Strikes, refusal, troublemaking: Workers’ resistance to and disruption of German rule in colonial Namibia
I will be presenting part of my research on anti-colonial dissent in 1884–1915 German Southwest Africa, present-day Namibia. Drawing on and critically engaging with the archives of the German colonial administration in Windhoek and Berlin, the project explores how labour was a key site of both collective and everyday resistance to German colonial rule. One strand of the project sheds light on the exploitation of Namibian labour in railway construction and mining. Here, I discuss unstudied archival material on numerous workers’ strikes and their violent suppression, emphasising the sustained challenge of Namibians to colonial accumulation. A second strand turns to the exploitation of domestic labour, an arena crucial to the reproduction of empire, yet usually marginalised in accounts of colonial expropriation. My research traces the varied ways in which Namibian women, forced to perform domestic labour in the German home, resisted their oppressors through fugitivity, work refusal, and troublemaking. Methodologically, this project is grounded in an approach of reading against the archival grain, challenging the epistemic violence of colonial archives and stretching their interpretive boundaries to trace otherwise obscured voices and practices of resistance.
Date: 10 March 2026, 16:00
Venue: Queen Elizabeth House, 3 Mansfield Road OX1 3TB
Venue Details: Seminar Room 2
Speaker: Malin Bornemann (University of Oxford)
Organising department: Oxford Department of International Development
Organiser: Ila Axelrod (University of Oxford)
Part of: Oxford Southern Africa Discussion Group
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Tamsin Kelk