Henning Melber

Henning Melber (born August 22, 1950 in Stuttgart ) is a German-Namibian Africanist and political activist.

Life

Melber grew up in Esslingen am Neckar and Leutkirch in Baden-Württemberg. He came to Namibia in 1967 as a teenager and son of German immigrants and graduated from the German High School of Windhoek. In 1974, he joined SWAPO's liberation movement. From 1975 to 1990, he was forbidden to enter Namibia. In the 1970s, Melber studied politics and sociology at the Free University of Berlin, and in 1977 he graduated as a diploma lecturer. He promoted in 1980 with a work "school and colonialism" at the University of Bremen. From 1982 to 1992 he was an assistant at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Kassel. In 1993 he qualified as a professor at the University of Bremen. From 1992 to 2000 he was Head of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek. From 1994 to 2000 he was Chairman of the Namibian-German Foundation for Cultural Cooperation in Windhoek. From 1996 to 1998 he was also chairman of the Association of Namibian Publishers (ANP). In 2000, he joined the Nordiska Afrikainstitutet in Uppsala, Sweden. After that, he headed the Swedish Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation from 2006 to 2012, which he is currently still in an advisory capacity.

Since 2012 Melber has been an extraordinary professor at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Since 2013 he has also been an associate professor at the Center for Africa Studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa. Since 2017 he is president of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).

Publications

Melber has published numerous books and several hundred contributions on problems and the history of Namibia, as well as on other topics such as internationalism and racism:

• School and Colonialism: The Formal Education of Namibia, Hamburg 1979.
• The whiteness of the last conclusion: racism and colonial gaze. Brandes & Apsel, Frankfurt, 1992, ISBN 3-86099-102-7 .
• Opportunities of international civil society. (With Reinhart Kößler) Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-518-11797-1.
• A New Scramble for Africa? Imperialism, Investment and Development. (Eds., Together with Roger Southall) *Scottsville, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press 2009, ISBN 978-1-86914-171-4.
• The United Nations and Regional Challenges in Africa - 50 Years after Dag Hammarskjöld. (Eds with Maxi Schoeman) = Development Dialogue, no.57, December 2011, ISBN 978-91-85214-63-1 .
• Understanding Namibia. Jacana Media, Cape Town 2014, ISBN 978-1-4314-2133-6. (Also Oxford University Press, London 2015, ISBN 978-0190241568 ).
• Namibia - Socio-political explorations since independence. Brandes & Apsel, Frankfurt a. M. 2015, ISBN 978-3-95558-109-1 .
• Henning Melber, Reinhart Kößler: Genocide - and then what? The policy of German-Namibian past processing. Brandes & Apsel, Frankfurt, 2017, ISBN 978-3-95558-193-0 .