Maverick Life

Memory and guilt — Artist explores the intersections between private and public histories in Namibia

Nicola Brandt: The Distance Within, Steidl Verlag (2025)

29 Apr 2025

Featuring photographs and video stills made over more than a decade, The Distance Within reflects on Nicola Brandt’s German and Namibian inheritance and deconstructs certain established ways of seeing Namibia.

Nicola Brandt travelled the country extensively, documenting landscapes and people, structures and encounters, to reveal ensnared histories of German colonialism, National Socialism and apartheid.

Markers of these histories range from the ephemeral and private, such as a dilapidated mound of stones as a roadside memorial, to official sites of remembrance and resistance, particularly for colonial atrocities. Alongside her images, Brandt assembles texts by thought leaders in photography, postcolonial cultures, memory and genocide studies, as well as material from private and public archives, to understand enduring blind spots.

Read an extract below by Sean O’Toole, titled “Memory Work”, from Brandt’s The Distance Within.

***

The road inland from the Atlantic coastal village of Henties Bay to Uis, a threadbare desert settlement established at the site of a tin mine in Namibia’s central Erongo region, is arrow-straight. Mostly. As the unpaved road approaches the Brandberg Mountains, a dung-heap prominence on the flat horizon that grows in scale nearing Uis, the landscape begins to gently warp and kink, as does the road. Sometime in 2015, the driver of a silver hatchback misjudged one of the bends here and fatally plunged their car into a culvert. A rectangle of stones topped with a wooden cross records the memory of the unnamed 32-year-old who died here.

There are many such markers and memorials scattered across the treacherous desert landscapes of Namibia. Some are makeshift visualisations of private traumas and barely knowable histories; one such memorial photographed by Nicola Brandt on the road between Swakopmund and Usakos, not far south of Uis, in 2013. Others, though, like the Herero and Nama graveyard and genocide memorial in Swakopmund, also reprinted in this book, are less provisional and speak to a collective history of conquest and resistance that is postcolonial Namibia’s knotty inheritance.

The agency of these two histories, one obscure and private, the other shared and public, informs Brandt’s photographs of urban monuments, roadside memorials, abandoned settlements, defunct industrial projects, inaccessible private spaces and intimate kinfolk.

In broad terms, Brandt’s photographs explore the intersections between private and public histories. These histories awkwardly socialise more than fluidly commingle.

In a way, there is something Hegelian about Brandt’s ambition of mediating two opposing histories: of conquest and oppression, of memory and guilt. There is, however, no neat synthesis produced by this dialectic. A volatile energy frames her photos of contemporary Namibia. That energy is perhaps best summarised by the German word betroffen, which encompasses a spectrum of conditions ranging from shock and dismay to bewilderment, sadness, and suffering.

Guardian II, Rössing stone quarry, Namib Desert, 1 December 2017. Sculptural props left in the desert from a Hollywood film set are now placed at the entrance of a mining quarry. (Photo: Nicola Brandt)

Entrance to Rostock Ritz, 17 January 2021. A lodge between Walvis Bay and Maltahöhe, on the way to Aus. (Photo: Nicola Brandt)

Illuminated, unrecounted, Diaz Point, 15 September 2013. (Photo: Nicola Brandt)

The Dutch writer Ian Buruma invokes this word in his fascinating 1994 book The Wages of Guilt, a roaming investigation of guilt and memory in post-war Germany and Japan.

‘To be betroffen,’ writes Buruma, ‘implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment. To be betroffen is to be speechless.’ But, adds Buruma, the word also connotes absolution. ‘To be betroffen is one way to “master the past,” to show contriteness, to confess, and to be absolved and purified.’

Brandt’s photographs are about all these things: guilt, shame, speechlessness, contrition and confession. This is a book deeply occupied with memory and the labour of mourning, with Trauerarbeit, as Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich phrased it in their well-known 1958 book The Inability to Mourn. Memory is closely linked with mourning, as it is with culpability. To remember is to acknowledge responsibility. Accountability is central to Brandt’s provocative photobook. To disremember, her photobook proposes, to not account for the past, to wilfully unremember things, to be indifferent, is to deny guilt.

The setting for Brandt’s purposefully discursive and, at times, wrenchingly personal enquiry into memory and guilt in Namibia is a familiar one.

In the main, her inventory of people forgotten, places abandoned, and histories retrieved locates the viewer in the wide-open range beneath a rainless sky. This place of exposure and heat, of thirst and failure, contains many prompts to remember.

After all, failure in this dry and unforgiving place is not easily hidden.

Once, near ǃNamiǂNûs, 7 July 2014. (Photo: Nicola Brandt)

Brickmaking factory at Uis, 6 February 2020. (Photo: Nicola Brandt)

In April 2016, during a road trip across the Erongo region, I spent two days in Uis. Breakdown is written into the landscape of this faltering desert outpost. The opencast tin mine that sponsored the establishment of Uis in the 1950s is defunct. Artisanal miners now sift through the excavated residue of the mine, formerly owned by apartheid South Africa’s state-run Iron and Steel Industrial Corporation, for leftover wealth. Formal work is scarce.

For a while the brickworks filled the breach left by the mine, but the recent building boom in Swakopmund has fizzled. In the still-segregated residential township attached to Uis, located behind a straggle of mine tailings and known locally as ‘upper town,’ Black youths idle about amidst the din of loud music. One older resident has opted for a shack in the desert rather than endure the noise and resentment.

Abandonment is not uncommon in Namibia. Uis may end up like the ghost town at Kolmanskop, or not. New settlers are still willing to try their luck in Namibia.

The prejudices that agitate small towns across southern Africa, while piquant and particular, also key into larger geopolitical shifts from which mineral-rich Namibia is not immune. Locals in Uis whisper that the operators of the ‘China shop’ in upper town are behind the disappearance of roaming donkeys, a source of modest wealth and mobility for peasant farmers who live along gravel roads connecting somewhere and nowhere.

Donkeys on the track to the tin mine at Uis, 6 February 2020. (Photo: Nicola Brandt)

Much like the donkeys Brandt photographed near a flooded quarry, now an aquaculture farm specialising in tilapia, I also wandered the mine. These sites of milled earth and stilled industrial aspiration are commonplace across the subcontinent. In their own way they are memorials too. They commemorate a primal labour: digging. The pervasiveness of this labour across Erongo, be it extractive capitalist ransacking by foreign corporations or survivalist rummaging for semi-precious stones by peasants, accounts for the improbable location of human settlements like Uis, as well as its graves.

Emerging from the tailings, walking back into centre of town, I encountered 16 graves in a floodplain next to the main road. The graves were laid out side-by-side in a fenced-off plot, each grave bounded by a perimeter of rocks and covered with smaller crushed stones. None of the graves had a headstone. Years ago, I later learnt, a group of Aawambo men, migrants from the north, had perished here. Unfamiliar with the local desert flora, they had used a poisonous Damara milk-bush for firewood. They grilled their food over toxic fumes, ate and died. Later they were buried next to each other.

Who were these men? How old were they? What did they look like? Did they perish in yellow overalls worn by miners during South Africa’s contested occupation of Namibia, incidentally a time of record mining profits? Was their death met with the same dazed and stupefied horror that gripped Señora Prudencia Linero, a pilgrim from Buenos Aires, at the death of 17 Englishmen in flannel trousers, diagonally striped ties and dark jackets aboard her steamship docked in Naples harbour? ‘Poisoned by the oyster soup at supper,’ writes Gabriel García Márquez in his short story about devotion and sudden death. ‘Just imagine, oysters in August!’ Just imagine, dying from the smoke of a desiccated grey-green desert plant.

Uncertain territories, near Walvis Bay, 27 August 2011. (Photo: Nicola Brandt)

Unremembered lives are gristle for the mill of storytellers. The 16 miners perished in the early 1900s, goes one version of their story, before Uis was founded. In another version the men numbered 11.

Or perhaps they were 13 visiting footballers, not miners, only briefly in town. The story of these unnamed men has already become legend. Brandt is familiar with the troubling limits of memory in Namibia, as well as the paradox of its memorials for the imprecisely remembered. It haunts her artistic practice and work as a revisionist art historian.

The enormity of the memories imprinted on the ravaged landscapes of southern Africa, be it through war or industry, stupidity or avarice, can prompt boredom, a languor born of hopelessness, or—worse still—indifference. Brandt’s practice as an artist and thinker refuses indifference.

Woestynkombuis (desert kitchen), Maltahöhe, 21 January 2012, with Magrieta Muzorongondo and the late Joryn Niemand. (Photo: Nicola Brandt)

To be betroffen is a way to show contriteness, to confess, Buruma proposes. It is a way to be absolved and purified. Words like absolution and purification should be treated with suspicion. Buruma knows this. ‘Places of horror,’ he writes about Auschwitz-Birkenau, ‘hold a fascination which can all too easily slip into a form of masochistic pleasure. The imagination turns toward a morbid desire to be horrified.’ The mind begins to flirt with kitsch. ‘Can one internalise Auschwitz from the point of view of the aggressors without falling prey to kitsch emotions of false guilt or even false pride?’ he asks. To which I would add: is it possible to know the pain of another?

While waiting for our vehicle to be repaired in Uis, I walked. I also languished by the hotel pool reading James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man, a compilation of short stories published in 1965 and dedicated to his friend, the mesmerising painter Beauford Delaney.

The stories are uncompromising. One recounts the murder of a child. Another includes a childhood memory of a lynching. ‘He watched the hanging, gleaming body, the most beautiful and terrible object he had ever seen till then,’ writes Baldwin. Both stories involve Baldwin inhabiting the consciousness of young white boys. It is a form of artistic license, or permission, increasingly under threat.

Baldwin was at the height of his powers and widely acclaimed when Going to Meet the Man appeared. ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,’ he remarked in a Life magazine profile published two years earlier, ‘but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.’

This remark is well known and widely quoted. Quotes are like icebergs: we only see the tip, often overlooking the submerged mass. Baldwin continues talking. He likens the artist to an ‘emotional or spiritual historian.’

The role of an artist, adds Baldwin, ‘is to make you realise the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.’

At the Herero and Nama graveyard in Swakopmund, 5 January 2012. The contours of a middle-class suburb overlook the concentration-camp graveyard where those who died during the War of 1904–1908 and the Genocide are buried. (Photo: Nicola Brandt)

Baldwin, whose writing I read while sipping tea spoiled by Uis’s contaminated water supply, is a helpful voice in outlining the difficult task Brandt has taken upon herself with this book. Baldwin, again from Life: ‘Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.’ […]

The labour of mourning is not abstract for Brandt. For her, to be betroffen involves a sense of shame. It is to be speechless. To be betroffen means facing an open wound and admitting complicity. This is the volatile energy at play in Brandt’s provocative and also intimate book about historical memory and guilt in contemporary Namibia. DM

Nicola Brandt: The Distance Within, Steidl Verlag (2025)

This is an excerpt from Sean O’Toole’s essay “Memory Work” in Nicola Brandt: The Distance Within (Steidl Verlag, 2025), which can be ordered online.

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