Paper short abstract:

African intellectuals initiated and invested in archival collections during Namibia's colonial past. Hidden from the apartheid state´s control, the paper, tape and image collections envisioned post-colonial futures, spoke to the colonial archive and today map out decolonial research agendas.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I review the political agendas of some African intellectuals during Namibia´s past as a South African colony in the 20th century by initiating and investing in written and audiovisual collections. The paper focuses on two examples: firstly, the ´secret´ archives of Otjiherero-speaking intellectuals with mission church backgrounds as formed in the late 1940s by means of notebooks; secondly, attempts by liberation activists in the 1950s to deploy the tape recorder and the camera. In both cases, some of the documents circulated/migrated purposefully amongst particular local and/or international audiences. In both cases, post-colonial visions informed their creation, material nature, usage and content. This paper examines some of these aspects and concludes with reflections about methods and practices of knowledge creation attached to and reflected in the documents under review. Whilst largely ignored by post-colonial archivists and western-trained scholars, their very nature and content, despite now partly informing post-colonial Namibian politics, map out decolonial research agendas, amongst the latter issues concerning relational knowledge production, alternative documentation and archive practices and the need for cooperative archival/research/translation projects.