Revolution in Uwe Timm’s Morenga: Towards a Comparative Analysis of the Herero and the German Democratic Republic Revolutions

Abstract

The intersection of history and memory makes us understand that history is a product of memory and memory cannot exist without history. Although scholarship has not given much attention to it as it has to the Holocaust, Germany’s colonial past in Africa is something worth talking about. Coming in late in the colonial game, Germany still managed to acquire four colonies in Africa, namely: Cameroun, Togo, German East Africa (including present-day Burundi, Rwanda, and the mainland part of Tanzania); German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia). However, another Holocaust took place in German South-West Africa, which Germans tried to sweep under the carpet, a Holocaust that should have gotten the same attention the Holocaust against the Jews got. The Herero genocide or Holocaust came as a popular revolution against the colonial masters. There are several reasons that led to that popular revolt which led to the genocide of 85% of the Herero population. A comparative analysis of the 1989 revolution in East Germany and the Herero revolution shows many similarities and differences.
This paper seeks to answer the following questions: How similar or different are the contexts of the GDR and German South-West Africa revolutions? What and how have the power dynamics led to different outcomes? What role did race play in the outcome of the two revolutions? What role did memory play in the two revolutions?
Using Uwe Timm’s fictional work Morenga, which is a colonial account of Germany’s colonial past from a contemporary German, this paper argues that the Herero revolution and the GDR revolution had a common purpose: liberty but a different outcome. Within the memory and postcolonial theory framework, I show the role race played in the different outcomes.