Melber grew up in Esslingen am Neckar and Leutkirch in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He moved to Namibia in 1967 as a teenager and the son of German immigrants, and graduated from the German Higher Private School Windhoek in 1970.[5] In 1974, he joined the SWAPO liberation movement. From 1975 to 1989 he was banned from entering Namibia and until 1993 also to South Africa. After Namibia's independence (March 21, 1990) he returned to Namibia. In 2000 he moved to Sweden.[6]
From 1992 to 2000 he was Head of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek. From 1994 to 2000 he was chairman of the de: Namibisch-Deutsche Stiftung in Windhoek. From 1996 to 1998 he was also chairman of the Association of Namibian Publishers (ANP). In 2000, he joined the Nordiska Afrikainstitutet in Uppsala, Sweden. After that, he headed the Swedish Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation from 2006 to 2012, where he is currently still a member in an advisory capacity.[8][9][10][11]
Melber was also a visiting scholar at the Cluster of Excellence: Cultural Foundations of Social Integration at the University of Konstanz (April/May, 2018), Van Zyl Slabbert Visiting professor at the University of Cape Town (October/November, 2017) and visiting scholar at Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies (University of Bayreuth), (April/May, 2016).[15]
Henning Melber is married and has one daughter.
Awards
Conversation Africa Science Communication Award, University of Pretoria in 2020 and 2021 in the category Science Communication Excellence.
Melber has published numerous books and several hundred contributions on Namibia's problems and history, as well as on other topics such as internationalism and racism:
School and Colonialism: The Formal Education of Namibia, Hamburg 1979.
The whiteness of the last conclusion: racism and colonial gaze. Brandes & Apsel, Frankfurt 1992, ISBN3-86099-102-7 .
Namibia - Socio-political explorations since independence. Brandes & Apsel, Frankfurt a. M. 2015, ISBN978-3-95558-109-1 .
Genocide - and then what? The policy of German-Namibian past processing. (with de:Reinhart Kößler) Brandes & Apsel, Frankfurt, 2017, ISBN978-3-95558-193-0 .