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Memory in the Body

One conversation which might take place at the fire involves explaining to children physical, bodily markers of an elder’s or ancestor’s intimate involvement with Germans in the past. Several individuals told me they had learned about their ancestors’ experiences in such ways. Certainly, physical features speak to an individual’s past and life experiences. They reflect parentage, any past injury, nutrition, and daily habits. Bodies may symbolically or physically capture some aspect of past trauma when memories are inscribed on bodies as physical traits or wounds.26 Such physical markers transmit and reproduce memory of physical and psychological traumas. In a number of different modes, bodies then constitute sites of memory much like those proposed by Pierre Nora (1989).

Physical traits contribute to various socio-cultural identities (race, class, caste, ethnicity), both those that individuals claim and those that are applied by others. For many Namibians, skin tone is one physical feature widely understood to signify cultural affiliation. For example, one acquaintance explained that due to his lighter skin color he doesn’t fit in

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with either the German or Herero community although he lives with Ovaherero. Individually, one’s physical traits may visibly link one to ancestors and siblings, but they may also

highlight difference from rather than connection to one’s affinal relatives or ethnic

community. Adopted children, for example, may feel they do not belong when they or others point out physical traits dissimilar to parents or siblings. Similarly, some Ovaherero

recognize traits in themselves or others that are understood to be abnormal, markers of their ancestors’ unusual experiences or even results of physical traumas. In themselves, these markers constitute a sort of physical memory of injury and social suffering quite apart from any explanatory narratives.

In addition to problems of identity and belonging, some Herero children born of sexual relations between Herero women and German men during the colonial period were effectively fatherless. One man explained that his Herero mother loved his German father, but that because his father’s death effectively dissociated him from ties with his German family, he has no paternal kin to rely on for help. His experience with a German father was different from most whose biological fathers did not serve the social role of a father. Indeed because of marriage laws in the colonies based on concerns for the purity of German blood, nearly all children born of Herero-German relationships grew up with their mothers as Ovaherero (Wildenthal 1997). Particularly for people who practice double descent, the absence of a paternal lineage has significant cultural and economic consequences. Indeed, one argument that Riruako’s group employed to justify reparations from Germany is that the Herero community has had to bear the financial burden of children born of such sexual relations.

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“Blood,” for Ovaherero, is another trope of memory situated in bodies. Ovaherero estimated, for example, the percentage of the Namibian Herero population believed to have “German blood” or made such claims about themselves or their children. People do not connect blood with phenotypic traits; however, blood and cultural identity are typically understood to be overlapping traits.27 For example, a mother reported of conversations with her children: “They will ask, ‘why do we have German blood when we’re Herero?’” She explained that the status of her children’s blood means that it’s particularly important for them to know the past, the context in which they came to have German blood (traced through their father’s family). While having German blood does not preclude one from being Herero, it may have social implications.

One man whose mother was Herero and father German described being treated differently by others because of his mixed blood.

Most Hereros know about it, know we’re just thrown away. Those “two bloods.” People know that. Others would call, ‘hey, German kid!’ I was treated well, but they joked about omutwa – not real Herero – jokes. It’s the truth and I don’t feel anything. All my descendents are omutwa.

He described feeling that other Ovaherero did not accept him as being Herero, especially when he was young. The label “Omutwa” was not merely something that described him as someone other than Herero, but it also shaped the cultural practices in which he, and others like him, was allowed to participate. Rules about keeping and going to the Holy Fire were changed28 to accommodate children of German-Herero parentage because otherwise Omutwa were not permitted access to this important spiritual and cultural practice.29 I will return to the subject of rules about the Holy Fire below. Here, what is important is that German parentage, even if a result of a loving relationship, affects a person’s possibility of participating fully in Herero society.

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Blood not only symbolizes a form of embodied memory, it also represents a body’s genetic history beyond phenotypic traits. Some argue that German blood manifests in “White diseases” among the Herero population. Several Ovaherero held large placards at the

Ohamakari commemoration announcing their inheritance of diseases from German ancestors. They suggest that they face an abnormal burden by suffering from such diseases which are thought to be alien to Ovaherero.

The contexts in which some Ovaherero came to have lighter skin tone, German blood, “White diseases,” or even the very sexual relationships from which these marked traits developed were not recalled so vociferously, however. Judging from standards and laws at the time regarding racial mixing, most such sexual encounters were likely what would now be understood as rape. Indeed, rape has frequently accompanied war and colonialism.30 Individuals and families, especially women, bear very personal effects of power. For

Ovaherero such relations had important implications for reckoning kinship; however, I heard little about the physical or psychological trauma of such sexual acts.31

Scholarship on memory of mass rape in other contexts has found that such violence is unlikely to be recalled in narrative forms. For example, Indian women find the act of

remembering rape committed during Partition dangerous, comparable even to poison’s effects on a body. Consequently, Veena Das explains, they avoid directly discussing such memories.

This silence [surrounding women’s experiences during the Partition] was achieved either by the use of language that was general and metaphoric but that evaded specific description of any events so as to capture the particularity of their experience, or by describing the surrounding events but leaving the actual experience of abduction and rape unstated (Kleinman et al. 1997:84).

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While silences or haziness in the remembering of traumatic events are common (Shaw 2002, Reisberg and Hertel 2004), rape may be additionally tabooed. Indeed, among Ovaherero, sexuality in general is not a topic openly discussed with elders.

One acquaintance, who regarded herself as a cultural historian, though she had not been educated as such, explicitly sought to create a history of Herero women. She told me about her female relatives’ memories of forced sexual relations with Germans. Her aunt, who was “half White,” talked about asking other women about their light complexions.

Asked, why are you light complexion? Most said it was an issue of “skirt up!” That’s what our parents told us. “Rock hoch!” (Skirt up!) Whether you work for a White alone or a German with his wife. Then comes boss. After nine months you have a baby.

This account is remarkable in that from the words used to describe these experiences, one might not recognize that it is rape to which she alludes. The experience is phrased as though sex with one’s boss were a regular, routine job task. Notably, these memories of rape

emerged while discussing skin tone, not violence or sexuality. Even in public discussions framing the case for genocide, rape merely has been added to a list of criminal acts for which Germany is charged, but rape is not publicly discussed.

Such embodiments of past events, often prompts for narrated understandings of the past, produce their own sort of psychological trauma for Ovaherero, especially for marked individuals. In their edited volume, Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (1997) name such phenomena social suffering, the pain inflicted on human experience by power. While many Herero individuals told me “we are suffering” by living on marginal land with few sources of wealth, conditions attributed to the German colonial era, the notion of social suffering also has been used to authorize requests for restorative justice.

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