JOURNAL FOR STUDIES IN HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2012 I 1 ' ' CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 1992- 2012 I � Waking the dead: Civilian casualties in the Namibian liberation struggle- Martha Akawa University of Namibia Jeremy Silvester Museum Association of Namibia Abstract The liberation Struggle is marked by an absence of archival sources. This absence leads to an impossibility of systematic historical analysis of conflicting archival evidence; as a result, history is created with a broad brush on a monumental landscape. In terms of public history, the emphasis has been placed on the memory of the soldiers who died fightingin the liberation struggle. A post-war publication has listed their names, although those who died on Namibian soil remain buried in anonymous graves. The internet provides a virtual graveyard, which attempts to unite all those who died on the South African side during their "Border War'. Such lists suggest that the compilers have been able to enter inaccessible archives and/or contact knowledgeable informants. Yet many of the soldiers who died, on both sides, during the Namibian liberation Struggle died in Southern Angola and the community memory of the war in Namibia is more closely linked to the many incidents in which civilians were killed inside Namibia during the conflict.In Namibia, almost a generation after the end of the war, it remains unknown how many Namibian civilians died during the Namibian Liberation Struggle. Where estimates are provided, the victims are reduced to nameless numbers. The absence of a consolidated archival record of these deaths means that an important dimension of the war remains hidden. This article will present the work that has been done to create an archive of Civilian Casualties of the Namibian liberation Struggle anddiscuss some of the challenges and difficulties associated with the project. It will argue that combining a range of sources into a new collection of consolidated information on individual deaths can challenge one of the archival absences on the liberation struggle and shape the historiography of the Namibian liberation struggle that is being created by a new generation of Namibian historians. Preface One day in early January, 1984 an old Ford truck set out from Ruacana. Twenty-five workers stood crowded in the back. After travelling just five kilometers from the small town the truck drove over a double landmine. The explosion left a huge crater in the ground and immediately killed ten of the people in the truck, whilst another six were severely injured, losing hands, arms and legs. None of the names of those who had died were provided in I lhl Ull""l(•h. h W\�,,'iUOnllt11·d fut pt:X��ill)lepubllCdtiOn 10 fl rorttlc.olnlnq (envisaged)pub! cJtl�ld lid •>11th� papo�f>pr�n!t rsl tt Mnm,.nts., Monutnf>'nl1 ('olt•tnOIMdnd conk •"t'KX' "eid 1n W'ndt'IOt·k, 1009. Dr Martha Akawa is History Lecturer at the University ofNamibia. She JUst completed her PhD at the Untver· Slty of Basel fOOJSlng on gender issuesduring the Namibian hberation struggle. Her areas ofInterest Include Hentage and theNam•bian liberatJonsstruggle. Her latest publicationa is chapter 1n an ed•ted volume'Posters 1n Action' Ema1l address: [email protected] Dr Jeremy Silvester taught tn theH1story Department of theUniversity of Nam1bla for 8 years after havtng prev•ously taught at the Univers1bes of Bnstol, Keele and the Westof England. He is currently the ProJect Plan· nlng and Tra•ning Officer at the Museums Association of Namibia. Dr Silvester Is currently wntlng on heritage and public h1story, and the Namibian liberatJon Struggle. HIS most recent publicatiOn was ·PostersIn Act1on'. E·mall address: Sllvest}@iway.na :r2012 University of Namibia, Journolfor Studies in Humanitiesand Social Sciences Volume 1, Number1, March 2012 ISSN 2026·]215 117 Martha Akawa and Jeremy Silvester the press coverage of the incident ('Landmine that killed ten', Windhoek Observer,1984). On 23rd January, 1988 four young people were driving a Toyota Hilux van near their home when a unit of the Koevoet paramilitary police unit opened fire on their vehicle riddling it with bullets and totally destroying it. Cornelius Nghipukuula, aged 27, was killed immediately and two of the other occupants were wounded. The three survivors were told to report to the police station the next day to pay a R10o fineas an 'admission of guilt' for These were just two incidents amongst many that occurred during the Namibian war of independence in which the casualties were not soldiers, but civilians. Yet the absence of the names of those killed in one of the largest landmine explosions that took place during the war seems symptomatic of the way in which civilian victims of the war remain unrecognized in accounts of the liberation struggle. 1. Introduction: War monuments and peace memorials It is generally argued that there is a simple difference between monuments and memorials: Monuments celebrate victory, whilst Memorials show more concern with reflection and remembrance and are, therefore, more likely to encourage reconciliation. War memorials tend to focus on remembering the sacrifice of soldiers, rather than the other victims of war, civilians- the 'collateral damage' as it is termed in the language of the twenty-first centurythat dehumanizes and falsely sanitizes the horror of war. Throughout the world the focus of the heritage that commemorates war is on the military. However, Michael Rowlands has argued that "one of the features of nationalist war memorials has been their capacity to turn traumatic individual deaths into acts of national celebration and heroic assertions of collective values" (Rowlands, 1999:129). In Namibia, a massive heritage project, for a small country, has been the construction of Heroes Acre (essentially a memorial graveyard containing the virtual graves of early leaders of anti-colonial resistance and the actual graves of selected leaders who have passed away since Heroes Acre was opened). The dominant figureat the site is a huge statue of a soldier, carrying an AK-47 and throwing a hand grenade. Funerals provide an opportunity to celebrate the lives of Individuals and use the eulogies on their !iws to assert collective values and a national identity. Heroes Acre does not only contain military leaders, but also civilians who are considered to have contributed to the struggle for independence. Critics have contrasted the focus at Heroes Acre on a few individuals with the 'democracy of death' planned in the South African equivalent, Freedom Park, in Pretoria which will attempt to name and remember, as far as possible, all those who have been killed as a result of past conflicts in the country. It can be argued that a monument such as Heroes Acre located, as it is, in Windhoek far from the regions where much of the fighting took place does not provide an adequate site of remembrance for the thousands of people who lived in the war zone in Namibia and were killed during the conflict. In defense of Heroes Acre, it might be argued that this is not its intended purpose, but that in the pursuit of nation building there is a conscious effortto forget the sufferingoft he past and to celebrate the triumph of the liberation movement. Rowlands (1999, p.131) has argued "Triumphalism ... achieves this through the assertion of collective omnipotence and by banishing from memory those acts ot humil(ation when the nation tailed to prote(.t its own young." Memories of the feared knock on the door at midnight, the horrificimages of cars and bodies randomly ripped apart by landmine explosions, the cries of the children 118 �\,llo.ing th� d�ad: Civilian cawaltlesm th�Namibian libt>ration'trum;lt• caught in the crossfire of war. These are the memories that most people would probably want to banish from their minds, but they are also the reality of a war, which has left profound physical and mental scars on Namibia. Indeed the absence of a detailed account of the impact of the war on the civilian population of Namibia may result in a version of the war which down plays the terrible impact of the conflict inside Namibia. At present, it is not even known how many civilians died during the war. Efforts have been made to document the names of those who suffered in the struggle, but, to date, it has been the names of the soldiers on both sides which have been remembered and memorialized. Swapo published a book in 1996 entitled "Their Blood Waters Our Freedom' which contains the names (or combat names) of 7,792 members of PLAN (the People's Uberation Arrny of Namibia) who died during the liberation struggle. The memorial list does not only include those who died in combat, but also those who died in car crashes and other accidents. On the other side, the South Africans were able to more publicly acknowledge their military dead during the war itself. A monument was erected in Tsumeb in July 1981 with the following inscription in Afrikaans 'Tsumeb commemorates its fallen whites who died as a result of terrorism'. White SADF soldiers were often flown to South Africa for burial, but the deaths of black soldiers fighting in SWATF and Koevoet were not so publicly commemorated or accorded burials. Indeed, there were reports that in some instances Koevoet and PLAN fighters were anonymously buried together in mass graves. Today the South Africa War Graves Project has created a web site that lists the names of each South African soldier who died during what is dubbed the ·south West Africa Border War' a total of 2,365 names. It is interesting to note that the figure contrasts significantly with the 715 members of the security forces that Willem Steenkamp claims were killed during the 'Border War' in a book published towards the end of the war (Steenkamp, 1989, 185).