About us

The Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB) in Switzerland has been in existence since 1971 as a private specialist library and archive on southern Africa. It has an international reputation for its extensive holdings on Namibia.

In 1994, the BAB was incorporated into the non-profit Carl Schlettwein Foundation. The BAB networks with institutions and researchers all over the world and is an associate member of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel and the Swiss African Society.

The BAB supports and promotes the documentation and accessibility of library and archive holdings and engages in research on Namibia and southern Africa. The BAB also has its own publishing house and runs an antiquarian bookshop.

Carl Schlettwein, photo: Walter Sütterlin

A brief history of the BAB

The BAB was founded in 1971 by Carl Schlettwein (1925–2005), who wished to open up access to bibliographical information about South West Africa/Namibia. He was concerned at the time about the one-sided reporting on this former German and then South African colony. His own private library formed the nucleus of the BAB. He had begun collecting books in 1952 when he was living in southern Africa and continued to build up the collection after he moved to Basel (Switzerland) in 1964. The library was always open to anyone interested in consulting the collection, and it soon gained a reputation as the largest library of Namibiana outside Namibia itself. This is a ranking the BAB continues to foster today.

Carl Schlettwein also began to put together a collection of archival materials. These included various manuscript archives comprising legacies of written and photographic materials, a documentation archive with grey literature, and a collection related to the liberation movement SWAPO of Namibia. These collections, which have grown steadily in size over the last decade and have been joined by other collections, e.g. of posters, are today curated as the special collections of the BAB. The collection of old, valuable and bibliophile works is still also maintained separately , as the Rare-Book collection.

As a publisher, Carl Schlettwein brought out bibliographic works on Namibia, and between 1971 and 1979 produced the first "Namibian National Bibliography". His publishing activities then broadened to embrace works on African history, literature, culture and geography.

Since 1995, the BAB has borne the subtitle, Namibia Resource Centre & Southern Africa Library. Carl Schlettwein was its director until his death in January 2005. It is now directed by Luccio Schlettwein. Nine staff members are responsible for maintaining and running the library, the special collections, the publishing house and the specialist African antiquarian bookshop.