Exile History: an Ethnography of the Swapo Camps and the Namibian Nation
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EXILE HISTORY: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE SWAPO CAMPS AND THE NAMIBIAN NATION by Christian A. Williams A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology and History) in the University of Michigan 2009 Doctoral Committee: Professor David W. Cohen, Chair Associate Professor Alaina M. Lemon Visiting Associate Professor Adam Philip Ashforth Professor Patricia Hayes, University of the Western Cape Assistant Professor Miriam I. Ticktin, The New School Acknowledgements Since I first entered Namibia in January 2000, innumerable people have contributed to my thinking about and preparation of “Exile History,” a few of whom I would like to acknowledge here. First, I must thank persons affiliated with St. Therese Junior Secondary School in Tses. There, as a WorldTeach volunteer, I found my first Namibian home and began to learn about what life had been like at the school for its former students, some of whom eventually traveled into exile. For the St. Therese alumni who have inspired and assisted my research over the past decade, I am very grateful. From these beginnings other communities have taken me under their wing. From Tses I moved to Cape Town where I found a supportive space to think through my volunteer experiences and write a Master's thesis at UCT's Department of Social Anthropology. More recently, I have been enrolled in the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. It has been a privilege to study in this Program, where I have found such a provocative and supportive group of people to share ideas with me. I would especially like to thank my dissertation advisor, David Cohen, and my other committee members, Adam Ashforth, Patricia Hayes, Alaina Lemon and Miriam Ticktin, for mentoring me over the past six years. I also appreciate the centers at Michigan which have supported my studies and research: the Rackham Graduate School, the Center for Afro-American and African Studies, and the International Institute. ii Several organizations and archives hosted me during the early stages of my studies at Michigan and have enriched my subsequent work. They include the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York, the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Cape Town, the African Studies Library at the University of Cape Town, the Basler Afrika Bibliographien in Basel, Switzerland and the Vereinigte Evangelische Mission in Wuppertal, Germany. Special thanks are due to Dag Henrichsen and Giorgio Miescher in Basel and Wolfgang Appelt and Siegfried Groth in Wuppertal for going out of their way to assist me during and since my initial visits. Most of the research for “Exile History” was conducted in Namibia from January 2007 to August 2008 with support from a US Fulbright Scholarship. During that period I affiliated with the History Department at the University of Namibia and organized a photo exhibition which was sponsored by the Archives of Anti-Colonial Resistance and the Liberation Struggle. I thank all who shared their histories of exile with me, especially those who agreed to participate in recorded interviews for a public record and whose names are listed in the dissertation's bibliography. Here, I would like to acknowledge several people who are not on this list but who have made these interviews and other aspects of my research possible. They are: Martha Akawa, George Beukes, Phillip Bolocoto, Raymond Castillo, Wolfram Gleichmar-Hartmann, Werner Hillebrecht, Justine Hunter, Grace Kandundu, Pauline Kruse, John Liebenberg, Antoinette Mostert, Lovisa Nampala, Vilho Shigwedha, Kontiki Silva, Jeremy Silvester and Josef Thomas. Special thanks are also due to Steve Swartbooi for aiding and inspiring me as a research assistant, to Salatiel and Anita Ailonga for hosting me so graciously while I studied their personal archives, and to Canner and Theopholous Kalimba for accompanying me on a most iii memorable journey to Cassinga. While writing the dissertation I have benefitted from the comments of participants in Michigan's African History Group, Anthropology and History Workshop, and “Reading the Pre-Modern,” where drafts of my chapters were discussed. I am also thankful to Patricia Hayes, Reinhart Köβler and Andre du Pisani, who invited me to present chapters and receive feedback at workshops which they convened. Workshops included two sessions of “War and the Everyday” at the University of the Western Cape and “Reconciliation and the Aftermath of War,” a meeting of scholars examining legacies of violence in Angola and Namibia. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my family. Through encouragement and acceptance, help in moments of crisis and long periods of separation and silence, they have supported me in this and all of my projects. To them, I simply say thank you. iv Foreword In 1960, as many Africans prepared for or celebrated their independence from colonial rule, inhabitants of Southern Africa continued to be governed by white minority regimes committed to retaining direct political control and suppressing resistance through violence. In this context, people from Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe began to travel into “exile,” a space located outside their country of origin. Most exiles settled in the “front-line states,” including Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia and, following their independence, Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, where those who represented national liberation movements were granted resources from various allies to lead a liberation war and to care for their fellow nationals in camps. Others received scholarships to study overseas, while still others represented their liberation movement in offices spread across the globe. As violence in Southern Africa intensified, so did migration of the region's people across international borders, with hundreds of thousands leaving their national “home” to live abroad over a period of thirty years. By late 1990, when South Africa's transition to democracy was well under way, most Southern African exiles had repatriated to their countries of origin. Representations of the exile past, however, have continued to proliferate. In the region, as elsewhere, post-colonial states rely on the history of a nation, formed through colonial rule and anti- colonial resistance, to govern their citizens. Central to the history of most Southern African nations is a narrative about the oppression which drove people into exile and the v sacrifices made by exiles to liberate their country of origin. As people interact in, and make claims on, Southern African nation-states, they relate to the socially accepted history of exile in different ways. They may appeal to it when it strengthens their position, elaborate on it when they have been excluded from it, or challenge its authority when it associates them with stigma. In the process, happenings in the past become a basis for mediating relationships between people in the present. It is this relationship between the exile past and present which I call “exile history.” This dissertation studies exile history through the camps administered by the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO), a Namibian liberation movement.1 Founded in the late 1950s as the Ovamboland People's Congress (OPC) by Namibians living in Cape Town, SWAPO assumed its current name in 1960 shortly after several of its leaders left Namibia for exile.2 During the early 1960s the organization established a headquarters in Dar es Salaam and diplomatic offices at the United Nations in New York and in other urban centers, from where it lobbied support for the organization's aim to free Namibia from South African colonial rule.3 It also began, with the support of the 1 After Namibian independence “SWAPO” renamed itself “Swapo Party.” Given its focus on exile history, this dissertation refers to “SWAPO” unless a clear distinction between the pre-independence liberation movement and the post-independence political party is intended. 2 The OPC was renamed the Ovamboland People's Organization (OPO) when it was founded in Windhoek on April 19, 1959. In June 1960 the name was changed again to SWAPO (Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988), p. 45). 3 In 1884 Namibia, then South West Africa, was declared a German colony at the Conference of Berlin. Germany's rule over South West Africa ended with the First World War and in 1919 the region was transferred to South Africa as a League of Nations Mandate. Following the Second World War, South West Africa's mandate status became an object of international controversy. Although the newly formed United Nations had established a trusteeship system to administer territories mandated to governments under the League of Nations, South African officials refused to hand over South West Africa to the UN, arguing that the mandate had expired with the League's dissolution and that South Africa should incorporate it into the country as its fifth province. Although the UN turned down South Africa’s proposal, it was unable to force the South African government to place South West Africa under the new trusteeship system. It is in this context that a variety of persons and organizations began to petition the UN and its member states to assert pressure on South Africa to grant Namibia political independence. vi Organization of African Unity (OAU) and several allied governments, to train guerrilla soldiers for an armed struggle. In August 1966, shortly after the failed attempt by Ethiopia and Liberia to challenge the legal status of South African rule in Namibia at the Hague, the first skirmish took place between SWAPO guerrillas and the South African Police. SWAPO and South Africa continued to fight a war in northern Namibia4 and southern Angola until 1989, when exiles repatriated as part of a negotiated settlement through which Namibia held its first democratic elections and became an independent country in March 1990.