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The Biopolitical Usage of Colonial Camp Systems between 1896 and 1908 and the Quest for Restorative Justice

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Restorative Justice, Humanitarian Rhetorics, and Public Memories of Colonial Camp Cultures

Part of the book series: Rhetoric, Politics and Society series ((RPS))

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Abstract

In 2004, a minister from Germany visited Namibia and personally apologized for the colonial-era violence that killed at least 60,000 Herero people who survived the Battle of Waterberg and who were then rounded up and placed in German prisoner of war camps. Seven years later, German medical institutions repatriated Herero and Nama skulls that had been transported from Africa to Germany for anthropological studies in race science. All this happened because today’s Namibia have to deal with some of the imperial and colonial legacies that were bequeathed by those who once lived in a place called German South-West Africa (GSWA).

[T]he camp is the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized—a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without mediation.1

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population

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Notes

  1. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2009), 367.

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  1. Department of Communications, University of Utah, USA

    Hasian Marouf Jr. (Professor of Communications)

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Marouf, H. (2014). The Biopolitical Usage of Colonial Camp Systems between 1896 and 1908 and the Quest for Restorative Justice. In: Restorative Justice, Humanitarian Rhetorics, and Public Memories of Colonial Camp Cultures. Rhetoric, Politics and Society series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437112_1

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