Professor William Heuva published an online article in the Journal of African Cinemas in November 2025. The article was published under the title: ‘Preserving Indigenous Ovaherero cultural heritage in the digital age: Analysis of the film ‘Tjipangandjara.’

The film, produced in 2022, is based on Tjipangandjara ua Kahendjira, an early nineteenth-century griot (a walking archive of the community’s history and culture) who composed most of the Otjiherero proverbs and idioms. 

Heuva’s article on Tjipangandjara is, in his own words, mainly meant to “develop film scholarship and encourage the development of praxis with regard to the use of digital technologies in the production of African Indigenous language films.” 

Heuva’s premise in the article is that ‘the new technological development can contribute to the promotion and preservation of African Indigenous languages and cultural heritages, contrary to claims that modernisation is engineering the extinction of African cultural heritages.’ 

By locating the Namibian short film Tjipangandjara in that broad context, Heuva argues that the film has used “new (filmless) technology to stimulate the appreciation of the Ovaherero language and cultural heritage, while limiting the adverse effects associated with digital capitalism.” 

By using Tjipangandjara as an example, Heuva argues that it is possible to use ‘new technologies in producing creative works as cultural artefacts without converting them into profitable commodities.’ 

The article situates the film Tjipangandjara within the broader neo-liberal economic conditions in Namibia, which had a negative impact on the ‘production, distribution and consumption of the film.’ 

These conditions not only constrain the production of the film Tjipangandjara but also are not conducive to the production of films in African Indigenous languages in general because of commodification, argues Heuva. 

Heuva holds that despite the budget constraints, the Tjipangandjara project ‘retained its non-profit, non-commercial objective’ and by so doing, it challenges the neo-liberal circulation and commodification of cultural artefacts.’

Most importantly, Tjipangandjara represents ‘a marginalised heritage’s resistance to cultural relegation in an environment dominated by mainstream Western visual and literary narratives.’ 

Heuva also asserts that the film ‘promotes and preserves Ovaherero cultural heritage’ and in that sense, serves as a very important ‘cultural repository’. 

Furthermore, the article contributes to the literature on Indigenous language film, not only in Namibia but across Southern Africa.

Heuva positions his article in ‘broader critical perspectives that draw from the Third Cinema approaches.’ 

And in doing so, he uses social science lenses informed by ‘cultural studies and critical political economy of communication as a theoretical approach.’

The central thread of the article concerns the right of African people to ‘represent themselves in the film medium.’ That necessity is spurred on by the deep, albeit ‘invisible,’ cry of the African to ‘define himself/herself.’ In a global ‘ocean’ where we are out-organised and overwhelmed by the Euro-American cultural hegemony, it is high time that Africans exercised their right to self-identification and self-definition. 

Steve Biko, in one of his immortal observations, was to remark: “The strongest ally of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Simply put, you need your mind to transcend mental slavery, but if your mind is “captured,” how could you transcend that state of being?

Heuva’s critique of the short film Tjipangandjara is a call on all of us to re-imagine, not only the need to produce films in our Indigenous African languages, but also the role and relevance of African languages. 

Such a call is very relevant because we are caught in the “duality” between the practical need to use English as our official language on the one hand, and the urgency to promote our African Indigenous languages on the other. 

It is high time we debated this “duality,” because language, as a ‘conveyor’ of cultural norms and values, is not neutral. The English language, like many European languages, is the ‘conveyor belt’ of the Euro-American myth of the so-called higher Western culture that has dominated our discourse for centuries. 

Edward Said, an American professor of Palestinian origin, once remarked that people of colour ‘are out-smarted and out-classed’ by Euro-American cultural hegemony. To paraphrase Karl Marx, the ‘ideas of the ruling nations are the ruling ideas’; therefore, the global South needs a complete “cultural reset” to counterbalance that.  Heuva’s article on the film Tjipangandjara should be read and appreciated against that backdrop.

*Gerson Uaripi Tjihenuna is a Commissioner of the Electoral Commission of Namibia. However, the views expressed here are his own and not those of ECN.