The National Archives of Namibia signed up with enthusiasm to the Section for Archives of Literature and Art (SLA) of the International Council on Archives in 2010 and then to the emerging Diasporic Literary Archives Network in 2011— on behalf of a country with a strong literary culture but no established practice of collecting literary manuscripts, nor the correspondence and personal papers of literary authors.

Namibia was asked to play the role of the apprentice within the Network and has played that role fully and creatively— moving towards a position where by 2020 it aims to be a model in southern and eastern Africa for the collection and appreciation of literary and cultural papers.

Namibia accepted one of the principal messages of the Diasporic Literary Archives Network, which was that literary papers themselves could serve as a key part of the cultural heritage of countries which had achieved their independence within current lifetimes, and could provide a source of national pride, diversity, and identity.

Diversity had always been a prominent feature of cultural archives in Namibia, adding great variety to the archival collections while also sometimes deriving from controversial and painful aspects of national history. There had always been South African authors who lived in Namibia and Namibian authors who lived in South Africa, for example. There were also archival fonds reflecting the colonial past of Namibia, and the successive regimes of Germany, Britain, and South Africa. For the documentation of colonial rule and occupation, the papers of the rulers survived more extensively than papers concerning resistance and the fight for freedom. This is no doubt a general truth found by archivists in newly independent countries, especially when independence has followed wars of liberation. As a result, in Namibia, papers of cultural interest (although not specifically literary) in the German and Afrikaans languages had been collected, as well as in English and in several Namibian languages. Historical literature and diaries of historical interest, in particular, had found their way into the archives, and the letter-journals of the Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi (died 1905), owned by the National Archives of Namibia, had been included on the UNESCOMemory of the World Register as long ago as 2004.