“Transgenerational Trauma Among Descendants of the 1904-1908 Genocide

By Vitalio Angula
27 May 2025

Clinical psychologist Edwina Mensah-Husselmann says supporting young people processing inherited trauma is not about shielding them from painful truths, but about providing them with the tools, language and support to hold that truth with strength, pride and purpose.

She was speaking at the ‘Trilogy to the Future’ dialogue, a build-up to the inaugural Genocide Remembrance Day tomorrow.

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The 1904-1908 Ovaherero and Nama genocide didn’t only leave its victims dispossessed of land and cattle; the violence inflicted on the Ovaherero and Nama by the German colonial authorities left scars from deep-rooted trauma passed on from generation to generation.

“These unresolved traumas manifest themselves in negative behaviour such as substance abuse and emotional numbing, educational underperformance, lateral violence, including community conflict and increased crime, because of unresolved grief,” Mensah-Husselmann said.

EPIGENETICS

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“On a bio-neurological level, trauma goes and sits in our cells and that’s where we get inflammatory diseases like arthritis and colon disease… it is as a result of an over-active nervous system being in distress and what we call muscle memory,” Mensah-Husselmann said.
“That trauma response is sitting in our cells being passed on.

Just like the phrase ‘it runs is the blood’, we can inherit things like anxiety, she explained in response to a question on the link between past trauma and current trauma experienced by descendants of the 1904-1908 genocide.

In an essay titled ‘Understanding Epigenetics as a Descendant of Holocaust Survivors’, Elle Rosenfeld of the Jewish Women’s Archive acknowledges that epigenetic changes travel across time via intergenerational mechanisms.

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Stress, anxiety, poverty and land insecurity as a result of colonial dispossession have been identified as primary drivers of negative behaviour such as substance abuse among descendants of Namibia’s 1904-1908 genocide.

LAND BOUGHT FOR A BOTTLE OF WHISKY

The collective history of genocide is embedded in Ovaherero and Nama identity, and in acknowledging the effect on these communities, human rights activist Joyce Muzengua says.

Negative stereotypes attributed to these communities as being more susceptible to alcohol disorders compared to other communities are not only harmful but a reminder of the trans-generational impact of genocide.

Some members of these communities have turned to alcohol as a maladaptive coping mechanism.

“If collective healing does not take place, there is a chance that the generation after us will still carry the wounds of the past or the gene memory of the past,” Muzengua said at the panel discussion.

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“Given that in some instances land was traded for a bottle of whisky, the relationship with alcohol among indigenous people becomes a subject worth interrogating in itself,” Muzengua said.

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– Vitalio Angula is a socio-political commentator and independent columnist.”

• Full report “Transgenerational Trauma Among Descendants of the 1904-1908 Genocide” on the website of the Namibian (last checked in July 2025)

• See also details of the panel discussion “Psychological implications of genocide” as part I of the ‘Trilogy to the future’ series of NID and FES on 17 April 2025 in the ‘event’ section of this website