Largely unnoticed by most Namibians, the local German-language daily Allgemeine Zeitung provides a forum for colonial apologetics. Reinhart Kössler and Henning Melber examine recent comments and readers’ letters in this newspaper, exposing the reactionary attitudes and privileging strategies that maintain the minority language as a barrier to national reconciliation.

The repatriation of human remains more than a century after they were taken to Germany from Namibia has evoked painful memories of colonial wars in which primary African resistance was crushed, and genocide perpetrated (1904–08) in what was then the colony of German South West Africa. This contribution situates the current issues and practices of memory politics between Namibia and Germany within their historical context.