By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 15

A giraffe story is also a parcel of protected rights, and those rights now travel.

A children’s book about a giraffe is also a parcel of intellectual property, and when The Accidental Hero reached print in the United Kingdom, that parcel travelled further than its author did. The words and the illustrations are protected works, and their move into a foreign market is, in legal terms, an expansion of where and how those rights can earn.

Namibia rarely discusses its creative output as exportable property. This book is a small, concrete case of exactly that: a nationally owned work whose rights, distribution and visibility now extend across a border, without the author surrendering ownership of what she made.

Copyright that already crosses borders

The reassuring part is that the protection travelled by itself. Namibia acceded to the Berne Convention in 1990, the treaty that grants a work made in one member state the same protection in every other, with no registration formality. A Namibian author’s book is therefore protected in the United Kingdom the moment it exists, on the same terms a British author would enjoy.

That principle, national treatment, is what makes cross-border publishing safe to attempt. Van der Merwe did not have to register her copyright abroad to be covered there. The convention did the work, which is precisely the assurance a creator needs before letting a book loose in a foreign market.

Under Berne a Namibian book is protected in Britain the instant it is written.

The home framework behind the export

Domestically the work rests on the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act of 1994, which protects literary and artistic works, novels, illustrations and the rest, and on BIPA, the authority that registers business and intellectual property in Namibia. The home scaffolding matters, because a right that is clear at home is easier to license and defend abroad.

BIPA’s remit runs from trademarks to copyright to traditional knowledge, which frames creative work as registrable, ownable property rather than mere expression. That framing is the quiet precondition for treating a picture book as an asset that can be sold into another country’s market.

Rights that are clear at home are the ones that travel safely abroad.

From one sale to a bundle of rights

A published book is not one right but several. Publication in a new market can involve territorial distribution rights, and behind them sit translation, adaptation and licensing rights that a successful title can later be carved into. Berne reserves these to the author, so each is a separate potential earning line the work now carries into a larger readership.

For Namibia the significance is structural. When a national work reaches a bigger audience, the value of its secondary rights, a foreign-language edition, an audio version, a character licence, rises with that audience. Visibility abroad is not vanity. It raises the ceiling on what the underlying property can be worth.

Reaching a larger market lifts the value of every right the work still holds.

The export Namibia under-counts

Trade statistics count minerals and cattle, not copyrights, so a book earning royalties from British buyers is an export that barely registers in the national accounts. Yet it behaves like one: a domestically produced asset generating foreign receipts while the productive property stays firmly in Namibian hands.

That is the wider lesson beneath a single picture book. Intellectual property is one of the few assets a small economy can multiply without depleting anything physical, and the machinery to protect it across borders, Berne, ARIPO membership and a national IP authority, is already in place. What has been missing is the habit of using it.

Copyright is an export a small economy can grow without digging anything up.

For a Namibian creator, publisher or policymaker, The Accidental Hero is a reminder that the country’s intellectual property can already travel under protection it has held since 1990. The decision it raises is whether to treat creative rights as a deliberate export, registered, licensed and defended, or to keep letting them cross borders by accident, one book at a time, with no strategy to capture their full worth.

Sources: The Namibian; Business and Intellectual Property Authority (BIPA); Intellectual Property (BIPA); Summary of the Berne Convention (WIPO)