National History Competition Hosted in Luderitz

Over the weekend of the 9th of July the School, Clubs and Museum Exhibition (SCAMX) competition took place here in Luderitz. It was a national competition, organised by the Museums Association of Namibia, where 28 schools and history clubs from all over Namibia researched an area of interest relevant to their town.
The teams then created a display of the information they had gathered to be judged by four adjudicators on historical accuracy, relevance and ascetics.
The dedication and passion for the subject demonstrated by the learners and their teachers was wonderful to see. Many of the schools were on tight budgets and a lot of the trip was funded by the teachers themselves. Some schools even travelled more than 2000 kilometres to take part in the competition. Quite of a few of the learners present had never been to Luderitz before and the Mayor and Reverend Scholtz welcomed them to the town.
The opening ceremony took place on Friday 9th July at 4pm at the Youth Centre, which all the participants and their teachers attended, as well as the four judges. The projects were displayed around the hall for people to peruse, as well as a display on the holocaust in the front entrance which was also a point of interest for many people.
The Luderitz High School History Club chose to research the origins of Luderitz’ location; why people moved to Luderitz, what they worked as and what their living conditions were like. It was a highly interesting exhibition that really caught the four learners involved imagination’s and took them a full week to prepare. Not only did Luderitz Secondary School contribute to the exhibition, the talented school choir also entertained the audience with three songs.
The MAN representative also drew the audience’s attention to the National Heritage week that will take place in September, as well as challenging the participants to display their work in their local town or region once the competition was over, as all entries were good and provided interesting information.
Visiting students from schools and history clubs around the country spent Saturday exploring Luderitz and visiting historical sites like Shark Island before attending the awards ceremony in the evening.
The first prize went to Negumbo Senior Secondary School, the runners up were Otjikoto Senior Secondary School, third place was Ruacana High School and the oral History Prize was awarded to Okashandja Combined School. They were announced at a prize giving at the Nest Hotel from 6pm on Saturday 10th July.
They will have their exhibition displayed at Robben Island in spring. The top ten exhibits are being displayed in Kolmanskoppe Art Gallery for four weeks thanks to one of the judges, Giel Du Toit. The exhibits will be open for the public to see until mid- August, now that Giel has done a bit of display work on them and they were put in the gallery a week after the competition took place. The exhibits will then be delivered back to their respective schools in August.
The local history group was asked to help display them but unfortunately were busy writing their exams at the time.
It was a real honour for Luderitz to play host to this competition and gave learners from all over Namibia and opportunity to see Luderitz, become immersed in its history and hopefully return one day. •