NSSCO History 6138 common mistakes
NSSCO History 6138 · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Writing a narrative of what happened in a resistance event (for example the 1904–1908 Herero and Nama war) without ever stating why it happened, so causation questions receive description instead of analysis.
Candidates memorise event sequences from textbooks and reproduce them under time pressure; the command word ('Explain why', 'Assess the causes') is read as 'tell the story', and causation is treated as implicit in the narrative.
What to do instead
Before writing, underline the command word and convert it into a question ('Why did X happen?'). Plan three ranked causes and open each paragraph with a causal claim ('The primary cause was...'), then supply evidence. Reserve narrative detail for one sentence of context per cause, and finish with a sentence weighing which cause mattered most.
Treating 'pre-colonial Namibian societies' as a single undifferentiated group, or describing them only as static and communal, with no reference to specific communities such as the Ovambo kingdoms, Herero, Nama, Damara, San or Orlam and their distinct economies and political structures.
Summary notes and revision guides compress the topic into a few generalisations; candidates lack the specific names, trade goods and institutions needed to answer comparison or change-over-time questions.
What to do instead
Build a comparison table with rows for economy (cattle, copper, hunting, trade), political structure (kingship, councils, clan authority), and external links (Ovambo trade with Portuguese Angola, Nama–Orlam trade with the Cape). Learn two concrete examples per community and practise writing one paragraph that contrasts two of them directly.
Confusing the chronology and legal status of the colonial sequence: mixing up the 1884 German annexation of South West Africa, the 1885 Berlin Conference, the 1890 Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty, the 1904–1908 war, the 1915 South African occupation, and the 1920 League of Nations C mandate.
Dates are learned as isolated lists rather than as a causal chain, and several events involve Germany, Britain and South Africa in overlapping roles, so the actors and instruments blur together.
What to do instead
Draw a single timeline with three columns: date, event, and legal instrument or actor. Then write a short paragraph explaining how each step enabled the next (for example, how the 1885 conference's rules on effective occupation pushed Germany toward military control). Test yourself by covering the event column and reconstructing it from dates alone.
Answering source-analysis questions by summarising what a source says while ignoring provenance, purpose, audience and the distinction between the source's content and its usefulness as evidence.
Candidates equate comprehension with analysis; they have practised reading for meaning in language lessons but not the origin-purpose-content-value-limitation structure, and under exam pressure they write the first thing they notice.
What to do instead
Use a fixed four-step routine for every source: who made it, when and why; what it claims; what it is useful for proving; what it cannot prove. Practise on pairs of contrasting sources (for example a German colonial official's report versus an oral testimony) and always write one sentence on how the two differ in reliability and why.
Judging sources anachronistically, labelling a colonial-era document simply 'biased and useless' or a testimony 'reliable because it is from a victim', instead of assessing what each source can legitimately be used to show.
Candidates have learned that bias exists but not that all sources are partial and still evidential; they collapse reliability into likeability of the author and lose marks on 'value' questions.
What to do instead
Replace verdicts with functions: state what the source is evidence of (for example, official attitudes, propaganda aims, lived experience) and what it cannot establish (for example, casualty figures). Learn the distinction between reliability, usefulness and representativeness, and write practice sentences of the form 'This source is valuable as evidence of X because of its origin, but limited for Y.'
Describing the Cold War or the two World Wars in general European terms without linking them to Namibia and southern Africa, so answers on the liberation struggle omit the Cold War framing of SWAPO, Cuban and Soviet support, and the role of the UN and Western powers.
Candidates revise the international relations domain and the Namibian domain as separate subjects and do not practise transferring knowledge across them; exam questions that combine the two therefore produce two disconnected halves.
What to do instead
Create a 'linkage sheet' with one column for each international event (Cold War, Cuban involvement in Angola, UN decolonisation resolutions) and one for its Namibian consequence. Practise questions that explicitly demand both, and in each paragraph name the international factor, the local actor and the effect on the liberation struggle.
Writing about decolonisation and the Scramble for Africa as if African populations were passive objects, omitting African agency, resistance, negotiation and the divisions among African leaders and communities.
Older textbook framings present colonialism as something done to Africa, and candidates reproduce that framing without noticing whose perspective is missing; it also costs marks on 'to what extent' questions.
What to do instead
For every colonial event, add a sentence naming what Africans did in response: resistance, alliance, migration, petition, strike or participation in colonial structures. Keep a running list of named individuals and organisations (for example Hendrik Witbooi, Samuel Maharero, SWAPO, the Herero chiefs' petitions) and use at least two per essay to demonstrate agency.
Treating the liberation struggle as a single undivided movement, ignoring internal disagreements such as the 1960s split that produced SWAPO and SWANU, the role of the churches and trade unions, and the tensions around the armed struggle versus diplomacy.
Nationalist history is often taught as a unified march to independence, and candidates fear that discussing divisions weakens their argument, so they flatten the story.
What to do instead
Study the liberation struggle as a set of competing strategies: petitioning the UN, armed struggle from exile, internal strikes and boycotts, and diplomatic lobbying. For each, note who led it and what it achieved. In essays, use divisions to strengthen analysis with phrases such as 'although SWAPO claimed sole legitimacy, the existence of SWANU shows that...'.
Presenting historiography as a list of named historians' opinions without explaining what each interpretation argues or why interpretations differ, and without taking a position.
Candidates meet historiography late in the course and memorise names as facts to drop in, rather than as arguments about evidence; they also confuse 'different views exist' with evaluation.
What to do instead
For each interpretation, write three lines: the claim, the evidence it rests on, and its weakness. Then practise a conclusion structure that compares two interpretations directly ('Interpretation A emphasises structural causes, but B's focus on African agency better explains...'). Aim to use no more than three historians per essay, each attached to a specific argument.
Running out of time because essays open with long background introductions and only reach the argument in the final paragraph, leaving conclusions unfinished or omitted.
Candidates believe context earns marks and are anxious about starting with a judgement; without a timed plan they write chronologically and discover the question too late.
What to do instead
Spend the first few minutes writing a one-line thesis and a three-point plan, then answer the question in the first sentence and use background only where it supports a point. Practise under timed conditions, allocating roughly a tenth of the time to planning and reserving time to write a conclusion that restates the judgement with the strongest evidence.