Development as (In)Justice: The Case of Namibia

Abstract

This article critically examines the ongoing legacy of colonial land dispossession and its impacts on marginalized communities to reveal the limitations to achieving restorative justice. We focus on the unequal (re)distribution of land, the German Namibian reconciliation agreement and the threats posed by a planned German Namibian mega-project to produce green hydrogen, to advocate for development that delivers material benefits to marginalized groups and ensures intra- and inter-generational justice. Using the lenses of decoloniality and restorative justice, we argue that true decolonization requires commitment to substantive change through addressing the social structures that perpetuate material inequalities. We argue for a more pluralist, decolonial vision of justice to inform debates on restorative justice and to address these material inequalities.

I. Introduction

In this article, we critically engage with ideas of development in the context of discussions around decoloniality and justice. Here, decoloniality is seen as an epistemic, ontological and ethical endeavour—how we know and live in the world and who is recognized as a legitimate knower (Bhambra et al., 2018; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2007). This is distinguished from decolonization, which is fundamentally about political sovereignty and material redistribution—who governs the world and who owns it (Fanon, 1963). We argue that ‘true decolonisation would require a profound transformation of development’ (Kothari and Klein, 2023: 107) in terms of its aims, its leadership, its sensitivity to inequality and its attention to context and history. After briefly reviewing the history of land appropriation, reparations and the relationship between Namibia and Germany, the failings of development are illustrated in the section ‘The Green Land Grab’ through an account of the proposed green hydrogen (GH2) project. The project uses the goal of climate change mitigation to justify the appropriation of historically significant, indigenous land, resulting in what Bhambra and Newell (2023) have called ‘climate colonialism’. In responding to these challenges, we suggest that development studies move beyond attention to epistemology and discourse to address the historical and ongoing material inequalities and social structures that perpetuate injustice. Following Tronto (2003), we argue that conceiving of the past as irrelevant except insofar as it shapes our present and future options has devastating consequences for our concerns for justice. It puts an undue burden on those who have previously suffered from injustice; in addition to having endured the suffering of the past, those who have been harmed are now asked to surrender their sense of outrage, of having been wronged, of harm.

Decolonization necessitates revealing the multiple and diverse meanings of justice and how these have historically shaped understandings of global inequalities and their lasting effects. After all, any attempts at ‘distributive justice that fails to acknowledge the requirements of reparative justice for colonialism will always be partial’ (Bhambra, 2021: 320). Here, we illuminate historical and ongoing processes of accumulation through dispossession by briefly reviewing different types of justice and linking these to different aspects of the case study. This allows us to look at, for example, the role of procedural justice (defined as access to information, ability to shape decisions, civic space to protest unfair outcomes and courts to challenge them) in determining fair allocation of land (see section ‘The Perpetuation of Colonial Land Theft’). The overarching focus of the article is restorative justice (defined by UNODC as responding to wrongdoing by focusing on repairing the damage caused, restoring the well-being of all those involved and returning their agency and decision-making power). This becomes particularly significant in looking at the efficacy of reparations (see sections ‘The Issue of Reparations’ and ‘Land and Restorative Justice: Germany and Namibia’). It also highlights failures in substantive justice, historical and current, where basic resources are not provided, and risk and harms are increased through ill-considered government commitments to external investments (see section ‘The Green Land Grab’). The case of land in Namibia demonstrates these problems and challenges by showing how the unequal redistribution of land through a politicized process of pseudo-reparation creates conditions for the further immiseration of the population when an opportunity arises to use that land to generate green hydrogen. ¹

In our case study, the appropriation of limited natural resources for the gains of a few at the expense of many cannot be fully addressed because, as Tuck and Yang (2012: 19) observe, ‘until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism’. We suggest in the section ‘The Green Land Grab’ that in contexts where there is natural resource–based accumulation for private gains that encroach on people’s livelihoods, such as mining and green hydrogen, decoloniality must entail restorative justice in material terms. Indeed, as our analysis of the limitations of the Namibian land reform shows (see section ‘The Perpetuation of Colonial Land Theft’), development policies and practices provide no direct material benefits to marginalized people. Instead, they remain a tool, and a justification, for the reproduction of colonial power relations.

To demonstrate the intractability of these problems, we draw in the section ‘Land and Restorative Justice: Germany and Namibia’ on attempts made to address injustices through the Joint Declaration (dubbed the ‘reconciliation agreement’), negotiated in 2015 by the German and Namibian governments. We illustrate the limits of this agreement in achieving restorative justice in contexts of settler colonialism. Here, reparative processes are shown to fail to engage meaningfully with the descendants of those local communities most affected by the genocide and ignore the fact that most commercial farmland remains owned by, often German-speaking, whites.

As Tuck and Yang (2012) argue so powerfully, decoloniality must entail giving back appropriated resources and the undoing of economic structures that reproduce colonial inequalities. Decoloniality then must have real material effects. They argue, however, that while scholars have long shown how capitalist economic systems dehumanize populations and legitimize devaluation, expropriation and dispossession, there remains a reluctance to perform the critical, material work of redistribution and reparation. Therefore, to understand the history of colonial appropriation, and how it persists through, for example, green land grabs where the land of marginalized people is appropriated to generate biofuels, requires combining a decolonial lens with a commitment to restitution/restoration or, when this is no longer possible, to reparation.

II. The Case of Land in Namibia

Land is one of the core reference points when it comes to injustices and forms of restitution and reparations. This is particularly so when a settler-colonial history of occupation not only remains largely intact but is also being reproduced in land ownership patterns in the present. The case study of land in Namibia illustrates the intricacies of land policy in different ways. The colonial land grab summarized in the section ‘The Perpetuation of Colonial Land Theft’ elucidates how structural inequalities created by foreign rule to benefit a settler minority have remained largely in place even under a democratically elected government of a sovereign state. Land reforms since independence exemplify how these colonial patterns persist. We then review in the section ‘The Issue of Reparations’ the case for reparations made since the turn of the century. The section ‘Land and Restorative Justice: Germany and Namibia’ reveals how opportunities for restorative justice in Namibia were ignored even when the colonial crimes culminating in the first genocide of the twentieth century were acknowledged by the German government and negotiations in the name of reconciliation took place with the Namibian government. In the section ‘The Green Land Grab’, we show how disputes over appropriation of land continue through what has been dubbed green land grab: plans for large-scale hydrogen production in a protected area with direct German participation and involvement. We argue that colonialism and more recent green land grabs are examples of expropriation and resource exploitation by foreign, in this case mainly German, interests, most recently in collaboration with a new Namibian elite.

This elite displays to some extent ethnic affinities when it comes to elements and forms of patrimonial and clientelist rule. However, it is not ethnically homogenous but characterized more by shared class interests, making ethnicity a secondary factor. These class interests and their pursuance are visible in both commercial and communal land reforms. We have therefore included shorter references to the latter to underline that the utilization of land is more a matter of class than of ethnicity. But ownership and utilization of land is more than merely an economically important good. The challenges to making a living from the land do not stop the desire among the previously colonized who remain landless to have the stolen land returned.

The Perpetuation of Colonial Land Theft

Independent since 21 March 1990, the Republic of Namibia was the colonial prey of imperial Germany from 1884 to 1914, when South African troops of the allied forces took over. In 1918, following the Treaty of Versailles, it became a mandated territory. Its administration was delegated by the British Crown to the Union of South Africa under the supervision of the League of Nations. After the Second World War, South Africa refused to continue reporting to the United Nations Trusteeship Council as a successor body. After years of legal battles and rulings under international law, the occupation was declared a ‘trust betrayed’.

German settler colonialism had paved the way for continued white minority rule. It was the midwife for the infamous, and violent, structures of an apartheid society, in which the forced removal of colonized people from their land in substantial parts of the country and its subsequent occupation by white settlers endures into the present. After an imperial order issued in 1898, demarcated territorial entities for indigenous communities were established. Resistance to this foreign invasion and land occupation triggered the first genocide of the twentieth century (Wallace and Kinahan, 2011: 155–82).

Surviving members of Ovaherero, Nama and Damara (as well as San) communities, the main occupants of the eastern, central and southern regions of the country, were forcefully removed from the land they inhabited and relocated to so-called native reserves within the part of the territory declared a Police Zone under direct colonial administration. ² The internal border, dubbed the Red Line, remains a veterinary cordon fence (Miescher, 2012). According to Sullivan and Ganuses (2020: 306), ‘the result for land south of the Red Line was an alienated, and alienating, landscape of mapped and fenced static boundaries, signalling enclosed areas of private property improved through significant subsidies and loans to the settlers that became their tenants and owners’.

After Germany was compelled to surrender control over the territory during the First World War 1, land (dis)possession continued. South Africa provided Afrikaans-speaking poor whites a new existence as farmers in the occupied territory, administered like a fifth province. This resulted in further encroachment into ecologically fragile parts of the country. By 1939 a total of 17 reserves in the Police Zone existed. Apartheid was further systematized in the 1960s as part of the so-called Bantustan Policy euphemistically referred to as ‘separate development’. It consolidated the territorial entities (reserves) into one for each ethnic group under varying degrees of limited self-administrative structures. The 1963 ‘Report of the Commission of Enquiry into South West African Affairs’—commonly known by the name of its chairman as the ‘Odendaal Plan’—implemented a final physical segregation of groups based on ethnic classifications by means of further forced resettlements into territorially consolidated ‘homelands’ (Wallace and Kinahan, 2011: 261–67). These forms of land appropriation and forced resettlement continued until the early 1970s.

At independence, the liberation movement South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) took political power. The declaration of the sovereign Namibian state was a result of mediated decolonization (Melber and Saunders, 2007). The Constituent Assembly, which had been elected in November 1989 under the supervision of the United Nations Transitional Assistance Group, drafted and adopted the Constitution as the final step towards independence. They drew on core principles for such transitions which had been designed in the early 1980s by the so-called Western contact group. These principles included the recognition of existing property relations, which anchored the socio-economic status quo at independence. This entrenched the social disparities created during the colonial period by maintaining forms of private ownership, including that of land protected by common law. ³ Colonialism had turned land into a commodity, regulated by personalized ownership of individual title deeds, thereby moving a mainly common good into private (settler) or public (state) ownership.

A National Land Reform Conference in 1991 (Office of the Prime Minister, 1991) adopted a far-reaching consensus document that recommended:

The redistribution of commercial farmland, mainly on the basis of willing seller–willing buyer, with preferential rights for the government to purchase farmland for resettlement purposes;

The introduction of a land tax;

Limits to the size and number of individually owned farms;

The elimination of foreign-owned land and absentee landlordism.

As the conference admitted: ‘Given the complexities in redressing ancestral land claims, restitution in full is impossible’ (Office of the Prime Minister, 1991: 24) and was subsequently not implemented. The vagueness in the document allowed for widely differing interpretations and an arbitrariness that enabled those holding the power of definition to prevail. Additionally, state authorities were largely unwilling to accept land claims by indigenous communities (Odendaal and Werner, 2020).

As suggested by Werner (2002: 56), a director in the Ministry of Lands, Resettlement and Rehabilitation until the mid-1990s: ‘the difficulties involved in disentangling competing claims of lost lands provided an ideal political opportunity to broaden the category of beneficiaries of land reform to include those who were never dispossessed in the historical sense’. This entitled members of the main base of SWAPO in the northern areas of former Ovamboland to benefit from redistributive measures. Thus, as Werner (2002: 56) argues, the Land Conference ‘provided the political legitimacy to rule out any ethnically specific claims to land, no matter how justified they might have been’.

After a decade of independence, the government had more than 240,000 people on a waiting list for resettlement. Many of them were from the northern areas, where eviction from land had never taken place. This suggests that state-facilitated transactions in land are—as they were in settler-colonial times—partially connected to ethnic belonging. Namibian land policy privileged members of a new elite, which largely has origins in the Northern regions. Their access to privileges is based on their affiliation with the former liberation movement now as government is in control over the policy and administration of the state. Communities in the former Ovamboland as the home base of SWAPO but also others in higher-ranking positions of government and public service with different backgrounds, who were previously active in the liberation movement, benefitted from preferential treatment. Allocating to these as ‘previously disadvantaged’ resettlement farms or subsidizing their land acquisitions with public money turned farming increasingly into ‘a rich man’s hobby’ (Sherbourne, 2003), a status symbol and lifestyle choice. The government’s land policy mainly satisfied the appetite of the new black elite for securing their own private farms. ⁴ As a critical assessment two decades into independence concluded:

the ‘economics of affection’ have found expression in the ties of political patronage, which are being exploited by some bearers of political office and bureaucrats alike as elaborate avenues for allocating preferential treatment to party stalwarts, as well as friends and relatives of the ruling elite. (Kaapama, 2010: 202)

The skewed patterns of land ownership and the slow transfer of land were confirmed by the Namibia Statistics Agency in 2018 when land tenure was composed of 23% state land, 35% communal land and 42% freehold land. Also, 86% of commercial farms were privately owned by Namibians and 3% by non-Namibians (more than half of them Germans and more than a quarter South Africans). The rest was state property. About 70% of freehold agricultural land was in the possession of ‘previously advantaged’ (the official nomenklatura for whites). Between 1990 and 2018, a total of three million hectares (496 farms) were acquired by the state under a National Resettlement Programme, allocated to 5,352 beneficiaries (all data are from Namibia Statistics Agency, 2018: 44).

Those supported by state authorities from regions in the North to settle on land initially occupied by groups in the Police Zone fuelled inter-ethnic animosities (Gargallo, 2010a). Trying to investigate the mounting complaints concerning the selective and privileged transfer of state purchased and subsidized land, Namibia’s Ombudsman demanded in May 2018 access to the list of resettlement farms and their beneficiaries. Members of the political opposition have questioned the list’s authenticity and demanded a proper forensic land audit, due in part to lack of correspondence with a list compiled from legally required announcements in various print media between 2011 and early 2018 that had government officials and high-ranking civil servants as beneficiaries, resettled courtesy of the state on 99-year leaseholds throughout the country (Iikela, 2018). Despite their incompleteness, the records illustrate a haphazard reallocation of land guided by a dubious set of criteria. Beneficiaries were in many cases ethnically or politically close to those in government.

The growing frustration among the Nama communities in the southern regions resulted in the establishment of a new party, Landless People’s Movement (LPM) in 2018. ‘We are a party that wants to get the land for our people, no matter what the law says. We go and change the laws. We want to get the basics right and get our people into agricultural production’, declared its leader Bernadus Swartbooi ⁵ (Iikela, 2019). In the National Assembly elections held in November 2019, LPM became the second strongest opposition party with 4.7% and four seats. In the Regional and Local Authority elections of November 2020, it secured control over the two southern regions of Karas and Hardap and a majority in all local authorities in both regions. The party also made inroads into several towns and municipalities elsewhere. During a National Assembly debate, Swartbooi (2020: 11) argued for redressing the past imbalances in the land dispensation: ‘The restoration of the dignity of those Namibians who suffered genocide, who lost land, and who were subjected to white racism, which prohibited land ownership to black Namibians, is an urgent and long aspired human quest’. In a subsequent debate, he added: ‘Land must be returned to those that lost land, and not be a generalised exercise of land acquisition and land allocation’ (Tjitemisa, 2020). In the National Assembly elections of November 2024, LPM consolidated its role with 5.2% of votes and five seats for the legislature period 2025–2030. The party testifies to the frustrations expressed in an Afrobarometer survey among 1,200 Namibians during November 2017, in which 21% of respondents ranked land reform as the third most important problem (following unemployment with 66% and poverty/destitution with 34%), while 56% classified the land resettlement programme as not very or not at all effective (Isbell et al., 2019). As a local commentator observed, ‘the land issue is the most divisive of all that Namibia has experienced since independence’ (Kamwanyah, 2018).

Crucially, the complexity of existing forms of land use and ownership go beyond a simple dichotomy of commercial and/or communal forms. Since about a third of the three million Namibians live on communal lands in the northern parts of the territory, the test of a meaningful land reform is whether it reduces poverty among the population there. As the first Land Reform Conference already noted, in communal areas (the former ‘homelands’) disadvantaged communities ‘should receive special protection of their land rights’ (Office of the Prime Minister, 1991: 29). Title deeds and privatization were subsequently introduced, supposedly to benefit communities as these were a legal precondition to use land as a collateral to access loans. Instead, this has led to the appropriation, and the fencing in, of communal land as private property. This shrinking of collective access and use of communal areas has potentially ‘devastating consequences for the poorest of the poor’ (Odendaal, 2011b: 24; see also Odendaal, 2011a). Thus, land reforms, rather than serving the disadvantaged as a form of decolonization, can be part of a class-based elite project. Nghitevelekwa (2020) points to the differences between landowners and land users through the introduction of long-term leasehold, which effectively dispossesses the users of the land, while in a parallel process customary land rights are gradually commodified (see also Werner, 2015). Fencing off communal lands as a form of ‘elite land grabbing’ (Odendaal, 2011a, 2011b) signifies further class diversification (Twyman et al., 2001). Between 2012 and 2015, almost 300 cases of illegal fencing of land in communal areas were recorded in 5 of the country’s 14 regions (Tjitemisa, 2018). The part-time pastoralism practised as a fashionable lifestyle of the post-colonial urban and rural elites in salaried employment further increases the vulnerability of poor pastoral households (see Cox et al., 1998; Schnegg et al., 2013).

A second land conference in October 2018 adopted a total of 176 resolutions under 40 altogether different ‘identified topical issues’. ⁶ These stress the need for the protection of tenure rights, mainly in the interest of the poorest victims of illegal land occupations. Ancestral land claims were also acknowledged. A final proposal suggested that 70% of resettlement farms would be reserved for descendants of people from communities who were robbed of their land, with 30% left for those from other regions. However, the final resolution also included war veterans and their dependents as people dispossessed through colonialism. This re-introduced claimants from the northern regions and provided an opportunity to reward political favours.

In line with a resolution, a Presidential Commission of Inquiry on Ancestral Land was appointed in February 2019 by President Geingob. As its report emphasizes, ‘land was, and is, not just an economic resource, but also carries cultural and spiritual significance’ (Office of the Prime Minister, 2020: xxvi). It concedes that conflicting historical narratives among descendants of the indigenous communities and fluid interactions make it impossible to define exact territorial boundaries for the various communities in the pre-colonial era. The report then shares the critical views expressed during the numerous consultative meetings in all regions of the country:

The rate at which land redistribution is taking place is perceived to be painfully slow, and thus falls far below the expectations of the majority of largely landless communities in the country, particularly the descendants of those that were mostly affected by colonial land dispossession.

 … There are limitations to land in general and agricultural land in particular, in relation to sustainable livelihoods by communities. This must, however, not be used as a pretext for denying the majority of communities who continue to face systematic economic exclusion from benefiting from the available opportunities for land ownership, access and utilisation.

 Although the Government adopted a well-intended land reform programme, this, however, lacks a robust environment to nurture and support it (professionally and financially) to propel historically disadvantaged Namibians to become agriculturally successful and to improve food security. (Office of the Prime Minister, 2020: xxviii)

The report acknowledges that ‘the process in its current form favours the rich, the powerful and the politically connected’ and that beneficiaries were from ‘regions regarded as having least been affected by past colonial land dispossession’. The Commission therefore finds that policies ‘in their current forms are more “individual” focused rather than “community” focused’ and ‘lack adequate post-settlement support mechanisms’ (Office of the Prime Minister, 2020: xxviii, xxix). Finally, it points out: ‘if the Constitutional provisions are interpreted in a broad, expansionist and purposive manner, claims for ancestral land rights and restitution may be founded on our constitutional values’ and that initiatives to restore social justice ‘have not been adequately effective’ (Office of the Prime Minister, 2020: xxx).

The Issue of Reparations

Before discussing the Namibian case study further, we provide context by summarizing multiple attempts by Global South governments and communities to secure reparations for slavery, the slave trade and colonialism. The most prominent of these occurred at the UNESCO-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban from 31 August to 8 September 2001. This meeting adopted the victim-centred Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, which urges governments to provide effective remedies, resources, redress and compensatory measures to victims of racism and racial discrimination (UN Department of Public Information, 2002). However, this document contained no reference to colonialism nor to the term ‘reparation’ that had been included in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted 2 years earlier. The statute had referred to ‘principles relating to reparations to, or in respect of, victims, including restitution, compensation and rehabilitation’ (United Nations, 1998: 42). Despite this deficiency, however, the Durban Declaration does make a moral claim on those countries that benefitted from slavery to provide aid, embedding further the links between development and colonialism (Kothari, 2005).

Several subsequent resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly reiterated this global call and following Resolution 73/262 of 22 December 2018, the UN Secretary-General shared on 21 August 2019 a report by Tendayi Achiume, special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. It addresses the human rights obligations of member states in relation to reparations, declaring:

Full implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination must also be understood as an essential means of achieving reparations for slavery and colonialism … The effective protection of individuals from forms of racial discrimination requires access to justice, pursuit of accountability, reparations, guarantees of non-recurrence, and the elimination of impunity. (Secretary-General, UN General Assembly, 2019a: 40)

Despite these normative values, also manifest in the growing number of UN special rapporteurs advocating these principles, ensuring that these obligations are binding remains an uphill battle. As legal scholars involved in the reform efforts diagnose, the process triggered by the Durban Conference continues to face ‘unprincipled opposition of members of the Western Europe and Other States Group’ (Achiume and McDougall, 2023: 86) to restorative, or even corrective, justice. They conclude that ‘collaboration among UN member states to sideline any real reckoning for historical and contemporary racism rooted in slavery and colonialism remains a feature of the UN system’ (Achiume and McDougall, 2023: 86). This echoes the observation articulated in the report by Tendayi Achiume as special rapporteur: ‘Ultimately, the difficult truth is that the greatest barrier to reparations for colonialism and slavery is that the biggest beneficiaries of both lack the political will and moral courage to pursue such reparations’ (Secretary-General, UN General Assembly, 2019b: 6, 22).

As Kothari and Klein (2023: 110) observe, calls for reparations for past wrongs may be insufficiently aware of how these wrongs will continue unless reparations are ‘integrated into larger redistributive systems that transform the unjust social and economic structures established during colonialism and slavery that continue to shape local and global societies and economies’. Acknowledging the demands for reparatory justice clearly articulated at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa in October 2024 (Plaut, 2025), the final communique stated, ‘that the time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity’. ⁷ The following section returns to the Namibian case study to explore challenges inherent in these larger redistributive systems.

Land and Restorative Justice: Germany and Namibia

Referring to restorative justice, the 2020 Presidential Commission notes that

in international law, the term ‘reparation’ is used in a wide sense to refer to all those measures which includes restitution, compensation and satisfaction that may be employed to redress the various types of harms that victims may have suffered as a consequence of certain crimes. (Office of the Prime Minister, 2020: xxvi)

This draws attention to Germany’s admission in mid-2015 that the warfare in South West Africa was tantamount to genocide. Negotiations between the German and Namibian governments were initiated, and after nine meetings, the two special envoys initialled a Joint Declaration in May 2021. ⁸ While it was to be ratified a few weeks later by the foreign ministers, massive rejection in Namibia and subsequent queries by the Namibian government led to the need for further negotiations (Melber, 2024). The Declaration summarizes in Chapter I the crimes committed and concludes: ‘As a consequence, a substantial number of Ovaherero and Nama communities were exterminated through the actions of the German State. A large number of the Damara and San communities were also exterminated’.

Chapter II/Clause 10 ‘acknowledges that the abominable atrocities committed during periods of the colonial war culminated in events that, from today’s perspective, would be called genocide’. Clause 11/Chapter III adds: ‘Germany accepts a moral, historical and political obligation to tender an apology for this genocide and subsequently provide the necessary means for reconciliation and reconstruction’, while in Clause 13 ‘Germany apologizes and bows before the descendants of the victims’. Clause 14/Chapter IV hastens to add: ‘The Namibian Government and people accept Germany’s apology and believe that it paves the way to a lasting mutual understanding and the consolidation of a special relationship between the two nations’. It eagerly draws a line: ‘This shall close the painful chapter of the past and mark a new dawn in the relationship between our two countries and peoples’.

Both governments agreed on a ‘reconstruction and development support programme’ (Clause 16), ‘to assist the development of descendants of the particularly affected communities’, revealing how reparations often blur into aid. It was agreed that €1.1b would be disbursed over 30 years, with 1.05 billion earmarked for development programmes and 50 million to projects on reconciliation, remembrance, research and education. ⁹ To avoid any further demands, Clause 20 stresses that ‘these amounts … settle all financial aspects of the issues relating to the past’.

Although Clause 16 identifies ‘Land Reform, in particular Land Acquisition, within the framework of the Namibian Constitution, and Land Development’ as priorities, it remains unclear how any meaningful changes in terms of land ownership and utilization could be implemented. This points to a shared responsibility of both governments. After all, reversing the skewed land distribution requires political will to empower the landless. So far, however, patterns of land ownership are the visible evidence of structurally embedded inequalities and injustice.

The commercial agrarian sector in Namibia today remains associated with land theft, another reminder that colonialism did not end with political independence. However, this would not have been the case had the guidance from the second National Land Conference been followed, suggesting that ‘the reparations from the former colonial powers’ be used for land restitution. ¹⁰ This could have offered an opportunity for the Namibian and German governments to deal with their intertwined histories as long as both sides were willing to hand over the land to the descendants of those from whom it was stolen. Instead, the distribution of privately owned land is a reminder that colonialism did not end with independence. It continues if restorative justice is not part of the land debate (Nakuta, 2018).

Attitudes among locals who had benefitted from colonialism in terms of land ownership do not help in finding a solution. Indeed, the class privilege of white Namibians render them ‘largely indifferent to the structural violence that land inequality continues to sustain’ (Tjirera, 2022: 199). But land, beyond any other economic resource, is ultimately about identity for those who currently own it as much as for those who feel it should be theirs. Such desire for restoring identity was emphasized by the Bishop to the Evangelical Lutheran Rhenish Church in Namibia ¹¹ :

Our great grandparents died without seeing justice done to the land issue, our parents are dying in poverty with suffering engraved on their faces. … The violation of the land rights are the violation of the soul of the people, but its restoration is the resurrection of the soul of the people. (Kameeta, 2002: 29, 30)

Germany could have provided the necessary funds for a just (in the sense of fair) expropriation of white commercial farmers in recognition of the constitutional requirements. Their land was that of the indigenous communities, whose ancestors are buried there. In return, the Namibian government would have to commit to the allocation of the land to the descendants of those who were forcefully dispossessed. Such a transfer of land, however, can only constitute a first step and needs to avoid turning land once again into another dumping ground similar to the ‘native reserves’ created under colonial policy. Simply giving back land does not secure economic sustainability, as shown by some of the first farms utilized for resettlement purposes. Most of the resettled remain dependent on food aid without the necessary support towards attaining self-sufficiency (Gargallo, 2010b). Such dismal performance testifies to a policy beset by incompetence. After all, there have been many ignored recommendations on how best to provide resettled farmers with meaningful opportunities to live from the land (Werner and Odendaal, 2010; Rothauge, 2007). The German state should, therefore, in addition to the land acquisition, finance the necessary investments—in terms of infrastructure as well as know-how. This would empower those local communities willing to return to the land to fully benefit from resettlement and to make a living from the land under the conditions of climate change adaptation. To set this in context, the total costs of such fundamental atonement is unlikely to exceed those of German public investments in the new Berlin-Brandenburg airport (€7b) or the controversial underground railway station in Stuttgart (approaching €10b). For its part, the Namibian government would have to accept that beneficiaries of resettlement are the descendants of those indigenous communities robbed of their land. There is, however, no indication that the governments of either state are willing to take on such meaningful responsibility.

Instead, their negotiations excluded direct representation from descendants of the communities whose lives and lands were taken during German colonialism. This marginalization of indigenous communities in negotiations is in violation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted with the votes of both countries in 2007. Its Article 18 states: ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to participate in decision-making in matters which would affect their rights, through representatives chosen by themselves in accordance with their own procedures’ (United Nations, 2007). This motivated seven special rapporteurs of the OHCHR to submit a letter to the German (Palais Des Nations, 2023a) and Namibian (Palais Des Nations, 2023b) governments on 23 February 2023 (Theurer, 2023). They unanimously express grave concern for failing to secure such meaningful participation of the Ovaherero and Nama and stress,

that the question at hand is not a demand for assistance but rather, and clearly so, a demand for accountability and reparation for the harm inflicted. This has important ramifications as only full reparation that includes acknowledgement, apology, restitution, compensation, rehabilitation and guarantees of non-recurrence (including the reform of continuous forms of exclusion and discrimination), can effectively remedy past wounds. (Palais Des Nations, 2023a, 2023b)

This leaves the Namibian government facing the blame for perpetuating injustices. Some recorded voices from the Nama and Damara communities testify to this (all quotes from Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2024):

The modern state has altered our natural progression, and it has placed us at an acute disadvantage through the exploitation and oppression of our people. We have lost our land via theft and genocide, including the loss of our livestock to the Germans. The position that we are in is a direct result of Germany’s genocide programme, which was intentional, thus leaving us a minority tribe in Namibia. (59-year-old Nama)

…

When we became independent, we were in a good position to put the lives of all Namibians in a good position—we have the ocean, we have the land, we have the mineral resources. However, I know that the people who took power, the elites, instead of creating wealth for everyone, the finances, resources, and some of the land that was recovered were channelled within their families and to people that they know. … For me, land is the greatest wealth that you can have in a country. Namibians are still landless—and are we looking at how we can channel some of the land that we have lost in the past back to the people? (37-year-old Damara)

…

We really need land; this is our country, and everyone should have their own space. … We need land because that is what we lost a very long time ago, so that we can start over in a free country. (25-year-old Nama/Damara)

…

Why do Germans in Namibia still own farms, especially in the southern and eastern parts, while Namas and Hereros struggle with land and still work for them? (20-year-old Nama)

Instead of responding to these powerful words and showing genuine atonement, German interests have in collaboration with the Namibian elite in government and state institutions embarked on another form of land acquisition described in the next section. Ironically, this involves parts of the same land stolen from the Nama almost 150 years ago. In the following section, we look at this contemporary form of land appropriation through a study of a German-led project to extract green hydrogen.

The Green Land Grab

The increasing urgency for climate change mitigation, through, for example, biofuel production and the search for GH2, has led to renewed efforts to secure land as a resource for energy transition. Critical interventions are now impacting those countries considered suitable locations for these developments (see among others Kalt, 2024; Tunn et al., 2025) specifically by changing how land is used by indigenous people. Due to its physical environment, Namibia is considered to hold great potential to produce GH2 and has subsequently been courted by foreign offers of partnership. Scholars are cautious of the proposed benefits (Gabor and Sylla, 2023; Grobler et al., 2023; von Oertzen, 2021) ¹² as land once more is turned into a commodity for those benefitting from externally oriented development, at the cost of local communities.

We focus here on a planned German Namibian mega-project to illustrate the effects of the anticipated land occupation and utilization as another example of continued inequalities in Namibian German relations. As the project is situated in a national park, the general constitutional and legal framework is noteworthy. The Constitution of the Republic of Namibia (Republic of Namibia, 1990) declares in Chapter 11 (‘Principles of State Policy’), Article 95 (‘Promotion of the Welfare of the People’) that ‘the State shall actively promote and maintain the welfare of the people’ through the sustainable maintenance of ecosystems and biological diversity. Article 101 clarifies that these principles should guide the government in maintaining and applying laws, giving them custodianship over natural resources. The Environmental Management Act, 2007 (Act No. 7, 2007) ¹³ stipulates that damage to the environment must be prevented and activities which cause such damage must be reduced, limited or controlled. It provides for the precautionary principle to avoid serious or irreversible harm where the potential impact of interventions on the natural habitat is uncertain. However, it remains weak because it does not mandate precautionary action (e.g., see Melber, 2022).

The Namibia Green Hydrogen and Derivates Strategy (2022) claims it can produce GH2 and its derivates at highly competitive costs, turning Namibia into a global leader of GH2 supply. Concerned local voices point out that GH2 can also be a ‘dirty fuel’ if the electricity used to split it is generated via coal fired power stations rather than solar or wind (Matthys, 2024). In May 2023 the government signed a feasibility and implementation agreement with the German Hyphen Hydrogen Energy company for a US$ 10b GH2 plant situated in the Tsau//Khaeb national park. The project is tied to a ‘de-risking’ strategy for the German investors. Yet it comes with enormous investment costs for the Namibian state. As a junior equity partner, the government not only provide the land but also funds an equity share of up to 24% of the overall project costs: ‘Even a smaller US$ 500 million official stake in Hyphen would double Namibia’s foreign bond debt’ (Gabor and Sylla, 2023: 1187). In total, public investments into a green energy policy are estimated at N$ 980b (Weidlich, 2024), which is equivalent to US$ 55b. This is over nine times the country’s annual budget for 2025/2026 (N$ 103b) and marks a significant economic risk (Grynberg, 2024). Its economic viability is questionable (Shihepo and Grynberg, 2024) given that green hydrogen represents less than 1% of hydrogen production in the United States (Environmental and Energy Study Institute, 2022). As a local economist declared: ‘Using Namibian public funds for this dream is nothing short of reckless’ (Shipena, 2024). The specifics of the agreement have yet to be disclosed. The lack of transparency and accountability fosters suspicions that the arrangement could enable large-scale corruption (Matthys, 2023). A local expert also voiced concerns that ‘outsourcing our development pathway to commercial mega-developers creates new dependencies that are unlikely to result in favourable and sustainable local outcomes’ (Ndebele, 2023). Furthermore, as Tunn et al. argue (2025: 9), ‘if needed, agreements concerning millions of US Dollar investments can be launched within a couple of years, all the while reparations and recognition for colonial atrocities fail to materialize’.

Of concern is the project’s location in the Tsau//Khaeb national park, where 40 sq. km are put aside for the planned production of up to 350,000 tons of GH2 annually in one of the world’s biggest plants. The area was ironically the site of the first fraudulent land deal by the Germans in 1883 (Wallace and Kinahan, 2011: 116f.). This led to the proclamation of ‘German South West Africa’ as the empire’s first colony. An agent of the Bremen-based merchant Adolf Lüderitz entered two consecutive land deals with the locally resident Nama leader (kaptein) in the Angra Pequena Bay. In both cases, the distances demarcating the land were given in ‘geographical miles’. These were understood by the local people as English miles of 1.6 km length. But the Germans—with the knowledge of the emperor’s emissary, who in 1884 declared the territory as a German ‘protectorate’—applied the length of 7.4 km as the German nautical mile. This was unknown to the indigenous communities, who thereby were giving away the rights to all the land they occupied. ¹⁴ By 1885, further deceptions had secured Lüderitz the whole coastal strip between South Africa and Angola, reaching up to 150 km inland. This area represents a quarter of today’s Namibian territory. With the discovery of diamonds in the Namib desert, stretching along the coast from what was since then called Lüderitzbucht to the South African border, today’s park was in 1908 declared a prohibited area (Sperrgebiet). This de facto turned 26,000 sq km of land into a nature reserve that in 2008 was designated a ‘Sperrgebiet National Park’ and renamed Tsau//Khaeb in 2012.

The required infrastructure and the demand for water will have devastating consequences for the wider natural habitat. A position paper of the Namibian Chamber of Environment (2024: 1, 3) warned that the project ‘poses a severe threat to one of only a few global biodiversity hotspots in an arid area’. The ecological sensitivity of the park ‘should raise red flags about any large-scale industrial development’. The value of its biodiversity ‘is unmatched and irreplaceable’. It concludes, ‘Germany’s need for alternative energy sources should not be met at the cost of Namibia’s biodiversity’ (Namibia Chamber of Environment, 2024: 13). Calle Schlettwein, former finance minister (2015–2020), who as the only white German speaker in cabinet retired in March 2025 as Minister of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform, echoed the concerns:

The demand for economic growth overshadows, by far, the need to act in an environmentally sustainable way. This is substantiated by the fact that the industrial development of green hydrogen is happening in a proclaimed national park and is being funded through the Environmental Investment Fund. This is important to note as Namibia’s national parks are proclaimed to protect and conserve biodiversity and ecological systems and processes on state land, not to develop industries. To use them for industries, even if they are called green, is a misuse of statutory power. (Schlettwein, 2024)

Other criticism focuses on the impact of such projects on local communities by monopolizing scarce water resources:

The demand for water to support hydrogen production could exacerbate existing tensions within local communities who depend on these resources. Picture farms going dry and communities suffering from extreme water shortages all in the name of a ‘clean’ energy source that will mainly cater to foreign consumers. This trajectory is not just unsustainable, it is a potential time bomb with the potential to devastate ecosystems and livelihoods alike. (Tjipura, 2024)

Residents of Lüderitzbucht (often referring to themselves as ‘Buchters’) are divided over the promised boom for their rather isolated town. As reported by DeBoom (2025: 13):

Having experienced prior extractive violence and boom/bust cycles firsthand, most Buchters with whom I spoke were skeptical that Hyphen would ‘revitalize’ their community. Instead, they focused on the project’s socio-environmental costs—and who will pay them.

Those whose livelihoods depend on fisheries fear that the water desalination plant and the production of ammonia could severely damage marine life. Members of indigenous communities in the region also doubt the promised benefits. In the National Assembly’s annual budget debate 2023, the LPM vice-chairperson referred to the project as ‘another front for neo-colonialism and imperialism by the Germans’ (Weidlich, 2023). A resident of the regional capital Keetmanshoop opined: ‘As to the Green Hydrogen plans of the government, they look good on paper, but I don’t see how they are going to benefit the Nama community’ (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2024: 47).

Descendants of the communities exposed to genocide have other concerns too: long distance transport of this amount of GH2 (turned into toxic ammonia ¹⁵ ) requires the expansion of the Lüderitzbucht harbour. This threatens the memorial site on the adjacent Shark Island (Lehmann, 2019), the location of the largest concentration camp between 1905 and 1907. There, as in the Swakopmund concentration camp, men, women and children in huge numbers succumbed to inhuman treatment: forced labour and malnourishment, and exposure to the harsh climate: ‘in Swakopmund and Lüderitz alone, more than 1,550 Nama died’ (Carver and Iilonga, 2025). Many of their bodies were simply dumped in the sea or left in the sand of the desert. Connecting the Hyphen plant with the port facilities, roads and other infrastructure ‘will traverse … one of the areas we have investigated for likely mass and individual graves’, noted an investigation by Forensis and Forensic Architecture (2024: 10). It concludes: ‘The proposed extension of Lüderitz port … poses an imminent risk of further desecrating the heritage site directly and indirectly’ and ‘disturbing human remains and burial places’ (Forensis and Forensic Architecture, 2024: 51). As Carver and Iilonga (2025) point out: ‘Campaigners in Namibia are demanding the government and industry halt the expansion plans on Shark Island, and meaningfully engage with reconciliation’.

Instead, the project is conceptualized and guided by what could be characterized as a colonial mindset:

During interviews and events, government, think tank, and industry actors from Europe, the US, and South Africa described the Hyphen site using colonial tropes, including ‘virgin territory’ and ‘the ends of the Earth’. Hyphen’s own presentation and web site characterized the project as ‘revolutionizing the African frontier’. (DeBoom 2025: 9)

As DeBoom (2025: 15) concludes, stakeholders in both Europe and Namibia use imaginaries legitimizing ‘extracting climate solutions from a community that is highly vulnerable to—and almost entirely unresponsible for—climate change itself’. This makes energy transition ‘a distributional and socio-spatial one’, in which the German Namibian inter-state relations ‘may mask considerable injustices at subnational scales’.

III. Conclusion

This article contributes to pluralist visions of justice, guided by ‘a decolonial project for Europe’ (Bhambra, 2022: 229), which recognizes the complicity of European countries such as Germany in perpetuating colonial inequalities. It also provides an example of how asymmetric power relations and structures of inequality have domestic as well as global dimensions. The case study of Namibia underlines the importance of inter-generational justice and highlights how intragenerational equity can avoid setting communities against each other, as was the case in the failed attempts at land reform that we describe in the section ‘The Perpetuation of Colonial Land Theft’. As we show, following failures in restorative justice, the structural legacy of colonial rule remains in land ownership and utilization, continuing to disenfranchise the descendants of those who were robbed of their land.

Namibia also shows the limits of emancipation under former liberation movements. SWAPO fought for independence under the slogan ‘Solidarity, Freedom, Justice’. Measured against the social realities since being in government, this rings increasingly hollow. Namibia, classified as a higher middle-income country due to its mineral and marine resources, remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, failing to provide minimum resources and services such as water, food, energy and infrastructure to all. This reveals development interventions to be a sad caricature of what could be achieved in a resource-rich country.

As shown in the section ‘Land and Restorative Justice: Germany and Namibia’, bilateral negotiations between the German and Namibian governments reflected colonial asymmetries. They offer victim communities decimated by the genocide in 1904/1905 limited compensation and show no intention of returning the stolen land. To add insult to injury, these negotiations denied the main agencies of these communities a voice at the negotiating table. As the Nama activist Sima Luipert stressed: ‘No amount of money can ever wholly repair the damage that has been done. It’s about recognition’ (Lawal, 2023).

The new German Namibian collaboration in the production of green hydrogen (discussed in the section ‘The Green Land Grab’) illustrates the nature of pacts made between elites. Economic interests on a government-to-government level and private foreign investments pay insufficient attention to, and respect for, the needs of local communities who risk once again becoming collateral damage. Exploring various, at times conflicting, concepts and efforts to challenge ‘developmentalism’, we advocate for a renewed emphasis on social, as well as material, justice. We follow Gupta et al (2023: 636) in arguing that ‘without understanding who holds and wields power, perpetrators of injustice, reproduce, redistribute or increase injustices’. This requires recognizing the role of global transnational elites in increasing inequalities (Sklair, 2016) through, for example, so-called green land grabs.

More than a century of colonial rule has left festering wounds among indigenous communities in Namibia. Land policies remain ambiguous and half-hearted, not serving those who were made landless. Lacking coherence and sufficient prioritization, they are neither neoliberal nor transformative but a reflection of negligence towards the landless and rural poor. While the dividing lines shifted from a category of ‘race’ to ethnicity and class, ‘development’ as injustice prevails. In the end, land has become a natural resource for individual acquisition by a new political class and its allies—be it for commercial farming or for the use of protected parks and reserves for tourism enterprises or other forms of utilization through resource extraction—instead of being treated and protected as the country’s collective natural wealth.

A few days ahead of the second land conference, the editorial of a local newspaper characterized the battles for land as ‘a smokescreen to cover-up continued elite control over not just the land, but all income-generating natural resources in Namibia’. As it pointed out:

If an accurate look at who is receiving the resettlement farms, EPLs, fishing quotas, affirmative action farm loans and other natural resource allocations is ever possible, we are convinced it will reveal not necessarily one ethnic group reaping all benefits but one socio-economic class gathering wealth. (Windhoek Observer, 2018)

This reminds us of an observation by the late South African scholar Archie Mafeje. Based at Namibia’s university during the early 1990s, he suggested (as quoted in Sasa, 2013: 41):

The whole debate about land in Namibia is not about the livelihood of the dispossessed in the countryside but about how best to maintain the status quo. This could be true of white farmers, the government, as well as the black notables in the so-called communal areas.

We therefore conclude that Namibia is just another case of how so-called development fails to significantly improve the living conditions of people who are denied restitutive and restorative justice. The ultimate question to be answered by any planned development intervention remains: cui bono?