From 'One Namibia, One Nation' towards 'Unity in Diversity? Shifting representations of culture and nationhood in Namibian Independence Day celebrations, 1990-2010

In 2010 Namibia celebrated its twentieth anniversary of independence from South African rule. The main celebrations in the country’s capital Windhoek became the stage for an impressively orchestrated demonstration of maturing nationhood, symbolically embracing postcolonial policy concepts such as ‘national reconciliation’, ‘unity’ and ‘diversity’. At the same time, nation building in post-apartheid Namibia is characterised by a high degree of social and political fragmentation that manifests itself in cultural and/or ethnic discourses of belonging. Taking the highly significant independence jubilee as our vantage point, we map out a shift of cultural representations of the nation in Independence Day celebrations since 1990, embodied by the two prominent slogans of ‘One Namibia, one Nation’ and ‘Unity in Diversity’. As we will argue, the difficult and at times highly fragile postcolonial disposition made it necessary for the SWAPO government, as primary nation builder, to accommodate the demands of regions and local communities in its policy frameworks. This negotiation of local identifications and national belonging in turn shaped, and continues to shape, the performative dimension of Independence Day celebrations in Namibia.Web of Scienc

Building Collections of Ephemera at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien and Posters as a Historical Source

A paper presented at a one-day workshop organised by the libraries of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Institute for the Study of the Americas. This workshop was the culmination of a two-year project dedicated to the cataloguing and promotion of the collections of political ephemera held in the libraries of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the Institute for the Study of the Americas. Its aim was to bring together academics, researchers and librarians interested in the holdings both for their value as research collections and because of their nature as ephemera

Die Rote Linie: Eine Geschichte der innernamibischen Polizei-, Siedlungs- und Veterinärgrenze (1980er - 1960er Jahre)

The thesis recounts the history of Namibia during the first sixty years of the twentieth century through the perspective of an internal border, the ‘Red Line’. The border was a pivotal element in constituting not only the history of colonial Namibia as a segregated society but it also deeply determined Namibia’s historiography. Based on archival sources and on oral history the thesis reconstructs a border building process which spanned over sixty years. The process started with the establishment of a temporary veterinary defence line against Rinderpest by the German colonial power in the late 19th century and ended with the construction of continuous two-metre high fence by the South African colonial government sixty years later. This 1250 kilometres long fence separates northern from central Namibia up to date. The thesis combines a macro and a microperspective and differentiates between a cartographic and a physical reality. The analysis explores both the colonial state’s agency with regard to veterinary and settlement policy as well as strategies of Africans and Europeans living close to the border. The analysis also includes the different perceptions of people living in a distance north and south of the border and their experiences in crossing the border as migrants workers, African traders, European settlers or colonial officials. The Red Line’s history is understood as a gradual process of segregating stock and people, and also of constructing dichotomies of modern and traditional, healthy and sick, European and African. Seen in the logic of a South African Empire the Red Line conceptually functioned as a ‘barbarian border’ against the danger of inner-Africa and physically marked the limits of the ‘white’ settler South Africa

Arteries of Empire: On the Geographical Imagination of South Africa's Railway War, 1914/1915

This essay analyses a set of visual representations of the South African military campaign into German South West Africa in 1914/1915. This campaign is explored in terms of an imperial expansion and approached through the lens of visuality. Elaborating on an album produced by the Kimberley-based photographer Alfred Duggan-Cronin, and cartoons, photographs, and maps kept in the Transnet Heritage Library in Johannesburg, the article traces the ways in which the visual representation of the war favoured a distinct articulation of an imagined imperial space. The analysis of visualised imaginaries is anchored in an inquiry of materiality, and hence considers the importance of the railway system as the technology, vehicle and medium for a dramatic South African expansion in the region.

The NE 51 series frontier: The grand narrative of apartheid planning and the small town

The article proposes to bring the urban development of Usakos, a small Namibian town on the fringe of the South African empire, into conversation with the 'grand narrative' of the apartheid city. Narratives of the apartheid city were shaped by contemporary academic architectural discourses sustained by those who pioneered and promoted urban planning in South Africa. It was formulated in texts on architecture and apartheid produced in the 1980s and 1990s, which developed a strong argument about South African architects' involvement in the creation of standardised housing for Africans. Big cities constituted the main reference for both critics and promoters of South African urban planning, and their analyses subscribed to paradigmatic notions of rapidly growing cities and inevitable housing crises, slums and chaos. The analysis of the urban development in Usakos in the 20th century allows for challenging the teleological model of such hegemonic narratives. The case of a small town also integrates otherwise separate discussions on 'white' and 'black' housing. In Usakos, the transformation of urban space was primarily ideologically driven, and part of a general attempt to create a tangible and visible experience of a homogenous imperial South African space. One of the dominant material manifestations of such an imperial space were the iconic NE 51 series houses in standardised neighbourhoods, to which Africans were forcibly removed