In a cemetery on the edge of the Namibian desert, volunteer Laidlaw Peringanda tends the low dirt mounds where victims of the 20th century’s first genocide are buried.
Tens of thousands of people from the Ovaherero, Nama and San groups died in atrocities committed by German colonisers between 1904 and 1908, some in concentration camps in the coastal city of Swakopmund. Periganda’s great grandmother was one of those who survived.
“[She] told me they were forced to boil their own relatives” after they died so that the remains could be sent to German museums, said Peringanda, who is chair of the Namibian Genocide Association. The association campaigns for redress for the victims’ descendants, who are some of the southern African nation’s most marginalised people.