A Bit More Detail

[NEWS] Five notes about migration: Albania, Venezuela, Latvia, Namibia and East Germany, Yunnan

2018-02-24T02:28:36Z

This report from the Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso noting the sheer scale of emigration in parts of rural Albania, proceeding to the point of depopulating entire territories, tells a remarkable story.

This opinion suggesting that, due to the breakdown of the economy of Venezuela, we will soon see a refugee crisis rivaling Syria's seems frighteningly plausible.

Politico Europe notes that, in the case of Latvia, where emigration has helped bring the country's population down below two million, there are serious concerns.

OZY tells the unexpected story of hundreds of young Namibian children who, during apartheid, were raised in safety in Communist East Germany.

Many Chinese are fleeing the pollution of Beijing and other major cities for new lives in the cleaner environments in the southern province of Yunnan. The Guardian reports.

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[LINK] "The secret pool of surviving Bushmen at Chrissiesmeer"

2015-09-29T22:21:43Z

Kevin Davie's 2011 article in the Mail & Guardian describing the survival of a Bushman group in eastern South Africa is fascinating.

We have many languages in South Africa, but what about /Xegwi? The word looks so alien, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that /Xegwi was a language in use in South Africa as recently as 100 years ago.

/Xegwi is an ancient language, one of the country’s originals. If you Google it, you’ll quickly find that it is extinct, as dead as the people who once spoke it. But maybe not.

I came across this story on a bicycle trip through Mpumalanga with two friends. The laminated pamphlet on the front desk of our lodge in Chrissiesmeer, near Ermelo, offered activities such as visiting a derelict town, checking the apparent impression of a giant foot in a rock face or viewing Bushman paintings. The guides for the rock-art tour were two Bushmen.

Chrissiesmeer is something of a South African secret. There are more than 270 lakes in a 20km by 20km area. One, Lake Chrissie, is one of the largest fresh-water lakes in South Africa. The water attracts an abundance of bird, frog and animal life.

The fact that the rock-art guides are themselves Bushmen is extraordinary as they are widely believed to be extinct in most of South Africa.

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[LINK] "Germany set to recognize genocide in colonial Namibia"

2015-07-15T18:57:13Z

Al Jazeera reports on the noteworthy impending recognition by Germany of the campaign waged againdt the Herero of then-German Southwest Africa as genocide.

German authorities are set to officially recognize as "genocide" the colonial-era crackdown in Namibia by German troops more than a century ago in which over 65,000 ethnic Hereros were killed.

Talks with Namibia on a joint declaration about the events of the early 20th century are ongoing, and it isn't clear when they will be concluded, German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said Friday.

The basis for the German government's approach is a parliamentary motion signed three years ago by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, stating that "the war of destruction in Namibia from 1904 to 1908 was a war crime and genocide," Schaefer said. Steinmeier was an opposition leader at the time, and the motion didn't pass.

German Gen. Lothar von Trotha — who was sent to what was then South West Africa to put down an uprising by the Hereros against their German rulers in 1904 — instructed his troops to wipe out the entire tribe in what is widely seen as the 20th century’s first genocide, historians say.

On Oct. 2, 1904, Trotha issued a proclamation: “Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle will be shot. I shall not accept more women and children. … I shall order shots to be fired at them.”

Rounded up in prison camps, captured Hereros and as well as members of the Nama tribe died from malnutrition and severe weather. Dozens were beheaded after their deaths and their skulls sent to German researchers in Berlin for "scientific" experiments.

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[LINK] "Lüderitz v !Nami≠nüs: dispute over town's name divides Namibia"

2015-02-26T23:19:32Z

The Guardian's Africa correspondent David Smith writes about the controversy associated with giving the Namibian port of Lüderitz a Khoisan name.

Namibia was a German colony from 1884 to 1919, then administered by apartheid South Africa until 1990. It is still home to a small German population.

In 2013, the Caprivi Strip – a 280-mile (450km) area known for its tropical rivers and wildlife and named after count Leo von Caprivi – was rechristened the Zambezi region, after the river that forms the northern border with Angola.

At the time, the president, Hifikepunye Pohamba, also announced that Lüderitz would be called !Nami≠nüs, which means “embrace” in a Nama language and incorporates click-like sounds, often represented in written form by punctuation symbols.

According to the newspaper the Namibian, !Nami≠nüs was the original name given to Lüderitz by the !Aman community, a Nama subtribe that was the first to settle at the coastal town. German tobacco merchant Adolf Lüderitz is said to have bought the town from a Nama chief and named it after himself.

In 2004, Germany apologised for a genocide that killed 65,000 Herero people through starvation and slave labour in concentration camps that, according to some historians, later influenced the Nazis in the second world war. The Nama, a smaller ethnic group, lost half their population in what one book has described as the kaiser’s Holocaust.

But some in the town are resistant to the change and are calling for a referendum. Speaking on behalf of the business and tourism sector, Ulf Grünewald said an overwhelming majority of residents who attended consultation meetings were against it, according to the Namibian.

Businesspeople fear it will badly affect their business, Grünewald added. “They are selling their businesses under the trade name Lüderitz.”

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