Maxton Shitilifa
WE need to promote our history, an important part of our cultural heritage and which is best preserved in the form of sound and moving image recordings.
We need only think of crucial roles of media such as radio, film, TV and the internet in which sound and sound images play a vital, often the most crucial, role. In every country, large sound collections, often radio archives, or those produced by the music industry, await preservation, conservation and cataloguing.
Foreign journalists and scholars are also producing, and have done so in the past, important interviews and other collections of our history and these have been stored in foreign archives.
Some of these materials in foreign archives are labelled classified materials, which makes it difficult for our people to access.
Some of these collections are of great historical value to Namibia, for example, if we could listen to sound records today of our early resistance leaders making statements.
Such recordings need to be collected, preserved and made accessible for future generations and research. Interestingly, all the digitalization technologies which play crucial roles in this are available in Namibia today.
So it is very important that we start researching, collecting and preserving our lost rich history before it is completely lost.
Last year, I attended a workshop at the National Archives of Namibia, Windhoek representing the Okahandja Military Museum.
The theme of the workshop was Preserving and Researching Southern African sound and memory recordings, and we had participants from as far as South Africa and Europe.
During this workshop I learned from our colleagues at the NBC, Baby Doeseb and Aina Moongo, who are running a project called the Stolen Moments, that Namibian music history is untold and they had been travelling around the whole country researching and collecting old Namibian music, with all the new challenges which result from this.
The Namibian public and scholarly interest in Namibian historical sound archives is rapidly growing.
We do not talk of a visual turn any longer but increasingly of a sonic turn given the importance of the interest in voice and voices.
I have come across many students and researchers at Okahandja Military Museum in constant search of the authentic voice and long accustomed to the visuality of the history turn to historical sound in order to listen again to formerly absent voices and learn about the lost and forgotten history of Namibian people.
It is up to us, the younger generation of today and the heritage industry to produce more and preserve historical sound products of Namibia.
The Swapo Party archive has a number of collections on the Namibian liberation struggle, mainly photographs and some films and it’s very interesting when students and researchers come and listen to the voices of Swapo leaders in the early 1970s encouraging people to fight against the South African racist regime.
My father once told me that the richest place on earth is the cemetery and I used to wonder what he meant by that, but he later explained to me that the cemetery is rich because buried there are people who died with stories that today we call lost memories.
So I therefore call upon my fellow youths, let us go out there and record those elders who have stories to tell us before they depart with their rich history.
• Maxton Shitilifa works for the Okahandja Military Museum and writes in his own capacity.