“‘Inherited Testimonies’ Retraces the Genocide with Nama and Ovaherero Descendants

By Martha Mukaiwa

20 September 2025

Some oral history says that on the morning of the German colonial forces’ attack on Hornkranz, it was raining.

This quietly devastating note about the weather ahead of the massacre fades from the screen at the National Art Gallery of Namibia (NAGN) as various documentaries play on loop as part of a presentation titled ‘Inherited Testimonies – Re-tracing the Genocide with Nama and Ovaherero Descendants’.

Alhough the rain may seem a negligible detail, it speaks to the depth of the multi-year investigation that underpins the exhibition by Forensic Architecture and Forensis in collaboration with Ovaherero and Nama traditional leadership and genocide activist groups.

Identifying execution locations and skull-scraping chambers on Shark Island, detecting additional unmarked graves at Swakopmund, tracing the enduring environmental impact of German colonialism on Namibia’s once sprawling grasslands and reconstructing Hendrik Witbooi’s settlement through a synthesis of oral history, archival imagery and digital modelling, the exhibition layers trans-generational testimony over the colonial era archive to reconstruct, augment and interrogate existing records relating to significant sites of the Herero and Nama Genocide (1904 -1908).

“Central to our approach is an interviewing practice called ‘situated testimony’. This practice, developed by Forensic Architecture, invites the memories of witnesses and descendants to be ‘performed’ and reconstructed within a realistic digital environment,” reads an exhibition text explaining the presentation’s methodology in a segment titled ‘Cumulative Histories’.

[…]

On the back wall of the NAGN, ‘Inherited Testimonies’ uses a combination of ‘repeat photography’, aerial and satellite imagery and oral testimony to illustrate the extent of environmental change at Hatsamas.

Once stewarded by indigenous inhabitants who described the biodiversity of the grasslands to their descendants, Hatsamas is the case study for a ‘Bush Index’ representing 150 years of environmental shifts characterised by encroaching bush in the area.

[…]

“This project seeks to demonstrate what descendant communities have always known: that the genocide that began at the hands of German colonisers was not a single event that ended at some fixed point in history – rather, it should be understood as a continuous violence, unfolding over more than a century.”

Though ‘Inherited Testimonies’ highlights Herero and Nama Genocide denialism and people may place varying stock in oral history, the exhibition often quotes Germany’s own texts, authors, perpetrators, photographs, postcards and archives of the time.

[…]

Throughout the exhibition, the painstaking compilation of forensic evidence through digital models, geolocation, photo mapping, photogrammetry and ground penetrating radar in segments on Swakopmund, Hornkranz, Otjozondjupa, Omaheke and Khomas is a point of fascination.

Finding evidence in the witnessing rocks of Shark Island, underscoring the indigenous knowledge that ensured the Herero people’s survival in the ‘Waterless Omaheke’ and expanding on the fate of the ancestral homeland of the Maherero clan at Okahandja, the exhibition is a call for accountability as digital technology gives voice to latent history.

[…]

‘Inherited Testimonies’ with its wealth of colonial imagery, texts, postcards, photographs, untold stories, descendant testimonies and cultural wisdom, activist features, discoveries, digital memorials, calls to action and harrowingly humanising details closes at the NAGN tomorrow. The documentaries are free to view on forensic-architecture.org.”

• Full report “‘Inherited Testimonies’ Retraces the Genocide with Nama and Ovaherero Descendants” on the website of the Namibian (last checked in September 2025)

• See also information about the exhibition in the ‘Events’ section of this website

Editor’s note:

In the exhibition at the National Art Gallery of Namibia (NAGN), Forensic Architecture / Forensis presented the investigative work about the OvaHerero and Nama Genocide 1904 – 1908 during the German colonial era in Namibia, together with the Nama Traditional Leaders Association (NTLA), the OvaHerero Traditional Authority (OTA) and OvaHerero Genocide Foundation (OGF).

In partnership with NTLA and OTA, Forensic Architecture investigated four genocide-related locations in Namibia (see their webpage on investigations in Namibia):

Swakopmund (1904 – 1908) – published 15 October 2024

Hornkranz (massacre on 12 April 1893) – published 12 April 2024

Shark Island (concentration camp 1905 – 1908) – published 28 June 2024

Otjozondjupa, Omaheke and Khomas areas (1904 – 1908) – published 4 November 2022