Namibian President Hage Geingob has rejected Germany’s offer to compensate the southern African nation for colonial-era mass killings. Geingob said in a statement on Tuesday that Berlin’s offer of $11.7 million was “not acceptable.”
During the colonial era between 1904 and 1908 the German Empire killed as many as 80,000 Herero and Nama people in response to an anti-colonial resistance, per the US Holocaust Museum. Other estimates put the number of African people killed at over 100,000.
“The current offer for reparations made by the German government remains an outstanding issue and is not acceptable to the Namibian government,” Geingob said. The Namibian government plans to negotiate a “revised offer.”
Geingob also took issue with Berlin’s use of the phrase “healing of wounds” in place of the term reparations.
Although Namibia and Germany have been negotiating the arrangement of an official apology and aid compensation from the European country since 2015, Germany refuses to directly pay reparations to Namibia. Germany says the money it has given to Namibia in the form of development aid has displaced the need for official reparations. The two countries have engaged in eight rounds of negotiations since 2015.
Descendants of those who survived the genocide say they are entitled to receive $4 billion in compensation from Germany.
