Carol and Ron Gestwicki, a couple from northern America, worked for the Anglican Church in Namibia from 1964 to 1966. Ron worked as a priest in Windhoek’s African township, the Old Location, and as such worked closely with oppositional leaders such as Hosea Kutako and Clemens Kapuuo. Carol, a trained nurse, gave courses in the Red Cross clinic of the Old Location and also evening and Sunday classes for the Anglican church congregations. For a while they lived in a caravan on the outskirts of Gobabis in eastern Namibia in order to provide services to the so-called African reserve population.

Audio letters became the common feature of their communications with their family. Given the increasing surveillance by the colonial administration on foreign church workers in Namibia, the couple decided to return to the US in 1966, after the birth of their first child. Ron Gestwicki continued to work closely with the exiled Namibian politicians and American Anti-Apartheid groups in the US. For a while, their African friends in Namibia continued to send them audio letters from Namibia. Today, the Gestwicki’s collection of audio letters is housed at the BAB Archives.

Freedom Tichaona Nyamubaya (1958 – 2015) was a Zimbabwean freedom fighter, activist and poet. In 1975, she left what was then Rhodesia to join the Zimbabwe National Liberation Army (ZANLA) in Mozambique. She achieved the rank of Female Field Operation Commander and was elected the Secretary for Education in the first ZANU Women's League conference in 1979. After independence she worked as a rural development, gender and peace activist as well as a farmer, dancer and poet.

Ruth Weiss (*1924), who grew up in South Africa, was one of the few prolific female journalists for southern Africa during the 1960s to 1990s and reported extensively on the position of women in politics, in exile and in liberation movements. On 6th May 1982 she conducted an interview with Freedom Nyamubaya in Harare, Zimbabwe. In the extract from this conversation presented in the podcast, Nyamubaya talks about her experiences as a woman in the liberation army and on the front line.

Die BAB blicken 2021 auf 50 Jahre Institutsgeschichte zurück. 1971 von Carl Schlettwein als Bibliothek und Verlag gegründet, um Publikationen insbesondere zu Namibia unabhängig von kolonialen Rahmenbedingungen zugänglich zu machen, gewährleistet die Carl Schlettwein Stiftung seit 1994 das Bestehen der BAB als Namibia Resource Centre und Southern Africa Library, inklusive eines Archivs. In dem Gespräch von Dag Henrichsen und Daniela Schlettwein-Gsell mit Albert M. Debrunner im Juni 2018 erzählt Debrunner aus der Zeit der frühen 1990er Jahre, als er als Werkstudent und Bibliothekar in den BAB tätig war und mit «Carlo» Schlettwein zusammenarbeitete.

In this extract from an interview Ruth Weiss conducted with Maryknoll Sister Janice McLaughlin (1942–2021) in Harare (Zimbabwe) on 30th July 1982, Sister Janice reflects on her decision to move to Rhodesia where she worked for the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in 1977. Documenting atrocities of the Zimbabwean war of liberation she was arrested and deported, only to continue to work from Mozambique. After Rhodesia gained its independence in 1980, Sister Janice returned to Zimbabwe to work as an education consultant in the President's Office. She continued to work in Zimbabwe until 1992 and returned to work in the country in the areas of adult education, peacebuilding and combating human trafficking from 1998 to 2009 and from 2015 to 2020.

Ruth Weiss who had lived in Rhodesia in the late 1960s and then was expelled, also returned in 1980 to live and work in Zimbabwe. She soon started to research the lives of women and interviewed Sister Janice as “an important figure in the liberation struggle”, as she writes in her book “The women of Zimbabwe” (1986).

Kenneth Kaunda (1924–2021) was the first State President of independent Zambia. On March 30, 1977 Ruth Weiss conducted an interview with Kaunda in Lusaka on the occasion of the visit of Nikolai Podgorny, then President of the Soviet Union. In this extract from the interview, Kaunda provides an assessment of the Cold War situation in southern Africa, Zambia’s position as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement and the supportive role of the Soviet Union for Zambia.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the political solidarity committee “kämpfendes afrika” (fighting africa) in Zurich engaged in the support for African liberation movements. Its archives of papers, images and sound recordings are today housed at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien. The extracts of a recording presented here document an event of the “ka” on 1st March 1980 in the Zurich Volkshaus. Mike Muendane and Vuyisile Dlova speak as representatives of the South African liberation movement Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) to the audience. Barbara Müller from the “ka” translates their statements into German.
For further information on the “kämpfendes afrika” collection (General Archives AA.5), have a look at the finding aid or our online archive catalogue.

Lewis Nkosi (1936–2010), born in Embo (KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa), was an acclaimed journalist, writer and professor of literature in various African and European countries as well as in the USA. Living in exile since 1960, he resided in Basel between 1997 and 2010. On 11th November 1999 he gave a reading from his novels at the BAB. In this extract of the ensuing conversation, he talks about his identity as a writer and the experience of arriving in exile in London in 1960 and returning to South Africa in 1991.

In this extract from an interview conducted by Ruth Weiss on September 28th, 1979, the then “first and only” Namibian medical doctor, Libertina Inaviposa Amathila (née Appolus), also known as Libertine Amathila, talks about studying in exile and becoming a doctor as well as women’s education, gender issues and life in the Namibian refugee camps in Angola and Zambia. Amathila, who had fled South African ruled Namibia in the early 1960s, became a high-ranking SWAPO official. Ruth Weiss interviewed her most likely in Lusaka where SWAPO had its headquarters in the 1970s.

Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, doctoral student at the University of Cape Town, performed the “Ondaanisa yo Pomudhime” (Dance of the Rubber Tree) at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien and inside its archives shortly before this conversation took place with the BAB archivist. He reflects about the challenges of “decolonizing the archive” and his roles as a performance artist in “cleansing a space which is speaking to ghosts.”.

Vilho Shigwedha is a senior lecturer at the Department of Geography, History and Environmental Studies at the Unversity of Namibia in Windhoek. He, Martha Akawa and a group of students visited the Basler Afrika Bibliographien in August 2015. In this interview he talks about becoming a historian and researching the controversial history of the Cassinga massacre in southern Angola in 1978 during the Namibian liberation struggle