I think about this more than almost anything else I’ve written.
“I don’t know what dreams died with them.”
Not what lives. What dreams.
The soldiers who drove the Herero and Nama into the desert in 1904 didn’t just kill people. They killed everything those people would have become. Every child who would have been born. Every song that would have been written. Every discovery, every love, every ordinary Tuesday.
This is the arithmetic of genocide that we don’t talk about enough. It’s not just the dead. It’s everything the dead took with them.
Mama Namibia can’t give all of that back. Nothing can. But it can ask the question. It can refuse to pretend the question doesn’t exist.
“I don’t know what dreams died with them.”
Neither do I. But I know we owe it to them to wonder.
How do you think we should honor not just the lives lost, but the futures that were stolen?