Why Namibia’s stories matter more than we might realise
I live in Avis, Windhoek, close to the dam, and almost every day baboons visit our house because they have learnt that there may be an opportunity to find food. One morning I walked into my kitchen and found a baboon sitting on the table eating raw eggs. It was a terrifying experience, although I am still not entirely sure who was more frightened: the baboon or me.
What stayed with me afterwards was the fact that the baboon was not in my kitchen by accident. Somewhere along the way, he, or perhaps the troop before him, had learnt that people leave food in bins, that open doors can lead to opportunities, and that human settlements can provide rewards if one is prepared to take the risk. None of that knowledge appeared magically. It had travelled through observation, repetition and habit.
A young baboon is not born knowing where to find water after a long dry spell, which roots can be eaten safely, where danger is likely to come from, or how to move through a familiar landscape without attracting unwanted attention. He watches the older animals, learns what they do, and benefits from experience accumulated before he arrived. In time, he develops an understanding of the world far greater than anything he could have discovered alone.
Of course, he inherits more than wisdom. A useful habit survives, but so can an unhelpful one, simply because it has become normal. The young baboon has no special ability to sort truth from error before learning it. He learns from what he sees, and only later does experience teach him which lessons serve him well and which do not.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised I was thinking about AI.
The comparison is not exact. A baboon experiences the world directly. It sees, smells, watches and remembers. AI does not do that. It learns from the traces people leave behind: words, images, code and records of experience. Yet both examples point towards the same idea. Knowledge does not appear from nowhere. It comes from what has been seen, preserved and passed on.
For all the grand language and hype surrounding AI, it is not an independent source of wisdom floating somewhere above humanity. It has been shaped by an enormous collection of things people have written, recorded and shared. When it helps us write software, summarise documents or explain a difficult idea, it can seem remarkably intelligent because it has been exposed to more information than any one person could ever hope to work through in a lifetime. Yet what it can tell us is shaped by what people have written, recorded and shared in the first place.
That is not me complaining about AI. I use it and find it genuinely useful. But it does make me wonder whose experiences become part of the record from which these systems learn.
Namibia is not invisible online. We have journalists, researchers, bloggers, academics, businesses and institutions producing useful work every day, but compared with countries with much larger populations and greater resources, our digital footprint is small.
What makes this difficult to see is that many of the things that define Namibia are not the sort of things that usually appear in official reports or databases. A map can tell you the distance between towns, but it cannot tell you whether the road is good, whether the fuel station actually has fuel, whether the rain has washed part of the road away, or who you happened to meet along the way. Some knowledge lives in books and reports. Other knowledge lives in experience.
It is easy to imagine that the internet is a broad and reasonably balanced reflection of the world. The more I think about it, the less true that seems. Some countries and communities document almost every part of their lives, while others carry much of their knowledge through family stories, practical work, memory, humour and conversation, things that never make their way into a search engine or database.
There is an enormous amount written about life in London and New York. There is far less written about everyday life in Lüderitz, Outjo or Omaheke.
This imbalance has consequences.
An AI system may know a great deal about public transport in London while having little understanding of why a family from Outjo thinks differently about distance, travel and community. It may offer advice that sounds universal while quietly assuming reliable infrastructure, dense populations, different laws or a completely different climate. Advice about water use or farming that works well in California may not always suit somebody farming in the Hardap Region.
The machine will not reject the Namibian perspective or deliberately overlook our experiences. It will simply encounter them less often.
That is a quieter problem than people usually imagine. When one set of experiences is recorded millions of times and another appears only occasionally, the most common viewpoint can begin to look like the normal human experience. Other perspectives start to seem unusual, not because they are less valuable, but because fewer people have written about them.
What interests me most, though, is not only whether AI knows enough about Namibia. It is whether we are writing enough for one another.
I suspect many of us underestimate the value of our own experiences because they feel ordinary to us. When people hear discussions about AI and data, they imagine universities, governments, large companies and technology firms. They seldom imagine themselves. Yet some of the most valuable knowledge Namibia possesses exists nowhere except in the lives of ordinary Namibians.
A teacher in Katutura understands realities that may never appear in an international report. A farmer near Mariental has practical knowledge that cannot be fully captured in a textbook written on another continent. A shop owner in Oshakati notices patterns of community life that an outside observer would miss. A nurse in Rundu, a welder in Walvis Bay or a pensioner in Keetmanshoop each carries a view of Namibia that cannot be replaced by somebody else's experience.
Then there are the smaller things that are so familiar we hardly think of them as knowledge at all. We know that a distance on a map does not tell you much about a journey, because it leaves out the road, the weather, the fuel stop, the puncture and the person travelling with you. We know how neighbours respond when infrastructure fails, how people adapt when rain refuses to arrive, and how a sense of humour somehow survives almost anything.
These are not usually statistics. They are the texture of a country.
When I speak to people about writing, blogging or sharing their experiences online, I often hear the same question:
“What would I possibly have to say that matters?”
I understand the question because most of us do not experience our own lives as remarkable. We wake up, go to work, face familiar challenges and deal with ordinary problems.
Yet that is precisely the point.
The value of a Namibian story is not that it competes with millions of others. Its value lies in the fact that nobody else can tell it.
Not every contribution needs to be an essay or a book. Sometimes it is a thoughtful comment, a family memory, a correction, a photograph with a proper caption, or a few paragraphs about an otherwise ordinary day.
Perhaps what we need is a little less liking and a little more writing.
Less scrolling past a story from our own town and more responding with what we remember, what we know or how things looked from where we stood.
Writing something in a notebook still has value, particularly for family history and personal reflection. Some stories only need to be known by the people closest to them. Yet the more I thought about this, the more I realised that some stories only become part of a larger picture when they are shared. Knowledge that remains hidden can be difficult for others to learn from. Perhaps that is why blogs, community newsletters, local newspapers, websites, podcasts and even social media matter more than we sometimes realise.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is not only a Namibian issue. Every community has stories, memories and experiences that can be overlooked when louder voices dominate the conversation. The more people write about their own lives and communities, the harder it becomes for one version of the world to be mistaken for everyone’s version of the world.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons ordinary people matter so much in all of this. We are not simply leaving information behind for machines. We are leaving something behind for one another, and for the people who will come after us.
This should be done with care. Not every story, tradition or form of cultural knowledge belongs in a public database, and communities should retain the right to decide what is public, who may use it and whether it may be reproduced by commercial systems. Preserving knowledge and exploiting knowledge are not the same thing.
But perhaps the mistake is assuming that somebody else will tell our story for us.
More people are beginning to use AI as one of the ways they make sense of the world. I do not see that as a reason to fear it. I see it as one more reason to participate: to write a little more, respond a little more thoughtfully and leave a fuller record of who we are.
After all, the young baboon only learns from what the troop leaves behind. Perhaps the real question is not only what AI will learn about Namibia, but what future Namibians will learn about Namibia too.
If we do not write and share our own stories, future AI systems may know less about Namibia, but more importantly, future Namibians may know less about Namibia too. That will not be because our experiences did not matter. It will simply be because too few of them were written down, shared and remembered.
Stories survive because somebody takes the time to tell them. If AI gives us one more reason to write, publish and share our experiences, then perhaps that is not such a bad thing after all.
