Archival Entanglements

Chapter 7 Archival Entanglements Colonial Rule and Records in Namibia Ellen Ndeshi Namhila and Werner Hillebrecht Introduction This chapter illuminates the complexities of colonial and decolonial archival displacements beyond a simple colony-to-metropole trajectory, and does this by discussing the creation, displacement and entanglement of archival records in, from and about Namibia over the entire period of its recorded history, and the successful as well as (still) unsuccessful efforts to repatriate vitally important sources. Namibia gained independence only 30 years ago and is faced with serious gaps in its historical record. What is now Namibia (then known to Europeans as South-West Africa)1 remained free from formal colonisation (except for the harbour Walvis Bay that was annexed by Britain in 1878) until colonisation by Germany during the ‘scramble for Africa’ in 1884. The entire area was, however, already affected by colonialism in the form of Christian missions, European hunters and traders, and refugees from the Cape Colony in the South where settlers were displacing indigenous Khoekhoe communities.2 Unlike most other German colonies in Africa and Oceania, this colony was soon earmarked to become a settler colony.3 This was a violent process involving several wars of conquest. A general uprising against land alienation and racist overlordship in 1904 was answered by a genocidal war, expropriation and the reduction of the survivors to a landless servant class without political, economic or social rights.4 When the First World War resulted in the conquest of the colony by British South Africa, the Versailles Peace Conference awarded the territory as a ‘Class C’ League of Nations mandate to South Africa. This was understood by the South African government as a warrant to continue treating it as a settler colony, and eventually to attempt annexing it as a fifth province. Despite continuous – but never decisive – efforts by the United Nations and a 25-year liberation war to lead Namibia to independence, Namibian statehood was only achieved in 1990 through a negotiated settlement and UN-supervised elections.5 DOI: 10.4324/9781003057765-11 Archival Entanglements 193 Precolonial records The various and multi-lingual pre-colonial societies6 in the area of today’s Namibia were also pre-literate before the arrival of Christian missionaries. The first to arrive were Methodist missionaries who began in 1805 to work among pastoral Khoekhoe communities in Southern Namibia,7 followed by the German-based Rhenish Mission which also proceeded to the central regions,8 and eventually by Finnish missionaries among agrarian Oshiwambo-speaking communities in the North.9 These societies maintained oral traditions, mainly in the form of recited genealogies, praise songs, or other forms of poetry, which sometimes have been preserved in writing or as sound recordings by missionaries, linguists or historians. Such records were often taken out of the country, and then shared the varied fate of their secondary repositories over time. Only in the late 1980s, shortly before independence, efforts to record such sources for local preservation were initiated. It should be mentioned that orally transmitted traditions are still alive in several communities, although acutely endangered by rapid social change, while unfortunately no systematic programme to record them exists. The scattering of such oral sources in private hands, or in institutional repositories where they sometimes arrive after the death of their owners with inadequate contextual information, and the often marginal treatment of sound-carrying media by archives that focus on paper records, make it very difficult to identify and repatriate such sources. The National Archives of Namibia (NAN) was very fortunate in receiving, from the private ‘Basler Afrika Bibliographien’ archive in Switzerland, digitised copies of the valuable recordings of Ernst and Ruth Dammann that were made in Namibia in 1953/54. On the other hand, all efforts to locate recordings made by the Californian ethnographer Edwin Meyer Loeb in the 1940s have so far been fruitless. Written records from 19th-century Namibia exist in a variety of sources. The published memoirs of foreign travellers, hunters, traders and missionaries are easily accessible, both outside and inside Namibia.10 Those are, of course, invariably seen through Western eyes and heavily edited to suit the interest of their authors and their contemporary audience. Less censored original correspondence, reports, diaries and manuscripts were, however, almost always sent or taken out of the country and, where they were not kept in a more or less organised institutional archive, were subject to the vagaries of family custody and the antiquarian ‘Africana’ market. When in the 1980s the NAN started to take an active interest in such records, they could purchase microfilms of various important records. Some had already been microfilmed, and were available commercially, such as Methodist mission records from London.11 Others were microfilmed on demand, such as the Carl Hugo Hahn papers12 at the Cape Town repository of the National Archives of South Africa, or the diary of Francis Galton’s travel to Southern Africa in 1850–1852,13 held by University College London. Another microfilm, of 194 Ellen Ndeshi Namhila and Werner Hillebrecht the papers of the Swedish trader Charles John Andersson, illustrates the problems of such private papers: the whereabouts of the originals that were microfilmed in the 1950s is currently unknown.14 Another category of pre-colonial sources are the writings of Africans themselves. The spread of literacy in several Namibian communities since the mid-1800s brought about a lively political and private correspondence. While not much of this has survived within the country, due to unsuitable storage conditions and colonial wars,15 the diplomatic correspondence with colonial South Africa (Cape Colony) is preserved in the National Archives of South Africa, Cape Town Repository, and has partly been repatriated in photographic and microfilm copies. German colonial records German colonisation of Namibia started with the private ‘acquisition’ of land around the harbour of Angra Pequena (later renamed Lüderitzbucht) by a tobacco merchant, Adolf Lüderitz. His papers, which are of considerable interest concerning fraudulent practices and the role Lüderitz played in getting ‘his’ land recognised as the first German colony, are with the State Archives of Bremen, and have also been obtained on microfilm.16 By the time Namibia – or rather South West Africa, its official name until the United Nations endorsed the name Namibia in 1968 – was claimed by the German empire as a ‘protectorate’ in 1884, it was governed by several independent communities. For almost a decade, Germany only kept a nominal presence in Namibia with a few officials and efforts to conclude so-called protection treaties in order to bolster their claim vis-à-vis other European powers in the scramble for Africa.17 This changed in 1893 with a substantial military re-enforcement and an unprovoked German attack on Hoornkrans, a settlement of the Witboois. The Witboois (ǀKhowesin) were a Khoekhoe community which had consistently refused to sign a ‘protection treaty’, and their leader Hendrik Witbooi had conducted a diplomatic campaign by letters to other leaders, warning them of the German colonial intentions.18 The Hoornkrans settlement was destroyed, and among other booty the German forces captured a manuscript ledger that became famous as the ‘Diary of Hendrik Witbooi’, where copies of his incoming and outgoing correspondence were recorded. This early example of a conscious indigenous effort of written record-keeping was taken to Germany, but already returned to Namibia before World War I and is now kept in the NAN. Mainly due to Witbooi’s insights into the nature of colonialism that are expounded in its pages, it has meanwhile been published in the original Cape Dutch text, in German, English and French translations, and has been inscribed in UNESCO’s ‘Memory of the World’ register.19 The book loot of Hoornkrans had two sequels, which illustrate that African manuscripts can have strange fates before eventually coming home. Archival Entanglements 195 Hendrik Witbooi continued to keep record of his correspondence, and in 1904, when he was again at war with the Germans, a trader from Bremen looted two further letter-copy books at Gibeon, the Witbooi main settlement whose inhabitants had fled from the local German garrison. He took the books home and later sold them to the colonial museum (Überseemuseum) in Bremen, where they were forgotten and only rediscovered after Namibia’s independence. In an honourable early act of restitution, the originals were given back to Namibia in 1996. Witbooi had started a fourth letter-copy book, later in 1904, which was again looted and apparently dismembered and shared between two or more soldiers as a memento of war. One fragment appeared on the antiquarian market, was bought by a collector and restored to Namibia in 2005. Now all these documents are housed in the NAN,20 but the fate of the remainder of the fourth book is still not known.21 The genocidal colonial war of 1904–1908 is one of the most consequential and traumatic events in Namibian history. It ended with a terrible death toll, not only among fighting forces of the Ovaherero and Nama but also among civilian refugees and prisoners, women and children, who died in droves in concentration camps. It also resulted in the total expropriation of the land and livestock of the survivors. For the German side, it was their first major war since the German-French war of 1870, and therefore the Prussian General Staff had all military records immediately sent to Berlin to evaluate the experience for future colonial wars, and to write an official history.22 The two volumes of this sanitised military history are about all that remains from these records, as the military archives in Potsdam, where they were kept, burnt to the ground in a World War II air raid in 1945. Therefore, for example, no official record of the countless court-martial executions by the German troops survived, and gruesome photos, which were perversely circulating as postcards, are the only visual reminder.23 Other colonial records in Berlin did, however, survive. The archives of the German Colonial Office (Reichskolonialamt) were confiscated by Soviet troops in 1945, but restituted to what was then the German Democratic Republic in 1955.24 After re-unification of Germany, they were accommodated in the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) in BerlinLichterfelde.25 These records became the basis of the first academic histories of German rule in Namibia.26 They contain the correspondence between the colonies and the metropolitan administration, as well as the internal decision-making processes of the latter, and are indispensable for any historical research about all German colonies in the period 1884–1915. In a rather unprecedented move among former colonial powers, these records were microfilmed and the entire film set, without charge, made available to the national archives of all major former colonies (Cameroon, Namibia, Papua-New Guinea, Tanzania and Togo) in 2003. Similar steps have been taken by Denmark with regard to its former colony Danish Virgin Islands (now a United States colony, officially called a US unincorporated 196 Ellen Ndeshi Namhila and Werner Hillebrecht territory). Riksarkivet, the Danish National Archives, has loaded its digitised Virgin Island records, about 5 million pages, on a searchable website.27 And the Netherlands has repatriated records to Suriname and Indonesia. These few cases stand in contrast to other colonial powers, as Mnjama28 observed: ‘it is common practice for the requesting country to meet all filming expenses and, at the end of the day, to be supplied with only a positive copy leaving the master negative with the institution holding the originals’. The Reichskolonialamt records are entangled archives, created in Germany and entangled not only between Namibia and Germany but also all its former colonies. Sharing copies therefore was the obvious solution. The case is different with a set of migrated archives that was created in Namibia, but transferred to Berlin after the end of World War I with permission from the South African occupants: R1002 Behörden des Schutzgebietes Deutsch-Südwestafrika. The bulk of this fond consists of staff records of the German administration in the colony. Their digitisation will now be tackled, financed by the German Research Foundation, and the Bundesarchiv has signalled its readiness to share the digital copies.29 Namibia could, however, rightfully claim the original files of this fond, but has not yet done so. There are colonial archives relating to Namibia scattered all over Germany, in public as well as in private custody. Unlike the human remains and museum objects that have forcibly been taken from Namibia and are therefore expected to be repatriated, most relevant archives have not been removed from our country. They were created in Germany or have been received as correspondence and must be considered entangled archives. Therefore, the request in these cases is not the repatriation of originals, but the sharing of copies for research in the affected country. Highly charged in this regard is the diary of General Lothar von Trotha, the author of the 1904 ‘extermination order’ against the Ovaherero. It is kept under lock and key in a family archives, and only around 2017 the original was for the first time made available to an academic researcher.30 Such scattered resources would be less relevant if the main military records had been preserved, but the Potsdam archives disaster of 1945 makes it imperative to consult a multitude of other archives to piece information together. This concerns in particular the military records of the former federal states of imperial Germany which contributed to the ‘Schutztruppe’ colonial troops, and a number of private accessions from individual soldiers. As ongoing provenance research about human remains and ethnographic objects in German museums has shown, diaries and correspondence of soldiers and colonial administrators can also assist in elucidating the acquisition context of contested objects. A recently developed web portal31 by the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences provides an extensive, but certainly not exhaustive, overview of colonialism-related archival sources in Germany.32 Efforts to make copies of such scattered sources available in Namibia have so far been fragmentary, as discussed below. Archival Entanglements 197 The take-over of German records by South Africa In a relatively short campaign, the German colony was conquered by South African troops on request by Great Britain. The German ‘Schutztruppe’ retreated from the superior invasion forces and surrendered on 9 July 1915. The territory was put under military administration, but the German records survived the First World rather unscathed and on site, unlike in some other German colonies where records were often destroyed, damaged or displaced. In particular the central registry of the civil administration in the newly built administrative office, jokingly referred to as ‘Tintenpalast’ (ink palace), remained in place. Outside the capital Windhoek, decentralised agency and district records fared less well, were often unsuitably housed and in some cases partly destroyed by the new masters, purposely or by neglect.33 Current military records were taken along by the ‘Schutztruppe’ on their northwards retreat, and after their surrender were captured by South African forces at Otavifontein. The responsible General Lukin reported the capture and highlighted the importance and the need for their preservation in an explanatory memorandum.34 The Versailles Peace Conference took a decision to award a ‘C’ mandate to administer the former German colony, by Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, as part of the Peace Treaty of Versailles signed on 28 June 1919.35 The military administration ended with the mandate being officially awarded to South Africa on 17 December 1920, a goal that General Smuts had pursued from the beginning.36 ‘C’ mandate meant that the territory could be administered ‘as an integral portion’ of South Africa’s own territory. Subsequently, the South African government interpreted this provision as a licence to annex South West Africa instead of leading it towards independence. Even before that, the military administration had however taken some far-reaching decisions with regard to records. Firstly, they decided in October 1919 to burn the entire customs records (‘about a ton’) as ‘valueless for us’, thereby destroying an important source of economic history.37 They also decided to destroy the records of the Entschädigungskommission, a commission to deal with compensations for white farmers and businesspeople for damages in the 1904–1908 war.38 They further worked in conjunction with Ludwig Kastl, who had been assigned as commissioner liaison person to head the remaining German public service, in transferring a number of administrative records to Germany – mainly staff records claimed by Germany for pension and other administrative follow-up. These were the records mentioned above as the present Fonds R1002 in the Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde.39 And lastly, in 1915 the military administration entrusted the German Schutztruppe records to a German officer, Major von Lagiewski, to classify 198 Ellen Ndeshi Namhila and Werner Hillebrecht and safeguard the records, which was duly done.40 The military staff records were then sent together with the repatriation of active soldiers to Germany in 1919.41 Those were presumably transferred to the Heeresarchiv which perished in 1945, but no documentation on the German side concerning this transaction has been identified. It was intended to take a selection from the remaining military records to the archives of the Department of Defence in Pretoria.42 This apparently never happened, as the Department of Defence could find no German military records upon an enquiry of Windhoek archivist Esterhuyse in 1954.43 Esterhuyse could only state that the remainder of the military records was ‘destroyed when the building where they were stored was required for offices’.44 Neither date nor place of this destruction is known. A small amount of military records, namely files of the equipment depot of the Schutztruppe, were saved by a meteorology official from being burnt in 1926.45 The Mandate Period and South African annexation ambitions For the next 20 years, the State Archives of South Africa showed no interest in the occupied mandated territory, while the central German records gathered dust in the Tintenpalast and the district records rotted away, neglected by English- and Afrikaans-speaking magistrates who had inherited records that they could not read. The records of some economically important offices of the German administration, such as mining,46 land surveying and land title deeds,47 were however taken over and continued by the corresponding branches of the new administration. This archival neglect only changed in 1937 when the Clerk of the Legislative Assembly,48 a South African civil servant named Waldemar Schreve, realised the historic importance of the records that fell, by virtue of their storage space, under his custody. He requested the State Archives in Pretoria for assistance to organise the remaining German records into an accessible and researchable resource. An inspection in 1937 by the South African State Archivist, Graham Botha, came up with recommendations.49 Schreve continued to push for staffing and accommodation, and in January 1939 an archivist seconded by the State Archives started to work for a few months in Windhoek.50 The ‘Archives Depot of the Territory’, as it was called, really took off with the appointment of archivist Jan Hendrik Esterhuyse in 1946. He was uniquely prepared for this job, as he had studied from 1938 to 1939 at the Bavarian Archive School in Munich, Germany, and was fluent in reading the German ‘Gothic’ script. Until his transfer to Pretoria in 1956, he succeeded in centralising all surviving German records at the archives in Windhoek, and also started to ingest records of the South African administration, and important ‘private accessions’ such as the abovementioned Hendrik Witbooi Papers and Maharero Papers. Archival Entanglements 199 While the Archives was getting established as a functional unit, some archival problems were already looming with arbitrary decisions of the mandatory power. This concerned especially the north-eastern territorial appendix to Namibia, the so-called Caprivi Strip wedged between Botswana, Zambia and Angola. For logistical reasons, after the conquest of South West Africa in World War I, it was initially administered from the Botswana side, which was then a British Protectorate ‘Bechuanaland’.51 The local records from that period are now kept by the Botswana National Archives and Records Service.52 Upon misgivings in the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, administration of the Caprivi Strip was transferred to the South West Africa Administration in 1929, and the relevant records filed in Windhoek. This transfer was short-lived, because in 1939 administrative control was again transferred, this time to the South African Department of Bantu Affairs, and records were filed in Pretoria.53 Another problem arose out of the fact that the administration of Walvis Bay, which was a British-South African coastal enclave in German South West Africa, was in 1922 transferred to the Administration for South West Africa but in 1977, when Namibian independence appeared to come close, was re-transferred to the Cape Province.54 This affected the ownership of records of the Magistrate and the Town Clerk of Walvis Bay, and led to moving relevant records to South Africa.55 The re-transfer was not recognised by the United Nations, which maintained that Walvis Bay belongs to Namibia – and the territory was indeed re-integrated, together with the offshore islands, four years after independence, in 1994. A massive removal of records from Namibia to South Africa took place when the South African Department of the Interior decided to centralise birth, death and marriage records in South Africa. The timing and circumstances of this removal have not yet been elucidated. At independence, the Namibian government found itself without reliable civil records of its citizens, except those that were held by the individuals themselves. At least, the Caprivi and Walvis Bay issues concerned entire easily identifiable archival fonds. Much more problematic was the fact that the South African government successively removed key responsibilities from the Administration for South West Africa to its Departments in Pretoria. This means that decisions were discussed and taken in Pretoria, where only the outcome was transmitted to Windhoek, and even the implementation was supervised from Pretoria. As a result, records of key importance for Namibia are hopelessly entangled with South African records, and only identifiable through substantial research. One such area is the so-called ‘Native Administration’, which in apartheid newspeak was renamed ‘Bantu Administration’, and in a final euphemistic renaming, ‘Plural Affairs’. This domain was additionally complicated by a split responsibility between the Department of Justice which supervised the 200 Ellen Ndeshi Namhila and Werner Hillebrecht Magistrates who had to deal with ‘native affairs’, and the Department of Native Affairs, which supervised the Native Reserve Superintendents and ‘Welfare Officers’. In archival appraisal it is a common rule that circulars issued by an office should be preserved with the issuing office, and appraised for destruction in the many receiving offices. When one of the authors of this article researched about the fate of largely disappeared ‘native’ estate records in Namibia, she could only avoid costly additional research in South Africa because she could piece together the circular instructions of these two departments from magistrate records that had not been rigorously appraised, and had kept the circulars.56 Massive administrative re-arrangements occurred around 1969, when (amongst others) control over crucially important sectors like Water Affairs was transferred to South Africa. This co-incided with the carving up of the country into ethnically-defined Bantustans with so-called ‘self-government’ and prospective later ‘independence’, according to the ‘Odendaal Plan’.57 After a few years, the idea of independent mini-states was dropped for a ‘federal’ solution, but the administrative ethnic separation continued to be enforced with separate education, health, and social service systems for each of eleven so-called ‘population groups’. The constant re-arrangements of responsibilities and bureaucracies, with the accompanying shifting around of records, created an administrative and archival nightmare, making the assignment of clearly demarcated archival fonds and records series for the last three decades of South African rule in Namibia almost impossible. When independence arrived in 1990 with a total abolishment of the Bantustan system, the archivists, like almost everybody else, heaved a sigh of relief. Transition to independence The transition to independence brought with it a flood of records of discontinued and poorly organised apartheid institutions, including Bantustans, to the NAN, as nobody felt responsible for them anymore. Not all of them were transferred: some might have suffered the fate of the records of KaNgwane, one of the smaller South African Bantustans, so vividly described by Shireen Ally (2015): being sold by the locals, oblivious of the past, to a papermill. The NAN is still struggling to organise some of these records, which are not only of academic interest but have had an impact on the livelihood of people which is still felt and relevant today – such as allocations of agricultural land or construction plots. Disputes arising from the lack of reliable documentation on property and usage rights can tear a community apart. As it turned out, the retreating apartheid regime not only withdrew its troops and its Administrator-General, but also Namibian records. Despite international rules on state succession, and under the eyes of a ‘United Nations Transition Assistance Group’, the Administrator-General who had Archival Entanglements 201 ruled the last 12 years of occupied Namibia with dictatorial powers and under emergency regulations, took along all records of his office. The South African Defence Force took along not only the records of its own structures and actions, but also the records of the locally drafted ‘South West Africa Territory Force’ that had operated under South African command, amounting to 3 linear km.58 And lastly, all records of the secret police and state security apparatus disappeared into thin air. The first national archivist of independent Namibia, Brigitte Lau, requested from the South African State Archives59 microfilms of several records series pertaining to Namibia.60 This was approved, and the microfilms delivered at Namibia’s cost. She also requested the AdministratorGeneral’s and the military records back,61 but as long as the apartheid regime lasted, this was met with blank refusal. The Chief of the South African Defence Force claimed, confidently but incorrectly, that ‘any documents or records received or created in the South West African Territory Force are governed by the South African Archives Act and therefore South African archives’.62 The National Archives referred the matter to the Minister of National Education, but nothing moved. Only after the first free and general elections in South Africa, the attitude changed. Eventually, in 1997, the South African Cabinet adopted a decision that the Namibian records should be returned. It still took another ten years, and repeated reminders on various levels – from archivist to archivist, from Minister to Minister, and diplomatic visits by the High Commissioner – until the envisaged repatriation was effectively finalised. After microfilming to keep a copy available in South Africa, the originals of the following records were returned to the NAN, orderly processed and catalogued, and free of charge as promised: (1) the AdministratorGeneral’s office; (2) the Caprivi administration; (3) the Commissioner-General in Oshakati; (4) the Walvis Bay magistrate; (5) the Walvis Bay Town Clerk. The records, altogether 121 linear metres, were officially handed over in four batches between 1999 and 2007. In a parallel repatriation effort, the National Library of Namibia received two sets of legal deposit copies of Namibian publications, which had been sent in five copies (one for each province) to South Africa under South African legislation. And lastly, the abducted birth, marriage and death records were returned to the Namibian Ministry of Home Affairs and Immigration, which had pursued the issue independently with its South African counterpart. The records were symbolically handed over in a high-profile ceremony by President Thabo Mbeki to President Hifikepunye Pohamba, in October 2007.63 There are, however, reservations that some relevant civil registration documents might still be in South Africa, as they had been mixed up with South African records, and extracting the returned material had apparently been laborious. The abducted military records remain a sore point. Despite a somewhat more favourable climate at the South African military archives (officially 202 Ellen Ndeshi Namhila and Werner Hillebrecht called the Department of Defence Documentation Centre, which is not a part of the National Archives), nothing has moved in terms of restoring them to Namibia, let alone sharing the war diaries of the South African units operating against the liberation forces in Namibia. A team of archivists and historians from Namibia was able to compile an eight-page list64 of Namibian and probably Namibia-related records from the Documentation Centre’s master list ‘Nuwe argieflys’ of archival groups (which probably excludes top secret records). The team was told that the Centre is not entirely opposed to restitution of the records, but they were advised that any negotiations about a transfer could only be effected through high-level negotiations between the respective Ministers of Defence. Although communications have been sent from the Namibian defence minister to his South African counterpart, they were not regularly followed up after ministerial re-shuffles, which occur frequently in both countries. In the top-down culture of secrecy that is rampant in any military establishment, it is unlikely to see fast progress. As Gary Baines has observed, access to South African Defence Force files is fraught with declassification hurdles, and redaction to obliterate even names of persons who are easily identifiable through open sources.65 It is worthwhile to mention another important resource that has been repatriated in microfilm format to the National Archives: the Namibia section of the mission archives of the United Evangelical Mission (formerly Rhenish Mission) from Wuppertal, Germany. It consists of the largest part of missionaries’ letters and reports from Namibia, dating from 1838 to 1970. These films were handed over in 2005 on the occasion of an official apology of the mission society for their complicity in the colonial project. In a similar move, the Finnish Mission Society had already in 1984 donated its Namibian archives (starting in 1870) on microfiche to its sister church ELCIN in Namibia, which in turn deposited the copies at NAN, for wider accessibility. Outlook The South African Minister of Arts and Culture, Pallo Jordan, said on the occasion of the handover of the third return consignment on 24 September 2004: ‘We know there is more material that relates to Namibian history in our libraries and archives and I pledge that we will continue to work with the Namibians to locate and copy what is relevant for you’.66 None of this has happened so far. There are reasons for this, and they have nothing to do with the definite ill-will that was displayed by South Africa under apartheid rule, or by the British government with regard to the abducted documents that were kept hidden for decades at Hanslope Park.67 The reasons are, rather, that the relevant archives are not enabled by their governments to do more than (barely) maintain their holdings and keep them open to researchers. Archival Entanglements 203 Archival restitutions or shares involve a highly work-intensive process for both partners. They require laborious and highly qualified work to identify and prepare relevant records (especially with entangled archives) and ingest them on the receiving side. They also require the staying power of longterm negotiations, and insistence, and administrative clout in dealing with bureaucracies. The archival relations between Namibia and Botswana are an instructive example of bureaucratic procedural hurdles. Apart from the early Caprivi records in Botswana that were mentioned above, the Botswana National Archives and Records Service also holds highly significant records relating to Namibian exiles during the German colonial wars, and during the struggle for liberation. An archival exchange of relevant copies was already agreed between the Namibian and Botswana archives in 1999, and there is a Namibia-Botswana cultural agreement that should facilitate such exchange. But nothing has happened so far, because information about the high-level bilateral meetings, where such agreements can be finalised, usually trickles down through the bureaucracy to the lowly-placed archives when the meeting has already taken place. The availability of funds for source research – invariably requiring travel and subsistence cost – and for reproduction and transport cost arising on any side of the transaction is another issue. Releasing and transferring such funds has become increasingly difficult through well-intentioned but inflexible anti-corruption measures that turn any foreign payment from government institutions into a bureaucratic nightmare. The NAN was, between 2001 and 2009, in the fortunate position of an additional fund with the awkward name ‘Archives of Anti-Colonial Resistance and the Liberation Struggle’ (AACRLS). This project, jointly carried by the Namibian and German governments, was designed to fill the gaps in the historical records created by the exclusion of resistance records (in the broadest sense) by the colonial archives.68 It was governed by a steering committee which could bypass some of the bureaucratic procedures of government spending. With this project, the AACRLS realised a number of achievements in repatriating entangled and private archives from Germany, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and the United Nations. It could boast of some spectacular successes such as the discovery and digital repatriation of the earliest sound recordings of Namibians speaking of colonial oppression in 1931, which had been resting forgotten in a Berlin sound archives over 80 years.69 Unfortunately, the AACRLS ended when the assigned funds were depleted, without a continuation project. Many contacts about resources that required further follow-up had to be abandoned. The current debate about the restitution of colonial cultural objects, although focused on museums, has created a favourable environment for the restitution or sharing of archives, too. The public awareness that colonialism was not a benign development project but a violent plunder, is 204 Ellen Ndeshi Namhila and Werner Hillebrecht growing. This opportunity has, however, not yet been taken up vigorously by the archival community. Such repatriations can be further complicated by political fault lines. A rather high-profile repatriation of the ‘Witbooi Bible’ that took place in 201970 was unfortunately drawn into a political controversy between two parallel initiatives to seek reparations or the 1904–1908 genocide of Nama and Herero – one taking place as direct negotiations between the Namibian and German governments, the other as a lawsuit of sections of the affected communities against Germany in an American court. The resulting publicity focused more on this controversy, than on the fact of repatriation. Substantial research will be needed to identify more of the scattered Namibian heritage in German archives, museums, universities and private collections. Some, like an unpublished manuscript of an OtjihereroGerman dictionary, could only recently be located again at the Hamburg State Archives, after Namibia already tried to get it from private custody in the 1950s.71 The much-deplored colonial amnesia in Germany led to widespread neglect and failure to recall such items.72 There has, however, been a substantial increase of historical studies of German colonialism during the past two decades. A systematic review of the sources used in this research of colonial history would certainly lead to a substantial ‘shopping list’ of archives for repatriation or sharing. For the entangled archives of South African colonialism, the situation is different. In comparison to the brief 30 years of German colonialism, the 75 years under South African rule are still under-researched, in particular for the eventful three decades before independence. For this period, it is especially the liberation struggle that has enjoyed attention, but even this was researched mostly on the basis of published sources and oral history, while archives of the two main opponents, the South African military and the liberation movement SWAPO, both remain difficult to access. The wide-ranging administrative and infrastructural changes inside Namibia during this period are virtually unresearched, and it appears that there is very little interest in South Africa itself about this topic – a similar kind of colonial amnesia as it had been diagnosed for Germany. But without such research, which would prepare the ground and at the same time create more demand for archival sources, archivists are struggling to identify further records for repatriation and sharing in South Africa. In conclusion, it seems there are ample reasons to take up the many repatriation issues again, with a fresh view on historical, ethical and technical issues. As a postscript, it might be mentioned as well that with the founding of the United Nations, Namibia was supposed to become a UN Trust Territory. This was refused by South Africa, and since then the international status of Namibia became a constant concern of the United Nations until the negotiated transfer to independence under UN supervision. The records of United Nations involvement on Namibia are vast and generally quite accessible. Archival Entanglements 205 The UN has embarked on a digitisation programme that makes many relevant documents accessible online, and relatively easy to find. However, the records of the crucial final chapter, the United Nations Transitional Assistance Group (UNTAG) from 1989 to 1990, generally hailed as one of the most successful UN peace-keeping operations, remained unprocessed for decades. The finding aid of UNTAG files73 is now available, but it still labels an inexplicably large number of files as ‘strictly confidential’ and therefore inaccessible for research, over 30 years after the events. Conclusion From the aforesaid it might appear as if Namibia is a particularly complicated case for repatriation, with its two subsequent colonial powers, the attempted South African annexation and the strong involvement of the international community. However, a closer look at other former colonies shows that such and other complicating factors can be found in many other cases. One needs only to consider Namibia’s neighbours, where the archival situation of Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi is by no means (as one might think) a simple on-on-one issue between Great Britain and its three former colonies, but has through the ill-fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland led to entangled archives and archival claims between these sister countries. Likewise, the removal of written heritage by private individuals and entities such as mission societies or foreign and multinational enterprises is a common problem.74 The complexity of colonial displacements calls for an integrated approach of institutions, not only the national archives, as – for example – archival claims to mission archives might be better made or supported by the local successor churches. International cooperation between former colonies with similar experience would also be extremely helpful to facilitate sharing of archives of common interest with a number of interested countries, such as the microfilm of the Reichskolonialamt files in Berlin. This is, however, notoriously difficult to achieve, as exemplified by the envisaged but entirely aborted cooperation between the archives of former German colonies.75 Notes 1 The term South-West Africa for the stretch of land between the Orange River and the Kunene and Kavango Rivers was introduced by European travellers in the mid-19th century. It was internationally used as official name until the United Nations adopted the name Namibia, as proposed by the liberation movement, in 1968, although the South African administration stuck to the previous name or its acronym SWA throughout its rule. 2 Lau, Southern and Central Namibia. 3 Due to its climatic conditions, the country was considered suitable for the permanent settlement of Europeans, substituting the original inhabitants. 206 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 Ellen Ndeshi Namhila and Werner Hillebrecht This was in line with a perception of Germany having ‘people without space’ who needed colonial expansion. Drechsler, ‘Let Us Die Fighting.’ While there are a multitude of works about Namibia under colonialism and the Namibian liberation struggle, a succinct and comprehensive overview of Namibian pre-colonial and colonial history, including ample literature reference, is provided by Wallace in A History of Namibia. Lau, Southern and Central Namibia. Dedering, Khoekhoe and Missionaries. Hahn, Tagebücher = Diaries. Peltola, Dr Martti Rautanen. A few very rare early published sources, for example those about the 1840s guano rush on the Namibian islands, are not in the country, but nowadays at least available online in digitised format. This was the case with the records of the London Missionary Society and Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society kept at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, that were microfilmed by Inter Documentation Company, Zug, Switzerland. (NAN Accessions A.0471 and A.0496). NAN Accession A.0335. NAN Accession A.0535. NAN Accession A.0083. One notable exception is the “Maharero Papers”, NAN Accession 0003, consisting of 75 documents. NAN Accession A.0132. Esterhuyse, South West Africa 1880–1894. Drechsler, “Let Us Die Fighting,” 69–75. UNESCO, “Register Nomination Form.” Namhila, “The Hendrik Witbooi Diaries.” The Witbooi Papers have been registered in the NAN as Accessions A.0002, A.0650, and AACRLS.112. Grosser Generalstab, Die Kämpfe der deutschen. The NAN has several such photos, and occasionally others turn up from private property at auctions or on e-Bay – at prices far out of reach for an institution like NAN. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, 11. They are registered in the Bundesarchiv as fonds R1001. Drechsler, Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft; Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur. Riksarkivet, “The Danish West-Indies.” Mnjama, “Archival Claims,” 36. Letter from Dr Hollmann to W. Hillebrecht, 2 Dec. 2019. Häussler, Der Genozid, 34. https://archivfuehrer-kolonialzeit.de/. Fachhochschule Potsdam, Archivführer Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte. The official library of the German administration also stayed intact in the same building, and was later taken over by the South African administration. The museum, developed from small beginnings in 1907, fared far worse and apparently lost much to looting (Otto-Reiner, A Chronology). Lukin, Surrender of the Forces. Dugard, Documents and Scholarly Writings, 67–68. Dugard, Documents and Scholarly Writings, 72–74. Archival Entanglements 207 37 NAN: ARG [1] 1. Organisasie en inrigting van argiefdepot [Organization and establishment of archive depot], 1, memo from F. Minder to Director of Works, approved by unidentified official on 27.10.1919. 38 Ibid. – A small number of these records, apparently purposely selected because they concern South African land owners, was recently discovered to have survived the destruction. 39 The details of this transfer still remain to be researched. 40 NAN: ARG [2] 4/2/8 Oorplasing van dokumente na argief. Militere Afdeling [Transfer of documents to archive. Military Department], 7: Major Leipoldt to Major von Lagiewski, 19.10.1915. 41 Ibid., 5: Esterhuyse to Chief Archivist, 18.3.1954. 42 Ibid., 8: Brink to Administrator of SWA, 20.11.1918. 43 Ibid., 4: Secretary of Defence to Chief Archivist, 9.7.1954. 44 Ibid., 5: Esterhuyse to Chief Archivist, 18.3.1954. 45 Ibid., 6, Pieterse to Botha dated 28.2.1939. This is now the fond STR (Schutztruppe) in the NAN. 46 This is now the fonds IMW (Inspector of Mines Windhoek) in the NAN. 47 Both the Surveyor-General and the Registrar of Deeds still maintain their own archives, including German records, currently under the Ministry of Land Reform. 48 The Legislative Assembly was an all-white settler parliament with strictly limited authority that had been established in 1926, in terms of the South West Africa Constitution Act, Act 52 of 1925. 49 NAN: ARG [1] 1. Organisasie en inrigting van argiefdepot [Organization and establishment of archive depot], report by Graham Botha dated August 4, 1937, 3–7. 50 Ibid., 27–30, Pieterse to Botha, dated 9.1.1939. 51 Kangumu, Contesting Caprivi, 72–77. 52 An inventory of the relevant files has been compiled in 2007 (NAN: AACRLS.169). 53 Kangumu, Contesting Caprivi 78, 92. 54 Wallace, A History of Namibia, 287. 55 NAN: ARG [16] 8/2: Registratuur. Vertroulike korrespondensie 1971–1979 [Registry. Confidential correspondence 1971–1979]. 56 Namhila, Post-Colonial National Archive, 177. 57 South Africa, Report of the Commission. 58 van der Waag, “Military Record Preservation.” 59 Later officially renamed to National Archives and Records Service of South Africa 60 Namely, Deputy Minister for South West African Affairs, 1961–1968, Minister of Coloured Relations and Rehoboth Affairs, 1969–1975, as well as several commissions of enquiry. 61 NAN: 17/3/2/ P, Lau to Director of Archives Pretoria, dated 1.12.1993. 62 NAN: 17/3/2 P, Admiral Loedolff to Director of Archives Windhoek, dated 6.5.1994. 63 Emma Kakololo, “News Update,” New Era, October 31, 2007, https://neweralive. na/posts/namibia-sa-forge-close-ties. 64 NAN: IRION file 0189, by J Silvester & W Hillebrecht, March 2008. 65 Baines, “Assessing Information.” 66 Jordan, “Heritage Day Speech.” 67 Banton, interview. 68 Namhila, “Archives of Anti-Colonial Resistance.” 208 Ellen Ndeshi Namhila and Werner Hillebrecht 69 NAN: AACRLS.154 “Lichtenecker recordings.” 70 An autographed rare print of a Bible translation into the Nama language, looted at the 1893 German attack on Hoornkrans mentioned above. It was repatriated from the Linden Museum in Stuttgart. 71 The manuscript by missionary Irle is particularly important for the interpretation of old texts in the Herero language, which has undergone significant change since its compilation about 1900. 72 Kössler, “Awakened from Colonial Amnesia.” 73 United Nations Archives and Records Management Section, Summary of AG-038 United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) (1989–1990), Finding aid, Generated on June 4, 2015, https://search.archives.un.org/ downloads/united-nations-transition-assistance-group-untag-1989-1990.pdf. 74 The issue of the repatriation or even accessibility of foreign-held business records has not been addressed in this contribution, although it is an acute problem of almost all former colonies, and Namibia can claim both successes and failures in this regard. 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