The Song of Chief Iipumbu” Christianity, Colonialism, and the Limits of Agency in North-Central Namibia

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Religion &Theology brill.com/rt

Singing “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” Christianity, Colonialism, and the Limits of Agency in North-Central Namibia

Emily D. Crews The University of Alabama [email protected]

Abstract

This essay addresses “The Song of Chief Iipumbu,” an oral poem performed by a woman named Nekwaya Loide Shikongo in North-Central Namibia in 1953. It argues that “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” acted as an astute analysis of local power relations, employing scornful commentary on a deposed native chief as a cover for subtle but profound criticisms of European colonial institutions to which Shikongo, as a African Christian woman, was subject. Through a brief history of colonialism in Namibia and detailed attention to the linguistic and discursive webs woven by the poem’s author, this essay shows that Shikongo’s censure of oppressive authorities was not an attempt to under- mine the networks of power operating in colonial Namibia. Rather, it was an effort to affect acceptance of (or at least resignation to) her subordination in order to achieve the renewal of psychological and social equilibrium.

Keywords colonialism – Owambo – Namibia – agency – performance – resistance – Christianity – missionaries

On 23 December 1953, an Ovawambo woman named Nekwaya Loide Shikongo was invited to “narrate some of the customs of her tribe” for a visiting German anthropologist named Ernst Dammann.1 Instead of reciting the folk tales or histories often chosen for such events, Shikongo performed an outlawed genre

1 Heike Becker, “‘Let Me Come Tell You’: Loide Shikongo, the King, and Poetic License in Colo- nial Ovamboland,”HistoryandAnthropology 16, no. 2 (2005): 243, doi:10.1080/027572005001161

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/15743012-02503008Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access singing “the song of chief iipumbu” 259 of oral poetry called an oshitewo.2 Her poem was later named “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” (Appendix A). Threaded through its scornful commentary on a toppled Ovawambo king were subtle but profound criticisms of the primary authorities to which Shikongo was subject as a Christian African woman in a patriarchal colonial state.3 Through her poem Shikongo was a woman questioning men, a native questioning the colonial government, a Christian convert questioning the church in a forbidden ethnic art form, and an Ovawambo noble questioning a former king in European-inflected rhetoric. Shikongo and her remarkable oshitewo inspire a number of questions. In a time of widespread European violence against Ovawambo bodies and cultural traditions, what might have inspired Shikongo to risk her reputation, her livelihood, and even her physical wellbeing in order to level these critiques? What benefit might she have gained from her performance? How could she have escaped punishment for such inflammatory speech (as the historical record suggests she did)? And what can “The Song of Chief Iipumbu,” its dramatis per- sonae, and their histories teach scholars about how might research and write about the lives of people living under colonial rule? I attempt to answer the major questions of this essay in two parts. In part one, I provide an account of the historical and cultural context out of which Shikongo’s poem emerged and some specific details about the poem’s per-

62. Becker’s article on Shikongo has been invaluable to the development of this essay. It was the means by which I first discovered “The Song of Chief Iipumbu,” has served as my primary source for Shikongo’s biographical details, and has been a text to which I have repeatedly returned in an effort to think through my own ideas about Shikongo’s performance. I have attempted to expand on Becker’s work in this essay, attending more specifically to the why’s and how’s of “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” and their significance for scholarship on colonial resistance. 2 Shikongo’s performance was recorded, transcribed, and translated into German by Ernst Dammann, an Africanist anthropologist, linguist, and theologian. He named the poem “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” and included the transcription and translation in a 1975 compila- tion of Ovawambo poems, songs, and folktales that he published with a Swedish missionary to Owambo, Toivo E. Tirronen: Ernst Dammann and Toivo E. Tirronen, Ndonga-Anthologie, Afrika und Übersee 29, Folge der Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur Eingeborenen-Sprachen (Berlin: Verlag von Dietrich Reimer, 1975). 3 While it attends to some general history of Namibia (or [German] South-West Africa as it was called through the 1884–1915 period of German colonialism up till the end of South African administration of the country at independence on 21 March 1990), this essay is primarily concerned with the history of Owamboland (also Owambo, Ovamboland, or Ovambo), situated in North-Central Namibia along the Angolan border. Owamboland is home to eight sub-groups of Ovawambo (or Aawambo) peoples, a broad ethnolinguistic group of Bantu origin. Most of the terms used herein are drawn from OshiNdonga, the dialect of the Ndonga group, although some are from other dialects (primarily OshiKwamnyama).

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 260 crews former and its central characters. I use this framing in order to argue in part two that “The Song of Chief Iipumbu,” as many other pieces of African oral literature before it, presented not simply a historical account of a deposed king but rather an astute account of the power relations of its place and time of origin. Through this account, delivered in an art form reserved for political commentary, Shikongo called into question the actions and policies of the prevailing authorities of her world. In doing so it is possible that she was attempting to construct an alternative narrative of local history that corresponded to her own experience and served as a means of release and restructuring as she negotiated the morass of life in colonial Owambo.4 Thus, her act of re-thinking and re-telling history could be understood as an effort to calm the psychic tensions that arose from her identification with often-conflicting ideologies and to affect a renewal of internal and social cohesion. Part Two will further argue that Shikongo’s audience accepts her violence to the status quo because it is unable to grasp the oshitewo’s truly insubordinate nature. Due to the skill with which she deploys critical semantic and literary strategies, Shikongo is able to offer a veiled but damning commentary on the very people with whom she spent her daily life and may have even shared the room during her performance. A close reading of portions of the poem will illuminate the specific discursive webs Shikongo weaves to construct and disguise her critique. In its reading of the motivations and mechanics – and particularly the out- come – of Shikongo’s performance, this essay offers a broader prescription for scholarly work on gender, agency, performance, and colonial subjectivity. It asks that we be willing to consider the value of telling a tragic story so that we might better analyze the ways in which systems of power and oppression are produced and reproduced.

PARTONE

1 The Long-Legged Ones Have Settled in the Fields

“The Song of Chief Iipumbu” opens as follows:

Wait; let me come to tell you Allow me to tell you

4 Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History, Carter G. Woodson Institute Series in Black Studies (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1991).

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You, Iipumbu, wake up Wake up and see the initiation of men Wake up and see the initiation of men Look at the horrible things being done in the sky Wake up and see the airplane Nelomba, the plane, is moving up in the sky The long-legged ones have settled in the fields The long-legged ones are settling on the oshana5 It’s you they have been told about You, it’s you they have been told about You, Iipumbu, wake up Wake up and see the initiation of men Look at the horrible things being done at the brick building Wake up and see the initiation of men Wake up and see the initiation of men6

In these initial lines, Shikongo refers to some of the most historically significant institutions and events of North-Central Namibia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The colonial state (“the long-legged ones”), the church (those who forbade the initiation of men), and Ovawambo leaders (King Iipumbu) are each implicated in Shikongo’s composition. Struggles for power between local and colonial authorities, South African military violence against Namibian vil- lagers, disappearing rituals, and the arrival of modern technology, amongst other occurrences, all appear in the opening stanzas of the poem. North-Central Namibia, also known as Owambo or Owamboland, is the primary location of the Ovawambo ethnic group, of which Shikongo and Chief Iipumbu yaShilongo were members.7 In the centuries preceding Shikongo’s

5 Oshana is the Oshiwambo word for the temporary lakes that fill Owamboland’s salt pans during the yearly rainy season and enrich the landscape after months of intense dryness. This word has become a colloquial word in local forms of English, German, and Afrikaans, often not translated from Oshiwambo when spoken in those languages. 6 Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, “The Song of Chief Iipumbu,” lines 1–23, Damman, 256. Andiy’utale, ndi mu lombwele/ andiya ndi mu lombwele/ ngoye Iipumbu, penduka/ penduk’, u tal’ etanda/ penduk’, u tal’ etanda/ tal’ iihuna tiyi longwa pombanda/ penduk’, u tale ondhila/ Nelomba tay’ ende pombanda/ gamugulu og’ itula omaana/ gamugulu otag’ itula oshaana/ ongoye ga lombwelwa/ ngoye, ongoye ga lombwelwa/ ngoye Iipumbu, penduka/ u penduk’, u tal’ etanda/ tal’ iihuna tiyi longwa pondjugo/ penduk’, u tal’ etanda/ penduk’, u tal’ etanda/ owe yi uvil’ ohenda/ owe yi uvil’ ohenda/ ngoye owe owe yi uvil’ ohenda / ngoye owe shi ininga mwene/ owe shi ininga mwene, owe shi ininga mwene. Translations are my own, but take many of their cues from the work of Heike Becker, Nepeti Nicanor, and Ben Ulenga. 7 Meredith McKittrick, To Dwell Secure: Generation, Christianity, and Colonialism in Owambo-

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 262 crews performance the area underwent remarkable cultural change. The arrival of Europeans, and with them mercantile capitalism and Christianity, had a profound impact on Ovawambo material, political, and social life. In this section I will detail some of those changes and consider the ways in which they might have shaped the production and reception of Shikongo’s oshitewo. Europeans made their first sustained forays into Namibia around 1800, with greater numbers arriving in the middle of the century. The majority of these were Protestant missionaries from England, Finland, and Germany. The first successful settlements in Ovawambo were founded in the early years of the 1870’s in Ondonga, Olukonda, and Oniipa, the town that would later become Shikongo’s home. Despite significant protest and occasional violence from some members of the local population, other missions were soon established. While only some of them survived the first years of their inception, the number of Europeans in Owamboland, and Namibia as a whole, slowly grew. As was the case for many countries across the African continent, in Namibia, where missionaries went, a colonial government was soon to follow. In 1884 Germany staked its claim to Namibia and officially annexed the region as a crown colony under the name South West Africa in 1890. In 1919, losses in World War I forced Germany to relinquish its colonies, including Namibia, which was given as a protectorate to the Union of South Africa, which had recently attained nominal independence from Great Britain as a self-governing autonomous dominion in the British Empire.8 The upheavals that began during the German colonial period continued under South African administration. Due to its small staff and the relatively large size of the Ovawambo region, the colonial state employed indirect rule, a type of governance that relied upon the selective application of customary law, as it was defined by the colonial government, and the expectation of the

land, Social History of Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2002). As McKittrick rightly notes, the term “Ovawambo” elides internal divisions between subgroups – the Ndonga, the Uukwambi, the Kwanyama, etc. – and implies a cultural coherence that was not necessarily endemic to the population in the 19th and 20th centuries. While the complications of identity amongst broadly similar ethnic subgroups are acknowledged, for the purposes of this essay the term “Ovawambo” will be used. It is similarly complicated to determine how to refer to the broader geographical/political/cultural region of which the Ovawambo and Owamboland were a part: “Namibia” as it is used here is rather something of an anachronism, as the name was only came into regular usage after the collapse of German colonialism, under which Namibia was called Deutsch-Südwestafrika or German Southwest Africa. For the purposes of this essay, I have chosen to use the term Namibia. 8 It came into existence on 31 May 1910, formed out of the four British colonies of Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Transvaal, and the Orange River Colony (the latter two being the Boer republics annexed in 1902 after the conclusion of the South African War, 1899–1902).

Religion & TheologyDownloaded 25 from (2018) Brill.com09/24/2021 258–297 03:44:40PM via free access singing “the song of chief iipumbu” 263 aid of indigenous authorities in carrying out imperial prerogatives. That is, the colonial understanding of local practices and beliefs and the choice of which of those customs to acknowledge or eradicate, as well as who to support in bids for local leadership, were all determined by its own interests, and to great impact. The construction of tribal homelands, modeled on earlier experiments with racial segregation, fixed previously fluid distinctions between regions and ethnicities.9 Policies concerning mobility limited the movement of people, especially women, to within homelands while, conversely, forced migration for work in mines and on construction projects required constant, long-distance male movement. Standard local methods of accruing wealth and status, like raiding or the acquisition of additional grazing land through second and third marriages, were redefined and prohibited on (Christian) moral and (European) legal grounds. Young Ovawambo men, in search of new and less onerous methods of gaining social and economic majority than was available through the lineage system, were often initially more amenable to colonial interference than elder, elite men; in some instances the threat that the government might support their power inspired older male relatives to cooperate with the colonial state despite their misgiving, creating new divisions along nascent political and generational fissures. Loyalty to the state was rewarded with cattle, alcohol, and cloth, which further exacerbated the imbalance between those with valuable material resources and those without. Land dispossession and taxation crippled the local economy and reinforced the growing might of the migrant labor market, on which Namibians came to rely for their survival.10 In Owamboland, severe ecological problems like deforestation and overgrazing – likewise the result of curtailed mobility, which confined agricultural activity to strictly prescribed zones and thus prevented use of the fallow system – and severe drought further contributed to locals’ dependence on wage labor.11 In

9 For more on the creation and development of South Africa’s Bantustans, see Barbara Rogers, Divide and Rule: South Africa’s Bantustans (London: International Defense and Aid Fund, 1980) and Bertil Egerö, South Africa’s Bantustans: From Dumping Grounds to Battle- fronts, Scandinavian Institute for African Studies, Discussion Paper 4 (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1991). For a general discussion of the function of tribalism in the making of colonial policy in Southern Africa see Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in South- ern Africa, Perspectives on Southern Africa 43 (Berkeley; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1991), chs. 3, 7, and 8. 10 Patricia Hayes, et al., eds., Namibia under South African Rule: Mobility and Containment, 1915–1946 (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), 32, argue that of the country’s regions Owambo- land suffered the least from land dispossession, due largely to its high population density and the difficulty of relocating thousands of people from relatively small parcels of land. 11 Hayes, et al., Namibia under South African Rule, 230–233.

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 264 crews some years poor rainfall caused a sharp decrease in grain production, leaving thousands of Ovawambo dead and many more starving and at the mercy of government relief, which they received in exchange for work.12 Missionaries who had settled in Namibia in the years preceding the arrival of colonial governments played a central role in the growth of the imperial state: “Generally accepting that their work would be assisted by and successful under the formal sanction of colonial rule, the missionaries welcomed and contributed to its advent.”13 McKittrick, in her historical anthropology of Ovawambo Christianity, links the imperial church and state at their moments of origin: “[In Namibia] the story of uukristi’s (Christianity’s) creation is also the story of colonialism.”14 Missionaries preached to their congregations the authority not just of God but also of the new white government and the obli- gation of obedience to each, and to one through the other.15 As the first Euro- peans to learn local languages and customs and to explore the outlying parts of the country, they aided the government in brokering trades with various tribal chiefs or with gathering information about areas of interest beyond the standard colonial settlements, which were critical to the administration’s success.16 The missionaries served the new government politically, as well, acting as “diplomats in residence” for military commanders.17 In return for their assistance the state provided safety and logistical support to missionaries and their organizations. These practical concerns betray an underlying common ideology that was rarely explicit (or, in many cases, conscious or coherent), but nonetheless hugely important: both groups operated under the assump- tion that Western cultural systems and epistemologies, with their emphasis on Christianity and scientific rationality, were inviolably right, and the project of importing those systems into Africa was not only the privilege but the duty of the more superior and civilized race.18

12 Siiskonen estimates that some 20,000 people died as a result of the 1915–1916 drought and famine. See Harri Siiskonen, “Migration in Owambo: The Oshigambo and Elim Parishes, 1925–1935” in Hayes, et al., Namibia under South African Rule, 221. 13 Peter H. Katjivivi, Per Frostin, and Kaire Mbuende, eds., Church and Liberation in Namibia (London; Winchester, MA: Pluto Press, 1989), 4. 14 McKittrick, To Dwell Secure, 298. Uukristi is the Oshiwambo word for the belief in Christ, the institution of Christianity, and the state of being Christian. Missionaries defined it against its perceived opposite of uupangi, “paganism,” though most Ovawambo did typically not uphold this strict binary until the later years of Christianity. For more, see Hayes, et al., Namibia under South African Rule, 39–42 and McKittrick, To Dwell Secure, ch. 6. 15 Hayes, et al., Namibia under South African Rule, 39. 16 Hayes, et al., Namibia under South African Rule, 41. 17 Hayes, et al., Namibia under South African Rule, 41. 18 For an exceptional discussion of the links between Christianity and colonialism, see John

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Despite their shared history, the co-mingling of the ideologies and practices of colonial government and colonial religion was not always so smooth on the ground. While each institution typically affirmed European presence in Namibia, assumptions about the manner in which that presence was to be conducted were not always shared. Further, these assumptions often con- flicted with those of Ovawambo authorities. This is especially apparent when examining the issue of gender, particularly as it was constructed and contested through the practice of female initiation, or ohango (in the western regions) and efundula (in the east). Through debates over ohango/efundula the colonial government, the church, and various groups of Ovawambo struggled with one another for social and political authority and, in the process, reformed gender roles, hierarchies, and local-colonial relationships. The colonial government and Christian missionaries differed markedly in their opinions about ohango/efundula. The state championed the practice and encouraged its retention in Ovawambo communities, arguing that initiation was crucial to maintaining the “raw” and “virile” state of the native, which made the men better fit for labor in colonial mines and kept the women in the homestead and fields.19 Women’s mobility was seen as “highly threatening” and capable of undermining the colonial project, for if women were allowed to move freely from their homes, the traditional structure of Ovawambo would break down, leaving the society in chaos, unresponsive to indirect rule and therefore useless as a labor force for colonial enterprises.20 Missionaries, on the other hand, strenuously objected to the practice. Assert- ing its violent, sexual, pagan nature, they led an attack on the practice that ended in its full-out prohibition among Christian converts.21 This in turn put missionaries in direct contest with not only the colonial government, but many Ovawambo, as well, who viewed the rite of passage as essential to the stabil-

and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Conscious- ness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 19 Patricia Hayes, “‘Cocky’ Hahn and The Black Venus:The Making of a Native Commissioner in South West Africa, 1915–1948” in Gendered Colonialisms in African History, eds. Nancy Rose Hunt, Tessie P. Liu, and Jean Quataert, Gender and History (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 44. 20 Hayes, “‘Cocky’ Hahn and The Black Venus,” 44. 21 Missionaries were particularly concerned with the purported sexual aspects of the efundula. According to Hayes, “missionaries by the 1930s were singling out particular alleged and highly sexualised aspects of the ceremony (masturbation, doctoring drink with semen, possible sexual intercourse) and castigating the entire proceedings on this basis,” Patricia Hayes, “Efundula and History: Female Initiation in Pre-Colonial and Colonial His- tory” (paper presented at the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, nd).

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 266 crews ity of their culture. Motivated by their common concern for the preservation of Ovawambo tradition (variously defined by but singularly important to both parties), colonial officials and male village elite joined forces to preserve the practice of initiation against the corrosive effects of Christianity.22 The colonial government backed local authorities in several disputes with missionaries and provided Ovawambo leaders, whose subjects were uncooperative or unruly, with the means (material and martial) of shoring up their power, provided that they continued to hold efundula/ohango ceremonies each season. The alliance of government and local leaders against missionaries had a profound impact in Owambo.The link between male elites and colonial administration was strengthened, the divide between Christian and non-Christian Ovawambo widened, and the colonial struggle over the bodies, souls, and consciousness of the Ovawambo became even more heated. For women, this had a range of unanticipated consequences. Some women who wanted to escape marriage or the violence of initiation were able to flee to the mission where they were offered educations and homes in exchange for their acceptance of Christian doctrine.23 For others it meant confinement to spaces and roles gendered as female in a European understanding of proper social structures that relied on the binary of a masculine public and feminine private spheres. The public elements of female power that existed before colonialism were limited by all three institutions of power. Female members of the Ovawambo nobility were no longer accorded official positions as advisors to the king or member- ship on the village council. Ritual leadership and performance of critique and oral history (like Shikango’s oshitewo) were strictly curtailed. As their access to leadership in the village decreased, women sought other forms of influence and power in this new society. Ironically, the Christian church was one arena in which they were quite successful.Women who embodied (or at least appeared to embody) the European missionary expectations of femininity – docility, domesticity, modesty, piety – were praised as ideal products of the Christian civilizing mission. Other women found success in stereotypes of the precolonial noble savage. Women who embodied (or at least appeared to embody) the state’s expectations of femininity – immobil- ity, undergoing initiation, wearing tribal clothing and adornments, a devotion to indigenous gods and ancestors – were accorded the role of “vessel of tradition” and upheld as invaluable relics of a glorious past, bulwarks against the

22 Heike Becker, “Efundula Past and Present: Female Initiation, Gender and Customary Law in Northern Namibia,” paper presented at the Gender, Sexuality and Law Conference, Keele University, 1998. 23 Hayes, “Efundula and History.”

Religion & TheologyDownloaded 25 from (2018) Brill.com09/24/2021 258–297 03:44:40PM via free access singing “the song of chief iipumbu” 267 corrosive and deleterious tide of modernity. In both cases, women who proved that they were able to behave as expected were given the benefit of the doubt that they would continue to do so, and thus allowed access to certain amounts of influence within spheres deemed appropriate. Shikongo is an example of a woman who creatively re-worked both these ideal types of femininity to her own advantage. By representing, on the one hand, a model Christian and, one the other, a vault of knowledge about a pre- European past, and by revealing those characteristics to certain audiences at certain times, Shikongo crafted for herself an arena of importance within the church, the mission, and the village, that was less than that of most men but greater than that of most women, and less than she might have had before colonialism but greater than many had during it.

2 Wake Up and See the Airplane

The aforementioned struggles over ohango/enfundula and many other cultural and political issues were especially violent in the Uukwambi region of western Owamboland. The area was a source of particular interest for the colonial government due to its location at the confluence of several trading routes and missionary settlements, but the Ovakwambi as a whole, and particularly their leaders, proved to be notoriously obstinate and isolationist subjects. Arguably the most famous leader of the Uukwambi kingdom was the epony- mous character of Loide Shikongo’s poem, King Iipumbu yaShilongo. Iipumbu stands out as one of the most fascinating and problematic figures of colonial Owamboland, and the story of his life is inseparable from the predominant concerns of the time: political and cultural authority, religion, and gender and sexuality. Iipumbu was born into the Ovakwambi royal family around 1875.24 Little is known about his youth, save for an incident involving explosives in which he lost several fingers on his left hand, earning him the lifelong nickname “Ondil- imani,” meaning dynamite.25 His kingship, which he inherited in 1907 or 1908, coincided with a major wave of foreign ideological and economic incursion

24 The exact date of Iipumbu’s birth is unknown. His headstone in the Oshikuku Catholic Mission graveyard reads 1873. His descendants and biographers variously date his birth to 1874 and 1875. For more on the debates about Iipumbi’s eary life, see Wolfram Hart- mann, “‘Ondillimani!’ Iipumbu ya Tshilongo & the Ambiguities of Resistance in Ovambo,” in Namibia under South African Rule, 268. 25 Accounts of the origins of the word ondilimani differ. Some suggest it is an onomonopo- etic spelling of the sound made by dynamite. Other argues that it is a Bantu-ization of the actual word in English. See Hartmann, “‘Ondillimani!’,” 266.

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 268 crews into Owamboland, including the first serious intervention into Uukwambi. A bid for control of the area was undertaken in earnest as the government sought new sources of labor, missionaries sought new converts, and both institutions sought a way to connect their more successful enterprises to one another. Iipumbu’s response was to thwart those efforts at every opportunity. South African colonial documents from the period of his rule are flooded with commentary on his unwillingness to meet demands for migrant labor and taxation or to allow building projects in his territory.26 Missionary records likewise com- plain of his rabid commitment to traditional religious and cultural norms and practices, including the worship of local gods, polygamy, and especially rites of initiation.27 He was reviled for the harsh punishment he bestowed upon those of his subjects suspected of witchcraft or the practice of Christianity, particularly when those punishments meant missionaries’ loss of converts.28 Such treatment created an “ever-increasing alienation between the ruler and his subjects” that missionaries in turn exploited in order to gain followers who were otherwise reluctant to embrace the new religion.29 In 1932, Iipumbu, who was also notorious for his sexual appetites, directed his sexual attentions toward a young girl who was his social and perhaps even his biological daughter.30 The girl sought asylum at a local mission where, despite Iipumbu’s demands for her return, she was given permanent shelter.31 In response, Iipumbu and his army surrounded the mission where they fired shots into the air. For months they threatened the missionaries with harm and even death.32 Some months later, in August of 1932, the colonial government mounted an astounding aerial bombing against Iipumbu’s compound at Onashiku in supposed retaliation for his prolonged aggression against the mission station.33 Although Iipumbu escaped the attack, he was captured in the

26 Hartmann, “‘Ondillimani!’,” 266. 27 Kari Mietennen, On theWay toWhiteness: Christianization, Conflict, and Change in Colonial Owamboland, 1915–1965 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2005), 78. 28 Mietennen, On the Way to Whiteness, 77. 29 Hartmann, “‘Ondillimani!’,” 284. 30 Becker, “‘Let Me Come Tell You,’” 245. 31 Hartmann, “‘Ondillimani!’,” 267. 32 Mietennen, On the Way to Whiteness, 78. 33 Hayes, et al., Namibia under South African Rule, 79, convincingly argue that the Elim situation was a convenient pretext for Hahn to remove Iipumbu. Hahn, a skilled propagan- dist, had been in search of justification that would not stir further resentment amongst Ovawambo. The highly sensationalized and moralized events of 1932–1933, with their themes of sexualized violence, incest, defenseless innocents, and a despotic, gun-waving king offered an ideal narrative behind which to mobilize support for removing Iipumbu from his throne.

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Uukwambi bush some days later and sent into monitored exile in a neighboring kingdom. He dies of a terminal illness on September 3, 1959, some six years after the performance of the oshitewo that came to hold his name.34 Following the years of Iipumbu’s wars against the long-legged ones, more and more strictures against the freedoms of Namibians were put into effect. Continued misappropriation of land and resources drove thousands of people from their homes and sources of livelihood. In Owamboland, competition for power and scarce resources resulted in new alliances and separations. By the mid-1930s, labor migration had become nearly universal among young men, with many between the ages of 18 and 40 having spent several years, if not an entire decade, away from home.35 For these men, the construction of masculin- ity took place not through village rituals but through medical examinations by mine or ship doctors, residence in barracks with other men from across the country, and the shared experience of homesickness and brutal working conditions. Their return to the North brought with them new types of knowledge, illness, and wealth that were re-circulated into the local population. The geronto- cratic system of authority that had long operated in Owambo and had been first damaged and then propped up with colonial backing was further challenged by these returning youth, who were often unwilling to surrender their pay to their male elders. Family and gender structures were also affected: women, who could not hold labor contracts, became more dependent on men as the cash purchase of household goods and food replaced the previous method of barter and agriculture.36

34 Hartmann, “Ondilimani!,” 267. For colonial officials, Iipumbu’s deposal and banishment were touted as a decisive victory in the attempt to bring Owamboland under South African control. Later anti-colonial activists, however, read the event as proof of the strength of early Ovawambo resistance against foreign rule. Iipumbu became something of a stock character in both European and local narratives of history, serving alternately as a symbol of the degenerate influence of paganism, the inherently violent nature of African men, and the nationalist spirit of independence. In the 1990s, not long after the country gained its freedom from South Africa, nationalist propaganda credited Iipumbu with a particularly passionate speech at the time of his apprehension, in which he told colonials, “Nande mukuatendje ohiina taaja shito jemutse oshiti” (“Even if you whites take me away from my land, my people have the will to come and liberate and restore our human dignity and independence”). Namibian president Samuel Nujoma introduces the quotation as “the prophetic final words of Chief Iipumbu as he was forced into the enemy aircraft …” Samuel Nujoma, “Statement by his Excellency President Sam Nujoma on the Occasion of the Official Inauguration of Heroes’ Acre 26 August 2002,” Namibia‑1on1.com, http://www .namibia‑1on1.com/a‑central/heroes‑acre‑2.html. 35 McKittrick, To Dwell Secure, 14. 36 McKittrick, To Dwell Secure, ch. 6, “Negotiated Colonialism,” 170–203.

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By the 1940s, Christianity had, for the first time, been embraced across gener- ations.The first small wave of converts had reached the advanced stages of their lives, some of their children were Christians, and the majority of Ovawambo under the age of 30 had converted and were leading evangelical outreaches in their villages. As society evolved, Christian elites emerged at the top of a newly formed hierarchy based on access to European goods and culture and cash wealth.37 In the process of mass acceptance of Christianity the Ovawambo creatively reworked the religion in numerous ways. Several Ovawambo-led churches were founded in the region without the support (and, in several cases, against the direct prohibition) of missionaries and church authorities, and new forms of worship and theology arose outside the sanctioned white-dominated spaces.38 In some villages efundula/ohango was adapted to include aspects of Christian ritual and was practiced by Christians both with and without missionary approval. In the 1950s, the region experienced a dramatic religious “awakening” (epapadhuko) led by Lutheran youth that further established the binary between uukriisti and uupagani and their followers. The mélange of European prerogatives and perspectives, augmented by the considerable material might of the colonial government, and the productive responses of locals irrevocably altered Ovawambo society and its members. Many Ovawambo, like Shikongo, would surely have found themselves struggling to reconcile conflicting allegiances and identities as they engaged this rapidly changing world.

37 McKittrick, To Dwell Secure, 275. 38 Similar processes from across the African continent have been extensively studied by scholars of religion. Bengt G.M. Sundkler, missionary and academic, has long been considered the pioneer of the study of African independent churches. See Bengt G.M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (London: James Clarke, 1948); idem, Zulu Zion and Some Swazi Zionists, Oxford Studies in African Affairs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); idem, BaraBukoba:ChurchandCommunityinTanzania (London: C. Hurst, 1980); and most recently, with Christopher Steed, A History of the Church in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Sundkler has been followed by numerous relevant work, including John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1; Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton, Women of Fire and Spirit: Faith, Gender, and Religion in Roho Religion in Western Kenya (New York, NY; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana, International African Library 21 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).

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3 Allow Me to Tell You

The complex histories sketched out above, in which local kings and their subjects clashed and cooperated with one another and with foreign institutions, bear great importance for understanding “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” and the woman who conceived it. In this final section I will discuss the details of Shikongo’s life and the performance of her oshitewo. Nekwaya Loide Shikongo was born around 1886 in the village of Oniipa in the Ondonga region. Her father, Shikongo shaNangolo, was the wealthy son of the famous King Nangolo.39 Although not technically a member of the royalty herself, Shikongo maintained close ties to the royal family through much of her life, often acting as an advisor on important issues.40 Shikongo converted to Christianity in her teens.41 As an adult she served as the lead singer (omutameki) of the church choir and was known by Europeans and Ovawambo alike for her piety. She and family were in regular attendance at Oniipa’s parish church and her sons received a Christian education at the parish school. For much of her life Shikongo was actively engaged with the small, close-knit white society in Oniipa and it neighboring villages. She had a close relationship to Oniipa’s missionary family, the Tylvas, for whom she acted as a domestic servant before her marriage and with whom her son, Leonard Auala, was fostered and later worked as a teacher and pastor.42 After she was wed she took in laundry and seam work from the European and South African families of the area, including the family of Carl “Cocky” Hahn, the Native Com- missioner to Owambo.43 Shikongo’s ties to both the local Owambo and the

39 Nangolo ruled the kingdom of Ndongo from 1820 to 1857. In the 1850s Nangolo allowed Finnish missionaries to establish a base at Oniipa, which became the center for Lutheran missions in the Ondonga region, claiming thousands of converts. Shikongo’s mother was one of the many wives of Nangolo’s son, Shikongo shaNangolo. Nekwaya Shikongo was her mother’s lastborn (onkelo). Both scholarly and colloquial discussion of Shikongo shaNan- golo often remark on the number of wives he possessed and his dogged commitment to polygamy, even in the face of encroaching Christian morality, Lovisa Nampala and Vilho Shigwedha, Aawambo Kingdoms, History and Cultural Change: Perspectives from Northern Namibia, intro. Jeremy Silvester, Basel Namibia Studies Series 8/9 (Basel: P. Schlettwein, 2006), 8. 40 Becker, “Let Me Come Tell You,” 241. 41 Becker, “Let Me Come Tell You,” 242. 42 Leonard Nelomba Auala went on to become the first indigenous bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (ELCIN) and an anti-apartheid spokesperson for the ELCIN Church to the South African government. 43 Becker, “Let Me Come Tell You,” 242. Shikongo was renowned in the area for her rare skills at European-style washing and mending. She also did work for the family of the owner of Ondangwa’s general store, in addition to the Hahns and Tylvas.

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 272 crews white Christian societies earned her elite status in Oniipa. At the time of her death in 1961 she was considered a pillar of the local community. Her funeral “drew a large crowd.”44 Shikongo was considered by Hahn and Tylvas to be “a valuable source of Owambo orature … and was frequently called upon to perform for visiting officials or researchers.”45 This is consistent with the image of Shikongo as engaged with multiple spheres and defined by multiple identities. She is considered both sufficiently “traditional” – in her knowledge of Ovawambo culture, particularly oratorical performance, and sufficiently “civilized” – in her commitment to Christianity, European culture and prerogratives, and her relationships with the white society of Oniipa, to serve as an example to visitors of the success of the colonial project. It is no surprise, then, that she was chosen to perform for anthropologist and linguist Ernst Dammann. Dammann and his wife, Ruth, spent five months in 1953 and 1954 traveling across Namibia to collect sam- ples of local language, literature, and folklore.46 The Dammanns were guests of European missionaries across the country, and it was through their hosts that they were introduced to many of their informants, most of whom “appear to have been living within a missionary context.”47 Shikongo was specifically invited to perform for the Dammanns, and almost certainly would have known that her oshitewo would be recorded.48

44 Becker, “Let Me Come Tell You,” 242. 45 Becker, “Let Me Come Tell You,” 243. 46 The extent to which Ruth Dammann was involved in the academic aspects of her hus- band’s project is unclear. It is certainly the case that she was a highly skilled photographer and partner to Dammann, if not an amateur translator and anthropologist herself. 47 Dag Henrichsen, “II. Introduction,” Registratur PA. 39, Ernst und Ruth Dammann Perso- nenarchiv und Tonsammlung, Afrikanische Literatur und Sprachen in Namibia und dem Südlichen Afrika – Personal Papers and Sound Collection African Literature and Languages in Namibia and Southern Africa, 1953–1997, compiled by Dag Henrichsen and Aurore Schaff (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Namibia Resource Centre – Southern Africa Library, 2009), xv–xvii, http://baslerafrika.ch/wp‑content/uploads/2017/06/PA.39_Ernst‑und ‑Ruth‑Dammann_reduz.pdf. 48 All available evidence points to Shikongo having full knowledge that her poem was going to be recorded (and thus, one would imagine, that it would have been available for study or reflection beyond the ephemeral moment of its performance). Aside from second-hand information about others having been recorded that Shikongo likely would have heard, it is difficult to imagine that Shikongo would not have noted the technology used to capture her own voice. Records indicate that for all their field interviews the Dammanns made use of a Magnetophon, a large recording device comprised of a base (which typically held the tape reels on which the sound was recorded), an amplifier, and a detachable microphone. Ruth Dammann’s photos of interviews in process show performers speaking directly into the microphone, which was positioned close to their faces.

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Most of the Dammanns’ interviews seem to have taken place inside the mission complex where the anthropologists stayed during their travels.49 Their photographs and notes suggest that the sessions were often held in open breezeways or on porches (perhaps so that the oppressive summer heat might be broken by the breeze) and that it was common for informants to gather together and listen to the interview that was underway as they waited for their own turns at the microphone. In Shikongo’s case, one audience member may have been her aforementioned son, Leonard, who is listed as having recorded an interview immediately after his mother performed her oshitewo.50 Local missionaries and colonial staff who might have been nearby were often invited to listen, as well, if not to explicitly supervise the interactions.51 “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” was recorded at the Onanyokwe Mission on 23 December 1953.52 It lasted for 6 minutes and 55 seconds. The Dammanns labeled the oshitewo “an epic song about history” (Lied über Geschichte, Epos); of the hundreds of tracks recorded by the Dammanns it was the only one given this label.53 Before “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” there is no record of Shikongo ever having presented an oshitewo, which was considered by missionaries to be an art form dangerously associated with pagan traditions and forbidden on the mission. As a genre of political commentary often performed in ritual settings iitewo were particularly frowned upon because they conveyed to Europeans an unseemly concern with village matters better left behind in con-

49 Becker interviewed a number of Ovambo in the 1990s during her research into the circum- stances surrounding “The Song of Chief Iipumbu.” In the course of these interviews she noted that her informants expressed displeasure that the Dammanns expected that they be met at the mission complex for the recordings, rather than going out to interviewees’ homesteads. See Becker, “Let Me Come Tell You,” 243. 50 Even if he was not present at the actual performance of the oshitewo, Auala certainly knew of its existence and contents, for he provided some contextual commentary on a few aspects of the poem, which Dammann and Tironen published in their anthology. 51 For instance, at Mupini in 1954, the Dammanns made their recordings under trees on the mission grounds with dozens of Ovawambo, including a number of children, in attendance, Registratur PA. 39, Ernst und Ruth Dammann Personenarchiv und Tonsammlung, 8. 52 Registratur PA. 39, Ernst und Ruth Dammann Personenarchiv und Tonsammlung, 15. There is no explanation for why Shikongo performed at Onanyokwe rather than at the mission where she lived and attended church services. In addition to the oshitewo, the records indicate that Shikongo also performed a second piece, a fable (ongano) that was not included in the published anthology. Further work on this topic would require investigation of this fable and a comparison of its contents and structure to that of “The Song of King Iipumbu.” 53 Registratur PA. 39, Ernst und Ruth Dammann Personenarchiv und Tonsammlung, 15. This is consistent with the identification of the oshitewo as a form of indigenous art forbidden by the missionaries.

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 274 crews verts’ former lives.54 Dammann’s introduction of Shikongo, in which he stated that she had been invited to “narrate some of the customs of her tribe,” and the more mundane content of the later anthology suggest that a different kind of performance was expected. For Shikongo, however, the oshitewo did just as Dammann suggested: it narrated historical events in a form that was associated with critical commentary and was crucial to Ovawambo culture, even as it was undergoing dramatic change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

PARTTWO

It has been demonstrated that Shikongo’s oshitewo emerged out of a complex milieu of local and colonial interaction in which the Ovawambo experienced radical change in the practices and concepts of their daily lives. It is precisely that context and the psychological and emotional impact of life as a subject of oft-conflicting authorities and ideologies that act as the starting point for understanding why Shikongo might have chosen to perform “The Song of Chief Iipumbu.” This essay operates on some basic assumptions about the nature and function of Shikongo’s oshitewo specifically and African oral literature in general. It follows the conclusions of several theorists who conceive of the genre as a form of social and political commentary that offer an opportunity to object to and come to terms with exploitative power relations. Thus, African oral performance serves as a method of cultural resistance, one by which people largely lacking in power seek to redefine their own positions in relation to those who possess and trade in that precious commodity. It is a field on which power relations are projected, contested, and re-worked. Through the form, manner, and specific words chosen by the performer it has the ability “to provoke, to move, to direct, to prevent, to overturn, and to recast social reality.”55 African poetry and song in particular have been understood by scholars as a means by which performers address grievances or imbalances in power. The “artistic medium of the song is a way by which the singers hope to influence while at the same time avoiding the open danger of speaking directly. The con- ventionality of the song makes it possible to indicate publically what could not

54 Becker, “Let Me Come Tell You,” 248. 55 Graham Furniss and Liz Gunner, eds., Power and Marginality and African Oral Literature (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3.

Religion & TheologyDownloaded 25 from (2018) Brill.com09/24/2021 258–297 03:44:40PM via free access singing “the song of chief iipumbu” 275 be said privately or to a man’s face.”56 The mise-en-scene of the performance – the entire staging of the event, including the placement of the performer in a room or on a stage, the movements of her body, and her interaction with the audience – contributes to the way in which the singer or poet is able to mask or reveal the meaning of her words, or to confuse an audience by offering staging and text that seem disconsonant.57 This idea that certain genres of speech can be used to say what cannot be said is central to James Scott’s concept of “the hidden transcript,”58 which holds significant relevance here. Scott argues that the speech of subordinate peoples changes in structure and content depending on its audience. “Every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a ‘hidden transcript’ that repre- sents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant.”59 That critique acts as a release valve for the tensions of living a bifurcated existence – feigning compliance with imperial strictures while internally longing for freedom from them. Thus, transgressive performance emerges out of the conflict between the desperate desire to speak and the necessity of staying silent. “Far from an inchoate scream of rage,” the hidden transcript consists of calculating and strategically deployed commentary on exploitative power relations.60 It is “a finely drawn world … turned upside down.”61 According to Scott, rarely does the hidden transcript make its way into clear speech; instead, it emerges covertly, under cover of clever language and semantic misdirection. It emerges slowly but persistently, in a process that Scott, referencing George Elliot’s Adam Bede, calls “dribbling your mind out by the

56 Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, World Oral Literature Series 1 (Cambridge: Open Book, 2012), 268. 57 As Finnegan writes, “Quite apart from the separate question of the overtones and symbolic associations of words and phrases, the actual enactment of the poem also involves the emotional situation … the singer’s beauty of her voice, her sobs, facial expression, vocal expressiveness and movements …,” Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 5. Unfortunately, the lack of commentary from Dammann as well as photographic or other visual repre- sentations of Shikongo’s performance, means that this aspect of her presentation, and therefore a crucial opportunity for greater understanding of her meaning and motives, is lost to us. 58 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT; London: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1990). While Scott’s book has some considerable flaws – an overgeneraliza- tion of his primary categories of power, dominant and subordinate; an underdevelopment of the concept of “public” – his attention to the layered and variegated nature of language is insightful and does much to illuminate the manner in which Shikongo’s oshitewo func- tions. Of particular relevance are the “Introduction” and chs. 1–3. 59 Scott, Domination, xii. 60 Scott, Domination, 6. 61 Scott, Domination, 6.

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 276 crews sly.”62 This deliberate leak is simultaneously less satisfying and less dangerous than the alternative full-on rush of resentment and protest, and allows for the speaker to exercise some degree of resistance while maintaining a safe distance from the possibility of direct discovery. The hidden transcript is most often revealed through acts of everyday resistance, including the critique of the dominant through song.63 For Scott, it is nearly impossible for a subordinate person to identify with opposing ideologies. Rather, he would state that the public transcript is necessarily a contrived facade for sharply divergent internal emotions of resentment, anger, and even hatred. I would argue instead that the “transcript” Shikongo makes public is a product of the conflict and comingling of resentment and sympathy, protest and affirmation. In order to understand Shikongo’s performance and the broader context of twentieth century colonial Namibia, it is crucial to understand, as was noted above, that Christianity and the other trappings of white society were likely not simply invasive species for which Shikongo felt revulsion and resistance. Rather, they may have been very real and vibrant aspects of her identity that, because they were often at odds with others, required active consideration and “domestication.”64 Like Scott, in his theory of rituals of rebellion, anthropologist Max Gluck- man also considers the way in which tensions and resentments are addressed through corrosive speech acts and/or performances. In Rituals of Rebellion in Southeast Africa, Gluckman analyses instances in which subordinate groups displayed dramatic transgressive attitudes and behaviors toward their super- ordinates, reversing in performative fashion the standard structure of societal hierarchies.65 This “patent acting of fundamental conflicts both in the social structure and in individual psyches” was “believed to achieve good for the

62 Scott, Domination, 9. 63 Considerable work has been done on everyday resistance via song in the context of North American slavery. See Eugene D. Genovese’s classic text, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1976). See also Kerran L. Sanger, “Slave Resis- tance and Rhetorical Self-Definition: Spirituals as Strategy,” Western Journal of Communi- cation 59, no. 3 (1995): 177–192, doi:10.1080/10570319509374516, and Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, Gen- der and American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC; London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 64 On domestication, see Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 65 Gluckman’s Frazer Lecture was first published in 1954 as Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa, The Frazer Lecture, 1952 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954). It was later included in Max Gluckman, Order and Rebellion inTribal Africa. Collected Essays, with an Autobiographical Introduction (New York, NY: Free Press, 1963). The latter is cited here.

Religion & TheologyDownloaded 25 from (2018) Brill.com09/24/2021 258–297 03:44:40PM via free access singing “the song of chief iipumbu” 277 community.”66 Gluckman concludes, drawing on Aristotle, that these rituals of rebellion served a cathartic function in which the open acknowledgement of resentments through ritual achieved a kind of cleansing effect, reducing social tensions and ultimately achieving a renewed societal balance and re- affirmation of hierarchy. Acknowledging the fissures in society – especially when they had the greatest potential to destabilize it – and then moving past them, achieved a cultural reunification that simply ignoring them could not.67 The narrative these theories conjure is one in which subjugated peoples deploy skillfully crafted critiques of their oppressors in order to discipline stifling emotions and environments. Those critiques provide a measure of release from internal and social tensions and allow the speakers to maintain the appearance of obedience or right relations with those about whom they speak.68 That narrative offers a cogent explanation for why Shikongo might have chosen to risk her own reputation and wellbeing to mount so harsh an exposition of power relations in Owambo, and to have done so in the form of an oshitewo. By briefly unveiling her version of a hidden transcript through an art form reserved for cultural commentary and criticism, Shikongo offered considerable objection to – and, in turn, may have produced the ability to accept – the fraught condition of her life, and the lives of other Ovawambo, who simultaneously suffered and succeeded under South African colonialism. This, in turn, may have provided her with the temporary renewal of (internal) psychic and (external) social cohesion. Despite the profoundly corrosive nature of her speech, historical evidence gives no indication that Shikongo was ever in any way sanctioned for her performance of “The Song of Chief Iipumbu.” Nothing in either of the Dammanns’ notes or journals suggests that anyone present at the performance reacted neg- atively (or positively, for that matter) to “The Song of Chief Iipumbu.” This is

66 Gluckman, Order and Rebellion, 117. 67 Here Gluckman makes a key distinction between revolution and rebellion: revolution is a means of rending the social fabric in order to reconstitute it in an altered form, with new super- and subordinates. Rebellion, on the other hand, is a means of affirming and strengthening the social fabric by attending to and repairing points of weakness, leaving intact the systems of hierarchy that structure the society in question. Without these rituals of rebellion the underlying hostilities would have erupted into daily life, foment- ing revolution and thereby creating irrevocable damage to the society in which they occur. 68 In Gluckman’s case, this momentary overturning of the status quo is done with the full knowledge and support of those in power.

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 278 crews likewise the case of local mission and colonial documents, in which there is no mention at all of Shikongo’s oshitewo, despite the likelihood of missionaries having been invited. Shikongo’s relationship with the Europeans of the Oniipa area ostensibly remained unchanged after the Dammanns returned to Germany. Although it is quite likely that her son Leonard Auala was present at Shikongo’s session, and certain that he knew the content of her song, neither Shikongo’s family nor friends recall Shikongo having ever performed “The Song of Chief Iipumbu,” nor any other song in the oshitewo art form.69 How is it possible that Shikongo was able to escape punishment for speaking scornfully of the very people who commissioned and may have even attended her performance?To answer this question we must turn to the specific mechanics of the poem.

4 Multivalent Language and Imagery

Shikongo made use of flexible and varied language in “The Song of Chief Iipumbu,” such that many of its central terms or phrases could be molded to listeners’ expectations and understandings of morality,modernity,and sovereignty. The meaning of its language was open for interpretation, and so a potential member of the audience could have engaged the performance from his or her own nuanced perspective, while simultaneously and paradoxically, Shikongo’s clever selection of popular or significant terms could give the impression that her meaning was obvious. This flexible language might have conveyed one thing to a missionary, another to a colonial official, and something else entirely to an Owambo, to say nothing of the gender, class, and other differences that divide each of those groups. Take, for example, the following sentence: “Tal’ ihuuna tiyi longwa pondjugo.”70

69 Shikongo’s friends and family members who were interviewed by Becker in the 1990s, including Shikongo’s favorite niece (who was already an adult in 1953), claimed to have no memory of “The Song of King Iipumbu.” Even when presented with the audio recording in which Dammann names Shikongo as the performer of the oshitewo those interviewed were reluctant to believe that “Mother Loide” had crafted such a song. Becker posits that in the minds of Shikongo’s relatives her reputation as a Christian woman was at odds with the perception of the oshitewo as a pagan art form. For more see Becker, “Let Me Come Tell You,” 243. 70 Shikongo, Line 14.

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Oshiwambo Tala iihuna tiyi longwa po ondjugo. Grammatical verb noun; relative, verb; preposition; noun, Information 2p singular plural; plural, present locative; sing; imperative; def: horrors, def: that, continual def: in, at def: clay def: look disasters, which passive; building, (at), attend, horrible or def: being brick build- watch filthy things done, being ing, mission committed house, colonial headquar- ters, sleeping hut Literal Transla- (You,) look (the) horrors that are being at the building. tion at done

A direct, literal translation of this sentence might read, “You!, look at the horrible things being done at the brick building.” But what are the horrible things, and who is doing them, and to whom, and why? What is the brick building? Who is its owner and why is it, in particular, the site of horrors? The lack of specificity here allows for multiple interpretations, each of which corresponds to the assumptions and experiences of potential listeners. Let us begin with the word ondjugo. The word most literally means “building or house of clay.” It can also be translated as “brick building.” Until the 1920s, Ovawambo homesteads were constructed of wood with thatched roofs; only Europeans built brick houses. Ondjugo was often used to refer generally to mission or colonial buildings, and sometimes to those on settler farms. It was also sometimes specifically used for the dormitories that housed children on the mission and men at centers of migrant labor.71 After the 1920’s, the term was also used refer to the sleeping huts on Ovawambo homesteads, as large numbers of Ovawambo began to convert to Christianity and build brick houses. It is likely that anyone present, even someone with a limited grasp of Oshiwambo, would have understood through exposure to colloquial use that ondjugo referred to a European-style structure. Whether the word was translated as “mission building” or “government building” or “sleeping hut” would have depended on the specific audience member. Shikongo further complicates this translation by employing the term ombonge immediately following and, in later stanzas of the poem, almost inter-

71 Conversations with Anna Ashipala and Mwenda Shivute, Oshikuku, Namibia, January 2011.

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 280 crews changeably with ondjugo. Ombonge is more specific than ondjugo and was generally used only to refer to mission buildings or the mission more generally.72 In the lines about her son Nangolo, Shikongo states “Nangolo dhomulelwa pondjugo/ ondhomulelwa pondjugo mpa,/ pombonge …” “Nangolo was raised at the ondjugo, he was raised at this ondjugo/ at the ombonge.” The close association here of ondjugo and ombonge suggests that, for these lines, “sleeping hut” is not the most logical definition for the term. Shikongo’s son Nangolo spent much of his young life at the Finnish mission in Oniipa, and was thus “he was raised at the brick building, at the brick building, at the mission,” not on a homestead or in an Owambo house.73 The other words in this sentence from Shikongo’s poem are equally ambiguous but also seemingly obvious. The word “iihuna,” which I have translated as “horrible things” could have a number of meanings: disasters, catastrophes, horrible or disgusting things. It has been variously used to describe male violence against women or children, uninitiated pregnancies, rape, and the eating of donkey flesh.74 The word appears in colonial documents as a signifier of certain types of supposedly aberrant sexual activity. It is this meaning that missionaries in particular might have embraced. The word “longwa,” the passive construction of the verb longa (infinitive kulonga) can mean being done, being worked, or even being learned. The term is often used in reference to agriculture (e.g., “the fields must be worked”) and to school tasks (e.g., “these lessons must be learned”). Thus, this sentence could be read, “Look at the horrible things being learned at the sleeping hut/brick building” or “Look at the horrible things being done at the mission.” Even the word “tal” has several possible readings. While it is unquestion- ably the imperative form of the verb “to look” (okutala), one could argue that

72 Becker refers to the “ombonge” as “the signifier of white supremacy” in Shikongo’s poem. Becker, “Let Me Come Tell You,” 239. 73 Both Dammann and Tirronnen’s and Becker’s translations employ more than one meaning of ondjugo. When it is found in lines about Iipumbu and etanda, the male initiation ritual, they define ondjugo as Schlaffhütte and “sleeping hut” respectively. In the context of Shikongo’s sons, they translate it as “Pflegebefohlenen auf der Missionsstation” and “brick building.” This highlights the flexibility of Shikongo’s language and the way in which certain terms could be variously understood depending upon listeners’ interests and assumptions, including a new generation of readers with academic concerns. In my own translation of this line I have chosen to follow Becker, maintaining the multivalence of the poem’s language and the wide scope of Shikongo’s critique by translating ondjugu as “brick building” in both contexts. 74 Interview with Theophelius Haufiku and Anna Ashipala, Oshikuku, Namibia, 8 February 2011.

Religion & TheologyDownloaded 25 from (2018) Brill.com09/24/2021 258–297 03:44:40PM via free access singing “the song of chief iipumbu” 281 the object of the command is unclear.75 Who is being commanded to look? Shikongo occasionally uses Iipumbu’s name, but not at every command, and so it is possible to conclude that she speaks to more than one person in these lines. Perhaps the implied object of the command is not a specific “you,” but a general one, and thus could have served as a means of commanding all its listeners, even without their knowledge. As previously stated, Shikongo’s use of such ambiguous language could have resulted in a number of conceptions of the meaning of the sentence “Tal’ ihuuna tiyi longwa pondjugo.” Dammann and Tirronnen translated the sentence as “Blicke auf die schauerlichen Dinge, die bei der Schlafhütte gemacht werden” (“Look at the horrible things that are done at the sleeping hut/cabin”). For Becker, it reads, “Look at the disgusting things being done at the sleeping hut.” For missionaries, this sentence might have conjured associations with pagan rituals and an assumed inherent and deviant African sexuality, one that would have inspired behaviors like pre-marital sexual relations or sexually oriented initiation rites like ohango/efundula that missionaries constantly struggled to eradicate in their converts. Thus, the sentence could have been understood as something like, “You! [Iipumbu], look at the filthy things being done in the sleeping hut [because of initiation]” or “You![Iipumbu], look at the filthy things being done at the mission, thanks to your pagan influence and corrupt traditions.” For colonial officials, it might have referenced the violence Iipumbu unleashed on the colonial village, and thus could have been understood as something similar to, “You! [Iipumbu], look at the horrible things being done [by you and your militia] at our settlement.” There are obviously other possible groups or subgroups in Shikongo’s audience, many of whom surely claimed more complicated allegiances than the above translations allow, and thus for each there is a correspondingly idiosyn- cratic translation of the poem. The main point here, however, is that listeners’ unproblematized – and likely unexamined – autobiographical assumptions about Shikongo’s meaning might have allowed her to pronounce her more critical notions outright without the risk of being discovered. The openness of these lines also reflects the ambivalence Shikongo might herself have felt about the various people and institutions implicated within them. As a Christian woman whose daily life and identity were deeply interwoven with the mission and the government, Shikongo is very likely criticizing Iipumbu’s violence against his (and her) people and against the missionaries

75 “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” was transcribed with the diction, elisions, and rhythms of its oral performance intact. Thus, the written second person imperative verb tala (infinitive: okutala) appears here as tal’.

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 282 crews and colonial officials who resided in the brick buildings. On the other hand, as an Ovawambo noble who was born into a non-Christian family and maintained strong ties to her pagan relatives, and who witnessed the steady subjugation of her gender and her race at the hands of Europeans, Shikongo could just as well be criticizing the mission and colonial leadership. She may have been referring to any number of horrors: missionary prohibition of Ovawambo traditions; physical and sexual violence against locals; forced labor in colonial mines; interference in native politics; Iipumbu’s persecution and murder of his own people. Thus, her own understanding of the sentence (and possibly those of some other Ovawambo listening to the oshitewo) may have been something like “You, Iipumbu, look at the horrors you have done [to my people] at the mission/colonial village,” or “You, Iipumbu, look at the disgusting things being done at the sleeping hut [because of pagan initiation rituals]” or “You (imperial authorities), look at the horrible things being done by you at the mission/colonial village” or “You, Iipumbu, look at the horrible things being done by these foreigners at the mission/colonial village.”

5 Subversive Bricolage

The second technique Shikongo employs to mask her criticism of authority is what Jean Comaroff terms “subversive bricolage”: the borrowing of symbols or practices from across social strata and ideological divides to create new cultural identities that are opposed to and sometimes in revolt against the dominant authority.76 These symbols and practices (and in Shikongo’s case, discourses) are then used to actively reorder and destabilize the accepted hierarchy, giv- ing new opportunities for power to other individuals or groups. Scott describes this strategy as “using the cultural raw materials” of the oppressor in an ironic or contradictory fashion.77 An example of this technique appears in the first lines of the poem, which read as follows:

Wait, let me come to tell you Allow me to tell you You, Iipumbu, wake up Wake up and see the initiation of men

76 Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance, 11. 77 Scott, Domination, 6.

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Wake up and see the initiation of men Look at the horrors being done in the sky Wake up and see the airplane The plane, is moving up in the sky The long-legged ones have settled in the fields The long-legged ones are settling on the oshana It’s you they have been told about You, it’s you they have been told about You, Iipumbu, wake up Wake up and see the initiation of men Look at the horrible/filthy things being done at the brick building/sleeping hut Wake up and see the initiation of men78

Shikongo is highly skilled at creative re-appropriation of colonial discourse. She centers her oshitewo on a figure whose condemnation is virtually universal in the white community, and she does so on the grounds of her affiliation with Christianity. As previously discussed, the prevailing mission stance on female speech was similar to that of the government and, eventually, the village council: it was prohibited except on rare occasions, and only then in very prescribed and monitored settings. Where the colonial state and evolving gender structures (both local and European) insisted upon female silence, Shikongo’s identification as a devout Christian afforded her the right to speak critically of Iipumbu. Further, the historical opposition between the church and Iipumbu, pagan lothario and persecutor of innocent Christians, trumped the expected comportment of women. Shikongo, in having chosen Iipumbu as the target of her critique, crafted for herself limited but valuable access to power. Had she chosen a different subject for her scorn, this may not have been the case.79 She begins her oshitewo with a command that King Iipumbu yaShilongo wait and listen to what she has to tell him. Immediately she asserts her authority as

78 Shikongo, Lines 1–17. Andiy’ u tale, ndi mu lombwele/ andiya ndi mu lombwele/ ngoye Iipumbu, penduka/ penduk’,u tal’ etanda/ penduk’,u tal’ etanda/ tal’ iihuna tiyi longwa pombanda/ penduk’,u tale ondhila/ Nelomba tay’ ende pombanda/ gamugulu og’ itula omaana/ gamugulu otag’ itula oshaana/ ongoye ga lombwelwa/ ngoye, ongoye ga lombwelwa/ ngoye Iipumbu, penduka/ u penduk’, u tal’ etanda/ tal’ iihuna tiyi longwa pondjugo/ penduk’, u tal’ etanda/ penduk’, u tal’ etanda. 79 Becker’s analysis of “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” deals closely and far more elegantly with this issue of Shikongo’s appropriation of colonial discourses, particularly as it applies to the question of Shikongo’s relationship to her own gender identity. See Becker, “Let Me Come Tell You,” 249–254.

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 284 crews someone who has the right to arrest the motion of a king and bend his ear to her concerns – “Wait, let me come tell you/ You, Iipumbu, wake up.”80 This command and others regarding Iipumbu’s acknowledgement of her speech are found throughout the poem. Shikongo frames her rejection of Iipumbu’s politics and actions on the grounds of his violence against Christians and the mission. She appropriates Christian discourse about local “pagan” rites to vilify and shame Iipumbu, who actively fought to maintain those rites and threatened (and possibly even took) the lives of those who sought to avoid it out of Christian devotion. Her references to “the initiation of men” (etanda) are open to the importation of the mission’s perspective of the practice, “a horrid signifier of paganism” and sexual depravity.81 The oshitewo insists that Iipumbu “look at the horrible things being done at the brick building.”82 As previously stated, what precisely these “horrible” things are and which building Shikongo means in this sentence are left undetermined. One could also argue that by mocking the king and his failed attempts to preserve etanda, Shikongo is also mocking the colonial government, particularly Native Commissioner Hahn, who, like Iipumbu, failed in his campaign to preserve etanda and efundula. So, too, did he fail in his plans for using Ovawambo women and tradition to lure Owambo men back to their homes at the end of their labor contracts. Shikongo, as an educated woman living at the center of the colonial project in Owambo, was surely aware of these motivations and tensions and may have effectively exploited them here. A third interpretation is also possible. While it is quite likely that Shikongo is actually criticizing Iipumbu here and that, as a devoted Christian, she might have objected to some traditional practices associated with non-Christian religion, it is also possible that her disapproval in this passage is as much for missionaries as for the king. By the 1950s, when Shikongo performed “The Song of Chief Iipumbu,” etanda and many aspects of ohango/efundula had all but dis- appeared from Ovawambo ritual practice. In the same manner that “the long legged ones … settled in the fields [and] the oshanas,” displacing local residents and infrastructure as they went, they likewise eradicated rites of initiation and similar traditions that defined what it meant to be Ovawambo. “Look at the horrible things been done in the brick buildings” might just as well have referred to the mission’s systematic destruction of tradition, broadly writ. A similar meaning is conveyed if longwa is translated not as “being done” but “being learned.”

80 Shikongo, Lines 1–2. 81 Becker, “Let Me Come Tell You,” 246. 82 Shikongo, Lines 13–15.

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Here the “brick building” is the mission, not the sleeping hut, and “the horrible things being learned” are not pagan rites, but European values and norms. Thus, through her play with words, Shikongo makes it possible that, in addition to/under the guise of scorn, this portion of the poem conveys nostalgia for a time when Ovawambo traditions were free from European influence. A second example of Shikongo’s use of subversive bricolage appears in the following portion of the oshitewo:

Yes, Nangolo, the one raised at the mission The one raised at this mission At the brick house Where he is not an offspring …

I feel sorry No, no. At the place of mercy No, no. At the place of mercy Nangolo, the one raised at the mission At the brick house where he is not an offspring …

I have Victor The one is over there He is the one who went to Swakopmund He went to get the cloth Jersey, underpants, and waistcoat … Ask the people They know nothing about the place …

Nelomba, is the one over there … Nelomba, is the one over there83

In this excerpt Shikongo makes reference to three of her five sons, all of whom have left their natal home to reside in ideologically and geographically distant places. For Shikongo, this is a cause of both grief and joy. Her son Nangolo

83 Shikongo, Lines 88–110. Ee, Nangolog dhomulelwa pondjugo/ ondhomulelwa pondjugo mpa,/ pombonge ke shi muvalwa gwapo./ondi uvit/ ohenda,/ aaw’ aawe, pohenda, aaw’ aawe,pohenda./Nangologdhomulelwapondjugo,/pombonge,keshimuvalwagwapo.ndina gwaWikitori,/ nguyaa e li hwiya./oongwiy’ a ya kuMoonda/ okwa ka tal’ elapi,/ mbinza nuundholo ‘peleyi/ wa pula aantu,/ kaye shi kosha,/ Nelomba ngwiy’ a shinga hwiya./ Nelomba ngwiy’ a shinga hwiya.

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 286 crews has gone to live at the mission, “the place of mercy.” For most youth who converted to Christianity and were educated at the mission school, ties to traditional Ovawambo culture were quickly severed, and intimacy with biological families was often curtailed. That Shikongo calls the mission the place “where [Nangolo] is not an offspring” hints at this painful separation from her son.84 It also acknowledges the value of Nangolo’s connections. Christianity and the missionaries took away her son, but they also conferred upon him (and, by extension, his mother) an elite status unattainable for many of their association. She crafts a similarly elegant double narrative in her discussion of her son Victor, “the one who went to Swakopmund/he went to get the cloth/jersey underpants, and waistcoat.” Shikango claims that Victor’s choice to leave home was motivated by his desire for cloth, a commodity that was introduced by Europeans and functioned as a new marker of elite status – both economic and religious – in the shifting landscape of Ovawambo society.85 Victor wanted underpants and a jersey waistcoat, the style of dress typically reserved for Ovawambo with Christian educations.86 It is unclear whether Victor traveled to Swakopund only to buy cloth, or whether his desire for cloth and its sign value led him to accept a labor contract that took him to the city for work. In either case, Victor left the known world to travel south. Swakopmund, the former cultural stronghold of German colonialism, was nearly nine hundred kilometers from Shikango’s home at Oniipa and was situated precariously “on the boundaries” of the Ovawambo world, both geographically and con- ceptually. “Ask the people/they know nothing about the place.” Swakopmund would have been unknown and unknowable to many of “the people” – Oni-

84 Nangolo is the birth name of the son who was christened Leonard Auala. Auala went on to become the first Namibian bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (ELCIN). Incidentally, the Wikipedia page for Auala states that “he was raised by Lutheran missionaries from Finland.” There is no mention of Shikongo or her role in Auala’s life. See “Leonard Auala,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard _Auala. 85 See McKittrick’s discussion of the function of cloth in the rapidly evolving economy and social structure of Owambo in McKittrick, To Dwell Secure, 174–176. 86 In her book on colonial and postcolonial Zaire Nancy Rose Hunt addresses individuals like Victor. Her concept of “middle figures” – those with privileged access to the materials most intimately associated with colonialism (cloth, soap, hospital medicine) – does much to illuminate Shikongo’s ambivalence about Victor’s journeys to Swakopmund. See Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo, Body, Commodity, Text. Studies in Objectifying Practice (Durham, NC; London: Duke Uni- versity Press, 1999).

Religion & TheologyDownloaded 25 from (2018) Brill.com09/24/2021 258–297 03:44:40PM via free access singing “the song of chief iipumbu” 287 ipa’s residents, Shikongo and Victor’s relatives, less well-educated Ovawambo – and Victor’s travels there marked him with the unknown and unknowable, too. Shikongo’s youngest son, Nelomba, “is the one over there.” This sentence is doubly indicative, as Nelomba was the nickname of Shikongo’s son Filippus and is also the Oshiwambo word for bird and plane. Filippus earned the moniker after colonial officials sent him by air to work in Oranjemund in the far southern tip of Namibia, making him one of the only Ovawambo of the time to have ever flown on a plane. According to Becker, people in the area remembered this fact decades later.87 The word nelomba serves a crucial function in the oshitewo. It is perhaps the greatest single-term locus of Shikongo’s ambivalence about the circum- stances of colonial Owambo. It has at least four possible literal referents: 1: Fil- lipus, 2: the plane for which he is named, 3: the planes that bombed Iipumbu’s compounds, and 4: the colonial state’s use of planes to surveil and frighten its Owambo subjects. Beyond this, nelomba might have numerous symbolic meanings: Western technology, modernity, migrant labor, violence, European interference in Owambo politics, Christian triumph over a pagan king, and the separation of Shikongo from her son. The “plane” brings wealth, status, and progress, but it threatens Ovawambo sovereignty and tradition and separates a mother from her son. Modernity gives, but it takes away. This constant balance between gains and losses permeates the stanzas on Shikongo’s son. In each of their successes, they become more distant from her. For Nangolo, his choice of the mission as new home means he renounces most ties to his natal village, his traditions, and his family; for Victor, his pursuit of European trappings of material wealth has taken him beyond the boundaries of his world to a place where his culture has no value or purview; for Nelomba, his work in the mines in Oranjemund have taken him even farther than Victor, to the limits of the earth and beyond. Shikongo’s grief and ambivalence, however, are mingled with pride and are coded in language that Europeans could and likely would have understood as celebratory, not elegiac. For your child to live in the place of mercy, and for him to become God’s child instead of your own, is a cause for joy. For your other sons to travel to distant cities in pursuit of wealth and modernity – these are noble acts. All of these losses ultimately bring greater gains in the form of respect, status, and salvation. Ultimately, Shikongo so skillfully manipulated two critical semantic and literary strategies – 1: multivalent language and imagery, and 2: a subversive brico-

87 Becker, “‘Let Me Come Tell You’,” 247.

Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 258–297 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 03:44:40PM via free access 288 crews lage of terminology and concerns appropriated from European and Ovawambo discourse – that her audience could never clearly discern the specific criticisms masked under the rhetoric about Iipumbu. In a poetic sleight of hand, she obscured her more radical intentions behind a character whose condemnation is a familiar and popular refrain among both colonialists and Owambos, leaving her audience unaware of her true intentions while nonetheless accom- plishing a measure of relief for her own internal tensions. Her performance could thus have been viewed by anyone in attendance as an example of historical commentary and censure for a bad king, nothing more.

6 Conclusion

This essay has sought to demonstrate the manner in which one woman, subject as she was to a complex and often conflicting set of institutions, might have used oral literature to speak (veiled) truth to power. Through artful language and the appropriation of themes from dominant discourse, Nekwaya Loide Shikongo might have made public the “hidden transcript” of her existence in colonial Owamboland. Like the Zulu women and Swazi subjects of Gluckman’s essay, Shikongo could have acted transgressively not to remake the order of society, but to come to terms with it. It is possible that her oshitewo allowed her to momentarily accept and domesticate the psychological and social tensions that inevitably arose from her position as a Christian African woman in patriarchal colonial Namibia, making it possible to return to relative (albeit likely only temporary) harmony and good stead with the individuals and institutions toward whom she directed her critique. “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” is an illustration of the entangled nature of life as a colonial subject. It is filled with grief and triumph, loss and celebra- tion, censure and approval, all interwoven into flexible, multivalent language and images. It makes public the multiplicity of emotions and allegiances that make up Shikongo’s identity and molds them into something apprehendable and manageable. To that end Shikongo spoke when she could no longer keep silent, but in a voice that only she could hear. Shikongo’s performance was an act of astounding bravery. To contradict the dominant narrative of history in which white Europeans saved and civilized the wretched Ovawambo, and to do so in a form that had been outlawed by those who held great power over her social standing and wellbeing, was unques- tionably courageous. Shikongo succeeded in voicing her grievances against oppressive authorities and, through her remarkable skill with language and song, escaped sanction or punishment. This is a triumph.

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It is a triumph, but only a momentary one, because Shikongo’s performance was simultaneously and paradoxically also an act of tragedy.88 It produced no significant material change in her situation or the situations of other Ovawam- bo, many of whom, despite the reality of their close and valuable ties to Euro- pean institutions and their creative responses to colonialism, nonetheless suffered greatly under the South African imperial government. More significantly, while Shikongo’s successful appropriation of white, Christian discourses allowed her to achieve momentary access to a kind of power, it ultimately rein- scribed the very limits of that power. In relying on forms and ideologies that argued for and were central to the oppression of those like herself, Shikongo tightened the very bonds against which she struggled. This is not to argue that there was any other option for Shikongo’s protest. Even were it possible to cleanly separate identities that were so deeply entangled, to offer direct reproach of missionaries and the colonial government would surely have resulted in a loss of social, economic, and even bodily secu- rity. A momentary act of outright defiance might have meant years of further suffering.This is the greatest tragedy of Shikongo’s performance: that, while she was acutely aware of the systems of power that operated in colonial Owambo and the often exploitative manner in which she was subject to them, a speech behind her hand that would be remembered by virtually no one was the most cathartic and radical option available to her. I would argue that emphasizing this comingling of triumph and tragedy, as Shikongo herself does, is to do justice to her performance. When we, as scholars, concentrate solely or primarily on the heroic aspects of anti-colonial (or anti-fascist or anti-patriarchal, etc.) performances, when we read them solely through an analytic of hope, we lose the opportunity to critically examine the self-perpetuation of power and the ways in which colonial – and, I would argue, simply human – subjects are sometimes interpellated into the reproduction of the conditions of their own oppression. To cast our narratives in the mode of tragedy, as they so often demand and we so often resist, opens up the possibility for productive engagement with these realities and better allows us to trace the boundaries of human power, agency, and resistance.

88 Tragedy, as I use it here, is not meant to indicate a rigid generic mode of literature or performance, but rather a general trend toward elements and affect of grief, sadness, and/or pain.

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The Song of Chief Iipumbu (Appendix A)

Wait, let me come to tell you Allow me to tell you You, Iipumbu, wake up Wake up and see the initiation of men Wake up and see the initiation of men Look at the horrible things being done in the sky Wake up and see the airplane The airplane is moving up in the sky The long-legged ones have settled in the fields The long-legged ones are settling on the oshana It’s you they have been told about You, it’s you they have been told about You, Iipumbu, wake up Wake up and see the initiation of men Look at the horrors being done at the brick building Wake up and see the initiation of men Wake up and see the initiation of men Are you feeling sorry for yourself? Are you feeling sorry for yourself? You, are you feeling sorry for yourself? You, you brought it upon yourself You brought it on yourself You brought it on yourself The big-legged are settling over the oshana You brought it on yourself Don’t you want to see? Don’t you want to see? Your friends related Your friends related How the big legged are settling over the oshana settling over the oshana settling over the oshana

You, Iipumbu, wake up! You, Iipumbu Rise and witness the horrors moving up in the sky moving up in the sky as the big legged settle on the oshana

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You, Iipumbu, wake up You are feeling sorry for yourself You are feeling sorry for yourself It is obvious the big legged have been told about you It is you they have been told about It is you they have been told about The big legged have been told about you

You, Iipumbu, wake up You, Iipumbu, wake up You brought it on yourself You brought it on yourself The way the big legged are sitting in the oshana O! Look and witness the initiation of men Look and witness the initiation of men O! Look at witness the plane Nelomba, moving in the sky Nelomba, moving in the sky Nelomba, moving in the sky

Apparently, they have been informed about you It is you they have been told about When you brought it upon yourself You brought it upon yourself It is you the big-legged have been told about I feel sorry for you I feel sorry for you I feel sorry for you What a pity! Iipumbu Wake up Get out and look at the initiation of men Witness the horrors being done in the sky Iye, ye ye ya ye Iye ya ye ye ya ye ye ye

The brick buildings are standing The brick buildings are standing The big legged The brick buildings are standing You, you are the one they have been told about

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I feel sorry for you I feel sorry for you You, you were told You, you were told

What a pity! Iipumbu, wake up! What a pity! Iipumbu, wake up! What a pity! Iipumbu Rise and witness the horrors Being carried out up in the sky Being carried out up in the sky A Royal was made to suffer A Royal was made to suffer The big legged, the ones that move in the sky The ones that move in the sky When the big legged-move in the sky

I am about to tell you I am about to tell you I am about to tell you I have my staybehinders and restarters I have my staybehinders I have my staybehinders

Yes, Nangolo, the one raised at the brick building The one raised at this brick building At the mission Where he is not an offspring Iye, ye ye ya ye Iye ya ye ye ya ye ye ye

I feel sorry No, no. At the place of mercy No, no. At the place of mercy Nangolo, the one raised at the brick building At the mission where he is not an offspring Iye ye ye ye ye

I have Victor The one is over there

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He is the one who went to Swakopmund He went to get the cloth Jersey, underpants, and waistcoat Iye ye ye ye ye Ask the people They know nothing about the place Iye, ye ye ye ye They are on the boundaries He goes with his friends Iye ye ye ye ye At the boundaries At Ombwala ya Mbwenge Iye ye ye ye ye He is reading the people of Omundaungulo and Ombala ya Mbwenge Iye ye ye ye ya, Iye ye ye ya ye ye ye ya, Iye ye ye ya ya ye ye Why don’t you say: “Are you nostalgic?” Iye, ye, ye, ye, ya, ye

Kambonde, my middle one, you are grown Iye, ye, ye ya ye, ye You are so proud to the point of disrespect You are so proud to the point of disrespect With the cockiness of your male peers Iye ye ye ya, Iye ye ya ye ye ya, Iye ye ye ye ye

Nelomba is the one over there Iye ye ye ya ye Nelomba is the one over there Iye ye ye ya ye ye

I feel sorry Iye ye ye ya ye ye A Royal was made to suffer You, Iipumbu, wake up You, Iipumbu, Wake up and witness the horrors

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Look at the airplane Look at the big airplane The airplane is moving up in the sky Is moving up in the sky Is moving up in the sky The big legged have been told about you Iye ye ye ya, iye ye ye ye ya ya, iye ye ya ye ye ye ye ye ye ya

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