Christianity, spirituality, and the afterlives of Dutch colonial Slavery in the South of Namibia

This PhD project investigates the religious lives of Oorlam and Nama communities in southern Namibia, tracing their historical formation back to the Dutch Cape Colony and following the afterlives of these colonial encounters northward. While Dutch colonial slavery in the Caribbean and Indonesia is extensively studied, the Cape Colony remains comparatively neglected, and Namibia is largely absent from the narrative. Yet the Dutch colonial world did not end at the Cape; it traveled north through the communities it set in motion, extending its influence through Christianity into the Namibian interior. 

The project examines how Christianity functioned as a system of moral governance at the Cape, and explores how Oorlam and Nama communities strategically reinterpreted, indigenised, and deployed it as a tool of survival, resistance, and socio-political identity. This dynamic is being explored through the prophetic sovereignty of Hendrik Witbooi, whose theological reworking of Cape-origin Christianity developed into a political theology of liberation against German colonial rule.

The central premise is that what crossed the Orange River was not merely people, but a Cape-origin religious formation carried through language, naming practices, moral discipline, and baptismal culture. By combining archival research with oral histories and ethnographic fieldwork, the research examines how this formation persists in contemporary lived religious practices, while also attending to the African cosmologies that endured beneath and beyond colonial Christianity. Ultimately, the project contributes to Dutch colonial historiography, African religious history, and southern African memory studies by recovering a forgotten, transboundary history.