Namibia In Pictures

Describes the country of Namibia, including its history, geography, economy, and the cultures of its people.

Gerald Hoberman and his son Marc have produced a fascinating portrait of Namibia, a land of stark and astonishing beauty. These photographs are sheer poetry; the austere Namib Desert and its sensual dunes...the fog-shrouded Skeleton Coast...and the ancient cultures of Namibia's native San end Himba peoples. Readers will linger over the pages of this book for hours! Quarter-bound by hand with finest designer book cloth.

Richly illustrated with black and white photographs, this book brings together provocative and exciting new material on Namibia's colonial past. An eight-page colour section looks at how present day Namibians view themselves. It includes contributions from the editors, Wolfram Hartman, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes, as well as Michel Bollig, Jan Bart Gewald, Robert Gordon, Brent Harris, Paul Landau, Rick Rohde, Margo Timm and Marion Wallace.

Many children in Namibia find themselves facing a social crisis. They have been abandoned or abused, are malnourished, homeless, or live in shacks that barely provide any protection. However, amidst these disastrous living conditions, children have developed remarkable survival skills, and come up with equally clever and disillusioned analyses of their situation. For three years, Michaela Fink and Reimer Gronemeyer conducted interviews in Namibia with women who take care of vulnerable children. The book gives these children a voice in interviews and essays.

This book studies the relationship between photography and history in colonial Southern Africa, using a series of encounters with Southern African photographic archives to reflect on photography as a distinct historical form. Through use of private and public archives, images produced by African itinerant photographers, white settlers, and colonial state institutions, this book explores the relationship between photography and history in colonial Southern Africa. Late nineteenth century Cape Colonial prison albums, police photographs from German Southwest Africa, African studio portraits, identity documents, travel permits and passports from the 1920s and 1930s, visual studies of whiteness and blackness authored by settler photographers, South African dompas photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, and aerial photography from the Eastern Cape in the mid-twentieth century are examined to highlight the ways in which photographic images cut across conventional institutional boundaries and complicate rigid distinctions between the private and the public, the political and the aesthetic, the colonial and the vernacular, or the subject and the object. Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa argues that rather than understanding photographs as a means of preserving and recreating the past in the present, we can value them for how they evoke at once the need for and the limits of historical reconstruction. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of colonial history, photographic history, visual media, and African studies.

100 years since the end of German colonial rule in Namibia, the relationship between the former colonial power and the Namibian communities who were affected by its brutal colonial policies remains problematic, and interpretations of the past are still contested. This book examines the ongoing debates, conflicts and confrontations over the past. It scrutinises the consequences of German colonial rule, its impact on the descendants of victims of the 1904–08 genocide, Germany’s historical responsibility, and ways in which post-colonial reconciliation might be achieved.