Memory Biwa

Dr. Memory Biwa is a Namibian researcher based at the University of Namibia, Windhoek, and affiliated with the University of Bayreuth's Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence. Her scholarly work investigates colonial memory, visual-tactile archives, and transnational knowledge circulations, with a focus on Karakul sheep economies as critical sites for analyzing racialized power dynamics between Germany and Namibia.

Biwa earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in History, Law, and Politics from the University of Cape Town, completing her doctoral thesis “Weaving the Past with Threads of Memory: Narratives and Commemorations of the Colonial War in southern Namibia” at the University of the Western Cape in 2012. Her research methodology centers on narratives and performance as archives, actively re-centering alternative epistemologies and imaginaries within postcolonial contexts.

Her current project “Karakul Circulations: Colonial Economies and the Un-making of Disciplinary Knowledges in Germany and Namibia” employs transdisciplinary analysis of human-animal relations, examining how Karakul circulations simultaneously produced racialized others and challenged species boundaries across colonial and postcolonial timelines. This work connects German colonialism, South African imperial rule, and contemporary Namibian heritage debates through multi-directional knowledge pathways.

Biwa’s recent academic contributions include a 2021 lecture on Swakara photographic archives and her 2016 publication analyzing the repatriation of human remains from Berlin to Windhoek. Her research demonstrates consistent engagement with silenced knowledges and the material-semiotic entanglements of colonial economies, particularly through visual and sensory methodologies.

• Former archivist at Namibia’s National Archives in Windhoek
• Current teaching position at the University of Namibia
• Active participant in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence program