Mari Serebrov's Blog

Like a river or life itself, a good story flows naturally, its current carrying readers to forgotten lands, times past, or places unimagined. It introduces them to characters they’ll never forget, opens their eyes to the possible and the impossible, and fills them with hope and sadness.

Just as no two people see the exact same rainbow, no two people will experience a book in quite the same way. Thus, a reader completes the story the author began.

I was reminded of that when I did a Facetime interview about my historical novel Mama Namibia with a book club in southern California this past summer. One of the club members asked me about my favorite supporting characters in the book. After answering, I turned the question back to them. It was fascinating to see how the characters spoke differently to individual readers.

I see the same thing in reviews of Mama Namibia: Based on True Events, the story of a young Herero girl who survived alone in the desert after her family was killed in a German ambush during the first genocide of the 20th century.

Different passages and scenes in the novel speak to readers based on their own back stories. For instance, the story may echo with family history for a Herero journalist. For first-time tourists visiting Namibia, it can help them see the landscape in a new way. For a mother whose son is with the Peace Corps in Namibia, it can help her imagine his adventures.

For lovers of history, it opens the curtain on a tragedy too long denied. And for those who recognize that yesterday shapes tomorrow, it begs the question, “What if this genocide had not been ignored at the time?”

So why spend years writing a novel like Mama Namibia and doing a Facebook blog about a genocide that happened more than a century ago?

First of all, the 1904 genocide in what was then German South-West Africa is not ancient history. Its victims were the parents and grandparents of people who are alive today.

The consequences of that genocide continue to haunt the descendants, impacting their daily lives economically and emotionally. The extermination of 85 percent of the Herero and half the Nama made them a minority in the country that was to become Namibia. While they have a small voice in the government today, their communities often get the short end of government spending on schools, roads, and other improvement projects so desperately needed for economic growth.

Some of them still live in exile in Botswana and Angola. Many of those who live in Namibia remain landless because the land of their ancestors was taken by others.

German officials continue to marginalize the descendants of the genocide survivors by refusing to meet with Herero and Nama leaders to discuss an official apology and meaningful reparations. Instead, they insist on negotiating only with Namibian officials who are from tribes not targeted by the genocide.

And Germany has yet to make a comprehensive effort to find all the bones of Herero and Nama genocide victims that were taken there as souvenirs or for “scientific” research. While some skulls have been returned to Namibia, many more are packed away in German universities, museums, and, perhaps, attics. They need to be buried in the land of their ancestors.

Secondly, the 1904 genocide provides context for other genocides. It shows that the Holocaust didn’t happen in a vacuum or at the whims of one monstrous man. It also highlights the need for other nations to stop a genocide in the making instead of waiting to punish the guilty years after thousands or millions of innocent people have been slaughtered. And it reveals that if a country doesn’t have to answer for its national crimes, it – and other countries – will repeat them.

If genocide is to end, we all must become more aware of the past and of what’s happening in other parts of the world today. And we must not turn away. The danger is that with every genocide we deny or ignore, we grant permission for the next.

It is a way of stripping others of their humanity, of justifying our own depravity, of condoning our personal brutality and then blaming the victim.

It defends our greed, frees us from self-control and makes others responsible for our failings.

Racism is an attempt to silence the guilt so we can look in the mirror. It enables us to honor the memory of our ancestors who covered their own ugliness with a cloak of “civilized reasoning.”

We think of racism as skin deep. But in truth, it is so much more.

Racism seizes any feature that can be used to define “other” and create a target for the hatred and violence that live within us.

Its focus is often color. But it can also be gender, religion, ethnicity, disability, height, the length of a nose, hair texture, education or status – anything that allows us to see ourselves as “more human,” “more civilized” or “more deserving” than our neighbor.

Racism, after all, is just an excuse.

IT IS TOO EASY for those who have committed genocide to go on with their lives, forgetting the past and justifying their actions.

IT IS TOO EASY for them to embrace their children, filling their heads with romanticized stories of the “good old days.”

IT IS TOO EASY to point the finger of blame at their victims, saying they deserved to die because they were inferior, uncivilized, a barrier to progress or just too “other.”

IT IS TOO EASY to convince themselves that it wasn’t their fault, that they bear no personal responsibility.

And when the genocide is forgotten or ignored, IT IS TOO EASY for them to believe that it never happened or is buried so deep in the past that it no longer matters.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE for those who survive a genocide to go back to life as usual, as they are haunted by the past and the questions of why that will never be answered.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE for them to fully face the future as they embrace their children. The memories they share will be few, as the horror and loss are too painful for words.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to point a finger of blame at those responsible when the world refuses to admit that a genocide even occurred.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to convince themselves that they bear no guilt for surviving when so many others died.

And when the genocide continues to be forgotten or ignored, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE for them to believe it will ever end, for each denial is another bullet piercing their heart.

The most basic of human rights is the right to live. It is fitting that the day before Human Rights Day is the anniversary of the signing, on Dec. 9, 1948, of the UN’s Genocide Convention.

That convention recognizes genocide as a crime committed against members of a national, ethnic or religious group solely because they are members of that group. Such crimes stem from an intent to exterminate a particular group.

There is no motive that can justify genocide. It can grow out of greed, hatred, a sense of entitlement, or political or religious convictions.

Genocide is when “you are being killed not for what you have done, but for who you are,” Adama Dieng, the UN Secretary-General’s special adviser on prevention of genocide, said this past week as he emphasized the need to end genocide while paying tribute to the millions of men, women and children who were victims of past and current genocides.

“We owe to them and to ourselves and future generations to realize a world free of genocide,” he said.

The anniversary of the signing of the convention was recognized elsewhere around the world, especially among Armenians who are still haunted by the memory of the 1915 Armenian massacre by the Turks. That massacre has yet to be recognized as genocide.

It is a struggle the Armenians share with the Nama and Herero who are still fighting for global recognition of the genocide they endured in 1904 at the hands of the Germans.

To keep the past – and the victims – from being forgotten, the Armenian National Assembly is proposing declaring Dec. 9, from here on out, the Day of Remembrance of victims of all genocides.

Every “war comes to an end when the page of the past is turned and when the guilty repent," Vadim Rabinovich, president of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress and co-founder of the European Jewish Parliament, said in speaking in favor of the Day of Remembrance.

There are those who don’t want to remember. Who don’t want to repent the sins of their ancestors. They say the only way to move forward is to forget the past, that yesterday doesn’t matter. That was a different time, and the world was a different place then.

But yesterday teaches tomorrow. If the genocides of the past continue to be ignored, denied or forgotten, they will give birth to more genocides in the future.

While we can’t allow ourselves to be crippled by events of the past, we must recognize our history for what it was in order to heal and embrace tomorrow. And we must learn from it.

As Dieng said, no country is immune from genocide.

“When they died, their bodies were thrown into the great river for the sharks. Then they were forgotten. As if they had never lived.” – Kukuri, in Mama Namibia

These are Kukuri’s words to Jahohora as he tells her about the thousands of Herero and Nama who died in the German concentration camp at Shark Island in South West Africa more than a century ago. For the victims of this death camp, there were no gravestones, no monuments and no descendants to remember their names.

We can never give the genocide victims back their names. But we can remember them – as well as the victims of other genocides – in stories, in song, through poetry, on stage and on film.

In telling their stories, we give voice to their humanity. In grieving for them, we mourn for their past and the future they were denied. And in remembering them, we break the silence that allows genocides to continue unchecked.

This is the purpose of Mama Namibia, a historical novel about the first genocide of the 20th century.

“There are German leaders, like August Bebel, who speak out against the dangers of a racial pride that flows forward from the Crusades to be fueled by today’s ‘science’ of eugenics. A pride that’s the foundation of a national policy that says all other people, by divine right, are to be valued only for their service to the German empire. And if their best service is extermination, so be it.
Mari Serebrov
“This time it was the Herero and the Namas. How do I know that, in the future, it won’t be the Jews again?” – Kov, in "Mama Namibia"

Less than 40 years after the Kaiser unleashed the first genocide of the 20th century in German South West Africa, that same racial pride fueled the Holocaust.

Bent on erasing the Jews, the Nazis employed many of the techniques used to eradicate the Herero and Nama – death camps, starvation, medical experiments, rape, and denial. And just as it did in 1904, the rest of the world looked away.

Today, the nations of the world honor the victims of the Holocaust through monuments, museums, and organized remembrances. But they have forgotten the victims of Germany’s other genocide.

“Mama Namibia” seeks to change that. The first novel to tell the Herero story, “Mama Namibia” shows the human cost of genocide through the eyes of a 12-year-old Herero girl and Kov, a Jewish doctor serving in the German army.