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Murphy – In celebration of the release of the 10th anniversary edition of Mama Namibia, a historical novel by local author Mari Serebrov that puts a face to the first genocide of the 20th century, Rare Bird Emporium will host a reading and book signing at 2 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 11. The public is invited.
When Germany was carrying out the genocide in 1904-08 in German South-West Africa, the rest of the world ignored it. In that silence, German officials fine-tuned their experience – which included the slaughter of women, children and the elderly, train transports to death camps, and medical experiments – to carry out the Holocaust nearly 40 years later.
Although academic books had been written about the genocide that proved to be the training grounds for the Holocaust, Germany continued to deny it for more than a century. Then Mama Namibia was first published in 2013.
Based on the true story of Jahohora, the young daughter of a Herero healer, who survived alone in the Omaheke Desert (Kalahari) after her family was killed in a German ambush, Mama Namibia “turned the faceless statistics of the scholarly books into families, villages and a people with both a past and the hope of a future. It quickly became a resource for the genocide committees set up by the Ovaherero and Nama traditional authorities to bring world attention to the genocide so Germany would finally address the history it had tried to ignore or deny,” Dr. Hoze Riruako, paramount chief of the Herero Nation, says in the foreword to the new edition of the novel.
Mama Namibia also tells the story of Kov, a German doctor who happens to be Jewish and who volunteers to serve as a military doctor to show his loyalty to the Fatherland. The horrors he witnesses makes him rethink that loyalty and seek redemption. While Kov is fictional, his experiences are well-documented in eye-witness accounts of the genocide and German records.
In recognition of the importance of Mama Namibia to the Herero Nation and the 13 years of research that went into recapturing the traditional family and village life that was destroyed in the genocide and colonization, then-Paramount Chief Kuaima Riruako appointed Serebrov as the literary laureate of the Herero Nation in 2013.
For details, contact Serebrov at 603-398-2157 or mari.serebrov@yahoo.com.