We welcome Jephta Uaravaera Nguherimo as a new Visiting Fellow at the Research Center „Transformations of Political Violence“.
Jephta U. Nguherimo is a reparation activist, poet and a former professional labor negotiator of Herero-descent based in Washington D.C. He has been instrumental in the reparation movement for the OvaHerero and Nama genocides over the last three decades and was the co-founder of the OvaHerero, Ovambanderu, and Nama Genocide Institute (ongi.org) in the US. Beside this, he organized conferences and other platforms that eventually forced the German government to confront and acknowledge the Genocide of 1904-08.
In his collaborative activist-scholar work he has produced a series of papers with TraCe-member Dr. Kaya de Wolff which they jointly presented at academic conferences including the “New Perspectives of Memory Studies and Social Movements & Conflict Studies in Dialogue Conference in Berlin” (September and October 2023) and “Rethinking our communicative past. Radical and Reparatory Approaches” (April 2024, Loughborough University London). He was invited to speak as a guest lecturer of the TraCe-Roundtable “Rethinking Cosmopolitan Memory in Postcolonial Contexts” at Goethe University Frankfurt, 2+3 May 2024, where he also engaged in a workshop with members of the TraCe working area Memories of Political Violence. Following up on these fruitful conversations, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Astrid Erll and Dr. Kaya de Wolff invited him to be a TraCe visiting fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt. During his four-month fellowship, he will finalize his publications projects with Kaya de Wolff and prepare his second book project, engage within the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, and seek to map out further collaborations within the TraCe network.
Jephta U. Nguherimo will stay at Goethe University Frankfurt and will be part of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform.