Paul T. Shipale (with inputs by Folito Nghitongovali Diawara Gaspar)
Why African leaders must confront colonial amnesia and the dependency within
In the architecture of global historical memory, not all suffering is remembered equally. Some tragedies are institutionalised through museums, films, academic systems, and international commemorations until they become part of humanity’s shared moral vocabulary. Others remain marginalised, acknowledged only occasionally and often without the same global urgency or emotional investment.
Among the most overlooked of these atrocities is the Herero and Nama genocide, carried out by Imperial Germany between 1904 and 1908 in present-day Namibia. Many historians regard it as the first genocide of the twentieth century. Yet despite its historical significance, it remains largely absent from global consciousness.
This silence is not accidental. It reflects a deeper reality about how power shapes historical memory. But for African leaders, the Namibian tragedy should provoke a second and more uncomfortable reflection: if colonial powers marginalised African suffering, why have postcolonial African states failed to fully recover, institutionalise and globalise their own histories?
That question matters because the struggle for Africa was never only territorial or economic. It was also a struggle over memory, narrative and civilisational legitimacy.
The genocide the world rarely discusses
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Germany intensified its colonial project in Namibia, then known as German South West Africa. Indigenous communities, particularly the Herero and Nama peoples, faced growing land dispossession, cattle seizures, forced labour and racial domination under settler colonial rule. Resistance emerged. Germany responded with exterminatory violence.
Under the command of Lothar von Trotha, German forces issued explicit extermination orders. Survivors were driven into the desert, water sources were blocked, and thousands died from thirst, starvation, exhaustion, and disease. Those who survived were imprisoned in concentration camps such as Shark Island, where forced labour, medical experimentation, and systematic abuse became instruments of colonial control.
The objective was not merely military suppression. It was elimination. Long before the horrors of Nazi extermination camps shocked Europe, colonial Africa had already become a laboratory for racial hierarchy, dehumanisation, and organised mass violence.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this genocide is not simply that it happened but that it unfolded within a global order that largely normalised colonial violence against Africans. European imperial expansion was presented as a “civilising mission”, masking conquest, racial domination, and economic extraction beneath the language of progress. Violence against colonised populations was treated not as a contradiction of European civilisation but as part of its imperial logic.
This historical reality forces an uncomfortable conclusion that the African suffering occupied a lower position within the moral imagination of empire. When atrocities occurred in Europe, they were often treated as ruptures of civilisation. When similar atrocities occurred in Africa, they were rationalised as a colonial necessity.
The implications of that moral hierarchy continue to shape global historical consciousness today.
The politics of memory and the hierarchy of suffering
The relative obscurity of the Namibian genocide reveals that historical memory is not shaped solely by the scale of suffering. It is shaped by geopolitical power. Memory is institutionalised through educational systems, publishing industries, museums, cinema, research institutions, diplomacy, and media influence. For centuries, Africa occupied a structurally subordinate position within these systems. Colonial powers documented Africa extensively while often denying Africans authorship over their own historical narratives.
As a result, colonial atrocities in Africa were archived without being morally centred. This imbalance is visible across the continent, such as in the atrocities of Congo under Leopold II, the violence of French colonialism in Algeria, British detention camps during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, Portuguese colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique, and the long brutality of apartheid in South Africa. Africa possesses one of the richest anti-colonial histories in modern civilisation, yet it remains insufficiently institutionalised globally and often even within Africa itself.
This is where the reflection becomes urgent for African leadership.
The tragedy is not only that colonial powers buried African suffering. It is also that many postcolonial African states failed to systematically recover and institutionalise their own historical memory after independence. Decades after liberation, many African school systems still marginalise African resistance history. Few world class museums dedicated to colonial atrocities exist on the continent. African film industries rarely receive sufficient support to tell African historical stories on a global scale. Pan-African historical consciousness has weakened in many political spaces.
In some cases, African political elites became more invested in maintaining state power than cultivating historical consciousness. This has consequences. Historical amnesia weakens national cohesion. It produces shallow patriotism disconnected from civilisational memory. It encourages ideological dependency and makes societies more vulnerable to external narrative domination. A continent that does not preserve its historical memory risks losing not only its past, but also its strategic confidence about the future.
Memory sovereignty and genuine independence
Political independence without narrative independence remains incomplete sovereignty. True sovereignty is not merely control over borders, flags, or institutions. It also involves the power to define national memory, shape historical consciousness, and transmit civilisational identity across generations. Without memory sovereignty, foreign powers continue defining African history, African trauma remains internationally peripheral, and younger generations become disconnected from the struggles that produced independence itself.
The battle for memory is therefore not symbolic. It is geopolitical. Nations that control historical narratives shape global legitimacy, diplomatic influence, and cultural power. Nations that neglect memory often become consumers of external narratives about themselves.
Germany has formally recognised the Herero and Nama genocide in recent years. While this acknowledgment represented an important symbolic step, debates over reparations remain deeply contested. Many descendants of victims argue that reparative measures have been insufficient and that affected communities were inadequately represented in negotiations. Yet regardless of the limitations of European responses, African leaders must confront a broader reality that Africa cannot rely on former colonial powers to preserve African historical dignity. The responsibility for recovering, preserving, and globalising African memory belongs first to African institutions themselves.
This requires long-term investment in continental museums of colonial history, Pan-African research institutions, curriculum reform centred on African historical agency, film and documentary industries, digital historical archives, academic exchanges across African universities, and annual continental commemorations of anti-colonial struggles. The goal is not to cultivate perpetual victimhood. It is to restore historical continuity, civilisational confidence, and political consciousness. No society can project itself confidently into the future while remaining disconnected from the realities of its past.
The economic and psychological architecture of dependency beyond memory
Yet memory alone is insufficient. The silence surrounding colonial genocides is one symptom of a deeper malady: the systematic erosion of African confidence in African capability. Colonialism did not only extract land, labour, and resources. It also extracted historical visibility. And it reshaped consciousness. Entire generations were educated to administer systems they did not design, pursue models they did not create, and measure success according to external standards.
This psychological dimension of dependency remains one of the greatest obstacles to African transformation. And it is reinforced daily by an economic architecture that has never been fully decolonised.
Every year, Africa is celebrated in conferences, diplomatic summits, and development reports filled with familiar language: potential, resilience, emerging markets, the continent of the future. Yet beneath these polished expressions lies a more uncomfortable reality: for centuries, Africa has helped sustain global power while being denied the full benefits of its own labour, land, resources, and humanity.
To reflect honestly on Africa today requires rejecting two equally dangerous illusions.
The first is Afropessimism – the idea that Africa is condemned to failure.
The second is sentimental triumphalism – the belief that Africa will inevitably rise simply because of demographics, natural resources, or historical pride. History does not reward emotion. History rewards organised power, strategic vision, productive capacity, institutional discipline, and political consciousness.
Africa’s tragedy has never been a lack of wealth. The continent possesses immense mineral reserves, agricultural potential, strategic waterways, cultural influence, and one of the youngest populations on Earth. From cobalt and oil to rare earth minerals and fertile land, Africa remains central to the functioning of the modern global economy. Yet the deeper tragedy is that Africa entered modernity through conquest rather than through self-determined development.
Colonialism did not simply occupy territory. It reorganised African economies to serve external centres of power. Railways, ports, administrative systems, and borders were largely designed to extract wealth outward rather than develop societies inward. Independence changed flags and national anthems, but in many cases the economic architecture of dependency remained intact.
The result is visible across the continent. Many African states continue exporting raw materials while importing finished products at far greater value. Economies remain vulnerable to commodity fluctuations, debt dependency, foreign financing, and external policy influence. Political sovereignty exists formally, but economic dependence often limits strategic autonomy. No continent can outsource its industrialisation, import its food, depend excessively on foreign security structures and still claim full sovereignty.
This is not merely an economic problem. It is a civilisational question.
The unfinished liberation: From survival to organised power
And yet, despite everything, Africa survives. Africa survived slavery, partition, colonial exploitation, assassinations of liberation leaders, structural adjustment programmes, proxy wars, debt regimes, and decades of intellectual humiliation that taught Africans to question themselves before competing with the world. The continent survived because ordinary African workers, farmers, mothers, traders, teachers, artists, engineers, and youth carried societies forward even when institutions failed them.
That survival deserves recognition. But survival alone is not victory. The defining question of the twenty-first century is whether Africa will remain primarily a supplier of labour, minerals, and markets for stronger powers or become a coherent geopolitical and civilisational force capable of defining its own destiny. Africa does not merely possess potential.
Africa carries historical responsibility. The continent that gave humanity some of its earliest civilisations cannot remain structurally dependent in an age defined by artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, digital finance, biotechnology, and geopolitical competition. Africa cannot continue exporting raw materials while importing dependency disguised as partnership.
The next phase of African liberation will require more than symbolic nationalism or emotional Pan-Africanism. It will require strategic unity. Pan-Africanism must evolve beyond slogans and ceremonial gatherings into coordinated economic and political action at the continental industrial corridors, controlled African financial institutions, integrated energy systems, scientific and technological cooperation, continental digital infrastructure, food sovereignty, military coordination where necessary, and stronger intra-African trade.
Political fragmentation remains one of Africa’s greatest structural weaknesses. A divided Africa negotiates from weakness in a world increasingly shaped by large blocs and strategic alliances. But external domination alone cannot explain Africa’s condition. Corruption, authoritarianism, elite capture, weak institutions, ethnic manipulation, and short-term political thinking have also undermined development from within. Honest reflection requires moral courage. Anti-imperial analysis loses credibility when it refuses to confront internal failures.
The great African liberation thinkers understood this balance clearly. Kwame Nkrumah warned that political independence without economic control would remain incomplete. Thomas Sankara argued that dignity required self-reliance, discipline, and political courage. Julius Nyerere believed development must serve human beings rather than statistics. Frantz Fanon understood that liberation demanded psychological transformation as much as political change. Steve Biko reminded Africans that the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. Their message remains unfinished.
Stop asking for permission
Africa must stop seeing itself as a late student of modernity and rediscover itself as a civilisation interrupted, not a civilisation absent. This distinction matters profoundly. A civilisation interrupted can rebuild. A civilisation convinced of its inferiority becomes permanently dependent.
The world itself is changing rapidly. The post-Cold War order is fragmenting. New powers compete aggressively for influence across African ports, minerals, telecommunications networks, energy infrastructure and consumer markets. This competition creates opportunities, but also serious dangers. Africa risks once again becoming a strategic battleground where foreign powers negotiate influence while Africans negotiate survival.
The continent cannot afford another century of reactive politics. What Africa needs now is not pity, applause, or dependency packaged as development. It needs disciplined leadership, sovereign economic thinking, industrial policy, educational transformation, technological ambition, and citizens capable of demanding accountability beyond tribal loyalty or electoral theatre.
Africa’s educational systems must produce innovators rather than imitators. Its states must treat natural resources not merely as exports but as foundations for industrialisation. Its political culture must reward competence rather than patronage. Its intellectual class must recover the courage to imagine African futures beyond borrowed frameworks.
Above all, Africa must stop asking for permission to matter. Its future will not be gifted by global institutions, foreign investors, or geopolitical benefactors. It will be built painfully, unevenly and deliberately by Africans themselves.
The next liberation of Africa will not be fought primarily with rifles but with institutions, knowledge, industrial capacity, technological mastery, political courage, and continental discipline. The struggle for Africa was never only about controlling territory. It was also about controlling the story of humanity itself.
The silence surrounding the Herero and Nama genocide is recognised as such because it was quantitatively and qualitatively classified not simply as a war crime or a crime against humanity and not even a simple atrocity but a mass murder with the intention to wipe out entire communities, which should be linked to the Ghanaian initiative to declare slavery a crime against humanity, reflecting more than historical neglect. It reveals how global systems of power determine whose suffering becomes central to world consciousness. But the deeper challenge now belongs to Africa itself. Colonialism did not only extract African land, labour, and resources. It also extracted historical visibility. The unfinished task of African sovereignty is therefore not merely economic or political. It is intellectual and civilisational.
To remember Namibia fully is not simply an act of mourning. It is an act of strategic recovery. For African leaders, the lesson is clear: a continent that fails to preserve and institutionalise its own memory risks reproducing new forms of dependency, because historical amnesia weakens both sovereignty and self-understanding.
The question is no longer whether Africa has potential. The question is whether Africans are prepared to transform historical endurance into organised power and finally build civilisations strong enough to resist domination in all its modern forms.
That is the unfinished struggle. And it cannot wait.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of our employers or this newspaper. They represent our personal views as citizens and Pan-Africanists.
