“Hereros are German subjects no more… Every Herero found inside the German borders with or without a weapon, will be put to death. Women and children will be escorted out of here – or will be shot… There will be no male captive. They will be shot.”
Letter to the Herero people, General Lieutenant Lothar Von Trotha, October 2nd, 1904.

Herero Festival,
Okahandja, Namibia, August 2007

The fantasy of an army is awaking with its ghosts, its ghastly carnival march, its sacred square, the Okahandja cemetery, the Herero memorial… A whole community remembers.
The procession slowly appears in a cortege of rounded women with their seven petticoats under their big black and red dresses. Lined up children walks in the militaristic steps of some officer in tunic. They wear the beret their mother has embellished with a red mill end, black waxed shoes, mucked by the African sand. Obedient, they go with that peculiar step when one step forward is actually two steps back. The cavalry holds its horses and escorts the elderly under the mournful cries of the red women. The fathers are also dressed up as such: ersatz of German generals rub elbow with “so British” grenadier or “royal highlanders”. That one wears a white, blood and black tartan kilt, with long football socks, a cap, a black glove and a varnished stick.

Collage of borrowed medals, dare a match with various pins, black or white commercials – Coke – and the pandemic AIDS bow.

He, wears a belt; for sure a vintage of some German soldier of the colonial empire. He also displays a black glove. Kind of Black Panther, kind of black power…
Anachronism, chaotic influences: Amin Dada’s Scottish guards, Afrikaners officers from the deposed apartheid, William the second, Winston Churcill, Malcom X, Queen Latifah. Also the stick, the inescapable stick whereby he exists as a man: with the nerve of his role, he reaches the scope of his character and makes himself marshal! Spear, helmet, horn, dagger, pistol, belt, plume, tie, gaiter, tunic, medal, rank, battle flag, pride, dignity, etc.
In Okahandja, one does not dress up, one is disguised. It is an imaginary army but still it is an army, displaying a-tumble the features of the colonial Europe as well as the features of black power. In the whirl of the Atlantic winds, squeaks the wraith of eighty thousand deaths of the Herero massacre: Waterberg battle, Adrian Dietrich Lothar Von Trotta’s Vernichstungsbefehl, the poisoned wells near Omahabeke-Steppe, the captives parked like cattle in the first death camp of 1904. WE WON’T DO THAT TO THEM AGAIN!

Photography :
Hereros, 2007 © Charles Fréger

Partners :
Galerie des Filles du Calvaire, Paris


www.charlesfreger.com



Exhibition from 15th May to 29th June HEREROS Portraits photographiques et uniformes

Preview: Saturday 24 Mayu - 5pm
Exhibited at Palais Rihour - Place Rihour - Lille
Phone: 08 91 56 20 04

Open Monday to Friday from 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm.
Open Saturday to Sunday from 10am to 12am and 2pm to 5pm.
Closed Monday 16 june.