DHPS History Department (ed.): Acknowledging our Past – A History Shared, Windhoek (2020)
Textbook, 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 […].”
Editor’s note:
The author of this textbook is the Namibian historian Wolfram Hartmann. He initiated, conceptualised and realised it with an accompanying set of teaching aids for teachers in 2020. Hartmann designed the textbook for a course on German-Namibian colonial history in the history department of the Deutsche Höhere Privatschule. The DHPS is the German private school in Windhoek.
The Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtige Amt), Berlin, provided the funding for the project in the context of an international competition. The competition was entitled ‘Remembering for the Present’ (Wettbewerb ‘Erinnern für die Gegenwart’, see news story on DHPS website).