonialism colonial mentality has not ceased with the end of colonial rule.
The onslaught on the people in Gaza evokes memories and analogies to forms of the first genocide of the 20th century in the German colony Southwest Africa. Then, the Ovaherero had retreated into the dry savannah of the Omaheke. It was cordoned off by German soldiers. An extermination order declared that no prisoners were to be taken. Those seeking refuge were either shot or driven back into the Omaheke, to die of hunger and thirst. Such forms of genocidal warfare then seem to be repeated now. And Germany is complicit by taking the sides of the perpetrators. A line from Death Fugue by Paul Celan (1920-1970), one of the most influential post-Holocaust German-Jewish poets born in the Romanian Bukovina region, comes to my mind: "death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue."
This constellation triggered a confrontation between the former colonizers and the former colonized: Namibia supported South Africa's claim against Israel in the International Court of Justice, while Germany announced itself to be a third party in defence of Israel 120 years after the beginning of the war in its colony, with no word in remembrance of this genocide. This provoked a statement by the late Hage Geingob, President of Namibia:
"The German Government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil. ... Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza."
Never again means never again
The reference to "Never again" in the dominant German discourse, an admonition by the survivors of Buchenwald, illustrates a perverted instrumentalization of this obligation. It justifies the destruction of Gaza and indiscriminate mass killings. This misguided obsession has its roots in the trauma of the Holocaust. It translates into the obfuscation that Germans have forfeited to criticize the state of Israel, equating its government with the Jewish people.
Germans have the audacity to denigrate those citizens in Israel and Jews in the diaspora, who are condemning the Israeli government's policy and crimes as self-hating, antisemitic Jews. This testifies in a tragically perverted form that colonial asymmetries, including mass violence of a genocidal nature, remain an endorsed practice. By elevating the Holocaust into a singularity, other genocides are degraded. The ranking claims that any comparison would apply relative terms to the Holocaust and is therefore in tendency antisemitic. This betrays logic, since such an absolute statement can only be made based on comparisons.
Such misguided notion of singularity downplays the trauma of other genocide victims. After all, for all those decimated by genocidal extermination strategies and their descendants, this is also singular. That an estimated two-thirds to three-quarters of the Ovaherero and one-third to half of the Nama did not survive the German onslaught is a unique trauma too. Disrespecting their experiences is not only morally despicable and dehumanizing, but another form of white supremacy. There is no European master narrative which is entitled to negotiate and thereby deny any similar experiences in the history of other people. "Never again" should indeed mean "never again".
In a talk show broadcasted on German television, Deborah Feldman, while addressing Germany's vice chancellor Robert Habeck, insisted, "that there is only one legitimate lesson from the Holocaust. And that is, the absolute unconditional defence of human rights for all. These values lose their legitimacy when we apply them conditionally." And as Pankaj Mishra stressed, "if there is any bumper sticker lesson to be drawn from the Shoah, it is 'Never Again for Anyone'."
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Commenting on "comparison controversies", Michael Rothberg demands that historical comparisons must be taken seriously. They should be evaluated with what he calls an "ethics of comparison". This serves as a reminder, that cultivating the singularity of the Holocaust risks including a singularity of German remorse - at the expense of all other victims of mass violence executed by Germans.
The selectivity we are confronted with while witnessing the intentional mass starvation of the Palestine civilian population as a war crime is the notorious conditionality of a white supremacist perspective, claiming the commanding heights in global asymmetric power relations since the days of colonialism and imperialism. What Aimé Césaire already categorically stated remains a challenge and task in the fight for humanity: "Away with racism! Away with colonialism! They smack too much of barbarism."
*This piece is the first in a series of blog pieces published as part of our War on Gaza as a Discourse on Colonialism series that kicked off in mid-March 2024.
Henning Melber is an Associate of the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies/School of Advanced Study at the University of London, and Extraordinary Professor at the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria and the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. The Long Shadow of German Colonialism is published in 2024 by Hurst.
