Namibia's state media is feting President Geingob's announcement that Germany is ready to apologize for the colonial-era genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples.

In his state of the nation address last Thursday, President Hage Geingob suggested that Germany was about to apologize for colonial-era mass-killings of tens of thousands of people.

"The Federal Republic of Germany has agreed that the events of 1904--1908 can be termed genocide and they are ready to render an apology, at the highest level of German government," Geingob told lawmakers on June 4.

Germany refuses to comment

Closed-door talks between the two governments started in 2015 after Germany had refused for decades to recognize that the mass-killings of tens of thousands of Herero and Nama peoples in the former colony of "German South West Africa" amounted to genocide.

Ruprecht Polenz, the German envoy for the talks with Namibia said last February that the two governments were close to agreeing on a joint declaration about the killings.