Work in Progress – Do Not Cite Or Circulate Without Author’S Permission
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WORK IN PROGRESS – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION Wolfgang Zeller, University of Edinburgh [email protected] (Chapter 3.) Who welcomes whom? Staging the politics of celebration on the Namibia-Zambia border Abstract: This chapter relies on a detailed account of the 2004 opening of the Zambezi Bridge at Katima Mulilo to examine the actions and alliances the leadership of the Namibian and Zambian states were engaging to broadcast their power into the borderland at the time. The analysis draws on previous works in political anthropology on the public performance of state power in Africa and challenges the official narrative that sovereign state authority has created a new conduit for development and progress in the borderland. Instead, the new transport corridor is described as a politically contested space of transnational governance “from above”, which is the outcome of an alliance of powerful interests involving high- level Namibian and Zambian government representatives, international donors and investors, and so-called “traditional leaders” based in the borderland. The individual and collective interests and agency of these players are situated in the context of regional history established in chapter 2. 3.1. Introduction: Bridges, Togetherness and Separation - the Public Performance of State Authority in the African Postcolony ‘The struggle for Namibia’s independence was a national endeavour. (…) The residents of the Caprivi Region were no exception in this national duty. (…) Comrade Simbwaye is one of the greatest heroes of the Namibian struggle for national independence since he never wavered. He died for the total liberation of Namibia rather than compromise the territorial integrity of his motherland. History will judge harshly any person or group of persons who make any attempt to dismember any part of our republic’ (Namibian President Hifikepunje Pohamba at Heroes Day commemoration, Katima Mulilo, 26th August 2006). ‘The MMD administration wants Western Province to move from the poorest in the country to possibly the richest. This can only be done through upgrading the infrastructure. Government will encourage investment in Western Province in order to create employment and enhance income to the local 1 WORK IN PROGRESS – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION community’ (Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa to party cadres of his Movement for Multiparty Democracy in Western Province, quoted in The Post, 7th December 2004). ‘When we were making kushowelela there, I’m sure the people who are not Barotse, the presidents and the ministers, they were ashamed because they don’t know it. They were indeed looking at us like it was a new thing to them’ (Munukayumbwa Mulumemui, Barotse Royal Establishment, Mwandi, 21st May 2004). This chapter presents a detailed account of the 2004 opening of the Zambezi Bridge at the Wenela border post to examine the actions and alliances the leadership of the Namibian and Zambian states were engaging to broadcast their power into the borderland at the time. My situated analysis of the event challenges the official narrative of sovereign state authority creating a new conduit for development and progress in the borderland. I argue that the bridge and the new cross-border transport corridor it opened up are a politically contested space of transnational governance, created by an alliance of powerful interests involving high-level Namibian and Zambian government representatives, international donors and investors, as well as so-called “traditional leaders” based in the borderland. Through the examination of this alliance, the chapter contributes to my dissertation’s overall analysis how the Nambian and Zambian states’ assertions of territorial sovereignty are being negotiated with residents and powerful players in the two countries’ shared borderland. In my reading, the above statements by the Namibian and Zambian heads of state are attempts to bring peripheral regions rhetorically into their governments’ respective narratives of nation building. President Pohamba emphasized individual and collective acts of heroism in the liberation struggle which preceded Namibian independence from South Africa’s apartheid regime in 1990. He cautioned those who dare to question the official truth and sent a clear warning to the Caprivi secessionists. President Mwanawasa promised to turn the tide of Zambia’s three decades of gradual socioeconomic decline by aligning his administrations’ efforts with the forces of liberal market economy. Both presidents were addressing audiences in provinces which, until then, had been geographical and political peripheries within both countries. They were poorly connected to the capital centers of Windhoek and Lusaka and separatist movements had emerged on both sides of the 2 WORK IN PROGRESS – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION borderland. The third quote, by a senior member of the Barotse Royal Establishment, could be interpreted as a vignette illustrating that grassroot voices from the borderland were aiming and able to put an alternative and vernacular spin on the May 2004 opening ceremony of the Zambezi bridge, and the official narrative of development and (trans-) national integration it was designed to convey. My analysis will show, however, that BRE and other representatives of traditional authority, while publicly asserting their autonomy on the highly visible stage provided by the opening ceremony, were at the time not clearly outside the alliance of powerful interests, which had made the new infrastructure possible. While asserting their autonomous stance publicly they were, in fact, becoming part and parcel of the emerging field of transnational governance, which built it. My use of a public performance of state authority as a case to analyse political and socio- economic relations draws on a well-established strand of work in social anthropology and African studies. In 1938 Max Gluckman witnessed the opening ceremony of a new bridge in northern Zululand. His 1940 ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand’ (Gluckman 1952) has since become a classic of social anthropology. The essay first developed the extended case method and represented a major contribution to the scholarly critique of racial segregation in South African society. Gluckman provided a detailed account of the events on the day of the 1938 bridge opening and the actions of those attending the ceremony. He demonstrated that the attempt to construct a coherent representation of relations between white and black Zulu participants as clearly segregated along the racial divide was fraught with tensions that emerged in the context of the ceremony. Blacks and whites, he showed, were actually in a relationship of simultaneous togetherness and separation. While the white colonial regime held the monopoly of physical violence, blacks and whites were both part of a single social system dominated by the integration of Zululand into the South African industrial and agricultural economy. This necessitated both groups to adapt their behavior to each other in socially determined ways when they associated with one another. Gluckman showed this through several examples of blacks and whites adopting elements of each other’s ritual practices during the bridge opening ceremony (Cocks 2001: 753). Gluckman’s later colleague, Manchester anthropologist Victor Turner, further pursued the concept of 3 WORK IN PROGRESS – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION ritual practices as dynamic openings (Turner 1969)1. Turner emphasized the importance of rituals as a process generating and not just reflecting new social phenomena and paid close ethnographic and analytical attention to the relevance of hidden processes within rituals for political practice.2 In his 'Provisional notes on the Postcolony', republished as a chapter of his 2001 book, Achille Mbembe examines state-society relations in contemporary Africa through the aesthetics of public rituals of postcolonial state power. Five decades after Gluckman, Mbembe saw a new paradox of simultaneous togetherness and separation which led him to develop his concept of commandement. Mbembe argues that, in the absence of tangible material results that would be relevant for the everyday life of its citizens, the postcolonial state delivers overblown and glorifying representations of itself and its top representatives. Under these circumstances, state power seeks to institutionalize itself as an untouchable 'fetish’. Public spectacles become a key aspect of this project and serve to further consolidate the status quo of mutually disempowering relations between the dominant and those apparently dominated. The state commandeers the dancing bodies of its subjects. It colonizes and appropriates the ‘debris’ of ancestral ritual genres, which are emptied of their meaning and reduced to mere ornamentation. Arguing with Bakhtin (1981), Mbembe claims that the postcolonial state engages in an official 'monologue' where people are spoken to but cannot speak. Despite the incoherence of state power’s commandement, both rulers and ruled partake in it, and their relationship is characterized by conviviality rather than resistance. According to Mbembe, the postcolonial subjects willingly engage in 'baroque practices' of worship for the state-as-fetish (Mbembe 2001:129). They have 'internalized the authoritarian epistemology to the point where they reproduce it themselves in all minor circumstances of daily life'. An 'intimate