In March 2007, while conducting fieldwork for a doctoral thesis on exile camps administered by the Namibian liberation movement SWAPO, I was exposed to an archive in the private possession of Salatiel and Anita Ailonga, a Namibian-Finnish couple. Within this archive lies a substantial body of knowledge about Namibia’s liberation struggle, especially from 1974–76, the years when Salatiel served as SWAPO’s Exile Chaplain and distributed aid to Namibian refugees in Zambia. This archive does not revolve around SWAPO or Namibia per se, however, but rather around the Ailongas and other non-state actors with whom they maintained contact over many years. As such, it is unlike most other liberation-era archives utilised by scholars of Southern Africa, contesting and/or deepening accepted knowledge about the region’s late 20th century exile past. This paper examines the Ailonga Collection, tracing how the Ailongas and their interlocutors have worked with it over the last thirty-five years. The piece begins with discussion of a letter written by Salatiel Ailonga about human rights abuses occurring in SWAPO’s Zambian camps during the mid-1970s and published in a Namibian newspaper on the eve of the country’s first democratic elections in 1989. From there, the text turns to other initiatives aimed at mobilising content from the Ailonga Collection to open dialogue about controversial exile histories, including my own ethnographic research. As I argue, the Ailonga Collection has been a key site for dialogue about ‘reconciliation’ in Namibia, advancing discussion of what this word means and how it may be pursued. This dialogue reflects the historical trajectory of Namibian nationalism and experiences of Christian faith among specific transnational communities affiliated with the Lutheran church. These threads are not traceable through Southern Africa’s national archives alone, but they may be grasped through ethnographic work with personal archives such as the Ailonga Collection.