Jephta U Nguherimo is a lifelong activist, poet and a former professional labor negotiator of Herero-descent based in the US. He was 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 spent many years as a political refugee in Botswana and Kenya. In 1987, as a political refugee he was awarded a prestigious scholarship from the Bishop Desmond Tutu Scholarship Fund to study at the University of Rochester, NY, 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 and recently retired from Maryland State Education Association.

Jephta is an activist in the reparation movement about the OvaHerero and Nama genocide. He was the co-founder of the OvaHerero, Ovambanderu, and Nama Genocide Institute (ongi.org) in the US. He engaged in organizing conference and other platform’s that eventually forced the German government to confront and acknowledge the genocide of 1904-08.

He has led conversations and presented talks on the restorative justice struggles and memory culture at numerous international conferences Berlin civil society congress in 2014, Advancing Justice: Reparations and Racial Healing Summit in Accra, Ghana 2021, 1st Session of UN Permanent Forum of People of African Descent, Geneva Switzerland 2021, and he was fellow with DAICOR program. He 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 also published several articles on the struggle for recognition in the Namibia 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”. Pieces and Pains of the Struggle for Justice. His lifelong work led him to be featured in a documentary film by Al Jazeera titled “Namibia: The Price of genocide” in 2021, a comprehensive documentary that is available on the network People & Program. He is the founding member of the OvaHerero People’s Memorial and Reconstruction Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advance the struggle of Restorative Justice for the OvaHerero people.