Our Project

Usakos – a Railway Town

The Project ‘Photographs Beyond Ruins’ provides insight into the eventful history of the small town Usakos in central Namibia. Due to its natural water resources and geographical location at the edge of the Namib Desert, Usakos became the centre of the influential Otavi Mines and Railway Company in the early 20th century, which lead to a steady economic boom. This changed in the 1960s when today’s capital Windhoek became the new railway centre. Many workers followed the railway company and left Usakos. The economic downturn of Usakos came simultaneously with the ruthless realisation of the apartheid laws, which were enforced by Namibia’s colonial master South Africa (1915-1990). In the mid-1950’s they started planning the radical reorganization of the town, whereupon the population was forcibly relocated to new townships and segregated according to ethnicity.

The Exhibition


The exhibition ‘Usakos – Photographs Beyond Ruins’ focuses on this socially and economically challenging period. It is based on the photographic collections of four senior  women (Cecilie //Geises, Wilhelmine Katjimune, Gisela Pieters und Olga //Garoës) who lived in the old location before the forced removals. The first exhibition will permanently stay in Usakos, and a second exhibition will travel through Europe and South Africa. The private collections of these four women provide an alternative view of the history of Usakos and Namibia in general, and are unique, as photographs produced and curated by black people are almost non-existent in  public archives. One particular quality of these collections is that the people in the photographs are individuals known by name and that the pictures were taken by local photographers. This is what distinguishes the collections most from photographs in public archives, which very often picture “white” people or “natives” as a group and not as individual human beings. 

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