The publication came out over a decade of intensities of armed struggle in the present and fierce debates about forms of the postcolonial future. Each edition aimed to publish articles from a broad political, economic, cultural, social, and literary spectrum.  Most editions included updates and analysis on the latest negotiation issues and politics. For example in 1978, the review carried articles on “Namibian on the Eve of Elections” by Ottilie Abrahams;  “Prof. M. Kerina: An Interview by Kenneth Abrahams”; and “Current Events” by Nikodemus Muudjua. Often editions contained a range of race, class, and gender analysis. For example in No.1 Nov 1976 contained articles on “Appraisal of Turnhalle Economics,” “ Comments on Turnhalle: Women, Education, Culture,” and “Black Power, White Extremism, African Nationalism.” There would usually be articles both on the regional, national, and local front. For example in a double issue No.28 that came out in April/June 1983, there were articles on a range of issues entitled “the Internal Situation” from student movement mobilizing, from the Khomasdal Civic Association, the state of health care, local black business, etc. Articles were both informative, but also critical, including regular self-critique with the acknowledgement of failures, such as in an article No.17 (May/June 1980), an article on “a postmortum” on SWAPO-D (SWAPO-Democrats), a party the editors had been central to establishing after their expulsion from SWAPO, which they had also been central to establishing. In a similar vein, we find “A Critique of the ‘Kapuuo’ Edition, by D.S. and Others” and “A Reply” by Kenneth Abrahams (No.13, July 1978).

The Namibian Review’s editorial changed over time, partly due to the changes in the political context to which it was so intimately tied, and partly due to the changing structures of the journal itself, in terms of personnel but also the urgency of what it was responding to in the political moment, and how that shaped its agenda and form over time. We have identified what we think are five loose phases of the Review’s editorial structure. Writers involved in The Namibian Review included: Kenneth Abrahams, Ottilie Abrahams, Gabriel Tuhadeleni,  Nikodemus Muundjua, Aaron Shindjoba, Elsa Brabant, Moses K. Katjiuongua, Paul Helmuth, Godfrey Gaoseb, Mbahimua Kapute, Hans Beukes, Z.A. Mnakapa, Timoteus Shilongo, Peter Shakumu, N.S. Haikali, Olavi Hamukuaya, T.M. Kanyamukulua, K.F. Lempp, David Hamadeni, Pio Marapi Teek, Andreas Shipanga, Issy Katjikuru, Fillemon Moongo, Gerhard Totemeyer, Jean Sutherland, Dorian Haarhoff, Max du Preez, Annemarie Heywood, Brigitta Lau, Olga Levinson, Lucky Shoopala, G. Holst, J.J.S. Alberts, Chris Saunders, David Simon, Joseph Diescho, D. Conradie, Yvette Abrahams, Peter Honey, Wolfgang Thomas, Neville Alexander, Keith Gottschalk, Tony Weaver.

You can peruse the front cover/table of contents of all editions we have been able to find below. Please get in touch if you have copies of edition numbers 7, 8, or 12, or have the cover page to No.26.

On Readership and Distribution. The Namibian Review published between 150-200 copies of each edition. The aim was to put out new editions every 3-4 months with a promise of a minimum of two editions each year (this sometimes resulted in double issues).  From speaking to readers and finding pages of mailing address sticker labels, and reading letters of correspondence between the editors and readers from Zambia, USA, Germany, and beyond, we know that subscribers included: libraries, consulates, community groups, reading clubs, and individuals across Namibia, South Africa, Germany, USA, Finland. For example, organisational subscribers included: Black Student Study Project; the Hoover Institute on War Revolution and Peace at Stanford  University; Dept of Human Rights in Wuppertal,  West Germany; The Christian  Aid Library in London; The Africa Institute in Pretoria; Blackwells, in Oxford; The Press Officer at the British Consulate in Cape Town; The Canadian Embassy in Pretoria; SACHED Trust, in Cape Town and in Johannesburg; AZAPO, Elsies River; New African, London; OAU Liberation Committee, Dar es Salaam; United Nations Library, NY; The Windhoek Archives, Windhoek; University of Dar es Salaam, The Library; NORAD, Lusaka. Our sense is that approximately 40-50% of the subscriptions were from libraries of states or universities, and various study groups, and about 20-30% from individuals.

Starting in 1983, the same team put out a new series, Namibian Review Publications, as “an extension of our work in this field… to give more coverage to work that came out of seminars held from time to time which focus on one single aspect of Namibian society, e.g. politics, history, education, agriculture or economics. Namibian Review Publications shall therefore reproduce, as far as this is possible, the lectures presented at these seminars, and each volume shall deal with one specific theme.” ^{2The Namibian Review Publication, No.1 “Three Essays on Namibian History,” June 1983} A total of six publications came out between 1983-1986.  You can peruse the cover/table of contents pages of the Namibian Review Publications below. We are missing edition No.2, however a list of contents was published in The Namibian Review, No.30, (1983), p.2.

The Namibian Review was part of a constellation of publications that were part of the creation of movements and conversations between liberation movements across southern Africa. For example Kenneth Abrahams’s “State of the Nation” (Namibian Review No.32, May 1987)  including a question of the role of NGOs was republished in Free Azania. For examples, articles about the establishment of the Namibian student movement and what liberating a curriculum would look like, written by Yvette Abrahams (Namibian Review No.28, 1981), who also spent her Sunday mornings as a child stapling the Review for mass mail outs, had parallels in The Namibian Student.

The Namibian Review was fiercely committed to the politics and practices of democratic debate, of education, of non-partisan politics which put liberation above any party and beyond any nationalism.  It can thus be read both as history, as political debate, intervention, and invention with questions about the meaning and modes of work, at that time, and what it means for us today.  In an editorial entitled “Reviewing the Review” in No. 17 May/June 1980: “we hope that Namibians will realise just how necessary it is for us to ‘invent’ ie analyse, suggest, and propose, ways and means to solve our problems, settle the independence dispute and create a better life for us and our children.” This was their political orientation to the national question, to the question of non sectarianism, to national fronts, and sole authenticity, representation, leadership, and education. The Namibian Review was in many ways an outlet and futurist impulse for critical pedagogy; this is one reason why we think that re-visiting this publication might be a way to resurrect critical pedagogy that proposes decolonial imaginaries. Without romanticizing The Namibian Review, we are interested in finding it, and studying it together, as both an education in history, organizing, and orientations to manifesting or putting into action radical thought produced in movement.

Living histories of radical study practices

The founding members, editors, organizers, and writers of The Namibian Review– Kenneth Abrahams, trained and working as a medical doctor, and Ottilie Abrahams, a committed teacher, principle, and feminist activist- were involved in the formation of anti-colonial liberation political parties, underground movements, in education work, in study groups, in writing position papers, newsletters, lectures, and strategic plans.  In other words, The Namibian Review was just one piece in a much larger puzzle of the labours and movements for southern African liberation.

We first came across The Namibian Review in conversations with the late Ottilie Abrahams, who was part of the editorial team of The Namibian Review both in exile in Sweden and then when they relocated the journal back to South West Africa, as it was known at the time, in 1978 after two decades of lobbying for what became the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 435 (1978) on Namibia which called for the withdrawal of South African forces from South West Africa and for the transfer of power to the people of Namibia. We have been part of a small radical histories collective piecing together Aunty Tillie’s political life journey through militant underground reading groups in Cape Town in the 1960s, to exile in Zambia, to running the education camps in Tanzania, to splitting from SWAPO, to exile and lobbying work in Sweden, to establishing food security and education liberation schools in independent Namibia until her passing in 2018.

This work has been part of a creative approach to African history education that builds community across the colonial-imposed borders of the region. Our search for The Namibian Review, has been part of an active engagement in conversations about who holds these records of the past, and their various meanings. In reading the Review, we want to know what we (contemporary activists, historians & educators) can learn from these various intentional spaces/forms of debate, strategies, and knowledge production as we gather towards tomorrow, together.

In 2015, Koni and Asher began a series of interviews/conversations with people who had been involved in struggles against colonial apartheid in the past, and who remained involved in various ways, since 1994. These interviews were set up as conversations about what happened ‘then’, what they were involved in, and how they came to be involved; as well as about the demobilization period (what we understand the ‘democratic transition’ to be); and about how and why they chose to remain involved. We were trying to get at the question of how ‘now’ grew out of and might be similar and different from ‘then.’ These conversations, that we called Living Histories, also included or were often started or centered on discussion on student organizing now and various responses to that.

At the time, we were also involved in developing educational materials, we were designing and running Know Your Continent (KYC), a popular education series on African history. Some of the materials we used in KYC were developed by a team led by Neville Alexander in the 1980s while he was the Cape Town director of South African Committee for Higher (SACHED). We wanted to know more about the context of that work which had been developed for a number of different spaces -­‐ for high school students in and out of school, for activists, for teachers and community discussion sessions; we understood this work to be important, urgent and radical both then and now. So it was through these conversations with people involved in various ways then, as well as through research for KYC, and for a section of a UCT course on histories of race and education, that we were exposed to many radical education initiatives and the important work of SACHED.

In 2016 we applied for a research residency grant for what we saw as “The Urgency of African History: History Education as Creative Practice.”  We received support for a ten day research trip to collaborate with historians, artists, educators, and activists in Botswana and Namibia to workshop and explore historical themes, and produce artistic resources that respond to, and creatively depict the investigated histories.  This was part of a vision to reimagine and pursue exciting, relevant practices of historical education with intention to connect, and build networks with historians, educators, activists and artists across the Southern African region. You can read more about this work, here.

The following year in 2017 we drew on these connections in planning the education programme for a Youth Without Borders Study Tour. This included Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja presenting on a post- Muafangejo approach to southern African resistance art, and a walk about at the Katutura Community Art Center and National Art Gallery; walking tours of Windhoek and sessions on histories of genocide and colonial land dispossession, early resistance, as well as liberation struggle history. One evening, Ottilie Abrahams came to speak to the group and share her history as a liberation fighter. While she did not want to be the focus of a biography she was keen for her students at Jakob Marengo Secondary School, to learn about the history of political organization and organizing that she was part of in the past, and continued to be committed to until her passing in late 2018.  After a year of transcribing interviews, compiling texts and contexts, we returned in 2018 to present first drafts of the interactive mapping of her political life journey (below) with the students at her school, and at an arts festival:  Operation Odalate Workshop at the Katutura Community Arts Center.  In 2019 we extended this work with students at the school and students at the arts school, into murals, shared below.

This has been part of our approach to education/study as part of building cultures of resistance. Asher and Koni have written about this as a post-border praxis.  We are interested in acknowledging and in creating spaces of learning together, ie classrooms, where we can collectively and creatively study politics in the interests of changing them.  Our practice combines study, organizing, imagination, and creation.  This is collective work.  This is a praxis in process which we enact as part of a broader community through organising and education work with activists, artists, students, and educators across different spaces and borders in Cape Town, and South/ern Africa more broadly.

We are convinced that any relevant and radical politics of the future has to be based on a critical engagement with African history. It also has to be committed to a creative vision that imagines, a world beyond the multiple borders we have inherited, and engaged in a struggle to realise that future.  This requires both urgent challenges to the political and geographic walls that control the divisions and distributions of commodified resources, such as land and citizenship, as well as an unpacking of how all borders are normalised, internalised, maintained and reproduced daily by and between people.

Our praxis beyond the classroom, which shapes, permeates and, in various ways emerges from the classroom and attempts to extend it, necessitates working across borders– in the city, the classroom, in the conceptual, historical, and the political.  This work has been focused on trying to extend the classroom to create relationships, solidarity and community across various divides and distances to enable prefigurative enactments of post-border futures in the present. Through the dynamic movement between the classroom and the broader context that constitutes it, we try to nurture and encourage freedom’s dreams toward imagining a world beyond borders, thinking about what it will take to bring that world into being through collective action. Any possibility of what we imagine as a post-border world, requires unlearning and unpacking the historical baggage of borders, imagining and dreaming  something different, creatively devising and planning how to get there, and struggling to realise it.

Below are two examples of experimenting with research, writing, and education as a form of organizing across borders, boundaries, and time.

Radical Histories I: SACHED and Some Others

We have pieced together a history of conservative and radical moves in South African education from 1949-2023, starting with imagining what history we will teach when the REC (Radical Education Collective – a continent-wide collective with cells of revolutionaries based at colleges, technikons, and universities) successfully takes control of the finances and the pedagogical projects of most of the higher education institutions in southern Africa….

Why? Because we are looking for histories of alternative education to support this future/present vision. These largely unknown histories are being used to inform the future educational agenda of the liberation movement which the revolutionary forces now have immense scope to shape.

But please note, this is an unfinished history of The South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED) and some other alternative education initiatives under apartheid. It is unfinished in two ways:

1. There is not a lot of existing writing on SACHED but many people hold and know the history because they were there. The piece’s unfinished character is an invitation to collectively help us all fill in some of the gaps.
2. The other sense in which this piece is unfinished is that our history ends around the transition to neocolonial (in)dependence in the early 1990s. What happens to SACHED in that period is tied up with a broader narrative of demobilisation of progressive movements that took place across the spectrum – sports, arts, armed liberation forces, publishing, politics, community projects etc.

How were popular progressive movements like those mapped out here, which reached their height in the mid-late 1980s, then demobilised by/through/during the ‘democratic transition’? This is where we need to hear your stories on demobilisation/incorporation. Please get in touch, please add as we go. We have so far to go.

But for now, let’s cast our minds back and take another look at one of South Africa’s most significant alternative education projects/spaces…

The South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED) was founded in 1959 by a group of academics, church people and educationists. It was established as a response to the 1959 Extension of Universities Act which segregated universities based on ‘ethnic’ identity and race. Some of SACHED’s foundational impulses were to mitigate against “ethnic education” and the associated stigma of inferiority, and to plug the gap of lack of Black tertiary educational opportunity since Black students could no longer study at the white universities.

There was a wide range of political orientations and approaches taken under the SACHED banner at different historical moments from 1959 into the 1990s. By the 1980s, SACHED had 250 staff working in at least 9 cities and towns across South Africa. Not all, but many of SACHED’s initiatives were committed to establishing participatory, non-­‐discriminatory and non-­‐ authoritarian learning practices. Through conversations with people involved, through archival research and through secondary reading we have been researching SACHED and related projects which ran from 1960-1994 including: The Bursary Project (BP); Turret Correspondence College (TCC); Study Centers Project; The Bophuthatswana Teacher Upgrading Programme; a Newspapers Project; Labour and Community Programmes; UpBeat Magazine; Yu Chi Chan Club; SASO/BC Formation Schools; The History Workshop; Khanya College; Khanya Oral History Project; UWC People’s History Programme; Know Your Continent; National Education Crisis Committee and the People’s Education Movement; and Buchu Books.

It was interesting to learn about creative and flexible approaches to education which allowed them to respond to the ongoing crisis in education; with various people taking initiative and being given space, with relative autonomy and a minimum of bureaucracy, to use resources and to create projects and spaces of learning and building. We are interested in where this orientation to education work is now and what tactics/strategies/approaches from then remain important for us today. In this line, it seems important to think about how SACHED worked across so-­called formal and informal spaces – doing educational work in schools, colleges, universities, community organizations and trade unions -­ and took on various publication and arts initiatives to produce and make available and accessible alternative resources to state-­‐authorized education.

Ultimately, we wanted to know both about the range of projects but also about the political debates, which in some ways have fallen off the map of our timeline.

Conversations with people lead to reading articles and articles lead to speaking to people. We researched a time line, although we know that history is far from linear. And then it was time to narrow it all down, and select what to put in and what to leave out, this was difficult because there is so much. But we wanted to make space for what Paulo Freire calls the creative practice of reading. So while much more can and will be said or written, this timeline intentionally tries to make space for more to be written and heard by others and by us. In and between the details, the debates, and the what’s-­‐nexts, many of the moments on this map are here as dots to spark conversations about the ongoing history of Radical Education Collectives. This can only happen in conversation with the future, and hence the ideas of writing in 2016 from an imagined future of 2024 and of leaving space-­‐ as an imaginative invitation, for people to fill in what we are missing from then, and where these stories land now.

This timeline has therefore then been presented in various education spaces- from the Katatura Community Arts Center (KCAC) in Windhoek to the Neville Alexander Memorial Conference at the University of Johannesburg, where the history was first introduced in an interactive activity- radical history bingo- and then opened up for participants to add to the timeline that was up on the wall.

SACHED History Bingo

Radical History Bingo works like this: each participant gets randomly assigned a historical figure, process, organisation, event, place, etc. They get a paragraph describing this thing on a cue card and a bingo sheet with short descriptions and space for an answer in small squares. Each cue card is one answer to a question square on the bingo sheet. Everyone has to fill in all the squares by finding out information about each person’s clue. The first person to complete their bingo sheet wins. After someone finishes, the group collectively goes through each clue and has a discussion on each of them. The facilitators can prepare additional resources such as videos and/or music or other interesting materials which contribute to the discussion.

The facilitator needs:

• Introductory Notes, see instructions above.
• General Instructions for Playing Radical History Bingo, see instructions above.
• Printed cue cards- one for each person playing (if there are more than 16 people playing it is ok for more than one person to have the same card). PDF available here.
• A bingo sheet without the answers- one for each person playing. PDF available here.
• An answer sheet for the facilitator. PDF available here.

Radical Histories II: Ottilie Abrahams Speaks

This interactive mapping activity is at once a history, a curriculum, and a work in progress.

The map below has two types of annotations: hover your cursor over the cards for a short text or click on a card to open a longer note.

Download a hi-res version of the map to print and play with here (file size, 6.9mb).

The facilitator needs:

1. Introductory notes (optional!), to be drawn from the transcript of Ottilie Abrahams speaking to students, available here:
   Koni Benson, Asher Gamedze, and Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, “Radical Histories II: Ottilie Abrahams Speaks,” and “Mapping the Life Journey and Movements of Ottilie Abrahams: Revolutionary, Teacher Feminist,” in Owela: The Future of Work (Kaleni Kolletive, 2019) available at issuu.com/owela/docs/owela_publication.
2. Print out or draw a very large map of the continent of Africa. In the past, we have used an A2 print out, string, or flour poured on the ground. Be creative.
3. Print out the narrator’s chronology: Marks on the Map, Facilitators Road Map. PDF available here.
4. Cut out que cards and give one to each participant. PDF available here.
5. Begin by giving participants 10-15 minutes to work in pairs on reading and studying their que cards and preparing to be ready to share the main points/most interesting parts of their card with the group, when it is their turn.
6. The facilitator will then call out each milestone in Ottilie Abrahams political life journey and participants will come forward to read or tell the group about their card, and then decide where to place it in relation to the map of the continent. These choices make for interesting conversation. Likewise, the game often provokes interesting conversation, reflection, and sharing of ideas or experiences related to, and extending this history.
7. Please take a photo of the final map and send it to us! Below is a gallery of some of the ways and places we have played this game.