David Olusoga on The Kaiser’s Holocaust – Faber & Faber Blog
▻https://www.faber.co.uk/blog/david-olusoga-on-the-kaisers-holocaust
In The Kaiser’s Holocaust, David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen give us the unknown story of the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in Germany’s forgotten African empire – an atrocity that foreshadowed the Nazi genocides. It’s an important book and a fascinating – and often grim – read. Here is David Olusoga introducing it, putting the events into a wider context.
The story of the extermination of the Herero and Nama was not so much forgotten as deliberately written out of official history. It is a story that was entombed, initially by the German colonial authorities and later by the South Africans who replaced them. In the decades after the genocide, up until the end of South African rule and the birth of modern Namibia in 1990, no group with any power in the country had any vested interest in the story being exhumed.
