This is supposed to be a season for expansiveness. For conciliation and transcendence. Easter comes to show us we can all conquer death. On Passover we’re all slaves crossing over to freedom. Nobody wants to be a Pilate or a pharaoh. Not just now.
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And Drury has found a great historical meat hook on which to hang her case: the little-remembered genocide against indigenous peoples in what’s now Namibia, carried out by imperial Germany during the first years of the 20th century.
Not that the natives didn’t get wise. Both tribes raised rebellions, and the Herero actually held the advantage at one point during theirs. But Germany sent Lothar von Trotha down with thousands of troops. He beat the Herero at the battle of Waterberg, forcing them into the eastern desert, where he saw to it that they were denied access to food and water. When they dropped, he had them killed. He established slave labor camps, as well as a death camp called Shark Island. And he issued his Vernichtungsbefehl—”extermination order”—which said, in part, “Any Herero found inside the German frontier . . . will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children. I shall give the order to drive them away and fire on them.” He did pretty much the same to the Nama. Estimates of the total dead range up to around 110,000.
