Where Are Our Grandparents’ Royalties?

As a musician inspired by our traditional music, my heart cries out for those who made music before independence, received nothing for their recordings, and continue to get nothing.

While contemporary musicians register their music with the Namibian Society of Composers and Authors of Music (Nascam) and receive their royalties, the elders who were recorded by the South West African Broadcasting Corporation (SWABC), now the Namibia Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), back in the day received nothing.

The institution never recorded the performers’ names, the authors, or any useful details for royalty collection and distribution.

I once went through the NBC music library on Pettenkoffer Street in Windhoek to dig through the old recordings, mostly on reel tape and some on vinyl. To my surprise, the information on the records would indicate nothing more than lines like “Ovambo Group Sing a Traditional Song During Harvest” or “Herero Woman Singing At Wedding – Otjimbingwe.”

We know the names of these performers because they exist in our communities, and the presenters back then would even say their names on air. But it was never written on the records themselves. The trouble comes in when the playlists of what aired on those stations are sent to Nascam without the identities of the authors, composers and performers of those songs. Those records end up logged as ‘unknown’ on Nascam’s distribution sheets.

When work cannot be identified, the royalties allocated to that track get stuck in a basket of unidentified works, and after three years of not being claimed, that money goes back to Nascam’s distribution pool.

This means it gets chipped away by administrative overheads, and the remainder is paid out to mainstream artists whose works are already identified.

I believe the responsibility starts with the SWABC’s successor, the NBC. They are the ones sitting on this library with the old reels, the old paperwork and whatever institutional memory still exists from that era.

It is on the NBC to investigate every single unidentified traditional work in their archive, trace the performers and authors who were recorded and do right by them when it comes to royalties. The NBC has one more weapon in their arsenal, the ability to reach the same community which can assist in identifying the performers, the places and origins of the songs.

This cannot be treated as a side project or an act of goodwill. It is a debt the institution inherited, and it is theirs to settle.

The Business and Intellectual Property Authority (Bipa) also has a part to play here. As the body responsible for overseeing copyright in Namibia, this falls squarely within their mandate. Our copyright law forces a society built on community into a Western framework of individual ownership. And because that’s what the law says, lazy legal minds will comfortably hide behind it. But there is no honour in defending a legal position that is clearly careless about our historical and cultural realities on ownership.

Bipa, working together with the ministry responsible for arts and culture, could start a dedicated project to look past these rigid frameworks, identify these works, and reconnect them with the families they belong to. Given how technical this kind of archival and identification work can get, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) and the Heritage Council of Namibia would also be natural partners for this kind of collaboration.

Then there is Nascam. I understand debt prescription principles exist for good reason, and that unclaimed funds cannot sit in limbo forever. But I have to ask, why would Nascam be comfortable letting these funds simply loop back into the general distribution pool, knowing full well the void that colonialism created?

The people who made these recordings back then did not care who the authors or performers were. They did not care whether these musicians ever got paid a cent. To now apply an ordinary prescription rule to royalties that were never even claimable in the first place, because of that neglect, feels like the same erasure happening all over again.

It looks like the same abuse of rights continues in modern Namibia, only now it is dressed up in modern policy language.

So I am asking my fellow Namibians to start asking questions about these national gems and our heritage. Ask where the royalties of your grandfathers and grandmothers are. Ask why the songs that shaped who we are as a people have been sitting unclaimed for decades while nobody lifted a finger. There is no way we, the big names of today, can walk into a studio, record a song, register it with Nascam, and collect our royalties while the very people who laid the foundation of our sound continue to be overlooked.

Yes, it is too late for some, and yes, the royalties amount to pennies. But, this is not all about the money. It is more about the principles of a fair and just nation that Namibia aspires to be.

The post Where Are Our Grandparents’ Royalties? appeared first on The Namibian.