Noma and the History of the Nation

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Noma and other nemibian leaders faced a massive challenge in uniting people behind a new story about the nation. The history numibians had received from their colonizers taught them every single day that they were inferior and uncivilized. In two thousand one, numibias cabinet approved a plan to build a museum on the site of one of those colonial monuments. It was a deeply controversial statue of a german soldier called the writer dankma. Site also been a concentration camp where numibians were held by gerans in the early 19 hundreds.

In downtown Windhoek, Namibia -- at the intersection of Fidel Castro Street and Robert Mugabe Avenue -- there's an imposing gold building with an affectionate nickname: the Coffee Maker. This notable structure was built to commemorate Namibia’s fight for independence from apartheid South Africa, which it achieved in 1990. And for many of the visitors, the museum feels like a huge achievement. But for a museum that commemorates throwing off the chains of colonialism and forging a new era of self-determination, it has one pretty strange feature. It wasn't designed by a Namibian architect. It wasn't even designed by an African architect. It was built by North Korea's state-run design studio, which has long been a prolific maker of statues around the world. North Korea has left a distinct visual stamp across Africa in particular, with museums and monuments erected in more than a dozen African countries since the 1970s.

Monumental Diplomacy