Academics Martha Akawa, Andreas Eckl and Matthias Häussler offer a collection of pieces in 'An Unresolved Issue: Genocide in Colonial Namibia', published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Windhoek.
A look at the table of contents suggests the contributions to be scholarly, spanning from history, political science and archaeology to philosophy.
A truncated version of this book was published as a special issue of the German Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung (Journal for Genocide Research, vol. 2/2/2022).
It contained seven articles and was dedicated to war and genocide in German South West Africa.
The Namibian iteration of 2024 contains 16 articles, in English, with four by Namibian authors, all of them commissioned.
Why were these additional articles not part of the German publication?
The submissions range in quality from excellent to abysmal on (mostly) the issue of genocide in colonial Namibia; in fact, the book covers the German colonial era only.
Onto the actual work and with a preliminary caveat: I will not attach names to any of the rather numerous critical issues to not continue the apparent parading of some of the authors, as many a contributor's submission was definitely not subjected to a proper and rigorous editorial process before being presented to an interested public.
Rigorous proofreading, language editing, content checking and more were simply not followed.
Authors therefore had no chance of improving their often preliminary submissions. This in turn precluded an engagement with the contents of their work.
These allegations were confirmed true when discussed with some of the authors, who in fact had assumed their work was to be subjected to this common editorial practice.
I am highlighting the more egregious issues afflicting almost all the contributions:
- Referencing and evidence provision is predominantly deficient and does not serve its aim: transparency of evidence and sources. Many quotations are not referenced; interesting, new or contentious facts have no evidence attached to them at all. There is no attempt at proper and methodologically clean source-critique.
- Gross mistakes have not been weeded: 'Osombo Windimbe' (the German corruption of 'Ozombu zuvindimba') now is 'Osombo Windhuk', come on!
- Recent published work on topics presented have often not been incorporated, and local experts' work on some of the pertinent issues has been comprehensively ignored.
- There is, at times, too much virtue signalling and preaching, not fitting the serious topics in an academic perspective.
- Add to this a phenomenon that besets Namibian academic writing more generally: a hubristic reluctance of non-English speakers to have their work rigorously language-edited. None of the authors in the volume are native speakers of English.
- To be called out: One of the pieces quotes large chunks of German text without a translation into English; how considerate of a Namibian reading audience, one might quip.
- In large parts the contributions are based on German-language theoretical material exclusively. That is a bit much for a Namibian audience, isn't it?
- Some of the work was published elsewhere before. Good academic practice actually requires this to be acknowledged, to not create the misleading impression that these pieces are new and original.
- The omission of a list of short biographies of the contributors is a lacuna that can be seen as a blessing in disguise, as it would have inadvertently contributed to possible public shaming of its contributors.
To make it salient: This gross and cavalier negligence of good editorial practice has led, amongst others, to an unfounded, slanderous and litigable allegation of genocide denialism, committed by the author of this. How delectable ... !
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A sad state of editorial affairs then, one which flaunts unfinished work and backfires unfavourably, yet deservedly, on the editors and the enabling German non-governmental organisation.
A great chance of publishing cutting-edge new research was missed because the editors defaulted on their editorial responsibility. This book is not an edited scholarly volume, but a compilation at best of unedited, unproofread and unchecked content with verbose arguments, albeit with a few exceptions.
As such, it is another of these uppish, not above-board products, condescendingly disseminated by foreign and domestic actors, and with undisclosed, often dubious impulses and quite some colonial off-taste.
Namibia deserves better.
- Wolfram Hartmann is a historian and author, and edited 'Nuanced Considerations - Recent Voices in Namibian-German Colonial History' (OrumbundePress, 2019).
