As the Americas grapple with how - and whether - to "celebrate" the anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus on new world shores, Africa is also struggling with the legacy of colonial atrocities. In Namibia, in Southwest Africa, the Herero community has gone beyond protesting and turned to the courts, lodging a claim for $2 billion in damages for what the ethnic group claims was the enslavement and genocidal destruction caused by Germany, which colonized that region during the early part of the twentieth century. In what the Germans did to the Herero, some see an ominous portent - a warning that should have been heeded - of the Holocaust.
The lawsuit targets specific German companies - including Deutsche Bank, Terex Corporation and others - which it says conspired with imperial Germany to exterminate some 65,000 Herero people between 1904 and 1907. The Herero Paramount Chief, Kuaima Riruako, who heads the Chief Hosea Kutako Foundation, says that the lawsuit will be followed by another against the German government.

The secretary-general of the Chief Hosea Kutako Foundation, Riruako Mburumba Kerina, says his people do not want cash but a "mini-Marshall Plan" to get businesses started, along with scholarships to German universities for local students. According to human rights groups that study the region, the remaining Herero are a minority ethnic group, greatly outnumbered by the northern Ovambo people, who were beyond German reach in colonial days but led the fight against white South African rule, which ended victoriously in 1990. Namibia's government is dominated by Ovambo and does not support the Herero's quest for reparations.

Although Germany joined the European colonial plunder of Africa quite late, it effected in record time one of the worst records on the continent. The German presence in Africa began in 1884 when it colonized Togo, Cameroon, Namibia and Tanzania - the Namibian presence had begun in the 1870s with the arrival of a handful of German missionaries.

It was in the sleepy farm town of Okahandja in 1904 that the genocide began. For 20 years, German settlers moving inland had been stealing land and cattle, raping women, lynching men with impunity and calling them "baboons" to their faces. When the Herero finally hit back, they did so in an attack that killed all the German men in Okahandja - on the orders of their leader, Samuel Maherero, they spared women, children, missionaries and the few English and Afrikaner farmers. When word reached Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin, the counterattack was quick, brutal and quickly expanded into slaughter.

Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, notorious for his butchery in German East Africa (today's Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi), was dispatched with 10,000 volunteers and a battle plan. Von Trotha pushed the Herero guerrillas and their families north to Waterberg and then attacked from three sides, leaving one exit, the Omaheke Desert. When the Herero fled into it, he poisoned the water holes, erected guard posts along a 150-mile line and bayoneted everyone who crawled out. He then issued the Vernichtungsbefehl, or extermination order: "Within the German borders, every Herero, whether armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women or children. I shall drive them back to their people - otherwise I shall order shots to be fired at them."

The remaining Herero were rounded up and sent to labor camps, where they starved or died of overwork, typhus and smallpox. By 1907 the order had been denounced and von Trotha had been recalled , but the rebellion had been crushed. Historians say some 80% of the Herero had been killed.

In a sickening confluence of types of race-hate, many of the pseudo-scientific theories later adopted by Hitler were being formed at roughly the same time the Kaiser's armies were putting down the Herero revolt. It was to this region that German geneticist Eugene Fischer came to perform medical "experiments" to prove his increasingly dangerous racial theories. Fischer used Herero and mixed-race subjects as guinea pigs to prove the dangers of race mixing (never mind that the majority of the mixing was caused by German men raping local women) and the ultimate superiority of the Aryan race.

The book that resulted from Fischer's research in Namibia - The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene - went on to become one of Hitler's favorite reads. Fischer later became chancellor of the University of Berlin, where he taught medicine to Nazi physicians. One of his prominent students was Josef Mengele, the notorious doctor who performed genetic experiments on Jewish children at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

As one travels north of Windhoek, Namibia's capital, there's nothing much to define the landscape. The horizon opens up under vast African skies. Farms slip by mile after mile, with hardly a homestead to be seen. This is ranching country, where cattle and sheep graze beneath thorn trees. These roads, which once took South African troops northwards towards the Angolan border and war, are smooth and straight. The isolated villages here have a flavor of earlier times. Here German is frequently the language of choice among shopkeepers.

Now the Waterberg is a nature reserve. At the foot of the Waterberg is a small, well-kept graveyard. The German troops who died here nearly 100 years ago are remembered with marked graves. But the Herero who suffered here are still waiting for recognition.

In this age in which national apologies are demanded, Germany is not in the mood. At times, the country has seemed to waver on the edge of an apology, and even paying reparations. Yet despite acknowledging the country's dark past in Namibia, it has so far refused to officially apologize and compensate the Africans.

During his last years in office, President Bill Clinton expressed regret for slavery on a trip to Africa, and German leaders have gone down on their knees to Jews and Poles for World War II. Japan recently apologized for its brutal colonial rule in Korea and paid reparations to the "comfort women" (sex slaves) used by the Japanese troops in World War II.

Visiting Namibia in 1998, Germany's then-president Roman Herzog acknowledged that the Herero massacre was "a dark chapter in our bilateral relations." Yet he refused to apologize, saying "too much time has passed for a formal apology to the Hereros to make sense." The nearest President Herzog came to an apology was to admit that Trotha "acted incorrectly" and that the killing of the Herero was "a burden on the conscience of every German."

Perhaps the German conscience is officially overburdened, what with the country's very appropriate emphasis on an open acknowledgement of guilt for the Holocaust. According to reparation watchers, Germany has paid over 90 billion Deutsch Mark to Israel since 1949 in voluntary reparations. Still, people in Namibia hope that Germany can find room for more than one expression of remorse and finally own up to the horrors committed against the Herero.