Killarney,

The indigenous africans prior to colonialism were butchering each other at a prodigious rate, secondly the kingdoms that you mentioned never achieved the written word, and were mostly squalid encampments where a tiny minority enjoyed a modicum of wealth and power.

The lifting of colonialism enabled them largely to revert, this time with guns, tanks and aircraft, and there are very few citizens of this continent who enjoy a standard of living or safety even approaching what they had before freedom.

The events in Namibia which are described in this article occurred from 1904 to 1907. These events started two years after the Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899 – 1902, (henceforth called the Boer War), in which concentration camps featured as part of British policy in prosecuting the war. In that war 18,000 to 28,000 Boer civilians (about 26,000 is the usually accepted number) and 12,000 Blacks died in British concentration camps (Thomas Pakenham, 1979, The Boer War). Coming so shortly after the Boer War, the German colonial administrators of South West Africa would have noticed how the British used concentration camps in that war. Those administrators would then have developed the idea of the concentration camp further and applied those developments in the Herero-Nama Wars.
If the author wishes to draw a line linking the South West African concentration camps to the concentration camps of World War Two, it should be extended further back to include the British camps of the Boer War.
Perhaps those suing the German government should also sue the British government for implanting the idea of concentration camps into the minds of the German colonial administrators.

Concerning the last sentence of the article, according to the author’s figures, a total of 66,750 to 81,750 Hereros, Namas and Germans died in the Herero-Nama Wars. If Pakenham’s numbers are added up, the total number of Boer War deaths, battle and civilian (including concentration camp deaths), comes to 67,000, a number within the range of the Herero-Nama Wars. Combined with the burnt farms, blown up railways and loss of mine production, this number demonstrates that the Boer War was just as devastating as the Herero-Nama Wars. You could, however, be pedantic, and say that the Boer War was a 19th century war because it started in 1899 and that therefore you could discount any comparison with the Herero-Nama Wars, which occurred in the 20th century.
However, in the 20th century there were many wars in Southern Africa which were much more devastating than the Herero-Nama wars. For example, there were the Angolan (1975 – 2002) and Mozambican (1977 – 1992, 2013 – present) Civil Wars, which cost over 500,000 and 1,000,000 lives respectively, and displaced many millions of people. Then there were the various wars of independence and other civil wars, which together cost more lives than the Herero-Nama Wars.

Killarney, I was once an anti racist like your good self. What made me start thinking straight, was articles like this one, that presumes that white civilisation is the scourge of the world. Every advanced civilisation in human history, regardless of race, religion or culture, expanded it's borders into barbarian lands. Often this was done for sheer necessity. Primitive warlike people have always coveted the material possessions of the more advanced settled peoples, and have always raided civilisation. It was always a good idea for the civilised nations to sort the buggers out before they could become a threat. Think of Britain and the Vikings, or the USA and the Barbary pirates, and you get the idea.

Prior to 1600 AD, almost every civilisation on planet Earth was at the same level of technology. But it was the white, North European nations who began to ignore their priestly castes, and who cultivated critical thinking, who rocketed ahead of the rest of the world. The European Age of Imperialism was the greatest civilising force that this planet had ever seen, and it was as inevitable a the rising of tomorrows sun. It bestowed upon entire barbarian peoples medicine, agriculture, industry, and commerce. It built roads, schools, hospitals and bridges where none had before existed. I refuse to accept that this was usually a bad thing for the people of barbarian lands. Civilisation has always advanced at the point of a sword.

You can point out where European imperialism was brutal, rapacious, and self serving. But given the brutalities inherent in every barbarian society it was usually no worse than what the ordinary people got from their own backward leadership anyway. In Namibia, the two local tribes were already well known for butchering each other.

Overall, European imperialism in Africa was more good than bad. Since those dirty white imperialists fled, Africa has gone steadily backwards. In many African countries today, all of the infrastructure was built by the colonialists and it is rotting away, no matter how much UN Aid gets poured into these African countries.

"The slave trade destroyed much of this commercial trade, as travel within the continent became too dangerous, except for Europeans, and strongly contributed to the collapse of these civilisations."

Well, given that the African slave trade existed for 500 yrs prior to the arrival of western traders and that in that period vastly greater numbers of slaves went east than went west, this assertion is utter rubbish.

But since, for some, whatever bad things happened were, definitionally, caused by the west, this misunderstanding of history is entirely predictable.

In the Concentration Camp Stakes, the Confederate, Andersonville prison would be a likely contender.

"The site [Andersonville] is an iconic reminder of the horrors of Civil War prisons. It was commanded by Captain Henry Wirz, who was tried and executed after the war for war crimes. It was overcrowded to four times its capacity, with an inadequate water supply, inadequate food rations, and unsanitary conditions. Of the approximately 45,000 Union prisoners held at Camp Sumter [Andersonville] during the war, nearly 13,000 died. The chief causes of death were scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery [and the heavily polluted general water supply]."
from Wikipedia.