Jephta U. Nguherimo is a reparation activist, poet and a former professional labor negotiator of Herero-descent based in Washington D.C. Born in the village of Okanjokomukona, Namibia, in 1963, to a family of peasants, he engaged in the resistance struggle during Namibia’s colonial Apartheid era and, after being expelled from school, spent many years as a political refugee in Botswana and Kenya. In 1987, he was awarded a prestigious scholarship from the Bishop Desmond Tutu Scholarship Fund to study at the University of Rochester, New York, where he earned a B.S. in Philosophy and International Political Economy. In 1997, he received an M.S. in Labor Studies from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. An accomplished labor negotiator, he worked as a union representative. He recently retired from Maryland State Education Association to focus on his activist work and spend more time in Namibia to engage local communities.
Jephta Nguherimo has been instrumental in the reparation movement for the OvaHerero and Nama genocides, over the last three decades. He was the co-founder of the OvaHerero, Ovambanderu, and Nama Genocide Institute (ongi.org) in the US. He organized conferences and other platforms that eventually forced the German government to confront and acknowledge the Genocide of 1904-08.
He has led conversations and presented talks on the memory of the Genocide and restorative justice struggles at international conferences, including the first transnational non-governmental congress “Restorative Justice after Genocide” in Berlin in October 2014, Advancing Justice: Reparations and Racial Healing Summit in Accra, Ghana 2021, and the 1st Session of UN Permanent Forum of People of African Descent (PFAD), Geneva Switzerland 2021. He was a fellow with the DAICOR program in 2022/23, and served as a curriculum consultant and guest speaker for the Choices Program of Brown University, Confronting Genocide on developing a unit about the Genocide of the OvaHerero and Nama people.
As a writer and poet, he published numerous articles on the struggle for recognition in the Namibian press as well as guest comments and interviews in the German press. Last but not least, he is the author of a book of poetry titled “unBuried-unMarked: The Untold Namibian Story of the Victims of German Genocide between 1904 -1908”. His lifelong activism led him to be featured in a comprehensive documentary film produced by Al Jazeera in the network People & Program titled “Namibia: The Price of Genocide” in 2021.
In 2022, Jephta officially registered the OvaHerero People’s Memorial and Reconstruction Foundation (OPMRF), a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the struggle of Restorative Justice for the OvaHerero people from Germany transnationally.
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.