Imagine this. A visitor records a group of people performing traditional music on the banks of the Kavango River, cleans it up and licenses it for a well-funded Nat Geo Wild documentary.
They get paid thousands of dollars and come back for more recordings. Meanwhile, those who performed the music get packets of chips and cooldrink, and that is it.
Those who collectively composed and maintained the music for generations get less than nothing.
While this is hypothetical in its details, this scenario shows a pattern of cultural exploitation that has played out across Namibia and Africa as a whole for too long.
The communities that have maintained these traditions are often the last to benefit from the commercial use of their heritage, if ever.
If you have attended a meeting or workshop on intellectual property (IP), the conversation is all about IP protection, digital monetisation and the modern creative economy.
But if you travel down the gravel roads to the villages where Namibia’s oldest musical expressions are still sung, you will find a quiet, systemic extraction.
For decades, our traditional rhythms, sacred ritual melodies and communal songs have been treated like wild game in an open field; whoever has a field recorder and a studio back home gets to eat.
Last week, we asked a painful but necessary question: Where are our grandparents’ royalties? We looked at how pioneering musicians have their catalogues buried under mountains of administrative neglect while their estates struggle and their works continue to fill the airwaves.
But there is a deeper and darker layer to economic injustice dealt to our communities. What happens when the music belongs to an entire community instead of a single named composer? Yes! What happens to the melodies and rhythm that were shaped and preserved over generations by the Damara, Herero, Nama, San or Aawambo people?
Let’s acknowledge that the reality of our communal ownership system is a complex maze in itself. But accept too that there is no honour in just adopting pre-made templates when a more responsive path can be paved.
The harsh reality is that Namibia’s Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act of 1994 was drafted around identifiable authorship and offers little practical protection for communal ownership of traditional musical expressions.
Traditional music defies many of the assumptions on which modern copyright law is built. It is collective and intergenerational, and continues to evolve as the people themselves continue to exist.
Because our laws fail to recognise this adequately, many traditional musical expressions are treated in practice as if they were free for anyone to commercially exploit.
This provides ideal ground for exploitation. As it is, a commercial musician like myself may walk into a rural village, record a traditional healing song, mix it with an electronic beat, and upload it to Spotify.
Under current copyright law, the copyright in that new arrangement is owned by the artist or their record company. They are then paid streaming royalties, synchronisation fees and broadcasting revenue.
The community that preserved the melody through generations of colonialism and displacement receives nothing but a handshake. Those who delivered the performance of that well-preserved masterpiece go back to herding goats with nothing to show for it.
It appears that the institutional response so far has been a masterclass in bureaucratic inertia. If there is any action at all, then they probably communicate only among the choir and never to the affected people. Namibia signed the Swakopmund Protocol under the African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation, which promotes free, prior and informed consent before traditional cultural expressions are commercialised and encourages equitable benefit-sharing. Good for us.
But more than a decade has passed and our domestic law still does not reflect the regional framework. The state has made efforts to safeguard biological resources like hoodia and devil’s claw from foreign exploitation, but our intangible artistic legacy is almost completely unprotected.
Who else could we turn to? We cannot leave the remedy solely to our traditional authorities. They were never established to administer complex digital music licensing or international intellectual property rights. Besides that, we do not need fragmented committees managing cultural rights; we need professional, institutional steel.
The way to go here is to set up a specialised statutory structure under the oversight of the Ministry of Education, Innovation, Youth, Sport, Arts and Culture, Ministry of Information and Communication Technology and the Business and Intellectual Property Authority (Bipa), aligned with the standards of the World Intellectual Property Organisation and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.
One option would be to assign this function to Bipa rather than creating an entirely new statutory body. Do not lock gears here; it is actionable. Such an entity would act as the legal custodian of undocumented communal musical works. Bipa could maintain a secure national registry to identify and document these expressions, strengthening their protection and providing a basis for licensing.
If a film production house, corporate brand or commercial artist wants to exploit these works, they should obtain a licence through this central clearing mechanism.
Furthermore, our collective management organisation, the Namibian Society of Composers and Authors of Music (Nascam), should review how royalties from traditional or unattributed music are handled. Where communal works generate commercial value but cannot be attributed to an individual rights holder, those royalties should support the preservation and continued development of the communities from which the music originates.
For this to work, the structure referred to earlier could take custodianship of these works and register them on behalf of the originating communities, providing a legally recognised rights holder with whom Nascam could administer royalties and licensing.
Crucially, these funds should not simply be distributed as cash payments. They should be reinvested through audited community projects, cultural preservation initiatives, recording programmes and community arts academies.
We cannot continue treating our cultural identity as free raw material for global consumption. The songs of our ancestors are not commodities to be harvested without consequence. It is time for the state to close the legal gaps and ensure that the wealth generated by Namibia’s traditional creative expressions finally flows back to the soil that birthed them.
