And the horse you are riding in on: Vilho Amukwaya Shigwedha, ‘The Toppling of the Equestrian Statue and the Future of Colonial-Era Memorials in Namibia’, in Sarah Gensburger, Jenny Wüstenberg (eds), De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places, Berghahn Books, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

And the horse you are riding in on: Vilho Amukwaya Shigwedha, ‘The Toppling of the Equestrian Statue and the Future of Colonial-Era Memorials in Namibia’, in Sarah Gensburger, Jenny Wüstenberg (eds), De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places, Berghahn Books, 2023

22Apr24

Excerpt: Many of the towns in Namibia that were occupied by German colonialists between 1884 and 1915 contain historical memorials dedicated to the his-tory of German colonialist settlers in Germany South West Africa (GSWA). Following Namibia’s independence from South Africa in 1990, activists and some local politicians pushed to have several settler-colonialism-related memorials and monuments dismantled. Th e battle against settler-colonialist memorial landscape in Namibia was launched in 2013 when the Namibian government toppled the imperial German’s Equestrian, or Südwester Reiter, statue and relocated it from its traditional site in the heart of Windhoek to a camoufl aged location where its presence in town became less obvious to the public. Protesters in Namibia have been demanding the demolition of other colonial-era memorials in various Namibian towns since the fall of the Eques-trian statue. Several statues linked with settler colonialism in Namibia have been spray-painted and defaced by rebellious activists calling for the removal of statues of colonial fi gures from postcolonial Namibia’s public space.

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