How Namibia reminded me about Mau Mau

When I was young, in our little house in Nairobi, my father would sometimes say, “Ningaceduka Resaf”( I will rush to Resaf briefly, but I will be back). I would be  confused. Why was my father calling our home in Gatundu “Resaf”? It was only much later that I understood that he meant “reserve”.

He had been born at the height of the Mau Mau uprising, and “reserve” was part of the language of colonial Kenya. The Kikuyu Land Unit, a restricted native reserve, was created after fertile ancestral lands were alienated for European settlement. “Reserve” therefore carried a history of dispossession.

I remembered his story last week in another reserve, thousands of kilometres away, in Katutura, on the outskirts of Windhoek, Namibia. We went to Katutura by chance. After our city tour, our driver offered to take us for roast meat. “Let me show you the real Windhoek,” he said. Katutura means “the place where people do not want to live” in Otjiherero. During the apartheid era of South African rule, Black Namibians were forcibly removed from the Old Location, a vibrant community close to Windhoek’s centre, and relocated to the segregated township.

As I drove through Katutura, my father’s “Resaf” made sense. Different country, different colonial power, but the same language of dispossession: take the land, move the people and leave inequalities that survive after colonial rule.

I visited Christuskirche, the Lutheran church in Windhoek. Inside, bronze plaques preserve the names of German soldiers, marines and civilians who died during the colonial wars involving the Herero and Nama. Between 1904 and 1908, German forces carried out genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama.

An estimated 85,000 Ovaherero and 20,000 Nama were killed through massacres, forced displacement, starvation, dehydration, disease and imprisonment in concentration camps. Their land and cattle were seized, attacking the foundations of their economic and cultural life. Yet inside this church, it is only the names of the German dead inscribed.

I could not help thinking about Kenya. We have monuments to wars and soldiers, but where is the equivalent memorial space for Africans detained, tortured and killed during Mau Mau? Whose suffering becomes part of permanent memory, and whose disappears?

The Namibian story also shows genocide does not end when the killing stops. Its consequences travel through generations. For the Ovaherero, cattle represented wealth, status, security and identity. To take their cattle and land was to attack an entire way of life.

Germany acknowledged the genocide and, in 2021, agreed to provide €1.1 billion over 30 years for development and reconciliation. But Germany deliberately avoided calling the payment reparations or compensation. More troublingly, representatives of the affected Ovaherero and Nama communities were not directly involved in negotiating the agreement. Their objection is captured in the principle: “Anything about us, without us, is against us.”

When King Charles III visited Kenya in 2023, he expressed sorrow and regret for Britain’s colonial-era wrongdoings. Britain had already settled with Mau Mau claimants in 2013. But these steps did not settle the larger questions of land, memory and accountability.

The histories are not identical. But both force us to ask: Who owns the land after colonialism? Who tells the story? Who gets remembered? Who speaks for the victims? And what does justice mean generations later?

On March 25, 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognising the transatlantic slave trade and racialised chattel slavery as the gravest crime against humanity and urging reparatory justice. But if we rightly demand justice for Africans taken across the Atlantic, why should we not also demand justice for Africans who were oppressed, dispossessed and brutalised in their own lands? What about the Kikuyu whose land was seized and whose people were detained and tortured? What about the Ovaherero and Nama? What about South Africans subjected to colonial conquest and apartheid?

Our reparations conversation cannot become only about money. It must include land, restitution, historical truth, memorialisation, representation and structural reform. Otherwise, we risk paying for yesterday’s crimes while reproducing yesterday’s inequalities. The lesson I brought home from Namibia is simple: reconciliation cannot mean forgetting, and an apology cannot be the end of justice.

I went to Namibia expecting another country’s history. Instead, I found pieces of Kenya everywhere.

I went to Namibia and came home thinking about Mau Mau. Perhaps that is what memory is supposed to do: make the past impossible to leave behind until we confront what it still means today.