Henning Melber

Professor Dr. Henning Melber is the same age as WUS Germany. He grew up in Namibia and joined SWAPO in 1974 as the son of German immigrants. He taught, earned his doctorate and habilitation in Germany, and returned to Namibia ostensibly permanently in 1992 as director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU). As a critic of post-colonial conditions, however, he was sidelined and in 2000 moved to the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, as research director. There, he has been executive director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation from 2006 to 2012. He remains affiliated to both institutions as senior advisor, is extraordinary professor at the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria since 2012 and the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein since 2013, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Commonwealth Studies/University of London since 2015 and since 2017 president of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).