DHPS History Department (ed.): Acknowledging our Past – A History Shared, Windhoek (2020)
Printed booklet, bilingual (English and German), available at DHPS school book library
Description (excerpt of the introduction, page 6):
“This teaching aid covers approximately 150 years of southwestern African history up until the end of the wars of anti-colonial resistance in 1909. The era is often debated, most acrimoniously, without the most basic factual knowledge. This acrimonious debate occurs because different Namibian population groups claim their own version of this history as the only valid version; their arguments are based on an extremely thin knowledge base, picked as they suit identificatory, political and ideological purposes. (…) The impression persists that Namibian history is a collection of various, often even unrelated histories, all narrated as the only valid version respectively, instead of ONE history of ONE Namibia. These sectioned histories create the impression of a partitioned country. This, however, is pure opinion, not backed by any hard facts.
Namibian history is one history that happened in one Namibia: fact-based knowledge is therefore an urgent requirement for an argument (…).”
Text (English & German): Wolfram Hartmann, assisted by Matthias Häussler, Werner Hillebrecht, Alexander Kaputu, Freddy Nguvauva, Robert Hitchcock and Anton von Wietersheim
The booklet was created as part of a project by the history department at the Deutsche Höhere Privatschule (DHPS, German private school) in Windhoek with the Namibian historian Wolfram Hartmann, which was realised in 2019 and 2020 with funding from the Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) as part of the ‘Remembering for the Present’ competition (Wettbewerb ‘Erinnern für die Gegenwart’, see news story on DHPS website).