Ellen Ndeshi Namhila’s 2017 book “Little Research Value:” African Estate Records and Colonial Gaps in a Post-Colonial National Archive is an extensive and compelling historiography of the so-called Native Estates records and the institution currently known as the National Archives of Namibia (NAN). This book emerged from Namhila’s PhD dissertation at the University of Tampere, Finland. Making a distinct contribution to the field of critical archival studies, it challenges the one-sidedness of colonial archives. It focuses on person-related records of Africans, which have had very little research interest in post-colonial, subaltern and post-modernist studies of the colonial archive. Namhila uses terms such as “native” carefully, with an awareness of the problematic connotations they hold and how they emerged from specific historical processes of racial ideologies.
In her introduction, literature review and methodology chapters, the author makes a strong case for looking at Native Estates records, citing her own experience of working at the NAN as the Director of the Namibia Library and Archives Services for almost a decade. She recalls how most Native Estates records which were of interest to ordinary citizens remain largely inaccessible, a consequence of colonialism. This study pays attention to a range of records made during German colonialism and the South African apartheid periods and how the different transitions influenced preservation strategies of colonial officials. Using archival research, Namhila offers a mixed-methodological approach that analyses records in order to establish a critical perspective of the national burden the Native Estates records.
Chapter 4, “Legal Framework for Administration of Deceased Native Estates,” provides an overview of colonial legal frameworks in South West Africa during both German and South African occupation. The author makes a comparison that shows the differences and similarities between these legislations and how they subsequently orchestrated the erasure and displacement of Native Estates. This chapter establishes that the estate records for deceased Whites and Natives were managed and transferred through discriminatory procedures. This is to say that there were separate legal and administrative systems for Whites and Natives in colonial Namibia. Namhila’s analysis shows that the “ … acts and ordinances, their amendments, proclamations, regulations and notices has shown a complicated picture of frequent successive repeals and amendments, exclusions and reservations, definitions and redefinitions according to political expedience” (73). Although this chapter might be difficult for the reader to get through because of its legal jargon, it details the colonial legal framework which is crucial in understanding why the archival nature of Native Estates continue to be fragmented and largely inaccessible in a post-colonial archive such as the NAN.
Chapter 5 looks at the administrative structures and processes. It provides insights into the disregarding nature of colonial efforts of filing, transferring, appraising, preserving and disposing records of Native Estates. Native Estates were recorded in various circumstances. The author pays attention to inspection reports, disposal correspondences, transfer correspondence and appraisal recommendations which all proved to be useful for the study’s objectives. Colonial documents such as letters, Identification Passes, inventories, death notices and estate vouchers facilitated by colonial administrators such as Magistrates and Native Commissioners were identified as significant in processes of administering deceased Native Estates. Pointing the reader to various gaps in these archives, the authors argues that because there were too many structures of administering Native Estates, it led to the chaotic nature as well as the disappearance of some of these records. In contrast, “The White estate records were not subjected to this tossing and dicing between multiple structures, they were safely administered under one structure, the Master of the High Court” (86). As a result, Namhila’s critical analysis demonstrates that these colonial gaps, inconsistencies and silences were inherently aligned to the systemic dispossession that the Natives were subjected to. We see how the Native Estates overwhelmingly amounted to close to nothing. This is due to the political economy of colonialism which was characterised by its extractive, exploitative and repressive conditions such the contract labour system.
In Chapter 6, “The Management of Native Estate Records in the NAN,” Namhila reflects on an exploration of usage of the Native Estates records at the National Archives of Namibia. She offers a detailed account of what reads like a difficult archival system which is marked by absences and presences. In conversation with staff at the NAN, she shows us the necessity of adopting different strategies of retrieving data to avoid the usual cumbersome and time-consuming process. Working through the database and indexes (written and electronic), the study offers a statistical analysis which reveals the major temporal and spatial gaps in these records. The different periods are marked by absences of specific information and files, with some periods having more records than others. For example, “That there are huge unexplained gaps in the time coverage of Native Estates in almost all Native Estate record-creating offices” (137). The author makes a connection between these gaps and the deliberate neglect and destruction in processes of transferring these archives between different offices.
The last chapter is a discussion of the findings and a conclusion which highlights the book’s original contribution to its relevant field(s) of study. It points the readers to possible sites of future research such as Namibia’s history of administration which remains a huge gap. It also reminds us of the centrality of South African archives on this subject matter. The strength of this book is that it is fulfilling reading which makes evident the structural weakness and ideological bias in the colonial administrative processes of constructing archives. White settler colonialism and apartheid racial policy deeply influenced the archival traditions which did not consider Native life as important or worthy of careful documentation. “Someone decided to administer an estate, and to disregard another. As the colonial system condoned such arbitrary decision-making at the discretion of the officials, it also devalued the records as a future source of information” (157).
Because archives (as the author reminds us) are elite institutions, they will always be implicated in the ideological issues of erasure, absence, silence, exclusion and othering. As an artist-scholar who works regularly with records at the NAN, I am not convinced that the average Namibian even knows about the NAN and the ways in which they can make use of its resources. Said differently, national archives like post-apartheid museums in Namibia are not the most attractive and inviting spaces. This, I found to be the weakness of the book. It does not draw on innovative strategies and creative interventions in the (post)colonial archives to make an important point, which is how the Native Estate records and the NAN as a national institution could be made more appealing for the descendants of natives for example. Typically, the study centres archival material at the expense of the user, even though it focuses on person-related records. The resulting book could have been more explicit about the decolonial project required for dealing with a collection such as the Native Estates records. There are lot of possibilities for archivists, the general public as well as scholars in different fields of study. In her conclusion, Namhila emphasises that there is a need for collections such as the Native Estates records to be interfaced with other archives such as church records and oral genealogies: “ … the issue of surrogate records needs to be explored to diversify the available body of genealogical resources. One can hardly think of surrogate records for estates in the narrower sense, but many facets of the information that genealogical and academic researchers are looking for is contained in a variety of other records” (181).
“Little Research Value:” African Estate Records and Colonial Gaps in a Post-Colonial National Archive makes for interesting reading for this special issue titled After the Fire: Loss, Archive and African Studies. This is because this book delves into the systemic gaps and tendencies of deliberate exclusion in Native Estates records by what I refer to as archival regimes of racial segregation. This history haunts an African post-colonial archive such as the NAN which is left with the burden of dealing with fragments, remnants and residues of these Native Estate records. After reading Namhila’s book, I am left wondering about the kind of reparative and restorative work that is possible here? The way I see it, this is not only a question for NAN but also for African Studies which finds itself in multiple crises as a field of study that is deeply implicated in the “baggage” of the colonial archive. This question requires plural interventions that will make sense of archival loss in relation to other historic losses such as land dispossession, displacement, genocide and the colonial looting of cultural artefacts and human remains. This engagement with loss is best reflected by Simon Zhu Mbako (1950–1994) in his poem We Come and Die as Numbers, which is presented in the first pages of Namhila’s book. Moreover, I would go further and argue that loss, be it deliberate or by accident, is a central aspect that shapes any given archive. This is to say that every archival process is likely to be marked by damage, erasure or forgetfulness in its lifetime, as each generation decides what is worth archiving.
All in all, this book makes a significant contribution, and I look forward to seeing how future scholarship on the subject matter of person-related records and post-colonial archives will build on it.