“Little Research Value”

Ellen Ndeshi Namhila is intrigued by the question: Why can the
National Archives of Namibia respond to genealogical enquiries of Whites
in a matter of minutes with finding estate records of deceased persons,
while similar requests from Blacks cannot be served? Not satisfied with
the sweeping statement  that this is the result of colonialism and
apartheid, she follows the track of so-called “Native estates” through
legislation, record creation and disposal, records management  and
administrative neglect, authorised  and unauthorised destruction,
transfer and appraisal, selective processing, and (almost) final
amnesia. Eventually she discovers over 11,000 forgotten surviving
African estate records – but also evidence for the destruction of many
others. And she demonstrates  the potential  of these records to
interpret  the lives of those who otherwise appear in history only as
statistics – records which were condemned  to destruction  by colonial
archivists stating  they had “little research value and no functional
value”.

This study of memory against forgetting is a call to
post-colonial archives to re-visit their holdings and the systemic
colonial bias that continues to haunt them. This is the revised version
of Ellen Namhila’s 2015 doctoral thesis published at the University of
Tampere, Finland.