In Episode 6, we talk with transnational activist and poet, Jephta Nguherimo about his work for restorative justice and reparations for the German genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples in today’s Namibia. Jephta is part the Ovaherero tribe and will throughout the conversation share insights from decades of fighting for justice both through court rooms, art and poetry. Together, we will touch upon the historical trajectories of reparations, the bigger and smaller success, and everything there still is to fight for. The challenges are still many, and up until today only some people are invited to the table of negotiations meanwhile, German civil society’s awareness of the country’s colonial past remains small. Staytuned to hear why Jeptha nevertheless continues to fight with optimism for what the future and new generations have to bring. 

Bio

Jephta U. Nguherimo is a reparation activist, poet and a former professional labor negotiator of Herero-descent based in Washington D.C. Jephta Nguherimo has been instrumental in the reparation movement for the OvaHerero and Nama genocides, over the last three decades. He was the co-founder of the OvaHerero, Ovambanderu, and Nama Genocide Institute in the US. He organized conferences and other platforms that eventually forced the German government to confront and acknowledge the Genocide of 1904-08.

Mentioned in Podcast

• News article about German Gov. Official apology and reparations (Reuters) https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/germany-officially-calls-colonial-era-killings-namibia-genocide-2021-05-28/
• African union – 2025 year of reparations https://au.int/en/theme/2025

Further material

• Article (documentary inside article) with Al-Jezeera https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2022/11/6/reckoning-with-genocide-in-namibia
• “unBuried-unMarked” book by Jephta https://www.buecher.de/artikel/buch/unburied-unmarked/57792151/
• Germany’s colonial history with Namibia Time-line https://www.dw.com/en/namibia-a-timeline-of-germanys-brutal-colonial-history/a-57729985
• General history of Namibia: https://www.britannica.com/place/Namibia/The-South-African-conquest
• European Center for Constitutional Human Rights – “Colonial Repercussions: Namibia”: 115 years after the genocide: https://www.ecchr.eu/fileadmin/Publikationen/ECCHR_NAMIBIA_DS.pdf

• de Wolff, K. A., & Nguherimo, J. U. (2025). The Ovaherero and Nama People’s Struggle for Restorative Justice: An Activist-Scholar Lens. Journal of Genocide Research, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2025.2559463  

Together with Hanna Al-Taher and Firoozeh Farvardin, this episode explores a wide range of topics, including authoritarianism, collective mobilization, epistemic hierarchies, and the relationship between resistance, praxis, and academia. Drawing on the fascinating work of our guests, we highlight insights from decolonial and critical feminist perspectives.

Further Information & Reading:

Al-Taher, H., & Younes, A.-E. (2023). Lebensraum, geopolitics and race—Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia. Ethnography, 25(2), 142-168. https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231216845

Al-Taher, H. (2024). Deutsche Staatsräson und die Verunmöglichung palästinensischer Realität. PERIPHERIE – Politik • Ökonomie • Kultur, 44(2–2024), 250–259. https://doi.org/10.3224/peripherie.v44i2.08

Farvardin, F. (2024). Other Feminisms: A Subversive Gift to the World. In International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies & kollektiv orangotango (eds.), Beyond Molotovs – A Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Strategies (S. 286–295). transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839470558-045

Farvardin, F. & Talebi, N. (2024). Challenges of Southern Knowledge Production. In I. Dulley & Ö. E. İşcen (eds.), Displacing Theory Through the Global South (S. 57–77). ICI Berlin Press. https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-29_05

Video: [Round Table] Coloniality in the City // 8 July 2024 // Universität Freiburg

Episode 5 is an invitation to shift the gaze and think about Europe as a postcolonial space. Together with Miguel Cardina and Gerlov van Engelenhoven, we delve into the implications that colonialism has had (and continues to have) on Europe’s identities and current realities, as well as contestations thereof. We also address the issue of (post)colonial memory, exploring both its meaning and its relevance for what is commonly assumed to make Europe “Europe”.

Bios:

Miguel Cardina is a historian and a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He was an European Research Council (ERC) Grantee - project: «CROME - Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence. The Colonial-Liberation Wars in Postcolonial Times» (2017-2023). He is the author or co-author of several books, book chapters or papers on colonialism, anticolonialism and the colonial wars; political ideologies in the sixties and seventies; and the dynamics between history and memory.

Gerlov van Engelenhoven is an assistant professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). His research concerns postcolonial memory and heritage, law and culture, and cultural interaction. He also teaches various courses on these topics. His research methodology combines participatory research with discourse analysis and (auto)ethnography.

Further Information & Readings:

12:00 Postcolonial Memory-Cultural/Collective Memory Studies

• Talk by Sakiru Adebayo
• Postcolonial Memory – Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform
• also see below: Book by Gerlov

16:00 Former Holocaust Transit Camps in the Netherlands being used as “Repatriation camps”: Repatriation Camp – Kamp Westerbork

20:00 Activism-removal Debate about the Jan Pieterszoon Statue in Hoorn. Netherlands: Statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen in Hoorn

24:00 Amílcar Cabral’s impact on Portuguese democracy

• Interview with Peter Karibe Mendy on Amílcar Cabral,  The Socialist Agronomist Who Helped End Portuguese Colonialism
• Maria Poblet on Revolutionary Democracy, Class-Consciousness, and Cross-Class Movement Building: Lessons from Amílcar Cabral

25:45 The term Slow Violence was coined by Rob Nixon in 2011: Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Definition: “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” 

31:00 Banda Islands Genocide

• Katharine McGregor and Ana Dragojlovic (2024): Songs from another land: Decolonizing memories of colonialism and the nutmeg trade
• Multimedia journal: https://thebandajournal.org/

34:05 Gloria Wacker (2016): White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race

36:45 Herbert Marcuse (1969): Repressive Tolerance

46:45 Notion of the Combatant. Book from Inês Nascimento Rodrigues and Miguel Cardina (2023): Who is the combatant? A diachronic reading based on Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe

50:00 Gerlov on Silence: ‘There’s a great deal to be said about silence’

• See also Book (2023): Postcolonial Memory in the Netherlands: Meaningful Voices, Meaningful Silences

1:01:00 Museum on the History of Dutch Slavery

In Episode 3, we will explore what it means to challenge (post)colonial hierarchies in the classroom together with Amya Agarwal and Swati Parashar. The classroom is a space which can serve to promote critical thinking, a space that not only provides the possibility of reimagining the fundamentals of academic disciplines but that also allows for critical  students and radical scholarship to emerge and thrive.

Bios:

Amya Agarwal is a lecturer of International Relations at the University of Sheffield, UK. Prior to moving to the UK, she was a senior researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, Freiburg, Germany (2021–2023) and a postdoctoral fellow in Duisburg, Germany (2019–2021). She received her PhD from the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, India in 2017. In the past, she has held teaching positions in the University of Delhi, South Asian University, University of Freiburg and University College Freiburg. Amya's research lies at the intersection of gender, conflict and security. In particular, she studies and writes about masculinities, motherhood, art and aesthetics in times of violence and resistance.  

Swati Parashar is a Professor of Peace and Development at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her teaching and research have led to academic appointments and fellowships in India, Singapore, the UK, the US, Ireland, Australia, and Sweden. She has also taught at the University of Rwanda in Kigali and at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. Swati is a member of the Swedish Development Research Network and has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of

Further Information and readings:

bell hooks (1994): Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. New York and London. Routledge.

Jenny Edkins: “Global Politics” as basis of Professor Parashar’s seminar

Audre Lorde (1984): “Uses of the Erotic”

Audre Lorde and bell hooks as central Black feminist scholars

Swati Parashar (2016): “Feminism and Postcolonialism: (En)gendering Encounters”

Swati Parashar (2017): “Feminism Meets Postcolonialism: Rethinking Gender, State and Political Violence”

Conversation with J. Ann Tickner and Phillip Darby (2017) on “Feminism and Postcolonialism: The Twain Shall Meet”, edited by Swati Parashar; Video of the conversation

Katherine Mayo (1927): “Mother India” as an instrument of Indian control and policing bodies

Women Peace and Security Agenda (UN) promoting the idea of responsibility of Global North to save women. Adopted through Resolution 1325 by the UN Security Council in 2000.

1 in 5 Australian women face intimate partner violence: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Report on Personal Safety (2023)

Chandra Talpade Mohanty and L. H. M. "Lily" Ling as postcolonial feminists

Swati Parashar’s lecture on the coloniality and violence of famines in the Global South

Peace Adzo Medie: a feminist and postcolonial scholar who discussed the question of why the burden of decolonising academics lies with non-Whites

In Episode 1, part 2 we discuss the Postcolonial Hierarchies Competence Network (which this podcast is a part of)  and the network’s project of confronting coloniality/modernity dynamics in peace and conflict studies with....

Siddharth Tripathi - Senior Research Fellow at University of Erfurt. As part of his research at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels, he has conducted extensive fieldwork in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Berlin and Brussels. He edited the Rowman and Littlefield Handbook on Peace and Conflict Studies: Perspectives from the Global South (s) which is a collaborative endeavour of scholars from the Global North and the Global South

...and Susanne Buckley-Zistel - Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Executive Director of the Center for Conflict Studies at the Philipps University Marburg. Her main interests lie in (transitional) justice, memory, gender, space and post-colonialism.

Links:

Achille Mbembe in Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf 

Agenda of Peace by Boutros Boutros Ghali (1992) as the foundation of the understanding of liberal peace (and development etc.)

An agenda for peace : (un.org)

Johan Galtung’s concepts of structural, cultural, and direct violence

Short video of Johann Galtung explaining his concepts of violence - YouTube

Stuart Hall: West/Rest-Dichotomy

https://globalsocialtheory.org/thinkers/hall-stuart/

Stuart Hall (1992): The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power

hal1995-westa (wordpress.com)

Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhaba as scholars of Postcolonialism Postcolonialism – GLOBAL SOCIAL THEORY

World Systems and Dependency Theory

Development theory - Dependency, World Systems, Theories | Britannica Money

Aníbal Quijano, Maria Lugones and Walter D. Mignolo as scholars of Decoloniality

Decoloniality – GLOBAL SOCIAL THEORY

Gurminder Bhambra (2011) (Gurminder K Bhambra – Gurminder K Bhambra (gkbhambra.net)) on postcolonial and decolonial dialogues Full article: Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues (tandfonline.com)

“Theory is always for someone and for some purpose” - Robert W. Cox: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03058298810100020501 

“Dealing with the Past and Reconciliation (Transitional Justice)” (2019) 

https://transitionaljusticehub.org/glhimages/content/Interministerial-Strategy.pdf 

Prof. Cori Wielenga from university of Pretoria who is working on an archive by female mediators

Prof Cori Wielenga | University of Pretoria (up.ac.za)

Paulo Freire on everybody’s responsibility to create a more just world

Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Zinn Education Project (zinnedproject.org)

Paulo Freire (1970), Pedagogy of the Oppressed 

[Paulo_Freire]_Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed(BookFi.org).pdf (amu.edu.et)

Paulo Freire (1992), Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Paulo Freire · Pedagogy of Hope · Pedagogy for Change (pedagogy4change.org)+

Gloria Anzaldúa as a theorist of hope

ANZALDÚA, Gloria E. – GLOBAL SOCIAL THEORY

The episode was moderated by Abdul Karim Ibrahim  from the institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.

We also want to thank our team behind the scenes for the collaboration and contributions. We want to thank Abdul Karim Ibrahim for the introduction to this episode, Aurelio Cossar for the illustration of the cover and Harry and Tom Parfitt for the Jingle. It was inspired by Sheriff Ghale’s piece called “Nni Yeli”. 

For the preparation and recording of the podcast, we want to thank Miriam Bartelmann and Harry Parfitt. Furthermore we want to express our gratitude for the assistance on this podcast to Nora Wolf.

The equipment was provided by the media center of the University library in Freiburg, while Florian Laurösch from Radio Dreyeckland postproduced the podcast - thank you for the help and collaboration.

In Episode 1, part 1 of our podcast, we focus on coloniality and knowledge production with Manuela Boatcă - Professor of Sociology and Head of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Manuela has published widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Her co-authored book, with Anca Parvulescu, titled “Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania Across Empires” was published last year. It has received different international awards and will be available not only in English, but soon also in German, and Romanian.

Links:

Marx & Engels (1848): Manifesto of the Communist Party

Communist Manifesto - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (rosalux.de)

Migration, slavery and colonialism as the underside of modernity – Enrique Dussel (1998): The Underside of Modernity

332.2002_ingl.pdf (enriquedussel.com)

Credits:

The episode was moderated by Abdul Karim Ibrahim  from the institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.

We also want to thank our team behind the scenes for the collaboration and contributions. We want to thank Abdul Karim Ibrahim for the introduction to this episode, Aurelio Cossar for the illustration of the cover and Harry and Tom Parfitt for the Jingle. It was inspired by Sheriff Ghale’s piece called “Nni Yeli”. 

For the preparation and recording of the podcast, we want to thank Miriam Bartelmann and Harry Parfitt. Furthermore we want to express our gratitude for the assistance on this podcast to Nora Wolf.

The equipment was provided by the media center of the University library in Freiburg, while Florian Laurösch from Radio Dreyeckland postproduced the podcast - thank you for the help and collaboration.

In Episode 2, we discuss the "big buzzwords" of postcolonial theory and decolonial thought: what they mean, why and when to use them, and the plurality and diversity within their origins. The guests for this episode were Layla Brown & Filiberto Penados.

Bios.:

Dr. Filiberto Penados is a Co-Founder of CELA Belize and a Maya scholar whose work focuses on indigenous education and development. Dr. Penados has a long history of engaged scholarship with indigenous and local communities in Belize and a wealth of experience leveraging this involvement to create unique learning experiences.

Dr Penados has served as a professor at the University of Manitoba, University of Toronto, Galen University, and the University of Belize. He teaches courses on Sustainable Development, Natural Resource Management, and Education, and related fields. He also loves to play the guitar.

Links:

Postcolonialism as desire, anticolonial as struggle, decolonial as just fancy words – Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui:  CUSICANQUI, Silvia Rivera – GLOBAL SOCIAL THEORY

Decoloniality: coloniality and modernity as two sides of the same coin: See e.g. Walter Mignolo: MIGNOLO, Walter – GLOBAL SOCIAL THEORY

Filliberto Penado’s interview on Belizean TV: Belize National Indigenous Council – Maya in South Belize – YouTube

Juliet Hooker on racism and indigeneity: Juliet Hooker: “The closer you are to being indigenous, to being black, the lower you are in the racial hierarchy” – Nicaraguan Perspectives (nicaperspectives.org)

Lebohang Pheko on Feminist Economics: Lebohang Pheko: Feminist economics is everything. The revolution is now! | TED Talk

An interview with Robin D.G. Kelley on universities: The Meaning of African American Studies | The New Yorker

Fernando Sarango on pluriversities: Prof. Dr. Fernando Sarango Macas — Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies – FRIAS (uni-freiburg.de)

Credits

The episode was moderated by Abdul Karim Ibrahim  from the institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.

We also want to thank our team behind the scenes for the collaboration and contributions. We want to thank Abdul Karim Ibrahim for the introduction to this episode, Aurelio Cossar for the illustration of the cover and Harry and Tom Parfitt for the Jingle. It was inspired by Sheriff Ghale’s piece called “Nni Yeli”. 

For the preparation and recording of the podcast, we want to thank Rebecca Schmidt, Kristine Dünkelsbühler and Miriam Bartelmann. Furthermore we want to express our gratitude for the assistance on this podcast to Adrién Francoise and Johanna Unewisse.

The equipment was provided by the media center of the University library in Freiburg, who also postproduced the podcast – thank you for the help and collaboration.