ON OCTOBER 2nd 1904 General Lothar von Trotha issued what is now notorious as “the extermination order” to wipe out the Herero tribe in what was then German South West Africa, now Namibia. “Within the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot,” his edict read. During the next few months it was just about carried out. Probably four-fifths of the Herero people, women and children included, perished one way or another, though the survivors’ descendants now number 200,000-plus in a total Namibian population, scattered across a vast and mainly arid land, of 2.3m. The smaller Nama tribe, which also rose up against the Germans, was sorely afflicted too, losing perhaps a third of its people, in prison camps or in the desert into which they had been chased.

A variety of German politicians have since acknowledged their country’s burden of guilt, even uttering the dread word “genocide”, especially in the wake of the centenary in 2004. But recent negotiations between the two countries’ governments over how to settle the matter, the wording of an apology and material compensation are becoming fraught. Namibia’s 16,000 or so ethnic Germans, still prominent if not as dominant as they once were in business and farming, are twitchy.

The matter is becoming even more messy because, while the German and Namibian governments set about negotiation, some prominent Herero and Nama figures say they should be directly and separately involved—and have embarked on a class-action case in New York under the Alien Tort Statute, which lets a person of any nationality sue in an American court for violations of international law, such as genocide and expropriation of property without compensation.

The main force behind the New York case, Vekuii Rukoro, a former Namibian attorney-general, demands that any compensation should go directly to the Herero and Nama peoples, whereas the Namibian government, dominated by the far more numerous Ovambo people in northern Namibia, who were barely touched by the wars of 1904-07 and lost no land, says it should be handled by the government on behalf of all Namibians. The Namibian government’s amiable chief negotiator, Zedekia Ngavirue, himself a Nama, has been castigated by some of Mr Rukoro’s team as a sell-out. “Tribalism is rearing its ugly head,” says the finance minister, who happens to be an ethnic German.

The German government says it cannot be sued in court for crimes committed more than a century ago because the UN’s genocide convention was signed only in 1948. “Bullshit,” says Jürgen Zimmerer, a Hamburg historian who backs the genocide claim and says the German government is making a mess of things. “They think only like lawyers, not about the moral and political question.”

“None of the then existing laws was broken,” says a senior German official. “Maybe that’s morally unsatisfactory but it’s the legal position,” he adds. Indeed, German officialdom still makes elaborate semantic contortions to avoid a flat-out acceptance of the G-word, presumably pending a final accord between the two governments. Above all, Germany is determined to avert legal liability for reparations of the sort it accepted for the Jewish Holocaust in an agreement in 1952, while stressing that it is ready to raise the level of every sort of development aid to Namibia, to which it already gives far more per head than it does to any other country in the world.

Our African Heimat

Meanwhile, Namibia’s ethnic Germans are keeping their heads down, wary of recrimination over the distant past. “The German government does not represent us; we are Namibians,” says a local businessman. Very few of today’s German-speakers are, in any event, descended from the Schutztruppe (literally, “protection force”), the colonial soldiers who slaughtered the Herero and Nama in 1904-07.

All the same, few are happy to use the G-word, let alone accept its accuracy. “We grew up with talk of the colonial wars, the Herero uprising,” says a veteran writer on the Allgemeine Zeitung, Namibia’s German-language daily. “We don’t use the blanket term genocide.”

Namibian Germans often echo Hinrich Schneider-Waterberg, an 85-year-old farmer who has made a second career as a historian bent on rejecting the genocide charge (and who owns the land where a crucial battle between the Germans and the Herero took place). He contends that the Herero started the killing; that German civilians suffered atrocities, too; that the extermination order was soon rescinded in Berlin; that the number of Herero deaths is exaggerated; and that those of the Nama in prison camps were not intentional, thus not genocidal. These points are dismissed by most historians in Germany as “denialist”.

Burgert Brand, the jovial bishop of the branch of the Lutheran church to which most white Namibian German-speakers belong, acknowledges a German burden of guilt but shrinks at comparison with the Holocaust; some historians in Mr Zimmerer’s camp trace a direct link back to the earlier crimes and racial attitudes of 1904. “It is very frustrating for us bridge-builders, who must start again from scratch,” says the bishop.

Many Namibian Germans are nervous lest the argument over reparations spill over into calls for their farms to be confiscated, as Robert Mugabe has done in Zimbabwe. Werner von Maltzahn, a 69-year-old farmer, recalls how his grandfather, a Prussian baron who settled in the same arid spot in 1913, had to start all over again when the British army requisitioned his cattle in 1915. “Maybe I should ask the English for compensation,” he jokes.