Future Pasts

Press Release! A film made by the Future Pasts research project has been shortlisted for the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s[1] prestigious 2017 Research in Film Awards. The film ‘The Damara King’s Festival’ was made in collaboration with Namibian film organisation Mamokobo, the Damara King’s Festival Organising Committee, and UK academic partners at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for African Studies.

On Tues 18th July, the Future Pasts research project hosted a private view of our exhibition Future Pasts: Landscape, Memory and Music in West Namibia. Held at Gallery 44AD next to the Roman Baths and the Abbey in the centre of the City of Bath, the exhibition brings together images, music and videos made in collaboration with people and organisations in west Namibia. We have aimed to create a contemplative space where the themes of sustainability, identity and displacement w

It was when doing field research for my PhD in the mid-1990s that I first learned of local histories embedded in the broader landscape around the settlement of Sesfontein / !Nani|aus, north-west Namibia. This is an area known today for its spectacular landscapes and desert-adapted black rhino and elephant. It is a sought after tourism destination now catered for by luxury eco-lodges linked to locally-run conservancies. But I have come to learn that the landscapes described as

Perhaps it should be unsurprising that tracking such a slippery character as ‘Haiseb’ is proving less straightforward than I initially imagined. Scholars typically describe Haiseb as a culture hero or trickster folklore figure found among the Nama, Damara and Hai||om that overlaps strongly with wider Bushmen trickster figures from across southern Africa. These trickster figures range from |Kaggen of the nineteenth century |Xam of South Africa, to Huwe and Haiseb of contempora