Obed Emvula
Before we build Namibia’s creative economy, we must first understand the people we are building it for.
Picture a young woman in Katutura. It is early morning and still cool. She is charging camera batteries on a power strip beside her bed and checking the light through her window, mentally rehearsing the shots she needs before her client loses patience. She has no office, no salary, no sick leave. What she has is a story she wants to tell – and a country that has not yet decided whether that counts as work.
Across town, a young man rewrites a film script at a café table. He has been there since seven. He nurses one cup of coffee for three hours because the electricity at home is unreliable and the café has Wi-Fi. He is not lazy. He is not waiting for someone to save him. He is doing the thing – quietly, persistently, at his own cost.
These are Namibia’s creatives. Not artists in the romantic sense alone, but workers. Builders. People who carry the enormous overhead of a creative life – the equipment, the training, the unpaid hours of development – with no guarantee that anyone is thinking about them when the policy meetings begin. A tree standing alone in an open field may be beautiful. But it does not make a forest. Namibia’s creative economy will not be built by one remarkable individual. It will be built by many – and only if we build for all of them.
Most of us, when we hear the phrase “job creation”, picture something solid. A factory. A building going up. People in hard hats. We understand that kind of work because we can see it, measure it, and touch it. We know what a job in construction looks like and what it produces.
What is harder to see – and therefore harder to value – is the chain of life that a single film creates. One production activates a director and actors, yes. But also a camera operator, a sound technician, an editor, and a costume designer. It needs drivers and caterers. It uses guesthouses and fuel stations. It hires location scouts who know the Namib, the Caprivi, the streets of Lüderitz and the history of Omaheke. It creates a poster, which needs a graphic designer. It finds an audience, which needs a distributor and a marketer. A single story, told well, is not a cultural event. It is an economic ecosystem. It is a forest grown from one seed.
Nigeria understood this, and the numbers are not modest. Nollywood employs hundreds of thousands of people and is widely recognised as one of the largest film industries in the world by volume – built not by government decree, but by determined storytellers working with very little, in conditions not entirely unlike those of the photographer in Katutura. What they created is not simply a film industry. It is a value chain that spans acting and directing, editing and visual effects, logistics, catering, transport, and hospitality. Like manufacturing, it generates layered employment and economic spillovers that reach far beyond the screen. Cape Town recognised the same logic and built a production ecosystem so compelling that international studios now arrive with their crews and their budgets, transforming the city into a global filming destination. Both cities reveal the same truth: film is not a cultural byproduct of a thriving economy. It is one of the engines that builds one.
The question, then, was never whether Africans could tell stories. Africa has always told stories. Storytelling is rooted in the most fundamental human need: to make sense of the world. It is the vessel of culture, identity, and shared experience. It originates in ancestral tradition, serving as a method for teaching, preserving history, and carrying wisdom across generations. What is at question – and it is now Namibia’s question – is whether we can build economies, and ultimately cities, towns, and villages, around that gift.
Here is what makes that question urgent rather than merely interesting: Namibia is at a crossroads. Right now, in offices and boardrooms, plans are being made. Budgets are being considered. Strategies are being written for how to support the creative economy. This is good. This is necessary. And yet, this is precisely the moment when everything can go wrong.
It goes wrong in a very particular way – and it has happened before, in this sector and others. Well-meaning people sitting in offices with salaries and job security design systems for people whose daily lives look nothing like theirs. They set requirements that make sense on paper and are impossible in practice. They launch funds before anyone has honestly asked what the money should do. They build platforms before there is content to put on them. They announce strategies with no mechanism to measure whether those strategies are working. The result is what we might call ’empty culture’ – the appearance of progress without its substance.
And the creatives, the photographer in Katutura and the screenwriter at the café, are not in the room when these decisions are made. Or if they are, they are there to be presented to, not to be listened to.
This is the quiet crisis beneath the visible momentum. Not a lack of intention. A lack of consultation that is real rather than ceremonial. A forest cannot be planned by someone who has never walked among the trees.
There is an old discipline, older than any policy framework, that the elders understood well. Before a major journey, you gather. You listen. You question your own assumptions. You ask, ‘Do we truly understand the terrain we are entering?’ Because once the journey begins, once the funds flow and the institutions form and the strategies launch – it is very hard to change course. Mistakes harden into systems. Systems become habits. Habits shape generations.
How we got here matters deeply, because it is the only honest guide to where we ought to go. A skilled navigator does not guess the ocean. They read it – and they lean on the wisdom of those who have crossed it before. Right now, Namibia does not yet fully know how many active creatives are working across this country. We do not have a reliable picture of where the real bottlenecks are, what projects are currently in production, or what it truly costs an artist to survive long enough to finish their work. We need a living database of active creative projects – not as bureaucratic inventory, but as genuine intelligence. We may even be solving problems we have already solved elsewhere, in ways we have simply forgotten. We cannot build the right house without first surveying the land.
The best film economies in the world were not built by throwing money at talent and hoping something grew. They were built as machines – layered systems that attract filmmakers and support them efficiently, that tie investment to measurable outcomes, and that link creative work to national identity and global positioning. They built incentive frameworks alongside physical infrastructure. They opened market access while investing in the technology that scales creative work. Every dollar spent was a rail laid for thousands of creators to travel on, not a gift to a lucky few.
Namibia has something those ecosystems would pay dearly for: 20-40% lower production costs. Landscapes that stop international filmmakers mid-sentence. Stories that the world has not yet heard. A scale that allows us to move faster than larger markets, if we are coordinated. If structured properly – and that word, ‘properly’, carries all the weight – Namibia can become Africa’s most efficient and distinctive filming destination. That is not a dream. That is a plan waiting for honest people to write it.
What would it mean to get this right? Imagine a young filmmaker from Swakopmund collaborating with an editor trained in Windhoek. Imagine students from NUST learning inside working studios, not only classrooms. Imagine elders seated in the shade, their voices recorded, their knowledge of the land and its history woven into scripts that carry that knowledge forward – the sounds of nature, the memory of danger, the names of things that only they still know. Imagine a creative district, not a cold industrial park, but a living neighbourhood connected to cultural destinations across this vast and varied country – where storytelling, entrepreneurship, and technology exist side by side, where the landscape that already draws global eyes becomes the backdrop for stories the world has not yet heard. Our heritage. Our soil. Our voice.
This is not fantasy. It is what happens when a country builds deliberately instead of quickly. When many trees are planted together, with intention and care, a forest eventually stands. And a forest sustains life in ways a single tree never could.
There is one more thing worth saying, and it is perhaps the most important of all.
We have a habit of treating creativity as a luxury – something that matters once the serious business of development is done. But consider the word ‘agriculture’, which most of us would call the very foundation of survival. Split it open, and you find two words fused into one: ‘agri’, the living earth, and ‘culture’, the stories and knowledge and identity we pass between generations. They were never meant to be separate. One without the other is not survival. It is only production. Or worse – only memory, slowly fading.
Some food for thought.
Storytelling is not an escape from the land. It is an extension of it. When we treat it as infrastructure – as essential as a road or a school – we stop asking young Namibians to choose between feeding themselves and expressing who they are. We begin building something whole. A country that produces and a country that names itself. A people who harvest and a people who remember why.
The train is preparing to leave the station on Mburumba Kerina Street. There is pressure to act, to announce, to deliver results that can be pointed to. But this is the moment – before the journey, not during it – to pause in discipline rather than hesitation. To put faces to the people we are building for. To ask the screenwriter at the café what he actually needs. To ask the photographer in Katutura what would make her work sustainable, not just possible.
Namibia’s future will not be shaped by how quickly we start. It will be shaped by how honestly we listen, how carefully we build what we hear, and how tenderly we nurture the seeds already planted in the wee hours of the morning… waiting, as seeds do, for the right conditions to bloom.
*Obed Emvula is a Namibian actor, writer, creative producer and advocate for sustainable creative economies. He is the chairperson of the Namibian Oscars Selection Committee and a member of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (iEmmys).
