Alex Kaubtauuapela - Activist and Boinera

Namibia's Herero people are heartened that Germany is keen to atone for the genocide of their ancestors, but they expect something Berlin says it is not able to give.

"What we want is our land," said 74-year-old Alex Kaubtauuapela, whose parents survived the extermination of 80% of the community, a precursor to the Holocaust.

She lives much as they did, in a community dependent on cattle herding.

"The Herero are poor because of German people," she said, hunched over a walking stick as one of her grandchildren chased a stray dog around her crumbling house in the Herero ancestral homeland of Okahandja north of the capital, Windhoek.

About half of the arable land in the country in south west Africa which Germany annexed in 1884 is owned by descendants of German and Dutch immigrants, who make up just 6% of the 2.3 million population.

Land used by the Herero, also known as OvaHerero, and smaller Namaqua community for grazing was seized and thousands were executed after they rebelled in 1904. The rest were driven into the country's vast tracts of desert to starve.

The call for land restitution by indigenous groups is mirrored in countries across Africa, and any reparation agreement for the Herero could set a precedent to other groups seeking redress from European colonial powers.