The Minority Report

German Massacre: Namibia's move towards reparations.

The wounds inflicted on 60,000 Herero and 10,000 Namas in the erstwhile colony of Southwest Africa have yet to heal. The scars from the exhibition of human remains in museums and the manipulation for racist scientific hypotheses are added to the scars from concentration camps and slave labor. After a century of denial, both countries' governments agreed to compensate each other for 1.1 billion euros over 30 years. However, the victims' relatives do not believe their demands are being heard. Germany announced on May 28, 2021 that it had achieved a Reconciliation Agreement with Namibia.Between 1904 and 1908, it committed genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples in South West Africa (now Namibia), according to this agreement. The German Bundestag (German Federal Parliament) and the Namibian Parliament must yet approve the deal. The draft agreement is one of the first formal Reconciliation Agreements to be negotiated on a state-by-state basis between a former colonial authority and a former colony. #GermanMassacre #Genocide #Namibia

Canada's Residential Schools: A dark legacy of Cultural Genocide

The discovery of the remains of 215 children at the site of a former school in British Columbia shocked Canadians in May. The bodies belonged to Indigenous children as young as three years old who had attended Canada's state-sponsored "residential school" system. The schools, which were spread across the country, were designed to eradicate Indigenous peoples' culture and languages. The findings have refocused the world's attention on this heinous chapter in Canadian history, left deep wounds in hundreds of communities, and sparked new calls for justice against the Canadian government and the churches that ran the schools for decades. As of September 2021, more than 1300 unmarked graves have been found across the sites of five former residential schools.It drew attention to one of the most heinous chapters in that country's history.

Amazon Denied Leave to Appeal

The Western Cape High Court has dealt another major blow to the construction of Amazon’s new African headquarters in Observatory in Cape Town. The developers behind the R4-billion River Club mixed-use complex with Amazon as anchor tenant have been denied leave to appeal a court order halting construction. The court’s deputy judge president Patricia Goliath struck the application down, stating she had carefully considered her judgment and concluded that the arguments raised against it were without merit. So the fight is not over and it remains to be seen what the Supreme Court of Appeal will decide.

Amazon vs the Khoi and the San: When Capitalism clashes with Indigenous Rights.

The Khoi and the San were the earliest inhabitants of South Africa, the latter roaming as hunter gatherers for tens of thousands of years. Khoi and San leaders are celebrating after developers were told to halt construction on land said to be sacred. About two months ago, the Western Cape High Court granted an urgent interdict against developers working for the US-based company Amazon which is building its Africa head offices in Cape Town. The Black River Observatory site is allegedly sacred to many first-nations people. Groups representing Khoisan indigenous community, one of the earliest inhabitants of southern Africa, approached the Cape Town High Court on January 19, 2022 to stop the construction of Amazon's 70,000-square meter Africa headquarters on land they regard as sacred. The political window of opportunity is closing fast on South Africa’s first peoples. With every passing year, their centuries-old land claims get harder to verify, and their children grow increasingly indifferent toward the Khoisan cause. And in the end capitalism might just succeed in banishing the legacy of the Khoi and the San to a distant memory.