Imelda Hoebes, Christianity, Spirituality, and the Afterlives of Dutch Colonial Slavery in the South of Namibia

Imelda Hoebes’ doctoral research investigates the religious lives of Oorlam/Nama communities in southern Namibia, tracing their historical formation to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, which was a society structured by slavery, violent land dispossession, and racial hierarchy. The project follows the afterlives of these colonial encounters northward into present-day Namibia. The term Oorlam does not denote a fixed race or ethnicity, but refers to Cape-origin, Dutch-speaking, Christianized, and mobile frontier groups formed through colonial entanglements rather than genealogical purity. Having migrated north and later assimilated with Nama communities, they are referred to in this study as Oorlam/Nama. In contemporary Namibia, these communities generally identify as Khoekhoegowab-speaking Nama; the study therefore uses Oorlam/Nama primarily as a historical category while fully respecting present-day forms of self-identification.

While Dutch colonial slavery in the Caribbean and Indonesia has been extensively studied, the Cape Colony remains comparatively neglected, and Namibia is largely absent even when South Africa is included. 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. This project addresses that gap by shifting the analytical focus away from genealogical continuity toward the enduring afterlives of colonial slavery, tracing its reach from the Cape into southern Namibia.

The project examines how Christianity functioned as a system of moral governance at the Cape, and how Oorlam/Nama communities strategically reinterpreted, indigenised, and implemented it as a tool of survival, resistance, and socio-political identity formation. 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 of the research is that what crossed the Orange River with Oorlam communities was not merely people, but Cape-origin Christianity itself, carried through language, naming practices, moral discipline, and baptismal culture. The study investigates how this foundational religious formation persists today among descendants through inherited lived practices, while simultaneously attending to the African cosmologies and spiritual traditions that have endured alongside, beneath, and beyond colonial Christianity.

This study is guided by the central research question: how did the reinterpretation and implementation of Cape-origin Christianity enable Oorlam/Nama communities to construct socio-political identities, and how are these religious histories remembered, silenced, and practiced as lived religion among descendants in southern Namibia today?

To address this question, the study employs qualitative research design integrating archival research, oral history interviews, ethnographic engagement, and creative participatory methods, treated as mutually informing modes of inquiry. Archival work is being conducted across the Western Cape Archives in Cape Town, South Africa, the National Archives of Namibia, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Namibia Archives in Windhoek, and the Rhenish Mission Archives in Wuppertal, Germany. Fieldwork is centered among southern Namibian communities with direct historical and contemporary connections to the Oorlam/Nama formation.
This project contributes to Dutch colonial historiography, African religious history, and southern African memory studies by recovering an understudied transboundary history, tracing a colonial religious formation from its Cape roots to its contemporary afterlives in southern Namibia.