A quarter million Herero are estimated to live in Namibia today, with the population growing in recent years. Mbakumua Hengari grew up in the 1970s on a farm in southern Africa, in what is today the nation of Namibia. The arid soil around his family's homestead was sandy and grassy, a poor fit for staple crops, so he and seven siblings subsisted on a modest herd of cattle, sheep and goats. Hengari blames systematic racism for his family's poverty — and he and his people, the Herero, are still fighting for justice. The first crisis came in 1904. German colonists waged a brutal war of extermination — now considered a precursor to the Holocaust. Then came apartheid. A half century after the Herero genocide, the all-white government of South Africa extended its brutal policies of segregation to Namibia. Both periods etched poverty and inequality into Namibian society — and decades after the country gained independence, the Herero are still fighting to regain what they once had. For Hengari, it is a deeply personal fight. Cattle farming ran in the family, but the land on which they lived did not. Because Hengari is Herero, an ethnic group that shares the Otjiherero…