The blood of the dead cries out for justice

The twentieth century was an era of genocides. The best known of these, of course, are the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Yet the genocides of the century began and ended in Africa. The first of these was the near-extermination of the Herero people of Namibia, by their German colonisers. While Germany has acknowledged that it committed genocide against the Jews and the Sinti and Roma, German governments have stubbornly refused to acknowledge that the crimes committed by German forces against the Herero constituted genocide. They have come close, and they have promised aid to Namibia, but they have so far refused to provide reparations to the descendants of the victims.

The coldness with which the German commander, Lothar von Trotha, described his actions is a cold presaging of the Holocaust. In more ways than one:

During the period of colonisation and oppression, many women were used as sex
slaves. (This had not been von Trotha's intention. 'To receive women and
children, most of them ill, is a serious danger to the German troops. And to
feed them is an impossibility. I find it appropriate that the nation perishes
instead of infecting our soldiers.') In the Herero work camps there were
numerous children born to these abused women, and a man called Eugen Fischer,
who was interested in genetics, came to the camps to study them; he carried out
medical experiments on them as well. He decided that each mixed-race child was
physically and mentally inferior to its German father (a conclusion for which
there was and is no respectable scientific foundation whatever) and wrote a book
promoting his ideas: 'The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene'. Adolf
Hitler read it while he was in prison in 1923, and cited it in his own infamous
pursuit of 'racial purity'.

There is a thread connecting colonialism and imperialism with genocide. The claim that you are ruling over inferior subject peoples is used to justify removing those inferiors by any means, including extermination.

There is a curious echo at the end of the twentieth century, in the way that the United States sought to avoid the word 'genocide' being applied to the Interahamwe's reign of terror in Rwanda, though genocide it surely was.