By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 01

A free magazine that reaches ten issues has been run by someone, without a cover price to fund the work.

A free magazine that reaches ten issues has been run by someone for four years with no cover price to fund the work. At Doek that someone is a small pair of operators who built the publication out of a writing group and have kept editing it since.

Remy Ngamije, a Rwandan-born Namibian writer and photographer, co-founded Doek in 2019 with Mutaleni Nadimi and remains its editor-in-chief and chairperson of the Doek Arts Trust. The magazine the Namibian recorded reaching its tenth issue is, in operational terms, what those two and their editors have chosen to keep doing.

From a writing club to a masthead

The origin is modest and worth stating plainly. Doek grew out of the Windhoek Writers Club, a group seeded by the American author Peter Orner during a 2018 Fulbright fellowship. Ngamije has described the founding in ordinary terms – buying a domain, settling on a look, and starting the editing with Nadimi – rather than as a grand launch.

That plainness is the point of the profile. The magazine was not funded into existence; it was assembled by two people who decided a Namibian platform should exist and then did the unglamorous work of making one.

Doek was not funded into being – it was assembled, issue by issue, by its operators.

The editor-in-chief's double role

Ngamije carries two jobs that pull in different directions. As editor-in-chief he shapes what the magazine publishes; as chairperson of the trust he has to keep the organisation solvent and governed. He has said that treating the work as a business, rather than only as literature, is what makes solutions appear.

That combination is rare and fragile. A gifted editor who cannot run an organisation produces a fine magazine that folds; an administrator with no editorial eye produces one nobody reads. The profile of Doek is largely the profile of someone trying to hold both at once.

The scarce skill is not editing or managing but doing both without letting either slip.

The writer behind the platform

Ngamije is also a working writer, which shapes the magazine’s credibility. His debut novel, The Eternal Audience of One, was published by Blackbird Books and later distributed more widely, and his short fiction won the Africa regional prize of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and reached the shortlist of the AKO Caine Prize in 2020 and 2021.

That record matters to the operator story because it signals to contributors that the person reading their work has stood where they stand. A platform run by a credible writer asks for submissions from a position other editors cannot easily claim.

A magazine run by a proven writer recruits from credibility, not just from an open call.

The succession question

The strength is also the exposure. So much of Doek runs through one founder that the honest question for its future is who else can carry it. The trust structure exists partly to answer that, giving the platform an owner larger than any single editor, but the daily work still leans heavily on its founders.

For the magazine to reach a twentieth issue as surely as it reached a tenth, the operating base has to widen beyond the pair who began it. Continuity, not any single prize or issue, is the measure that will judge these operators.

The test of the operators is whether Doek can run on more hands than the two that built it.

For anyone backing cultural enterprise in a small market, Doek is a study in operator dependence: a platform that exists because specific people keep choosing to run it for little reward. The decision a funder or partner faces is whether to invest in widening that operating base now, while the founders are present, rather than discovering its narrowness only when they step back.

Sources: The Namibian; Namibian Writing Front and Center (Words Without Borders); Remy Ngamije (Doek)