Nanci Johnson and Dr. Mark Choate, Department of History
Research in the National Archives of Namibia started out very slowly. I arrived in Windhoek and met all sorts of challenges that I thought I had prepared for. I experienced an attempt at ATM theft against me and then needed to relocate to another guest house for security reasons. On the first day I had planned to do research, the government had shut down the library for water supply issues. Missing an entire day in the archives was difficult to recover from, especially since once I made it in the next day, I met all sorts of difficulties from the library staff. One woman was glad to help me use their very old computer system to look up items that might be useful, but others were not as willing to allow me access to anything. After talking to curator after curator, I started to get somewhere.
The library did not allow public access to the manuscripts collection and had them in a completely separate searchable system. It took three days for anyone to tell me this. I was searching the catalogue looking for anything that might be related to my topic and was coming up with secondary accounts, but no primary documents that could provide me with my own original research. I met with a curator who is the descendent of my research topic. She is a German woman who was born in Namibia. She identifies herself as a German, though she has never even been to Germany. She told that the German community is tight-knit and that the personal documents I was hoping for, such as letters and diaries, are usually kept in the families of those families. They do not donate them to the library. I did not feel comfortable asking her too many questions about her life in relation to my research, though I wish I had now, but she directed me to another German curator.
The next German curator I spoke with was in charge of the manuscripts collection. He was able to search the manuscript collection that I could not gain access to through anyone else. I discussed with him my topic of research and he gave me some titles of folders. I was able to get the manuscript information and now have a copy of it for my research. I experienced troubles with the conditions in the archives. Especially the lack of lighting. They did not turn lights on in the reading rooms, so I had to photograph the manuscripts on a chair next to the window to get as much light as possible.
These manuscripts were very difficult for me to read. Some were typewritten, which were easier to translate, but the majority of it was handwritten and quite illegible for someone of my transcribing abilities. I tried to work through it but was not able to make enough out to use it while I was at Cambridge. I brought it back to my mentor, Dr. Choate, when I returned to the States and he was not able to make any of it out either. From there I brought it to Dr. Hans- Wilhelm Kelling, in the BYU German Department, and he was able to read it easily. He was very intrigued by what i brought back with me and offered to co-author an article on it.
There were many set backs in this project and many that could not be anticipated. I think that I will be able to produce a very interesting project with the help of Dr. Kelling. He helped me understand the wealth of what I had brought back with me. It is the documentation by the Germans explaining where the German women came from and where they went in Namibia when they were sent to Namibia to marry a German man. They were initially sent to be domestic servants and were intended to marry there so that German settlers did not intermarry with the native Africans.
This project has a lot of potential and I am excited to take it further. It is considered a hot topic in the History World and this manuscript could shed a lot of light on the matter. It is something that has not been written on very much and is likely to get published for the contribution of hard-to- get-to sources directly from the National Archives in Namibia.