School of Communication and Culture

Even though public participation and using interactive technologies in museums is becoming popular around the world, museums in Namibia have not yet embraced interactive and emerging technologies to enhance participation, support meaningful interactions or attract visitors. The Independence Memorial Museum (IMM) in Windhoek Namibia, which houses the colonial history of Namibia, more specifically the German colonial era and the liberation struggle from South Africa [WiMa19] is a classic example of authoritarian and traditional curation: maintaining an obvious bias towards the colonial history, displaying monumental huge wall paintings, still images of past struggle and artefacts from the colonial period with textual descriptions in English over three floors. In this paper, we present an interactive exhibition on postcolonial narratives of the born frees which was co-designed with a group 10 youth and 5 interaction design students. The exhibition challenged traditional curation methods, introduced the youth voices in a traditional museum whose voices provoked the postcolonial narratives by addressing everyday experiences and issues relating to education, languages, economics and indigenous knowledge.