As humans are essentially homo narrans (storytellers) by nature, the presentation will use one published genocide-survivor-narrative-inspired text to provide a nuanced and qualitatively driven literary analysis of the Herero/Nama-German conflict, which took place in 1904-1908. T

Narratives and storytelling

The aim is to demonstrate the literary manifestations of conflict by using historical fiction, which offers a creative/imaginative presentation of reality as a bleeding wound and, thus, as the basis for negotiating restorative justice and peaceful co-existence. The presentation will therefore focus on The Sands Shall Witness by Walter Williamson (2023) to explore the ‘present-historical-immediacy’ of the genocide and its enactment, the pragmatics of love in wartime, the perpetrator conundrum and human universals, and how these shape paradoxical identities. What is important is showing how the creative arts aptly capture the qualitative facets of life, the ‘unspeakable’ and the seemingly unrepresentable horrors of conflict and the enactment of collective trauma as an enduring genocide wound.

More so, by exploring the deep historical scars through this text, the question is: How do narratives and storytelling help to expose the intersection of narratives, identities, and collective trauma, especially concerning instances where, on the ground, there are a myriad forms of provocations, piecemeal appeasements, and attempts towards erasure and sanitisation. The presentation will use this re-imaginative live artifact/historical novel set in colonial Namibia as source material to speak to ways in which conversations can be held around areas where deletion and silence have been evident, and to demonstrate how the full weight of the genocide continues to shape identities, histories, and futures.

The text offers multiple memories of the conflict and demonstrates how cultural artifacts and artistic creations narratively serve as vehicles of memory, resuscitating decolonial thoughts about conflict, atrocities, race-thinking, and reconciliation; as the author memorialises “how” the conflict took shape and provides an aesthetic that fictionalizes history as a basis for peaceful negotiation and healing.