by Mari Serebrov | Jul, Mon, 2026 | Mama Namibia
If you ask me, there’s a good reason we call numerals – especially the big ones – “numbers.” By their very nature, they “numb” us to the reality they quantify. Thus, when we hear that more than 60,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama died in the 1904-1908 genocide in German... 
by Mari Serebrov | Jun, Mon, 2026 | Mama Namibia
A driving force behind European colonialism was an insatiable hunger for land – the need to own it, to possess it, to put up fences to keep others out. It didn’t matter that others already lived on the land. If they weren’t putting it to a good use, from a European... 
by Mari Serebrov | Jun, Wed, 2026 | Mama Namibia
Twenty-one days ago, I started sharing this history because I believed you deserved to know it. Today is the last post in this series – but it is not an ending. “It’s a time to store up memories…” That line from Mama Namibia was written... by Mari Serebrov | Jun, Tue, 2026 | Mama Namibia
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... 
by Mari Serebrov | Jun, Mon, 2026 | Mama Namibia
One of the quietest lines in Mama Namibia has stayed with me for years. “I cling to every moment, wanting each one to last…” Jahohora says this after she has survived. Not in the middle of the crisis – after. In the ordinary moments, when she... 
by Mari Serebrov | May, Sun, 2026 | Mama Namibia
There is a Herero proverb I’ve never been able to shake. “The ancestors only give bad luck to make us remember them.” When I first heard that, I thought it was dark. And then I thought about it more. What does it mean to live in a world where the...