oppressed (adj.) To be oppressed is to be exploited or systematically harmed by others. People who have no freedom are oppressed.
On Tuesday morning (2021.06.01), I was listening to BBC Global News podcast on my way to school and one piece of news, which was also the headline for that episode, grabbed my attention. It says, “Germany officially recognizes colonial-era Namibia genocide.” When I read the title at the beginning, I had no idea about Namibia, but I was curious about any kinds of genocides which had happened in the world. So, I googled it and found an interesting article from New York Times — A Forgotten Genocide: What Germany Did in Namibia, and What It’s Saying Now. Later on, I read another report from AJ +— Namibia’s Ovaherero, Nama slam exclusion from Germany deal. After reading these news reports, I sent those links to my teacher and told her that I’d like to have a short discussion on this topic.
When people mentioned the term “genocide,” usually we were talking about the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews during World War II. While speaking of “genocides in African countries,” it usually refers to Rwandan genocide. It occurred between 7 April and 15 July in 1994. Till today, we’ve still tried hard to read, to understand how this tragedy happened and to make compensations for that. However, the massacre of two ethnic groups in Namibia was totally a different story in the frame. I bet most of us in Taiwan have never heard of the tribe names before — Ovaherero and Nama. What’s more, Namibia is a country that is far away from Asia. In short, I wrote down some notes for further discussions and debates.
- Why did Germany eat humble pie “now”? What political and economic interests are involved between these two countries and their neighbors? (How international relations work here?) Nowadays, more and more white Europeans admitted the atrocities they’d committed in the past; however, they don’t really change anything. The previleged still take advantages of poor Africans. How do we expound on this?
- Could we tell the positive and negative sides of the apology like this? In fact, the ethnic groups- Herero and Nama, didn't fully accept the apology from Germany because they felt like not taking part in the reconciliation.
- How can we educate ourselves to spend more time caring about minorities who were silenced in the press? By learning history from the oppressed, we may acquire new perspectives to the repeated historic events and to mitigate the following harmful effects on the society.
I’m going to collect more information about genocides around the world as well as organize news pieces germane to massacre, genocide, carnage, slaughter, etc., for human rights education. If you’re interested in these topics, please leave comments below. I will also appreciate if you recommend some useful books or websites for doing research on this domain.
