Thursday, October 24, 2013


"Namibian Music History Untold" - Stolen Moments Plan Touring Exhibition

Meeting with the AMA in Mayence, Cologne, Frankfurt, Bayreuth and Halle


Aino Moongo and Baby Doeseb are currently travelling Germany, Austria and Switzerland to meet with curators and managers of different archives and museums. They started off in Mainz and had their first visions shared with AMA director Hauke Dorsch. This was to become one of many sessions where the concept of a touring exhibition got the chance to be shaped and visualized.
The project also contains filmmaker Thorsten Schütte, who already did movies on education in Namiba ("Namibia Generation X", 2005) and 'ethno music' ("Crossroads", 1999).

In order to find many possible associates Aino and Baby travelled from Mayence to Stuttgart to Cologne to Frankfurt to Bayreuth to Vienna to Bremen to Berlin to Göttingen to Zurich to Halle and back to Mayence. Quite some tour!



A visit to the  former plenary hall in Bonn: Hauke Dorsch, Baby Doeseb and Aino Moongo (from left)



The purpose of the project is to reconstruct the age of Namibian popmusic that existed from the 1950s to the country's independency in 1990. Yet during the Apartheid system Namibian musicians had hard times playing their songs and hardly anything was being recorded at all. Today most people don't think of a pop scene but rather a gospel, Western classic and imported South African music scene when it comes to Namibia. Stolen Moments, Namibian Music History Untold therefore set the goal of clearing "misunderstandings so that future generations are able to profit from it" (Aino in the interview for Deutsch-Namibische Gesellschaft e.V.)

The Stolen Moments website says it "is an initiative of the National Archive of Namibia, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Information, the NBC, the Namibian, the Republikein, the Namibian Sun, Allgemeine Zeitung and Basler Afrika Bibliographien. All resultant oral history, recordings and research data will remain property of the originators that is YOU. Your contributions are going to be copied and deposited at the National Archives of Namibia. This will open up the area for future investigation and form the basis for a Namibian popular music archive, as intended by the National Archives of Namibia."

This is the link to the (German) interview with Aino, Baby and Thorsten:
http://www.dngev.de/verein/nachrichten/200-musikprojekt-stolen-moments



We'll keep you up-to-date about the further progress of Stolen Moments and their exhibition! For more information visit their Facebook page on https://www.facebook.com/pages/Stolen-Moments-Namibia/193689374012214?ref=ts


From now on we'll keep posting in English for our international audience!
For questions or remarks please mail to: liontail-records@gmx.de