National liberation in postcolonial Southern Africa : a historical ethnography of SWAPO's exile camps 9781107099340, 110709934X, 9781316400937, 131640093X

Table of contents :
Part I. Camp, Nation, History: 1. Liberation movement camps and the past of the present in Southern Africa; 2. Revisiting an image of a camp: remember Cassinga?; Part II. Camps and the Formation of a Nation: 3. Living in exile: life and crisis at SWAPO's Kongwa Camp, 1964-8; 4. Ordering the nation: SWAPO in Zambia, 1974-6; 5. 'The spy' and the camp: SWAPO in Angola, 1980-9; Part III. Camps and the Production of History: 6. Namibia's 'Wall of Silence': challenging national history in the international system; 7. Reconciliation in Namibia? Narrating the past in a post-camp nation; 8. The camp and the post-colony.

Citation preview

National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa Tracing the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) across its three decades in exile, this book examines the rich, local histories of the camps where Namibian exiles lived in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola. Christian A. Williams highlights how different Namibians experienced these sites, as well as the tensions that developed within SWAPO as Namibians encountered one another and as officials asserted their power and protected their interests within a national community. The book then follows Namibians who lived in exile into postcolonial Namibia, examining the extent to which divisions and hierarchies that emerged in the camps continue to shape how Namibians relate to one another today, undermining the more just and humane society that many had imagined. In developing these points about SWAPO, the book draws attention to Southern African literature more widely, suggesting parallels across the region and defining a field of study that examines postcolonial Africa through “the camp.” Christian A.  Williams is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State.

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African Studies The African Studies series, founded in 1968, publishes research monographs by emerging and senior scholars that feature innovative analyses in the fields of history, political science, anthropology, economics, and environmental studies. The series also produces mature, paradigm-shifting syntheses that seek to reinterpret and revitalize the scholarly literature in these fields. Editorial Board David Anderson, University of Warwick Catherine Boone, London School of Economics Carolyn Brown, Rutgers University Christopher Clapham, University of Cambridge Michael Gomez, New York University Nancy J. Jacobs, Brown University Richard Roberts, Stanford University David Robinson, Michigan State University Leonardo A. Villalón, University of Florida

A list of books in this series will be found at the end of this volume.

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National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps

CHRISTIAN A. WILLIAMS University of the Free State, South Africa

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32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107099340 © Christian A. Williams 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Williams, Christian A., author. National liberation in postcolonial Southern Africa : a historical ethnography of SWAPO’s exile camps / Christian A. Williams, University of the Free State, South Africa. pages cm. – (African studies series; 132) Based on the author’s thesis (doctoral)–University of Michigan, 2009, titled: Exile history: an ethnography of the SWAPO camps and the Namibian nation. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-107-09934-0 (hardback) 1. SWAPO – History. 2. National liberation movements – Namibia – History. 3. Exiles – Namibia – Social conditions. 4. Exiles – Africa, Southern – Social conditions. 5. Memory – Political aspects – Namibia. 6. Namibia – History – 1946–1990. I. Title. II. Series: African studies series; 132. DT1645.W55 2015 968.8103–dc23 2015015731 ISBN 978-1-107-09934-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa Tracing the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) across its three decades in exile, this book examines the rich, local histories of the camps where Namibian exiles lived in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola. Christian A. Williams highlights how different Namibians experienced these sites, as well as the tensions that developed within SWAPO as Namibians encountered one another and as officials asserted their power and protected their interests within a national community. The book then follows Namibians who lived in exile into postcolonial Namibia, examining the extent to which divisions and hierarchies that emerged in the camps continue to shape how Namibians relate to one another today, undermining the more just and humane society that many had imagined. In developing these points about SWAPO, the book draws attention to Southern African literature more widely, suggesting parallels across the region and defining a field of study that examines postcolonial Africa through “the camp.” Christian A.  Williams is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State.

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African Studies The African Studies series, founded in 1968, publishes research monographs by emerging and senior scholars that feature innovative analyses in the fields of history, political science, anthropology, economics, and environmental studies. The series also produces mature, paradigm-shifting syntheses that seek to reinterpret and revitalize the scholarly literature in these fields. Editorial Board David Anderson, University of Warwick Catherine Boone, London School of Economics Carolyn Brown, Rutgers University Christopher Clapham, University of Cambridge Michael Gomez, New York University Nancy J. Jacobs, Brown University Richard Roberts, Stanford University David Robinson, Michigan State University Leonardo A. Villalón, University of Florida

A list of books in this series will be found at the end of this volume.

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National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps

CHRISTIAN A. WILLIAMS University of the Free State, South Africa

/ 4787 9C BD, 8C D 9 D8 4 4 45 8 4

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32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107099340 © Christian A. Williams 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Williams, Christian A., author. National liberation in postcolonial Southern Africa : a historical ethnography of SWAPO’s exile camps / Christian A. Williams, University of the Free State, South Africa. pages cm. – (African studies series; 132) Based on the author’s thesis (doctoral)–University of Michigan, 2009, titled: Exile history: an ethnography of the SWAPO camps and the Namibian nation. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-107-09934-0 (hardback) 1. SWAPO – History. 2. National liberation movements – Namibia – History. 3. Exiles – Namibia – Social conditions. 4. Exiles – Africa, Southern – Social conditions. 5. Memory – Political aspects – Namibia. 6. Namibia – History – 1946–1990. I. Title. II. Series: African studies series; 132. DT1645.W55 2015 968.8103–dc23 2015015731 ISBN 978-1-107-09934-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

/ 4787 9C BD, 8C D 9 D8 4 4 45 8 4

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National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa Tracing the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) across its three decades in exile, this book examines the rich, local histories of the camps where Namibian exiles lived in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola. Christian A. Williams highlights how different Namibians experienced these sites, as well as the tensions that developed within SWAPO as Namibians encountered one another and as officials asserted their power and protected their interests within a national community. The book then follows Namibians who lived in exile into postcolonial Namibia, examining the extent to which divisions and hierarchies that emerged in the camps continue to shape how Namibians relate to one another today, undermining the more just and humane society that many had imagined. In developing these points about SWAPO, the book draws attention to Southern African literature more widely, suggesting parallels across the region and defining a field of study that examines postcolonial Africa through “the camp.” Christian A.  Williams is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State.

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African Studies The African Studies series, founded in 1968, publishes research monographs by emerging and senior scholars that feature innovative analyses in the fields of history, political science, anthropology, economics, and environmental studies. The series also produces mature, paradigm-shifting syntheses that seek to reinterpret and revitalize the scholarly literature in these fields. Editorial Board David Anderson, University of Warwick Catherine Boone, London School of Economics Carolyn Brown, Rutgers University Christopher Clapham, University of Cambridge Michael Gomez, New York University Nancy J. Jacobs, Brown University Richard Roberts, Stanford University David Robinson, Michigan State University Leonardo A. Villalón, University of Florida

A list of books in this series will be found at the end of this volume.

. 3676 8B :DD C 53 D7B C 8 C7 3 3 3 7 3D :DD C

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National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps

CHRISTIAN A. WILLIAMS University of the Free State, South Africa

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32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107099340 © Christian A. Williams 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Williams, Christian A., author. National liberation in postcolonial Southern Africa : a historical ethnography of SWAPO’s exile camps / Christian A. Williams, University of the Free State, South Africa. pages cm. – (African studies series; 132) Based on the author’s thesis (doctoral)–University of Michigan, 2009, titled: Exile history: an ethnography of the SWAPO camps and the Namibian nation. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-107-09934-0 (hardback) 1. SWAPO – History. 2. National liberation movements – Namibia – History. 3. Exiles – Namibia – Social conditions. 4. Exiles – Africa, Southern – Social conditions. 5. Memory – Political aspects – Namibia. 6. Namibia – History – 1946–1990. I. Title. II. Series: African studies series; 132. DT1645.W55 2015 968.8103–dc23 2015015731 ISBN 978-1-107-09934-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

. 3676 8B :DD C 53 D7B C 8 C7 3 3 3 7 3D :DD C

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National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa Tracing the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) across its three decades in exile, this book examines the rich, local histories of the camps where Namibian exiles lived in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola. Christian A. Williams highlights how different Namibians experienced these sites, as well as the tensions that developed within SWAPO as Namibians encountered one another and as officials asserted their power and protected their interests within a national community. The book then follows Namibians who lived in exile into postcolonial Namibia, examining the extent to which divisions and hierarchies that emerged in the camps continue to shape how Namibians relate to one another today, undermining the more just and humane society that many had imagined. In developing these points about SWAPO, the book draws attention to Southern African literature more widely, suggesting parallels across the region and defining a field of study that examines postcolonial Africa through “the camp.” Christian A.  Williams is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State.

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African Studies The African Studies series, founded in 1968, publishes research monographs by emerging and senior scholars that feature innovative analyses in the fields of history, political science, anthropology, economics, and environmental studies. The series also produces mature, paradigm-shifting syntheses that seek to reinterpret and revitalize the scholarly literature in these fields. Editorial Board David Anderson, University of Warwick Catherine Boone, London School of Economics Carolyn Brown, Rutgers University Christopher Clapham, University of Cambridge Michael Gomez, New York University Nancy J. Jacobs, Brown University Richard Roberts, Stanford University David Robinson, Michigan State University Leonardo A. Villalón, University of Florida

A list of books in this series will be found at the end of this volume.

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National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps

CHRISTIAN A. WILLIAMS University of the Free State, South Africa

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32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107099340 © Christian A. Williams 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Williams, Christian A., author. National liberation in postcolonial Southern Africa : a historical ethnography of SWAPO’s exile camps / Christian A. Williams, University of the Free State, South Africa. pages cm. – (African studies series; 132) Based on the author’s thesis (doctoral)–University of Michigan, 2009, titled: Exile history: an ethnography of the SWAPO camps and the Namibian nation. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-107-09934-0 (hardback) 1. SWAPO – History. 2. National liberation movements – Namibia – History. 3. Exiles – Namibia – Social conditions. 4. Exiles – Africa, Southern – Social conditions. 5. Memory – Political aspects – Namibia. 6. Namibia – History – 1946–1990. I. Title. II. Series: African studies series; 132. DT1645.W55 2015 968.8103–dc23 2015015731 ISBN 978-1-107-09934-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

page viii xi xv

List of Maps and Photos Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Part I – Camp, Nation, History 1. Liberation Movement Camps and the Past of the Present in Southern Africa 2. Revisiting an Image of a Camp: Remember Cassinga?

3 30

Part II – Camps and the Formation of a Nation 3. Living in Exile: Life and Crisis at SWAPO’s Kongwa Camp, 1964–1968 4. Ordering the Nation: SWAPO in Zambia, 1974–1976 5. “The Spy” and the Camp: SWAPO in Lubango, 1980–1989

65 94 123

Part III – Camps and the Production of History 6. Namibia’s “Wall of Silence”: Challenging National History in the International System 7. Reconciliation in Namibia? Narrating the Past in a Postcamp Nation 8. The Camp and the Postcolony

149 185 215 233 251

Bibliography Index

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Maps and Photos

Maps 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Southern Africa Namibia Cassinga Southern Angola and SWAPO’s route through Cassinga SWAPO Camp in Tanzania SWAPO (and Zambian) Camps in Zambia SWAPO Camps in Angola

page xvii xviii 33 37 66 98 135

Photos 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Cassinga parade Remains of the camp office at Cassinga Remains of the PLAN office at Cassinga PLAN commanders at Cassinga Johan van der Mescht together with Peter Nanyemba Cassinga parade (Namibia Today) Cassinga grave (Namibia Today) Prisoners captured by the SADF during its attack on Vietnam Old railway station renovated for use at Kongwa camp The Old Farm after a church service Deep dugout, located near Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre outside Lubango Toivo Ya Toivo and others present for the detainees’ release outside Lubango The female detainees’ release outside Lubango

31 36 38 39 42 46 47 49 69 102 142 161 162

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Maps and Photos 14. 15. 16. 17.

ix

The male detainees’ release outside Lubango KaufilwaNepelilo and Abed Hauwanga at the Tsumeb Old Age Home Namibians in a classroom at Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre outside Lubango The “Living in Exile” exhibition in Keetmanshoop

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Acknowledgments

This book is written primarily with and about people who experienced Namibia’s liberation struggle. The names of those who contributed to the book directly are scattered throughout the text and references that follow. Nevertheless, there are several individuals and organizations that I especially wish to acknowledge here. First, I  would like to acknowledge people affiliated with St. Therese Secondary School in Tses. There, as a WorldTeach volunteer in 2000 and 2001, I found my first Namibian home. It is St. Therese alumni who first shared with me their personal histories of exile, including histories of violence perpetrated on them by fellow SWAPO members in camps. Through our encounters, I was pushed to question my early views of national liberation in Southern Africa and to consider the consequences of a dominant narrative that effaces how different people have experienced a painful past. From these beginnings many have contributed to my research. In 2007 and 2008 I again lived in Namibia while preparing a doctoral thesis on Namibia’s exile history. Then, and during annual return visits, I  have based myself in Windhoek and traveled throughout the country following former exiles and their families to some of the many scattered places where they now live. Here I  would like to acknowledge several individuals who, although they are not cited in this book as research participants, have nevertheless helped make my research productive:  Martha Akawa, George Beukes, Phillip Bolocoto, Raymond Castillo, Erasmus Stephanus, Wolfram Gleichmar-Hartmann, Werner Hillebrecht, Justine Hunter, Grace Kandundu, Pauline Kruse-Vries, John Liebenberg, Beauty Matongo, Antoinette Mostert, Lovisa Nampala, Vilho Shigwedha, Kontiki Silva, Jeremy Silvester, and Josef Thomas. Special thanks are also due to research participants whose contribution to my project extends far beyond that of our cited interviews. These include Steve Swartbooi for working with me for several months as a research assistant, Canner and xi / 4787 9C BD, 8C D 9 D8 4 4 45 8 4

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Acknowledgments

xii

Theopholus Kalimba for accompanying me on our journey to Cassinga, and Salatiel and Anita Ailonga for hosting me many times while I  studied their archives and shared their home. Also, Junius Ikondja, Samson Ndeikwila, Helao Shityuwete, and Joseph Stephanus have been exceptionally helpful in introducing me to others who have participated in my research and in commenting on my writing. Throughout these years, my research has been supported by a range of institutions. In 2002 I found an ideal space to think through my volunteer experience at the University of Cape Town’s Department of Social Anthropology where I  wrote a master’s thesis under the supervision of Sally Frankenthal and Fiona Ross. From 2003 to 2009 I  enrolled in the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan which created the conditions for me to write the thesis on which this manuscript is based. I am grateful to all faculty and students at Michigan who engaged with my work, especially my thesis advisor, David William Cohen, and other members of my thesis committee: Adam Ashforth, Patricia Hayes, Alaina Lemon, and Miriam Ticktin. Several additional institutions also enabled my doctoral research. These include the U.S. Fulbright Scholars Program, the National Archives of Namibia, the Special Collections Library at the University of Namibia, 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 this project. Since completing my doctorate in 2009, my work has been supported primarily by persons and institutions in South Africa. I  particularly wish to thank Patricia Hayes (again), Premesh Lalu, and other interlocutors at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), which offered me postdoctoral fellowships in 2010 and 2011 and hosted me for four years while I rewrote my doctoral thesis into this book. During this period I also participated in several conferences that have shaped my subsequent work, above all “Camps, Liberation Movements, Politics,” a conference that I ran at UWC with considerable help from Patricia, Premesh, Nicky Rouseau, Paolo Israel, and Brian Raftopolous, and “Mobile Soldiers and the Un-National Liberation of Southern Africa,” a colloquium organized by Luise White and Miles Larmer at the University of Sheffield. I am further grateful to Heike Becker in the UWC Anthropology Department and South Africa’s National Research Foundation for granting me fellowships in 2012 and 2013 that enabled me to continue working on this book and conduct further research on liberation movement camps and international relations at Kongwa, Tanzania. Although most of the material from my research at Kongwa will be used in future writings, some of it is incorporated here thanks to the assistance of many in Tanzania, including Paul Bjerk, Paolo Mtutuwi, White Zuberi Mwanzalila, Godfrey Nago, Neville Reuben, Musa

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Sadock, and Elias Tarimo. Also, I  wish to thank Jess Auerbach and two anonymous reviewers at Cambridge University Press for exceptionally helpful readings of my manuscript; Rob Gordon, Petro Esterhuyse, and Andre Keet for providing me with a supportive space to complete the manuscript at the University of the Free State; and Chris Saunders and Richard Pakleppa for repeatedly supporting my work since my return to South Africa. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my wife, family, and friends in many places. For years you have supported this project, inspiring it in various ways and sharing its pleasures and burdens with me. For this (and a great many other things), I thank you all.

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Abbreviations

AFP AME ANC BAB BBC BWS CANU CCN CCZ DELK DTA EIN ELC ELOC Exco FNLA FRELIMO G1 G2 ICC ICJ ICRC ICTJ IDAF IGFM ISHR LWF LWI MK MPLA NAN

Agence France-Presse African Methodist Episcopal Church African National Congress Basler Afrika Bibliographien British Broadcasting Corporation Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement Caprivi African National Union Council of Churches of Namibia Christian Council of Zambia Deutsche Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche Democratic Turnhalle Alliance Ecumenical Institute for Namibia Evangelical Lutheran Church in South West Africa Evangelical Lutheran Ovambo-Kavango Church SWAPO National Executive Committee Frente Naçional para Libertação de Angola Frente de Libertação de Moçambique the first SWALA group to infiltrate Namibia the second SWALA group to infiltrate Namibia International Criminal Court International Court of Justice International Committee for the Red Cross International Center for Transitional Justice International Defence and Aid Fund Internationalle Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte International Society for Human Rights Lutheran World Federation Lutheran World Information Umkhonto we Sizwe Movimento Popular para Libertação de Angola National Archives of Namibia xv

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xvi NBC NISER NSHR OAU OPC OPO PCC PLAN PUM RDP SADET SADF SIDA SPARC SWALA SWANU SWAPO SWAPO-D SWATF SYL TRC UCT UDF UN UNAM UNHCR UNICEF UNIN UNIP UNITA UNMD UNTAG UWC VEM WENELA WFP ZANU ZAPU

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Namibian Broadcasting Corporation Namibian Institute for Social and Economic Research National Society for Human Rights Organization of African Unity Ovamboland People’s Congress Ovamboland People’s Organization Political Consultative Council People’s Liberation Army of Namibia Patriotic Unity Movement Rally for Democracy and Progress South Africa Democracy and Education Trust South African Defence Force Swedish International Development Agency SWAPO Party Archive South West Africa Liberation Army South West Africa National Union South West Africa People’s Organization SWAPO-Democrats South West African Territorial Force SWAPO Youth League Truth and Reconciliation Commission University of Cape Town United Democratic Front United Nations University of Namibia United Nations High Commission for Refugees United Nations Children’s Fund United Nations Institute for Namibia United National Independence Party União para Independençia Total de Angola United Nations Mission on Detainees United Nations Transition Assistance Group University of the Western Cape Vereinigte Evangelische Mission Witwatersrand Native Labour Association United Nations World Food Programme Zimbabwe African National Union Zimbabwe African People’s Union

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GABON

DEMOCRATIC

CONGO Brazzaville

Bujumbura BURUNDI

Mombasa Dodoma

Kananga

(Angola)

OF THE Luanda

Zanzibar Dar es Salaam

TA N Z A N I A

CONGO

A

Benguela

MALA W

Lubumbashi

ANGOLA

I Z A M B Lilongwe Lusaka

E

I

Blantyre

Harare

Windhoek

BOTSWANA Gaborone

Lüderitz

Johannesburg

SOUTH

AT L A N T I C

B

IQ

Beira

U

MADAGASCAR

Pretoria Mbabane SWAZILAND

Maseru LESOTHO

OCEAN

MOZ A

Bulawayo

NAMIBIA

M

ZIMBABWE

Walvis Bay

Nairobi KENYA

Mwanza

REPUBLIC

Kinshasa

CABINDA

RWANDA Kigali

Maputo

INDIAN OCEAN

Durban

AFRICA

Cape Town

Port Elizabeth

0

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500 300

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Map 1. Southern Africa.

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Oshikango Odibo Eenhana Outapi Oshakati Ohangwena Ongandjera Ondangwa O v a m b o l a n d Omusati Etosha Pan Oshikoto Kunene Tsumeb

N

G

O

L

A

Katima Mulilo

Cap

N

Oshana

Rundu

Strip Caprivi

rivi

Okavango

a m

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Otavi Grootfontein Otjozondjupa Otjiwarongo Hereroland

D

Outjo

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am

D

a ra

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la

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Omaruru Okahandja

Omaheke

Usakos

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OCEAN

I

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Rehoboth

Maltahöhe

AT L A N T I C

Gobabis

Windhoek

Swakopmund Walvis Bay

B O T S W A N A Hoachanas Mariental Gibeon

Tses Vaalgras Gainachas Berseba N a m a l a n d Keetmanshoop

Red Line (1960s)

Karas

0

100

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Karasburg

SOUTH AFRICA

Map 2. Namibia.

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1 Liberation Movement Camps and the Past of the Present in Southern Africa

For students of Southern Africa, 1960 marks a turning point in a distinct regional past. In that year, as African nations to the north prepared for or celebrated their independence from colonial rule, Portugal, Southern Rhodesia, and South Africa retained direct control over their racially oppressed subjects, responding to the latter’s aspirations for democracy and equality with violence. In turn, people began to flee their countries of origin and organize new forms of resistance from exile. There, representatives of national liberation movements were granted resources from far-flung allies to prepare guerrilla armies and to care for their fellow nationals. A regional war ensued that not only pitted the liberation movements against their respective governments, but also drew in neighboring “frontline states,” which hosted the great majority of exiles, and the Cold War powers, whose geopolitical interests escalated the violence, especially from the mid-1970s in Angola. And violence erupted within the exiled liberation movements, whose own members vied for influence and protected interests within emerging national communities. By 1990, following democratic elections in Namibia and the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, Southern Africa as a whole was finally moving into a postcolonial, postapartheid era.1 Nevertheless, the region’s late colonial past remains a powerful presence. Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa are now each governed by former liberation movements whose legitimacy is based on histories of liberating their respective nations from white minority regimes. In this context, like others across the postcolonial world, historical representation has come to reflect and reproduce social divisions generated during the colonial

1

Throughout this text, postcolonial is often used as a shorthand for postcolonial and postapartheid despite the fact that, strictly speaking, apartheid South Africa was not a colony.

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era – especially divisions that emerged within anticolonial movements and that directly threaten the moral authority of current national elites. This book explores relationships between Southern Africa’s recent past and present through histories of camps administered in exile by the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO).2 Founded in 1957 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 fled political repression by apartheid South Africa in Namibia.3 Over its three decades in exile, SWAPO was responsible for the welfare of roughly sixty thousand Namibians (about 4 percent of the Namibian population at independence), most of whom lived in camps administered directly by the liberation movement.4 SWAPO’s first camp was located at Kongwa in central Tanzania, where the Tanzanian government and Organization of African Unity (OAU) granted military training facilities to several liberation movements from 1964. In the early 1970s, SWAPO’s center of gravity shifted to Zambia, where it established several camps for guerrillas near the Namibian border and a camp outside Lusaka, where health and educational services were provided by SWAPO to noncombatants for the first time. In 1974, when the collapse of the Portuguese empire opened the Angolan border to Namibians, the number of exiles increased greatly with thousands migrating through Angola to SWAPO camps in Zambia. By the late 1970s, SWAPO had established a network of makeshift bases in southern Angola, inhabited by the flow of people infiltrating and fleeing Namibia, and larger, semipermanent settlements deeper in Angola and Zambia, all of which I refer to here as “camps.”5 At the time when Namibian exiles repatriated in 2

3

4

5

After Namibian independence “SWAPO” renamed itself “SWAPO Party” (or “Swapo Party” in some references). Given its focus on exile camps, this book refers to “SWAPO” unless a clear distinction between the preindependence liberation movement and postindependence political party are intended. The OPC was renamed the Ovamboland People’s Organisation (OPO) when it was founded in Windhoek on April 19, 1959. In June 1960 its name was changed again to SWAPO. See Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988), 45; Marion Wallace, A History of Namibia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 246–50. According to a report issued by the Namibian Institute for Social and Economic Research (NISER), nearly fifty thousand Namibians had returned to Namibia by the end of 1991 (Rosemary Preston et al., The Integration of Returned Exiles, Former Combatants and Other War-Affected Namibians [Windhoek: NISER, 1993], 5–21). While this number is less than the seventy thousand to one hundred thousand exiles that SWAPO claimed to be administering in its camps in various reports submitted to donors in the 1980s, it exceeds the forty-three thousand that repatriated to Namibia prior to democratic elections (5–21) and suggests that closer to sixty thousand Namibians lived in exile. The latter estimate includes not only those who had repatriated by 1991, but also the 7,792 people whose deaths are recorded in SWAPO’s official record (SWAPO Party, Their Blood Waters Our Freedom [Windhoek: SWAPO Party, 1996]) and others who never repatriated to Namibia or whose “disappearance” in exile has not been officially recorded. The “missing persons” and their estimated numbers are discussed later in this text, especially in Chapter 6. SWAPO also administered a college, the UN Institute for Namibia (UNIN), in Lusaka from 1976, primary and secondary schools on the Isle of Youth in Cuba from 1978, and a technical

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1989, most were living in camps, and almost all, including SWAPO officials and students based overseas, had spent time in one or another camp during their years abroad. The camps were, in short, the focal point for a Namibian exile community. More than twenty-five years after the war’s end and Namibians’ repatriation, the SWAPO camps remain central to Namibian life. Some, like Cassinga, the target of a South African Defence Force (SADF) attack in May 1978, figure prominently in a dominant history of atrocities perpetrated on Namibians and of SWAPO’s ultimate triumph over the apartheid regime. Others, such as the sites where people accused of spying for South Africa were detained and “disappeared” near Lubango during the 1980s, are central to a counternarrative through which Namibians stigmatized by SWAPO in exile challenge an official history. In these and other cases across the Southern African region, liberation movement camps are presented in a manner that credits certain people for a nation’s liberation, blames others for betraying it, and effaces a more complex reality.6 Even scholarly work tends to present camps in terms of this stark dichotomy. Nevertheless, liberation movement camps also have a unique capacity to open new perspectives on Southern Africa’s recent past and its legacy. As noted, camps were sites of everyday life for most Namibians, and many other Southern Africans, during their years in exile. They are, therefore, focal points for rich personal narratives that evade highly politicized, competing accounts of a national liberation struggle. Moreover, as we shall see, camps illuminate the very processes through which exiled nations have formed and histories of exile have been constructed, shaping how citizens relate to one another today. By highlighting the ties that bind camp, nation, and history in Namibia, this book traces legacies of national liberation that are crucial for understanding postcolonial Southern Africa and that have barely been considered. Critical Exile Historiography and Limits to Liberation To date, two bodies of scholarship have emerged that trace connections between Southern Africa’s liberation struggle past and postliberation present, challenging discourses that mark the end of colonialism and apartheid as if they were

6

school at Loudima, Congo-Brazzaville in collaboration with the Norwegian government from 1986. SWAPO had some autonomy in governing these sites. They were designed, however, for Namibian students and rarely accommodated SWAPO guerrillas or others who were not directly involved in running schools. Moreover, although research participants were not entirely consistent in how they used the label “camp,” they did not apply it to UNIN, the Isle of Youth, or Loudima. These sites are, therefore, outside the scope of “the SWAPO camps” as defined here. This dichotomy, it should be noted, shapes a far broader field of social interaction than camps or liberation struggles. For discussion of the dynamics shaping “credit” and “blame,” see Charles Tilley, Credit and Blame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

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“the end of history.”7 The first body focuses on histories of exile, examining conflicts that emerged within exiled liberation movements and suggesting how they bear on the nation-states that several of these movements now govern. The second focuses on government in Southern Africa today, considering how its liberating potential has been impaired by the process of resisting white minority regimes and highlighting the significance of liberation history as a medium through which a new political elite wields power. Both literatures refer to liberation movements’ camps as sites of internal conflict and contested memory within national communities. And yet, camps remain at the fringes of these literatures’ discussions, with camps’ powerful agency and paradoxical qualities left largely unexplored. Critical Exile Historiography For decades, and increasingly in recent years, scholarly texts have been published about Southern Africans’ experiences in exile, a crucial dimension of the region’s liberation struggles.8 Although some of this writing acknowledges that conflicts occurred within a given exiled liberation movement, the literature tends to belittle these conflicts or to present them as if they were exceptional – outside a liberation movement’s norms and ideals. Nevertheless, there is a growing body of scholarship that focuses on liberation movements’ internal conflicts, presenting them as significant, recurring events that should be understood in terms of specific contexts in which these movements operated in exile. Some of the first work on exile presented from this critical standpoint was written in the field of political science during the late 1970s and 1980s as the region’s liberation struggles were still unfolding. As John Marcum then theorized, drawing from his seminal work on Angola, “the politics of exile” were pushing liberation movements to focus their energies more on garnering external assistance than on mobilizing grassroots support. In turn, these politics were concentrating power in the hands of the liberation movement elites who successfully lobbied powerful donors, drawing members into repetitions of doctrine and petty rivalries and away from open discussion of shared concerns.9 For years Marcum’s thesis remained the benchmark for political 7

8

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This phrase, widely associated with Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement about humanity’s sociocultural evolution at the end of the Cold War (The End of History and the Last Man [New  York:  Simon and Schuster,  1992]), has also been used to critique official histories of Southern Africa’s postliberation nations. See, e.g., Wallace, A History of Namibia, 315. For recent overviews of literature pertaining to Southern Africa’s liberation struggles, see Hillary Sapire, “Liberation Movements, Exile and International Solidarity: An Introduction,” Special Issue on Liberation Movements, Exile and International Solidarity, Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 2 (2009): 271–86; Christopher Saunders, “Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa: New Perspectives,” South African Historical Journal 62, no. 1 (2010):  1–6; Hugh Macmillan, The Lusaka Years: The ANC in Exile in Zambia, 1963 to 1994 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2013), 1–12; Chris Saunders, “The ANC in the Historiography of the National Liberation Struggle in South Africa,” in Kwandiwe Kondlo, Chris Saunders, and Siphamandla Zondi, eds., Treading the Waters of History: Perspectives on the ANC (Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, 2014), 11–22. John Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, Volume 2:  Exile Politics and Guerrilla Warfare (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1978); “The Exile Condition and Revolutionary

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scientists doing comparative work on exile in Southern Africa, including those who questioned its usefulness for understanding the trajectory of particular liberation movements, notably Tom Lodge in his writings on the ANC.10 Indeed, early critical scholarship on SWAPO by Franz Ansprenger and Lauren Dobell works from the premise that exile tends to become dysfunctional, concentrating power with external forces, generating tensions between rank and file and elites, and (in Dobell’s formulation) undermining ideological commitments beyond national liberation, narrowly conceived.11 As Southern African countries transitioned to postcolonial rule, more detailed and better documented narratives of conflicts within these countries’ respective liberation movements also began to surface. In 1979, Masipule Sithole completed his provocative book about “struggles within the struggle,” highlighting how education, ideology, generation, and other differences combined to generate conflicts within and between Zimbabwe’s liberation movements.12 From 1990 to 1993, Paul Trewhela published several essays in Searchlight South Africa, a small-circulation journal that he and fellow exile Baruch Hirson coedited in London, exposing violence that the ANC and SWAPO had perpetrated on their own members in exile.13 In 1992 Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba (the pen name of Ellis’s coauthor) published Comrades against Apartheid, which attributed authoritarian and violent practices within the exiled ANC to the

10

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Effectiveness:  Southern African Liberation Movements,” in Christian Potholm and Richard Dale, eds., Southern Africa in Perspective (New York: Free Press, 1979), 262–75. Tom Lodge, “Revolutionary Exile Politics, 1960–1975,” in Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (London:  Longman Group Ltd., 1983), 295–320; “State of Exile:  The ANC of South Africa, 1976–1986,” in P. Frankel, N. Pines, and M. Swilling, eds., State, Resistance and Change in South Africa (Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, 1988), 229–58. Franz Ansprenger, Die SWAPO:  Profil einer afrikanischen Befreiungsbewegung (Mainz:  Matthias-Grunewald Verlag, 1984); Lauren Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia, 1960–1991:  War by Other Means (Basel:  P. Schlettwein Publishing, 1991). Ansprenger and Dobell’s depictions of SWAPO in exile contrast with those of Peter Katjavivi, whose research was conducted within the very different paradigm of resistance historiography. See Peter Katjavivi, “The Rise of Nationalism in Namibia and Its International Dimensions,” PhD diss., St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, 1986; Katjavivi, A History of Resistance. Masipula Sithole, Zimbabwe: Struggles within the Struggle (Harare:  Rujeko Publishers, 1979, repr., 1999). See also David Moore, “Democracy, Violence and Identity in the Zimbabwean War of National Liberation: Reflections from the Realms of Dissent,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 29, no. 3 (1995): 375–402. Paul Trewhela, “A Namibian Horror: Swapo’s Prisons in Angola,” Searchlight South Africa 1, no. 4 (February 1990): 78–94; “Inside Quadro” and “A Miscarriage of Democracy,” Searchlight South Africa 2, no. 1 (July 1990): 30–68; “The Kissinger-Vorster-Kaunda Détente: Genesis of the SWAPO ‘Spy Drama,’ Part I,” Searchlight South Africa 2, no.  1 (July 1990):  69–86; “A Death in South Africa:  The Killing of Sipho Phungulwa,” Searchlight South Africa 2, no.  2 (January 1991): 11–24; “The Kissinger-Vorster-Kaunda Détente: Genesis of the SWAPO ‘Spy Drama,’ Part II,” Searchlight South Africa 2, no.  2 (January 1991):  42–58; “Swapo and the Churches: An International Scandal,” Searchlight South Africa 2, no. 3 (July 1991): 65–88; “The ANC Prison Camps: An Audit of Three Years, 1990–1993,” Searchlight South Africa 3, no. 2 (April 1993): 8–30; “The Dilemma of Albie Sachs: ANC Constitutionalism and the Death of Thami Zulu,” Searchlight South Africa 3, no. 11 (October 1993): 34–52.

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relationship between the ANC, the South African Communist Party, and the latter’s Soviet Union allies.14 In 1993 the ANC made public its internal investigations of abuses perpetrated by its guerrilla army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), in exile, a topic later taken up by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).15 And, in 1995, Colin Leys and John Saul published their landmark volume on Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, highlighting this struggle’s “two-edged sword” and analyzing how, while leading a war from exile, SWAPO became increasingly paranoid and violent toward its own members – to the point of threatening to destroy the organization.16 Finally, within the past few years, new critical histories of exile have appeared, fueled, at least in part, by the availability of fresh source materials and efforts to understand the shortcomings of postcolonial governments.17 In 2009 Paul Trewhela published Inside Quatro (named after the infamous ANC camp and apartheid government prison), which reproduces some of his prior articles in Searchlight South Africa alongside more recent essays linking the ANC’s exile conflicts with contemporary South African politics.18 In 2012 Stephen Ellis completed External Mission, using new sources to elaborate on his previous book’s thesis and to suggest how the ANC’s transformation into a liberation movement in exile impacts on South Africa today.19 In 2013 Hugh Macmillan published The Lusaka Years, the first scholarly monograph to focus on a liberation movement in one host country.20 Although written explicitly in opposition to Stephen Ellis’s work, which he criticizes for equating “the culture 14

15

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Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba, Comrades against Apartheid:  The ANC and the South African Communist Party in Exile (London:  James Currey, 1992). See also Stephen Ellis, “Mbokodo: Security in ANC Camps,” African Affairs 93, no. 371 (1994): 279–98. The ANC’s Montsuenyane Commission Report (1993) followed up two prior ANC internal commissions of inquiry: the Stuart Commission (1984) and the Skweyiya Commission (1992). South Africa’s TRC reported in 1998 on human rights violations committed in exile by the ANC (TRC Report, Volume 2, 348–73). For a critical history of these commissions, see Todd Cleveland, “ ‘We still want the truth’: The ANC’s Angolan Detention Camps and Post-Apartheid Memory,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 1 (2005): 63–78. Colin Leys and John S. Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle:  The Two Edged Sword (London:  James Currey, 1995). See esp. Leys and Saul’s chapter “SWAPO:  The Politics of Exile,” 40–65. Hillary Sapire and Chris Saunders, eds., Southern African Liberation Struggles:  New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2013), 2. Paul Trewhela, Inside Quatro:  Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2009). Stephen Ellis, External Mission:  The ANC in Exile, 1960–1990 (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012). Macmillan, The Lusaka Years. See also Hugh Macmillan, “The African National Congress of South Africa in Zambia: The Culture of Exile and the Changing Relationship with Home, 1964–1990,” Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 2 (2009):  303–29; “Morogoro and After: The Continuing Crisis in the African National Congress (of South Africa) in Zambia,” in Hillary Sapire and Chris Saunders, eds., Southern African Liberation Struggles: New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2013), 76–95.

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of exile” with violence that the ANC perpetrated on its members in camps in Angola,21 Macmillan also contextualizes the ANC’s internal conflicts, drawing from historical research and personal experiences living in Lusaka. Outside the specifically South African literature, Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnne McGregor identify the battlefield and exile as contexts in which similar internal divisions and forms of discipline emerged across the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), and other liberation movements.22 Lara Pawson examines the events of May 27, 1977 in Angola, tracing how mass violence perpetrated by the Movimento Popular para Libertação de Angola (MPLA) after returning from exile and assuming state power continues to define national belonging.23 And a new generation of scholars has emerged whose doctoral theses offer critical perspectives on exiled liberation movements from across the region and some of whose insights have been collected in Chris Saunders and Hilary Sapire’s volume Southern African Liberation Struggles and in special issues of the Journal of Southern African Studies and Social Dynamics.24

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Macmillan, The Lusaka Years, 6, 8, 10. Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnne McGregor, and Terrence Ranger, Violence and Memory:  One Hundred Years in the Dark Forests of “Matabeleland” (Oxford:  James Currey, 2000); Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnne McGregor, “War Stories: Guerrilla Narratives of Zimbabwe’s Liberation War,” History Workshop Journal 57 (2004):  79–100; Jocelyn Alexander and Gary Kynoch, “Introduction: Histories and Legacies of Punishment in Southern Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 3 (2011): 395–413. Alexander and Kynoch’s observations about ZANU in exile draw significantly from Gerald Mazarire, “Discipline and Punishment in ZANLA, 1964–1979,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 3 (2011): 571–91. See also Luise White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2003), 17–40. Lara Pawson, In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (New York:  Palgrave, 2014). As Pawson notes, the events of May 27, 1977 were also refracted through the MPLA’s exile experience (95, 117). Sapire and Saunders, eds., Southern African Liberation Struggles; Hillary Sapire, ed., Special Issue on Liberation Movements, Exile and International Solidarity, Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 2 (2009); Christian A. Williams, ed., Special Section on Camps and Liberation in Southern Africa, Social Dynamics 39, no. 1 (2013); Luise White and Miles Larmer, eds., Part Special Issue on “Mobile Soldiers and the Un-National Liberation of Southern Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 40, no. 6 (2014). For recent doctoral theses specifically on SWAPO in exile, see Justine Hunter, “Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia seit der staatlichen Unabhängigkeit” (Unviersität Freiburg, 2005), modified and published under the title Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia:  Umgang mit schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen der Ära des bewaffneten Befreiungskampfes, 1966 bis 1989 (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2008); Christian A. Williams, “Exile History: An Ethnography of the SWAPO Camps and the Namibian Nation” (University of Michigan, 2009); Martha Akawa, “The Sexual Politics of the Namibian Liberation Struggle” (University of Basel, 2010), modified and published under the title The Gender Politics of the Namibian Liberation Struggle (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2014); Vilho Amukwaya Shigwedha, “Enduring Suffering:  The Cassinga Massacre of Namibian Exiles in 1978 and the Conflicts between Survivors’ Memories and Testimonies” (University of the Western Cape, 2011).

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Collectively, these texts highlight trends in Southern Africa’s liberation movements in exile. As they illustrate, conflicts occurred repeatedly within every major liberation movement during its years abroad. Conflicts revolved around the same kinds of issues, including exiles’ differing access to resources and privileges, setbacks in armed struggles, rumors of traitors and spies, and the work of liberation movements’ own security apparatuses. Conflicts also reflected the same markers of social difference, including ethnicity, region, generation, gender, and education. Repeatedly, liberation movements used violence to respond to internal division and discipline their own members. And frequently, movements perpetrated this violence with the support of host governments whose leaders sided consistently with liberation movements’ established elites.25 Despite these common trajectories across the region, however, little has been done to think Southern Africa’s exile past within a single frame of analysis. Significantly, the existing literature on exile, critical and otherwise, is organized around distinct national historiographies focused on one or another liberation movement. The great majority of texts and debates, moreover, are focused on South Africa and the ANC.26 In the past few years, scholars have noted this limitation, and a few have drawn writings on different liberation movements into the same volume.27 Nevertheless, comparisons between the historical trajectories of liberation movements introduced in these texts remain mostly implicit, and theoretical consideration of what it might mean to develop a transnational perspective on Southern Africa’s exile past remains largely unexplored.28 As noted, “the politics of exile” literature of the 1970s and 1980s was explicitly comparative and theoretical in its framing. This literature has not, however, been taken up by historians since 1990 to develop a genuinely regional discussion about exile. Moreover, this literature’s framework is inadequate to address social contexts that have influenced the region’s exiled nations in similar ways and that are highlighted in recent historical scholarship. 25

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Christian A. Williams, “Ordering the Nation:  SWAPO in Zambia, 1974–1976,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 4 (2011):  712–13. For a similar comparative analysis, see Alexander and Kynoch, “Histories and Legacies of Punishment,” 405–8. Both Sapire and Saunders note the South African and ANC focus of most literature on Southern Africa’s liberation struggles in their review articles (“Liberation Movements, Exile and International Solidarity”; “Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa”). Significantly, there have been no publications outside South Africa comparable to the six volumes published by the South African Democracy and Education Trust (SADET) on South Africa’s liberation struggle. Although the Hashim Mbita project of the Southern African Development Community supported research on liberation struggles that was regional in scope, the project’s findings remain, to date, unpublished. Trewhela, Inside Quatro; Alexander and Kynoch, “Histories and Legacies of Punishment”; Sapire and Saunders, Southern African Liberation Struggles. Alexander and Kynoch’s essay on “Histories and Legacies of Punishment in Southern Africa” is an exception here, for it draws research focused on different Southern African countries into a conversation through tracing formative social contexts across the region, including exile camps.

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One such context is the camp. Liberation movements representing each of Southern Africa’s postliberation nations trained guerrilla soldiers and administered fellow nationals in camps during their years abroad. Although scattered across several countries over three decades, camps shared features that are repeatedly noted in secondary literature.29 In camps, liberation movements wielded an extraordinary degree of control over the everyday lives of their rank-and-file members. From the moment in which exiles entered a camp, they were reliant on those who administered them to access food, shelter, clothing, medicine, and weapons – all the resources necessary for survival and for fighting a war. Camp inhabitants were also required to follow the particular rules and routines of the camps in which they were living, including restrictions on their ability to move within and beyond camp space and to associate with other camp inhabitants. Deviations from camp rules were met with various forms of discipline, including corporal punishment and detention, sometimes in other camps designed for that purpose. In such a setting, exiles were highly vulnerable not only to colonial regimes and their allies, which might target camps with attacks, but also to liberation movement officials who administered camps. And, not infrequently, camp officials abused this power as they asserted their authority over other members of a national community. Given these characteristics, it is not surprising that liberation movements’ camps should have received attention in critical exile historiography. In their seminal work Sithole, Trewhela, Ellis, and Leys and Saul each touch on camps, using camp histories to highlight violent internal conflicts and a “creeping 29

The following references stand out for their focus on everyday life in liberation movements’ exile camps: Alexander and McGregor, “War Stories,” 87–92; Shireen Hassim, “Nationalism, Feminism and Autonomy: The ANC in Exile and the Question of Women,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 3 (2004):  440–3; Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa:  Contesting Authority (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press 2006), 97–100; Steve Davis, “Cosmopolitans in Close Quarters: Everyday Life in the Ranks of Umkhonto we Sizwe (1961–Present),” PhD diss., University of Florida, 2010; “Training and Deployment at Novo Catengue and the Diaries of Jack Simons,” Journal of Southern African Studies 40, no.  6 (2014):  1325–42; Alexander and Kynoch, “Histories and Legacies of Punishment,” 405–8; Mazarire, “Discipline and Punishment”; Michael G.  Panzer, “A Nation in Name, a ‘State’ in Exile:  The FRELIMO Proto-State, Youth, Gender and the Liberation of Mozambique, 1962–1975,” PhD diss., State University of New York at Albany, 2013; “Building a Revolutionary Constituency:  Mozambican Refugees and the Development of the FRELIMO Proto-State, 1964–1968,” Social Dynamics 39, no.  1 (2013):  5–23; Martha Akawa, Gender Politics, 124–54. See also work that examines camplike spaces that liberation movements administered in their respective “liberated zones”: Harry West, “Girls with Guns: Narrating the Experience of War of FRELIMO’s ‘Female Detachment,’ ” Special Issue on Youth and Social Imagination, Anthropological Quarterly 73, no. 4 (2000): 180–94; Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 133–63; Inge Brinkman, A War for People: Civilians, Legitimacy and Mobility in South-East Angola in MPLA’s War for Independence (Köln: Rüddiger Köppe, 2005). There is also a growing body of primary literature that addresses people’s personal experiences of camps, some of which is discussed in subsequent chapters.

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authoritarianism” within liberation movements during their years in exile.30 Some recent scholarship has also focused on camps more directly, presenting them not only as places where conflicts occurred, but also as a kind of space that shaped the form that conflicts took and enabled national elites to forge allegiances and manage tensions.31 Some authors, moreover, have begun to consider camps in relation to other kinds of social space that have shaped exiled liberation movements. It is from this vantage point, for example, that Hugh Macmillan compares camps that MK administered in Angola with the city of Lusaka, whose relatively open and tolerant environment also influenced the ANC. Although Macmillan’s point that “the culture of the ANC in Lusaka was more typical of the ANC as a whole than its culture in any other place” should be questioned,32 his attention to city and camp illuminates different social dynamics that coexisted within an exile community and that are easily overlooked in histories of exile that do not attend to social space. Despite these and other arguments framed around camps, however, historiography has barely begun to define camps as an object of study with considerable significance for comprehending Southern Africa’s recent past. Like the literature on exile generally, few publications pertaining to camps engage with the camps of different nations’ liberation movements.33 Authors regularly refer to liberation movements’ “military (or training) camps,” “refugee camps,” “transit camps,” and “detention camps” without defining what constitutes these and other kinds of camps or working through the ambiguity of applying such labels in the context of a liberation war.34 Few texts attend in any detail 30

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Steve Davis makes this point about “creeping authoritarianism” in relation to how Paul Trewhela and Stephen Ellis narrate Novo Catengue. See Davis, “Training and Deployment at Novo Catengue,” 1325–6. For discussion of FRELIMO’s distribution of resources and authoritarianism in camps in 1960s Tanzania, see Panzer, “Building a Revolutionary Constituency.” For discussion of camps and sexual abuse within the ANC and SWAPO, respectively, see Hassim, “Nationalism, Feminism and Autonomy,” 440–3, Women’s Organizations, 97–100; Akawa, Gender Politics, 124–54. For discussion of camp discipline and its significance in securing the position of ZANU’s “old guard” in the liberation movement’s internal conflicts, see Mazarire, “Discipline and Punishment”; Alexander and Kynoch, “Histories and Legacies of Punishment,” 405–8. In distinguishing between “the culture” of the ANC in Lusaka and “the culture” of the ANC in MK’s Angolan camps, Macmillan suggests that these two “cultures” were distinct (The Lusaka Years, 6, 291). This distinction allows him to present developments in the camps in Angola as “aberrations” in the practice of what “was usually a humane and caring organization” (186–7). And yet, as Macmillan’s own evidence indicates, there was substantial traffic of ANC members, including security operatives, across these boundaries. For discussion of SWAPO in Lusaka and how camp and city are intertwined with one another during SWAPO’s 1974–6 crisis, see Chapter 4. For exceptions, see Alexander and Kynoch, “Histories and Legacies of Punishment,” 405–8; Williams, “Ordering the Nation,” 712–13; “Introduction: Thinking Southern Africa from ‘the Camp,’ ” Social Dynamics 39, no.  1 (2013):  1–4; Davis, “Training and Deployment at Novo Catengue,” 1340–2; Akawa, The Gender Politics, 107–8. E.g., in the introduction to her chapter on “Women and the SWAPO refugee camps,” Martha Akawa writes “I would define a camp as a permanently or semi-permanently occupied

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to the places where specific camps were located or to the relationships that developed between exiles and those who lived alongside them there, including local hosts, other liberation movements and foreign military units.35 And only a few scholars acknowledge, let alone explain, the capacity of camps to shape very different, and seemingly contradictory, relationships among inhabitants. These relationships include not only the violent conflicts and authoritarianism highlighted in most critical historiography, but also “comradeship,” “pride in new military abilities,” and “empowered” roles for women.36 Finally, and crucially for addressing all of these topics, historiography has, for the most part, not attended to the epistemological grounds on which claims about liberation movements’ camps are made. As Steve Davis and I  have argued in different contexts, histories of camps, like histories of exile generally, tend to be rendered through binary oppositions that overdetermine meaning and obscure exiles’ daily lives.37 Clearly, postcolonial nationalism shapes these oppositions, drawing camps into competing histories that either legitimate liberation movements turned ruling parties or contest their authority to rule. And yet, as I argue in this book, the politics of camp representation are not simply reflections of current political discourse, but also of the camps where exiles lived in the past and the historical processes through which camps and nations have become entangled in one another. Although not addressed in Southern Africa’s exile historiography, there is scholarly literature pertaining to exile that has repeatedly drawn attention to such entanglements. As anthropologists have demonstrated in diverse contexts, crossing social boundaries tends to induce those who cross them to construct

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settlement with infrastructure in place. . . . Military posts or transit camps . . . often lacked basic infrastructure and as such were not considered to be camps” (The Gender Politics, 108). Nevertheless, Akawa then proceeds to apply the label “camp” to the very sites that she excludes from her definition and to present camps in a manner that effaces many of the differences between them, including the distinction that her initial definition highlighted (108–23). For texts that examine relationships between Southern African exiles and local host communities, see Sean Morrow, Brown Maaba, and Loyiso Pulumani, Education in Exile: SOMAFCO, the ANC School in Tanzania, 1978 to 1992 (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2004), 113–32; Christian A. Williams, “Living in Exile: Daily Life and International Relations at SWAPO’s Kongwa Camp,” Kronos:  Southern African Histories 37 (2011):  60–86; Arianna Lissoni and Maria Suriano, “Married to the ANC: Tanzanian Women’s Entanglement in South Africa’s Liberation Struggle,” Journal of Southern African Studies 40, no. 1 (2014): 129–50; Christian A. Williams, “Practicing Pan-Africanism: An Anthropological Perspective on Exile-Host Relations at Kongwa, Tanzania,” Anthropology Southern Africa 37, nos. 3–4 (2014): 223–8; Davis, “Training and Deployment at Novo Catengue.” See Akawa, The Gender Politics, 119–23, 195; Alexander and McGregor, “War Stories,” 87–92; West, “Girls with Guns.” For discussion of liberating practice in SWAPO’s camps, see Chapters 2 and 8. Davis, “Cosmopolitans,” 14–15, 139–85; “Training and Deployment at Novo Catengue”; Williams, “Exile History,” 1–28; “National History in Southern Africa:  Reflections on the ‘Remember Cassinga?’ Exhibition” Kronos 36 (2010): 207–50; “Living in Exile,” 60–86.

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ideologies of belonging that are useful in their new environment.38 These ideologies – including the idea of belonging to “a nation in exile” – are shaped by the kinds of social space that migrants inhabit. And these spaces – including the camps where many exiles live – are imagined in ways that reflect migrants’ relationships to other people in the wider world.39 Such a perspective – which highlights how “camp” and “nation” may create one another – demands attention to the historical processes through which knowledge of camps are produced. And this perspective is crucially important for evaluating claims about camps and for developing a more nuanced perspective on Southern Africa’s exile past and its legacy. Limits to Liberation Outside historiography there is another growing body of literature associated with political science and other social science disciplines that addresses exile and its legacy in Southern Africa. In 2001, amidst resurging political turmoil in the region, especially in Zimbabwe, the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala initiated a research project on “Liberation and Democracy in Southern Africa.” As Henning Melber writes in the introduction to Limits to Liberation, one of two edited volumes that the project directly generated,40 contributors sought to address a glaring contradiction in Southern Africa’s postliberation societies:  Namely, that “liberation movements which spearheaded mass popular struggles for liberation from colonial rule have, in power, developed into authoritarian and, to varying degrees, corrupt ruling regimes,” which have abandoned declared aims to promote democracy and social justice.41 Although essays focus on several countries and themes, Melber’s introduction captures two recurring lines of argument. First, he notes that the way in which liberation movements resisted colonial rule often contradicted their stated aims by 38

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See, e.g., J. Clyde Mitchell, “The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia,” Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No. 27 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1956) and other urban studies by the Rhodes Livingstone Institute; Frederik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries:  The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (Oslo:  Scandinavian University Press, 1969); Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, eds., Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered (New  York:  New  York Academy of Sciences, 1992); Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1995); Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving, Struggles for Home:  Violence, Hope and the Movement of People (New  York:  Berghahn Books, 2009). Malkki, Purity and Exile. Malkki’s specific argument about the social construction of exile will be discussed more in the following text. Henning Melber, ed., Limits to Liberation in Southern Africa:  The Unfinished Business of Democratic Consolidation (Cape Town:  HSRC Press, 2003); Henning Melber, ed., Re-Examining Liberation in Namibia:  Political Culture since Independence (Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2003). Melber, Limits to Liberation, xiii–xiv.

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“falling prey to authoritarian patterns of rule and undemocratic (as well as sometimes violent) practices towards real or imagined dissidents within their ranks.”42 Second, Melber emphasizes that liberation movements, now ruling parties, have mobilized “selective narratives and memories of the war(s) of liberation” to assert themselves as sole legitimate representatives of their respective nations and to dismiss any criticism as a threat to “the people and the national interest.”43 Both arguments suggest that the armed struggle and the social environment in exile have undermined a more genuine liberation, turning “victims” into “perpetrators.”44 Since the early 2000s similar lines of argument have been developed by others working on “limits to liberation” in Southern Africa, especially John Saul and Roger Southhall. For Saul, the contradictions of Southern Africa’s present must be understood both in the context of the region’s “Thirty Years War” and the “empire of capital,” which has constrained political and economic choices since this war’s end. As Saul discusses in several monographs, during Southern Africa’s liberation struggles, elites emerged within liberation movements who have, in turn, come to benefit from, and wield power through, societies whose structure has changed little since the colonial period.45 Saul’s earlier work with Colin Leys on Namibia and SWAPO and his recent book with Patrick Bond on South Africa and the ANC particularly highlight the significance of exile in this trajectory for it is there where a national elite was entrenched whose interests have resided more in capturing state power than in deepening democracy or promoting social change.46 Roger Southall’s recent book, Liberation 42

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Ibid., xiv; Re-Examining Liberation in Namibia, 9. As Melber notes, these patterns and practices reflect the very regimes that the liberation movements were resisting and that compelled the movements to turn to armed struggle. Melber, Limits to Liberation, xiv–xv; Re-Examining Liberation in Namibia, 10–11. Melber develops these arguments further in much of his subsequent writing. Seminal texts include Henning Melber, “Namibia’s Past in the Present:  Colonial Genocide and Liberation Struggle in Commemorative Narratives,” South African Historical Journal 54, no. 1 (2005):  91–111; “Southern African Liberation Movements as Governments and the Limits to Liberation,” Review of African Political Economy 36, no. 121 (2009): 452–3; Understanding Namibia: The Trials of Independence (Jacana:  Johannesburg, 2014), 23–36. For specific reference to how “victims” become “perpetrators,” see “Namibia’s Past in the Present,” 103; “Southern African Liberation Movements as Governments,” 452–4; Understanding Namibia, 34–5. John S. Saul, The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy in Southern Africa (New York:  Monthly Review Press, 2005); Decolonization and Empire: Contesting the Rhetoric and Practice of Resubordination in Southern Africa and beyond (London: Merlin Press, 2008); Liberation Lite: The Roots of Recolonization in Southern Africa (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2011); A Flawed Freedom: Rethinking Southern African Liberation (London: Pluto Press, 2014); John S. Saul and Patrick Bond, South Africa – The Present as History: From Mrs. Ples to Mandela & Marikana (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2014). Colin Leys and John S. Saul, “Liberation without Democracy,” Journal of Southern African Studies 20, no. 1 (1994):  123–47; “The Politics of Exile,” in Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 40–65; Saul and Bond, South Africa, 94–105. For other work that links exile history with social injustice in contemporary Namibia, see Justine Hunter, Die Politik; “No Man’s Land of Time:  Reflections on the Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Namibia,” in Gary Baines,

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Movements in Power also works with these arguments, albeit from a somewhat different angle.47 As he maintains, the ANC, SWAPO, and ZANU should be understood primarily as “party machines,” in which party and state have become increasingly inseparable as party members mobilize support from internal factions through the allocation of state resources in highly unequal and resource scarce postcolonial contexts. These machines have roots in exile where conditions produced divisions and undermined internal democracy,48 and they are reinforced through official histories that present a given liberation movement as undivided and solely responsible for a nation’s freedom.49 Collectively, these three scholars draw from critical exile historiography while offering perspectives on the legacy of liberation struggles that are marginal to this and other literature. First, they draw attention to the legacy as a regional phenomenon that can be interrogated productively through comparative study of different nations. To this end, they draw attention primarily to South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia – countries that bear similarity as former colonies within the Anglophone sphere of influence and whose liberation struggles ended in negotiated settlements. Nevertheless, Angola and Mozambique are drawn into the same frame of analysis and addressed explicitly in John Saul’s and others’ work.50 Moreover, authors note that liberation movements in power not only achieve legitimacy through the official histories of their respective countries, but also are bound by what Roger Southall calls a “regional syndrome of solidarity” in which former liberation movements reinforce the sole legitimacy of one another.51 In all these respects, authors draw national literatures on the contradictions of liberation struggles into a significant regional conversation. Second, “limits to liberation” literature explores the manner and extent to which national histories narrated in postcolonial Southern Africa are a powerful

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ed., Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late Cold War Conflicts (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2008), 302–21; “Dealing with the Past in Namibia: Getting the Balance Right Between Justice and Sustainable Peace?,” in André Du Pisani, Reinhart Kössler, and William A. Lindeke, eds., The Long Aftermath of War – Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia (Freiburg: Arnold Bergstraesser Institut, 2010), 403–33. Roger Southall, Liberation Movements in Power:  Party and State in Southern Africa (Pietermaritzberg: UKZN Press, 2013). Ibid., 57–63. Ibid., 70–2. See, e.g., John Saul’s chapters on Mozambique in the previously cited monographs and discussion of the “regional record” on liberation in his article “The Strange Death of Liberated Southern Africa,” Transformation 64 (2007): 1–26 and chapter “The Failure of Southern African Liberation?” in A Flawed Freedom, 17–27. For scholarship that specifically highlights the continuity of authoritarian and violent governance by FRELIMO before and after independence, see Victor Igreja, “Frelimo’s Political Ruling through Violence and Memory in Postcolonial Mozambique,” Journal of Southern African Studies 36, no. 4 (2010): 781–99; Panzer, “A Nation in Name, a ‘State’ in Exile” and “Building a Revolutionary Constituency.” Southall, Liberation Movements in Power, 73.

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historical legacy.52 This perspective is most fully developed in Henning Melber’s writing on political discourse and history in Namibia.53 As Melber argues, drawing from other scholars of Namibian memory politics, Namibia’s political discourse “reflects an ongoing affinity towards the authoritarian structures required to wage a war.”54 This discourse is organized around a stark dichotomy between “us,” the liberator, and “them,” the enemy, which undermines any genuine attempt to overcome colonial era social divisions through “national reconciliation.”55 It is also a highly masculine discourse, focused on heroism and triumph, personified in the figure of Namibia’s official “Founding Father,” Sam Nujoma, and with no space for mourning or empathy.56 It follows that what is at stake in Namibia and elsewhere today is not only the exclusion of difficult facts from official histories, as critical exile historiography emphasizes, but also the manner in which histories are remembered. In making the latter point, Melber draws directly from Richard Werbner’s seminal text, Memory and the Postcolony, using it both as a theoretical framework for understanding a “memory crisis” in postcolonial Africa and as a reference for comparisons between Namibia and Zimbabwe, where the armed struggle similarly dominates the national narrative.57

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Some of the historical literature on exile also discusses forms of historical narration as legacies of the exile past. See Alexander and McGregor, “War Stories,” 79–100; Davis, “Cosmopolitans in Close Quarters,” 9–15, 282–335; Ellis, External Mission, 301–4. See Henning Melber, Understanding Namibia, 23–36 and other specific references from previous writings cited in the following text. Henning Melber, “Namibia’s Past in the Present,” 99. Melber, Re-Examining Liberation, 10–11. See also Reinhart Kössler, “Facing a Fragmented Past: Memory, Culture and Politics in Namibia,” Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 2 (2007): 370; Lali Metsola, “The Struggle Continues? The Spectre of Liberation, Memory Politics and ‘War Veterans’ in Namibia,” Development and Change 41, no. 4 (2010): 605–10; André du Pisani, “Discursive Limits of SWAPO’s Dominant Discourse on Anti-Colonial Nationalism in Postcolonial Namibia – A First Exploration,” in André du Pisani, Reinhart Kössler, and William A. Lindeke, eds., The Long Aftermath of War  – Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia (Freiburg:  Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut, 2010), 1–40. For further discussion of Namibia’s reconciliation discourse, see Chapter 7. Melber, “Namibia’s Past in the Present,” 102–3; “Southern African Liberation Movements,” 456–8. Richard Werbner, “Beyond Oblivion:  Confronting Memory Crisis,” in Richard Werbner, ed., Memory and the Postcolony:  African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London and New York: Zed, 1998), 1–17; “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in Zimbabwe,” in Richard Werbner, ed., Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London and New  York:  Zed, 1998), 71–102. See also Terrence Ranger, “Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 2 (2003): 215–34; Reinhart Kössler, “Images of History and the Nation: Namibia and Zimbabwe Compared,” South African Historical Journal 62, no. 1 (2010): 29–53. For discussion of South Africa’s “rainbow nation discourse” and how it compares with “patriotic history” in Namibia and Zimbabwe, see Southall, Liberation Movements in Power, 70–3.

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Despite these valuable insights, however, “limits to liberation” leaves much of the social terrain shaping historical narration of Southern Africa’s liberation struggles unexplored. By and large, the literature focuses on a dominant narrative constructed by former liberation movements and their representatives. As a result, those whose experiences are excluded from this official narrative tend to be presented as “victims” of a liberation movement or new national elite. Such an approach dovetails with a normative human rights framework that renders “silence after violence” an obstacle to achieving “reconciliation” and other transitional justice aims.58 But it tends to obscure the everyday contexts in which people construct relationships in a national community through voicing stories about a shared past. To make these observations is not to suggest that “limits to liberation” authors disregard voices of people who have been excluded from an official history. For example, in “Lubango and After,” an article directly relevant to the discussion here, John Saul and Colin Leys focus attention on SWAPO’s “ex-detainees,” highlighting their agency in opposing a dominant national narrative that has rendered them “spies” and in seeking recognition for violence perpetrated on them by SWAPO in camps near Lubango, Angola. Nevertheless, the issue is framed in terms of a binary opposition – “to forget or not to forget”  – that can only encompass how a few government officials and ex-detainees have narrated opposing histories in public space and cannot account for the many ways in which Namibians articulate their relationship to SWAPO’s Lubango camps, including people at the margins of the Lubango debate.59 Also and crucially, the “limits to liberation” literature does not address important temporal dimensions of how the region’s recent past and present relate to one another. Authors tend to narrate history as if it occurred in two distinct phases – the colonial and the postcolonial periods. Thus, the struggle against colonialism turned “victims” into “perpetrators” or created conditions for national elites to betray struggle ideals or enabled liberation movements to 58

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For a broader discussion of normative assumptions accompanying “Silence after Violence,” see Yehonatan Alsheh, Robert Gordon, Anja Henebury, and Christian A.  Williams, eds., Special Issue on “Silence after Violence,” Acta Academica 47, no. 1 (2015). Colin Leys and John S. Saul, “Lubango and After: ‘Forgotten History’ as Politics in Namibia,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 2 (2003):  300–25. Some of the literature on memory politics in Namibia does attend to how different groups engage a dominant narrative through diverse forms of memory in everyday contexts. For texts that address this topic directly, see Godwin Kornes, “Whose Blood Waters Whose Freedom? Gegenerinnerungen in der namibischen Interniertenfrage,” in Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 122 (2010); “Negotiating Silent Reconciliation: The Long Struggle for Transitional Justice in Namibia,” in Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 141 (2013); Heike Becker, “Commemorating Heroes in Windhoek and Eenhana:  Memory, Culture and Nationalism in Namibia, 1990–2010,” Africa 81, no. 4 (2011): 519–43; “Silence, Victimhood, and (photo-) Voice in Northern Namibia,” Special Issue on “Silence after Violence,” Acta Academica 47, no. 1 (2015): (in press).

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become “party machines.” And yet, these formulations do not account for more fluid processes of social construction that move back and forth over time and whose future outcomes remain uncertain. As previously suggested, camps are at the center of such processes in Southern Africa, caught in national narratives that both reflect camps in the past and that shift as people articulate camp histories in the present. These sites are worthy, therefore, of more sustained attention. The Liberation Movement Camp The study of liberation movement camps should begin from an understanding of how these sites have become entangled in the histories of Southern African nations. Like postcolonies elsewhere, Southern African states rely heavily on narratives of colonial oppression and anticolonial resistance to govern national communities. Important to any rendering of these national histories in the region are stories told about the years spent by people in exile and the camps, where most of these exiles lived. Nevertheless, the violent intranational divisions that emerged in camps constrain how these sites are incorporated into national histories. Following their nations’ independence and their acquisition of state power, liberation movement officials have propagated a narrative that affirms their status as leaders of a nation while obscuring histories that might undermine this status – above all, histories of the camps. And camp histories have become potent sites through which citizens contest this social order and seek to raise their position in it. In making these connections between camp, nation, and history, this text is influenced by anthropological literature on refugees, especially Liisa Malkki’s groundbreaking ethnography, Purity and Exile.60 Drawing from fieldwork among refugees who fled genocidal violence in Burundi in 1972 Malkki highlights how the circumstances in which these refugees were living at the time (1985–6) in western Tanzania shaped their understanding of nation and their consciousness of history. Refugees who lived in Mishamo, a camp, were set apart from other nationalities and governed through their status as people dislocated from a nation. In response, they articulated a national history, constituting themselves as members of an exiled Hutu nation that had been denied its own state by rival Tutsis. In contrast, others of similar background and experiences who migrated to Kigoma, a town, were not governed on the basis of a national identity and were more likely to improve their social status by integrating themselves into their new community. Consequently, they eschewed Hutu nationalism and the history through which it was advanced, adopting instead a “cosmopolitan” relation to difference. Liisa Malkki’s work has advantages over other critical literature on camps as a starting point for the study of liberation movement camps in SouthernAfrica.61 Like 60 61

Malkki, Purity and Exile. There is, of course, much literature pertaining to camps that renders them in an uncritical manner according to humanitarian and other policy-driven discourses. For further discussion of

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Giorgio Agamben in his seminal book Homo Sacer,62 Malkki describes “the camp” as a highly unequal space in which people live under a sovereign with control over all resources necessary for maintaining human life. Moreover, both Malkki and Agamben suggest that camps are similar to a range of other “disciplinary institutions” employing “biopolitical” techniques of government and producing exceptional contradictions between human rights discourse and everyday practice.63 Unlike Agamben, however, who portrays camp inhabitants as people whose “bare life” has become inseparable from the biopolitics of nation-states, Malkki highlights new political subjectivities that form when people enter a camp organized around the principal that they have been forcibly displaced from a national home.64 This perspective opens Malkki to the insight that camps are not only products, but also producers, of new forms of politics. It allows her, and other scholars who have subsequently conducted ethnographic research with refugees, to associate the lived space of refugee camps with the formation of national political meanings across a range of contexts.65 And it opens the possibility that “the camp” is not merely the end of modern history, as Agamben suggests, but also one of its beginnings  – a

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this literature and how it differs from critical perspectives developed here, see Liisa H. Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1996): 493–523. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:  Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1998). See also Agamben’s article “The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern,” in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Violence, Identity and Self-Determination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 166–80. In discussing disciplinary institutions and biopolitics, Malkki and Agamben both draw from Michel Foucault’s seminal work. See Society Must Be Defended:  Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976, Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, eds. (New York:  Picador, 2003), 249–53 and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979). The same contrast could be made between Liisa Malkki and Hannah Arendt, who in “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1951) famously argues that refugees, the very people whom human rights ought to protect, are, in fact, people without rights because they have been excluded from a nation-state and are, therefore, “nothing but human” (300). For further discussion of how my approach to camps relates to theoretical literature on refugees, see Christian A. Williams, “Refugees and Social Theory: From the Politics of ‘Bare Life’ to Refugees as Political Subjects,” Acta Academica 46, no. 4 (2014): 117–31. Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement:  Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Michel Agier, “Between War and City: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps,” Ethnography 3, no. 3 (2002): 317–66; On the Margins of the World:  The Refugee Experience Today (Malden, MA:  Polity Press, 2008); “Humanity as an Identity and Its Political Effects (A Note on Camps and Humanitarian Government)” Humanity 1, no.  1:  29–46; Aihwa Ong, The Buddha Is Hiding:  Refugees, Citizenship and the New America (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2003); Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Simon Turner, Politics of Innocence: Hutu Identity, Conflict and Camp Life (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).

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space where socially significant histories are produced and around which violent futures, like Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, may unfold.66 Nevertheless, the distinctive features of Southern Africa’s liberation movement camps – features that differ from the refugee camps that Malkki and other anthropologists have studied and that make them a distinct kind of camp – must be examined if one hopes to unravel contradictory images of these sites. Importantly, inhabitants of liberation movement camps not only fled political violence in their country of origin, but also joined an organization leading a liberation war. As a result, they often identified themselves as “freedom fighters” irrespective of whether they had trained as guerrillas, or intended to take up arms, to liberate their nation. Moreover, distinctions between camps intended for combatants and noncombatants were inevitably blurred. Those camps that the liberation movements created to offer health and educational services to noncombatants routinely harbored military units affiliated with a given movement’s army and responsible for camp defense. Likewise, camps that were designed to train and deploy guerrillas often accommodated noncombatants, including children, women, and elderly people fleeing into exile or traveling between sites administered by a liberation movement. Even those camps where liberation movements imprisoned members accused of spying were sometimes the same sites where guerrillas received training and children attended school, and they were always integral to a broader constellation of camps under a movement’s control. Thus, while there was some division of labor within liberation movement camps, labels such as “military,” “refugee,” “transit,” and “detention” are less reflective of distinct categories of camps than they are of the global context in which international legal categories for camps have been established and contested. One feature that does define liberation movement camps as a whole and distinguishes them from most refugee camps is the role of liberation movements in governing them. Whereas refugee camps are usually administered directly by a host nation and/or transnational humanitarian agency, Southern Africa’s liberation movement camps were governed directly by exiles affiliated with a liberation movement, often with little oversight from hosts and donors. This difference in the structure of camps seems to have impacted on the different social relations that have emerged at these sites. Whereas Malkki and other ethnographers of refugee camps focus primarily on hierarchical relations forming between governed refugees and governing foreigners, this text highlights steep hierarchies that formed within an exile/refugee community.67 These 66

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Malkki draws connections between the communities of Burundian refugees analyzed in the body of her book and the genocide unfolding in Rwanda at the time of her book manuscript’s submission in a postscript titled “Return to Genocide” in Purity and Exile, 259–97. Mention of social differentiation among refugee communities is not entirely absent from the ethnographic literature. As Ilana Feldman argues, services delivered to refugees and others “in crisis” are, by nature, hierarchical, strengthening the authority not only of the governing body responsible for administering aid but also of the social networks through which aid is administered (Governing Gaza). Michel Agier and Aihwa Ong consider how such networks form in

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hierarchies reflect not only the relative position of liberation movement leaders, camp commanders, and others in governing the everyday lives of exiles, but also other social categories whose status in a national community has been mediated through this camp order. Such hierarchies are critically important to understand for analyzing representations of liberation movement camps because they structure how inhabitants at various positions in these hierarchies have experienced and represented camps differently. Moreover, they begin to explain how differences in camps over time and place have been effaced by homogenizing claims about “the camps”  – claims articulated by those in a position to speak about camps on a nation’s behalf. Finally, the relationship between Southern Africa’s liberation movement camps and the region’s postcolonial governments has a unique effect on the social production of camp histories.68 As former exiles seek recognition for their bravery and suffering during the liberation struggle, they often render histories of the camps where they, as exiles, once lived. These histories tend to affirm an official narrative articulated by liberation movements upon whom citizens now rely for resources in a postcolonial nation. Nevertheless, as former exiles attempt to gain leverage over the recognition that they are granted, they sometimes include details of their own unique experiences in camps. In so doing, they present historical knowledge that extends beyond the boundaries of an accepted national narrative and of any competing narrative which opposes it. In recent years, as Southern Africa has moved further from its liberation struggle past, the forces drawing such knowledge to the surface of social life have intensified. Most former exiles, like the majority of Southern Africa’s people, continue to live in precarious economic circumstances in nations marked by the extreme disparity of wealth between their ordinary and elite citizens. The threat of colonial rule, which bound people together in the past against a common enemy, has become less tangible than it once was. New forms of technology and sociality have opened opportunities for people to circulate their views on the past outside their government’s direct observation. Under such circumstances, camp histories are not “silent,” as is frequently assumed. Rather, they are highly vocal, for they are a primary medium through which citizens negotiate their relations with other members of a national community. And their social significance today cannot be apprehended without knowledge of the camps, for the hierarchies that formed at these sites shape their ongoing historical production.

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the particular camps that they study, noting how various groups of refugees access sources of capital from outside the camp and privileges from administrators within it. See Agier, “Between War and City,” 329–32; Agier, On the Margins of the World, 53–7; Ong, The Buddha Is Hiding, 53–5. Nevertheless, these and other studies do not focus on the hierarchies that form among camp populations. For seminal work that discusses historical knowledge in terms of “social production,” see David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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A Historical Ethnography of Camps As suggested, Southern Africa’s liberation movement camps have shaped social structures that not only siphon camp histories into competing national narratives, but also evoke historical knowledge that undermines them. It follows that conducting research on these camps requires accessing knowledge that extends beyond nationalism’s binary oppositions. To this end, my research employed an ethnographic approach, centered on personal relationships with Namibian former exiles. Research participants included those whom I met while teaching and conducting master’s fieldwork in Tses (2000–3), conducting doctoral fieldwork in Windhoek and “Ovamboland”69 (2007–8), and traveling around the country once or more annually over fifteen years.70 Relationships developed through various activities, such as arranged meetings and interviews, shared attendance of public events, and everyday encounters with former exiles, their friends, and families. As I moved with research participants across these settings, I observed how they spoke about the camps where they had once lived and how camp representations changed as they entered spaces with different relationships to the nation. I  asked questions about camp daily life, which, while seemingly distant from national politics, illuminated power relations in the camps where a nation had formed. And I circulated historical sources that I hoped would not overtly threaten, but would evade, narration in a national history. Sources included others’ memories of camps; documents about camps located in archives scattered across Namibia (Windhoek, Outapi), South Africa (Alice, Cape Town, Pretoria), Germany (Wuppertal) and Switzerland (Basel); and material remains of camps that I photographed in Angola and Tanzania and later shared with research participants. This ethnographic approach clearly differs from other historical scholarship on liberation struggles and exile in Southern Africa.71 To date, work in this field has drawn from a combination of official archives, private papers, TRC reports, memoirs of former exiles, and recorded interviews. Despite the recent proliferation of source materials and scholarly texts, however, there has been relatively little attention to how particular archives of exile knowledge, or the archive of exile more generally, frame their historical objects.72 Scholars tend to present 69

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“Ovamboland” remains the colloquial name for the territory that was reserved for those classified as Ovambo during the apartheid era. It largely (but not entirely) corresponds with four administrative regions in the central part of northern Namibia: Oshikoto, Oshana, Omusati, and Ohangwena. The majority of Namibia’s former exiles live in Ovamboland. Sites in Namibia where I  conducted fieldwork in preparation for this book include Berseba, Eenhana, Engela, Gainachas, Keetmanshoop, Lüderitz, Mariental, Odibo, Onayana, Ondangwa, Ongwediva, Oshakati, Oshikuku, Outapi, Rundu, Tses, Tsumeb, Vaalgras, and Windhoek. As previously noted, there is ethnographic literature on memory politics in (and beyond) Namibia that discusses liberation struggle history. This work, however, focuses on analyzing contemporary societies – not on employing ethnographic techniques for the purpose of historical reconstruction and analysis. This question is central, however, to Luise White and Miles Larmer, eds., Part Special Issue on “Mobile Soldiers and the Un-National Liberation of Southern Africa,” Journal of Southern

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histories of exile as highly vulnerable to political distortion, but nevertheless, open to critical assessment and revision through “impartial” historical research with “verified” primary sources.73 However, such methods do not, in and of themselves, account for the social processes through which historical knowledge of exile is produced or the political consequences of producing such knowledge. As a result, camps usually remain embedded in national histories, affirming or challenging dominant narratives of exile in a given nation rather than illuminating the powerful conceptual framework through which exile is commonly understood and the experiences of people who remain unintelligible within it. At the same time, this book’s approach to ethnography clearly differs from that of most anthropologists, including Liisa Malkki and others working on camps.74 Unlike Malkki, I was unable to observe any of the camps about which I now write at the time while my research participants were living there. Rather, I harnessed other sources of knowledge that were available to me more than ten years after exiles’ repatriation. My research was ethnographic, based on an ongoing “conversation” between me and research participants over extended periods of fieldwork.75 But it was also camp ethnography of a different kind – a historical ethnography of camps. By historical ethnography I refer not only to a set of methods adapted to analyzing the past and to utilizing sources often associated with the discipline of history, but also to an approach that interrogates relationships between time and space, including how knowledge is produced in particular temporal and spatial contexts.76 Such historical ethnography may

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African Studies 40, no.  6 (2014). See, esp., Patricia Hayes, “Nationalism’s Exile:  Godfrey Nangonya and SWAPO’s Sacrifice in Southern Angola,” Journal of Southern African Studies 40, no. 6 (2014): 1305–24; Steve Davis, “Training and Deployment at Novo Catengue,” 1325–27, 1340–2. E.g., Paul Trewhela uses the language of investigative journalism to promote his book  – a book committed to “uncovering the exile history of the ANC and SWAPO” through recourse to “facts” that he and his coeditor have “verified” (Inside Quatro, v). Similarly, Stephen Ellis portends to distinguish South African “myths” from “history” by taking account of “the known facts” discernible through sources that have become available to scholars in the past twenty years (External Mission, 305, 309–10). In a more traditionally academic but still largely unreflective vein, Saunders and Sapire maintain that the authors featured in their volume “offer broader and more impartial perspectives” on Southern Africa’s highly politicized struggle histories through scholarly recourse to recently accessible sources (Southern African Liberation Struggles, 2). One anthropologist who has worked with historical camps is Peter Redfield in his book Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 76–108. Here I am drawing particularly from Johannes Fabian’s notion that fieldwork is a form of performance in which the fieldworker is “a provider of occasions” involved in an ongoing “conversation” with interlocutors. See Johannes Fabian, Power and Performance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 4–7. For recent reflections on historical ethnography and other scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and history, see Edward Murphy, David William Cohen, Chandra D. Bhimull,

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open new perspectives on any topic that relies heavily on knowledge collected in one kind of social space over a narrow period of time. And it is especially relevant for the study of camps, a space in which critical knowledge is often highly constrained. Consider, for example, Mishamo, the refugee camp where Liisa Malkki conducted her fieldwork. As Malkki writes, while she was living at Mishamo, she was only able to visit research participants inside the camp at particular times and locations predetermined by camp and other government officials. The refugees perceived that they were under surveillance, and this perception influenced both how Malkki was seen by the refugees and how the refugees would and would not gather in groups.77 Such conditions are hardly conducive to the production of critical knowledge, and they may explain lacunae that some scholars have identified in Malkki’s study.78 In contrast, my research participants and I were never confined to a camp. We did inhabit a nation with some camplike characteristics  – where government officials are the primary conduit of resources among citizens and use their considerable control of public media to propagate official knowledge and to sow suspicion of potential rivals. Nevertheless, we could move between sites where interlocutors were compelled to reproduce a strict national narrative and others where they spoke more freely about their personal experiences in exile and, sometimes, expressed their doubts about an official history. The research drew heavily from eyewitness sources of people depicting what they had seen, or what they were seeing, in a camp. But as these sources moved between my interlocutors over time, sources extended beyond the national frames that had previously constrained their points of view and illuminated contexts shaping their own production, including the camps.79 Certain sources and techniques were particularly useful for disentangling the camps from the nation that had confined representations of them. As I discovered shortly after beginning my doctoral fieldwork, the National Archives

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Fernando Coronil, Monica Patterson, and Julie Skurski, eds., Anthrohistory:  Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). Malkki, Purity and Exile, 47–51. As Simon Turner notes in Politics of Innocence, his recent ethnography of Burundian Hutus living in a camp in Tanzania, Malkki does not discuss the likelihood that the dominant history that she heard at Mishamo reflects the hegemonic position of the Hutu nationalist party Palipehutu at that camp (4; 146–9). See also Mia Green’s book review of Purity and Exile, wherein she notes that most of Malkki’s research participants were highly politicized adult men who may have used the camp to propagate their narratives of the nation at the expense of competing histories: “Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania – Book Review,” Journal of Southern African Studies 23, no. 2 (1997): 386–8. Nevertheless, some eyewitness sources were uniquely situated to observe how Southern African exiles lived in camps and able to comment on camps in writing not intended as propaganda. See, e.g., Steve Davis’s discussion and use of Jack Simons’s diaries in “Training and Deployment at Novo Catengue.”

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of Namibia houses an extensive collection of photographs of Namibians living in camps taken by journalists and members of solidarity movements who were invited to visit them by SWAPO. In most cases, the captions assigned to these photos are divorced from the particular people, places, and occasions depicted in them. Nevertheless, as I shared photos with research participants in private interviews and public exhibitions,80 viewers often highlighted details depicted in the photos that they knew from their personal experiences and that had been excluded from the captions. In some cases, viewers were also able to illuminate histories of the photos, including the circumstances in which they had been taken, associated with captions and deposited in the National Archives. Moreover, the photos were often catalysts for histories that did not relate directly to the photographs but that were, nevertheless, elicited by them when viewers remembered their lives in exile through the images. In all these instances, photos proved an especially effective medium for initiating a dialogue about camps because they could evoke poignant memories and be accessed by many people, including those with little formal education and unable to communicate comfortably in English.81 The knowledge of camps that accumulated through such methods presented additional strategies for pulling former camp inhabitants’ histories from the nation that had effaced them. As I learned, the particular camps where exiles lived, the times when they lived there, and the locations that they could and could not access within a given camp at a given time all impact on how former exiles now perceive and present “the camps.” These distinctions are repeatedly overlooked in public discourse – not only because national elites render a single narrative that structures this discourse, but also because those whose experiences extend outside this narrative articulate their histories in diffuse social networks that reflect, to a great extent, the diffuse geography and temporality of the camps themselves. Through identifying such networks, recording their distinct histories, and incorporating these histories into subsequent interviews, I have asked interlocutors to account for people and experiences that are excluded from dominant representations. In so doing, I aim to complicate the grounds on which people make claims about exile and to suspend the processes through which experiences of certain people are abstracted into the history of an entire nation.

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The titles of these exhibitions are “Living in Exile:  An Exhibition of Photographs from the SWAPO Camps” and “Remember Cassinga? An Exhibition of Photographs and Histories.” The former exhibition is included in my doctoral thesis, “Exile History” (284–317), and the latter was published with an accompanying article under the title, “National History in Southern Africa: Reflections on the ‘Remember Cassinga?’ Exhibition,” Kronos 36 (2010): 207–50. Although many of my formal interviews were conducted in English, local research assistants served as translators for some interviews, including those involving photographs. Research assistants were also an integral part of my photo exhibitions, speaking with viewers in various Namibian languages and sharing viewers’ responses with me.

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Scope and Organization This book is organized in three parts. The first part traces a series of relationships between camp, nation, and history in Southern Africa. Having introduced these relationships and my theoretical and methodological approach to them in this opening chapter, I turn in Chapter 2 to Cassinga, elaborating on them through a single, detailed example. Drawing from a photograph, the chapter traces histories of Cassinga that have been effaced from a dominant narrative since the camp was attacked by the SADF on May 4, 1978. As I maintain, the camp at Cassinga and the history of Namibia are deeply intertwined, effacing the manner in which Cassinga’s former inhabitants lived and encouraging the spread of dubious and divisive rumors. Nevertheless representations of camps are poised to evoke knowledge that diverges from dominant narratives when they circulate among people who inhabited these sites and who seek recognition for their particular experiences there in a national community. From this perspective, one may begin to imagine more insightful and progressive alternatives – not only to the official SWAPO (and SADF) version of Cassinga, but also to prevailing representations of other camps that are similarly embedded in a nation and shaped by Cassinga’s past. From there, Part II offers an alternative history of SWAPO in exile, organized around camps that have impacted significantly on the formation of social hierarchies within the Namibian nation at particular moments in time. I begin to narrate this history in Chapter 3 with a study of the SWAPO camp at Kongwa, Tanzania, where SWAPO and other OAU recognized liberation movements were first granted responsibility to administer their nascent guerrilla armies in 1964. The chapter traces the formation of a Namibian community at Kongwa, examining how tensions emerged in response to living conditions in the camp and how SWAPO and Tanzanian officials used their control over inhabitants’ access to resources outside the camp to secure their positions. Such qualities of camp life are consistently effaced in national histories of Kongwa and other liberation movement camps. And they are critically important for understanding SWAPO’s 1968  “Kongwa Crisis” and other later “events” that occurred among exiled Namibians. Chapter  4 moves to SWAPO’s Zambian camps during the mid-1970s, when a new generation of Namibians migrated into exile. In the wake of this migration, a more substantial conflict developed within SWAPO, commonly known as “the Shipanga Crisis,” which resulted in the detention of several senior SWAPO officials and more than one thousand guerrillas, some of whom subsequently “disappeared.” Although previous studies indicate that the conflict manifested itself in camps, they tend to depict camps as a series of places where residents were influenced by individuals, such as SWAPO leader Andreas Shipanga, and ideologically tinged events, like calls for a SWAPO congress. In contrast, this chapter focuses on the camp as a kind of space wherein disputes emerged among Namibians and in which SWAPO officials used their control

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over basic commodities, movement, and knowledge in order to manage them. From this perspective, the chapter offers new insight into how some SWAPO elites consolidated power at a moment when their authority was widely contested by exiled Namibians. Chapter 5 focuses attention on “the spy,” a source of fear and mode of discourse in liberation movement camps that SWAPO officials mobilized to an unprecedented extent in Lubango, Angola, during the 1980s. Drawing from anthropological literature on witchcraft, I discuss how some officials used their control of public knowledge in camps to direct inhabitants’ fears of apartheid violence toward people who were threatening to these officials and who were marked as culturally different among the camp rank and file. These dynamics are not addressed in the existing literature on the Lubango “Spy Drama,” which focuses more narrowly on individuals and factions within SWAPO who are held responsible for abusing power in exile, rather than on a kind of space that encouraged these abuses to unfold. And they are critical for comprehending how members of an emerging nation living in camps may be compelled to mobilize the ethnic, regional, racial, and gendered categories of a colonial government that they are opposing. In Part III, the book shifts focus from people living in SWAPO camps to people narrating histories about them, highlighting how camp histories have sustained and may subvert hierarchies that formed there. To begin, Chapter 6 examines histories of violence perpetrated by SWAPO officials on fellow Namibians in exile as they have been articulated at three points in time by three overlapping groups of people – the Committee of Parents (1985–6), the “ex-detainees” (1989), and the Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement (1996). These groups amassed extensive evidence of abuses committed by SWAPO officials at Lubango and other SWAPO camps, first through letters circulated among exiled Namibians and later through oral testimonies of ex-detainees and photographs of their disfigured bodies. Nevertheless, this evidence was repeatedly dismissed and the historical narratives based upon it remain widely stigmatized in Namibia. As I emphasize, the process of dismissing evidence not only required certain individuals and organizations to deny abuses about which they had considerable knowledge, but also required a system of nation-states that has shaped palatable representations of transnational migrant communities generally and of liberation movement camps in particular. By drawing attention to this system and the humanitarian/human rights language that it mobilizes, the chapter illuminates the system’s power to define camps and solidify nations over time and place. Chapter 7 turns to the topic of reconciliation, tracing the entanglement of the Namibian government’s reconciliation policy, the camps where Namibian exiles lived, and histories of the camps through which Namibians negotiate social relations with one another today. As I  explain, the government’s approach to reconciliation, which calls on Namibians to eschew any histories that might threaten an official narrative of the liberation struggle, both reflects

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the circumstances in which SWAPO released the detainees from its Lubango camps and impacts on many people, including those not widely associated with “the detainee issue.” Examples discussed in the chapter include Kaufilwa Nepelilo, a former exile whose experiences at Kongwa confound narratives of the liberation struggle; Vaalgras, a village on the Tses Reserve, whose offspring include a famous “puppet” (Emil Appolus) and many “spies”; and family members of ex-detainees who never lived in exile but who still live with “Lubango.” Through these cases, the chapter highlights how reconciliation discourse shapes the social fabric of Namibia, reproducing violence and perpetuating hierarchies that first emerged in the SWAPO camps. Camp histories are not “silent,” however, as human rights literature on reconciliation tends to assume. Rather, they are voiced at certain moments for certain audiences, shaping the terrain on which Namibians and other national communities inhabit their recent past. Finally, Chapter  8 concludes with a discussion of “the camp” and “the postcolony” more broadly conceived. Drawing from prior observations about SWAPO’s camps and regional scholarship on exile, the chapter compares camps that the liberation movements administered, considering the extent to which these camps may illuminate pasts unfolding in Southern Africa today. From there, the chapter turns to scholarship on Africa since the mid-twentieth century, suggesting the extent to which camps may generate new perspectives on Africa’s postcolonial nations. As I argue, camps are a key space from which to engage critically with entrenched forms of representation and to open new possibilities for dialogue and recognition.

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2 Revisiting an Image of a Camp: Remember Cassinga?

We remember Cassinga, we remember; We remember Cassinga, we remember; We remember Cassinga, we remember; We remember forever.1

At the National Archives of Namibia (NAN) in Windhoek, there is a collection of photographs featuring Namibians living in exile. The photos, which were acquired from the Mayibuye Centre at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and, before that, from the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), present a rich visual record of camps that Namibians inhabited in Zambia and Angola during the 1970s and 1980s. Photos focus primarily on everyday activities such as parade gatherings, military training, school classes, medical service, farming, cooking, singing, and dancing. Captions applied to the photos are sparse, including few details about the particular people and places that were photographed and of the contexts in which the photos were taken. Rather, they present general observations about the collective experience of Namibians in camps as presented to the world by SWAPO and its allies during those years. One of these photographs appears on the cover of this book. When, in February 2007, I first encountered a black-and-white version of a nearly identical image, the NAN’s caption read:  “Namibian refugees at Kassinga camp. A  month before the raid by South African troops in which over 800 people were massacred, May 1978.”2 (See Photo 1.) With these words the caption drew attention to a narrative well-known to Namibians and others who supported SWAPO during Namibia’s liberation struggle. According to that history, on May 4, 1978, the SADF conducted a “surprise attack” on the SWAPO “refugee camp” at Cassinga/Kassinga,3 resulting in the death of hundreds of people, 1 2 3

This is the refrain of a song commonly sung by Namibians on Cassinga Day. NAN, Photo Archive, No. 12778. Some sources refer to “Kassinga” with a “K.” This use may derive from the German spelling because Krupp, a German firm, owned the nearby iron mines at the time of Angola’s independence

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Photo 1. Cassinga parade. The photo is on file at the National Archives of Namibia (NAN/IDAF 12788) and was taken by Per Sanden.

many of them women and children. Despite this event, the greatest loss of life suffered on any single day of the conflict between SWAPO and apartheid South Africa, Namibians had united to free themselves from apartheid rule and to create an independent nation, led by a democratically elected SWAPO government. The photo appears to confirm this history, foregrounding children and women in civilian clothes raising clenched fists and directing their gaze toward a common goal. And it seems to refute an opposing history articulated by the SADF and its apologists, according to which Cassinga was a “military camp,” where the apartheid government led a legitimate and tactically difficult aerial assault. This chapter offers an expanded view of this photo. First, it examines life at Cassinga, moving from the daily ritual of the parade pictured in the photograph to the particular circumstances in which the photo was taken and other concurrent happenings in the camp. From there, the chapter traces the circulation of the photograph in the aftermath of the attack, examining how two competing sets of images came to stand for “Cassinga” at the expense of the more complex and diverse experiences of Cassinga’s former inhabitants. in 1975. See Edward George McGill Alexander, “The Cassinga Raid,” MA thesis, University of South Africa, 2003, 41; Gaetano Pagano, letter in “The Kassinga File” (Geneva: International University Exchange Fund, 1978). There was a sign in the camp, however, that spelled Cassinga with a “C” and Angola’s and Namibia’s governments both refer to Cassinga with a “C” today.

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The chapter then considers various accusations about who was responsible for the Cassinga attack, involving the photographer and others, which have proliferated among Namibians. Finally, the chapter reflects on how I collected information about Cassinga by introducing one of Cassinga’s commanders and our conversations about the photograph and other sources. As I maintain, the camp at Cassinga and the history of Namibia are deeply intertwined, effacing the manner in which Cassinga’s former inhabitants lived and encouraging the spread of dubious and divisive rumors. Nevertheless, Cassinga is also poised to evoke knowledge when sources, such as the aforementioned photo, circulate among those who lived in the camp and who seek recognition for their personal experiences there in a national community. And this knowledge may be used to assemble new histories, illuminating not only Cassinga, but also other camps that are similarly entangled in a nation and shaped by Cassinga’s past. Life at Cassinga For most Namibians who lived in exile, this photograph is immediately recognizable as a photo of “the parade.” Every morning at a set time, Cassinga’s inhabitants gathered near a cleared area or “parade ground” just to the west of the main dirt road running through the center of the camp. (See Map 3.) There, they commenced a ritual that resembled parades at other SWAPO camps across place and time. First, camp inhabitants congregated in their respective “platoons” and “sections” – groups modeled on units of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) and to which they were assigned upon entering the camp. These groups then arranged themselves in lines, and after taking attendance, marched onto the parade ground and assembled in designated areas. The camp commanders, individuals assigned by SWAPO to reside at the camp and manage its day-to-day administration, waited on either side of the path leading to the parade together with any senior PLAN officials who were at the camp at that time. Once the last section had entered, the commanders and other officials proceeded to the front of the parade and faced the people. There, everyone would stand, with some dressed in civilian clothes and others in military uniforms, which were worn not only by trained soldiers but also by untrained youth, imitating soldiers’ dress. Then, after all had performed songs and chants, declaring their allegiance to “One Namibia, One Nation,”4 a commander would address the assembled.5 4

5

For discussion of the chant “One Namibia, One Nation,” see Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (Trenton:  Africa World Press, 1988), 74–5; Michael Uusiku Akuupa and Godwin Kornes, “From ‘One Namibia, One Nation’ towards ‘Unity in Diversity’? Shifting Representations of Culture and Nationhood in Namibian Independence Day Celebrations, 1990–2010,” Anthropology Southern Africa 36, nos. 1–2 (2013):  37–9; Martha Akawa, The Gender Politics of the Namibian Liberation Struggle (Basel:  Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2014), 1. This paragraph draws from informal conversations with many individuals who lived at Cassinga as well as my interviews with Darius “Mbolondondo” Shikongo (Interviews, March 26, 2007,

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Road to Techamutete and the Front

Map 3. Cassinga.

Much of the content of commanders’ addresses focused on the assignment of work tasks necessary for meeting camp inhabitants’ basic biological needs. For example, camp commanders would announce that, on a given day, certain sections were to collect water in buckets from the Cuilonga River, located one kilometer to the west of the camp. Others were sent for wood, which was available in the moderately forested savanna surrounding Cassinga and needed for cooking and heating. Still others might be sent to collect grass that, together with wood cuttings, was used to construct housing – especially after the camp’s numbers expanded beyond what Cassinga’s colonial-era buildings could accommodate.6 Groups were also tasked to work agricultural fields

6

3, 15–16; June 11, 2007, 38–9; August 20, 2007, 66; September 3, 2007, 75). Page numbers accompanying interviews reflect transcripts. For further information about my interview transcripts, see the bibliography. These buildings had been used to house administrators and workers for nearby iron mines located at or near Techamutete. Cassinga was abandoned with the outbreak of Angola’s Civil War in 1975–6. See Annemarie Heywood, The Cassinga Event: An Investigation of the Records

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located between the camp and the river, where maize and other vegetables were grown, supplementing donations sent to SWAPO from the United Nations and other sources.7 Other groups were responsible for cooking, which was done in empty drums in the open air, and for serving meals, which consisted primarily of maize-meal, garnished with available items.8 In addition, groups were assigned to create, and later maintain, a workplace for a tailor, a garage, and a system of latrines.9 Parade announcements also involved the administration of two services offered to Namibians at Cassinga: namely, health and education. In the camp there was a clinic, where several trained nurses worked and patients were treated. The clinic held supplies of basic medicines, vaccines and first aid equipment that were applied to Namibians fleeing into exile and to combatants returning from the front line of PLAN operations along the Namibian-Angolan border. Facilities, however, were rudimentary and serious cases transferred as quickly as possible to Jamba (50 kilometers to the north) or Lubango (more than 250 kilometers west), where, by 1977, SWAPO had established camps with better medical facilities.10 There were also classes offered at Cassinga aimed at improving inhabitants’ basic literacy and numeracy skills. For example, as early as 1976 Canner Kalimba established a primary school for children at Cassinga.11 Although Kalimba and her pupils were transferred in 1977 to Jamba, where resources for a more permanent and better supplied school were available, SWAPO continued to offer classes to Namibians who were passing through Cassinga.12 By April 1978 school facilities at Cassinga had expanded to an extent that visitors from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) could write of an “education system” of twenty-six classes some of which were being held in “converted store-houses” left by Cassinga’s former inhabitants and newly built “straw structures strengthened with planks.”13

7

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(Windhoek: National Archives of Namibia, 1994), 17, 20; Alexander, “The Cassinga Raid,” 41; Pagano, “The Kassinga File.” Canner Kalimba (Interview, June 13, 2007, 8); Mvula ya Nangolo and Tor Sellstrom’s Kassinga: A Story Untold (Windhoek: Namibia Book Development Council, 1995), 23–4; Tor Sellström, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, Vol. 2: Solidarity and Assistance 1970–1994 (Uppsala:  Noriska Afrikainstitutet, 2002), 350. By September 1976 the Swedish government had agreed to grant food supplies and a small cash allowance to SWAPO for “the Namibian refugees in Angola.” By 1977 UNICEF had pledged aid to these refugees, followed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), and other Nordic aid agencies. NAN, File A.614, UNICEF Area Office Brazzaville, “Report on a Mission to SWAPO Centres for Namibian Refugees in Angola from 10 to 14 April 1978,” 13; C. Kalimba, June 13, 2007, 25. Jesaya Nyamu (Interview, April 3, 2008, 15); C.  Kalimba, June 13, 2007, 15; Per Sanden (Interview, February 5, 2008, 7); “UNICEF Report,” 9. “UNICEF Report,” 11; Ellen Namhila (Interview, July 25, 2008). Iyambo Indongo, a trained Namibian doctor, ran a medical center at Jamba. C. Kalimba (Interview, April 2, 2007, 1); June 13, 2007, 4, 6; William Amagulu (Interview, May 29, 2008). C. Kalimba, June 13, 2007, 4; Theopholus Kalimba (Interview, September 2, 2007, 2, 3). “UNICEF Report,” 16.

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The parade was also essential for establishing discipline at Cassinga. Indeed, the process of disciplining exiles began as soon as Namibians entered Angola with the assistance of PLAN guerrillas deployed along the Namibian-Angolan border. By the time exiles arrived at Cassinga, they would have passed for weeks through the network of camps that PLAN guerrillas maintained in southern Angola and been initiated to camp practices resembling those at other sites. Nevertheless, every camp had its own rules and routines, and the parade offered a space in which commanders could articulate them. For example, the commanders informed new arrivals about how time was managed at Cassinga, including when they were expected to wake and sleep, when to eat, and when to perform various tasks. Inhabitants were told how and when they might be granted permission to leave the camp and informed that they were not to leave the camp at night – above all due to the União Nacional para a Independençia Total de Angola (UNITA), which, following its defeat in the violence at Angola’s independence, had withdrawn into the southern Angolan bush where it continued to pose a threat to the MPLA government and its allies.14 The commanders publicly denounced those who had broken camp rules, narrating occasions in which Namibians were caught drinking and/or fighting with Angolan peasants living in the neighboring village located just across the Cuilonga River.15 They also introduced new arrivals to the camp’s “military police,” which assembled at the parade as a distinct, identifiable unit and which were responsible for enforcing rules and applying punishments. Punishments might include beatings and detention in a rectangular dugout several meters deep located near the camp kitchen.16 All these parade announcements were the direct responsibility of the camp commanders. According to Darius “Mbolondondo” Shikongo, from the time he was first appointed by the SWAPO leadership as commissar at Cassinga in November 1976, the commanders consisted of twenty to thirty persons.17 Together, they worked out of “the camp office,” a large Portuguese colonial building located just to the east of the main road that passes through Cassinga. (See Photo 2.) The office was responsible for different “departments” of camp life, including logistics, housing, transport, medicine, education, and police.18 The leaders of these departments were appointed and overseen by 14

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UNITA is one of three Angolan liberation movements that fought Portuguese colonialism. Following Portuguese independence and the ascension of the rival MPLA to power, UNITA waged a civil war, at times supported by the apartheid South Africa and U.S. governments. For further discussion of UNITA as it pertains to Namibia’s liberation struggle, see Chapters 4 and 5. Mbolondondo, March 26, 2007, 16; August 20, 2007, 66. Mbolondondo, August 20, 2007, 64–6. According to Mbolondondo, the most common punishment at Cassinga was to detain offenders in the dugout for a day or two after which they would rejoin others at the camp. “Beating,” he maintains, was used primarily as a threat to keep people in line. Mbolondondo, March 26, 2007, 3.  Mbolondondo traveled to the Soviet Union for military training in February 1977 and resumed the role of commissar at Cassinga in January 1978. Mbolondondo, March 26, 2007, 15–16; August 20, 2007, 65–6; September 3, 2007, 76–7.

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Photo 2. This is a photo of what remains of the camp office at Cassinga, taken by the author in September 2007.

Nalinkonkole, the camp’s senior commander, and Mbolondondo who, as commissar, functioned as deputy commander.19 At the parade, Cassinga’s new arrivals were informed about the location of the camp office and about the identities of those responsible for administering its different departments. And inhabitants interfaced regularly with camp office officials who were responsible for organizing their daily tasks. At the same time, there was also another office at Cassinga, which was not mentioned at the parade and about which most people who passed through the camp were largely unaware. In the middle of 1976, as SWAPO shifted its base of operations from Zambia to Angola following Angolan independence,20 19

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Mbolondondo, March 26, 2007, 17. Unlike many “commissars” assigned to SWAPO camps in later years, Mbolondondo was not responsible exclusively or primarily for political education. In the months preceding Angolan independence on November 11, 1975, PLAN guerrillas began to operate out of southern Angola. In March 1976, SWAPO recognized the MPLA as Angola’s sovereign government and began to coordinate military activities in the country with it. From this point onward, SWAPO began to relocate large numbers of its exiled members from Zambia to Angola. For more details and references on this movement from Angola to Zambia, see Christian Williams, “Remember Cassinga? An Exhibition of Photographs and Histories,” Kronos 36 (2010): 215–16.

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PLAN’s senior commander, Dimo Hamaambo, established an office at Cassinga. By then, hundreds of PLAN combatants had already passed through the abandoned Portuguese settlement at Cassinga, en route between Huambo, where many were stationed in late 1975 and 1976,21 and the frontline that PLAN was then establishing to the west and east of Ondjiva. (See Map 4.) Together with two assistants, Charles “Ho Chi Minh” Namoloh and Mwetufa “Cabral” Mupopiwa,22 Hamaambo began to record information about PLAN operations along the Angolan-Namibian border, such as where they took place, who was involved, and who died in combat, and file it in a Portuguese colonial building west of the main road.23 (See Photo 3.) Logistical matters for soldiers on the border and 21

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Mwetufa “Cabral” Mupopiwa (Interview, July 26, 2008); Charles “Ho Chi Minh” Namoloh (Interview, June 19, 2008); Ben Ulenga (Interview, June 12, 2008). Hamaambo’s body guard and driver also lived in the PLAN Office at Cassinga. Later they were joined by PLAN Political Commissar Greenwell Matongo, who moved to Cassinga in late 1976 or early 1977 (Namoloh, June 19, 2008; Mupopiwa, July 26, 2008; Nyamu, April 3, 2008). According to their respective testimonies, Namoloh and Mupopiwa are the only two living persons with knowledge of the work done in and by the PLAN office during its first months. Later material was moved from the original PLAN office to a house that Namibians at Cassinga built for Dimo Hamaambo. Prior to the move Hamaambo lived in the PLAN office together

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Photo 3. This is a photo of what remains of the original PLAN office at Cassinga, taken by the author in September 2007.

the accommodation of soldiers passing through Cassinga en route to the border were also arranged from this office. When, shortly after the formation of “the PLAN office,” new exiles from Namibia began to enter Cassinga, Hamaambo established a separate “camp office” to administer them. By late 1976 hundreds of Namibians were living at Cassinga, most of them people with no military training who had fled the escalating violence in the Ovamboland region of northern Namibia and were reliant on SWAPO for their sustenance and protection.24 From this point onward, most Namibians who lived at Cassinga interacted little with the PLAN office and those administering it – except at the parade where, occasionally, Dimo Hamaambo and other senior PLAN commanders would join the camp commanders in observing and addressing the people. (See Photo 4.)

24

with Namoloh and Mupopiwa (Canner Kalimba, Theopholus Kalimba, and Galiano Ntyanba (Interview, September 2, 2007, 2–3); Mbolondondo, June 11, 2007, 40; September 3, 2007, 69; Nyamu, April 3, 2008, 17; Namoloh, June 19, 2008. C. Kalimba, June 13, 2007, 4–5; T.  Kalimba, September 2, 2007; Namoloh, June 19, 2008; Mupopiwa, July 26, 2008; Nyamu, April 3, 2008, 12, 17. Some of these exiles had traveled into exile already in the latter half of 1975 but had been unable to proceed from SWAPO camps along the Namibian-Angolan border due to the outbreak of the civil war in Angola. See C. Kalimba, April 2, 2007.

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Photo 4. This is a photo of PLAN commanders at Cassinga. It was developed from an undeveloped role of film that the South African Defence Force claims to have captured at the camp on the day of the attack. According to research participants, the photo depicts several senior PLAN commanders entering the Cassinga parade ground. The commanders appear to be (from left to right) Greenwell Matongo, Dimo Hamaambo, “MacNamara,” “Haiduwa,” and “Pondo.”

Nevertheless, the work of the PLAN office and the camp office was intertwined. Commanders in the PLAN office visited the camp office to collect information about, and share news relevant to, the camp’s day-to-day administration, and the camp commanders reported to the PLAN office for similar reasons.25 Meetings frequently addressed camp security, which was the direct responsibility of the camp’s military police and a small defense unit that PLAN stationed at Cassinga.26 Also, the camp office was responsible for the well-being of PLAN combatants living in the camp at any given time, including the defense unit’s members and any other guerrillas passing through the camp on their way to and from the front, which the PLAN office might ask the camp office to feed and accommodate.27 Moreover, the PLAN and camp offices were in regular contact with 25

26

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Namoloh, June 19, 2008; Mbolondondo, March 26, 2007; June 11, 2007; August 20, 2007; September 3, 2007. See esp. September 3, 2007, 76. Despite some claims that Cassinga’s camp defense unit numbered between two hundred and three hundred (see, e.g., Alexander, “The Cassinga Raid,” 49), sources consulted for this research, including Mbolondondo and Namoloh, suggest that the number never reached more than one hundred (Mbolondondo, August 20, 2007, 61–2, 64–5; September 3, 2007, 76; Namoloh, June 19, 2007). Mbolondondo, August 20, 2007, 61–2; September 3, 2007, 76; Namoloh, June 19, 2007.

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Cuban soldiers at Techamutete (15 kilometers south of Cassinga), who had maintained a base there since shortly after the Cubans’ entry into Angola in November 1975 and were assisting Namibians at Cassinga with logistical support.28 These interactions were facilitated by the shared experiences of those administering the PLAN and camp offices, all of whom had received military training and recognized PLAN’s command structure, according to which Dimo Hamaambo was the ranking officer at Cassinga. But they were not visible to many Namibians standing at the parade, most of whom were unaware of the PLAN office and its role in coordinating guerrillas’ activities. May 3, 1978 In addition to depicting the parade at Cassinga, the photograph under discussion also reflects a more specific history. According to Per Sanden, the photographer, the photograph was taken on the afternoon of May 3, 1978 – about fifteen hours before the South African attack. The occasion was a special parade held in honor of him and his Swedish colleague, Tommy Bergh.29 Since January30 Sanden and Bergh had been traveling by foot with PLAN members as they moved through southern Angola and northern Namibia, collecting material for a documentary film commissioned by SWAPO, the second of its kind.31 From April 29 to May 3, Sanden and Bergh had visited Cassinga, filming and photographing various activities that they observed in the camp: marching, plowing, the teaching of schoolchildren, and the administering of medical treatment.32 For Sanden, the parade marked the climax of his trip, a moment when the unity of exiled Namibians and solidarity with their Swedish guests was expressed through chants and banners captured in Sanden’s film.33 28

29 30

31

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Mbolondondo, June 11, 2007, 42–3; Mupopiwa, July 26, 2008. Cuban military forces entered Angola following the SADF’s invasion and shortly before Angola’s formal independence on November 11, 1975. For discussion of the Cuban presence in Angola during the 1970s and 1980s, see Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 65–97. Sanden, February 5, 2008, 9, 15–16. The timing of the visit of “the Swedish journalists” is recorded in documents housed at the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) Documentation Centre in Pretoria. See HSOPS/310/4 Bruilof, “The 8th Minutes of the Military Council,” January 4, 1978, 1, 4–5. The meeting appears to have taken place at “Mongolia,” a camp better known to Namibians as Efitu. According to Alexander, this document was in possession of the SADF prior to the attack on Cassinga (Alexander, “The Cassinga Raid,” 57). Sanden and another cameraman, Rudi Speer, had first made films with PLAN in southwestern Zambia and the Caprivi Region of Namibia in 1973. They are the first and only filmmakers to have worked inside PLAN for many years. Sanden developed personal relationships with Sam Nujoma and other SWAPO leaders from the early 1960s when he became involved in antiapartheid activities as a student in Sweden (Sanden, February 5, 2008, 1–2). Ibid., 9, 15–16. Per Sanden and I viewed some of the footage that he had taken at Cassinga during one of our visits in 2008. This footage is housed at SPARC in Windhoek. Although SPARC’s materials were

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In narrating his personal relationship to this photograph, Per Sanden draws it into a series of events and relationships, complicating the photo’s subsequent association with anonymous refugees. And yet, unsurprisingly, Sanden was unaware of many happenings in and around Cassinga at the time when he took the photo.34 For example, Jesaya Nyamu, then SWAPO’s Deputy Secretary for Information and Publicity, had accompanied Sanden and Bergh during their trip.35 Nyamu remembers little about the parade held for Sanden and Bergh. But he recalls in detail the conversation that he had with Dimo Hamaambo about the “reconnaissance plane” that Nyamu and others observed flying over the camp the day after his and Sanden’s entourage had arrived: “I remember Dimo [Hamaambo] himself jumping out of his room to look at it. And he told us that it has been a regular visit.”36 Nyamu’s account is corroborated and further elaborated by Mbolondondo. According to him, some weeks prior to the attack, as early as February or March, officials in the PLAN and camp offices began to observe “strange airplanes” flying over the camp.37 Although the identity and intentions of the pilots were unclear, the camp command thought there might be a connection between them and Johan van der Mescht, a South African prisoner of war. (See Photo 5.) Van der Mescht had been captured on February 18 in a PLAN raid on a SADF base outside Elundu near Eenhana in northeastern Ovamboland. In fact, Sanden and Nyamu were traveling with the PLAN detachment that led the attack in which Johan van der Mescht was captured, but Sanden was unaware that van der Mescht had been transported to Cassinga shortly after his capture and, for a time, detained in the camp.38 According to Mbolondondo, Cassinga’s commanders became concerned that South Africa might launch an attack on Cassinga to free van der Mescht and therefore transferred him to Lubango.39

34

35 36 37 38

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not open to the public at the time of viewing, I received permission to view the film footage with Sanden. The same point may be made with respect to UNICEF’s visit to Cassinga from April 10 to 14, 1978. The subsequent report, which was submitted by UNICEF’s Brazzaville office to the mother body on May 2, 1978, notes “the rapid increase in refugees at Cassinga in 1978” but contains claims about the history of the SWAPO camps at Cassinga and Jamba, which are discredited by all research participants involved in administering these camps. For a more detailed discussion of “the UNICEF Report” see Williams, “Remember Cassinga?,” 228. Sanden, February 5, 2008, 7, 9; Nyamu, April 3, 2008, 15–16. Nyamu, April 3, 2008, 19. Mbolondondo, March 26, 2007, 3, 17; June 11, 2007, 32, 35–6, 39–40. Sanden, February 5, 2008, 5–6; Nyamu, April 3, 2008, 16; University of Namibia (UNAM), Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 5, File No. 9, “For Immediate Release,” May 4, 1978; Mbolondondo, June 11, 2007, 39. Among these sources it was Mbolondondo who offered an account of Van der Mescht’s detention at Cassinga. It should further be noted that freeing Johan van der Mescht was one of the stated objectives of Operation Reindeer. See Willem Steenkamp, Borderstrike! South Africa into Angola (Durban: Butterworths, 1983), 76. Mbolondondo, June 11, 2007, 39–40. According to Mbolondondo, this transfer was accomplished in conjunction with a trip made by President Sam Nujoma to Cassinga sometime before Sanden and Nyamu arrived in late April.

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Photo 5. This photograph pictures Johan van der Mescht, the South African soldier captured by PLAN on February 18, 1978, together with Peter Nanyemba, SWAPO Secretary of Defence. The photo was taken near Lubango by Per Sanden, a Swedish filmmaker who was moving with the PLAN unit involved in van der Mescht’s capture.

Other changes were also made to Cassinga at this time, apparently in response to the repeated sighting of strange airplanes. For example, after the planes were first observed, the camp office staff instructed inhabitants to build trenches to the southwest of the camp40 and to dig a hole on the western side of the main road, intended to store food supplies that could survive an enemy raid.41 Also, whereas large numbers of children, women with infants and elderly inhabitants at Cassinga had been residing near the camp office, the office’s staff began to arrange for the construction of a satellite camp one kilometer to the northwest, to accommodate persons who would be most vulnerable in the event of an attack.42 At the same time, numbers were growing rapidly inside Cassinga. In early 1978 the flow of Namibians into exile from Ovamboland increased and the intake in the camp was particularly high. Furthermore, while a truck usually 40

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Ibid., 33, 35. The trenches, which are clearly visible in the SADF’s aerial footage and maps, are a frequently discussed feature in accounts of what kind of camp Cassinga was and of what happened at Cassinga during the attack. Mbolondondo, March 26, 2007, 15. According to Mbolondondo, the hole, which had been dug before May 4, was used for the larger mass grave after the South African attack. Mbolondondo, June 11, 2007, 35–6. The satellite camp is marked on Map 3 as “Camp No. 2.”

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picked up Cassinga inhabitants traveling onward to Jamba and Lubango as soon as there were sufficient numbers to fill it, this was not the case during the weeks preceding the attack. The result was a bottleneck such that people who under other circumstances would have left Cassinga for the Angolan interior within days remained there for weeks or months.43 Moreover, PLAN guerrillas were passing through Cassinga en route to the front, including an unarmed detachment that had recently left Zambia and arrived at Cassinga on the evening of May 3.44 All these groups added to the population of Cassinga that, at the time of the attack, was three thousand or more in number.45 The bottleneck at Cassinga appears to have been a major concern among senior PLAN commanders at this time. Among the documents that the SADF claims to have captured during the attack are copies of two letters sent by Dimo Hamaambo to SWAPO officials outside the camp, both of which overlap Mbolondondo’s and Nyamu’s accounts.46 The first of these, dated April 10, 1978 and addressed to PLAN Defence Headquarters in Lubango, notes Hamaambo’s concern about “an [i]mminent invasion intention of the enemy of our [camp] in Southern Angola.” The second, dated, April 18, 1978 and probably sent to PLAN Commissar Greenwell Matongo, offers further corroborating detail: Dear Comrades, Our Revolutionary Greetings, please! I have the honour to inform your Office that we have removed from Cassinga, a portion of the Namibian Community and settled it about 7 km north of the existing camp. The reasons for this move are as follows: 1. With enemy (S.A.) Air-reconnaissance work going on continuously, we came to the conclusion that S.A.  racsists [sic] intend to conduct an air-raid on this camp. 2. Jamba which is already overcrowded can no longer accom[modate] more of our people and worse there is a standing order for the removal of our people. The new camp is therefore a “security” place for children, mothers, the sick and expectants. Its [sic] not a military camp. Hoping that you will accept our explanation. I am, Yours for the eliminationof [sic] Imperialism, Dimo Hamaambo47 43 44

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Ibid., 35. This detachment consisted of Namibians who were detained by the Zambian army at SWAPO’s request at Mboroma camp in Zambia. Mbolondondo mentioned this group’s arrival at Cassinga on May 3 in our interviews (Mbolondondo, June 11, 2007, 44; June 16, 2011). For more details about the Mboroma detainees at Cassinga, see the following section, “Victims of ‘a Second Cassinga.’ ” For a discussion of these numbers and a critique of UNICEF’s estimates see Heywood, The Cassinga Event, 19 and Williams, “Remember Cassinga?,” 228. For a discussion of various documents that the SADF claims to have captured, see Alexander, “The Cassinga Raid,” 62–3 and Justine Hunter, Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia:  Umgang mit schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen der Ära des bewaffneten Befreiungskampfes, 1966 bis 1989 (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2008), 56–8. Justine Hunter, “Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia seit der staatlichen Unabhängigkeit,” PhD diss., Universität Freiburg, 2005, 80. The letter has also been published in German translation in Hunter’s previously cited book (p. 57). According to Hunter, the letter was included in the personal files of the late Hannes Smith, formerly the editor of the Windhoek Observer. These files have been transferred to the NAN but are not yet accessible to researchers.

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When Hamaambo writes of a “new camp . . . for children, mothers, the sick and expectants” that had been “settled  . . . north of the existing camp,” he appears to refer to the satellite camp mentioned by Mbolondondo in our interviews  – despite discrepancies in accounts of the distance between these sites.48 Hamaambo also suggests an explanation for Mbolondondo’s point that the trucks were not coming to Cassinga frequently to transport people from the camp in the weeks preceding the attack:  namely, because Jamba was “overcrowded” and that there was “a standing order to remove our [i.e., Namibian] people.” These conditions at Jamba may help to explain why there was an exceptionally large number of Namibians, the majority of whom had no access to weapons or military training, inhabiting Cassinga on the night of May 3, 1978. Creating an Image of the Camp On the morning of May 4, 1978, as Namibians assembled at the Cassinga parade, the SADF launched its attack. From this moment (and in South Africa’s case even before), SWAPO and the South African government began to marshal evidence about the camp to justify their competing claims about the attack’s meaning. Claims revolved around a binary opposition, with SWAPO and South Africa presenting Cassinga to the world as a refugee camp and as a military camp, respectively. In this context, Per Sanden’s images of Cassinga, including the image under discussion, became important pieces of evidence used to support SWAPO’s claim even as they became separated from the social world of the camp and the particular circumstances of their production. According to Sanden, he and Bergh left Cassinga for Jamba late in the afternoon of May 3, shortly after taking the photograph at the parade. Early in the morning of May 4, as he and his colleagues were approaching Jamba, they observed helicopters and airplanes flying overhead. Suspecting that they were South African but not knowing their destination, the convoy stopped outside Jamba and waited. On May 5 the group was still there when PLAN dispatched a detachment of guerrillas to collect Sanden and Bergh’s film and transport it to Lubango. From there it was flown to Luanda and to London, where on May 6 Sanden radioed a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) correspondent who developed some of the film for broadcasting. After returning to Sweden in June, Sanden began to edit the film for a documentary that was eventually released under the title Here Is Namibia: Inside the Liberated Areas and Beyond.49 The 48

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Mbolondondo, June 11, 2007, 35–6. Some former Cassinga inhabitants also refer to an area, like the one that Hamaambo identifies here, as “Camp No. 2” (See “Cassinga Revisited,” The Namibian, May 7, 1999). But whereas they and Mbolondondo suggest that “Camp No. 2” was located about one kilometer outside the main camp, Hamaambo’s letter refers to a distance of seven kilometers. Sanden, February 5, 2008, 10, 12–13; Nyamu, April 3, 2008, 15. Sanden also prepared a publication of the same title that was jointly edited by Jesaya Nyamu.

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film was screened first in Sweden and then all over the world, winning prizes at documentary film festivals in Leipzig, Amsterdam, and Ottawa.50 And the film was cited in solidarity literature as proof that “Cassinga was a refugee settlement” and that “there were no military installations and no more soldiers than a small unit designated to protect the settlement.”51 At the same time, Sanden’s printed photographs came to be associated with similar claims. Among the most popular images was the parade photo under discussion, which in the aftermath of the attack appeared in SWAPO literature alongside descriptions of the violence inflicted on Namibians at the Cassinga “refugee camp.” Importantly, the association of Sanden’s photographs with refugees was heightened by other photos taken a few days after the attack that were frequently displayed in the same publications with Sanden’s earlier photos. Of these postattack photos, none demanded attention or overdetermined meaning like a few images of Cassinga’s open mass grave. Consider, for example, the issue of SWAPO’s international newsletter, Namibia Today, published after the Cassinga attack. The front cover displays a cropped version of one of Per Sanden’s parade photos; page four displays Cassinga’s open mass grave.52 (See Photos  6 and 7.) Taken from one of the grave’s rectangular ends, the grave photo is close enough to the corpses that individual bodies, wounds, articles of clothing, and flies covering them are discernible. A quote appearing above the photo, attributed to a foreign, eyewitness observer, directs viewers’ reactions by imputing meaning to the bodies in the grave: First we saw gaily coloured frocks, blue jeans, shirts and a few uniforms. Then there was the sight of the bodies inside them. Swollen, blood-stained, they were the bodies of young girls, young men, a few older adults, some young children, all apparently recent arrivals from Namibia. The Guardian (London) 10.5.7853

This text, together with the grave photo, does more than merely record violence perpetrated by the SADF on Namibians at Cassinga or the extraordinary destruction that apartheid wreaked on human lives. It also identifies refugee qualities of the bodies in the grave, emphasizing the presence of “civilian” clothes worn by “young girls” and others, “all apparently recent arrivals from 50 51 52

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Sanden, February 5, 2008, 12–13. Alexander, “The Cassinga Raid,” 45–6. This grave photo appears identical to the one that Gaetano Pagano, an Italian journalist, claims to have taken at Cassinga on May 6, 1978, included in “The Kassinga File.” Other sources, including Namibia Today, claim that the photo was taken on May 8. For a detailed account of the production of images of Cassinga following the attack, see chapter 2 of Vilho Shigwedha’s doctoral thesis “Enduring Suffering: The Cassinga Massacre of Namibian Exiles in 1978 and the Conflicts between Survivors’ Memories and Testimonies,” University of the Western Cape, 2011, 31–61. I also include a discussion of how camp inhabitants presented the mass grave to international journalists in “Remember Cassinga?,” 239. Namibia Today 2, no.  2 (1978), 4.  The author of the quoted text was The Guardian’s Jane Bergerol.

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Photo 6. Cassinga parade. The photo was published in the June 1978 issue of Namibia Today and was taken by Per Sanden.

Namibia.” By making these associations in the context of SWAPO and the South African government’s battle to speak for Cassinga, the caption directs the manner in which this and all other images of Cassinga should be viewed by those opposed to the apartheid regime. In turn, Sanden’s photograph is reduced to one more piece of evidence demonstrating the violence perpetrated on innocent “refugees” at Cassinga, and it is separated from other histories that complicate, or are irrelevant to, that claim.54 54

In his doctoral thesis Vilho Shigwedha critiques my argument here, which I also advance elsewhere (“Exile History,” 58; “Remember Cassinga?,” 238). He writes: “the photograph of the

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Photo 7. Cassinga grave. The photo was published in the June 1978 issue of Namibia Today.

Cassinga open mass grave does not, in any way possible, draw attention to the ‘civilian’ qualities of the bodies in the mass grave,’ ” but rather “obscures the traumatic experience and suffering of those who survived the massacre” (“Enduring Suffering,” 24). As should be clear from this chapter, I agree with Shigwedha’s claim that the mass grave photo obscures the experience and suffering of survivors. By tracing how a “refugee” meaning has become attached to the photo for many viewers, I suggest how this experience and suffering has been obscured. Shigwedha’s thesis illuminates this process from other angles and in great detail.

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At the same time, the South African government was at great pains to render visual evidence that might appear to confirm its representation of the camp. For example, when the first news reports about the attack were shown on South African television, photos and film taken by SADF paratroopers during the raid on Cassinga were interspersed with images of SWAPO camps neighboring Chetequera, including a camp code named “Vietnam.”55 Vietnam was also attacked by the SADF on May 4, 1978 as part of the same military operation, which the SADF dubbed “Operation Reindeer.” But Vietnam was located more than two hundred kilometers to the southwest of Cassinga. The Vietnam footage appears to have been useful for the SADF because Vietnam was better armed than Cassinga and the film of the fighting there included armored cars, personnel carriers, and artillery.56 Moreover, although the SADF did not capture any prisoners at Cassinga, it did capture about two hundred prisoners at Vietnam.57 These prisoners, most of whom were young men and wearing military uniforms at the time of their capture, became the object of photographs taken by South African journalists who were flown to Chetequera and whose photos appeared widely in South African newspapers’ coverage of the May 4 attacks.58 (See Photo 8.) For some viewers, especially white South Africans who expressed their support for the attacks in the press,59 such images may have appeared to offer evidence that Cassinga was indeed a “military camp” and, therefore, a legitimate target. It is the SWAPO version of Cassinga, however, that was widely accepted abroad. Support came quickly from the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries that supported SWAPO’s armed struggle.60 More significantly, on May 6, the governments of the United States, Canada, Britain, France, and West Germany endorsed a UN Resolution that condemned the attack on Cassinga and threatened punitive measures should the SADF carry out another 55 56 57

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Cassinga also was known by a code name, “Moscow.” Heywood, The Cassinga Event, 8. This point about the identity of the “Kassinga detainees” was confirmed by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Volume 2, “Operation Reindeer: The Attacks on Kassinga and Chetequera Camps,” 52–3) and is further elaborated in a book by former detainee, Willy Mary Amutenya, Brave Unyielding Comrades:  The Untold Story of Vietnam (Chetequera) Prisoners of War in the Liberation Struggle of Namibia (Windhoek: Macmillan, 2011). NAN, Institute for Contemporary History, 78 F80, Pretoria News, “I visited ‘Vietnam’ and saw the aftermath of the battle,” May 6, 1978. Magdalena Nghatanga offers a similar account of being photographed after her capture at Chetequera in IDAF’s “Remember Kassinga – And Other Papers of Political Prisoners and Detainees in Namibia. Fact Paper on Southern Africa No. 9,” available at UWC’s Mayibuye Centre. For further discussion of these photos see Williams, “Remember Cassinga?,” 232. Alexander, “The Cassinga Raid,” 162, 165–7. Already on May 5 Radio Moscow had transmitted a headline describing the attack on Cassinga as “a massacre in [a] town where there were several thousand old men, women and children who had fled from the South African invaders” (Alexander, “The Cassinga Raid,” 162–3).

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Photo 8. This photo depicts prisoners captured by the SADF during its May 4, 1978 attack on Vietnam. It appears to have been taken on the day of the attack when South African journalists were flown to the camp and photographed “prisoners of war . . . sitting in rows while guarded by armed South African soldiers” (“I visited ‘Vietnam’ and saw the aftermath of the battle,” Pretoria News, May 6, 1978).

operation in Angola.61 Although the endorsement of the UN Resolution by the “Western Five,”62 and subsequent statements issued by UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, did not address the “refugee” quality of Cassinga directly, it did undermine South Africa’s efforts to define Cassinga as a legitimate military target among potential allies. Within days of the attack, many governments, human rights organizations, and humanitarian agencies had issued statements condemning the SADF attack and associating the word Cassinga with refugee. Once South Africa’s version of the camp had been widely dismissed and the link between Cassinga and refugee repeatedly asserted, there was little impetus for anyone interested in Namibian independence to examine how exactly Namibians had actually lived at Cassinga or were then living elsewhere in Angola and Zambia. The label “refugee camp” constituted these sites as

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Ibid., 164; UN General Assembly Resolution 428. At that time the United States, Canada, France, Britain, and West Germany were in the midst of intensive negotiations with South Africa and SWAPO over the timing and terms of Namibian independence. In the context of these negotiations they were often referred to as “the Western Five.”

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a generic social object that was intelligible to an international community and could be used to leverage responses from it, especially in the aftermath of a “surprise attack” by the apartheid regime. From May 1978, SWAPO received unprecedented support in the form of humanitarian aid sent to its remaining camps and offers from foreign governments (above all Cuba and East Germany) to educate Namibians in their countries. Over the following decade, annual commemorations of “Cassinga Day” became powerful sites for rekindling commitment to the liberation struggle among diverse communities in Namibia and abroad who joined one another in condemning apartheid South Africa and expressing solidarity with SWAPO. Even the prisoners whom the SADF had captured at Vietnam and presented to the press as evidence of a legitimate military operation became associated with “refugees” at Cassinga. In July and August 1979, SWAPO held a series of press conferences announcing that “200 refugees” captured during the attack on “Cassinga” were being tortured and detained in a secret SADF camp in Namibia. Thereafter, “the Cassinga detainees” became a global human rights issue involving solidarity movements, Amnesty International, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.63 On the surface, Namibian independence and the fall of apartheid have had little impact on these memory practices. In 1990, shortly after the repatriation of Namibian exiles, Namibia’s democratically elected SWAPO government declared Cassinga Day a national holiday. Since then, the Namibian government has organized annual commemorations that have repeated SWAPO’s official narrative of the camp. Women who were teenagers in 1978 and who entered the camp shortly before the attack have figured prominently at these events, speaking repeatedly on behalf of “the Cassinga survivors.” This demographic has also dominated the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio and television programs on Cassinga as well as the textbooks, monographs, and exhibitions about Cassinga supported by the Namibian government.64 As a result, this knowledge production has tended to affirm the association of Cassinga with refugees while obscuring former camp inhabitants and aspects of camp life that might complicate it. Meanwhile, in South Africa, some former paratroopers have continued to mark “the Battle of Cassinga,” quietly commemorating May 4, 1978 in a manner that reproduces annual commemorative practices led by the SADF during the apartheid era.65 Moreover, Cassinga has become an object of 63 64

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The last “Cassinga detainees” were released from prison in October 1984. See, e.g., Mvula ya Nangolo and Tor Sellstrom’s Kassinga: A Story Untold (Windhoek: Namibia Book Development Council, 1995). The text includes sixteen transcribed stories of survivors of the Cassinga attack (38–69). Also, Ellen Namhila’s autobiography, The Price of Freedom (Windhoek: New Namibia Books, 1997), contains a widely cited survivor’s account. In his doctoral thesis Vilho Shigwedha discusses how the SADF, generally, and paratroopers who participated in the attack, specifically, have commemorated the anniversary of “the Battle of Cassinga” since 1978 (Shigwedha, “Enduring Suffering,” 136–8). As he notes, in 1996 paratroopers’ annual commemoration became an international controversy, compelling Joe Modise,

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attention in personal memoirs and social media sites created by former SADF soldiers, including paratroopers who participated in the attack.66 Perspectives on Cassinga vary, ranging from unapologetic celebrations of “the battle” to more reflective, personal accounts. Even writing that distances itself from the SADF’s official history, however, focuses overwhelmingly on the experiences of white South African soldiers. In so doing, this writing, like writing on the “Border War” generally, spares little attention for the people who actually inhabited this border and who suffered the brunt of SADF violence at Cassinga and other sites.67 Since the mid-1990s a scholarly literature has emerged that complicates dominant representations of Cassinga from various perspectives.68 There is, however, little evidence that the interventions of this literature have influenced public discourse. Moreover, the literature remains caught within Cassinga’s competing national narratives and their binary oppositions. Drawn to the violence on May 4, 1978 and its aftermath, authors focus relatively little attention on understanding how people actually lived at Cassinga prior to the attack and on disentangling the different sources through which such histories may be reconstructed.69 Texts that avoid applying the term refugee camp or military camp to Cassinga still return to some combination of these misleading labels,

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the Chief of the new South African Defence Force, to apologize to the Namibian government and take steps “to ensure that no similar event takes place” again. Nevertheless, both Alexander and Shigwedha indicate that former SADF paratroopers have continued to commemorate the anniversary quietly (Alexander, “The Cassinga Raid,” 5–6; Shigwedha, “Enduring Suffering,” 137–8). See Willem Steenkamp, Borderstrike! South Africa into Angola (Durban:  Butterworths, 1983); Jan Breytenbach, Eagle Strike! The Story of the Controversial Airborne Assault on Cassinga 04 May 1978 (Sandton:  Manie Grove Publishing, 2008); Mike McWilliams, Battle for Cassinga: South Africa’s Controversial Cross-Border Raid, Angola 1978 (Solihull, UK and Pinetown, South Africa:  South Publishers, 2011); “Cassinga Veterans”/ Facebook. Online at https://www.facebook.com/CassingaDay (accessed April 29, 2015). Two recent publications stand out for critiquing South African discourse on “the Border War” through photographs of the places where this war was fought:  John Liebenberg and Patricia Hayes, Bush of Ghosts: Life and War in Namibia 1986–90 (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2010) and Joe Ractliffe, As Terras do Fim do Mundo: The Lands of the End of the World (Cape Town: Michael Stevenson, 2010). Heywood, The Cassinga Event; Nangolo and Sellström, Kassinga: A Story Untold; Alexander, “The Cassinga Raid”; Colin Leys and John S. Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle:  The Two-Edged Sword (London: James Currey, 1995), 53–4, 63; Hunter, Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens, 57–8; TRC, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 46–55; Gary Baines, “Conflicting Memories, Competing Narratives and Complicating Histories:  Revisiting the Cassinga Controversy,” Journal of Namibian Studies 6 (2009), 7–26; Shigwedha, “Enduring Suffering”; Gary Baines, “The Battle for Cassinga:  Competing Narratives and Complicating Histories,” in South Africa’s ‘Border War’: Contested Narratives and Conflicting Memories (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 190–226. Strikingly, professional historian Piero Gleijeses does not even attempt to engage contradictory sources or work with complexity when discussing Cassinga. As he argues in Visions of Freedom, “all the evidence indicates that Cassinga was indeed a refugee camp” (61).

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rather than insisting that Cassinga and other sites that SWAPO administered were, in fact, liberation movement camps – a unique kind of camp.70 Even Gary Baines, whose work focuses on conflicting memories of Cassinga and defers from adjudicating “the Casinga debate,” suggests that there are two “sides” to the story: “the SADF story” and “the SWAPO story.”71 In so doing, he and other scholars tend to overlook both the diversity of people’s lived experiences at Cassinga (and Vietnam) and the capacity of SADF violence to produce a multiplicity of stories among affected communities.72 Victims of “a Second Cassinga” In the aftermath of the SADF’s May 4 attacks, rumors began to spread among Namibians and their allies about persons who might have disclosed information about Cassinga and Vietnam to the apartheid regime. Among those who became targets of these rumors was Per Sanden. According to Jesaya Nyamu, shortly after the attacks, he was informed by another SWAPO official that he “should be careful” to visit SWAPO camps in southern Angola because of a rumor then circulating among Namibians there that “the Swedish journalists” whom he had led to Cassinga were, in fact, South African spies and responsible for the SADF raids.73 Similarly, rumors about the Swedish journalists circulated among detainees captured by the SADF at Vietnam, where Sanden had also visited and taken photographs during his travels with PLAN prior to May 4, 1978.74 Although these stories were whispered for years among various Namibians, it is only decades later that they surfaced into a broader Namibian public’s view.75 On May 3, 2007, the day before Namibia’s annual Cassinga Day commemoration, New Era, a popular government-sponsored newspaper, published an 70

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E.g., in its report on Cassinga, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission critiques both competing representations before concluding that “Kassinga was thus both a military base and a refugee camp” (TRC, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 50). For discussion of the exact language employed to describe Cassinga in different scholarly texts published through 2008, see Williams, “Exile History,” 30–1. Baines, “Conflicting Memories”; “The Battle for Cassinga.” In his discussion Baines illuminates several views elided by an official SADF story but largely overlooks the proliferation of stories articulated at the edges of SWAPO’s official narrative, claiming misleadingly “that there are no other groups competing for ownership of the Cassinga story” within SWAPO or Namibia (“The Battle for Cassinga,” 209, 213). Of the previously cited literature on Cassinga, only Shigwedha’s “Enduring Suffering” begins to address the proliferation of stories circulating among Namibians about Cassinga. Jesaya Nyamu (Interview, May 10, 2011). Willy Mary Amutenya (Interview, May 11, 2011); Amutenya, Brave Unyielding Comrades, 10–11; Sanden, February 5, 2008, 6. For recorded accounts of the circulation and prevalence of this rumor, see Samson Ndeikwila and Jackson Mwalundange (Interview, May 13, 2011); Samson Ndeikwila, “My Dream, Agony and Hope: Autobiography of Samson Tobias Ndeikwila,” 41 (unpublished manuscript given to the author in 2011).

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article titled “Foreigner Responsible for Attacks on Cassinga Is in Namibia.” The article focused on the testimony of Willy Mary Amutenya, one of “the Cassinga detainees” captured at Vietnam. Apparently a response to Per Sanden’s move to Windhoek to take up a position at the recently created SWAPO Party Archive (SPARC), Amutenya accused the unnamed “foreign national” of being responsible for the SADF’s May 4 attacks and offered “proof” to support his allegations. According to Amutenya, “the foreign national came to . . . ‘Vietnam’, with some party leaders and posed as someone willing to help the refugees at the camp.” Weeks later, immediately following the attack on Vietnam, he “saw the foreign national, together with the South African soldiers, still wearing the same type of trousers, and we recognized him.” Thereafter, Amutenya and others were transported to a detention camp in Oshakati where “a Major in the South African army came with a picture of the same foreign national and told them that the foreign national was responsible for the attack on Cassinga.” Months later, after Amutenya and other detainees had been transported to Keikanachab Prison outside Mariental, two SADF officials showed Amutenya a copy of the SADF’s magazine, “Apparatus” (sic),76 in which pictures appeared of both Amutenya and “the same foreign national” whom the officials indicated had “made the attack at Cassinga and Vietnam possible.” Later, after Amutenya’s release from prison in 1984, he traveled to London where he claims to have located this copy of “Apparatus” in “the archives” and showed the pictures to Justin Ellis and Georg Iita, who allegedly offered further details about the foreign national’s “business interests in South Africa, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of [the] Congo.”77 Willy Amutenya’s claims about Per Sanden are contradicted by Sanden, Iita, and others, and are highly unlikely even when viewed on Amutenya’s own terms.78 Nevertheless, they do illuminate a phenomenon that is critical for 76

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I understand from my interview with Amutenya that he was referring to the SADF’s magazine Paratus (May 11, 2011). Kuvee Kanueehi, “Foreigner Responsible for Attacks on Cassinga Is in Namibia,” New Era, May 3, 2007. According to Per Sanden and others familiar with his movements in May 1978, he was at Jamba, far from Vietnam, from May 4 until he returned to Cassinga to photograph the open mass grave several days later (e.g., Sanden, February 5, 2008, 8). According to George Iita, Amutenya never approached him to discuss his suspicions about Sanden and was using Iita’s name “to slander a brave reporter who did visit the camps at the time at the SWAPO leadership’s express invitation” (George Iita, “A Patent Attempt at Disinformation,” New Era, May 11, 2007). In his book, Brave Unyielding Comrades, Amutenya indicates that he first learned about the Swedish journalists’ involvement in the Vietnam attack not through direct observation but through a conversation with an SADF officer, Major Wolf, and a now deceased comrade, Abner Nambala (10–11). In my interview with Amutenya (May 11, 2011), he repeated claims that he had made in New Era about “the foreign journalist” (whom he identified as Per Sanden) and made other allegations as well. The latter focused on members of the Rally for Democracy and Progress (a Namibian opposition party formed in November 2007) who had participated in Sanden’s expedition and “guilt,” which he said that he could read in Sanden’s eyes and expressions. As for the issue of “Apparatus” in which Amutenya and Sanden allegedly appear, Amutenya indicated that he had lost his copy and that further copies have disappeared

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understanding enduring legacies of apartheid-era violence. Namely, Namibians and other nationals have not only suffered through the direct actions of their South African assailants, but also through painful consequences of these actions that have been mobilized to stigmatize others and advance agendas in a national community. Willy Amutenya’s claims about Sanden are one manifestation of this condition, shaped by his experience of the SADF attack on Vietnam – which resulted in the amputation of his right arm, extensive torture, and six-and-a-half years of imprisonment79 – and his current circumstances in Namibia. As he expressed during our interview in May 2011, he was “fed up” with the fact that there had been no place in previous Cassinga Day commemorative events for the attack on Vietnam and that his fellow detainees had not yet been recognized by Namibia’s Ministry of Veterans Affairs or received any compensation for their sacrifices during the struggle.80 Such conditions seem to have compelled Amutenya to publish rumors about Sanden, a man whom he suspects of spying for apartheid South Africa and who was then “living peacefully in Namibia and enjoying the fruits of independence” through the direct support of the Namibian government.81 Through his accusation, Amutenya not only expressed antipathy toward Sanden, but also cast suspicion on SWAPO officials who had permitted Sanden to film sensitive material in camps and to take up a coveted job in Windhoek, while genuine national heroes like himself continued to suffer.82 And Amutenya critiqued a national history that does not hold any individuals accountable for the SADF’s May 4 attacks or recognize the circumstances of any people living in the attacks’ aftermath.

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from various public archives under mysterious circumstances. Nevertheless, I was able to locate the June 1978 issue of Paratus at the SANDF Archives in Pretoria. A photograph of a wounded PLAN guerrilla, who may well be Willy Amutenya, appears on page 6, but I am unable to locate an image of anyone who looks like Per Sanden in this or any other issue of Paratus, available at the SANDF Archives. All these experiences are described at length in Amutenya’s book, Brave Unyielding Comrades. In 2008, shortly after the Windhoek demonstrations that Mbolondondo and I discussed in our interviews (See page 59), the Namibian government founded its Ministry of Veterans Affairs. The ministry was mandated to administer a lump sum grant, a monthly stipend, and several other projects and benefits available to those who had remained affiliated with SWAPO throughout the years they were in exile. Although Amutenya believed that the detainees should at least qualify for the standard grants for Veterans, their application to the ministry three years earlier had received no response at the time of our interview (Amutenya, May 11, 2011). Kangueehi, “Foreigner Responsible,” New Era, May 3, 2007. Subsequent events strengthen this reading of Amutenya’s accusation. In August 2011 The Namibian published an article in which Amutenya criticized the Ministry of Veterans Affairs for not replying to the detainees’ application and responded to a rumor that their case had been referred from the ministry to the cabinet because of suspicions that some detainees had become South African spies following their release from detention. In turn, Amutenya cast suspicion on the ministry, suggesting that some of its officials were not, in fact, loyal SWAPO members but hidden supporters of competing political parties, including the Congress of Democrats (COD) and the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) (The Namibian, “PS Tells Ex-Detainees That They Have to Be Vetted,” August 25, 2011).

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In a sense, then, both Amutenya and Sanden have been wounded by apartheid violence and the national narrative through which this violence is rendered socially intelligible to Namibians. Injured by the SADF’s May 4 raids, Amutenya has drawn Sanden into the raids’ vortex as he (Amutenya) responds to his enduring suffering and to an official history that is stubbornly insensitive to it.83 In so doing, Amutenya reproduces a practice that has impacted on many staunch supporters of Namibia’s liberation struggle. And this practice was especially rampant in the SWAPO camps, where inhabitants were constantly at risk of an SADF attack and often used the risk of an attack to circulate rumors and perpetrate violence on one another. Consider, for example, this article in PLAN’s newsletter, The Combatant, about a visit by SWAPO President Sam Nujoma to southern Angola in September 1981. The visit, which occurred during an SADF offensive across the Namibian-Angolan border, focuses on a speech that Nujoma delivered at an unnamed SWAPO camp: He [Nujoma] was genuinely concerned about the thousands of women, children and aged who fled racist horrors in Namibia and who were temporarily accommodated in refugee camps in Southern Angola. Their safety was threatened by the invading war-mongers who already slaughtered over seven hundred refugees in Cassinga, 1978. SWAPO is doing everything in its power to avoid as much as possible a second Cassinga. We have gained reliable intelligence reports that the enemy is considering a massive raid on the civilian refugee camp at Kwanza-Sul, about 800 km north of the Namibian border. It is therefore that out [sic] President is calling upon the camp authorities and civilians themselves to strengthen security measures. He calls on double vigilance, discipline and unity of purpose and action.84

On the surface, Nujoma’s points here appear prudent. Namibian exiles in Angola lived in the midst of a war that threatened their and their neighbors’ lives on a daily basis. The SADF’s attack on Cassinga had proven the apartheid regime’s capacity and willingness to strike sites far from Namibia’s borders where few military personnel were based. Even a camp such as Kwanza Sul, which, by 1981, was inhabited by thousands of Namibians without military training and had no apparent strategic value for PLAN, might be at risk. The possibility of “a second Cassinga” was always at hand but might be avoided through “security measures . . . vigilance, discipline and unity of purpose and action.” Nevertheless, by 1981, talk of “a second Cassinga” was beginning to tear SWAPO in exile apart. In that year SWAPO established its new security 83

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Amutenya’s article is not the first instance in which Sanden was drawn into the vortex of the violence at Cassinga. As previously noted, he was one of the journalists who visited the camp after the attack. Moreover, after returning to Sweden in June 1978, he received an envelope from Pretoria at his home in Stockholm. Suspicious of the envelope, he brought it to the police who discovered that it was a letter bomb (Sanden, February 5, 2008, 10). “SWAPO President Visits Southern Angola,” The Combatant 3, no. 2 (September 1981): 4.

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apparatus under the command of Solomon “Jesus” Hawala. Over the coming decade members of SWAPO Security would detain hundreds of Namibians in its camps outside Lubango where they were interrogated and tortured until they “confessed” to being spies. Among the common topics introduced during these interrogations was Cassinga. Alleged spies were asked if they had given information about Cassinga to the SADF and compelled through torture to make claims about how they had done so. Moreover, some “spies” were made to confess how they were aiding the South African military to launch “a second Cassinga” on Kwanza Sul or other camps. In practice, there was often no relationship between SWAPO Security’s identification of spies and verifiable evidence of these persons’ collaboration with the enemy. Nevertheless, SWAPO Security’s actions were rooted in Namibians’ very real experiences of living in the camps. And critical to understanding those experiences is awareness of the SADF’s attack on Cassinga, of the fear that South Africa would unleash a similar assault again, and of the rumors about spies whose hidden activities could result in such horrendous events.85 At the same time that “Cassinga” was contributing to violence perpetrated by Namibians on Namibians at Lubango, it was also being hurled at those bent on exposing this and other instances of violence among SWAPO members in exile. The first target of these accusations was Andreas Shipanga. Imprisoned in a schism that split SWAPO in Zambia in 1976, Shipanga was the most senior SWAPO official to have expressed sympathy with a new generation of exiles whose increasingly vocal criticisms of the liberation movement’s leadership culminated in the detention of eleven SWAPO officials and more than one thousand PLAN guerrillas. In May 1978 Shipanga was sitting in Ukonga Prison in Dar es Salaam when he and other inmates first learned through newspaper and radio reports that he had “personally led the Boers to Cassinga.”86 Later that month Shipanga was released from prison and traveled to the United Kingdom where he had been granted political asylum and where, in London, he first held a press conference offering his perspective on the 1976 conflict and refuting accusations made against him, including blame for Cassinga.87 Although the specific Cassinga accusation soon fell out of public discourse, Shipanga and hundreds of others detained in the so-called Shipanga Crisis continued to be seen by many Namibians as having betrayed the nation at Cassinga and elsewhere. 85

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These points draw from my interviews with SWAPO ex-detainees detained at Lubango during the 1980s. For more details and references see Chapter 5, “ ‘The Spy’ and the Camp: SWAPO in Lubango, Angola, 1980–1989.” Andreas Shipanga, In Search of Freedom:  The Andreas Shipanga Story (Gibraltar:  Ashanti Publishing, 1989), 142–3; Tangeni Nuukuawo (Interview, May 27, 2011); Immanuel Engombe and Hizipo Shikondombolo (Interview, June 12, 2011). Nuukuawo and Engombe were among the eleven SWAPO officials that the Zambian and Tanzanian governments had detained since April 1976. All were released from Ukonga Prison on May 25, 1978. Nuukuawo, May 27, 2011.

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Later, during the mid-1980s, as SWAPO’s detention of accused spies in Angola began to receive international press, “Cassinga” was again central to SWAPO’s response. The Committee of Parents, a group of family members of SWAPO detainees who publicized the “detainee issue,” suffered the brunt of these accusations. As the SWAPO Women’s Council wrote in their reply to the Committee of Parents’ first public statement in February 1986, “It was because of these sorts of people [the Committee of Parents] that close to 800 Namibians were killed during the Cassinga raid. . . . Is it justified in your eyes that so many Namibians be killed because of your brother, sister or relative that sells out?”88 In making this and similar statements, SWAPO officials sustained rumors connecting the SADF’s attack on Cassinga with the activities of “spies” among listeners who remained very distant from the camps where Namibian exiles lived. And they stigmatized individuals who had collected substantial evidence of abuses perpetrated by SWAPO in the camps but who lacked authority in the international community to speak on exiled Namibians’ behalfs. Such discourse, in turn, has initiated further rumors of Cassinga articulated by Namibians accused of betraying the nation there and who remain stigmatized in a national community. For example, some SWAPO ex-detainees speculate about the identity of “the real traitors” within SWAPO’s leadership who were responsible for exposing Namibians to the SADF attack, thereby marking Cassinga as a symbol of SWAPO’s betrayal of the Namibian people during the liberation struggle. A group of Namibians detained during SWAPO’s internal conflicts of the mid-1970s articulate an especially ironic version of this story. In late 1977 many PLAN guerrillas detained at Mboroma camp in Zambia were reintegrated into SWAPO, and on May 3, 1978 a detachment of them arrived at Cassinga, dressed in military uniform but unarmed. Many died or were injured the following morning during the SADF attack.89 For some Mboroma ex-detainees, these happenings, combined with other experiences in exile, constitute grounds for suspicion, if not “proof,” that leading SWAPO officials were working together with the South African government to eliminate them. At the same time, these happenings have rendered Mboroma ex-detainees a largely invisible group, whose suffering at Cassinga is obscured by controversial events that occurred at other SWAPO camps at other times. When Cassinga is seen from these perspectives, one can hardly talk about the SWAPO (or SADF) side of the Cassinga story. Rather, what emerges are innumerable stories about Cassinga refracted through Namibians’ diverse 88 89

The Namibian, “Swapo Women’s Council Rejects Parents Committee,” March 7, 1986. Engombe and Shikondombolo, June 12, 2011; Phillip Shuudifonya in Keshii Nathanael, A Journey to Exile: A Story of a Namibian Freedom Fighter (Abertswyth:  Sosiumi Press, 2002), 184; Hidipo Hamutenya (Interview, April 2, 2008, 4); Mbolondondo, June 16, 2011. Accounts vary about the size of the detachment of Mboroma ex-detainees who were sent to Cassinga but, contrary to some versions of this story, many Namibians detained at Mboroma were not sent there. For more details about the Mboroma detainees and their experiences following their detention, see Chapter 4.

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experiences of the liberation struggle and of the postliberation present. Some stories are rumors, supported by scant or dubious evidence, and many are divisive, used to assert power over others in a nation. As a result, these stories may seem to impede the work of reconstructing the common social world of the camp at Cassinga. Nevertheless, Cassinga is also poised to evoke historical knowledge when people who lived in the camp seek recognition for their unique experiences there in a national community. And this knowledge may be used to assemble new histories, not only of Cassinga, but also of other camps that are similarly embedded in a nation and with which Cassinga’s history has become thoroughly intertwined. Producing Histories of Camp Daily Life In March 2007, shortly after my first encounter with Sanden’s parade photo, I  began to share copies of this and other photographs with former exiles now living in Namibia. It is then that I  first visited Darius “Mbolondondo” Shikongo. We met in an unfurnished, makeshift office located behind a strip mall in Ondangwa, where, at the time, Mbolondondo was struggling to establish his own construction company. Conversation moved easily from introductions to Mbolondondo’s experiences in exile  – above all his experiences at Cassinga. Sanden’s parade photo is one of the sources that we discussed during our first meeting. When I  handed him the photo, he immediately identified it as a photo of Cassinga and claimed ownership over the activity pictured in it. “You see how we organized them?” he asked. “We,” as he explained, included both commanders in the camp office, like himself, and their superiors in the PLAN office, with whom the camp office had coordinated Cassinga’s daily activities. When I mentioned that I had never heard about these offices, Mbolondondo expressed concern. As he explained, he was the highest ranking officer in the camp office to survive the attack and had assisted many of the camp’s inhabitants to evade their South African assailants.90 Nevertheless, since his return from exile, he had been approached only once to share his experiences, a brief interview held with the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation’s Oshiwambo radio service in 1990. In contrast, young women who had arrived at Cassinga just before the attack and politicians with no personal knowledge of the camp had spoken repeatedly for Cassinga on Cassinga Day and at other commemorative events. Reasons for Mbolondondo’s concern about who was speaking for Cassinga became increasingly clear as we met over the course of that year. During our first visit Mbolondondo mentioned that since independence he had been 90

Nalikonkole died in the South African attack on Cassinga (Shigwedha, “Enduring Suffering,” 56; Mbolondondo, March 26, 2007, 17). Many research participants shared stories with me of Mbolondondo’s role in saving Namibians’ lives during the attack.

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struggling to make ends meet through a combination of subsistence farming and self-employment. Although he had worked volunteer positions with SWAPO and had enough standing with the party to have been invited to several Party Congresses, he had never been offered a paid appointment. Several months later, when we met again, Mbolondondo expressed his frustration with the Namibian government’s treatment of PLAN ex-combatants who were then demonstrating on the streets of Windhoek, demanding recognition and reparation. As he reasoned, many of the ex-combatants had, like himself, been unable to study abroad because of their duties with PLAN. If he and others were not qualified to take up posts in independent Namibia, it is because they were in the bush, risking their lives for the nation. Later and after several more interviews, Mbolondondo made another admission: that his standing in SWAPO had already begun to shift before independence. In 1984, when the SWAPO Security apparatus was imprisoning and “disappearing” hundreds of accused spies in its camps outside Lubango, Mbolondondo was also detained there. According to him, he was never given an explanation for his detention other than that “the orders were coming from the [SWAPO] headquarters.”91 When Mbolondondo was released from detention several months later, he was appointed to work in a camp for vehicle repair near Lubango. This assignment was clearly a demotion for a man who had served not only as commissar at Cassinga but also, during the early 1980s, as the senior commander of SWAPO’s then largest camp, Kwanza Sul.92 These points offer important background for interpreting Mbolondondo’s account of Cassinga. By foregrounding the camp office, Mbolondondo highlighted his own position as a commander responsible for administering a prominent site in Namibia’s history and for leading Namibians to safety during the infamous South African attack. Part of establishing the camp office’s role involved detailing its relationship to the PLAN office and highlighting the latter’s little known activities in transporting soldiers, supplies, and information to and from the front. In highlighting these points, Mbolondondo had no interest in entering a debate about whether Cassinga was, in fact, a refugee or military camp. For him there is no apology that can possibly be made for the SADF’s conduct on May 4, 1978 or for the celebratory stories that occasionally make their way from former SADF paratroopers and into the Namibian press. Nevertheless, Mbolondondo did respond to a prevailing discourse in Namibia that had not recognized his experiences at Cassinga, by sharing them with me, a researcher writing a book about Namibian history. In the process, he shared knowledge about the camp, drawing from Per Sanden’s photograph and other sources to offer detailed descriptions of camp daily life.

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The histories of Cassinga assembled in this chapter draw heavily from my interviews with Mbolondondo and several other former PLAN combatants whose interest in describing life there are shaped by overlapping experiences in exile and in Namibia.93 Nevertheless, the manner in which these sources render Cassinga reflects a far broader landscape that structures their and others’ historical production. Importantly, Cassinga is both an event that has become symbolic in a nation’s history and a place where people once lived and through which former inhabitants now seek recognition from others in a national community. The SADF attack and the ensuing efforts to attach meaning to it constrain dominant representations and elicit rumors. But they also evoke strands of knowledge as former inhabitants draw from personal experiences at Cassinga to position themselves in a nation. And this knowledge may be incorporated into alternative histories that both push beyond the boundaries of a national narrative and illuminate social conditions in which such narratives form. For Namibia and other nations, camps are a fulcrum of this kind of knowledge production. Most Namibians who traveled into exile lived part or all of their years abroad in one or another SWAPO camp. Camps, therefore, are sites of everyday life that former exiles draw upon as they locate themselves in national histories that homogenize the past and obscure exiles’ unique experiences. At the same time, camps are also a kind of social space that has structured national histories. Mbolondondo has struggled to gain recognition for his experiences at Cassinga not simply because a national narrative cannot easily accommodate him and other PLAN guerrillas who lived there, but also because social relations in and around this camp have produced histories that cannot easily accommodate people like Mbolondondo. Those who usually speak for Cassinga never accessed the offices from which Mbolondondo and others administered the camp, and the international community mobilized opinion around a camp that differs considerably from the one that Mbolondondo and others describe. Moreover, any authority to speak for Cassinga that Mbolondondo wielded through his position in SWAPO dissipated after his detention at Lubango  – an event that should be understood in terms of the aftermath of the Cassinga attack and of exiles’ everyday life in camps, which enabled power to be abused there.

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E.g., Charles Namoloh has been involved in his own struggles for recognition within SWAPO and has used his and others’ experiences at Cassinga to bolster his position. As Namoloh (then Namibia’s Minister of Defence) asserted in an interview with the Windhoek Observer following the launch of the “Remember Cassinga?” exhibition in Windhoek in 2010, when “the leadership of the country . . . tell history[,] they tell their own history while forgetting other people’s history” (Windhoek Observer, “Cassinga Massacre Must Unite Us,” Saturday, May 1–Friday, May 7, 2010). In identifying whose history has been forgotten, Namoloh referred to specific guerrillas, who died while defending Namibians at Cassinga and yet have received no recognition from SWAPO for their contributions there.

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Conclusion This chapter has drawn from one photograph to unravel several histories of Cassinga. The caption attached to the photo at the National Archives of Namibia conceals these histories, reducing them to a single sentence that corresponds with a national narrative. And yet, the photo may open new perspectives on Cassinga if we attend to contexts of its production as an image. The camp is one such vital context, reflecting both a specific location in which the photo was taken and a field of social relations that have overdetermined the photo’s meaning. When seen through the camp, the photo draws attention both to its inability to define “Cassinga” and to its ability to evoke knowledge about a space that has defined it, including Cassinga specifically and other sites where Namibian exiles lived. This book moves now to some of these other sites, tracing particular camps that SWAPO administered in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola over three decades. Camps shaped a steep social hierarchy that Namibia inherited at independence and through which histories of Namibia’s liberation struggle (and of camps) are now mediated. These sites often remain hidden behind Cassinga, the most famous SWAPO camp and a preeminent symbol of the brutality that apartheid South Africa perpetrated on Namibians. And yet, as I suggest here, histories of Cassinga and other sites that SWAPO administered in exile are deeply entangled with one another. The SADF attack on Cassinga casts a long shadow, shaping subsequent conflicts among Namibians and stories of happenings that occurred prior to the attack. Drawing attention to these matters should not cause us to neglect apartheid violence at Cassinga, but rather to consider legacies of this violence that cannot be accommodated by a national history because of the extent to which these legacies implicate national elites. Ironically, “Cassinga,” the camp that symbolizes Namibians’ suffering under apartheid, has concealed camp pasts that must be seen if we are to comprehend this suffering and appraise more fully a postapartheid, postcolonial condition.

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3 Living in Exile: Life and Crisis at SWAPO’s Kongwa Camp, 1964–1968

In April 1964 the Tanzanian government, on behalf of the OAU Liberation Committee, first set aside a tract of land for the liberation movements hosted within Tanzania’s borders. The land was situated at the site of an abandoned railway station located less than two kilometers west of Kongwa village and eighty kilometers east of Dodoma.1 (See Map 5.) There, SWAPO based its new guerrilla army and accommodated its burgeoning membership in Tanzania. Some Namibians passed through Kongwa camp only briefly as they moved between military training courses overseas and Namibia’s borders, but many lived at Kongwa for five or more years as they awaited instructions from their leaders and sought other opportunities abroad. It was at Kongwa camp that SWAPO governed Namibian nationals for the first time. And the emerging Namibian nation was shaped by Kongwa’s unique international community, consisting of local agro-pastoralists, Tanzanian officials, Southern African exiles, and the far-flung governments and organizations that supported and influenced them. Such qualities of Kongwa camp – of the camp as a transnational, lived space – are barely reflected in historical literature. As Peter Katjavivi, SWAPO’s former secretary of information and a professional historian, writes in A History of Resistance in Namibia, SWAPO ran “operational headquarters in Tanzania” from which it coordinated its “fighting units” in Namibia and where “the fighters were brought together . . . to harmonise and agree upon final operational procedures.”2 There is no reference to the particular place where this camp is located, or to the years when Namibians and people of different nationalities 1

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According to current inhabitants of Kongwa village, the railway station was built by the British in the late 1940s in conjunction with the East African Groundnut Scheme and was abandoned a few years later when the Groundnut Scheme failed (White Zuberi Mwanzalila and Gauden Kitomoi [Interview, August 9, 2012]). Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988), 60, 85. For similar references to Kongwa, see, e.g., Oswin O. Namakulu, Armed Liberation Struggle: Some

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lived together there. Other scholars associate Kongwa with conflicts within a liberation movement. Thus, in Namibian historiography, Kongwa has been invoked as a crisis (“the Kongwa Crisis”), in which seven guerrillas (“the Seven Comrades” or “Chinamen”) based at Kongwa in late 1968 openly criticized the SWAPO leadership and were detained by the Tanzanian authorities.3 While contributing to historical knowledge, these and other texts tend to reduce a place where exiles lived to key events, people, and ideas in a nation’s resistance to colonial rule. Even Colin Leys and John Saul, whose work includes some context for understanding how SWAPO members were living at Kongwa (and is the primary reference for subsequent writing on “the Kongwa Crisis”), offer little information about the camp and emphasize the ideological content of the Seven Comrades’ protest.4 In so doing, they omit mundane qualities of camp life – qualities that shaped this “crisis” and other previously overlooked conflicts among Namibians at Kongwa.5 In contrast, this chapter examines histories of camp life from Kongwa’s formation in 1964 through 1968.6 The first section traces the origins of SWAPO’s and other liberation movements’ camps at Kongwa and the daily lives of Namibians and their neighbors there. As I emphasize, Kongwa was a transnational site in which different Namibians’ access to the world outside their camp/ nation was highly unequal. The second section discusses three conflicts that emerged at Kongwa during its early years as Namibians responded to inequalities in their local environment and as SWAPO officials used their control of

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Accounts of PLAN’s Combat Operations (Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan, 2004), 1–2 and, in the ANC’s case, Vladimir Shubin, ANC: A View from Moscow (Johannesburg: Jacana, 1999), 50. Lauren Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia, 1960–1991:  War by Other Means (Basel:  P. Schlettwein Publishing, 1991), 37–8; Colin Leys and John S. Saul, “SWAPO: The Politics of Exile” in Leys and Saul, eds., Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword (London:  James Currey, 1995), 43–4; Justine Hunter, Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia:  Umgang mit schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen der Ära des bewaffneten Befreiungskampfes, 1966 bis 1989 (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2008), 77–80; Paul Trewhela, Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Johannesburg:  Jacana, 2009), 143, 189; Marrion Wallace, A History of Namibia (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2011), 271. Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 43–4. Among literature pertaining to Kongwa, Sifiso Ndolvu’s work is unique because it includes a section focused on camp everyday life. See Sifiso Ndlovu, “The ANC in Exile, 1960–1970,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 1 (1960–1970) (Cape Town:  Zebra Press, 2004), 463–9. Stephen Ellis also includes important details about camp life in his discussion of ethnic and factional rivalries at Kongwa. See Stephen Ellis, External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960–1990 (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012), 51–7. Nevertheless, both pieces focus solely on the ANC’s Kongwa camp, and neither offers sustained attention to how everyday life shaped the emergence and resolution of conflicts within the ANC and other liberation movements at that site. Parts of this chapter are published in my article “Living in Exile: Daily Life and International Relations at SWAPO’s Kongwa Camp,” Kronos: Southern African Histories 37 (2011): 60–86.

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inhabitants’ everyday needs to establish and enforce hierarchies. Finally, the last section turns to the “event” in Namibia’s liberation history often referred to as “the Kongwa Crisis.” As I emphasize, social relations forming at Kongwa from 1964 offer important context for understanding “the Crisis” of 1968. And these relations highlight forms of agency that were emerging among exiled Namibians around camps and that liberation histories consistently obscure. SWAPO at Kongwa Origins of the Camp According to John Otto Nankudhu, one of the first Namibians to receive military training and to inhabit Kongwa camp,7 he and his comrades arrived at Kongwa in early April 1964. Within two days, they were joined by a larger group of Mozambicans affiliated with the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) and led by Samora Machel.8 Over the next several weeks, SWAPO and FRELIMO members renovated the dilapidated railway station into soldiers’ barracks, constructed new buildings to be used as offices and kitchens, and separated the two movements’ camps with a barbed wire fence.9 (See Photo 9.) In all these activities, the liberation movements were aided by local Tanzanians who, at the request of Tanzanian government officials, helped with the camps’ construction and provided food and drink for the workers.10 By May, the Namibians and Mozambicans had moved out of their tents, which they had pitched in the bush near Kongwa, and into their respective camps.11

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John Otto Nankudhu and Helao Shityuwete (Interview, June 2, 2011, 1); Helao Shityuwete (Interview, July 24, 2007, 24); Sam Nujoma, Where Others Wavered (London:  Panaf Books, 2001), 158–9. Nankudhu and Shityuwete, June 2, 2011, 1–2. The FRELIMO publication Tempos corroborates this date although it does not refer to liberation movements other than FRELIMO. See “Kongwa:  Berço da Revolução” (June 15, 1975):  19, 21. Also, Tanzanians who were living at Kongwa during the 1960s indicate that “the freedom fighters” arrived at Kongwa in 1964 (Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma, and John Madeba [Interview, August 8,  2012]; White Zuberi Mwanzalila [Interview, August 9,  2012]). In contrast, Sam Nujoma writes in Where Others Wavered that “on 27 May 1963, [SWAPO] opened [its] military camp at Kongwa in Tanzania.” It is possible that Nujoma is referring to a formal ceremony at which land was allocated by the Tanzanian government to SWAPO. Members of SWAPO and other liberation movements did not move to Kongwa until later, however. Nankudhu and Shityuwete, June 2, 2011; “Kongwa: Berço da Revolução,” 19, 21. Interestingly, there is no reference in the Tempos article to the buildings that exiles found on site when they arrived at Kongwa, but Nankudhu is quite detailed in his description of the buildings that the liberation movements found at the camp and how they were divided between SWAPO and FRELIMO. Nankudhu refers both to a “railway station” and “a school” on the site of the camp, but local sources suggest that all the buildings that the guerrillas found there were somehow linked to the railway. Nakudhu and Shityuwete, June 2, 2011, 4–5; Mbijima et al., August 8, 2012, 24. Nakudhu and Shityuwete, June 2, 2011, 4–5; “Kongwa: Berço da Revolução,” 20.

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Photo 9. Members of the liberation movements renovated this old railway station for their use at Kongwa camp. The photo was taken by the author in August 2012.

From the perspective of Nankudhu and others, the site allocated to SWAPO at Kongwa12 appeared a periphery. It was situated far from the borders of Namibia and nearly five hundred kilometers from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s main urban center and the hub of SWAPO’s community in exile. Driving the rough, gravel road between Dar es Salaam and Kongwa was a full day’s journey,13 and although there was a railway stop located fifteen kilometers northeast of the camp along the line running inland from Dar es Salaam to Lake Tanganyika, the liberation movements’ access to the railway was restricted by the Tanzanian government.14 Kongwa was sparsely populated. Population estimates by locals and former exiles suggest that the village was inhabited by no

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Henceforth, I will use “Kongwa” to refer to the site given to the liberation movements outside Kongwa village. If I wish to refer to the village or to a particular liberation movement’s camp at Kongwa, I will specify accordingly. Helao Shityuwete (Interview, December 14, 2010); Lawrence Phokanoka (“Peter Tladi”) in The Road to Democracy:  South Africans Telling their Stories (Johannesburg:  Mutloatse Arts Heritage Trust, 2008), 418. No people or military equipment belonging to the liberation movements could travel by rail due to the threat that such travel entailed for the Tanzanian state (Shityuwete, December 14, 2010).

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more than two thousand people, and perhaps closer to one thousand.15 Around it lay farmland and small, shifting settlements occupied by people who collectively referred to themselves as “Wagogo.”16 Through a combination of agriculture, cattle raising, and migration, the Wagogo subsisted in a region prone to extended droughts and severe famines.17 During the late 1940s Kongwa briefly became a site in a large British development project, the East African Groundnut Scheme,18 and, by the 1960s, some Wagogo had entered Tanzania’s migrant labor system and were selling groundnuts (karanga) in a cash economy.19 Regardless of the impact of these changes on Gogo communities,20 they and their new neighbors lived on the distant margins of a world system. Nevertheless, they all now lived at the center of a new international community forming around the liberation movements at Kongwa. In the beginning, FRELIMO was the largest presence in this community. According to Samora Machel, by September 1964 Kongwa had already accommodated at least 250 FRELIMO guerrillas who, following military training in the camp, infiltrated Mozambique and initiated the armed struggle.21 From then until FRELIMO vacated Kongwa a few years later, hundreds of FRELIMO guerrillas were moving between the camp and locations in Mozambique where they were involved in military operations and supplying those living in the liberated zones.22 By contrast, in late 1964 there were roughly one hundred Namibians living at Kongwa and, by

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Mwanzalila, August 9, 2012, 23; Shitywuwete, December 14, 2010; Samson Ndeikwila (Interview, July 21, 2007, 22). Simeon Nashilongo (Interview, December 11, 2010); Shityuwete, December 14, 2010. According to Peter Rigby, Kongwa corresponds to the northeastern region of “Ugogo” (Cattle and Kinship among the Gogo: A Semi-Pastoral Society in Central Tanzania (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 12). Rigby, Cattle and Kinship, 20; Gregory Maddox, “Environment and Population Growth:  In Ugogo Central Tanzania,” in Gregory Maddox and James L. Giblin, eds., Custodians of the Land (London:  James Currey, 1996), 43; Derek Peterson, “Morality Plays: Marriage, Church Courts, and Colonial Agency in Central Tanganyika, ca. 1876–1928,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 4 (2006):  988–90. Maddox emphasizes that Ugogo is the most famine-prone region in all of Tanzania with an average annual rainfall of about 500 mm per year, just surpassing the minimum for supporting agriculture. For a discussion of the “The Groundnut Scheme” and its relationship to Kongwa, see Jan S. Hogendorn and K. M. Scott, “Very Large-Scale Agricultural Projects:  The Lessons of the East African Groundnut Scheme,” in Robert I. Rotberg, ed., Imperialism, Colonialism, and Hunger: East and Central Africa (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1983), 167–98. Rigby, Cattle and Kinship, 20, 22–3; Maddox, “Environment and Population Growth,” 54, 56–7. In Cattle and Kinship Rigby emphasizes that migrant labor and cash crops had minimal impact on “Gogo culture,” the topic of his study, whereas Maddox’s article (“Environment and Population Growth”) draws attention to changes in Ugogo over time. “Kongwa: Berço da Revolução,” 19–23. Ibid.; Shityuwete, December 14, 2010. Documents in Fort Hare University’s Morogoro Papers suggest that FRELIMO retained some presence at Kongwa through at least part of 1967. See Box 16, Folder 134, Letter from Eleazar Maboee to ANC Deputy President, 15 April 1967.

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the middle of 1965, there were nearly three hundred.23 For the most part, these guerrillas remained inside the camp with only small groups departing from it to infiltrate Namibia in 1965 and 1966. Within a year or so of the first camps’ openings, other liberation movements also established camps at Kongwa. In August 1964 the ANC founded its camp.24 Located on the site of the old railway station about fifty meters outside the SWAPO and FRELIMO camps,25 the ANC camp was first inhabited by Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadres returning from military training in Egypt and the USSR, followed by others who had recently traveled from South Africa to Tanzania.26 Numbers increased very quickly such that by the end of 1964, there may have been four hundred to five hundred South Africans living in the camp, making it the second largest at Kongwa.27 Only a few of these first MK cadres were women – a paucity mirrored in SWAPO’s and FRELIMO’s camps as well.28 In 1965 Angola’s MPLA and Zimbabwe’s ZAPU also moved to Kongwa.29 There, these two liberation movements initially located themselves at sites neighboring, but not directly adjacent to, the SWAPO, FRELIMO, and ANC camps.30 Numbers fluctuated considerably in the MPLA camp as its leaders prepared to take advantage of Zambian independence in 1964 and Zambian government recognition in early 1965 by opening a new front along 23

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Helao Shityuwete, Never Follow the Wolf (London: Kliptown Books, 1990), 99–100; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 1–2. Shityuwete was responsible for keeping records in the SWAPO camp office in 1965. Ndlovu, “The ANC in Exile, 1960–1970,” 457; Archie Sibeko, Freedom in Our Lifetime (Durban:  Indicator Press University of Natal, 1996), 80–1; Isaac Makopo in The Road to Democracy: South Africans Telling their Stories, 210; Tladi, Telling their Stories, 418. It should be noted that most of these authors give the impression that when the ANC entered Kongwa that there were no other liberation movements based there. Only Peter Tladi mentions that when the ANC arrived at Kongwa “we found that FRELIMO and SWAPO were more or less in the same camp.” Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 22; Shityuwete, December 14, 2010; Nankudhu and Shityuwete, June 2, 2011, 2. Ndlovu, “The ANC in Exile, 1960–1970,” 458–60. Sibeko, Our Lifetime, 82; Nashilongo, December 11, 2010; Shityuwete, December 14, 2007. Ruth Mompati discusses the women in the ANC section of Kongwa in The Road to Democracy: South Africans Telling Their Stories, 315–16. Only one woman lived in the SWAPO camp during the 1960s, Mukwanangobe “Mukwahepo” yaImmanuel. She lived in a separate flat with her partner, David Shilunga (Samson Ndeikwila [Interview, February 9, 2007, 5]; Shityuwete, December 14, 2010). Mukwahepo’s life, including time at Kongwa, is discussed in Ellen Ndeshi Namhila, Mukwahepo:  Woman, Soldier, Mother (Windhoek:  University of Namibia Press, 2013). Research participants maintain that there were no women in the FRELIMO camp (Nashilongo, December 11, 2010; Shityuwete, December 14, 2010). Nankudhu and Shityuwetwe, June 2, 2011, 2; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 21–2; December 14, 2010; Toivo Ashipala (Interview, March 16, 2007, 5). Helao Shityuwete, a Namibian formerly based at Kongwa, indicates that the MPLA and ZAPU camps were located as much as two or three kilometers from the other camps (Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 21–2; December 14, 2010)  although local Tanzanians did not perceive any of the movements as living at distinct sites separated from the others.

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the Zambian-Angolan border.31 The MPLA’s and ZAPU’s presence at Kongwa remained smaller than that of FRELIMO, the ANC, and SWAPO, however, and both liberation movements’ camps closed before the end of the 1960s.32 International Relations at Kongwa By 1965, then, and for the next few years, more than one thousand exiles from across Southern Africa, belonging to liberation movements representing all the regions’ nations then under white minority rule, were inhabiting camps at Kongwa. Ostensibly, each of these movements acted as an autonomous unit, governing the daily lives of fellow nationals according to the routines set within each camp. In SWAPO’s case,33 the day usually began before dawn when camp inhabitants woke to participate in physical training, which included jogging and calisthenics. After returning to the barracks and eating breakfast, inhabitants assembled at the parade where they participated in the parade ceremony, registered their attendance, and were assigned tasks for the day. Tasks included routine camp maintenance, such as cooking, cleaning, and guard duty, as well as other activities more directly aimed at training “freedom fighters.” For example, inhabitants took classes in which they learned how to use different kinds of firearms and explosives, and studied tactics and philosophies of guerrilla warfare. Knowledge was tested and skills were honed in various ways. Trainees made scheduled visits to the shooting range during which they would practice hitting the targets with the different weapons about which they had been taught. They also were sent on “the long march” during which they  would engage in forms of mock warfare, which included laying ambushes for rival groups and locating items hidden in the bush.34 31

32

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Samson Ndeikwila (Interview, February 16, 2007, 10; July 21, 2007, 23); Fred Bridgland, Jonas Savimbi: A Key to Africa (Johannesburg: Macmillan, 1986), 70. Bridgland specifically refers to a group of “170 MPLA recruits” passing from Zambia through Kongwa en route to the Soviet Union in “summer 1965” and “another 90” that passed through the camp en route to Cuba. Previously MPLA guerrillas had been working primarily out of a base in Congo-Brazzaville near the border of Cabinda. Nashilongo, December 11, 2010; Shityuwete, December 14, 2010; Mbijima et  al., August 8, 2012, 32–3. It should be noted that there is considerable confusion among my research participants about which Zimbabwean liberation movements inhabited Kongwa at which points in time. Documentary evidence confirms that ZAPU (and not ZANU) was at Kongwa in 1967. See Fort Hare University, Morogoro Papers, Box 16, Folder 134, Letter from Eleazar Maboee to ANC Deputy President, April 15, 1967. ZANU too eventually administered a camp at Kongwa, probably after ZAPU moved out in the late 1960s. See, e.g., Wilfred Mhanda’s account of his experiences as a ZANU guerrilla based at Kongwa in 1972 in Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter (Harare: Weaver Press, 2011), 27–9. In this instance, as other cases in which I make collective claims about the SWAPO camp in this chapter, I draw from all of my interviews with inhabitants of SWAPO’s Kongwa camp during the 1960s. Ndeikwila, July 21, 2007, 25; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 6. In some instances, the “long march” could last for days at a time. E.g., Toivo Ashipala indicates that the Mozambicans (but not the Namibians) at Kongwa used to stay in the bush over consecutive days, practicing guerrilla

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During evenings basic mathematics and literacy classes were also held, which, some argued, were critical for guerrillas making calculations with explosives and engaging in a freedom struggle.35 All activities in the SWAPO camp were organized by a hierarchy of officials affiliated with the South West African Liberation Army (SWALA), the predecessor of PLAN.36 “The commanders” consisted of those who had completed guerrilla training courses and were responsible for training new arrivals from Namibia. Seniority was granted to the commanders who founded SWAPO’s Kongwa camp37 and to the “Military Council” appointed in 1964 from among Kongwa’s founders and chaired by SWAPO President Sam Nujoma.38 In turn, the Military Council granted individuals authority over particular spheres of camp life. Thus, the titles “First, Second, and Third Chief-in-Command” were conferred on those responsible for the camp and the army as a whole; “First, Second, and Third Secretary” on those responsible for logistical and administrative details in the camp; and “Political Commissar” and “Deputy Political Commissar” on those responsible for soldiers’ political education and morale.39 Together, this hierarchy of commanders distributed food, monitored movement, and dispersed information among those who lived in the camp. And the hierarchy’s jurisdiction over camp and nation was asserted through camp activities – especially during the parade when senior commanders officially set the terms of camp life and led inhabitants in drills and songs proclaiming SWAPO’s aim to liberate Namibia through armed struggle.40

35 36

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warfare techniques (Ashipala, March 16, 2007, 7). A letter from the ANC regional commander at Morogoro on July 23, 1975 also refers to a “long march” scheduled at Kongwa to take place over fifteen days for the purpose of practicing “a.) Sabotage, b.) Ambush, c.) Raids, d.) Crossing of roads, borders and boundaries, and also villages” (Fort Hare University, Morogoro Papers, Box 26, Folder 17). Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 6; Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007, 2–3. SWALA’s name was changed to the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) following the Tanga Conference of 1969–70. Kaufilwa Nepelilo (Interview, August 4, 2007, 7–8); Shityuwete, July 24, 2007; Nashilongo, December 11, 2010. Several sources, including John Otto Nankudhu (June 2, 2011, 2), indicate that the founders of SWAPO’s Kongwa camp numbered fifteen people and were composed of one group returning from training in the Soviet Union and another returning from training in China. Although sources often refer to SWALA’s “Military Council,” their descriptions of who actually belonged to it differ. All accounts indicate that Tobias Hainyeko and Leonard Philemon “Castro” Nangolo had leadership positions. See Leonard Philemon “Castro” Nangolo, “My History,” 1994 (a gift to the author); Nujoma, Where Others Wavered, 158–9, 170; Namakulu, Armed Liberation Struggle, 2. For a detailed discussion of these various positions and their significance at Kongwa in 1965 and 1966, see Shityuwete, July 24, 2007. Peter Tladi also offers an account of how the camp command was organized in the ANC’s Kongwa camp. Although the titles and breakdown of responsibilities differ, Tladi emphasizes the importance of hierarchy and titles in the camp (Tladi, Road to Democracy, 419). See esp. Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 2, 7.

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Beyond the camp’s national boundaries, an international community reinforced the authority of SWAPO officials at Kongwa. Among members of this community, Major Chongambele and Lieutenant Muganga (later replaced by Lieutenant Muchongo) had the most direct impact on the SWAPO camp.41 Chongambele and Muganga were members of the Tanzanian Defence Force responsible for liaising between the liberation movements at Kongwa and the Tanzanian government. Although not involved in the respective camps’ day to day administration, the two officers visited the camps regularly and played a crucial role in camp life. For example, whenever Tanzanians experienced a problem with members of the liberation movements, they were expected to report their problem to Chongambele’s office. Working together with the Tanzanian police, Chongambele and his assistant would then detain anyone accused of breaking the law and report the incident to the relevant liberation movement camp office, working with officials there to resolve the matter.42 In other cases, exiles requested that Chongambele intervene in a conflict within one of their camps. In the SWAPO camp, such meetings were usually initiated by the camp commanders and held in the camp office, where both commanders and rank-and-file guerrillas would attend. Chongambele could also intervene directly in the liberation movements’ affairs if he perceived the interests of the Tanzanian state to be at risk. Such risks ranged from the use of weapons at the camps to the bill incurred by liberation movements using Tanzanian telephones installed in camp offices.43 In addition to Chongambele’s office, other offices were influencing activities at Kongwa from further afield. By the mid-1960s, SWAPO was sustained materially through the support of a range of foreign governments. These included African states, which from 1963 made annual contributions to the OAU Liberation Committee’s fund, which were dispersed to the OAU recognized liberation movements and their guerrilla armies.44 Far more significant 41

42

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Muganga was the first Tanzanian lieutenant assigned to the liberation movements’ camps at Kongwa, and he was later replaced by Lieutenant Muchongo (Mwanzalila, August 9, 2012, 16–17). This point is corroborated by Namibians who lived at Kongwa from 1964 to 1966 and from 1967 to 1968, who remember Muganga and Muchongo, respectively. Tanzanian research participants also indicated that Major Chongambele’s name is spelled with a “Ch,” correcting “Living in Exile,” my previous article on Kongwa, which had drawn information exclusively from Namibian research participants. Shityuwete, December 14, 2010. As SWAPO’s third secretary-in-command, Shityuwete participated in many such meetings with Chongambele and often visited the Kongwa police station to release SWAPO members who had been detained there. Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 8–10; ANC Morogoro Papers, Box 16, Folder 134, Letter from Eleazar Maboee to ANC Deputy President, April 15, 1967. According to the letter, the ANC and ZAPU incurred a bill of “about 2200/- . . . as compared to 300/- over the same period for MPLA and SWAPO and FRELIMO.” According to Helao Shityuwete, there were no phones in the camps when he worked at the SWAPO office from mid-1965 to February 1966 (Shityuwete, December 14, 2010). Klaas van Walraven, Dreams of Power: The Role of the Organization of African Unity in the Politics of Africa, 1963–1993 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, African Studies Centre Research Series, No. 13, 1999), 243–6; Shubin, ANC, 51–2.

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in financial terms were donations made by the Eastern bloc countries, especially the Soviet Union, which recognized the liberation movements whose armies were based at Kongwa. Soviet aid consisted of cash deposits as well as shipments of arms, tinned food, and other commodities sent directly from the USSR.45 The Chinese government also offered aid to Southern African liberation movements from the early 1960s although this aid dried up for at least some of the movements at Kongwa in 1965 following the Sino-Soviet Split.46 In addition to sending material aid, some foreign governments also trained liberation movement guerrillas on their own soil. By the mid-1960s, the SWAPO camp at Kongwa included soldiers who had trained in Egypt, the USSR, China, Algeria, Ghana, and North Korea.47 Tanzanian and liberation movement officials were key intermediaries in all these relations developing between the guerrillas at Kongwa and their supporters abroad. With respect to material aid, the Tanzanian government required that items intended for the liberation movements be sent to the OAU Liberation Committee’s headquarters in Dar es Salaam, earmarked for a particular movement.48 There, aid was separated into the categories “military” and “humanitarian.” Military aid was to be handled strictly by the Tanzanian government, which transported arms to Kongwa by military convoy and handed them over to the liberation movements in the presence of Major Chongambele. In contrast, humanitarian aid was given directly to the liberation movements in Dar es Salaam, which were then responsible for transferring this material to Kongwa. In the case of SWAPO, camp commanders sometimes traveled with this aid in SWAPO vehicles. In other instances, especially when transporting staples such as maize meal and biscuits in bulk, SWAPO sent these items by train and arranged for commanders to pick them up at the railhead fifteen kilometers from Kongwa. Camp administrations established their own systems for recording information about humanitarian goods that entered the camps without oversight from Tanzanian officers at Kongwa.49 Similarly, liberation movement and Tanzanian officials mediated knowledge entering the camps from outside. When cadres returned from their training abroad to Kongwa, they brought with them overlapping, but not identical, bodies of knowledge about guerrilla warfare and revolutionary struggle. For example, while all cadres learned how to drill as part of their training, the counts and steps for drilling differed depending on where cadres had been trained. In this and other instances, standard practices had to be established

45

46 47

48 49

Walraven, Dreams of Power, 244–5; Shubin, ANC, 52; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 9; December 17, 2010. Shubin, ANC, 52. This list is derived from interviews with Sam Nujoma (March 4, 2008), Helao Shityuwete (December 17, 2010) and references to training sites in SWAPO publications. Shubin, ANC, 76–7. Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 8–10; December 17, 2010.

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for the armies to function effectively.50 Similarly, ideas about “the liberation struggle” and the nature of the enemy against which the liberation movements were struggling was far from identical across the countries that trained guerrillas and within the political leaderships of the movements. In responding to such discrepancies, SWAPO officials frequently used their command of camp space, especially the parade, to pronounce official knowledge. And they relied upon the support of Chongambele and other Tanzanian officials when their authority to articulate this knowledge was contested. Conflicts in the SWAPO Camp “Going Abroad” The social order of SWAPO’s Kongwa camp  – an order at once national and international in scope  – shaped conflicts that soon formed among Namibians living there. Consider, for example, the circumstances in which Namibians who were seeking opportunities “abroad” found themselves living in the camp. The majority of Namibians who entered Tanzania in the early and mid-1960s were contract workers recruited in Francistown, Bechuanaland.51 There, SWAPO had established an office, under the direction of Maxton Mutongulume Joseph, which aimed to recruit workers traveling between northern Namibia and the South African Witwatersrand . Many of those recruited were passing through Francistown as part of the migration route that the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WENELA) coordinated for its mine workers originating outside South Africa.52 Others were contract workers and students inside Namibia who registered with WENELA so that they could make their way to Francistown and join the liberation movement in Tanzania from there.53 Apparently, SWAPO officials who recruited these exiles highlighted opportunities that would be available to Namibians who joined the liberation movement “abroad.”54 These 50

51

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Shityuwete, December 17, 2010; Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus and Michael Kahuika (Interview, September 20, 2007, 4). Johann Müller discusses the importance of SWAPO’s Francistown office in recruiting most early Namibian exiles in his monograph, The Inevitable Pipeline into Exile: Botswana’s Role in the Namibian Liberation Struggle (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2012), 148–69. My research participants who lived in exile during the 1960s emphasized the importance of the Francistown office and confirm many of the details of Müller’s account. WENELA recruited workers from all over Southern Africa to work on the mines. Workers were registered in various WENELA offices and flown to Francistown from where they were transported by train to the Witwatersrand. The WENELA office in Namibia was located in Rundu, and most of those registered at WENELA’s Rundu office were Angolans, transported to Rundu from various locations inside Angola. See Müller, “The Inevitable Pipeline,” 152–6 and my interviews with Samson Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007, March 2, 2007, July 21, 2007; Silas Shikongo, March 16, 2007; Kaufilwa Nepelilo, August 4, 2007. In my interviews with former exiles, they often used the English word abroad or expression going abroad regardless of the language in which the interview was conducted.

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included the opportunity to live in Tanzania and other independent countries, study internationally, and contribute to Namibia’s liberation from colonial rule.55 By presenting exile in this manner, recruiters appealed to a “tradition of mobility” through which Southern African men had, over generations, found ways to use the migrant labor system to access resources and opportunities otherwise denied to them.56 Nevertheless, many of these early Namibian exiles, and probably many of the recruiters, had only a vague notion of what exiles would actually find in Tanzania. Apparently, some arrived in Dar es Salaam optimistic that they would be able to access scholarships regardless of their age or the extent of their education prior to traveling abroad. Also, a considerable number were unaware of SWAPO’s plans to organize for an armed struggle and that they might be enlisted as soldiers in a guerrilla army.57 It was, therefore, with surprise and reluctance that some Namibians found themselves at Kongwa. For many the encounter began upon their arrival in Dar es Salaam when they first met other Namibians living in the city. Among them were students attending Kurasini International Educational Centre, a school established by the African-American Institute for exiles from Southern Africa.58 Apparently, Kurasini students often discouraged newcomers from going to Kongwa and emphasized problems at the camp, such as poor living conditions and organization.59 Nevertheless, few Namibians living in Tanzania had a choice in the matter. Those who had the necessary educational qualifications, fit within the age parameters and had received the endorsement of SWAPO or another liberation movement were able to enroll in educational institutions in Tanzania.60 The others, who were in the majority and who were required to associate with a liberation movement in order to live legally in Tanzania, were sent by SWAPO to 55

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Interviews with Ashipala, March 16, 2007; Sylvester Hangula, June 18, 2011; Kati, August 11, 2007; Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007; Nepelilo, August 4, 2007; Shikongo, March 16, 2007; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007. Tony Emmett, Popular Resistance and the Roots of Nationalism in Namibia, 1915–1966 (Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 1999), 332. Emmett, Popular Resistance, 332; Ashipala, March 16, 2007, 3; Hangula, June 18, 2011; Nepelilo, August 4, 2007; Shikongo, March 16, 2007. Kurasini opened its doors in December 1962 and became a full-fledged secondary school in 1965. By January 1967, 188 students were enrolled there, including 150 “refugee students” from Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, South Africa, and South West Africa (Fort Hare University, ANC Morogoro Office, Box 11, Folder 96, “Kurasini International Education Centre,” 2–3). Nepelilo, August 4, 2007, 5, 6; Kati, August 11, 2007, 16–17. Interestingly, Nepelilo maintains that Kurasini students discouraged him from going to Kongwa as early as 1964 – before the open controversies and detentions in the camp. To enter Kurasini students had to pass an aptitude test, have sufficient English language skills, and fit within age parameters, which some former exiles remember as eighteen to twenty-five. See Ashipala, July 25, 2007, 25; Kati, August 11, 2007, 3; Ndeikwila, March 2, 2007, 3; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 18; Shityuwete, Never Follow the Wolf (London: Kliptown Books, 1990), 96–7. In addition to SWAPO, the South West Africa National Union (SWANU) was also based in Dar es Salaam during the 1960s, and a small number of Namibians, most or all of whom were Herero, accessed scholarships through it.

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Kongwa.61 There, exiles were compelled to undergo military training regardless of whether becoming a “freedom fighter” had been their intent or if they supported the SWAPO leadership’s decision to take up an armed struggle. Conditions in and around Kongwa heightened some exiles’ sense of discontent. As sources emphasize, life at Kongwa could be harsh. Camp inhabitants often lived without basic commodities,62 and their movements and speech were monitored and restricted. At the same time, camp inhabitants’ access to resources entering the camp from outside was uneven, and the confined living space of the camp made such inequalities difficult to hide. For example, rank-and-file soldiers made requests for pocket money, but their requests were repeatedly denied – despite the fact that commanders who denied them clearly had access to money that they were using to purchase items in Kongwa village.63 Similarly, camp commanders warned soldiers against drinking excessively and having sexual relationships with women even as some repeatedly did not report to the parade and were not found in the camp after nights in the location.64 SWAPO’s senior camp commanders at Kongwa, it should be further noted, were contract workers with little formal education, making them no more educated, and sometimes less educated, than those whom they were commanding in the camp. Moreover, most of the rank-and-file soldiers were more than thirty years of age and roughly the same age as their commanders.65 In the eyes of some at Kongwa, commanders’ authority over the camp was based solely on their having arrived in exile first and received positions by the SWAPO leaders – not on their legitimacy to govern those inhabiting the camp.66 Especially troubling for some newcomers at Kongwa were instances in which camp commanders dismissed those among the SWAPO leaders who encouraged Namibians to study. For example, in 1964 or 1965 SWAPO Secretary General Jacob Kuhangua visited Kongwa and informed the Namibians there about opportunities to study at Kurasini that might soon become available to the camp’s younger inhabitants, regardless of their previous education.67 As Kuhangua stressed, Kurasini had been established by the African-American Institute in Dar es Salaam and those who passed their studies at Kurasini could receive scholarships to study in the United States, where Kuhangua had 61

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This point is confirmed by all of my Kongwa research participants as well as Tony Emmett. As he writes, “It was essentially those for whom scholarships could not be obtained who formed the nucleus of the SWAPO guerrilla force” (Emmett, Popular Resistance, 332). And this guerrilla force was based at Kongwa. See, e.g., Kati, August 11, 2007, 1–2; Silas Shikongo (Interview, July 22, 2007, 19). Nepelilo, August 4, 2007, 16. Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007, 5; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 3; Nepelilo, August 4, 2007, 10. Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 18; Kati, August 11, 2007, 1. See, e.g., Nepelilo, August 4, 2007, 7, 9. Ashipala, March 16, 2007, 1; July 25, 2007, 25; Shikongo, July 22, 2007, 19–20; Samson Ndeikwila, The Agony of Truth (Windhoek: Kuiseb Publishers, 2014), 23. Ndeikwila’s account of Kuhangua’s visit to Kongwa draws from his memory of discussions with Kongwa inhabitants after arriving at the camp in 1967.

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recently studied.68 Apparently, Kuhangua’s words were received with great enthusiasm by many camp inhabitants. Some commanders, however, took to referring to Kuhangua and the Kurasini students as “stooges” set on undermining the Namibian revolution.69 In employing this rhetoric, commanders not only reproduced anti-American discourse articulated in countries where many had received military training, but also aligned themselves with a faction of the SWAPO leadership associated with SWAPO Vice President Louis Nelengani. Nelengani had received guerrilla training in the Soviet Union and may have been personally responsible for securing supplies from Eastern bloc states for SWAPO cadres at Kongwa.70 While ideological battles between Kuhangua, Nelengani, and other SWAPO leaders were fought away from the parade ground, it was clear to many at Kongwa that their aspirations to study had become entangled in the politics of the Cold War.71 It was in this context, at once local and global, that some of the first Namibians began to resist the camp order and confront officials at Kongwa. Among these early dissidents was Silas Shikongo. Like others attending St. Mary’s Mission School in Odibo during the early 1960s, Shikongo was recruited by Peter Nanyemba, then SWAPO’s Representative for East Africa, to leave Namibia to seek further studies through the liberation movement in exile. By 1964 Shikongo was living in Salvation Camp, a camp for Southern African refugees on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam where he waited for SWAPO to arrange a scholarship for him.72 Sometime thereafter, possibly in response to the Tanzanian government’s efforts to reduce the number of liberation movement members living around Dar es Salaam,73 Shikongo was sent by SWAPO to Kongwa. As Shikongo emphasizes, SWAPO took him and about fifty other Namibians from the refugee camp at night without any prior notice that they were to be sent to Kongwa.74 In response, Shikongo attempted to address camp 68 69 70 71

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Kuhangua was one of several Namibians who studied at Lincoln University during the 1960s. Ashipala, July 25, 2007, 25; Hangula, June 18, 2011. Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 7, 14–15; Ndeikwila, The Agony of Truth, 23–4. In late 1965 or 1966 Kuhangua and Nelengani fought physically at the house that they shared in Dar es Salaam. During the fight Nelengani stabbed Kuhangua, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and resulting in Nelengani’s suspension as SWAPO’s vice-president. For accounts of the conflict between Kuhangua and Nelengani, see Katjavivi, A History of Resistance, 62; Nujoma, Where Others Wavered, 146–7; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 7, 14–15; Ndeikwila, The Agony of Truth, 23–4. For further discussion of how Cold War divisions appeared to different people at Kongwa, see Ashipala, July 25, 2007, 25; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 15–16; Hangula, June 18, 2011. Some research participants referred to this camp as “Temeke,” the district in which Salvation Camp appears to have been located. See Nepelilo, 4 August 2007, 11; Nankudhu and Shityuwete, 2 June 2011, 13–14. According to Helao Shityuwete (July 24, 2007, 18) and Vladimir Shubin (ANC: A View from Moscow, 54), from 1964 the Tanzanian government limited the number of liberation movement members in Dar es Salaam to registered students and four or five representatives administering movement offices. All others had to be sent elsewhere. Shityuwete suggests that the impetus for this regulation was the January 1964 coup attempt against Nyerere’s government. Shikongo, March 16, 2007, 4; July 22, 2007, 14.

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officials in the hope that he, like some other young Namibians, would be permitted to leave the camp and further his studies. Repeatedly, however, he found his efforts thwarted. To account for his misfortune, Shikongo explains that after arriving at Kongwa, Tobias Hainyeko, the commander of SWALA, learned that Shikongo descended from a royal family that was closely associated with the South African government and its efforts to establish apartheid homelands in Namibia.75 Hainyeko was, therefore, unwilling to support Shikongo’s search for scholarships or allow him an audience with SWAPO officials in Dar es Salaam on the premise that if he were granted a scholarship that he might “just fly from there . . . to see [his] father.”76 Shikongo, in turn, attempted to subvert the camp command by smuggling a letter to SWAPO President Sam Nujoma, who originates from a village neighboring Shikongo’s in the Ongandjera region of Ovamboland and knew Shikongo personally. Nujoma eventually did come to the camp to announce that those who were interested in taking up further studies should register their names. But the response from the political leadership was slow and, according to Shikongo, he and others tired of waiting and began to express their discontent in new ways.77 Toward the end of 1965, Silas Shikongo decided to stop taking orders from the camp commanders: “I must not go to cook; I must not go for the morning marching or morning [parade]; I must not go to the camp gate at nighttime.”78 Although Shikongo emphasizes that his “strike” was a personal choice and lasted for about three months,79 there were also clearly others who were not following the camp rules at this time, and some who had fled the camp at night and not returned.80 In response, Tobias Hainyeko and Major Chongambele decided to call a meeting of all Namibians at Kongwa in the SWAPO camp office in January 1966.81 There, Chongambele asked those assembled to explain the situation in the camp and express their concerns. Shikongo was among three rank-and-file soldiers who spoke and explained that their purpose for entering exile was to study, that they had been taken to Kongwa against their will, and that they felt they were being mistreated in the camp.82 Related issues were 75

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Shikongo’s father was a chief in Ongandjera and his father’s youngest brother, Ushona Shiimi, became the first chief councillor of the Ovamboland Homeland from 1968 to 1972. Shikongo, July 22, 2007, 5. Eventually, SWAPO did send a group of twenty Namibians, who had registered to study during Nujoma’s visit at Kongwa, to Mbeya. There they were administered a test. Those who passed were sent to Kurasini to study while those who failed were sent back to Kongwa or detained at Keko Prison (Shikongo, July 22, 2007, 21; Nashilongo, December 11, 2010; Hangula, June 18, 2011). Shikongo, July 22, 2007, 7. Silas Shikongo (Interview, June 8, 2011). Shikongo, July 22, 2007, 18–19. Most of my Kongwa research participants who lived in the camp in 1966 discuss these events. Shikongo narrates them in relationship to his own strike (ibid.). Shikongo, March 16, 2007, 7; July 22, 2007, 18. The other speakers were Lazarus Pohamba and Valendin Katumbe.

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also introduced such as Hainyeko’s alleged prejudice against Shikongo, and Shikongo’s work in the camp logistics office, from where he had distributed fresh milk and other items to those who claimed dietary needs that were not recognized by the commanders.83 In making these statements at the meeting, Shikongo appealed to Chongambele to intervene in injustices at the camp or at least to bring them to the attention of other SWAPO officials, such as Peter Nanyemba and Jacob Kuhangua whom many aspiring students saw as allies but who remained distant from Kongwa at SWAPO’s head office in Dar es Salaam. Instead, Tanzanian officials escorted Shikongo and his two outspoken comrades the same night to Keko, a Tanzanian state prison in Dar es Salaam, where they spent the next six months in detention.84 Shikongo was among the first Namibians to be detained for openly criticizing camp officials at Kongwa.85 His experience, however, reflects a trend that continued to replay itself in later years. From as early as 1964, some Namibians living at Kongwa were dissatisfied with their placement at a camp that constrained their access to opportunities that they had hoped to find in exile. Increasingly, they resented the commanders who were responsible for monitoring their lives inside the camp and who were better able to access a world outside of it. When Shikongo and others resisted their place in the camp order by disobeying rules and appealing to Major Chongambele, they again discovered the vulnerability of their position – beholden to a Tanzanian official mediating between an exiled liberation movement and the government that supported it. Only later, when rank-and-file Namibians managed to forge their own social networks with people outside the camp, were some able to access the opportunities that had enticed many of them to travel “abroad.” As one former camp inhabitant recalls, during the mid-1960s Jackson Kambode, a SWAPO official living in Dar es Salaam, left the liberation movement and traveled to Nairobi where he began to study with a scholarship accessed through the United Nations. Eventually, word of Kambode’s scholarship reached Kongwa and the first Namibians there began to slip quietly from the camp and make their way to Kenya.86 To encourage their comrades to join them and facilitate their travel, Namibia’s first Kenya exiles corresponded with those still at Kongwa through a Tanzanian whom they had befriended in Kongwa village and who helped smuggle letters in and out of the camp on their behalfs.87 By the early 1970s there were more than fifty Namibians living in Nairobi who had previously lived at Kongwa. Most or all of them were studying through 83 84 85

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Shikongo, July 22, 2007, 18. Ibid., 18. Shikgongo, March 16, 2007; July 22, 2007; Ashipala, July 25, 2007, 31; Nepelilo, August 4, 2007, 15. Ashipala, July 25, 2007, 35. Ibid.

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scholarships granted by the UN Council for South West Africa (later UN Council for Namibia) on behalf of Namibian exiles and chaneled through the Kenya Christian Refugee Services.88 Among these students was Silas Shikongo who, following his release from Keko Prison, eventually made his way to Kenya and secured a scholarship.89 Caprivi African National Union In addition to those whom SWAPO officials recruited to join the liberation movement in Tanzania during the 1960s, some Namibians traveled abroad under the auspices of other organizations. Among these organizations was the Caprivi African National Union (CANU). Founded by schoolteachers in Namibia’s Caprivi Region in September 1962, CANU managed to mobilize support among a range of teachers, students, and traditional leaders in the Caprivi over the next two years.90 Following a student strike at Holy Family Mission School in Katima Mulilo and the arrest of CANU President Brendan Simbwaye in 1964, as many as seventy CANU members fled across the Zambezi River into Zambia.91 In November 1964 in Lusaka, leaders from CANU and SWAPO agreed to merge the two organizations, and Brendan Simbwaye and Mishake Muyongo were appointed SWAPO Vice

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Samson Ndeikwila (Interview, September 2, 2014); Ndeikwila, The Agony of Truth, 40–3. The UN General Assembly created the UN Council for South West Africa in October 1966 (Katjavivi, A History of Resistance, 58; Wallace, A History of Namibia, 261). Through it, the United Nations granted scholarships and other assistance to exiled Namibians. In Tanzania this assistance passed primarily through SWAPO, but in Kenya and other countries where ties to SWAPO were not strong, Namibians could access these resources directly through UN officials. For discussion of how Namibians moved from Tanzania to seek asylum and scholarships in other African countries, including Uganda, Ethiopia, and Somalia, see interviews with Ashipala, March 16, 2007, 2; Kati, August 11, 2007, 12, 15; and Ndeikwila, May 13, 2011. Shikongo was released from Keko Prison in July 1966. After learning that SWAPO might send him again to Kongwa, he made his way to Mbeya where he passed an examination, qualifying him to attend Kurasini. In 1970 Shikongo moved on to Nairobi, where he joined other Namibians already studying there (Shikongo, March 16, 2007, 10–11; June 8, 2011). Albert Zechariah Ndopu, Interview with Beauty Matongo, February 27, 2011, 7–13 (transcription shared with the author); Bennett Kangumu, Contesting Caprivi:  A  History of Colonial Isolation and Regional Nationalism in Namibia (Basel:  Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2011), 201–2. Albert Ndopu was a founding member of CANU’s Executive Committee. His detailed narrative of the formation of CANU corrects Peter Katjavivi’s assertion that CANU was established in 1963 (A History of Resistance in Namibia, 51). Ndopu, February 27, 2011, 9–13; Frederick Matongo, Interview with Beauty Matongo, March 13, 2011, 19–20 (transcription shared with the author); my interviews with Frederick Matongo, June 18, 2011, 1–2; Ellen Musialela, July 24, 2008; Samson Ndeikwila, March 2, 2007, 13, 15. Bennett Kangumu’s Contesting Caprivi also discusses the strike at Holy Family Mission School (207–8), the flight of Caprivians into exile (208–9), and the arrest of Brendan Simbwaye (214–16). Sources suggest that some of the students arrived in Zambia before Simbwaye’s arrest in July or August 1964.

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President and SWAPO Representative to Zambia, respectively.92 In December 1964 and January 1965 SWAPO made arrangements to transport the exiled Caprivians, most of whom had congregated in refugee camps in southwestern Zambia and had not participated in the negotiations that merged CANU with SWAPO, to Tanzania.93 There, in the southwestern Tanzanian town of Mbeya, the Caprivians were divided into two groups, with a smaller group sent to Dar es Salaam for further schooling and a larger group sent to Kongwa for military training.94 The arrival of the Caprivians at Kongwa changed the social dynamics within SWAPO’s camp significantly. The great majority of the one hundred to two hundred Namibians who had previously inhabited Kongwa were Oshiwambo speakers from north-central Namibia and others who shared similar languages and cultural practices from Namibia’s Kavango Region.95 Thus, upon their arrival in the camp, the Caprivians became a large ethnic minority. Not only did the newcomers speak languages that were unintelligible to those previously residing in the camp, but they shared relatively little common history with their new neighbors. Although they lived within the same colonial boundaries, Caprivians had not been incorporated into the German and South African colonial economies through the contract labor system as had people from the Ovambo and Kavango regions, and many had schooled and worked in southwestern Zambia alongside Zambians with whom they shared overlapping pasts and cultural affinities. Moreover, the idea of creating CANU had been 92

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Ndopu, February 27, 2011, 13–15; Kangumu, Contesting Caprivi, 230–1; Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia, 51. By the time of the official merger, Simbwaye had been detained by South African Security Forces. He is believed to have died in detention. During the 1970s Muyongo became the acting vice president of SWAPO before he was expelled from the organization in 1980. Ndopu, February 27, 2011, 13–15; F. Matongo, March 13, 2011, 19–20; June 18, 2011, 3–4. Moreover, Ndopu, who during the early 1960s was CANU’s public secretary, maintains that the CANU delegation sent to Lusaka in July 1964 was not sent by the exiled CANU leadership to meet with SWAPO. Rather, their mission was to update members of the United National Independence Party and the United Nations on developments in the Caprivi. He and other members of the CANU leadership waiting in the camp for the delegation’s return were, therefore, “amazed” and “irritated” when they learned that SWAPO and CANU had merged (Ndopu, February 27, 2011, 14). Ndopu, February 27, 2011, 15; F.  Matongo, March 13, 2011, 20; June 18, 2011, 2.  In The Gender Politics of the Namibian Liberation Struggle, Martha Akawa identifies “Mbeya as the first camp for Namibians established in exile” (108). In fact, there were several refugee camps in Tanzania where Namibian and other Southern Africans found themselves living in the early 1960s. The first camp specifically for, and run by, Namibians was the SWAPO camp at Kongwa. Helao Shityuwete, Never Follow the Wolf, 99–100; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 1–2. In addition, camp inhabitants included a few Otjiherero speakers who had been recruited from the Herero community in Bechuanaland and, from sometime in the middle of 1965, the Angolans recruited by Jonas Savimbi. For more on Savimbi’s recruits living in the camp see Williams, “Living in Exile,” 65, 67–8.

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generated not through exchanges with Namibian nationalists, but rather with Zambian nationalists – particularly the United National Independence Party (UNIP) whose leaders Caprivians met regularly during the early 1960s and on whose model CANU drafted its constitution.96 Moreover, the social backgrounds of the particular groups from Caprivi and Ovambo/Kavango sent to Kongwa differed considerably. Many of the Caprivians had been educated in mission schools and spoke English whereas most others in the camp, including the established camp commanders, did not.97 Thus, initially, the Caprivians shared no common language with their new neighbors, and they were accommodated in separate tents, further reinforcing the sense that the camp was composed of two distinct ethnic/political groups.98 It was in this context that a conflict began to unfold between “CANU” and “SWAPO” at Kongwa.99 According to Frederick Matongo, one of the first cohort of Caprivian exiles, tensions emerged just before their arrival at the camp when a SWAPO representative came to collect Caprivians assigned to Kongwa at the Dodoma train station: When we hear[d] the name Kongwa, we were puzzled because at that time there was a war . . . in Congo Kinshasa. . . . For us the two names “Kongwa” and “Congo” [sounded] the same. . . . [Before] that time in our lives we had never before [been] mixed with other Namibians such as Ovambo[s]. . . . We could not speak Oshiwambo and Afrikaans; the Ovambos could not speak Subia and English. . . . The people who came to collect us arrived in the morning but we were just refusing to go until at around 4 [pm]. Then Green[well Matongo]100 said, “Let’s just go. Once we reach the border we shall see words on the board, telling us that we are now entering this country. . . . If we see it is Congo, we shall not cross the border.”101

96

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Ndopu, February 27, 2011. Kangumu describes connections between CANU and UNIP officials in his text Contesting Caprivi (199). F. Matongo, March 13, 2011, 20; June 18, 2011, 2; Ndeikwila, March 2, 2007, 15; Shityuwete, December 14, 2010. It should be noted that some Oshiwambo-speaking camp inhabitants had been educated at mission schools (such as St. Mary’s in Odibo) where English was the medium of instruction, but the vast majority, including most of the camp commanders, had accessed little or no formal education. Shityuwete, December 14, 2010. In 1965 rank-and-file guerrillas at Kongwa were accommodated in tents, with concrete structures reserved for the commanders (Hangula, June 18, 2011). By 1967 all the Namibians at Kongwa were accommodated in concrete barracks although the barracks of the Caprivians and other Namibians at Kongwa remained separate (Ndeikwila, March 2, 2007, 19; July 21, 2007, 25; June 17, 2011). As noted, CANU did not officially exist as a separate organization from SWAPO in 1965. Nevertheless, the terms CANU and SWAPO, and the related ethnic/regional labels Caprivian and Ovambo, were used by those involved in the conflict. Greenwell Matongo, nephew to Frederick Matongo, later became the chief political commissar of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia and one of the best known SWAPO guerrilla commanders. He died in 1979 when his car drove over a land mine. F. Matongo, March 13, 2011, 20.

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Eventually Matongo’s group arrived at Kongwa (not Congo) and took up training in the camp. Nevertheless, their relationship with their Oshiwambo-speaking commanders continued to be dogged by language divides and related issues. Sources suggest that the SWAPO commanders did little to make the newcomers from Caprivi feel welcome in the camp and that some of the Caprivians questioned the credentials of their new commanders, whom they thought, as representatives of a nationalist movement, should be able to speak English.102 Commanders, however, seem to have mistrusted the intentions of some Caprivian leaders, whom they suspected were not committed to SWAPO but had only merged with SWAPO so that they could resurrect CANU in Tanzania.103 For some months these tensions remained outside Kongwa’s public discourse, but events in the middle of 1965 brought them to the surface. According to some accounts, Mishake Muyongo traveled from his office to Kongwa where he organized a special meeting with other Caprivians, hatching his plans to revive CANU and sowing the seeds for an open rebellion.104 Camp minutes, while not dismissing Muyongo’s role as instigator, offer another narrative, grounded in the circumstances of camp daily life.105 As Titus Muailelpeni, one of the commanders, narrates: “One night some of [the Caprivian] comrades arrived from the village under liquor influence, [sic] they were insulting, swearing, cursing and saying all bad languages . . . [about] the SWAPO leaders.” In response, some of the camp commanders threatened to fight the Caprivians. As one Caprivian reports, a commander “came . . . in our tent with a stick in his hand [with] the intention to do harm to us.”106 By September 1965, many of the Caprivians at Kongwa had gone “on strike” by disobeying the commanders and disregarding organized camp activities.107 On September 21 high-ranking SWAPO leaders, including President Sam 102

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Ndeikwila, May 13, 2011; F.  Matongo, March 13, 2011, 20–1; June 18, 2011, 2.  It should be noted that, in Matongo’s account, the language barrier between Caprivians and Ovambos became less divisive after the Caprivians spent time with their new comrades in the camp. In contrast, Ndeikwila and several other former Kongwa inhabitants maintain that language was an ongoing source of division among Namibians at Kongwa. Shityuwete, December 14, 2010. F. Matongo, June 18, 2011, 4; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 13. UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 5, File No. 9, “The National Executive Committee of SWAPO held 21/9/65 at 8.10 A.M. Under the Chairmanship of Leonard Philemon First D.D.C Chief Under Secretary of Josep Shitwete,” (henceforth “Minutes 21/9/65”), 5–6. It should be noted that these minutes are the only ones available from Kongwa in the Katjavivi Collection or any of the other major archives of SWAPO material that I have been able to access. According to Helao Shityuwete, who took the minutes, he was one of the first literate commanders at Kongwa and initiated the practice of keeping camp minutes after arriving in the camp and being appointed “third secretary” in the middle of 1965. He maintains that this meeting is the only one at Kongwa involving the top SWAPO leadership while he lived in the camp and indicates that he wrote the minutes by hand and then gave them to Sam Nujoma’s personal secretary, Ewald Katjivena, who probably typed them (Helao Shityuwete [Interview, June 5, 2008]). Minutes 21/9/65, 5–6. Ibid., 5, 8.  The camp minutes and other sources refer uniformly to the strike of “the Caprivians,” but some of the Caprivians at Kongwa did not participate in it. As Frederick

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Nujoma, gathered at Kongwa to speak with the camp commanders about “the problem of the Caprivians.”108 As the meeting minutes demonstrate, “the problem” posed SWAPO officials with several dilemmas. Although Major Chongambele had offered to deport the Caprivians on the premise that they were only allowed to remain in Tanzania if they cooperated with SWAPO, a recognized liberation movement,109 deportation was fraught with risks. It could poison SWAPO’s reputation in the Caprivi Region and result in deportees revealing information about Kongwa and other military secrets to “the Boers.”110 By contrast, if SWAPO officials tried to enlist the support of Caprivians who were by then representing SWAPO in its offices abroad, there was no guarantee that they would cooperate or that the Caprivians at Kongwa would listen to them. This mistrust of the Caprivians manifested itself at the meeting when Mishake Muyongo, who remained outside the office while the Ovambo commanders discussed “the problem of the Caprivians,” was asked to enter and profess his loyalty to SWAPO. Although Muyongo claimed that he would inform his fellow Caprivians “to obey all orders given . . . by SWAPO officials or the Tanzanian Government,” some SWAPO officials maintained that Muyongo’s words were disingenuous and that he had ulterior motives. As Nujoma and others alleged, Muyongo had used SWAPO’s Lusaka office to distribute letters to the OAU Liberation Committee, the Zambian government, and UNIP complaining about how the SWAPO leadership was treating Caprivians.111 Moreover, neither Muyongo nor the other Caprivians at the camp were forthcoming about the location of George Mutwa and Nalishua Tongo, the supposed ringleaders of the strike, who had disappeared from the camp sometime before the meeting. Some speculated that Muyongo had only traveled to Tanzania so that he could meet secretly with Mutwa and Tongo and plan CANU’s next move.112 Despite these dilemmas, SWAPO’s international recognition granted the liberation movement’s officials considerable power over the CANU dissidents in its camp. Whereas CANU was not officially recognized by the organizations to which Mishake Muyongo wrote, SWAPO was recognized by all of them and by the Tanzanian government as well. And SWAPO drew from these support networks and the instruments that they allowed SWAPO to exercise at Kongwa to “resolve” the CANU issue.

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Matongo emphasizes, after the meeting with Muyongo, he and some other Caprivians who attended actually reported the meeting’s content to the Tanzanian authorities and never went on strike (F. Matongo, June 18, 2011). Minutes 21/9/65, 1. Interestingly, Shityuwete points to another conflict within the camp that he believes was the main purpose of Nujoma’s visit. See the section of this chapter titled “Castro”. Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 13–14, 23; December 14, 2010. Minutes 21/9/65, 2–3. Minutes, 21/9/65, 7; Shityuwete, December 14, 2010. Minutes 21/9/65, 7–9.

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Sometime after the camp meeting George Mutwa and Nalishua Tongo were arrested by Tanzanian officials in Dar es Salaam and detained at Keko Prison.113 At roughly the same time, Caprivians who remained committed to the strike refused to eat and moved their tents outside the physical space of the camp.114 In turn, SWAPO officials used their control over camp resources to coax those on the outside to return inside, allegedly promising them food and protection from the more “radical” Caprivians115 while threatening those who refused to cooperate with sjamboks.116 Within a few weeks, most or all the Caprivians living outside the camp had returned inside with their tents. As for Mishake Muyongo, he returned to Zambia where he continued to represent SWAPO at the Lusaka office. “Castro” On September 21, 1965, the date when SWAPO officials met at Kongwa, “the problem of the Caprivians” was not the only issue on their agenda. Although the camp minutes report exclusively on the Caprivi conflict, the author of those minutes, Helao Shityuwete, maintains that there was another issue in the camp that had compelled the leaders to travel from Dar es Salaam. At the center of this issue was the then second-in-command of SWALA and senior camp commander, Leonard Philemon “Castro” Nangolo.117 A member of the group that established SWAPO’s forerunner in Cape Town during the late 1950s,118 Castro traveled to Tanzania in 1962 and from there was sent by SWAPO to Egypt to receive training as one of the first seven SWALA guerrillas. After finishing another training course in the Soviet Union, Castro and other trainees returned to Tanzania to found the SWAPO camp at Kongwa.119 For those Namibians who were not satisfied with their lives at Kongwa, Castro soon became a focal point of criticism, blamed for abusing 113

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Hangula, June 18, 2011; Nashilongo, December 11, 2010; Kangumu, Contesting Caprivi, 231. Hangula and Nashilongo were also detained at Keko and offer perspectives on Mutwa and Tongo’s arrest based, allegedly, on conversations that they had while they were all imprisoned together. According to Hangula, Mutwa and Tongo escaped from Kongwa and traveled to the SWAPO office in Dar es Salaam to present their grievances  – only to be arrested when the SWAPO leaders who received them there called on the Tanzanian police for assistance. Testimony in the camp minutes appears to corroborate Hangula’s point (Minutes 21/9/65, 7). Inhabitants at Kongwa in 1965 often refer to the Caprivians’ strike as a “hunger strike,” but Shityuwete maintains that the Caprivians did not refuse to eat until after the September 21 meeting (Shityuwete, December 14, 2010). Ibid. Hangula, June 18, 2011. Shityuwete, June 5, 2008; December 14, 2010. The name of this forerunner was the Ovamboland People’s Congress (OPC). The OPC was renamed OPO in 1959 and SWAPO in 1960. Nangolo, “My History”; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 24; Nankudhu and Shityuwete, June 2, 2011, 2, 14–15. Despite considerable evidence that Castro was part of these early training missions to Egypt and the Soviet Union, his name is excluded from Nujoma’s account (Where Others Wavered, 158–9).

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the power that he wielded over Namibians living in the camp. For example, Castro was associated with a regime of discipline and deference to authority in the camp that treated camp inhabitants like “permanent soldiers” rather than as “comrades” in a liberation struggle.120 Castro set the rules when camp inhabitants were required to be inside the camp and report to the parade and yet he often absconded from the parade and spent nights in the location, where some believed he was sleeping with local women.121 Castro was also blamed for some commanders’ practice of diverting aid to the camp and selling it to the people living around Kongwa for self-enrichment.122 Moreover, Castro was among the camp commanders who did not speak English and whom some Caprivians at Kongwa saw as antagonistic toward them. Sources suggest that some Namibians at Kongwa were dissatisfied with Castro from the camp’s early days and that rank-and-file guerrillas had tried to raise their concerns with Major Chongambele at a camp meeting before September 1965.123 The September 1965 meeting, however, reflected a significant, new conjuncture of events. Earlier that year, three new groups of guerrillas returned from military training in Algeria, Egypt, and Ghana to Kongwa. Upon their return, the leaders of these groups, including Dimo Hamaambo, Caleb Tjipahura, and Helao Shityuwete,124 became responsible for training newcomers to the camp and, in the process, began challenging the status quo. New activities were organized, attendance at the parade was carefully recorded, and soldiers were encouraged to drop salutes and other formal practices that reinforced the hierarchy within the camp.125 In response, Castro contacted the SWAPO head office in Dar es Salaam and a meeting was scheduled with SWAPO leaders that would address the tension between the camp commanders as well as the Caprivi issue.126 According to Helao Shityuwete, President Nujoma opened the meeting by asking Castro to speak about the problems at the camp and with Castro insinuating that the newcomers were instigating the rank-and-file “to rebel against [Castro] and his other commanders.” In response, Hamaambo, Tjipahura, and Shityuwete explained 120

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Ashipala, July 25, 2007, 23; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 2, 5; Shityuwete, Never Follow the Wolf, 99. Nepelilo, August 4, 2007, 10; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 3; December 14, 2010; Shityuwete, Never Follow the Wolf, 99. Ashipala, July 25, 2007, 23, 28–9; Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 3–4, 10; Shityuwete, Never Follow the Wolf, 99. Ashipala, July 25, 2007, 23–4, 27–9. Dimo Hamaambo was the leader of the group trained in Algeria and went on to become the commander of PLAN, the successor to SWALA. Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 2; Ashipala, July 25, 2007, 27–8. Shityuwete maintains that the main issue on the agenda for the meeting was, in fact, the disagreement between the commanders and that the commanders might have resolved the Caprivi issue on their own, with the help of the Tanzanian government, if Castro had not contacted the head office to draw attention to the conflict between the commanders (Shityuwete, June 5, 2008).

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their dissatisfaction with the conditions they found at the camp – points that were strengthened, apparently, when Peter Hambiya, a SWAPO official based in Dar es Salaam, checked the camp books against his own, discovering that there were items intended for Kongwa inhabitants that had not been registered in the books. Thereafter, Hamaambo, Tjipahura, and Shityuwete were each appointed to formal positions in the camp command alongside Castro, who retained the position of senior camp commander.127 The September 1965 meeting may have temporarily addressed the Castro issue at Kongwa, but it soon emerged again – albeit in an expanded context. In February 1966 Castro was selected as a member of Group 2 (G2), the second group of SWALA guerrillas that departed from Kongwa to infiltrate Namibia. Three months later, Castro’s group was arrested by the South African Police in Namibia’s Kavango Region as were the members of several subsequent groups that traveled from Kongwa to Namibia.128 As Kongwa inhabitants learned about these arrests, rumors spread that they were being led unwittingly to their capture through the work of a South African agent or agents. Suspicions focused on Castro, who had somehow managed to return to Tanzania after the G2 group was captured and had been involved in planning the movements of the subsequent groups that had traveled from Kongwa to Namibia. Although Castro maintained that he escaped his captors after his arrest, others suspected that he had negotiated his release and was responsible for the capture of guerrillas and other setbacks that SWAPO experienced in late 1966 and 1967. These included the South African attack on the first SWALA guerrilla base at Omgulumbashe in northern Namibia, the subsequent arrest of Andimba Toivo Ya Toivo and other leading SWAPO members, and the death of SWALA Commander Tobias Hainyeko in a shoot-out along the Zambezi River.129 A turning point in Kongwa inhabitants’ perception of Castro and his relation to these events appears to have been a meeting at the camp parade when members of SWAPO and the ANC gathered to hear Castro speak about SWAPO’s encounter with South African forces at Omgulumbashe. According to one source, guerrillas questioned the truthfulness of Castro’s story because, as he delivered it, he omitted important details and was “shivering” as if he were panicked to speak on the topic.130 Thus, by the late 1960s, rumors were circulating at Kongwa that Castro was a spy. Nevertheless, it was more mundane aspects of camp life that were initially the focus of criticisms of Castro and that enabled him to wield power over Namibians in similar ways for years. By controlling the camp’s boundaries 127 128

129

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Shityuwete, July 24, 2007, 3–4; June 5, 2008. For information about G2, see the accounts of G2 member Helao Shityuwete (Never Follow the Wolf, 101–30) and Sam Nujoma (Where Others Wavered, 170–1). The arrest of subsequent groups is confirmed by former Kongwa inhabitants interviewed and by Nujoma (ibid., 172–3). For more details about these events and people, see Katjavivi, A History of Resistance, 59–64 and Wallace, A History of Namibia, 268–70. Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007, 3; July 21, 2007, 34–5.

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and breaking his own rules, siphoning aid from foreign donors, and, apparently, becoming a double agent for South Africa,131 Castro abused his privileged access to the international community supporting Kongwa camp. Beyond “the Kongwa Crisis” Of the conflicts unfolding at SWAPO’s Kongwa camp across the 1960s, only one event has received any attention from historians. As they indicate, “the Kongwa Crisis” occurred following the return of seven guerrillas to Tanzania from military training in China in 1968. After spending several months at Kongwa, “the Seven Comrades” wrote a critical memorandum intended for the SWAPO leadership.132 Therein, and in their resignation statement that followed, they raised a variety of issues, accusing SWAPO officials of corruption, poor military strategy, and, in the case of Castro, spying for South Africa. They presented these documents to SWAPO commanders at Kongwa and requested an audience with SWAPO’s political leadership in Dar es Salaam. Instead, they were picked up by a Tanzanian official, Lieutenant Muchongo, and driven directly to the Dar es Salaam police station where they were detained for six months followed by an additional nine months at Keko Prison. Only in early 1970, after their transfer from Keko to Ndebaro refugee camp in northern Tanzania, were they able to escape their confinement and make their way to Kenya.133 These happenings both reflect and mark an important moment in Namibia’s liberation struggle. By late 1968, most of SWAPO’s internal leadership, including Toivo Ya Toivo and others who played a key role in facilitating Namibians’ travel into exile, had been sentenced to lengthy prison terms on Robben Island.134 Several consecutive groups that had attempted to infiltrate Namibia

131

132

133

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For publications that present evidence of Castro’s activities as a spy, see Shityuwete, Never Follow the Wolf, 141–2 and Nujoma, Where Others Wavered, 172. “My History,” which Castro wrote in Norway in 1994 (and that was given to me in 2006 by Siegfried Groth), offers Castro’s version of this history. Those who lived at Kongwa with whom I shared “My History” find it dubious on several accounts. As Colin Leys and John Saul note in a footnote to their account, one of the seven guerrillas returning from China, Paul Kanyemba, did not sign the memorandum or resignation letter, but Samson Ndeikwila, whom they found living at Kongwa when they arrived, did sign them and was arrested. Thus, their numbers ultimately leveled off at seven (Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 59; Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007; Kati, August 11, 2007). Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007, 3–4; July 21, 2007, 41–2; June 17, 2011; Kati, August 11, 2007, 5–6; June 16, 2011; Ndeikwila’s book, The Agony of Truth, 32–4. Other scholars offer overlapping accounts but exclude and/or misstate some details pertaining to the memorandum and statement of resignation, the role of Lieutenant Muchongo, and the comrades’ flight to Kenya. See Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia, 37–8; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 43–4; Hunter, Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia, 77–80; Trewhela, Inside Quatro, 143, 189; Wallace, A History of Namibia, 271. Toivo Ya Toivo was part of a group of thirty-seven leading SWAPO members, including SWALA guerrillas and most of SWAPO’s internal leadership, who were tried in the Terrorism Trial of

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from exile had been captured and Castro, who following Tobias Hainyeko’s death had become SWALA’s senior commander, was widely distrusted. As a result, SWAPO’s efforts to recruit more Namibians for its liberation army and to infiltrate guerrillas into Namibia had come virtually to a standstill.135 It was in this context that a small group of Namibians living at Kongwa composed a memorandum identifying problems that they were witnessing at the camp. Although the memorandum was not widely circulated and its authors were quickly arrested, it cast a long shadow over SWAPO in exile. In early 1969 Castro was imprisoned at Keko, where he remained for the next seventeen years, leading some to speculate that the Seven Comrades’ memorandum prompted an investigation, proving Castro’s spying activities.136 In December 1969 and January 1970 SWAPO held its first Consultative Congress at Tanga whereat delegates discussed some of the problems within the movement that had been identified by the Seven Comrades – although the Comrades and their memorandum were not directly mentioned.137 Moreover, the detention of the Seven Comrades may have influenced the way in which SWAPO responded to criticism from within its ranks in later years. At the least, their detention has served as the point of origin for a history articulated by SWAPO dissidents, challenging SWAPO’s triumphant version of Namibia’s liberation struggle with a narrative of SWAPO’s repeated, and increasingly violent, abuse of Namibians in exile.138 Nevertheless, when Kongwa is viewed primarily through “the Kongwa Crisis,” it is easy to overlook tensions among camp inhabitants that preceded SWAPO’s setbacks in the late 1960s and that shaped developments there. From as early as 1964, some Namibians living at Kongwa were dissatisfied with their placement at a camp that constrained their access to opportunities that they had hoped to find in exile. Others felt that SWAPO officials were privileging

135

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1967–8. For Toivo Ya Toivo’s role in facilitating Namibians’ flight into exile, see Andimba Toivo Ya Toivo (Interview, July 3, 2008). Although SWAPO guerrillas were involved in clashes with South African forces in Namibia’s Caprivi Region in 1968, possibly as late as October (Brown, “Diplomacy by Other Means,” 21–2; Kangumu, Contesting Caprivi, 227–9), guerrillas were not deployed from Kongwa on these and later combat missions. The minimal operations conducted by SWALA/PLAN from 1968 through 1973 were launched directly from southwestern Zambia. For discussion of these operations and the virtual cessation of military activity from late 1968 through 1970, see Brown (“Diplomacy by Other Means”) and Namakulu, Armed Liberation Struggle, 19–38. Kati, August 11, 2007, 9; Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007; Nepelilo, August 4, 2007, 20–4. Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia, 37–8; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 43–4. Most of the Namibian historiography that references the “Kongwa Crisis” draws it into a longer history of human rights abuse (Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle; Hunter, Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia; Trewhela, Inside Quatro). See also the version of Namibian history rendered by the Lubango detainees in 1989 in which they begin to narrate “the SWAPO Spy Drama” through an account of “the Kongwa Crisis” (Political Consultative Committee, “A Report to the Namibian People: Historical Account of the Swapo Spy-Drama” [Windhoek: BWS, 1989, repr. 1997]).

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some camp inhabitants over others on the basis of ethnic and regional affiliations. Resentment for particular commanders, who were responsible for monitoring their lives inside the camp and who were better able to access a world outside of it, was widespread. SWAPO’s setbacks in the late 1960s aggravated these grievances, creating conditions for increased numbers to abscond from camp activities, a stream of desertions from the camp, and the writing of the Seven Comrades’ memorandum. But the issues to which Kongwa’s inhabitants were then responding were always part of longer camp histories – histories of which the Seven Comrades were at least partially aware. As Samson Ndeikwila and Nambinga Kati, two of the comrades, emphasized in our interviews, their suspicions of Castro were rooted in their and others’ direct observations of him living at Kongwa over several years. And Ndeikwila maintains that the comrades’ memorandum was deeply influenced by encounters with Caprivians at the camp who felt that their group leaders had been imprisoned unjustly in 1965 and that Caprivians, as a whole, were still unwelcome within SWAPO.139 Such historical perspectives on Kongwa camp do not merely shed light on “the Kongwa Crisis.” They also draw attention to social relations that are of greater consequence than “the Crisis.” Repeatedly, across the 1960s, inequalities at SWAPO’s Kongwa camp were a source of conflict for the camp’s inhabitants. In turn, SWAPO officials used their capacity to control camp inhabitants’ daily lives and their privileged access to Tanzanian and other international officials to enforce a hierarchy among Namibians living there. The “event” identified as the Kongwa Crisis was one of many happenings that constituted the camp’s social order. These happenings consist of multiple incidents, both before and after 1968, when the Tanzanian government imprisoned Namibians at Kongwa on SWAPO officials’ behalfs.140 And they also include mundane routines – the distribution of resources sent to SWAPO by its allies, the control of guerrillas’ movements in and out of the location, and the articulation of official knowledge at the parade ground – through which a national hierarchy was reiterated daily. Kongwa, therefore, was not merely a site influenced by the individuals who entered it, the choices that they made, and the experiences that they had previously accumulated. Rather, it was a social space with a potent agency of its own. National histories cannot easily account for this agency. They tend to highlight events and people who have made a nation’s history rather than social settings outside the nation where certain kinds of occurrences repeatedly happened and where particular types of figures were likely to emerge. Histories of “the 139 140

Ndeikwila, February 16, 2007; July 21, 2007; June 17, 2011; Kati, June 16, 2011. Among these incidents are events that are not discussed in this chapter and that are not mentioned in previous historiography. These include the detention of Namibian students who failed a test at Mbeya and refused to return to Kongwa in 1966 (previous footnote) and a riot that broke out among Namibians at Kongwa in 1971, resulting in the temporary closure of the SWAPO camp. See Chapter 7, “Reconciliation in Namibia? Narrating the Past in a Postcamp Nation.”

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Kongwa Crisis,” articulated by historians and former exiles alike, do attribute power to Kongwa, suggesting that happenings there impacted on later developments within SWAPO. Their plot, however, revolves around officials deemed responsible for violating Namibians in exile. As a result, these histories do not consider social conditions that shaped these events across time and place and that guide how their histories have been told. Repeatedly, camps were the sites where conflicts emerged among exiles and through which liberation movement officials, together with host governments, disciplined their members. Kongwa could become a reference point in later conflicts precisely because of the similar conditions in which SWAPO administered its camps and the common instruments available to camp officials for controlling fellow nationals across time and place.

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4 Ordering the Nation: SWAPO in Zambia, 1974–1976

The mid-1970s mark a watershed both in the liberation of Namibia from white minority rule and in the formation of a Namibian nation in exile. On April 25, 1974 the Portuguese armed forces, led by General António Spínola, overthrew Marcelo Caetano and his regime. Influenced by the pressures placed on Portugal over years of fighting liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, the interim government began to prepare its former colonies for independence. For Namibians living along the Namibian-Angolan border and suffering from the violence that followed the Ovamboland election boycott of 1973,1 the revolution in Portugal presented an opportunity for the oppressed to flee into exile. From June 1974 to August 1975 between four thousand and six thousand people fled from Namibia through Angola to Zambia where previously only a few hundred SWAPO members had been living in camps in Zambia’s Western Province and in or near Lusaka, the site of the liberation movement’s political headquarters since 1972.2 During this period of rapid expansion, tensions built up within the Namibian exile community, reaching a climax in 1976. By March of that year, PLAN combatants had imprisoned several of their commanders and requested meetings with 1

2

In 1973 SWAPO led a boycott of elections for an independent government in Ovamboland, one of the homelands envisioned in the Odendaal Plan (1964), the South African government’s blueprint for implementing apartheid in Namibia. Andreas Shipanga, In Search of Freedom (Gibraltar: Ashanti Publishing, 1989), 98; Lauren Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia, 1960–1991: War by Other Means (Basel, Switzerland: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 1991, repr. 2000), 47; Colin Leys and John S. Saul, “SWAPO: The Politics of Exile,” in Leys and Saul, eds., Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: The Two Edged Sword (London: James Currey, 1995), 130; Ailonga Collection, File Name: “Amnesty, International Community,” Salatiel Ailonga, “To the Members of the ICSWA Conference, Wuppertal,” February 12, 1976. The Ailonga Collection was accessed through Salatiel and Anita Ailonga directly. Although the Ailongas donated a copy of the collection to the National Archives of Namibia in 2006, I was not permitted to access it during my research.

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leaders to express their concerns about conditions at the front. In April, groups of PLAN combatants and officials were arrested in Lusaka by the Zambian army at the request of SWAPO leaders. In July, other combatants in southwestern Zambia, numbering more than one thousand people, were also detained by Zambian soldiers. Only in 1977 and 1978, after the remaining SWAPO leaders had consolidated their power and pressure had been placed on them to release their prisoners, were various detainees permitted to rejoin SWAPO, to register as refugees, or granted political asylum. Several histories of this conflict within SWAPO have been written. In the leadership’s official narrative, the conflict is attributed primarily to the SWAPO secretary of information, Andreas Shipanga, and the SWAPO Youth League (SYL) who, due to their aspirations for power and, in Shipanga’s case, collaboration with West Germany, misled the newcomers in exile.3 This version, referred to as “the Shipanga Crisis,” is also reflected in Peter Katjavivi’s account that, while reserving judgment, identifies Shipanga and the SYL as taking leading roles in fomenting discontent.4 Other histories focus on the new exiles’ frustration with how SWAPO was administered during the period and the leadership’s unwillingness to address these issues at a party congress that, based on resolutions passed at the previous congress in Tanga, Tanzania, should have convened by the end of 1974.5 It is from this perspective that Colin Leys and John Saul suggest that “the Shipanga Crisis” be renamed “the Democratic Crisis.” All studies of SWAPO in Zambia during the mid-1970s indicate that the crisis manifested itself in SWAPO-administered camps. Sources, however, tend to depict the camps as a variety of places where residents were influenced by people, like Andreas Shipanga, and ideologically tinged events, like calls for

3

4 5

University of Namibia (UNAM), Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 3, File 2, “Report of the Findings and Recommendations of the John Ya Otto Commission of Inquiry into Circumstances which led to the Revolt of SWAPO Cadres between June, 1974 and April, 1976” (a.k.a. “Ya Otto Report”), June 4, 1976. See  also, Sam Nujoma, Where Others Wavered:  The Autobiography of Sam Nujoma (London:  Panaf Books), 242, 246–7; Oswin O. Namakulu, Armed Liberation Struggle:  Some Accounts of PLAN’s Combat Operations (Windhoek:  Gamsberg Macmillan, 2004), 37–8. Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (London: James Currey, 1988), 105–8. Franz Ansprenger, Die SWAPO:  Profil einer afrikanischen Befreiungsbewegung (Mainz: Matthias-Grunewald Verlag, 1984), 111–18; Shipanga, In Search of Freedom; Paul Trewhela, “The Kissinger/Vorster/Kaunda Détente: The Genesis of the SWAPO ‘Spy Drama,’ ” Searchlight South Africa 5 (July 1990):  69–86 and 6 (January 1991):  42–58; Inside Quatro:  Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2009), 187–224. Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia; Colin Leys and John S. Saul, “Liberation without Democracy,” Journal of Southern African Studies 20, no. 1 (1994):  123–47; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle; Keshii Nathanael, A Journey to Exile (Aberstwyth:  Sosiumi Press, 2002); Justine Hunter, Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia:  Umgang mit schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen der Ära des bewaffneten Befreiungskampfes,1966 bis 1989 (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2008), 80–92. Marion Wallace summarizes competing views of this past in A History of Namibia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 279–84.

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the SWAPO congress, rather than as a kind of space that ordered social relations among the entire Namibian exile community. This chapter examines SWAPO in Zambia, 1974–6, from the perspective of the camps. Drawing from stories about sleeping arrangements, parade announcements, food and weapon distribution, inhabitants’ movements, and detentions, it argues that the camps not only reflected disputes that originated outside of them, but also shaped a conflict that developed within them. Through their control of this space, internationally recognized SWAPO leaders and the commanders who administered camps on their behalf had considerable capacity to forge allegiances and manage tensions. Especially during the mid-1970s, when the Namibian exile community was in flux and the SWAPO leadership’s authority was openly and widely contested, camps enabled established leaders to isolate rivals and retain power. The Exodus Arrives In the memories of many of the first Namibians to travel to Zambia in 1974, the conflict started as soon as they entered the SWAPO camps.6 From as early as June they had begun crossing the border into Angola in small groups, which, in most cases, were picked up by the Portuguese authorities and transported to Luso (now Luena). By July, three to four hundred Namibians were assembled there, most of them young, secondary school educated, and ethnically Ovambo. Many of them had played a leading role in the resurgence of resistance to South African rule inside Namibia through participation in the Walvis Bay contract workers’ strike of 1971–2, the formation of the SYL, and the boycott of the 1973 Ovamboland election.7 Also, a sizable minority of these new exiles were women, perhaps as many as 20 percent.8 This group was then 6

7

8

The narrative that follows of the first exodus group’s arrival is derived primarily from my interviews with persons who were part of this group (Abed Hauwanga [Interviews, July 26, 2007; August 3, 2007]; Tangeni Nuukuawo [Interviews, February 17, 2007; February 23, 2007]; Erastus Shamena [Interview, March 1, 2007]; Sheeli Shangula [Interview, March 25, 2007]; Ben Ulenga [Interview, June 6, 2008])  and from two published memoirs (Magdalena and Erastus Shamena, Wir Kinder Namibias: Eine Lebensgeschichte ausgezeichnet von Kirsti Ihamäki nach Berichten in Ndonga [Wuppertal: Verlag der VEM, 1981, repr. 1987] and Keshii Nathanael, A Journey to Exile). Where individuals identify details that are not part of all these persons’ stories, they are cited accordingly. In December 1971, contract workers at Walvis Bay began a strike that spread across the country’s urban centers over two months. Among those involved in organizing these strikes were young political activists who went on to form the SYL in 1972. In turn, the SYL played a central role in organizing the successful boycott of the 1973 Ovamboland elections. Most SYL activists who were not detained by the South African authorities in June and July 1974 traveled into exile at that time. See Katjavivi, A History of Resistance, 67–71, 74–5; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 71–3; Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 13–51; Wallace, A History of Namibia, 275–7, 280. Katjavivi, A History of Resistance, 93; Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia, 47.

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transported by Portuguese soldiers to a place in the bush near the Zambian border from where the Namibians walked for three days until they reached a UNITA camp located near the town of Kalabo in Zambia. There they were met by SWAPO officials, who had close ties to UNITA’s camp commanders and who transported them on to Senanga, a SWAPO camp.9 (See Map 6.) Senanga, which was located near the Zambian town of the same name on the banks of the Zambezi River, was established during the late 1960s for SWAPO members moving between Lusaka and the frontline that SWAPO was then establishing near the border of Namibia’s Caprivi Region.10 The camp consisted of a few rudimentary buildings only – barely enough to accommodate the few men who were stationed there and the officials, also all male, who had come to collect the newcomers from Kalabo earlier that day. Thus, when the exiles arrived in Senanga, there was uncertainty about where the newcomers were going to sleep. During the three days of walking from the Angolan-Zambian border, the new exiles had been sleeping together as a group in the bush. That first night in Senanga, however, some maintained that men and women should now sleep on different sides of the camp. Sheeli Shangula, then SYL’s secretary general and a leader among the new exiles, recalls: [When we arrived at Senanga] they started with this, that boys should not [sleep] in close proximity with girls. They were saying that even at home that men are together with boys. But the question was we were still in transit. There was no permanent structure to say this is the dormitory or the boarding of the girls. . . . [Also,] on the way, maybe I had a bag. One girl just left like that [without a bag] or the bag that she had got torn up. My things and her things were together in one bag. And we didn’t have many things. . . . So it was not so easy already there to introduce the question of separation. . . . [Also] it was just a question of security. . . . We left together; now I only know you from my village. Those others, even if we speak the same language, I don’t know them.11

From Shangula’s perspective the matter of sleeping arrangements at Senanga was one to be considered in the context of the exiles’ journey: the circumstances 9

10

11

SWAPO had a long history of close cooperation with UNITA necessitated by the fact that PLAN guerrillas were operating in UNITA-controlled territories along the Angolan-Zambian border. As early as 1965, there were at least eleven Angolans affiliated with soon-to-be UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi living in SWAPO’s Kongwa camp. See Fred Bridgeland, Jonas Savimbi:  A  Key to Africa (Johannesburg:  Macmillan, 1986), 69–71; Christian A. Williams, “Living in Exile: Daily Life and International Relations at SWAPO’s Kongwa Camp,” Kronos 37 (2011): 65. For further discussion of SWAPO’s long-standing ties with UNITA, see Brown, “Diplomacy by Other Means,” 24; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 47; Leys and Saul, “Liberation without Democracy?,” 128; Vilho Amukwaya Shigwedha, “The Relationship between UNITA and SWAPO: Allies and Adversaries,” Journal of Southern African Studies 40, no. 6 (2014): 1275–87; Patricia Hayes, “Nationalism’s Exile: Godfrey Nangonya and SWAPO’s Sacrifice in Southern Angola,” Journal of Southern African Studies 40, no. 6 (2014): 1305–24. Although SWAPO only moved its political headquarters to Zambia in 1972, its guerrillas began operating out of camps in southwestern Zambia from as early as 1968. See Brown, “Diplomacy by Other Means,” 21. Shangula, March 25, 2008, 8.

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DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

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Masvingo

Bulawayo

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Senanga Kaunga Mash Central Base Oshatotwa Old Farm

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Meheba (Zambian Government/UNHCR) Ruakera (Zambian Government) Nyango Mboroma (Zambian Government) Nampundwe (Zambian Government)

Map 6. SWAPO (and Zambian) Camps in Zambia.

in which Namibians entered Zambia in July 1974 necessitated that men and women not be separated at night. Yet, as Shangula indicates, camp administrators saw the matter differently. Some drew from memories of life at home – “even at home . . . men are together with boys” – to justify separation. Nahas Angula, who would revisit the issue some days later when the new exiles arrived at the Old Farm, the camp where he was an administrator, put the / 4787 9C BD, 8C D 9 D8 4 4 45 8 4

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matter like this: “You had these people who came there. They wanted to have communal life, girls and boys sleeping together in the same sleeping quarters. And, of course, we said, ‘No. Society is not organized like that.’ ”12 At the same time that SWAPO officials were appealing to traditional gender norms at Senanga, some were also flouting them. Keshii Nathanael, the president of the SYL, explains that before going to bed the first night it was noticed that some of the women from their party had been escorted by SWAPO officials to a bar in the town of Senanga. There they were given drinks and bedded in the officials’ private quarters.13 Nathanael emphasizes that these practices, which continued over the nights that the group spent in Senanga, were a breach of “Ovambo custom.” He writes that an Ovambo couple could only “afford to be seen together in public” and a man could only give “presents  . . . to a woman not of his immediate family” once the relationship had been sanctioned through a meeting of the couple’s parents.14 Not surprisingly, Nathanael and Shangula emphasize that the young men felt threatened by the officials and possessive of the women with whom they had traveled for weeks and, in some cases, had relationships that extended back to Namibia.15 The following afternoon the newcomers assembled at the camp parade. There, Peter Mueshihange, SWAPO’s secretary for foreign affairs, the highest ranking SWAPO leader at Senanga at the time and one of those implicated in the previous night’s events, addressed them. Nathanael recalls: When [Mueshihange] rose to speak we were shocked to hear what he had to say. . . . He said he understood that there were intellectuals among us although he didn’t say what was wrong with that. He did, however, warn that SWAPO was a movement of illiterate people – as if that was how he would have preferred us to be. . . . Mueshihange also warned that those who thought that they were popular at home to forget their popularity abroad. For abroad, he reiterated there was only one leader and he was the law. He demanded that we say after him, “One Namibia! One nation! One SWAPO! One leader!” Quite stunned by what I was hearing, I kept my mouth shut while some of the others shouted the slogans.16

It is likely that if Nathanael responded this way to Mueshihange’s comments about intellectuals, others assembled at the parade had a similar reaction. As noted, many of them had attended secondary school and were seen by others at home as educated and some, like Sheeli Shangula, had attended university in South Africa as well. Also, SYL members were accustomed to the language of participatory politics, which their leaders absorbed during the contract 12 13 14 15

16

Nahas Angula (Interview, February 13, 2008, 5). Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 64, 66. Ibid., 66. Shangula, March 25, 2007, 8; Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 66. Research participants, especially women, often highlighted the extent to which women were vulnerable to the sexual advances of male commanders in camps. For a detailed discussion of these themes, see Martha Akawa, The Gender Politics of the Namibian Liberation Struggle (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2014), 107–53. Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 65.

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workers’ strike in Walvis Bay in 1971–2 and while studying in South Africa. This discourse could not have been easily reconciled with Peter Mueshihange’s message about SWAPO’s “one leader.” According to Nathanael, he and several of the SYL leaders met after the speech to discuss their frustrations with how they had been received by the SWAPO leadership, but they had a greater wish “to reach Lusaka to be sent for military training, [and] so . . . decided not to make an issue of what [they] had heard and seen.”17 Instead, a few days later, shortly before departing from Senanga, they wrote a letter addressed to SWAPO’s leaders in Lusaka in which they declared:  “Our wish, in fact our decision, is that each and everybody of us be trained militarily before he/she pursues any ordinary academic studies.”18 Several days later a fleet of Zambian trucks arrived at Senanga to pick up the new arrivals.19 When they boarded the trucks, many hoped and expected that they would be traveling to SWAPO’s headquarters in Lusaka, but that evening they found themselves in northwestern Zambia, far from their desired destination. Upon hearing from a Zambian official that they had arrived at “Meheba Refugee Camp,” a commotion ensued. Only after Zambian soldiers stationed at the camp had coaxed them with food and threatened them with violence, did the Namibians finally disembark from the trucks.20 Thereafter, Keshii Nathanael wrote a second letter to the SWAPO leaders in Lusaka, stating on behalf of the group that they were “freedom fighters” and therefore “wanted to be released [from Meheba] to receive military training and . . . fight the enemy.”21 A few days later Zambian trucks arrived at Meheba and transported the group to the Old Farm, a SWAPO camp near Lusaka. On August 26, two days after their arrival, SWAPO held a parade to commemorate “Namibia Day.”22 For the occasion SWAPO President Sam Nujoma traveled from Lusaka to Old Farm and addressed the newcomers. According to Nathanael, “Nujoma  . . . spoke words of welcome and praise for those of us who had shown courage to organize political work at home and brave all manner of difficulties to come to 17 18

19

20 21

22

Ibid. UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 14, File No. 3, Keshii Nathanael and Sheeli Shangula, “A Statement from the SWAPO Youth League Members That Entered the Republic of Zambia,” July 1974. By the time the Zambian trucks arrived, several leaders among the new exiles had already been transported to Lusaka where they spoke with representatives of the UN Anti-Apartheid Committee. Thereafter they were flown to New  York to brief the UN General Assembly on recent developments in Namibia (Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 68; Nuukuawo, February 17, 2007, 3). Shamena, Wir Kinder Namibias, 58; Shamena, March 1, 2007, 5. Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 69. In this case, Nathanael is paraphrasing his letter from memory. The original was written in Oshiwambo. August 26 marks the anniversary of the first skirmish that took place between SWAPO guerrillas and the South African Police at Omgulumbashe in 1966. It also marks the anniversary of the reburial of Samuel Maherero at Okahandja in 1923, an important event in the collective memory of Namibia’s Otjiherero-speaking community. “Namibia Day” is now a Namibian national holiday, commemorated as “Heroes’ Day.”

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Zambia . . . but he concluded his speech on a jarring note. He warned anyone who might be harboring ambitions to break away from the main body of the party that the Zambian army would crush them.”23 Anita Ailonga, a Finnish woman who was working at the Old Farm and would soon become entangled in the conflict, recalls Namibia Day 1974 similarly: “Nujoma spoke very harshly to [the youth] and [about] the papers they had written [to the leaders before arriving at the Old Farm]. And there was nothing to be angry about. They were not boasting or berating Nujoma.”24 In contrast, Nahas Angula remembers the exodus’s arrival at the Old Farm and subsequent parades as being marked primarily by the SYL leaders’ speeches, which suggested that “they wanted to regard themselves as a party within a party” and undermined the SWAPO leaders’ authority.25 This collective story of the exiles’ arrival in the SWAPO camps may be read as a portent of things to come. The manner in which sources describe these first encounters in 1974 tends to be teleological, presenting events in a way that justifies the sides that individuals later took in the SWAPO crisis. Yet the sides that people took in the crisis, and the histories that are told about it, were not set at the arrival of the exiles. Rather, they were shaped in the future and especially over the following two years as a new community of Namibians interacted with one another in Zambia in various settings, above all camps. Through accounts of these interactions offered by sources with multiple relationships to the crisis, we can observe not only that encounters in the camps generated conflict but also how they structured it, as those who administered camps shaped group allegiances within this space. Old Farm, Nyango, and the Politics of the Belly Among the encounters in the SWAPO camps following the new exiles’ arrival, many of the most contentious involved food and other essential commodities. For the most part, Namibians who entered Zambia in 1974–5 carried few belongings and had no personal connections in Zambia outside the Namibian exile community. Thus, they were extremely dependent on the assistance of SWAPO, which was receiving “humanitarian aid” from foreign donors and had been permitted by the Zambian government to distribute this aid in the camps. Under the circumstances, SWAPO officials had a powerful means of influencing and governing Namibians in Zambia – as long as the ability of officials to distribute aid to Namibian exiles remained privileged. Between 1974 and 1976, several groups effectively challenged the ability of a few officials to control the distribution of aid in SWAPO camps. Consider, for example, the Chaplaincy to Namibians and its work at the Old Farm. 23 24 25

Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 73. Salatiel and Anita Ailonga (Interview, March 23, 2007, 11). Angula, February 13, 2008, 5–6.

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Photo 10. This photo was taken by Siegfried Groth after a church service that he held at the Old Farm in August 1975. Salatiel Ailonga usually led church services at this site.

(See Photo  10.) In February 1974, Salatiel and Anita Ailonga founded the Chaplaincy to Namibians, a Christian ministry for Namibian exiles. From its origin the Chaplaincy was assisted by several organizations: the Christian Council of Zambia (CCZ), which connected the Chaplaincy with other Christian organizations working in the host country; the Evangelical Lutheran Ovambo-Kavango Church (ELOC), to which Salatiel belonged in Namibia; and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), the Finnish Missionary Society, and the Vereinigte Evangelische Mission (VEM), with which the Ailongas maintained connections through Salatiel’s home church and Anita’s previous work as a missionary in Tanzania.26 As such, the Chaplaincy received support for Namibian exiles from sources that were external to SWAPO, including, shortly 26

Ailonga Collection, File Names:  “Chaplaincy Correspondence” and “General Files A,” Letter from Salatiel Ailonga to Pastor Groth, November 20, 1974; Ailonga Collection, File Name:  “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy,” Salatiel Ailonga, “The Work of the Chaplaincy to Namibians in Central and East Africa,” May 5, 1975. The Finnish Missionary Society worked in the northern part of Namibia where the ELOC was later founded. The VEM is the successor of the Rhenish Missionary Society, which worked in the southern part of Namibia where the Evangelical Lutheran Church in South West Africa (ELC) was later founded.

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after the exodus began, large quantities of humanitarian aid. But because the overwhelming majority of Namibian exiles belonged to SWAPO and inhabited SWAPO camps, the Chaplaincy needed to work through SWAPO to carry out its mission. One might have expected that working with SWAPO would present no problem to the Ailongas. Salatiel was a founding member of the liberation movement, who had traveled with several of its leaders into exile in 1961 and had been endorsed by it to attend a seminary in Tanzania. Anita also had long-standing relationships with some of SWAPO’s most senior members and helped the liberation movement pay its rent and buy furniture shortly after it founded its office in Dar es Salaam in 1961.27 Yet, despite these connections, the Chaplaincy found its work repeatedly obstructed. Prior to moving to Zambia in February 1974, the Ailongas requested permission to reside at the Old Farm where about one hundred Namibians, mostly elderly women from the Caprivi, were settled and a small school for children had been established.28 Upon arriving in Lusaka, however, they were told by the liberation movement that they must live in the city.29 With the support of donations from the CCZ, LWF, and VEM, the Ailongas purchased a pickup truck and established a routine of driving the twenty-six miles from the city to the Old Farm, where they worked on various projects during the week and Reverend Ailonga led services of worship on Sundays and other holy days.30 But during the 1974–1975 rainy season Ailonga reports that he and others had struggled to travel in and out of the Old Farm because of the effect of the rains on the road. The road was critical for bringing food and other supplies to the Old Farm and for transporting sick people to Lusaka, tasks for which the Chaplaincy had primary responsibility at that time.31 Over the coming months Ailonga began to raise money for machinery and materials that could be used to improve the road, presumably for use in mid-1975 during the dry season. At some point that year, however, the project broke down. By way of explanation Ailonga says that, while he was working on the road, he began to hear rumors that he was trying to undermine the SWAPO leadership.32 At roughly the same time, the Chaplaincy was chastised by SWAPO leaders for a report submitted by a Namibian pastor affiliated

27 28

29 30

31 32

Ailongas, March 23, 2007, 1–2; Paul Helmuth (Interview, July 13, 2007, 7). UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 2, “Namibian Educational and Health Centre,” 1973; Angula, February 13, 2008; Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 70. For more details about the Old Farm before the exodus’s arrival, see Christian A. Williams, “Exile History: An Ethnography of the SWAPO Camps and the Namibian Nation,” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 82–3. Ailongas, March 23, 2007, 4, 6–7. Letter from Ailonga to Groth, November 20, 1974; Ailongas, March 23, 2007, 10; “Namibian Educational and Health Centre,” 1973, 3. Letter from Ailonga to Groth, November 20, 1974. Salatiel Ailonga (Interview, June 22, 2007, 27–8).

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with it to UNICEF and the UN Commissioner to Namibia.33 Apparently the document, which attributes disease in SWAPO’s southwestern Zambian camps to malnutrition, unhygienic water, poor accommodation and inefficient transport, was seen by some SWAPO leaders not as a cry to help suffering Namibian exiles but as a critique of the organization’s leadership.34 The challenges that the Chaplaincy faced may have resulted, to some extent, from deep-seated ideological or personal differences between the Ailongas and the people who were administering the Old Farm. In particular, Nahas Angula, who was responsible for the Old Farm’s school and, for a time, the entire settlement,35 was seen by some former camp inhabitants as “anti-Christian” and, allegedly, went out of his way to discredit and interrupt Reverend Ailonga’s church services.36 Nonetheless, the Ailongas’ aid, and the political effects that it could have on Namibians living in a space like Old Farm, must also be an important context for understanding why the ministry was obstructed. In the conditions of scarcity prevailing within SWAPO camps following the exodus, the Chaplaincy, with its separate access to donor networks, could be regarded as a rival to the liberation movement, which was struggling to provide for its people. Religious services might also be seen as bolstering the authority of Reverend Ailonga and other pastors who were leaders of a popular church rather than a national community.37 The Chaplaincy would have appeared particularly threatening if the Ailongas were thought to be sympathetic to those who from 1974 to 1976 were calling, with increasing vehemence, for a SWAPO congress. Salatiel Ailonga, for his part, denies that he took sides in this or other conflicts within the liberation movement but volunteers that he was naively insensitive to the political differences between leaders. According to him, he gave help directly to different members of the National Executive Committee (Exco), SWAPO’s highest organ,38 upon request:  “Nanyemba [SWAPO’s Secretary of Defence] 33

34

35

36 37

38

In addition to Salatiel and Anita Ailonga, two other pastors also worked for the Chaplaincy following their flight into exile during the exodus: Oscar Shamwe and Jesaja Uahengo (Ailonga, June 22, 2007, 29–30; Andreas Shipanga [Interview, March 20, 2007, 7]). Ailonga Collection, File Names: “S. Ailonga Chaplaincy to Namibians” and “General Files A,” Oscar Shamhe [sic], “Report,” March 7, 1975; “A Short Report Concerning the Situation of the Namibians,” March 18, 1975; Ailongas, March 23, 2007, 4. In several narratives research participants referred to Angula not only as the school principal but also as the camp administrator or commander. Angula indicates that there were several people who were responsible for administering the camp at different times, of which he was one (Angula, February 13, 2008, 4). Ailongas, March 23, 2007, 10; Shamena, March 1, 2007, 9. The ELOC, to which Reverends Ailonga, Shamwe, and Uahengo belonged, is Namibia’s largest church. Most inhabitants of the Old Farm, who hailed from Ovamboland, where the ELOC is based, would have belonged to this church before entering exile. In addition to the Exco, SWAPO’s leadership structure also included a Central Committee that was meant to oversee the Exco’s work and make recommendations to it. According to Andreas Shipanga, the Central Committee had not met since the Tanga Congress. See Shipanga, In Search of Freedom, 99–100.

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came himself and asked [for] food. . . . And Shipanga again himself, he came and asked if I had food . . . I thought they were working together.”39 And yet Nanyemba and Shipanga, as at least some Namibians living in Lusaka were aware, were on opposing sides of the party congress issue and had been part of estranged factions within SWAPO for years prior to the exodus’s arrival.40 By giving to Shipanga, Ailonga was effectively affirming Shipanga’s authority as a legitimate SWAPO leader and threatening the monopoly that Nanyemba, Nujoma, and those aligned with them otherwise had on the distribution of supplies in the SWAPO camps. In the months preceding the crisis’ climax, SWAPO leaders continued to govern through the use of food distribution at the Old Farm and other camps, although their authority was increasingly undermined. On December 14, 1975 at a meeting held on the Old Farm parade ground, SWAPO President Sam Nujoma denounced Keshii Nathanael and Sheeli Shangula in public for a statement that the two had published the previous month about the war in Angola.41 Nujoma’s criticisms focused on how their statement related to Namibian bellies: “Those two . . . have written a paper in which they accuse Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire of having been involved in war in Angola. Not knowing that all the food you eat comes from Mobutu, they want to sell you out because for them, they don’t care because they have somewhere else to go.”42 Nathanael’s response, in turn, focused on an incident that occurred at the Old Farm the previous night in which food had been withheld from inhabitants as a punishment for alleged misbehavior. Addressing others at the parade, Nathanael asked: “Haven’t we passed through difficulties together from the time when we started from home? Why didn’t we sell you out then? Sam said that he wanted to warn you because he loved you. Isn’t it true that you went to bed on empty stomachs last night? . . . Isn’t it true that the store over there is full of food? Why didn’t Sam Nujoma order his people to open that door to provide you with something to eat last night?”43 39 40

41

42

43

Ailonga, June 22, 2007, 26. Andreas Shipanga, Nahas Angula, and Hidipo Hamutenya, former SWAPO leaders who took different sides in the 1976 conflict and have differing political allegiances in Namibia today, all confirm that the liberation movement’s leadership was divided at the time the exodus arrived in 1974 (Shipanga, In Search of Freedom, 99–100; Shipanga, March 20, 2007; Angula, February 13, 2008; Hidipo Hamutenya [Interview, April 2, 2008]). Since early 1975 fighting had broken out in Angola between its three main liberation movements, the MPLA, UNITA, and Frente Naçional para Libertação de Angola (FNLA), and the foreign governments supporting these forces. Angola became independent on November 11, 1975 and violence was ongoing in December at the time of Nujoma and Nathanael’s clash at the Old Farm parade. Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 114–15. Nathanael and Shangula’s report had been critical of the FNLA on the basis that it was supported by the U.S. government and Zaire’s President Mobutu Sese Seko. In contrast, SWAPO’s official stance on the three liberation movements vying for power in Angola was neutral. For more details on how SWAPO members in Zambia responded to the war in Angola, see the next section of this chapter, titled “Détente and the Front.” Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 114–16.

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Within days of the confrontation at the parade, Nathanael and perhaps twenty-five others were sent on an assignment to Kaoma District, six hundred kilometers west of Lusaka, to establish a new camp called Nyango.44 For several weeks the group worked alone, clearing the densely wooded bush and building houses with the saplings, and in early 1976 residents of Old Farm were transferred to Nyango. The new camp did not have sufficient food to meet the needs of the Old Farm population, however.45 According to Nathanael, in January he and Sheeli Shangula managed to get a lift with Zambian army officials back to the SWAPO offices in Lusaka, where they requested food and supplies for the people at Nyango. When their request was denied, they turned to Salatiel Ailonga, who indicated that there was food and clothing being stored at the World Council of Churches’ local office. Together Ailonga and Shipanga collected the aid and arranged for it to be transported with a Zambian truck to Nyango. Despite initial resistance from Erastus Haikali, the man assigned by the SWAPO leaders to administer the new camp, the aid was eventually distributed.46 When Andreas Shipanga returned to Lusaka, he allegedly visited several embassies trying to collect additional supplies for the residents of Nyango. Eventually he was offered a large shipment of food from the West German government but, before Shipanga could send the food to Nyango, it was confiscated. In what was probably the first public denouncement of Shipanga, Nyango residents were told from the parade that Andreas Shipanga had collaborated with West German “imperialists” and that, with the food he had gathered, he intended to poison the Namibian people.47 Détente and the Front The coup in Portugal impacted on SWAPO not only by enabling Namibians to flee into exile, but also by encouraging Southern African leaders to pursue new geopolitical strategies. Among them was the “détente” negotiated by the South African and Zambian governments during the latter half of 1974. The logic of a South African-Zambian détente at this time may be seen from several perspectives, including the two countries’ converging interests vis-à-vis the contest for power in Angola. Neither the South African apartheid regime nor Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda wanted to see the MPLA, with its clear Soviet leanings, rise to power. These circumstances, in conjunction with 44 45

46

47

Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 117; Engombe, March 25, 2007, 5; Shangula, March 25, 2007, 2. Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 117; Engombe, March 25, 2007, 5, 16. As Engombe notes, Old Farm residents did not have enough food at this time either, but they did have greater opportunity to supplement their diets around Lusaka than did people at Nyango, which was very isolated. Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 118–19; UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 15, Letter from Hans Beukes to “Bishop Auala, Daniel Tjongerero, Other members of SWAPO,” May 14, 1976, 1. Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 120–1; Shipanga, March 20, 2007, 11.

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Zambia’s vulnerability to South Africa as the dominant military and economic power in the region, begin to explain why the Zambians entered negotiations with a regime whose policies otherwise contradicted Zambia and the OAU’s commitment to liberating the African continent from white minority rule.48 With respect to SWAPO, the détente dictated that the Zambian government must restrict the operations of this and all other liberation movements from Zambian soil. As a guest in Zambia, SWAPO may also have been pressured to align itself with other aspects of the détente, including the Zambian government’s support of UNITA. In the event, regardless of how various SWAPO leaders felt about these policies,49 the organization that they represented complied with them. SWAPO did not denounce the Zambian government for negotiating with its arch enemy, and it halted, or allowed the Zambian government to halt, the delivery of weapons and ammunition to its soldiers. SWAPO avoided officially taking sides in the conflict between the three Angolan liberation movements, and it unofficially delivered weapons to, and fought alongside its long-standing ally UNITA – even after September 1975, by which time South African forces had entered Angola and begun staging joint SADF-UNITA operations.50 Among Namibian exiles, those most directly affected by the détente were soldiers based in southwestern Zambia near the Angolan and Namibian (Caprivi) borders. Despite the limited scale of PLAN-SADF clashes in this area through the mid-1970s, camps in southwestern Zambia continued to accommodate most PLAN guerrillas until 1976. According to guerrillas based at this front 48

49

50

There are a number of published accounts of the détente negotiations and their relationship to political settlements in the Southern African region. See, e.g., David Martin and Phyllis Johnson’s The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 125–57; Shipanga, In Search of Freedom, 114–18; Trewhela, “The Kissinger-Vorster-Kaunda Détente,” 77–86; Macmillan, The Lusaka Years, 113–19. Colin Leys and John Saul indicate that “Swapo leaders worried about the implications of Kaunda’s machinations  . . . for their own cause” (Leys and Saul, “Liberation without Democracy?,” 129) whereas Paul Trewhela suggests that SWAPO leaders, with their UN-centered approach to liberation, could embrace the détente with its potential for an internationally brokered resolution to Namibian independence (Trewhela, “The Kissinger/Vorster/Kaunda Détente”). With respect to SWAPO’s collaboration with UNITA in late 1975 and early 1976, see “The PLAN Fighter’s Declaration,” April 1976 (Ailonga Collection, File Names: “SWAPO Office Zambia” and “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy”); “To the President of SWAPO,” March 23, 1976 (Ailonga Collection, File Names: “SWAPO Conflict Zambia” and “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy”); Trewhela, “The Kissinger-Vorster-Kaunda Détente,” 50–1; John Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, Volume 2:  Exile Politics and Guerrilla Warfare (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1978), 277–8, 444. In my interviews with combatants who were at the front and who compiled these documents, we discussed how they had received and evaluated stories about relations between SWAPO and UNITA in Angola (Immanuel Engombe, Junius Ikondja, Ndamono Ndeulita, and Hizipo Shikondombolo [Interview, July 29, 2007, 15–17]; Abed Hauwanga, August 3, 2007, 21–2). As for the timing of the South African intervention in Angola in 1975, see Trewhela, “The Kissinger/Vorster/ Kaunda Détente,” 47–8, 56.

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during the mid-1970s,51 they experienced shortages of supplies that became increasingly pronounced. Most soldiers who had weapons used carbine rifles, which placed them at a great disadvantage against South African troops armed with automatic weapons and other sophisticated equipment. Some trained soldiers did not have a weapon or ammunition for their weapon, and there were many stories of weapons received by soldiers that did not function properly. Shipments of food to the front were inconsistent and insufficient, and although soldiers could sometimes supplement their diets hunting game in the bush and trading commodities with local villagers, these practices were not always possible. Medical supplies were sparse or nonexistent. These conditions at the front affected all Namibians who lived there, including the commanders, who at this point in time were primarily exiles who had lived abroad since the 1960s and had been appointed by more senior SWAPO officials to train and lead the exodus exiles after they began to arrive in 1974.52 According to the soldiers from the exodus, they used to have frank conversations with some of their commanders about the problems they were all experiencing.53 Commanders also shared stories about difficulties that they had experienced prior to the arrival of the exodus, especially at Kongwa, where some among them had questioned the status quo and had been detained. In so doing, commanders highlighted the common qualities of all PLAN combatants’ experiences and their subordinate relationship to the political leaders. Nonetheless, there were significant strains between the commanders and common soldiers, reflecting tensions inherent to a liberation movement army and exacerbated by the kind of social space in which SWAPO’s guerrillas lived. As in other SWAPO camps, commanders at the front were responsible for the distribution of supplies and, as a result, had first access to them. They also controlled access to locations both inside and outside the camp. In practice, 51

52

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The following description of conditions at the front in southwestern Zambia from 1974 to 1976 is drawn from interviews with people who lived there during some or all of that time: Immanuel Engombe (March 25, 2007); Valde Haikali (March 27, 2007); Abed Hauwanga (July 26, 2007; August 3, 2007); Junius Ikondja (March 18, 2007; June 10, 2007); Jackson Mwalundange (February 9, 2007; February 16, 2007); Charles Namoloh (June 18, 2008; June 19, 2008); Ndamono Ndeulita (March 18, 2007; June 10, 2007); Kandi Nehova (April 7, 2008); Phillip Nekondo (March 24, 2007); Tangeni Nuukuawo (February 17, 2007; February 23, 2007; March 10, 2007); Erastus Shamena (March 1, 2007); Hizipo Shikondombolo (June 17, 2007); Darius “Mbolondondo” Shikongo (March 26, 2007; June 11, 2007); Ben Ulenga (June 6, 2008); Phil Ya Nangoloh (February 19, 2007); Immanuel Engombe, Junius Ikondja, Ndamono Ndeulita, and Hizipo Shikondombolo (June 17, 2007; July 29, 2007). This overlap between the term commander and the PLAN combatants whom the exodus exiles found in Zambia upon their arrival was reflected in all of my interviews with soldiers stationed in southwestern Zambia from 1974 to 1976. As will be demonstrated, this distinction between “1960s exiles” and “1974 exiles,” between “commanders” and “soldiers,” is significant for understanding the 1976 crisis within SWAPO in Zambia. Nonetheless, it has been largely overlooked in the scholarship on it. For further discussion, see the concluding section of this chapter. Ikondja, March 18, 2007, 9–10; Engombe et al., July 29, 2007, 26–7.

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this often meant that commanders took meals in their own mess, where rank-and-file soldiers could not observe what they were eating or drinking, and had private or commander-only accommodations, where they could sleep with whom they wanted in relative privacy. Soldiers generally had to request permission from commanders to leave the camp whereas the more senior commanders could leave their camps at any time. Some senior commanders were also in direct communication with the SWAPO political leaders about military affairs and could make requests to them during trips to Lusaka and during leaders’ visits to the front. Such differences, which would create hierarchy between commanders and common soldiers under any circumstances, could be expected to generate conflict under the conditions in which Namibians were living in southwestern Zambia in the mid-1970s. Soldiers might mistrust commanders’ explanations about weapons and food and covet commanders’ privileged access to these commodities. Women, who were also at the front after the exodus but in relatively small numbers, might also cause conflict as male soldiers envied commanders’ access to them and as women resented the sexual advances of commanders. Soldiers might also resent the basis on which commanders had been granted their status, which both contradicted the language of equal “comrades” fighting a liberation struggle and offered little opportunity for exodus exiles to become commanders.54 Commanders, for their part, risked their status and related privileges if they identified too closely with soldiers, particularly those who might be construed as inciting insurrection against the SWAPO leaders. Thus, when commanders shared their concerns about living conditions with common soldiers or told them histories of how they had been mistreated in the past, they tended to do so in small groups, away from the parade and any more senior officials who might use these revelations to denounce them.55 Clearly, camp spatial practices shaped a leadership structure among Namibians living at the front. And, as this structure became increasingly imperiled, SWAPO leaders and their Zambian government allies tried to use social divisions created in and around the camps to manage the emerging conflict. For example, in late July or early August 1975, the first exodus exiles to receive military training in Tanzania (Kongwa) and the Soviet Union began returning to Zambia, among them members of that first cohort that had arrived at Senanga a year earlier.56 Many expected that when they returned, the new trainees would be sent to the front to join the other soldiers in the fighting there. However, they were sent instead to Ruakera, a camp located thirty kilometers outside Mwinilunga in northwestern Zambia. Ruakera lay hundreds of kilometers from the front and was surrounded by Zambian soldiers, who

54 55 56

Ikondja, June 10, 2007, 34. Ikondja, March 18, 2007, 9–10. Ulenga, June 6, 2008.

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were responsible for keeping the new trainees there.57 Many in the Namibian exile community who were aware of what had happened disapproved of the treatment of the new trainees – including senior PLAN commanders, several of whom petitioned the political leaders in October 1975, requesting that the soldiers at Ruakera be handed over to PLAN.58 Among common soldiers at the front, however, little or nothing was known about Ruakera. Several weeks after the commanders submitted their petition, the soldiers at Ruakera were transferred to the front. There they were assigned to Central Base, a SWAPO camp located less than ten kilometers from the Kwando River near where the borders of Zambia, Angola, and Namibia meet.59 Central Base was the home of senior SWAPO commanders and a point from which weapons and supplies were distributed to smaller camps located along the river, where PLAN guerrillas were operating.60 Upon learning that a group had arrived at Central Base, some of these soldiers from the river, who were not involved in any military operations and not closely supervised by commanders at this time,61 made their way to Central Base where they managed to exchange news with the newcomers. Those who had been at the front learned about how their comrades had been held for months at Ruakera, and those from Ruakera learned about the problems soldiers had been experiencing at the front and news from the war in Angola.62 By this time the Angolan liberation movements had been fighting for several months. Although PLAN soldiers had been involved in the combat there, most were part of units that had been operating deep in Angola since early 1975, not soldiers who had been stationed along the Kwando River at Angola’s southeastern edge.63 Nonetheless, there were some soldiers at the Kwando River who had been sent on missions deep in Angola, especially truck drivers who had delivered weapons to various units there. They told stories of weapons intended 57

58

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According to Andreas Shipanga, the placement of PLAN combatants at Ruakera resulted from a direct order of the Zambian government to the SWAPO leaders to comply with the détente policy: “The Minister of Defence, called us, the SWAPO leaders, to [him] and gave us orders that [our] guerrillas must be rounded up, must be photographed, must [have] their particulars [recorded] and sent to Ruakera, [in the] north, northwest of Zambia. I was there at the time . . . [as were] Peter Nanyemba, Peter Mueshihange and Mishake Muyongo” (Shipanga, March 20, 2007, 2). Ndeulita, June 10, 2007; Shikondombolo, June 17, 2007; Ulenga, June 6, 2008; Ailonga Collection, File Names:  “SWAPO Office Zambia” and “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy,” “Very Urgent Attention Is Required to the Following Points,” October 28, 1975. Engombe et al., June 17, 2007, 9, 13, 32; Ikondja, June 10, 2007, 20; Ulenga, June 6, 2008. Engombe et al., June 17, 2007, 9, 13; July 29, 2007, 23–5. Nekondo, March 24, 2007; Engombe et al., June 17, 2007; July 29, 2007; Hauwanga, July 26, 2007, 12–13. Ikondja, March 18, 2007, 6; Hauwanga, July 26, 2007, 12–13; August 3, 2007, 21–2; Engombe et al., July 29, 2007, 15–17. Shipanga, In Search of Freedom, 102–3; Shipanga, March 20, 2007, 5–6; Mbolondondo, March 26, 2007, 2; Engombe et al., July 29, 2007, 24; Ulenga, June 6, 2008.

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for SWAPO being delivered to UNITA and of SWAPO soldiers fighting alongside UNITA – despite the latter’s supposed alliance with South Africa.64 These stories must have placed additional pressure on soldier-commander relations. Whereas the commanders tended to speak favorably of UNITA, alongside which they had been operating in the bush for years before the exodus’s arrival, those soldiers recently trained in the Soviet Union or by Soviet-influenced instructors in Tanzania had been instructed to see the MPLA as Angola’s only legitimate liberation movement. Moreover, even though SWAPO and Zambian officials had still made no announcements to soldiers at the front about the détente, the commanders directly ordered soldiers to deliver weapons to UNITA and to join UNITA units in battle. Blame for these orders, thus, could only be placed unequivocally on the commanders. In February or early March 1976 relations between soldiers and commanders reached a tipping point. At Kaunga Mash, a SWAPO camp along the Kwando River, PLAN soldiers discovered a cache of concealed weapons.65 As soldiers who were then at the front explain, the significance of the event was not that the weapons were unearthed per se. Hiding weapons in boxes underground was standard practice for SWAPO guerrillas over many years and knowledge of the locations of weapons would certainly have been restricted information. Rather, the weapons lit a fuse because of the context of their discovery at a time when soldiers’ means to defend themselves were inadequate and rumors abounded about SWAPO delivering weapons to UNITA. Shortly after the incident at Kaunga Mash, two PLAN commanders were blamed for concealing the arms and detained by the soldiers, and other commanders fled from their respective camps.66 Some of the soldiers proceeded to Central Base where they shared information about these happenings with others there and set up an “Investigation Committee,” representing various units across the front.67 In the process the Investigation Committee became the de facto command. As one former soldier put it, “[At that time] Central Base, Kaunga Mash was one house. Because it was under the same leadership  . . . the Committee.”68 The committee was charged by soldiers to search for more weapons and to investigate rumors circulating at the front. In turn, it held meetings with soldiers to share information and compiled reports that justified 64

65

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67

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“The PLAN Fighter’s Declaration”; “To the President of SWAPO”; Engombe et  al., July 29, 2007, 15–17; Hauwanga, August 3, 2007, 21–2. E.g., Ailonga Collection, File Names: “SWAPO Office Zambia” and “SWAPO Conflict Zambia,” “Why We Have to Meet Directly with the Liberation Committee of the OAU,” March 23, 1976, 1. “The PLAN Fighter’s Declaration,” 3–4; Ndeulita, March 18, 2007, 5; Shikondombolo, June 17, 2007, 8–9; Engombe et al., July 29, 2007, 19, 34. Hauwanga, July 26, 2007, 12; Shikondombolo, June 17, 2007, 10; Engombe et al., June 17, 2007, 9. Research participants also sometimes refer to an “Advisory Committee,” which assisted the Investigation Committee. Engombe et al., July 29, 2007, 18–19.

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the soldiers’ actions, discredited those of their former superiors and called for the party congress. With the commanders gone, the committee used the typewriter at the Central Base office to print this information and attempted to circulate their documents to other Namibians through sympathetic truck drivers, who were traveling to and from the front.69 Even as camp structures at the front appeared to be breaking down, however, they continued to be used by SWAPO leaders to manage the conflict. Soon after the soldiers arrested the commanders they held responsible for hiding the weapons at Kaunga Mash, they called on their chief leaders, President Sam Nujoma and Secretary for Defence Peter Nanyemba, to visit them at the front to account for this and respond to other grievances. During Nanyemba’s ensuing visit, a confrontational meeting with soldiers at the Central Base parade, most of the commanders assembled at Oshatotwa, the camp for PLAN soldiers undergoing military training in Zambia. Located twenty kilometers northeast of Central Base and thirty kilometers northeast of the Kwando River, Oshatotwa was the first camp reached when approaching the front from Lusaka.70 Thus, it was possible for SWAPO trucks to continue to transport food to those living at Oshatotwa, while cutting off supplies to all the other soldiers at the front and impeding their travel into the Zambian interior.71 Under these conditions some soldiers at Central Base slipped away from the camp and gave themselves over to the commanders at Oshatotwa. Allegedly, physical force was used by people on both sides to keep inhabitants inside their respective camps.72 Threatened by the commanders and soldiers assembled under them at Oshatotwa and cut off from contemporaneous happenings in Lusaka and Nyango, the Investigation Committee’s reports from March 1976 condemned the commanders but withheld judgment on Zambia’s and SWAPO’s most senior officials.73 And on April 11, 1976, when a group of soldiers from Central Base traveled to Oshatotwa to meet with the soldiers there,74 the commanders responded with violence. According to members of the group from Central Base, they were disarmed, beaten, stripped to the waist, and tied to trees for the night. In the morning, after another group from Central Base had come to 69

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Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 126; Ailonga, July 22, 2007, 26–7; Hauwanga, July 26, 2007, 22–3; Engombe et al., July 29, 2007, 18. Engombe et al., June 17, 2007, 9, 13; Ikondja, June 10, 2007, 19–20. UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 16, “Oh World Hear Our Cries,” August 7, 1976 “To the President of SWAPO,” 1; Letter from Beukes, 2; Ikondja, March 18, 2007, 8, 10. Mwalundange, February 9, 2007, 5; “Ya Otto Report,” 14; “The PLAN Fighter’s Declaration,” 3. “Why We Have to Meet”; “To the President of SWAPO.” According to members of the group from Central Base, they walked to Oshatotwa to “explain [their] aim and stand to the 150 comrades and trainees in Oshatotwa.” “The 150 comrades” refers to a group of soldiers led by Commander Katjipuka, who had left Zambia on a mission across the Kwando River in January, prior to when the weapons were uncovered. “Trainees” refers to those who had been undergoing military training at Oshatotwa when the commanders assembled themselves at this camp (“The PLAN Fighters’ Declaration,” 3–4; Engombe et al., July 29, 2007, 32).

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check on them, the entire group, consisting now of several hundred soldiers, was lined up, tied one to another, led into the bush and threatened with their lives. Only after the committee had released the two detained commanders were the soldiers able to return to Central Base.75 “Conflict Resolution” in the International System By April 1976 SWAPO was openly in conflict. At the main battlefront the majority of soldiers were in rebellion against the camp commanders. At the Old Farm and Nyango, SWAPO leaders denounced Nathanael and Shipanga, and Nathanael, Shipanga, and others disobeyed the SWAPO leaders by distributing food there. Although SWAPO officials used the camps to assert their influence and manage tensions among Namibians, their control over those living in them appeared to be slipping. Whereas SWAPO leaders had managed to retain the allegiance of the commanders and to isolate other groups that were dissatisfied with their leadership, rivals continued to influence camp inhabitants and, at the front, the command structure in most camps had been overturned entirely. Even at this moment, however, the SWAPO camps remained part of a global political order, most of whose constituent bodies both recognized SWAPO as representative of a Namibian nation and granted certain persons the authority and instruments to govern “their people” in autonomous settlements. This order not only affirmed nationalism as the common ideology binding those living in the camps in Zambia, but also recognized a particular hierarchy of persons administering Namibians within this space. It is precisely when the patterns of camp life were dissolving and the authority of the officials administering camps were most contested that one can best see the resilience of camp structures and the international system of which they were an integral part. In April 1976 SWAPO’s most immediate ally in the international system was the Zambian government. Despite Zambia’s efforts to curtail PLAN operations during the period of détente, its government remained officially allied to SWAPO. As a member of the OAU, Zambia was part of the collection of nation-states that since 1965 had recognized SWAPO as Namibians’ “sole and authentic” representative and provided space for the liberation movement to administer its members in camps.76 This status, in turn, structured the personal relationships of Zambian and SWAPO officials. As the OAU’s chosen liberation movement in Namibia, SWAPO and its President Sam Nujoma represented the country at OAU functions that also included President Kaunda, and a close friendship had developed between them.77 According to Shipanga, Nathanael, and others, as tensions built within SWAPO in late 1975 and early 75

76 77

“The PLAN Fighters’ Declaration,” 3–4; Mwalundange, February 9, 2007, 5–6; Shikondombolo, June 17, 2007, 3–4. Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia, 35; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 41–2. Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 43.

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1976, Nujoma, Kaunda, and other leaders began to hold private meetings to discuss how to resolve the conflict.78 Similarly, Major Mulopa, the Zambian army commander responsible for monitoring the liberation movements, conversed with only a few SWAPO leaders. According to Tangeni Nuukuawo, who worked near Mulopa at the Liberation Centre in Lusaka, he and other SWAPO leaders pressing for the Party Congress were never able to access Major Mulopa.79 In addition to these diplomatic and personal ties, the Zambian government and the Nujoma faction of SWAPO also had overlapping strategic interests. Although SWAPO leaders might have had conflicting responses to the détente when they first became aware of this policy, there was, by early 1976, considerable reason for those supporting the established order to be concerned about distributing weapons to PLAN combatants, who might use these weapons to mutiny against the SWAPO leadership. Also, the Zambian government had cause to be concerned about a conflict within SWAPO spilling out of its control. After the assassination in Lusaka of ZANU leader Herbert Chitepo on March 18, 1975, the Zambian government had been subjected to widespread criticism for not having intervened to stop violence within a liberation movement, and the government was even suspected by some of involvement in the violence.80 Thereafter a state of emergency was declared in which the Zambian army was granted extended powers to arrest anyone suspected of threatening national security.81 Controversy around “the Chitepo affair” heightened again after March 8, 1976 when the commission of inquiry into Chitepo’s assassination submitted its report to President Kaunda, a report seen by some as no more than an attempt to clear the Zambian government of any complicity in Chitepo’s murder.82 It is in this context that the Zambian government began to intervene in the SWAPO crisis. Shortly after the Investigation Committee was formed and began to distribute documents on behalf of the fighters, it became necessary for SWAPO officials wishing to travel outside Lusaka to request permission from Major Mulopa. This included not only officials wanting to visit Oshatotwa, Central Base, and the front, where visits had been restricted by SWAPO prior to the new order, but all SWAPO camps, including Old Farm and Nyango.83 78

79 80

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Ailonga Collection, File Name:  “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy,” J.  Amupala, I. Engombe, M. Solomon, F. Moongo, S. Shangula, S. Shikomba, A. Shipanga, K. Nathanael, A. [T.] Nuukuawo, M. Taneni, U. Ndeshi, “Statement,” June 16, 1976; Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 112–13. Nuukuawo, February 23, 2007, 9–10; July 3, 2008. The rationale for this argument is related to the politics of the détente. Chitepo is known to have resisted the Zambian government’s attempts to halt ZANU military operations from Zambia. Also, he was a high-ranking official in ZANU, a rival to Kaunda’s preferred Zimbabwean liberation movement, ZAPU. Some believed that Chitepo’s assassination offered the Zambian government an excuse to crack down on ZANU. Ailonga Collection, File Names: “Chaplaincy Letters” and “General Files A,” Salatiel Ailonga, “Memorandum,” June 24, 1976. Martin and Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe, 183–4. Ailonga Collection, File Names:  “Chaplaincy to Namibians in Exile” and “General File A,” Letter from Salatiel Ailonga to Major Mulopa, April 8, 1976; Ailonga, June 22, 2007, 34.

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The Zambian army then took action to disarm the soldiers at the front. Some soldiers were told by members of the Investigation Committee to hand over their weapons to Zambian soldiers following the committee’s first and only meeting with the Zambian government and OAU representatives in Lusaka in early April.84 Others were disarmed by Major Mulopa and Zambian soldiers directly on the premise that otherwise “we [the Namibians] were going to shoot ourselves like the Zimbabweans did.”85 In both cases, after the PLAN soldiers were disarmed, Zambians were placed around the SWAPO camps to guard and keep the soldiers there.86 Then, on April 21 before dawn, the Zambian army and police raided a series of Lusaka houses inhabited by SWAPO members, where Andreas Shipanga, Sheeli Shangula, and four others were arrested. From there they were transported to Nampundwe, a camp on the outskirts of Lusaka where members of ZANU suspected of the murder of Herbert Chitepo had been detained only months before. Over the next few weeks, five other SWAPO officials, including Keshii Nathanael and Tangeni Nuukuawo, who had eluded the initial arrest because they were representing SWAPO at a conference in the Hague, were detained and sent to Nampundwe.87 At the same time as the first arrests in Lusaka, a group of forty-eight soldiers representing the Investigation Committee was transported from the front on Zambian trucks on the premise that it was to hold more extensive meetings in Lusaka with the OAU. Instead, the group was transferred onward to Ruakera where they were held under the guard of Zambian soldiers for several months.88 In June, Salatiel and Anita Ailonga were deported from Zambia as were Hans Beukes, a long-standing SWAPO member, and his Norwegian wife, Adel.89 The Zambian government was soon forced to try to justify these actions. Shortly after the arrests in Lusaka, Sheeli Shangula and Martin Taneni, another co-detainee, managed to escape from Nampundwe and, with the help of sympathetic diplomats, to release a statement to the international 84

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Ailonga, “Memorandum,” June 24, 1976, 5; Mwalundange, June 9, 2007; Hauwanga, July 26, 2007, 9–10; Engombe et al., July 29, 2007, 20–1. Ikondja, March 18, 2007, 5; Nekondo, March 24, 2007, 10; Haikali, March 27, 2007, 7; Engombe et al., July 29, 2007, 20–1. Mwalundange, February 9, 2007, 5; Ikondja, March 18, 2007, 7. Ailonga Collection, File Name: “SWAPO Conflict Zambia,” “Our Arrest and the Subsequent Detention”; Shipanga, In Search of Freedom, 109–10; Nathanael, A Journey to Exile, 138–45; Nuukuawo, February 17, 2007, 4. Ailonga, “Memorandum,” 6; “Oh World Hear Our Cries”; “The PLAN Fighters Declaration,” 2.  In “The PLAN Fighters’ Declaration,” which was written by the soldiers at the front in mid-April 1976, a “Brief Notice” dated April 23, 1976 narrates how the committee was deceived and sent to Mwinilunga, the town nearest to Ruakera. The authors of the “Brief Notice” are reportedly two members of the committee who escaped when the committee passed through Lusaka en route to Ruakera (Hauwanga, July 26, 2007, 10; Engombe et al., July 29, 2007). Ailonga Collection, File Names: “Chaplaincy – Relation to Namibians outside SWAPO” and “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy,” “Two SWAPO Leaders Ordered to Quit Zambia,” Times of Zambia, July 16, 1976; Ailonga, “Memorandum,” 7.

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press.90 In response to this and other rumors that SWAPO members had been abducted, the Zambian Foreign Ministry issued a statement that “certain SWAPO individuals had been placed under protective custody for their own safety.”91 On May 14, Andreas Shipanga, whose wife Esme had hired a lawyer on his behalf, submitted an application to the Zambian High Court for a writ of habeas corpus.92 Eventually Shipanga’s case was sent to the Zambian Supreme Court where it was successful but by that point Shipanga and the ten others detained with him at Nampundwe had been flown from Lusaka to Dar es Salaam and imprisoned there. Despite the court’s orders to the Zambian government to secure Shipanga’s release, these were to no avail. As Zambia’s minister of legal affairs, Mainza Chona, maintained in a response to the court, SWAPO had informed the Zambian government that Shipanga should remain in Tanzania and “consistent with our obligations as a loyal member of the United Nations and of the Organisation of African Unity, Zambia regards SWAPO as the authentic voice of the struggling masses of Namibia.”93 When the Zambian government finally made an official request to the Tanzanian government for Shipanga and his fellow detainees, the latter’s reply stated that, “there is no legal basis on which the request for his return could be granted.”94 Only in May 1978, after considerable lobbying overseas and after political asylum had been granted to the detainees in several European countries, were Shipanga and the others released. While the Zambian state wrangled with its courts over Shipanga’s right to habeas corpus, SWAPO leaders began to justify the former’s intervention on their behalf. On May 23, 1976, SWAPO Vice President Mishake Muyongo, standing in for Nujoma (who, along with Peter Nanyemba, had left Zambia shortly before the April 21 arrests), established a commission of inquiry chaired by John Ya Otto. The Ya Otto Commission was charged to: “(a) investigate into the circumstances and the surrounding which led to the revolt of SWAPO Cadres between June 1974 and April 1976; (b)  recommend a program and cause of action to prevent an event of similar nature occurring in the future.”95 As Nahas Angula, one of the commissioners, volunteered in our interview:  “We had somehow to demonstrate to the Liberation Committee, 90 91

92

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Shipanga, In Search of Freedom, 111–12; Shangula, March 25, 2007. UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Section B1, Category 16, “Zambians Hold 40 Members of Swapo,” The Cape Times, May 5, 1976; “Swapo Split,” Rand Daily Mail, May 5, 1976; “SWAPO Men Held,” Zambia Daily Mail, May 5, 1976. UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Section B1, Category 16, “SWAPO Official Sues for ‘Habeas Corpus,’ ” Zambia Daily Mail, May 15, 1976. UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Section B1, Category 16, “Move to Have Ex-Swapo Official Released,” Rand Daily Mail, October 6, 1976. Ailonga Collection, File Names:  “Articles, Cuttings,” and “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy,” “Dar Turns Down Plea for Shipanga Return,” Times of Zambia, February 8, 1977. Ailonga Collection, File Name:  “SWAPO Office” and “SWAPO Conflict Zambia,” Mishake Muyongo, “Commission of Inquiry on the Revolt of SWAPO Cadres at Central Base Zambia and Lusaka.”

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to our host in Zambia, that somehow we are in control of the situation. So one way of legitimizing that was to have a commission. I think that’s how the Ya Otto Commission came about.”96 The makeup of the commission and its methods of inquiry, as detailed in its final report, seem to support Angula’s point. The commission consisted of SWAPO leaders and commanders. It interviewed none of “the dissidents under detention.”97 The committee did visit the Ailongas the week before they were deported from Zambia. Anita Ailonga recalls: “They even came to us. . . . But if you speak against SWAPO, what will they do? . . . They had a committee of just SWAPO leaders! (laughter) [They were] asking, ‘Why are you afraid or angry with the SWAPO leaders?’ I mean it was nonsense. What would people dare to say?”98 The Ya Otto Commission’s Report, submitted on June 4, 1976, attributes “the revolt of SWAPO cadres” to several factors. The first part of the report focuses on “enemy intrigues and infiltration.” Therein, it alleges that “contrary to the decision of the National Executive Committee of SWAPO,” which had barred diplomatic relations between the liberation movement and the West German government, “Shipanga in July 1975 had a working luncheon with the West German Foreign Minister, Herr Hans Dietrich Genscher. It was during this luncheon it is believed that Shipanga made a secret agreement resulting in a chartered plane full of food stuffs earmarked for SWAPO arriving at Nairobi at the end of last year, and a ship loaded with food stuffs and other materials which is still docked at Mombasa, Kenya.”99 Two of the soldiers at the front, Karistus Shafooli and Jackson Hampembe, are also alleged to have been collaborators with the enemy. Elsewhere the Ya Otto Report identifies a “power struggle” led by some members of the SYL against SWAPO and a campaign of “lies, exaggerations and malicious rumours” resulting in “misguided elements” as contributing to the crisis.100 Toward the report’s end, the commissioners also include a section on “official shortcomings and incompetence.” Therein, the authors identify “operating for a very long time with neither a written constitution nor a political programme,” “poor channels of communication and mobilisation from the top down to the bottom,” “absence of the Treasurer General and the consequent lack of a sound centrally controlled system of receiving, expending, accounting and auditing Party funds,” and a “tendency to isolate those considered to be trouble makers with a view to silence or punish them.”101 All of these shortcomings, it should be noted, had previously been articulated by either Andreas Shipanga, those detained with him or the soldiers at the front. 96 97 98 99 100 101

Angula, February 13, 2008, 7. “Ya Otto Report,” 19. Ailongas, March 23, 2007, 13. “Ya Otto Report,” 7. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 11–13.

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On July 28, an enlarged SWAPO Central Committee met at Nampundwe but those who had been detained there a few weeks earlier and the other “misguided elements” from the front were not in attendance. Drawing on the mandate of a congress convened by SWAPO’s internal leadership at Walvis Bay in May,102 SWAPO’s exiled leaders retained their positions. At the same time President Nujoma offered his first account of “the Shipanga Crisis” to the international press, drawing heavily from the Ya Otto Commission.103 In the months that followed, this narrative was persuasive enough for SWAPO to retain and extend its support at home and abroad.104 By the end of 1976, the UN General Assembly had recognized SWAPO as “the sole and authentic representative of the Namibian people.” Thenceforth, any talks “discussing the modalities for the transfer of power to the people of Namibia” were to be conducted only with SWAPO.105 Meanwhile, as ripples of the Ya Otto Report were spreading across SWAPO networks around the globe, nothing was said publicly about the brutal conditions in which hundreds of Namibians living in Zambia were detained. In July 1976, after having remained for months without weapons and under Zambian guard, the soldiers from Central Base and the front, numbering one thousand or more,106 were transported on Zambian trucks to Mboroma, a camp in the Kabwe District, northeast of Lusaka.107 Within a few weeks they were joined there by the forty-eight members of the Investigation Committee who, since April, had been held at Ruakera.108 Documents that the committee eventually smuggled out of the camp and the memories of former Mboroma detainees paint a picture of the conditions in

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The Congress reelected three leaders:  Sam Nujoma as president, Mishake Muyongo as vice-president and David Meroro, who had fled into exile in late 1975, as chairman. In turn, it called on these three people to make all other appointments within SWAPO on their behalf. According to some sources, SWAPO’s external leadership called for a congress inside Namibia that would reelect them and bolster their position. (Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 74, 90; Erica Beukes [Interviews, March 10, 2007, 1; May 13, 2008, 7].) Ailonga Collection, File Names: “SWAPO Conflict Zambia” and “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy,” “Statement by Comrade Sam Nujoma, President, SWAPO, to Members of the Press, Monday 2 August, 1976, Lusaka Zambia,” 2. There is ample evidence that SWAPO representatives were drawing from the Ya Otto Report’s account of the conflict in Zambia in mending relationships with long-standing allies at home and abroad in 1976. See Williams, “Exile History,” 114–15. UN General Assembly Resolution 31/146; Katjavivi, A History of Resistance, 100. In their documents the Investigation Committee usually refers to the soldiers as numbering “more than 1,000.” Colin Leys and John Saul project the number to have been 1,600 to 1,800 (“Liberation without Democracy?,” 138; Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 49). Until shortly before Namibians’ detention at Mboroma, the camp had been inhabited by ZANU and ZAPU detainees, imprisoned in conjunction with the murder of Herbert Chitepo (“Liberation without Democracy?,” 138; Martin and Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe, 197–202). Engombe et al., June 17, 2007, 15; Hauwanga, July 26, 2007, 15; “Oh World Hear Our Cries.”

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which they were living there.109 Guarded by Zambian soldiers “who admit readily that they were following orders as laid down by SWAPO top leaders in Lusaka,”110 the detainees were not permitted to move outside the camp nor were outsiders, with the exception of a few SWAPO leaders, able to communicate with those within it. At most, soldiers were given mealie-meal, without salt or cooking oil, once daily, and food was often withheld for days at a time. Commodities such as clothes, blankets, soap, and tobacco were scarce, particularly because, as the authors of one document report, soldiers had “sold the rest [of the commodities they] had at the front in order to keep [themselves] alive during the cutting off of food supply.”111 On August 5, after consulting with the Zambian captain in charge of Mboroma, soldiers arranged themselves in files to depart from the camp en route to Angola, where they hoped to join PLAN units fighting there. Before passing through the camp gate, however, the Zambian army fired into the soldiers’ ranks. Four were killed, as many as thirteen wounded. It was weeks before any information about Mboroma filtered into the international press112 and months before the Zambian government was pressured to respond. In late April or early May 1977, Sakarias Elago and Hizipo Shikondombolo, PLAN soldiers who had managed to escape from Mboroma and travel, without money or supplies, across much of Zambia, Tanzania, and Kenya, presented themselves to a BBC reporter in Nairobi.113 Their stories, carried on news reports around the world, prompted the Zambian government to intervene at Mboroma. But even then, the manner of the detainees’ 109

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UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 16, “To the Zambian Government, To the A.L.C.  of the O.A.U.,” July 20, 1976; “Oh World Hear Our Cries,” August 7, 1976; “Oh World Hear Our Cries,” August 11, 1976; UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 5, File 8, “Appeal for the Release of over 1,000 Namibians in Detentions in Zambia and in Tanzania,” April 27, 1977; Engombe et al., June 17, 2007; July 29, 2007; Haikali, March 27, 2007; Hauwanga, July 26, 2007; August 3, 2007; Ikondja, March 18, 2007; June 10, 2007; Mwalundange, February 9, 2007; February 16, 2007; Ndeulita, March 18, 2007; June 10, 2007; Nekondo, March 24, 2007; Shikondombolo, June 17, 2007. “Appeal for the Release,” 4. “Oh World Hear Our Cries,” August 7, 1976. Some of these first newspaper articles are held at UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 16, “Guerrillas Held in Zambia,” The Observer, October 10, 1976 and “Zambia and SWAPO: Plenty of Strife,” Africa Confidential, October 22, 1976. Elago and Shikondombolo walked and hitchhiked the distance from Mboroma to Nairobi, more than two thousand kilometers. Before traveling to Nairobi, they sought assistance at the Swedish Embassy and the UNHCR in Dar es Salaam, which could only refer them to the Tanzanian authorities, where they did not dare to report due to the government’s detention of Shipanga and other Namibians involved in the crisis. Ailonga Collection, File Names: “Chaplaincy – Relations to Namibians outside SWAPO,” “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy,” “Network Africa:  BBC African Services,” transcription of a report, May 2, 1977; Ailonga Collection, loose sheet, “Two Flee Swapo Prison,” The Guardian, May 2, 1977; Tor Sellström, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, Vol. 2:  Solidarity and Assistance (Uppsala: Noriska Afrikainstitutet, 2002), 320; Shikondombolo, June 17, 2007.

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release evaded foreign journalists and others who might have applied pressure on SWAPO leaders to adhere to any principle other than preserving their own power. Although the journey of two hundred “Namibian refugees” from Mboroma to Meheba was covered in the press,114 the “rehabilitation” of the remaining Mboroma inhabitants was not reported. Detainees who did not wish to become refugees were pressured to sign “a confession,” indicating among other things, that they “had been misled by Andreas Shipanga” and that they “had collaborated with the enemy” in a South African attack at Oshatotwa on July 11, 1976.115 Most who signed were sent to Nyango where they lived in a separate location from others in the camp and were stigmatized as “Shipanga’s people.”116 In 1978 several hundred from this group were sent to the SWAPO camp at Cassinga where they arrived unarmed on May 3, 1978 and became victims of the SADF attack.117 As for members of the Investigation Committee living at Nyango, they simply “disappeared.”118 Ordering the Nation Clearly, from 1974 to 1976, camps were not merely sites of a conflict within SWAPO in Zambia; they were a space that shaped the form that this conflict took and enabled some SWAPO officials to consolidate power. From discussions of where the first exodus exiles would sleep at Senanga through the distribution of food at the Old Farm and Nyango, from the control of space at the front through the structuring of knowledge across this and other sites around the world, camps were not peripheral to a conflict between Nujoma, Shipanga, and other factions. Rather, they were central to how these factions formed and how their disputes were “resolved.” This observation should not detract from other insights presented in previous critical scholarship on SWAPO in Zambia. As Paul Trewhela writes and as I also echo in the preceding text, the coup in Portugal, the South African/Zambian 114

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Ailonga Collection, File Name:  “SWAPO Conflict Zambia,” “200 Flee Swapo Camp,” The Guardian, June 11, 1977. Engombe et al., July 29, 2007, 44; Ndeulita, March 18, 2007, 6; June 10, 2007, 8; Hamutenya, April 2, 2008, 4.  Some soldiers were still at the front when the attack occurred, but others had been removed by Zambian soldiers from the front shortly beforehand (“To the Zambian Government”; Mwalundange, February 9, 2007, 6; Ikondja, March 18, 2007, 11–12; Shikondombolo, June 17, 2007, 5; Engombe et al., June 17, 2007). Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus (Interview, July 2, 2007, 29); Steve Swartbooi (Interview, January 29, 2007, 12–14); Phillip Shuudifonya, interview with Nathanael and Amupala published in Nathanael’s book, A Journey to Exile, 183–5. Shuudifonya is one of the former Mboroma detainees who were sent to Nyango for rehabilitation. Stephanus and Swartbooi were both living in Nyango during a period shortly after the group from Mboroma arrived there. For more details about the group of Mboroma ex-detainees who arrived at Cassinga shortly before the SADF attack, see Chapter 2. Shuudifonya offers an account of how people “disappeared” from Nyango (A Journey to Exile, 182–4) as does Kandi Nehova in our interview (April 7, 2008, 7).

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détente, and the war in Angola all created conditions of possibility for the conflict that erupted among exiled Namibians in 1976.119 Moreover, as Trewhela and other critics of the “Shipanga Crisis” narrative emphasize, the conflict was driven in large measure by the ideological commitments of a new generation of exiles, expressed clearly in documents that the SYL and the Investigation Committee produced. To quote Colin Leys and John Saul’s crucial point:  “at centre stage [of the crisis] one finds the demand, springing directly from the movement’s rank-and-file, for the realization of more democratic procedures and for a far greater measure both of leadership accountability and of membership participation within Swapo. It was a demand that the Swapo leadership was, in the end, most loath to countenance, much less to meet.”120 Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that this “demand” was not expressed in a social void but rather in a kind of social space that impacted on the form that the demand took and enabled national elites to suppress it effectively. Here, critical historiography misses the mark when it separates the “logistical” problem that SWAPO faced in meeting the pressing biological needs of Namibians arriving in Zambia in 1974 and 1975 from the “political” problem of accommodating new exiles’ ideological views and creating accountable forms of exile government.121 From their very first encounter, camp officials exercised power in how they addressed exodus exiles’ needs, and SYL leaders and PLAN guerrillas became alienated from SWAPO’s political leadership primarily through firsthand experiences of logistics in camps. Moreover, as tensions escalated among exiled Namibians, camp logistics and geographies became primary means through which SWAPO and Zambian elites divided those who were critical of the status quo. This point is crucial for understanding the evolving relationship among different groups of Namibian exiles during this period, especially guerrillas who had lived at Kongwa and other camps prior to the exodus and guerrillas who arrived in exile only in 1974 and 1975. Although these two groups shared common grievances with SWAPO’s political leadership, the older generation of guerrillas sided with the dominant faction of SWAPO elites in 1976 – a point overlooked in previous scholarship on SWAPO’s “Democratic Crisis” but unmistakable when the crisis is seen from the viewpoint of soldiers living in camps in southwestern Zambia over two years.122 119 120

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Trewhela, “The Kissinger/Vorster/Kaunda Détente.” Leys and Saul, “Liberation without Democracy?,” 124. See also Trewhela, “The Kissinger/ Vorster/Kaunda Détente,” 200 and Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia, 50. See Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia, 47–8; Leys and Saul, “Liberation without Democracy?,” 127; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 46. Trewhela does not discuss the substantial logistical difficulties that SWAPO faced in accommodating thousands of new exiles. Colin Leys and John Saul do identify two distinct groups of PLAN combatants, those trained before and after the exodus, that were at odds with the SWAPO leaders, but they do not trace how their allegiances evolve in the early months of 1976. See Leys and Saul, “Liberation without Democracy?,” 130; Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 48.

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In developing such a perspective, this chapter, like others, draws from an anthropological literature on refugees, wherein the distribution of humanitarian aid in camps is presented as intensely political and highly productive of national forms of identity. While incorporating the literature’s key insight, encapsulated in Liisa Malkki’s phrase “the national order of things,”123 this chapter’s title focuses attention on something more specific than what Malkki and others have observed. Namely, it illuminates how things in and around liberation movement camps may order the structure of a nation. Camp aid delivery, spatial control, and knowledge production are marginal to competing Namibian histories of the “Shipanga Crisis” and “Democratic Crisis,” but they provided powerful mechanisms through which SWAPO’s emerging national elite asserted its authority to represent Namibians during its exile years. Zambia from 1974 to 1976 reflects a place and time when senior SWAPO leaders’ authority to represent Namibians was uniquely vulnerable and when control over fellow nationals living in camps became particularly vital for these leaders to retain their positions. Nevertheless, the manner in which tensions emerged and were managed in SWAPO camps was similar across different exile contexts and developed a powerful momentum of its own. Thus far we have traced this momentum from Kongwa in the 1960s through the Old Farm, Nyango, and the front in Zambia in the 1970s. As we shall see, different conditions prevailed among SWAPO members in Angola during the 1980s, reflecting the escalation of SWAPO’s war with apartheid South Africa, significant setbacks in that war for SWAPO, and the growing power of a SWAPO security apparatus trained by Eastern bloc governments. Nevertheless, the resolution of the 1976 conflict set a precedent that not only deterred SWAPO members of all levels from asking questions about the organization’s policy,124 but also breathed life into imaginary beings that, by the mid-1980s, no one within SWAPO could quite manage to control. Indeed, “the Spy Drama,” a purge that threatened every Namibian exile and even the continued existence of SWAPO, can only be understood through a history of camps, where “spies” came to wield extraordinary power.

123

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Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 493–523. For further discussion of ethnographic work on refugee camps and its relevance here, see Chapter 1. Leys and Saul draw this specific connection between the resolution of SWAPO’s 1976 crisis and the purge of “spies” at Lubango. As they maintain, “the Lubango horrors were [not] merely some natural outgrowth of the events of 1976. . . . What does link the catastrophe of Lubango to 1976 is that after 1976 all questioning of policy decisions was delegitimized” even among members of SWAPO’s Central Committee (“Liberation without Democracy?,” 145).

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5 “The Spy” and the Camp: SWAPO in Lubango, 1980–1989

In early November 1976 Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus departed from Namibia for exile.1 Over the preceding months Stephanus had been mobilizing fellow students at St. Therese in Tses and southern Namibia’s other secondary schools to organize a strike of the final exams, thereby marking their rejection of Bantu education and solidarity with the students of Soweto, South Africa.2 After being expelled from school for these activities, Stephanus made his way, with the help of SWAPO contacts, to a point near the Buitepos border post, where he crossed over to Mamuno, Botswana and registered as a refugee. Over the following weeks he was joined there by about fifty others who had participated in the November strikes, the first large cohort of exiles from south of Namibia’s Red Line.3 They were transported by SWAPO to Maun and, a few months later, to Zambia, where they underwent military training at Oshatotwa with Stephanus appointed as “group commander.” Later that year Stephanus was selected to 1

2

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The following story about Stephanus is derived from two of my interviews with him (May 29, 2005; May 31, 2005). Although the details of Stephanus’s personal story are his own, the general contours of his military training, education at UNIN, and detention at Lubango overlap with many other sources cited in the following text. Christian A.  Williams, “Remembering St. Therese:  A  Namibian Mission School and the Possibilities for Its Students,” MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 2002; Remembering St. Therese (Windhoek: Out of Africa, 2003); “Student Political Consciousness: Lessons from a Namibian Mission School,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no.  3 (2004):  539–58. “Southern Namibia” or “the South” is used in this text to refer to the area of Namibia designated for white settlement during the colonial period. The “Red Line” is commonly used by Namibians and scholars of Namibia to refer to the boundary between the area designated for white settlement during the colonial period and the colony’s northern areas. This shifting boundary was first marked by the German colonial government in 1896–7 in order to protect German settlers to the south from an epidemic of cattle disease. In 1925 the boundary was published on a South African government map as a red line, and from 1965 a veterinary fence was constructed that corresponded largely with the boundary at that time (See Map 2). For a history of the Red Line, see Giorgio Miescher, Namibia’s Red Line: The History of a Veterinary and Settlement Border (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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attend the United Nations Institute for Namibia (UNIN), a tertiary institution that had been established in Lusaka in 1976. Upon completing his studies and a brief internship in Benin, he was sent for military training again, this time outside Lubango, Angola, where, since the late 1970s, SWAPO had maintained a network of camps. Thereafter, he was given a position as political information officer for the SWAPO Youth League (SYL). First from Lusaka and later from Luanda, he edited the SYL’s newspaper and represented the organization in meetings at SWAPO’s larger settlements and at conferences organized by the liberation movement’s allies around the world. On March 9, 1985, just after celebrating his thirtieth birthday with friends at his Luanda apartment, Stephanus was arrested by SWAPO. After being held at a SWAPO-owned house for several days, he was escorted by two armed guards on one of the liberation movement’s supply convoys to Lubango. Almost a week later the convoy arrived and Stephanus was dropped at SWAPO’s Karl Marx Reception Centre where he was put in a solitary cell and told to write a statement about his life. After several days soldiers returned to his cell and escorted him to a chamber where he sat in front of a group of commanders affiliated with PLAN, SWAPO’s guerrilla army. There Stephanus was informed that in his statement he had forgotten to mention something – his “life as a South African spy.”4 When Stephanus denied the accusation, he was stripped naked and his hands were tied to the ceiling. Suspended from the ground, the soldiers beat him with bundles of freshly cut sticks while insulting him for his alleged spying, his education, and his cultural background. He was later sent back to his cell where hot water was applied to his fresh wounds and where he waited until he was led out again for another session. At some point Stephanus was visited by one of his interrogators, whom he had recognized as the former bodyguard of a friend on the Political Bureau, SWAPO’s highest organ.5 The man came to Stephanus alone and advised him:  “You just lie to these guys or they will kill you. Then you will go to where your brothers and friends are.”6 After enduring torture almost daily for a month, Stephanus “confessed” that he was a spy. In turn, he was asked several questions: “Who recruited you? Who was your contact in exile? Who were you trained with? What was your mission?” In his responses, Stephanus told stories that anyone with basic knowledge of his personal history and the places where he had lived in Namibia could easily have contradicted but that his interrogators accepted without question. After the interrogators had transcribed Stephanus’s story and Stephanus had signed it, he was taken to one of the “dungeons,” rectangular underground holes covered with corrugated iron where hundreds of accused spies, including most of his 1976 exile cohort, were 4 5

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Stephanus, May 31, 2005, 11. SWAPO changed the name of its highest organ from the National Executive Committee to the Political Bureau after its conflict in Zambia in 1976. Stephanus, May 31, 2005, 11–12.

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detained. For the next four-and-a-half years, Stephanus lived in one or another dungeon administered by SWAPO outside Lubango, where he suffered from poor health and where many died from illness. Some of his fellow detainees were also commanded to leave the dungeons and subsequently “disappeared.” Only in the middle of 1989 was Stephanus released from detention and repatriated to Namibia as part of SWAPO’s implementation of UN Resolution 435.7 More than two decades since his release and repatriation, Stephanus still struggles to understand why he and others were accused of spying and submitted to such brutality in Lubango. The structures shaping national history pull against a thorough inquiry into this topic, however. SWAPO officials implicated in spy accusations have hidden themselves behind an official narrative, according to which a large number of South African spies infiltrated SWAPO in exile during the 1980s and the liberation movement responded with appropriate measures.8 In turn, ex-detainees, scholars, and others have published histories that challenge this narrative, drawing attention to the innocence of many accused spies and to the individuals and groups within SWAPO responsible for a purge.9 And yet, as Stephanus’s narrative suggests and as the historiography confirms, there was often no relationship between how “spies” were identified in Lubango and attempts to gather verifiable evidence of these persons’ collaboration with the enemy. Moreover, many who identified others as “spies” were subsequently identified, tortured, and detained. Under the circumstances, grasping what happened to Stephanus requires more than knowledge of the physical activities of South African spies, SWAPO officials, or others who may have betrayed the nation. It requires knowledge of “the spy” and of the contexts in which this invisible figure could accrue such extraordinary power. 7

8

9

Although SWAPO and the South African government had accepted Resolution 435 as a blueprint for implementing Namibian independence in 1978, South Africa did not follow through on the terms of the resolution until 1989. Negotiations resumed in 1988 in the context of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the end of the Cold War, resulting in the Geneva Accords of December 1988. Significantly, SWAPO has made little or no effort to identify who these alleged spies were  – despite opportunities presented by South Africa’s TRC and friendly relations between Namibia and South Africa’s postapartheid governments. For further discussion of the TRC and “reconciliation” as they pertain to Namibia, see Chapters 6 and 7. Published histories include Political Consultative Council, “A Report to the Namibian People:  Historical Account of the SWAPO Spy-Drama” (Windhoek:  Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement, 1989, repr. 1997); Nico Basson and Ben Motinga, eds., Call Them Spies: A Documentary Account of the SWAPO Spy Drama (Windhoek: Africa Communications Project, 1989); Paul Trewhela, “A Namibian Horror,” Searchlight South Africa 4 (1990): 78–93; Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2009), 140–58; Colin Leys and John S. Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle:  The Two-Edged Sword (London:  James Currey, 1995), 53–8, 63–5; Siegfried Groth, Namibia  – The Wall of Silence (Wuppertal:  Peter Hammer Verlag, 1995); Justine Hunter, Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia: Umgang mit schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen der Ära des bewaffneten Befreiungskampfes, 1966 bis 1989 (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2008), 92–107. See also two films about SWAPO’s Lubango detentions: Nda Mona (directed by Richard Pakleppa, 1999); Testimony (directed by the Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement, 2003).

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This chapter examines “the spy” from the perspective of the camp. Drawing from anthropological literature on relationships between witchcraft discourse and social context,10 I consider qualities of camp life that made spying a plausible and powerful explanation for the misfortunes that people could experience while living in that space. There, where inhabitants were constantly at risk of South African violence, SWAPO officials utilized their control over public discourse to focus attention on dangers emanating from outside the camp, which they were authorized to address as national representatives. At the same time, they could exploit ambiguities surrounding who spies were and how they accomplished their work to heighten fears and direct them toward categories of people already marginalized inside camps. The chapter first makes these observations about SWAPO camps in general, drawing from examples introduced in previous chapters, and then applies them to circumstances in Lubango during the 1980s, considering how “the spy” became an agent that some SWAPO officials used to coerce rivals but that no single person or faction could ever entirely control. Explaining Misfortune in the Camp To understand the power of “the spy” among Namibian exiles, it is first important to see the camps where they lived as an insecure space where there was much fear of external violence. Many of those who entered the camps had been harassed, imprisoned, or tortured by South African officials before departing from Namibia, and all came from a country in which physical violence was inflicted on black people who openly resisted the apartheid government. Exiles also encountered or risked encountering violence during their journey abroad when they escaped over the Namibian border and, in many cases, traveled through combat zones. For those who had passed through such hardships prior to reaching the camps, these sites may have seemed relatively secure, especially those located some distance from the front. And yet inhabitants knew that as members of SWAPO living in exile, they were at risk and that the camps where they lived were potential targets. As we have seen, fears of apartheid violence were evident at Kongwa, where guerrillas learned of South African forces’ capacity to intercept groups moving from there to Namibia, in southwestern Zambia, where combatants discussed their vulnerability to a possible SADF attack, and at Nyango, where inhabitants considered how the apartheid regime and its allies might poison their food. Above all, the attack on Cassinga 10

In my doctoral thesis I  discuss work by Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Harry West, Kupilikula:  Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2005) considering how these authors reframe the literature on witchcraft in anthropology. See “Exile History: An Ethnography of the SWAPO Camps and the Namibian Nation,” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2009, 123–7. Here I draw implicitly from Ashforth’s and West’s insights.

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confirmed exiles’ fears that South Africa might inflict devastating violence on them at any time or place – even a camp with few military personnel located far from the Namibian border. Such acts of violence, both real and imagined, could easily be attributed to spying. Happenings like the attack on Cassinga lent themselves to spy explanations because of the insider knowledge of SWAPO that seemed necessary for their implementation and the inadequacy of publicly available information to explain such devastating events. Nevertheless, exiles would be unlikely to discount the possibility that South Africa had a hand in any setbacks that they might encounter. Many had personal experiences with, or deep suspicions of, people in their home communities who had informed the police about SWAPO meetings or about PLAN soldiers infiltrating the northern part of the country.11 Moreover, the South African military was known to wield forms of technology to which most Namibian exiles had never been exposed. Thus, the notion that the South Africans were inflicting harm on Namibians living in SWAPO camps through secret agents and surreptitious means would have seemed both plausible and likely. The impetus to attribute misfortunes to “the spy” did not come solely from dangers emanating outside camps, however, but also from those inherent to them. As we have seen at Kongwa, Old Farm, Oshatotwa, and other sites, the hierarchical social order of camp life made those on its bottom rungs highly vulnerable. All were to follow the orders of the camp commanders and, when they were visiting, the political leaders. Questioning orders from these officials was discouraged on the premise that to do so threatened Namibians’ unity of purpose in resisting South African rule. There was generally no place for appealing to personally held moral values or rights in resisting camp authorities’ commands. And officials controlled the distribution of food, shelter, clothing, medicine, and weapons – all essential resources for survival and for conducting the war. These differences could cause resentment between SWAPO officials and rank-and-file members and, on several occasions, erupted in open conflict: above all SWAPO’s 1976 crisis in Zambia. Under these conditions SWAPO officials had strong impetus to project exiles’ fears onto “the spy.” By attributing violence and other misfortunes in the camps to South African spying, officials focused attention on a threat to national security that they, as the nation’s representatives, were authorized to address, and away from inequalities and conflicts in the camps, which might undermine their authority and endanger their lives. In turn, they used the fear of spies to coerce other Namibians to align with their will and to eliminate rivals for power in a national community. In the process, “the spy” became

11

In her MA thesis, “Our Memories of the Liberation War: How Civilians in Post War Northern Namibia Remember the War” (University of the Western Cape, 2003), Martha Akawa specifically examines suspicions and accusations about South African collaborators in Ovamboland.

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a weapon in power struggles occurring within the camps even as it presented itself always as a danger originating outside of them. To understand how SWAPO officials projected exiles’ fears onto spies, the camp is, once again, an important context. Through announcements at the daily parade, officials could shape a discourse on spying among members of an exile community, all of whom either lived in or passed through camp space. Generally, SWAPO officials spoke about South African agents who had been sent into exile to undermine SWAPO and endanger Namibians.12 Exiles, in turn, were exhorted to be vigilant and report suspicious behavior to camp authorities so that Namibians might avoid future catastrophes, especially, from 1978, the specter of “a second Cassinga.”13 In some instances, announcements focused on specific individuals who were accused of spying, above all “Castro” and “Shipanga” who were regularly denounced from camp parades and blamed for particular setbacks to SWAPO.14 At the same time, officials encouraged exiles to imagine spies’ hidden and maleficent powers, the possibility that they might be anywhere and could do anything that to harm Namibians at any moment. Much of the specific content of officials’ speeches played on preexisting sources of suspicion among camp inhabitants. Significantly, most individuals accused of spying during SWAPO’s three decades in exile were minorities in an exile community that consisted predominantly of Oshiwambo speakers from rural, northern Namibia. A sizable portion of this community, moreover, had never traveled outside Ovamboland or encountered Namibia’s ethnic diversity before arriving in a SWAPO camp.15 In the context of fear prevailing in the camps, cultural differences could easily become sources of mistrust. For example, in our interviews many former exiles from southern Namibia indicated that while living in the camps they often felt mistrusted by “people from the North,” a phrase used to refer to people from northern Namibia generally or from Ovamboland more specifically. According to these sources, “people from the North” often interpreted benign questions or reasonable grievances as 12

13

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15

See, e.g., Hans Pieters (Interview, September 9, 2007, 29); Steve Swartbooi (Interview, September 21, 2007, 21); Oiva Alikie Angula, “Brutalised Innocence: The Turns of Destiny and Tyranny” (unpublished manuscript, given to the author), 64; “Comrade President Attends SWAPO Camps,” The Combatant 2, no. 4 (November 1980): 4–5; “President Nujoma Visits SWAPO Camps,” The Combatant 2, no. 10 (May 1981): 7. For further discussion of “a second Cassinga” and how this concept was articulated among exiles see Chapter 2. In addition to Castro and Shipanga, Mishake Muyongo was frequently associated with spying after his dismissal from SWAPO in 1980. To see how Muyongo, Shipanga, and Castro could be linked to one another in a seamless narrative of South African spying see “Racist Hopes Surviving on Malicious Propaganda,” The Combatant (February 1986): 10–11. Although many Ovambo men traveled to southern Namibia at some point in their lives as contract laborers, Ovambo women and children were usually restricted to Ovamboland. Indeed, Ellen Namhila was far from the only exile to discover upon arriving in a SWAPO camp that “there were other language groups in Namibia besides Oshiwambo to which I belonged.” See The Price of Freedom (Windhoek: New Namibia Books, 1997), 12.

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signs of disrespect. Urban, educated women were particularly likely to violate prevailing social taboos if they asked questions to older men or looked men directly in their eyes when they spoke.16 Some southern Namibians were ostracized because of the way they responded to camp food, which often consisted of porridge garnished with beans or kapenta, components of traditional diets in the North but not in the South.17 Race too could be a source of mistrust. Several interviewees suggested that they were not entirely accepted by other exiles because of their skin color, which in the case of “Namas,” “Coloureds,” and “Basters” tended to be considerably lighter and less “African” than most Namibians.18 As individuals from minority groups were identified as spies, their cultural practices and racial features also became associated with spying and used to justify the persecution of those who possessed them. Language appears to have been a particularly significant marker of difference and source of suspicion in the camps. Although officially the language of SWAPO as an organization and its proposed language for independent Namibia was English, most exiles had little exposure to English before traveling abroad. Therefore, in day-to-day conversation, Oshiwambo was primarily used. Those who felt left out of conversation because they could not speak or understand Oshiwambo or who sought the company of others with whom they could communicate more easily often associated with people who spoke their mother tongue. Such practices, like when people speaking the same language gathered around one another at a meal or moved from one section of a camp to another to meet same-language friends, could result in accusations that these groups were being “tribalist.”19 As we have seen, such dynamics produced tensions during the 1960s at Kongwa, creating mistrust between SWAPO members who feared Caprivians speaking local languages and resurrecting CANU behind their backs and Caprivians who thought that SWAPO officials did not have the necessary English skills to lead a nationalist movement. In later years, those who spoke Afrikaans were particularly susceptible to suspicion because many northern Namibians did not speak the language and had come to associate it with the Afrikaner colonizer.20 Particular groups of people were also associated with derogatory terms in Oshiwambo based on their use of language. For example, Stephanus and others who spoke Khoekhoegowab were frequently referred to as kwangara, a word used to refer to “Bushmen” and others who spoke Khoisan languages.21 Those who spoke Oshiwambo in a manner 16 17 18

19

20 21

Emma Kambangula (Interview, February 15, 2007). E.g., Steve Swartbooi (Interview, January 29, 2007, 12). “Nama,” “Coloured,” and “Baster” are categories that were used by the South African government to classify Namibia’s inhabitants and that Namibians often use to identify themselves. As suggested, they all have a racial component. Pauline Dempers (Interview, May 23, 2007); Pieters, September 9, 2007; Stephanus, May 31, 2005. E.g., Pieters, September 9, 2007, 27. Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus and Steve Swartbooi (Interview, April 25, 2009).

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considered improper by people raised in the North might be called mbwiti,22 a term for Ovambos who had settled in the South and whose Oshiwambo had incorporated elements of Afrikaans and other languages to which they had been exposed there. Accused spies at Lubango were often mocked during interrogation and torture for being either kwangara or mbwiti. SWAPO officials also exploited other sources of camp inhabitants’ fears during their parade announcements. In describing how spies accomplished their work, officials spoke of items hidden inside spies’ bodies that were used by them to transmit messages to the South Africans or to kill Namibians directly. Scars on the body and large breasts were identified as locations where people could hide radios and send messages to the enemy.23 On at least one occasion it was announced that a spy had a hollow wooden leg, which appeared to look like a normal leg while the man did his activities during the day, but which he would dismantle at night, using the radio inside to communicate with his South African colleagues.24 Weapons might also be hidden in or near the body, such as a pistol attached to the head of a woman whose hair was particularly long and wavy.25 The most widely remembered claim involved a device with poisoned razor blades that women allegedly inserted into their vaginas. After enticing a SWAPO official to have sex, the official’s penis would be cut in the act of intercourse, and he would be poisoned or bleed to death.26 Parallels between such claims made about spies in the SWAPO camps and ethnographic literature on witchcraft in northern Namibia are striking. As Maija Hiltunen details in her study of Finnish missionary writings on witchcraft (uulodhi) in Ovamboland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the evil power (iigwanga) possessed by a witch (omulodhi) was understood to reside physically in the witch’s body.27 Although claims about the content of this substance and its location varied, it was sometimes said to be located in a small bag in a woman’s breast.28 The methods by which witches did their work were mysterious and always enacted at night.29 It was thought, 22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29

The word mbwiti literally refers to “weeds” and connotes impurity. Kambangula, February 15, 2007, 12; Pieters, September 9, 2007, 28. Nambinga Kati (Interview, December 8, 2007, 28). Ibid. Kambangula, February 15, 2007, 12–13; Kati, December 8, 2007, 28–9; Pieters, September 9, 2007, 28–9; Stephanus, May 31, 2005, 10; S. Swartbooi, September 21, 2007. These devices became an object of investigation among solidarity workers through the Commission of Inquiry into the Crimes of the Racist and Apartheid South African Regime in February 1981. See University of the Western Cape, Mayibuye Centre, IDAF, Margeret Ling, “Further Information Obtained by Maria Haufiku and Terecia Wilhelm.” Maija Hiltunen, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Ovambo (Helsinki:  Suomen Antropologinen Seura, 1986). Hiltunen worked for the Finnish Missionary Society in Ovamboland from 1958 to 1962 and from 1964 to 1966. Her text draws primarily from material collected and written by Finnish missionaries since the 1870s when they first began to work in the Ovamboland region. See also Good Magic in Ovambo (Helsinki: Suomen Antropologinen Seura, 1993). Hiltunen, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Ovambo, 44–5. Ibid., 59–67.

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however, that they did not go to the persons whom they bewitched directly but rather communicated with the ancestral spirits (aathithi) who were then sent to those whom witches wanted to harm.30 One source indicates that a witch “is able to release her arms, legs and head from her body when falling asleep” and in the morning “joins them together becoming a whole human being again.”31 Another notes that witches may “shoot a small magical arrow” or “inject poisons” into their victims.32 Although both men and women could be witches, women were generally seen as “better mediums” for harnessing the power of the ancestral spirits for harming living men than men were.33 It would be misleading to infer from Hiltunen’s research that Namibians accepted what SWAPO officials said about spies from the parade because the content of their messages confirmed what they already “believed” about witchcraft.34 In fact, several research participants who recounted officials’ claims about how spies did their work mentioned these incidents to register their skepticism. One said that he doubted the claims because neither the radios and weapons nor the bodies of the spies into which they were allegedly inserted were ever shown to people at the parade.35 Another noted that the officials who were killed through hidden weapons were never identified.36 They and others questioned whether it was biologically possible for spies to carry radios and weapons inside their bodies, drawing in some cases from scientific theories that they had learned in school to discredit these claims.37 As for the SWAPO officials making the announcements at the parade, they did not refer to witchcraft directly in their speeches but rather used a distinct terminology for spying. When addressing gatherings in Oshiwambo, the words espy, omatuma (“someone who has been sent”), and omapuli (“traitor”) were generally used.38 On the far fewer occasions when officials referred to uulodhi/“witchcraft,” they appear to have done so primarily to denounce it as superstition. As the authors of one urgent report to the SWAPO president noted, efforts to educate the rank and file in SWAPO’s 1976 political program had been impeded because “a very large section of our cadres . . . are deeply stopped [sic] in superstition (the numerous cases of with-craft) [sic].”39 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., 61. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 24–5, 46. It also should be noted that in some Southern African witchcraft traditions, witches may harm their victims through sexual intercourse by means of a “tokoloshe,” a familiar that works on the witch’s behalf. Hiltunen, however, does not identify this as one of the powers of owls, the Ovambo familiar (65–7). See here Adam Ashforth’s distinction between witchcraft as “belief” and witchcraft as plausible explanation in a social context (Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa, 123). Kati, December 8, 2007, 28. Stephanus, May 31, 2007, 10. Pieters, September 9, 2007, 29. E.g., Jackson Mwalundange (Interview, April 23, 2009). UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 3, File 1, “Report to the President: Office of the Administrative Secretary,” 1977.

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But who could afford to discredit or discount the claims that SWAPO officials made about spies, especially if their powers might overlap with those of witches? As suggested, witches were sources of fear among people living in the camps. While cases of witchcraft usually involved breaches of social taboo involving small groups of people, accusations often focused on marginal figures in the exile community  – the same people who bore the brunt of spy accusations.40 By describing spies in a manner that resonated with an Oshiwambo discourse on witchcraft, SWAPO officials simultaneously played on exiles’ fears and affirmed officials’ authority to confront agents who were, first and foremost, a threat to a national community. Moreover, an explicit discourse on witchcraft, with its connotations in the West of superstition, could only be a liability to SWAPO as it represented itself to an international community, whereas spying could be used abroad to justify all manner of happenings in an internationally recognized liberation movement. It must also be noted that even the most skeptical exile could not easily question what was said about spies from his or her location in a camp. Classrooms in the camps were generally not sites that encouraged critical thinking, and the classrooms where commissars taught scientific socialism during the late 1970s and 1980s were likely to corroborate claims about spies dispersed at the parade. Some persons had access to radio, but the ability to listen to news was impaired by the remote location of camps, the language skills of camp inhabitants, and the suspicions of others living in camps.41 The socially acceptable radio station that exiles often could access and understand was SWAPO’s Voice of Namibia, which, predictably, confirmed claims made in the camps about spies.42 Few exiles would have had the opportunity to hear the perspectives of the “spies” after they had been accused. Most were imprisoned by host governments or taken to separate camps where they lived apart from the rest of the exile community with the exception of the commanders and soldiers who were assigned to guard them.43 The locations to which accused spies were moved were not publicly announced, and free movement inside and outside of SWAPO camps was restricted to senior officials. It was also not unusual for people to “appear and disappear” from camps. Camp residents rarely knew 40

41 42 43

E.g., Namhila, The Price of Freedom, 45–7; S.  Swartbooi, January 29, 2007, 15–17. In one striking instance, an interlocutor narrated a story about an Ovambo man from the North accusing an Ovambo woman from the South of witchcraft because, after going to bed with him, the woman had offended him by “touching him on his genitals.” Thus “the mbwiti woman,” one of the chief objects of the spy discourse, had been declared a witch. E.g., S. Swartbooi, September 21, 2007, 24. Ibid., 21. Exiles who lived in SWAPO camps during the mid-1970s report instances in which accused spies were tied to gates and trees in places where all camp inhabitants could see them. Even under these circumstances, however, the accused would have had little opportunity to express themselves (see Ndamono Ndeulita [Interview, March 18, 2007,  2]; Phil Ya Nangoloh [Interview, February 19, 2007, 4]).

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where they were going when they were commanded to leave a given camp, and information about other exiles’ location was often unavailable even to their closest family members. All this movement in and out of the SWAPO camps did open camps to knowledge exchanges occurring outside of them. Especially when SWAPO members returned to the camps from assignments overseas, there was opportunity to share information between the rank and file living primarily within the camps and the political leaders and students living primarily outside of them, where information flowed more freely. Nonetheless, any knowledge that people did have about spies that contradicted official claims was constrained by the fears that surrounded “the spy.” Questioning claims could be seen as an affront to the authority of figures making them and mark one as a potential spy, especially if, as some suspected, SWAPO planted spies to identify those who asked subversive questions.44 In such a context, like the circumstances in which people gossip more generally,45 it was necessary that any exchange of information relating to spies and varying from the official discourse occur within a group of people who trusted one another. It is not surprising, therefore, that when research participants mentioned conversations that they had with others about spies, these were almost always held with people they knew before entering exile or with whom they shared a common language and ethnic identity. Even when exiles spoke privately with senior SWAPO officials about spy accusations, these conversations usually occurred on tribal lines.46 Counterevidence and alternative theories about spying could, therefore, travel within personal networks shaped by region, language, and ethnicity, but were unlikely to extend outside this range. Under these circumstances, exiles might privately question aspects of the spy discourse, but they were unlikely to dismiss its content altogether. In turn, “the spy” became an agent with powers of his own. “Spies” influenced to whom exiles spoke, what they said and where and how they said it. They encouraged people to mistrust others with different cultural practices and racial features and to entertain ideologies derived from witchcraft that might explain how the enemy was threatening people’s lives. They changed forms as individuals imagined spies being in places and doing things that only those persons could conceive. And, as we shall see, they crossed social boundaries, threatening or attacking officials who had done much to heighten the fear of spies and make dubious accusations in spies’ names.

44

45

46

Immanuel Engombe, Junius Ikondja, Ndamono Ndeulita, Hizipo Shikondombolo (Interview, July 29, 2007); S. Swartbooi, September 21, 2007, 38. Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa, 66; Max Gluckman, ‘‘Gossip and Scandal,” Current Anthropology 4, no. 3 (1963): 307–16. Andries Basson (Interview, May 30, 2007, 15–16, 21–2); Kandi Nehova (Interview, April 7, 2008, 14–15); Pieters, May 21, 2007, 1; September 9, 2007, 27; November 14, 2007, 36; Stephanus, May 31, 2005.

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Lubango and the 1980s Although “the spy” was part of the lives of all Namibians living in SWAPO camps during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the purge that enveloped Joseph Stephanus and others in Lubango should also be understood in terms of a more specific history. Following the coup in Portugal on April 25, 1974, Angola became accessible to Namibians fleeing their country of origin for exile and PLAN combatants returning from exile to infiltrate Namibia. In March 1976, following the SADF’s retreat from Angola, SWAPO pledged its allegiance to the MPLA, establishing an office in Luanda and a network of camps in southern Angola with the support of the Angolan government. For the next several years PLAN combatants operated out of a network of makeshift camps near the Angolan-Namibian border from which they regularly infiltrated Namibia and easily received Namibians fleeing across the border into exile.47 These camps were supported by others further removed from the front, including the Defence Headquarters, Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre, and specialized logistical camps, all clustered between twelve and thirty kilometers northeast of Lubango.48 (See Map 7.) At the turn of the decade, the war’s tide began to change. From May 1978, when the SADF raided Cassinga, South Africa launched attacks deep into southern Angola almost every year,49 utilizing its superior military technology, including air force, mechanized units, and ability to monitor some SWAPO radio communications,50 to push PLAN back from the border. By 1982 the SADF occupied much of southern Angola, resulting in the relocation of PLAN’s southern-most camps 100 to 150 kilometers north of the border and making combatants’ attempts to enter Namibia much more difficult.51 At the same time, UNITA, which had withdrawn into the southern Angolan bush following the retreat of its South African allies from the country in March 1976, was becoming a stronger presence in many regions. By the early 1980s UNITA ambushes of SWAPO convoys were a common occurrence, and all SWAPO camps, including those located outside Lubango and in Kwanza Sul, seemed increasingly vulnerable to enemy attacks.52 As setbacks mounted, developments both external and internal to SWAPO influenced how the liberation movement’s members understood and responded to their misfortune. In 1978 the South African government established its 47

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Susan Brown, “Diplomacy by Other Means,” in Colin Leys and John S. Saul, eds., Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword (London: James Currey, 1995), 27. The exact locations of all the SWAPO camps outside Lubango are noted in Annex I to “The Report of the United Nations Mission on Detainees,” October 11, 1989 (Vereinigte Evangelische Mission, Groth Collection, File No. 1335). Brown, “Diplomacy,” 30, 32; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 55. Apparently, the SADF was monitoring SWAPO radio communications to an extent that SWAPO officials did not grasp at the time (Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 55). Brown, “Diplomacy,” 27, 29; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 55. Brown, “Diplomacy,” 35; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 55.

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“The Spy” and the Camp: SWAPO in Lubango, 1980–1989 Kwanza Norte Ndalatando

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7. Kwanza Sul 8. Viana

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counterinsurgency unit Koevoet.53 Known for the reign of violence that it unleashed in northern Namibia, Koevoet pressured civilians to provide information about the activities of PLAN infiltrators and those assisting them and is likely to have heightened anxieties about South African informers entering exile. In 1980 the government extended conscription to all young men in southern Namibia to create the South West African Territorial Force (SWATF). From thenceforth PLAN found itself facing a black-and-white army. The formation of SWATF also increased the number Namibians from southern Namibia living in exile, which had expanded gradually since 1976, when students involved in mobilizing support for SWAPO and organizing strikes following the Soweto Uprising fled the country. These newcomers from the South carried many of the characteristics that marked people as different in the SWAPO camps. Many did not speak Oshiwambo but all spoke Afrikaans. Some had light skin and other physical features that differed significantly from most people already living in exile. Almost all had some education, and many were secondary school students who through schooling had been exposed to Namibians from a wide range of backgrounds and communities. The migration of Namibians fleeing conscription coincided with the development of a conflict within the SWAPO military. By 1980 PLAN had begun to respond to SADF attacks by establishing a more conventional army, transforming its small, mobile guerrilla platoons into larger units and, eventually, mechanized brigades.54 In this context there was impetus for the liberation movement not only to increase the number of combatants, but also the number of educated persons working in PLAN, which to that point had consisted primarily of exiles who were unable to access the scholarships that the international community had made available to SWAPO.55 At the same time SWAPO secretary for defense, Peter Nanyemba, placed as many as fifty secondary school–educated exiles, most of whom were from southern Namibia, at the Defence Headquarters outside Lubango.56 Nanyemba rationalized these appointments much the same way that he and others did the move of educated persons to the front more generally, that SWAPO “can no longer have an illiterate army.”57 Nonetheless, they also precipitated a conflict between the Defence Headquarters and Command Headquarters, from where PLAN coordinated military operations closer to the front.58 According to research participants stationed at both Defense and Command, Nanyemba’s appointments were threatening to officials at Command Headquarters because they 53 54 55

56 57 58

Koevoet is Afrikaans for “crowbar.” Brown, “Diplomacy,” 31; Stephanus, May 29, 2007, 5; S. Swartbooi, September 21, 2007, 19–20. E.g., most of the UNIN class of 1981 was called to the front immediately after graduation (Michael Kahuika and Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus [Interview, September 20, 2007, 2]). Pieters, September 9, 2007, 27. Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 55. The actual location of Command Headquarters shifted repeatedly in response to the war (Brown, “Diplomacy,” 31; Willy Swartbooi [Interview, December 12, 2007]; Charles Namoloh [Interview, July 9, 2008]).

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reproduced the same structures of authority that had already been established there.59 At the same time they created a stark dichotomy in the educational and regional backgrounds of the two headquarters with Defense made up primarily of educated Namibians from the South led by Nanyemba, an Ndonga, and Command consisting largely of uneducated Namibians from Ovamboland led by PLAN army commanders, Dimo Hamaambo and Solomon “Jesus” Hawala, both of whom were Kwanyama.60 By this time the Soviet Union and its allies had become actively involved in SWAPO’s conduct of the war, including maintaining the liberation movement’s security. Although the Soviet government had supported SWAPO diplomatically and militarily as early as 1964, during the late 1970s, when SWAPO shifted its operations to Angola, the personal exchanges between the liberation movement and its Soviet allies increased greatly. In addition to Soviet and Soviet allied officials interacting with SWAPO leaders in Luanda, Soviet advisors were assigned to a range of units stationed at Defence Headquarters and the Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre.61 Based in Lubango proper, they traveled to and from their homes and the SWAPO camps where they trained PLAN commanders in various fields, including organizational security.62 At the same time SWAPO members were selected to attend military training courses in Eastern bloc countries, including classes held in East Germany between 1979 and 1984 aimed at preparing military personnel for security work.63 Allegedly, persons involved in these classes were incorporated into the SWAPO security apparatus when it was established by the Central Committee under the command of Solomon Hawala in 1981.64 It is in these circumstances that the first “spies” were interrogated and detained in SWAPO’s Lubango camps. One well documented instance, involving six PLAN members from southern Namibia stationed at Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre, occurred in the middle of 1980. Told that they were being sent on a party mission, the group was led to a deep underground dugout, or 59 60

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Pieters, May 21, 2007, 3; W. Swartbooi, December 12, 2007, 8. Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 55; Pieters, May 21, 2007, 3; Andries Basson (Interview, September 22, 2007). Ndonga and Kwanyama refer to the two largest subethnic groups among the Ovambo. Basson, September 22, 2007, 18; Kahuika and Stephanus, September 20, 2007, 3–4; Pieters, May 21, 2007, 8. Basson, September 22, 2007, 18; Pieters, May 21, 2007, 8; Hunter, Die Politik, 95–6. Hunter, Die Politik, 95–6. Basson, May 30, 2007, 8, 13; Kahuika and Stephanus, September 20, 2007, 4; Hans Pieters and Willy Swartbooi (Interview, September 9, 2007, 36); Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 55–6; Hunter, Die Politik, 99. It should be noted that since at least the mid-1970s PLAN had appointed several commanders, including Jackon Kakwambi, “Pondo,” and James Hawala (no relation to Solomon “Jesus” Hawala) who were responsible for “intelligence” and “counterintelligence.” It seems that both the training and formal mandate of intelligence and counterintelligence differed from that of the new apparatus some of whose personnel had been trained in the Eastern bloc and whose responsibilities extended beyond PLAN to SWAPO in exile as a whole (Basson, May 30, 2007, 8; Nehova, April 7, 2007, 10, 12; Pieters, May 21, 2007, 2; Pieters and W. Swartbooi, September 9, 2007, 34–6; W. Swartbooi, December 12, 2007, 7).

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“dungeon,” on the outskirts of the camp where members were detained for four weeks. Detainees were later ordered to exit the dugout one by one and pressured through torture to admit that they had been sent by South Africa to spy on SWAPO. According to Oiva Alikie Angula and Hans Pieters, two of the six detained, the group was released after a delegation from the Defence Headquarters, led by its chief commissar, Tauno Hatuikulipi, intervened on behalf of the detainees, several of whom Hatuikulipi knew through their joint activities with SWAPO inside Namibia and their work as commissars in the camps. Thereafter the six learned from Hatuikulipi and some of their interrogators that they had been accused of spying by another detainee who had implicated as many as seventy others under the influence of torture.65 Clearly this group was not the only one imprisoned in Lubango on spy accusations during the early 1980s. Pieters notes that while he was detained he discovered other people accused of spying held in the same area outside Hainyeko.66 At least some of these early detainees were new exiles from southern Namibia who had been intercepted at the Karl Marx Reception Centre, tortured until they confessed to being spies, and sent to the dungeons without having entered any of SWAPO’s rear camps.67 Although most exiles were not aware of these detentions at the time, some, including friends and family of the newcomers stationed at Lubango, clearly were. For example, Andries Basson, PLAN’s chief protocol officer stationed at Defence Headquarters, indicates that he knew of Namibians arriving at the Reception Centre who then “disappeared.”68 In several meetings held at Defense during Basson’s tenure there from 1981 to 1983, the matter of disappearing people was discussed. While PLAN security officers working under Solomon Hawala acknowledged that “enemy agents” had been detained, they would not offer further details – even when these “agents” were people that Basson and Hatuikulipi (who also attended these meetings) knew from their work as SWAPO activists in southern Namibia.69 It appears that even Peter Nanyemba was excluded from information about disappearing persons. According to Basson, Nanyemba questioned security officers in meetings about how they knew that certain persons were sent by the enemy.70 Nanyemba also tabled the issue for discussion in December 1982 at a meeting of the Political Bureau, but the issue was not discussed on the premise that it should be addressed directly by “the comrades in PLAN.”71 65

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Angula, “Brutalised Innocence,” 72–84; Pieters, May 21, 2007, 1–2; Pieters, September 9, 2007, 19, 31, 35; “A Report to the Namibian People,” 16–17. Pieters, September 9, 2007, 19. Basson, May 30, 2007; September 22, 2007; Kahuika and Stephanus, September 20, 2007; Pieters, September 9, 2007; S. Swartbooi, September 21, 2007. Passing through the Reception Centre had been standard procedure for those joining SWAPO in Angola since the late 1970s although the interrogations and detentions were not. Basson, May 30, 2007; September 22, 2007. Basson, May 30, 2007, 8, 15–16; September 22, 2007, 21–2. Basson, September 22, 2007, 21. “A Report to the Namibian People,” 17.

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On April 1, 1983, on the eve of a SWAPO Central Committee meeting in which PLAN’s command structure was to be discussed, Peter Nanyemba died in a car crash.73 Namibians living in the Lubango camps who were later detained remember Nanyemba’s death as a turning point, after which people whom they knew living in those camps began to vanish.74 According to Hans Pieters, who was then working at Defence Headquarters as political editor of The Combatant, the permanent staff at Defence Headquarters was gradually arrested after Nanyemba’s death. By the mid-1980s most of its members had “disappeared.”75 Those arrested included the highest ranking officials from the Namibian South based at Defense, Andries Basson and Tauno Hatuikulipi. According to Oiva Angula on the morning of November 8, 1983, only hours after he had last seen Basson while working on guard duty at Defence Headquarters the previous night, he learned from a PLAN commander that Basson had “defected to the enemy.”76 Over the coming weeks the story of Basson’s defection was announced from Lubango camp parades and inhabitants warned that Basson could lead the South Africans to them at any time, a claim that seemed to be confirmed in December by Operation Askari, an offensive, in which the SADF bombed the SWAPO settlements outside Lubango and caused extensive damage to Defence Headquarters.77 Within weeks Hatuikulipi also disappeared. In July 1984 in an address at a Lubango parade, SWAPO President Sam Nujoma announced that Hatuikulipi had been identified by SWAPO Security as a traitor and that when apprehended he had committed suicide by swallowing a poison capsule hidden in a gold-filled tooth.78 From 1983 Namibian exiles living outside Lubango were also brought to the camps there and detained.79 In some cases, people were arrested directly by 73

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According Colin Leys and John Saul’s sources, Nanyemba hoped at this meeting “to get support for a radical reconstruction of the PLAN command structure which would have put power decisively into the hands of a reduced general staff recruited by himself” (Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 55). Some of my research participants suspect that Peter Nanyemba was assassinated. Angula, July 14, 2008; Basson, May 30, 2007; September 22, 2007; Dempers, May 23, 2007; Pieters, May 21, 2007; September 9, 2007. Pieters, September 9, 2007, 27. Angula, “Brutalised Innocence,” 88. Ibid., 88–94; Dempers, May 23, 2007, 3; Pieters, May 21, 2007, 1; September 9, 2007, 25–6. Angula, “Brutalised Innocence,” 95–6; “A Report to the Namibian People,” 15–16. The following account of the arrest, interrogation, and detention of accused spies in Lubango draws from the previously cited published histories as well as archival sources and personal interviews with ex-detainees:  Vereinigte Evangelische Mission, Groth Collection, File Nos. 1369a, 1369b, “Tagebuchaufzeichnungen”; Oiva Angula, July 14, 2008; Andries Basson, May 30, 2007; Theresia Basson, June 1, 2005; Pauline Dempers, May 23, 2007; Kala Gertze, February 21, 2007; Michael Kahuika, May 16, 2007; Michael Kahuika and Joseph Stephanus, September 20, 2007; Emma Kambangula, February 15, 2007; Willem Meyer, June 16, 2005; June 17, 2005; “I Left the Country on the 15th of November, 1976,” 1990 (unpublished manuscript, given to the author); Hans Pieters, May 21, 2007; Hans Pieters, September 9, 2007; Joseph Stephanus, May 29, 2005; May 31, 2005; September 18, 2007; Steve Swartbooi, January 29, 2007; Willy Swartbooi, December 12, 2007. Where individuals identify details that differ from the experiences narrated in all the aforementioned sources, they are cited accordingly.

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SWAPO Security. For example, a number of SWAPO officials living in Luanda and Lusaka, such as Joseph Stephanus, were captured directly. Students studying in Eastern bloc countries were arrested by the police there and flown to Luanda where they were handed to security and transported in SWAPO convoys headed to Lubango.80 Others were told through official SWAPO correspondence to return to Angola, where they were detained either after they had been sent on a mission to Lubango or immediately upon their arrival in Luanda. Among these detainees were a large number of students studying in Western countries and at UNIN in Lusaka as well as teachers working at the SWAPO-administered schools on the Isle of Youth in Cuba. In the latter cases, some disobeyed orders and left SWAPO because they had heard of people disappearing in SWAPO’s Angolan camps and wanted to avoid this fate. Many, however, elected to return, citing confidence in their ability to defend themselves against spy accusations and fear that if they did not return that they would be accused of spying and forced to leave SWAPO to support their actions. Those detained or who left SWAPO to avoid detention included a large proportion of the educated southern Namibian leaders and students living abroad.81 Namibians from the South were not the only ones who were accused and detained, however. Following Mishake Muyongo’s expulsion from SWAPO in 1980, the security apparatus detained persons from the Caprivi Region who were accused of attempting to revive CANU, a regional nationalist organization that was allegedly working with the South Africans.82 In so doing, SWAPO officials played on social tensions between exiled Caprivians and other Namibians that had emerged already during the mid-1960s when they first lived together at Kongwa camp.83 Among the detainees were also a number of prominent Ndonga officials, such as SWAPO camp chief administrator and Central Committee member Victor Nkandi, fueling theories that spy accusations were also motivated by an ethnic rivalry between Solomon Hawala and other Kwanyamas at Command Headquarters and Peter Nanyemba’s Ndonga allies. Well-educated SWAPO leaders, especially those who had received scholarships to study in the United States during the 1960s, were frequently named in accused spies’ interrogations as being responsible for leading the collaboration 80

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Before being transported to Lubango, accused spies sometimes were taken to Viana, a town and SWAPO camp located about twenty kilometers southeast of Luanda. The camp was used by a variety of SWAPO members who were traveling through Luanda en route to other locations. E.g., in preparing my master’s thesis on St. Therese, one of four secondary schools offering a standard 10 (grade 12)  education to black students in southern Namibia by 1976, I  learned that twenty-three of the twenty-seven former students who traveled into exile were detained as accused spies. One of the four who was not detained died in exile before 1980; the other three left SWAPO, apparently to avoid detention (Remembering St. Therese [Windhoek: Out of Africa, 2003]). Alex Kamwi (Interview, February 26, 2007, 3, 8–9); Pieters, September 9, 2007, 4, 19; “A Report to the Namibian People,” 20–1; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 63. For discussion of these tensions, see Chapter 3.

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with the enemy. High-ranking officials within SWAPO Security were arrested by others in the apparatus.84 And in 1988 even President Sam Nujoma’s wife, Kowambo Nujoma, and brother-in-law and Central Committee member, Aaron Muchimba, were detained in Lubango. The methods of interrogation and detention experienced by “spies” were quite consistent. Having been separated from all other camp inhabitants by armed PLAN personnel, the accused was led to a group of commanders for questioning, usually at the Karl Marx Reception Centre.85 There he or she was asked to offer an account of experiences before and since entering exile. When the accused was told that he or she had forgotten to mention his or her work as enemy agents and denied these claims, torture followed until a confession was made. Torture took place over days, and sometimes over weeks and months, and usually involved the accused being stripped naked and tied to poles while interrogators beat him or her with sticks. It was also common for accused spies to have hot water and painful ointments applied to their torture wounds, to be told to build their own graves and be buried in them until they were unconscious and to have close friends and family members living in exile threatened with death. During their ordeal some accused spies were approached individually by an interrogator who indicated that that they should fabricate a story about their collaboration with the South Africans. Those who did provide a fictional account, indicating where and when they were trained and their fellow agents (usually other Namibian exiles whom their interrogators pressured them to name), were taken to camps near to but separated from the other SWAPO settlements outside Lubango.86 (See Photo 11.) There they were detained in various dungeons with anywhere from a handful to more than one hundred others who had also been accused of spying. Movement into and out of the dungeons was restricted by their physical structure, which, at three to four meters deep, could only be entered and exited through a sink plate at one end where guards inserted a ladder. Also, the camps in which the dungeons were located had their 84

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Among the most commonly mentioned are James Hawala and “Babino” Khaibeb, who according to research participants based at Defence Headquarters and Command Headquarters, were responsible during the early 1980s for PLAN intelligence and counterintelligence (Pieters, May 21, 2007; Pieters and W. Swartbooi, September 9, 2007). Soldiers who guarded accused spies during their interrogations and led them to and from questioning did not interrogate or apply torture. There were instances in which guards tortured accused spies after their detentions, however (Pieters, September 9, 2007, 27; S. Swartbooi, September 21, 2007, 25, 38). The names and locations of the primary camps where most detainees were held are Etale (a.k.a. Etare), c. fifteen kilometers northeast of Lubango, Minya (a.k.a. Ominya, Security Prison), c. sixteen kilometers north of Lubango, and Mungakwiyu (a.k.a. Bwana’s Base), Shoombe’s Base, and Ethiopia Camp, all of which are within a kilometer of one another at least twenty kilometers, possibly twenty-five kilometers northeast of Lubango, on the edge of the Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre. Estimates are based on the “Report of the United Missions on Detainees,” conversations with ex-detainees, and a trip made by the author to Lubango in December 2007.

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Photo 11. This is a photo of a deep dugout, located roughly one kilometer from the parade ground at Tobias Hainyeko outside Lubango and taken by the author in December 2007. Some ex-detainees think that the dugout is one of the dungeons, either Mungakwiyu (a.k.a. Bwana’s Base) or Shoombe’s Base.

own commanders and guards, who ensured that detainees would not leave and outsiders would not enter the camp premises. At least twice a day inmates were permitted by guards to vacate their dungeon and use toilet facilities in the camps. Otherwise they were usually confined to their dungeon or assigned manual labor by the guards or commanders.87 Detainees took their meals in the dungeons, usually left over mealie-meal, rice, and soup that they were given once or twice daily, and slept in sacks that had carried food donated to SWAPO. With little access to ventilation, nutrition, and medical care, many suffered from poor health and died from illnesses thought to have been asthma, beriberi, cholera, and tuberculosis. Other detainees were commanded to leave the dungeons and never returned to them.88 Hundreds of persons detained in Lubango remain missing.89 87

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Women inmates detained at Minya Base usually spent the day outside their dungeons and helped with various projects. Ex-detainees narrate numerous occasions in which those imprisoned in the camps were called out and then disappeared, several of which Justine Hunter renders (Die Politik, 104–5). Ex-detainees under the aegis of the Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement published a document titled “Lists of Namibia’s ‘Missing Persons,’ ” (Windhoek: BWS, 1996). The lists name

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Who Is Responsible? Given the nature and brutality of the spy purge in SWAPO’s Lubango camps, it is not surprising that much of what has been written and said about them focuses on who is responsible. With regard to SWAPO Security there is consensus. In “A Report to the Namibian People,” an account of the Lubango spy detentions written by survivors in Angola shortly before their repatriation and Namibia’s first democratic elections in 1989,90 blame is laid, first and foremost, at the feet of SWAPO Security and its leader Solomon Hawala, “the Butcher of Lubango.”91 This analysis is supported by Colin Leys and John Saul in their 1995 chapter and by Justine Hunter in her 2008 book, both of which link the Lubango detentions with the formation of the security apparatus led by Solomon Hawala and its unchecked abuse of power.92 It is also affirmed by ex-detainee participants in my research, who detailed the involvement of known security officials in their ordeals and indicated that Hawala, specifically, had led some of their interrogations, was a regular visitor in their detention camps, and was involved in soliciting “confessions” from all detainees who were released in conjunction with the implementation of Resolution 435 in 1989. Where sources differ is in the extent to which they portray senior SWAPO political leaders as aware of and/or actively involved in supporting these abuses. For example, “A Report to the Namibian People,” emphasizes President Nujoma’s responsibility: “Despite incessant appeals by members of the Organisation, including those under detention, to the leadership of SWAPO especially its President, to act timely and decisively in resolving the [early 1980s spy] crisis through investigation, the leading clique  . . . led by Sam Nujoma utterly and deliberately [italics mine] failed to launch an investigation, thereby exacerbating the crisis to the point where no solution could be found to avert it. The problem was in fact left in the hands of the . . . so called SWAPO security.”93 The authors further maintain that the SWAPO president used Hawala and his subordinates to drive “a wedge . . . between the political leadership and the military one” as a means of securing his own power. Colin Leys, John Saul, and Justine Hunter’s writings provide another perspective. Whereas they note that Nujoma was the only person who had authority over SWAPO Security, they also suggest that SWAPO Security’s activities were beyond his control and he may have been threatened by them, an argument strengthened by the fact that Nujoma’s wife and brother-in-law were both detained.94 In a similar

90 91 92 93 94

708 people, including 554 SWAPO detainees who have not been accounted for and 93 SWAPO detainees whose deaths were witnessed by repatriated detainees. Hans Pieters (Interview, July 22, 2008). “A Report to the Namibian People,” 13, 15. Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 55–6; Hunter, Die Politik, 97–100. “A Report to the Namibian People,”13. “A Report to the Namibian People,”14; Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 56; Hunter, Die Politik, 99–100.

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contrast, “A Report” emphasizes the culpability of all SWAPO leaders for not launching an investigation to resolve the spy crisis, while Leys, Saul, and Hunter note that political leaders, especially those named during the interrogations, may have been directly threatened by it. My research participants also offer their own theories to account for the awareness and involvement of the leaders in the abuses at Lubango. Some maintain that Nujoma and/or other SWAPO leaders were fooled into believing that those detained were spies through false information planted in SWAPO by the South Africans.95 Others insist that, in addition to Solomon Hawala, there was some person or faction in the SWAPO political leadership deliberately using false claims about spies to eliminate rivals, especially those belonging to other tribes. That some senior political leaders were aware of particular people who were detained and the location of camps where detainees were held is beyond question. In late 1984 or early 1985,96 Hidipo Hamutenya, SWAPO secretary for information and publicity, visited Lubango, where he and others were involved in filming several detainees’ confessions. According to Hamutenya, he was commissioned to this task by the SWAPO Political Bureau whose members were discussing whether “all those people that were being picked up were the agents of the enemy.”97 It was thought that as secretary for information and publicity, he and others trained in recording and filmmaking “should go record these people, put their voice on tape  . . . so people are able to judge whether they were indeed credible.”98 Those whose stories were recorded during Hamutenya’s visit recall being pressured to reproduce their confessions in front of either him or other members of his entourage.99 Ex-detainees also remember visits by three other members of the Political Bureau, President Sam Nujoma, Secretary of Defence (after Nanyemba’s death) Peter Mueshihange, and Administrative Secretary Moses Garoeb, each of whom addressed them at the parade ground.100 Of particular significance to many ex-detainees is President Nujoma’s April 21, 1986 visit, which they remember as the first time that they saw Nujoma at one of the detention camps. 95

96 97 98 99 100

One piece of evidence supporting this claim that merits further scrutiny is “Spies from Nowhere,” an article published in Times of Namibia (November 23, 1990). Therein the author offers an account of how the South African government planted false information about spies in SWAPO. The article is based on the testimony of a Cuban officer who liaised between SWAPO, Angolan, and Cuban forces in Angola and later defected to a Western country. Hidipo Hamutenya (Interview, April 2, 2008, 5); Groth, The Wall of Silence, 115. Hamutenya, April 2, 2008, 7. Ibid., 6. Basson, September 22, 2007, 27; Groth, The Wall of Silence, 115. Basson, September 22, 2007, 27; Kahuika and Stephanus, September 20, 2007, 11–13; Meyer, “I Left the Country on the 15th of November, 1976,” 3; Stephanus, September 18, 2007, 38; S.  Swartbooi, September 21, 2007, 31; Angula, “Brutalised Innocence,” 152–3; Groth, Wall of Silence, 107; Trewhela, “A Namibian Horror,” 89–90. According to the latter source, Sam Nujoma and Peter Mueshihange were accompanied on one of their visits by Peter Tsheehama, SWAPO Representative to Central Africa, and Ananias Angula.

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“The Spy” and the Camp: SWAPO in Lubango, 1980–1989

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Oiva Angula’s narration of Nujoma’s speech delivered at Mungakwiyu, a camp located just outside the Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre, closely resembles the accounts of others who were present on that occasion: When Nujoma arrived in the company of Hawala and senior security officers, the whole atmosphere was tense. We were made to line up a hundred meters from the dungeons. . . . The SWAPO leader stepped forward . . . , “Viva SWAPO! Viva PLAN! . . . I greet you in the name of the Mandumes, the Witboois, the Mahereros and the Ipumbus that you have betrayed. . . .101 When Namibia is freed, SWAPO will parade you at Freedom Square. The Namibian people will decide what to do with you.” Before the SWAPO leader could finish . . . some detainees raised their hands. “Can I ask the President a question?” a detainee said. “No, it’s no time for questions” [a commander] intervened. . . . Hawala then motioned Nujoma that it was time to go. They left unceremoniously.102

For some ex-detainees this speech was a turning point in their understanding of their detention. Whereas previously many imagined that President Nujoma was unaware of what was happening in Lubango and that, once he knew, he would intervene on detainees’ behalfs, Nujoma’s 1986 visit and subsequent ones disabused them of this hope. Nonetheless, it seems likely that there were limits to what SWAPO leaders knew of happenings in Lubango. Hamutenya indicates that he visited the detention camps only once, on which occasion he met only a few detainees and did not visit the places where they were imprisoned.103 Based on ex-detainees’ testimonies, it may be that Nujoma visited only a fraction of the total number detained, and he might never have seen the dungeons.104 There is no evidence that SWAPO political leaders were part of the interrogation of accused spies. Security appears to have maintained some contact with political leaders, at least with President Sam Nujoma, but the dispersal of information may have been limited. Certainly, its content remains opaque. Even Solomon Hawala is unlikely to have known about all the activities of SWAPO Security members. In the case of Pieters’s and Angula’s four-week detention outside Tobias Hainyeko some months before the new SWAPO Security under Solomon Hawala was formally established, the matter appears to have been resolved when Tauno Hatuikulipi intervened with “Lawrence,” the nom de guerre of the man responsible for security at Tobias Hainyeko camp. Although the interrogation and detention methods used on this occasion resemble those experienced by detainees throughout the 1980s, Pieters 101 102

103 104

These are prominent figures in the early resistance to colonial rule in Namibia. Angula, “Brutalised Innocence,” 137–8. See also Groth, Wall of Silence, 125; Trewhela, “A Namibian Horror,” 89–90; Gertze, February 21, 2007, 6; Kahuika and Stephanus, September 20, 2007, 11–13; S. Swartbooi, September 21, 2007, 30–1. Hamutenya, April 2, 2008, 5, 6. Gertze, February 21, 2007, 6; S.  Swartbooi, September 21, 2007, 30–1. For Nujoma’s own account of spies within SWAPO, an account that avoids all contextual detail about when, where, and how so-called spies were detained, see Where Others Wavered, 356–7.

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doubts that Solomon Hawala or any security officials outside Hainyeko were aware of his 1980 detention.105 Even after Hawala became the head of SWAPO Security in 1981, he did not live primarily in Lubango, but rather at Command Headquarters near the front, where he was responsible for coordinating day-today operations of PLAN.106 He could not easily know what all of these officials were doing while he was at the front, let alone more junior personnel responsible for maintaining security in particular camps. Although such ambiguities make it difficult to apportion blame for what transpired in SWAPO’s Lubango camps, they are critically important for understanding how a spy discourse achieved its power there. In the camps, where inhabitants were at constant risk of South African violence and reliant on commanders to access information and other resources, senior SWAPO officials need not have naively believed in or knowingly manipulated a story about spies to create conditions for a purge. They need only have drawn attention to the threat of spies and played on exiles’ fears of who these spies could be and the methods that they might be using. In turn, some officials used spy accusations to eliminate potential rivals, and whole categories of Namibians became associated with spying. But officials could never entirely contain the ambiguity of “the spy” and the possibility that they too would become victims of its invisible power.

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Pieters and W. Swartbooi, September 9, 2007, 35. Basson, May 21, 2007, 8; Pieters, September 9, 2007, 21.

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6 Namibia’s “Wall of Silence”: Challenging National History in the International System

Between December 1988, when the Geneva Accords set provisions for the implementation of UN Resolution 435, and November 1989, when Namibia’s first democratic elections were held, SWAPO members vacated their camps in exile and repatriated en masse to Namibia.1 Far from leaving the camps behind, however, exiles carried experiences and histories of them into the new nation. No camp histories have proven more volatile than those that involve detention and other forms of violence perpetrated by SWAPO officials on fellow Namibians. Although such histories have entered public discourse at various points in time, they have penetrated it most forcefully on three occasions. First, during the mid-1980s, relatives of Namibians who had seemingly disappeared in exile (later known as “the Committee of Parents”) began to correspond with people abroad who were following developments in Namibia’s liberation struggle. The knowledge generated by these and other exchanges eventually compelled SWAPO to make a public statement pertaining to the detention of accused spies in its camps. At a press conference in London in February 1986, SWAPO announced that it was detaining a “South African spy network numbering at least 100 people” but denied that “SWAPO camps are concentration camps,” decrying such rumors as “a well calculated campaign organized by South Africa.”2 In the middle of 1989, as Namibian exiles began to repatriate, stories about the SWAPO camps captured headlines again. In May of that year, journalists from around the world traveled to Lubango and met with 199 SWAPO members who had been detained in neighboring camps. Although threatened by SWAPO officials to remain quiet, some of this 1

2

Most exiles repatriated to Namibia in the middle of 1989. In a few locations where Namibian youth were schooling, exiles remained abroad into the early 1990s. The Namibian, February 21, 1986. The article has been copied in National Society for Human Rights (NSHR), “Critical Analysis: SWAPO’s ‘Book of the Dead’ ” (Windhoek: NSHR, 1996), Appendix A.

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group (referred to widely as “the ex-detainees”) took the journalists’ visit as an opportunity to share their stories – of torture, forced confession, and imprisonment by SWAPO’s security branch, and of the murder and disappearance of hundreds of comrades. Finally, in 1995 and 1996 controversial camp histories entered public discourse again following the publication of Siegfried Groth’s book, Namibia  – The Wall of Silence.3 Although the book’s content was not new to those following developments in Namibia’s liberation struggle, its release in Namibia sparked the formation of the Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement, a human rights organization committed to voicing the experiences of all SWAPO ex-detainees and to promoting “national reconciliation” in Namibia. This chapter focuses on these three moments through the knowledge production of three groups at the center of them  – the Committee of Parents, the Lubango ex-detainees, and the Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement. Each group challenged SWAPO’s official history of exile by dispersing contrasting evidence and an alternative narrative amongst a wide range of people in Namibia and abroad. At the same time, this alternative and those who have articulated it remain widely stigmatized. This stigmatization has resulted not only from SWAPO leaders who, as previous literature emphasizes,4 have denied responsibility for violence that they or their organization perpetrated, but also from an international system wherein certain kinds of histories are readily accepted and others are easily dismissed. “The camp” is a powerful signifier in this system, drawing attention to “humanitarian crises” and “human rights abuses” suffered by an exiled nation while obscuring violent conflicts among exiles, who were shaped by conditions in camps. By tracing the production 3 4

Siegfried Groth, Namibia: The Wall of Silence (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1995). Erica Thiro-Beukes, Attie Beukes, and Hewat Beukes, A Struggle Betrayed (Rehoboth:  Akasia Drukkery, 1986); Committee of Parents, “Report on SWAPO Leadership Abuses” (Windhoek:  Committee of Parents, 1987); Nico Basson and Ben Motinga, eds., Call Them Spies: A Documentary Account of the SWAPO Spy Drama (Windhoek: Africa Communications Project, 1989); Paul Trewhela, “SWAPO and the Churches: An International Scandal,” Searchlight South Africa 7 (1991):  65–88; Inside Quatro:  Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Auckland Park:  Jacana, 2009); Phillip Steenkamp, “The Churches,” in Colin Leys and John S. Saul eds., Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword (London:  James Currey, 1995), 94–114; Lauren Dobell, “Silence in Context:  Truth and/or Reconciliation in Namibia,” Journal of Southern African Studies 23, no. 2 (1997):  371–82; Colin Leys and John S. Saul, “Lubango and After: ‘Forgotten History’ as Politics in Namibia,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 2 (2003):  300–25; Justine Hunter, Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia: Umgang mit schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen der Ära des bewaffneten Befreiungskampfes, 1966 bis 1989 (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2008); “No Man’s Land of Time:  Reflections on the Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Namibia,” in Gary Baines, ed., Beyond the Border War:  New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late Cold War Conflicts (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2008), 302–21; “Dealing with the Past in Namibia: Getting the Balance Right between Justice and Sustainable Peace?,” in André Du Pisani, Reinhart Kössler, and William A. Lindeke, eds., The Long Aftermath of War – Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia (Freiburg: Arnold Bergstraesser Institut, 2010), 403–33.

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of camp histories in relation to the international system, the chapter focuses attention not primarily on an organization and individuals who abused others’ human rights but rather on a constellation of social entities, which, in the name of protecting human rights, allowed a liberation movement to violate its own people. The Committee of Parents The Committee of Parents formed amidst the global circulation of knowledge about the detention of accused spies in SWAPO’s Lubango camps. The key event that hastened this circulation and the committee’s formation was the Lusaka Conference of May 1984. Organized as part of the ongoing negotiations between South Africa, Namibia’s South Africa endorsed government, and SWAPO over Namibian independence,5 the conference drew together representatives from SWAPO’s exiled and internal wings. In the course of the conference proceedings, some exiles shared stories with Namibians coming from home about the disappearance of SWAPO members in the movement’s Lubango camps, the imprisonment and torture of people there, and exiles’ fears of SWAPO’s security apparatus.6 Among those who listened to these stories in Lusaka was Attie Beukes. Attie worked at the Development Office at the Council of Churches of Namibia (CCN) where he supervised Erica Beukes (no family relation), whose brother, Walter Thiro, had traveled into exile during the late 1970s.7 When Attie returned to Namibia, he shared what he had learned with Erica, including news that her brother was among those thought to be detained.8 In turn, Erica approached several pastors and early SWAPO leader Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, who had recently been set free after eighteen years at South Africa’s Robben Island Prison.9 At the same time, she also began to share stories openly among colleagues at the CCN office in Windhoek, and people there and elsewhere

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From September 1975 the South African government initiated negotiations aimed at achieving an “internal” political settlement for South West Africa/Namibia that could be promoted internationally as “independence.” At the same time, the United Nations attempted to engage South Africa in negotiations aimed at a political transition that would be acceptable to the international community. In May 1984, at the behest of U.S. and frontline state governments, parties working within the framework of South Africa’s internal settlement held talks with SWAPO in Lusaka. The talks failed to resolve the Namibia issue. See Hildegard Pütz, Paul and Sandra Caplan, and Ralph and Adeline von Egidy, eds., Namibia Handbook and Political Who’s Who (Windhoek: The Magnus Company, 1989), 42. Thiro-Beukes et al., A Struggle Betrayed, 27–8; Committee of Parents, “Report,” 5; Erica Beukes (Interviews, March 10, 2007, 3–4; May 13, 2008, 11). E. Beukes, March 10, 2007, 3–4. Ibid., 11. Thiro-Beukes et al., A Struggle Betrayed, 28–9; Committee of Parents, “Report,” 6–7; E. Beukes, May 13, 2008, 12.

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began to contact her, asking her what she knew and telling her what they had heard and who might have more information.10 In some respects, the conversations in which Attie and Erica Beukes participated following the Lusaka Conference must have resembled others in Namibia at that time. Apparently, several Namibians approached local pastors and SWAPO’s internal leadership following the conference to discuss what they had learned there.11 There were also other social networks inside Namibia discussing what they had heard about the SWAPO camps independently of conference participants,12 and Erica Beukes was surprised to learn what some people had heard about SWAPO detentions years earlier.13 Nevertheless, the group of people and body of knowledge collecting around Attie and Erica Beukes in 1984 and 1985 was particularly significant. Within a few months of the Lusaka Conference, the Beukeses had become a hub for information about exiles then “disappearing” in Angola and a point of reference for others living in Namibia who were already discussing what was happening there. The Beukeses’ position at the CCN clearly facilitated these developments. Attie and Erica’s CCN offices provided a central and relatively protected space where Namibians living in, or passing through, Windhoek could share their stories. Also, the CCN was the primary institutional site through which foreign donors channeled funds to SWAPO-affiliated projects in Namibia during the 1980s, and the organization linked the Beukeses to a range of people involved in resisting South African rule at home and abroad who worked with the CCN.14 In this process of collecting and dispersing knowledge, Erica and Attie Beukes’ CCN fundraising trip to Western Europe in February and March 1985 proved especially important. At a distance from Southern Africa’s wars, Erica and Attie met with Namibian exiles who had made their way to Europe and with Europeans following events in Namibia. One crucial source of information was Siegfried Groth, a German pastor.15 Since 1961 Groth had represented 10 11 12

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14

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E. Beukes, March 10, 2007, 4; May 13, 2008, 12. Thiro-Beukes et al., A Struggle Betrayed, 28–9. See, e.g., Julia Thomas’s account of receiving a letter from Maria “Amies” Isaacks about close friends and family who had disappeared in Angola as discussed in Chapter 7. E. Beukes, March 10, 2007, 4; May 13, 2008, 12–13. I have also heard other accounts of people in Namibia discussing rumors of happenings in SWAPO’s Angolan camps in the early 1980s from sources who would prefer to remain anonymous. The CCN was founded in 1978 following the move of most of Namibia’s churches to oppose South African rule in Namibia. During the 1980s many office bearers in SWAPO’s internal leadership were employed at the CCN. There are two published sources that describe Groth’s relationship to Namibia and its exile community in detail. These are Groth’s book, Namibia: The Wall of Silence, and a book written by Groth’s former colleague, Klaus Gockel, Mission und Apartheid: Aus der Arbeit der Rheinischen Missionsgesellschaft (RMG bis 1971)  bzw. der Vereinigten Evangelischen Mission (VEM ab 1971) in der Zeit nach dem 2. Weltkrieg bis zur Unabhängigkeit Namibias (Wuppertal: Archivund Museumstiftung VEM, 2006). In addition, the Siegfried Groth Collection at the VEM has an extensive record of Groth’s correspondences with Namibians and of his experiences in Africa, some of which I cite in the following text.

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the Vereinigte Evangelische Mission (VEM), a German missionary society, to Namibia’s Lutheran churches,16 and since 1971 Groth had been commissioned by the VEM’s partner churches in Namibia to minister to thousands of their members living in exile. Despite the fact that Groth, like most foreign pastors, was not permitted to work in SWAPO-administered camps following the liberation movement’s 1976 conflict, he did travel annually to Zambia (and frequently also to Botswana) to meet with Namibian exiles there, some of whom had left SWAPO.  By the time Siegfried Groth and Erica Beukes met on March 15, 1985, Groth had amassed an extensive archive about conflicts within SWAPO in exile and of the wide-scale disappearance of Namibians in SWAPO’s Lubango camps, and he would share much of this information with her in regular correspondence over the following year.17 As 1985 progressed, Erica and Attie Beukes, together with family members of other missing exiles, wrote to many organizations supporting SWAPO, sharing evidence of how the Namibian liberation movement was abusing power in its camps and urging its allies to intervene. On May 9 and May 16, 1985 they sent telexes to UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar requesting a meeting but received no reply.18 On June 2, they issued a memorandum, signed by 132 persons, to the leaders of all the large Christian denominations in Namibia detailing information the families had gathered about happenings in exile and demanding a meeting with church leaders.19 On July 9, the families sent a similar detailed account to a variety of church and solidarity organizations that were supporting SWAPO overseas.20 And on September 20, following a meeting with Namibian church officials who seemed unprepared to press SWAPO on the issue, the families distributed a new series of letters to an even broader audience, wherein they openly criticized the SWAPO leadership and called for an international investigation of the camps.21 In all this correspondence, 16

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18 19

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The VEM was previously the Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft, the main mission society working in southern Namibia from the early nineteenth century. It has been estimated that 90 percent or more of Namibia’s population belongs to a Christian church (e.g., Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 11), and the Lutheran Church is the largest denomination in Namibia. Groth, Wall of Silence, 141; E. Beukes, March 10, 2007. In fact, Beukes and Groth had known one another since the 1960s when Beukes was training to become a nurse in Germany, and they were again in contact during the late 1970s when the VEM administered a scholarship for her to study in the United Kingdom. Thiro-Beukes et al., A Struggle Betrayed, 31; Committee of Parents, “Report,” 8. Ailonga Collection, File Name: “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy,” “Memorandum, Junie 1985, Aan die Namibiaanse Kerkleiers.” “Memorandum from Mothers and Relatives of Namibian Refugees to Solidarity Groups in Namibia on July 9, 1985,” in Basson and Motinga, Call Them Spies, 43. N.B. The documents cited in this chapter from Call Them Spies have been typed into Basson and Motinga’s text. Where possible I have checked Basson and Motinga’s version of a document against the original or a photocopy. Basson and Motinga, Call Them Spies, 44–6. Recipients of these letters included Sam Nujoma, Eduardo dos Santos, Kenneth Kaunda, and Fidel Castro, the presidents of SWAPO, Angola, Zambia, and Cuba, respectively.

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authors drew heavily on the language of human rights, detailing “atrocities” and “abuses” and emphasizing the victims’ legal status as “refugees” and, therefore, as “innocent life.” Even the name with which the group signed its messages, “the Committee of Parents,” appealed to the shared human emotions of interlocutors, drawing attention away from the politics of the warring parties and toward a tragedy with which any parent should empathize.22 Nevertheless, even as the Committee of Parents presented evidence to advocate for an investigation of human rights abuses in SWAPO’s camps, the committee found itself up against arguments that privileged alternative interpretations of human rights and their moral imperatives. According to one dominant line of thought, supporting SWAPO was critical to supporting human rights, because SWAPO represented the Namibian people, whose rights had been violated by colonialism and apartheid.23 Thus accusations of abuses committed by SWAPO in its camps were, in fact, a threat to human rights because they undermined the movement capable of protecting these rights by liberating Namibia from colonial rule. Central to this argument were descriptions of the SWAPO camps. Repeatedly, solidarity groups, aid agencies, and church leaders offered glowing reports about the schools, clinics, and other “humanitarian work” that SWAPO was doing on behalf of Namibians in its camps. And organizations used these reports as evidence that SWAPO would govern an independent Namibia humanely. Such representations of the camps, and of the human rights imperatives surrounding them, were far more palatable to most organizations following Southern African affairs during the 1980s than those presented by the Committee of Parents. And camp discourse offers an important context for understanding how SWAPO responded to organizations alleging that the liberation movement was committing human rights violations. On February 16, 1986 SWAPO held a press conference in London at which Theo-Ben Gurirab and Hidipo Hamutenya, SWAPO’s foreign relations secretary and secretary for information, respectively, announced that the movement had uncovered a “South African spy network, numbering at least 100 people.” As they explained, SWAPO was revealing this information in response to “a well calculated campaign organized by South Africa, saying that SWAPO camps are concentration camps” and that “SWAPO was involved in ‘fascist’ activities against Namibian refugees.” In framing the press release in this manner, Gurirab and Hamutenya invoked a report recently published by the Internationalle Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte (IGFM), a Frankfurt-based human rights organization, that 22

23

To maintain its identity as an organization, many of those most involved in the Committee of Parents, such as Attie and Erica’s husband, Hewatt, never signed its letters because they were not “blood family” of any persons who had disappeared in exile (Beukes, May 13, 2008, 12). As Jan Eckel argues in “Utopie der Moral: Kalkül der Macht,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009): 437–84, the 1970s were a turning point in the use of human rights as a moral discourse internationally, and the antiapartheid movement was an important node for the emerging discourse of human rights.

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had described SWAPO’s exile settlements as “concentration camps.”24 In turn, the SWAPO officials used this sensational and improbable accusation to dismiss the IGFM’s claims. As Gurirab and Hamutenya noted, referring to SWAPO camps as concentration camps contradicted another, well-established view, according to which SWAPO camps were exemplary refugee camps, for which SWAPO had received accolades for its humanitarian work on behalf of Namibians. These points could be corroborated by “Swedish, Norwegian and German teachers and nurses” who were “working with the refugees.” It was understandable, the officials reasoned, that SWAPO was detaining individuals whom it learned had been spying for South Africa, and a film was screened in which accused spies “confessed” to their spying activities as evidence that SWAPO was responding to the situation responsibly.25 SWAPO had not “become fascist against [its] own people” and remained “committed to human rights.”26 Despite evidence then circulating widely among SWAPO supporters that disputed Gurirab and Hamutenya’s camp representations, none raised critical questions in the media following SWAPO’s press release. And, ten days later, when the Committee of Parents released its own press statement, offering for the first time a public account of its history and a critique of the SWAPO press release, the group found itself isolated from allies that many of its members had previously had as SWAPO supporters. Setbacks to the organization and its leaders were immediate and harsh. In March, Erica and Attie Beukes were dismissed from their CCN jobs. Shortly thereafter, Oxfam Great Britain removed funding from a township teaching project that Erica Beukes had been coordinating. In May, pamphlets were distributed in Windhoek townships labeling members of the Committee of Parents “traitors” and calling on Namibians to “Stay Away from South Africa’s Poison!” In August, Erica Beukes’s house was fire bombed.27 Repeatedly, attacks on the Committee of Parents were justified through humanitarian appeals and depictions of camps. As the SWAPO Women’s Council emphasized in its response to the committee in early March 1986, “It was because of these sorts of people that close to 800 Namibians 24

25

26 27

IGFM, “Namibia:  Human Rights in Conflict” (Frankfurt am Main:  IGFM, 1985). One of the editors of this report, Willy Lützenkirchen, published an article on the topic of SWAPO’s human rights abuses in the newspaper Mannheimer Morgen on April 17, 1985. See Tor Sellström, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, Vol. 2: Solidarity and Assistance (Uppsala: Noriska Afrikainstitutet, 2002), 334. The IGFM report was first published in German in 1985 shortly after Lützenkirchen’s article. The report was published in English translation in February 1986, the same month as the SWAPO press release. The film screened in London was part of a longer film that had, in fact, been screened previously among exiled Namibians, including a gathering of hundreds of SWAPO members at the UN Institute for Namibia in Lusaka on March 4, 1985. Hidipo Hamutenya was involved in creating this film and offers an account of its creation in our interview (Hidipo Hamutenya [Interview, April 2, 2008]), to which I refer in Chapter 5. The Namibian, February 21, 1986. Trewhela, “SWAPO and the Churches,” 75–6; E. Beukes, May 13, 2008, 14.

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were killed during the Cassinga raid. . . . Is it justified in your eyes that so many Namibians be killed because of your brother, sister or relative that sells out?”28 Similarly, internal SWAPO’s information and publicity secretary, Mokganedi Thlabanello, responded to the committee by drawing attention to its alleged “lack of concern about the plight facing numerous Namibian children” and disinterest in “children and parents” killed during “South African raids on SWAPO camps in Zambia and Angola, including Cassinga.” “Where was the Committee of Parents then? he asked.”29 Even as the Committee of Parents was being discredited in this manner, SWAPO invited certain international organizations to visit its camps and to produce new reports that responded directly to the allegations that SWAPO was violating human rights there. Although SWAPO allies produced reports responding to abuse allegations from as early as 1985,30 none received more attention than that of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). On February 16, 1987, the LWF, the Namibian churches, and SWAPO held a meeting in Geneva during which the Committee of Parents’ September 1985 letters were discussed, and the LWF accepted an offer by SWAPO President, Sam Nujoma, to visit the SWAPO camps.31 Later that year, from December 1 to 6, a delegation of six LWF members32 traveled to Angola where they spoke to representatives of SWAPO, the Angolan government, and the Christian Council of Angola in Luanda and visited Kwanza Sul, a camp composed primarily of women, children, and elderly persons located in the Angolan province of the same name. On March 24, 1988, the delegation issued a report about its trip, which stated that the delegation was “unable to substantiate the allegations” made by the Committee of Parents but that it did observe 28 29 30

31

32

“Swapo Women’s Council Rejects Parents Committee,” The Namibian, March 7, 1986. “Swapo Hits Back over Atrocity Allegations,” The Windhoek Advertiser, April 14, 1986. E.g., in June 1985 Roland Axelsson of the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) in Lusaka traveled to SWAPO’s Nyango camp on behalf of the humanitarian agency and presented a report on the camp that was then used by SIDA representatives to discredit Lützenkirchen’s article. Apparently, SIDA also attempted to visit Kwanza Sul at this time but could not due to security restrictions, resulting from escalating UNITA violence in that region (Sellström, Sweden and National Liberation, 334). Later that year, “435,” a Lutheran church affiliated solidarity group in West Germany, sent members to visit Nyango and issued a report condemning the IGFM’s claim that Nyango was “a concentration camp” (document in the author’s possession). Lutheran World Information (LWI), “LWF Delegation to Angola Submits Report on December Visit to Namibian Refugee Settlements,” 11 (1988): 11–12; “Report in The Namibian, February 20, 1987,” in Basson and Motinga, Call Them Spies, 59–60. The delegations’ members included Reverend Ruth Blazer of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada, Olle Eriksson of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, Hanne Sophie Greve of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Norway, Reverend Helmut Jehle of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria, Bodil Sollig of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, and Dr. Ishmael Noko, director of the LWF Department of Church Cooperation (LWI, “LWF Delegation,” 11). Apparently, the VEM had requested that Siegfried Groth be included in the delegation, but this was not possible due to the SWAPO leadership’s mistrust of him (Groth, Wall of Silence, 163).

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the efficiency with which Kwanza Sul was administered, its effective system for distributing food, and the quality of health services and pastoral care provided there. The report admits that Namibian exiles “accused of major crimes such as espionage are not . . . tried by the civilian but by the military courts” and “that these courts were not at Kwanza Sul.”33 It might have further added that the focal point of the alleged human rights abuses was not Kwanza Sul but Lubango, where PLAN maintained its headquarters hundreds of kilometers away. Despite such caveats, stated and unstated, SWAPO supporters made bold claims on the basis of the report. In his oft-cited response, LWF President Gunner Staalsett indicates that “the report made clear that the accusations of human rights abuses were not substantiated” and that “those who have levelled the accusations against SWAPO” were “part of the on-going South African propaganda war aimed at discrediting the liberation movements.”34 With such statements being made by widely respected sources, based on eyewitness accounts, the Committee of Parents struggled to respond persuasively. And, ironically, in its attempts to do so, committee members played into the hands of those determined to discredit them. Even before the organization went public, the Committee of Parents was making statements in its written correspondence that exceeded what it could establish through documentary evidence or persuasive argument. For example, the committee wrote in at least two of its September 1985 letters that it suspected SWAPO Administrative Secretary Moses Garoeb and Secretary for Information and Publicity Hidipo Hamutenya to be “agents of South Africa.”35 Apparently a response to the role these two leaders played in filming and screening films of accused spies,36 it was not supported with evidence and was rejected by influential individuals reading the committee’s letters.37 Then, in June 1986 Erica, Hewat (Erica’s husband), and Attie Beukes published A Struggle Betrayed, a book, that, according to the Committee of Parents’ February 26 press release, would “provide irrefutable proof that the SWAPO leadership is trying to cover up the sordid 33 34 35

36

37

LWI, “LWF Delegation,” 11. Ibid., 11–12. “Letter to Sam Nujoma, 20 September 1985,” “Letter from the Committee of Parents to the Secretary General of the UN, 20 September 1985,” in Basson and Motinga, Call Them Spies, 44–5. As previously noted, Hamutenya was both involved in filming detained spies at SWAPO’s Lubango camps and in screening some of this film at SWAPO’s February 16 press briefing. The film was also screened elsewhere in Europe thereafter and, apparently, both Hamutenya and Moses Garoeb were involved in these screenings (Leys and Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 340). See, e.g., the reply of the general secretary of the CCN, Abisai Shejavali, to the president of the World Council of Churches, Ninan Koshy, regarding the Committee of Parents, wherein Shejavali refers to the Committee of Parents’ claims about Hamutenya and Garoeb as “pure fabricated propaganda” (Ailonga Collection, File Name: “Articles, Cuttings,” letter from Abisai Shejavali to Ninan Koshy, December 23, 1985).

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truth.”38 Although the book’s ninety-two pages of documents demonstrate that the Committee of Parents possessed considerable evidence about happenings in the camps at this time, the accompanying text makes unreferenced and pejorative statements about SWAPO leaders and their allies that, when challenged, had the potential to discredit the committee’s authority to make any claims about happenings in the camps at all. Moreover, much of the documentary evidence published in the book had been stolen from Siegfried Groth’s office during a second trip to Europe that Attie Beukes took in September and October 1985.39 This material, including letters written by exiles addressed to family members and church leaders in Namibia and Siegfried Groth’s record of his conversations with Erica Beukes, offers some of the most persuasive evidence of abuses then occurring in SWAPO camps and of the organizations then aware of them. The material’s publication, however, may have impaired Groth’s ability to influence the UNHCR, Amnesty International, the LWF, the VEM, and the Namibian church leaders, all of which he had been informing about the abuses in SWAPO camps and hoped would influence the SWAPO leadership to change course.40 At the same time, members of the Committee of Parents were making associations that gave its critics new ammunition. Shortly after the committee’s February 26 press release, it received an invitation from the IGFM to visit its offices in Frankfurt. Although the committee declined the invitation due to concern about the IGFM’s “right wing links,” three of its members traveled with the IGFM’s support to West Germany and Britain, attending a conference on March 27 on human rights abuses in Namibia. Thereafter, the IGFM became a primary vehicle through which committee members’ knowledge of abuses within SWAPO camps was disseminated internationally. At the same time, the involvement with the IGFM was used repeatedly to link the Committee of Parents with South Africa and Western powers more interested in pursuing a Cold War agenda than pressuring the apartheid government. Moreover, it precipitated a split between those who opposed working with the IGFM, centered around the committee’s de facto leader Erica Beukes, and those who participated in the IGFM meetings: Stella Maria Boois, Stella Gaes, 38

39

40

Thiro-Beukes et al., A Struggle Betrayed. The announcement of the book’s pending release was printed in the Windhoek Observer (“SWAPO is Accused of Crimes and Abuse,” March 1, 1986). The article has been copied in Thiro-Beukes et al., A Struggle Betrayed, 77. E. Beukes, March 10, 2007, 5–6; Groth, Wall of Silence, 144. Attie Beukes spent part of October 1985 with Siegfried Groth at the VEM in Wuppertal. According to Erica Beukes, during the visit Attie encouraged Groth to make the information that Groth had more widely accessible, including records from meetings with Namibian exiles, which Groth had promised would remain confidential. When Groth refused to change his course, Attie took the files, which he was able to access directly from Groth’s office, where Groth had provided Attie with a space to work. There is a variety of evidence of Groth’s correspondence with these people and organizations in the Siegfried Groth Collection at the VEM. Some of this material was reproduced in Thiro-Beukes, A Struggle Betrayed, 93–106.

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and Talida Schmidt. In turn the latter three established their own committee, “the Parents’ Committee,” which operated separately from the Committee of Parents although the names of the two became conflated in many subsequent publications.41 Why would members of the Committee of Parents/Parents’ Committee make dubious assertions and affiliations when they could offer so much evidence to support their basic claim that widespread human rights abuses were occurring inside SWAPO camps? Again, it is important to consider the committee from the perspective of the international system. In the mid-1980s relatives of Namibian exiles gathered extensive knowledge about violence perpetrated on Namibians in SWAPO camps. In turn, they attempted to make that knowledge widely known and socially acceptable by approaching various leaders, above all, SWAPO’s most accessible and influential ally: the churches. When the churches and others would not accommodate them, these families were compelled to take increasingly drastic measures: communicating directly with the leaders of institutions and governments overseas, challenging the moral authority of those who did not respond to them, and aligning with former enemies who were willing to give them a platform from which to expound their knowledge. However, without prominent SWAPO members or supporters standing up for the committee members’ bona fides and without the capacity to enter the camps, these efforts further distanced them from SWAPO and the organizations they most wished to influence. This is not to say that the Committee of Parents/Parents Committee had no effect. With information provided by members of the committees, Siegfried Groth, and the IGFM, Amnesty International published a report on SWAPO human rights abuses in 1987. Although UN Secretary General De Cuellar had not responded to previous pleas made by the Committee of Parents and IGFM, he did respond to Amnesty and raised concerns with SWAPO President Sam Nujoma, resulting in a public debate over how to gain more information about SWAPO’s alleged abuses. In 1989, when plans were made for implementing Resolution 435, the release of “the SWAPO 100” was an issue of international concern. More than that, the news of the Committee of Parents/Parents’ Committee made its way to the detention sites outside Lubango where “spies” were being held. According to some sources, knowledge that there were people whom they knew and trusted working on their behalf was a source of hope. Nonetheless, the Committee of Parents/Parents’ Committee and its claims 41

E. Beukes, May 13, 2008, 14–15; Phil Ya Nangoloh (Interview, February 19, 2007, 5–6). At the time the Committee of Parents formed, Phil Ya Nangoloh was living in the United States. There he began corresponding with the Committee of Parents, sharing with the committee his experiences as an exile in Zambia during the mid-1970s. Following his return to Namibia in late 1986, Ya Nangoloh became the spokesperson for the Parents’ Committee and at independence formed the National Society for Human Rights (Ya Nangoloh, February 19, 2007; Phil Ya Nangoloh, “A Foreign Education – Angola, USSR, USA,” in Colin Leys and Susan Brown, eds., Histories of Namibia: Living through the Liberation Struggle [London: Merlin Press, 2005], 111–24).

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remained stigmatized throughout the late 1980s. As a result, it was unable to garner support for an investigation of SWAPO’s camps that might have challenged the national narrative so readily accepted by most of SWAPO’s members and international supporters. The Lubango Ex-Detainees Between May and July 1989 the axis of debate about human rights abuses in SWAPO camps shifted. According to the provisions for Namibian independence outlined in UN Resolution 435, both South Africa and SWAPO were obliged to release their political prisoners prior to UN supervised elections. On May 25, 1989, less than six months prior to the November election date specified by the Geneva Accord, an entourage of international journalists, Angolan government officials, and SWAPO members, led by Secretary General Andimba Toivo Ya Toivo, Administrative Secretary Moses Garoeb, Secretary of Defence Peter Mueshihange, and PLAN Deputy Commander Solomon “Jesus” Hawala, traveled to the camps outside Lubango to confirm the release of SWAPO’s “ex-detainees.”42 (See Photo 12.) The entourage drove first to a camp near the Old Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre about fifteen kilometers northeast of Lubango, where they met a group of about one hundred women and children. After assembling and greeting the visitors in chorus, the group was addressed by Toivo Ya Toivo, who announced that he was accompanied by journalists who would like to interview them.43 According to Pauline Dempers, one of the detainees assembled, it was at this moment that a reporter intervened: It [was] a lady from France . . . [who] said, “Tell us, who are these?” She asked Ya Toivo. But Ya Toivo didn’t want to say it. He said, “No, you will hear from them.” And she insisted saying that you are leading this delegation, you have to tell us who these people are. And that’s when he started saying that “these are the spies.” Then the lady . . . asked, “Did you also imprison children?” Then Ya Toivo just couldn’t answer that. I remember 42

43

Most of the information about the ex-detainees’ release that follows is gleaned from discussions with former exiles about a collection of thirty-two photographs taken by John Liebenberg on May 25, 1989, in conjunction with his trip to Lubango as a journalist for The Namibian. Ex-detainees were consulted at a variety of venues, including at the “Strategic Planning Retreat” of the Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement held at Rock Lodge outside Okahandja from November 24–5, 2007, when the photos were put on display for the weekend and discussed by more than thirty ex-detainees. Several ex-detainees were also formally interviewed about the photographs as was the leader of the SWAPO delegation, Andimba Toivo Ya Toivo (July 3, 2008). Where points represent the views of a particular source, the reference is cited in the following text. Apparently, Toivo Ya Toivo had announced to the women the previous day that there were journalists in Lubango who would be coming to speak with them (Pauline Dempers [Interview, November 21, 2007,  13]; Emma Kambangula [Interview, November 26, 2007,  21]). Male detainees indicate that they were similarly informed that they would be interviewed by foreign journalists.

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Photo 12. This photo by John Liebenberg depicts people who were present for the detainees’ release to journalists outside Lubango on May 25, 1989. These people include SWAPO Secretary General Andimba Toivo Ya Toivo (center, gesturing), SWAPO Administrative Secretary Moses Garoeb (next right), and Eliaser Tuhadeleni (next right). Research participants indicated that the children in the photo were those of female detainees. he could not say anything. He just said, “You will hear from them.” That is what he was saying. And with that the whole chaos started.44

“The chaos” to which Dempers refers was an eruption of histories. Women began to shout in protest that they were not spies and that they had been mistreated by those who had accused and detained them. In turn, the reporters moved away from the SWAPO leaders and interacted with the ex-detainees, recording and photographing them as individuals recounted their personal experiences. Later, John Liebenberg, who with Raja Munamava was covering the ex-detainees’ release on behalf of The Namibian,45 would describe “the angry, frustrated-looking women standing with arms crossed in front of reporters, some with children and babies in their arms. . . . [They] were all adamant that they were innocent of any charges against them and that they had been imprisoned without reason.”46 (See Photo 13.) Similarly, the French journalist, 44

45

46

Dempers, November 21, 2007, 15. For another account of the French journalist’s intervention, see Kambangula, November 26, 2007, 17. The Namibian is a widely read English language daily newspaper, which, in 1989, was seen by many as a critic of the South African government and supportive of SWAPO. John Liebenberg, “Detainees Speak of Ordeal,” The Namibian, June 9, 1989. The article is also included in Basson and Motinga, Call Them Spies, 87–8.

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Photo 13. This photo is one of the photographs that John Liebenberg took upon arriving at the female detainees’ camp. The photo was later printed in The Namibian alongside an article by Liebenberg (John Liebenberg, “Detainees Speak of Ordeal,” The Namibian, June 9, 1989).

Marie Joannidis, reported that the women “want above all to denounce the bad treatment and clear their names of all suspicion.”47 One woman told a German television crew that the child she was carrying was conceived when she was raped by a camp guard.48 Another child allegedly walked over to Toivo Ya Toivo, tugged at his sleeve and asked, “Did you kill my father?”49 The journalists encountered a similar scene at Nakada Base, a camp where one hundred male ex-detainees were being held approximately fifteen kilometers beyond the women’s camp. After being introduced to the journalists by Toivo Ya Toivo, the detainees responded by delivering a statement that a group of them had prepared the previous evening shortly after they had learned of the journalists’ pending visit.50 The statement, delivered by Riundja Ali Kaakunga, began: “For more than ten years we have been forced to incriminate others, and told that we are agents of the South African regime. We have 47 48 49

50

“Report by AFP on May 27, 1989,” in Basson and Motinga, Call Them Spies, 86–7. The Namibian, June 9, 1989. David Lush, Last Steps to Uhuru:  An Eye-witness Account of Namibia’s Transition to Independence (Windhoek: New Namibia Books, 1993), 199. Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus (Interview, May 29, 2005, 2–3; November 18, 2007, 45).

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Photo 14. The man displaying his wounds to John Liebenberg here is Oiva Angula. Other individuals pictured in the photograph whose personal histories are discussed in this book include Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus (third to Angula’s right) and Samuel Thomas (fourth to Angula’s right).

suffered harassment and torture in order to cow us into submission.” Recently, Kaakunga continued, SWAPO had announced that the detainees had two options for their repatriation: “either to agree to imposed re-integration into SWAPO, or to be handed over to South Africa, which would prove our collaboration with the South African regime. We rejected that option and we agreed to be re-integrated into SWAPO. Both these options are unacceptable to us. We want to be released from those who call us South African spies.” Thereafter, the spokesman described the conditions of their detention: the “dungeons,” or underground pits, in which they had lived, the poor food and lack of medical supplies, and the methods of torture. In response to the latter, “one of the detainees pulled down his trousers to display a wound that he had incurred during interrogation.”51 Throughout all of this, the SWAPO leadership stood by silently. However, when the journalists were eventually urged to leave, the detainees “became agitated. . . . One after another the ex-prisoners undress[ed] to show marks and scars . . . left by torture.”52 (See Photo 14.)

51 52

The Namibian, June 9, 1989. AFP, May 27, 1989.

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Reports of the journalists and detainees’ encounter did not circulate immediately. Although the journalists represented papers from several countries,53 groups publicizing “the detainee issue” were only able to trace two articles in which journalists described their visit in any detail. Liebenberg’s piece “Detainees Speak of Ordeal,” was not published in The Namibian until June 9, 1989 and Joannidis’s article for the Agence France-Presse (AFP), while dated May 27, 1989, only became known to the IGFM on June 2.54 In the interim, the reports about the detainees that did circulate generated confusion over who and where the detainees were, what they had experienced, and what they wanted. On May 23, 1989 the SWAPO Central Committee released a press statement from Luanda announcing that “the misguided elements . . . have been freed and are already registered with the UNHCR to return to Namibia like all other Namibians.”55 The following day, however, when a spokesperson for UNHCR was asked about the detainees’ release, he could not confirm that this had occurred.56 On May 25, 1989, the day of the journalists’ visit, Cedric Thornberry of the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG), announced in Windhoek that UNTAG observers in Angola had “come across” 199 ex-detainees, adding that they were “well looked after” although he would not add any other details about the encounter.57 Thereafter, SWAPO issued another press statement from Luanda, indicating that the former prisoners had “voluntarily rejoined the organisation.”58 In fact, the day after the journalists’ visit a group of PLAN soldiers led by Solomon Hawala tore down the male detainees’ camp, forcing them to flee 53

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Sources frequently mention reporters from France, East Germany, USSR, and Namibia, and some also think that Britain, Portugal, and Angola were represented. See Willem Meyer, “I Left the Country on the 15th of November, 1976,” 1990 (gift to the author); Han Pieters (Interview, November 19, 2007, 48). “Extracts of the report ‘No Escape from Misery,’ by the International Society for Human Rights on August 6, 1989,” in Basson and Motinga, Call Them Spies, 104. According to Liebenberg and a telex that he sent from Luanda to Gwen Lister (editor of The Namibian) in Windhoek, he gave film cartridges containing photos of the detainees’ release to Marie Joannidis on May 25 with the instruction that “these films must be developed [in Windhoek] and pictures sent to Reuters in Johannesburg.” Joannidis did not deliver the film to Lister or Reuters, however, and The Namibian only covered the story with Liebenberg’s information and pictures two weeks later after he had returned from Angola (Liebenberg telex in the author’s possession). BAB, SWAPO of Namibia Collection, 89fSLuPR1, “SWAPO Press Release on the Resolution of the Central Committee of SWAPO Luanda, May 23, 1989.” ISHR, August 6, 1989, 103. Ibid. Ex-detainees recall that the day before the journalists’ visit they were visited by a UNTAG delegation led by Colonel Michael Moriarty, at which time some of them requested that UNTAG take responsibility for their protection (Kambangula, November 26, 2007, 21; Stephanus, November 18, 2007, 48; Pieters, November 19, 2007, 47; Meyer, “I Left the Country,” 3). Cedric Thornberry presents Moriarity’s account of this visit in his (Thornberry’s) book A Nation is Born: The Inside Story of Namibia’s Independence (Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan, 2004), 169. ISHR, August 6, 1989, 103.

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into the surrounding bush. In turn, detainees renewed their efforts to make their voices heard. Three of the men walked the thirty kilometers from Nakada Base to Lubango proper, where they made their way to the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), asked for protection and requested its intervention to protect the other detainees.59 Independently, three of the female detainees also traveled to UNTAG’s offices in Lubango, while several others walked to and from the men’s camp assessing the situation.60 After “an unofficial visit” from UNHCR to the men’s camp confirmed the men and women’s allegations, a joint meeting was held between UNHCR, the Angolan government, and SWAPO whereat arrangements were made for Angola to receive the detainees and UNHCR to offer them humanitarian aid.61 On May 31, the Angolan government picked up 153 detainees who had indicated that they wanted to leave SWAPO and transported them from Old Hainyeko and Nakada to Lubango where they were accommodated by the Angolan Provincial Department of Social Welfare and received visits from UNHCR and the Red Cross.62 The following day SWAPO indicated for the first time that some of the detainees were “unrepentant” and had therefore been handed over to other organizations in Lubango.63 In the following weeks, news about the journalists’ visit finally began to spread through discussions of Joannidis’s and Liebenberg’s articles and through letters written by the detainees delivered by the Red Cross to detainees’ families in Namibia.64 A month later, SWAPO’s released detainees became the focus of news again. On July 4, 1989, the group of 153 was flown to Namibia, and on July 6 its members held a press conference with the Parents’ Committee65 in a community center located in Khomasdal, a Windhoek township. There, Othniel Kaakunga read a press statement, in which he narrated a history of “the SWAPO spy-drama.”66 Kaakunga concluded his remarks by stating, categorically, that the detainees 59

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Hans Pieters, one of the men who walked to Lubango, offers an account of this experience in one of our interviews (Hans Pieters [Interview, May 21, 2007]). Theresia Basson, one of the women who walked to Lubango, offers an account of this experience in our interview (Theresia Basson [Interview, June 1, 2005]); Pauline Dempers and Emma Kambangula offer accounts of their own and other women’s movement around Lubango during the week following the journalists’ visit (Dempers, November 21, 2007, 17–18; Kambangula, November 26, 2007, 19–20). VEM, Groth Collection, File No. 1311, UNHCR BO Angola, “Notes on Issue of Ex-Detainees,” 1–2. UNHCR BO Angola, 2. Those from the group of 199 registered with UNTAG who were not picked up by the Angolans on May 31 repatriated to Namibia interspersed with other members of SWAPO. ISHR, August 6, 1989, 104. Maria Higoam, Sophia Kahuika, and Emma Motinga (Interview, September 14, 2007, 4); T. Basson, June 1, 2005, 10. Erica Beukes and others affiliated with the Committee of Parents also participated in these events. The press coverage consulted for this period makes no distinction between “the Committee of Parents” and “the Parents’ Committee.” This press statement as well as “A Report to the Namibian People: Historical Account of the Swapo Spy-Drama” (Windhoek:  BWS, 1989, repr. 1997)  were written by Hans Pieters and

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had never been South African spies and remained “faithful to the cause of total liberation of our country.” Therefore, the group had constituted itself as the Political Consultative Council of ex-detainees (PCC). The PCC, Kaakunga emphasized, was not a political party but rather a pressure group committed to three objectives: to inform Namibians about “the SWAPO spy-drama,” prevent SWAPO from coming to power, and demand the release of hundreds of other detainees that had last been seen in SWAPO camps near Lubango.67 After Kaakunga had finished his remarks, the conference was opened to questions from the press, but the exchange was soon quieted when seventeen detainees undressed, revealing deep wounds on their backs, legs, breasts, and buttocks.68 The resulting photographs were circulated throughout Namibia and in many foreign papers.69 SWAPO’s official response to the ex-detainees’ revelations was to deny some of them and to belittle the significance of others. For example, immediately after the May 25 meeting between journalists and detainees in Lubango, Moses Garoeb offered journalists an interpretation of what they had heard and seen. According to Garoeb, SWAPO wanted the truth to be known. “Mistakes” were made, Garoeb admitted, “but SWAPO has been fighting a war of survival. Our camps have been bombed and many innocent lives have been lost . . . as a result of the activities of South African agents. . . . If these people have suffered, it is nothing in comparison to what has been happening to our people in SADF camps.”70 Similarly, on July 9, shortly after the ex-detainees’ press conference, the SWAPO election directorate declared that all those who had been detained were South African spies and that any torture resulted from the “extreme conditions of a brutal war.”71 At no point did SWAPO acknowledge that it had detained far more people than it had released to the press and repatriated – even after some of these additional detainees managed to escape from SWAPO camps where they were imprisoned and arrive at UNHCR’s Lubango offices in mid-July.72

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several others while the group of 153 were in Lubango awaiting their repatriation to Namibia (Hans Pieters [Interview, July 22, 2008]). “A Report” was printed and distributed in Namibia a few weeks after the detainees’ return and offers a more detailed history of “the spy-drama.” Unlike the press statement, however, “A Report” appears not to have received much attention in the media. In 1997 “A Report” was published by BWS. “Press Statement by the Political Consultative Council on July 6, 1989,” in Basson and Motinga, Call Them Spies, 92–3. Some of the detainees last seen in Lubango who did not return at independence were, according to repatriated detainees, together with them as late as April and May 1989 – well after the peace process in Namibia was underway. “Einigen weht nun der Wind ins Gesicht,” Allgemeine Zeitung, July 7, 1989. Trewhela, “SWAPO and the Churches,” 68. The Namibian, June 9, 1989. Lush, Last Steps to Uhuru, 205. Between July 12 and July 15, 1989, sixteen persons, all claiming to be “ex-detainees of SWAPO” arrived at the UNHCR’s offices in Lubango. As they reported, they and sixty-eight others were being held in an isolated location outside Lubango. SWAPO initially denied these claims but later revised its position, indicating that these eighty-four individuals were “not [political]

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Despite efforts to maintain a consistent party line, however, SWAPO leaders were divided over how to respond to what they and others had seen and heard at Lubango. In a later interview, Toivo Ya Toivo spoke of these internal divisions. Referring to the events of May 25, 1989, he recalled: It was terrible. Because when I was there, I knew some people who were detained there, and I started asking for them. . . . [After the meeting with the journalists] I received a telex from Sam Nujoma that he was going somewhere, that I must go back to Luanda. . . . I think that this was just something cooked up because [Solomon] Hawala and Peter Mueshihange reported to [Nujoma] that I was asking things that they didn’t want me to ask and that I must go back. . . . And then these people, after I left, they [raided the detainees’] homes.73

As Ya Toivo and other SWAPO leaders quietly discussed the detainees among themselves, some leaders made public statements that undermined the liberation movement’s official position. Most notably, at a rally in Rehoboth, hometown of the Beukes families, SWAPO Foreign Secretary Theo-Ben Gurirab announced that “as a SWAPO leader I will never defend the humiliation and suffering of torture. If the allegations are true, I apologize to the victims and to their parents and pledge to you now that the SWAPO leadership will take the necessary steps to bring those involved to book.”74 According to Hidipo Hamutenya, who had led the London press conference with Gurirab back in 1986, “Ben was reprimanded [for his statement in Rehoboth], not directly, but his story was not welcomed by [some SWAPO leaders]. And therefore it was not pursued.”75 There were also SWAPO leaders who went out of their way to meet detainees following their return to Namibia, both to express sympathy and to suggest ways that SWAPO and the detainees might achieve perceived common interests. According to one ex-detainee, these leaders argued that “priority number one was to get rid of the colonial situation and then the issue about our detention and human rights abuses would get attention on a national scale.”76 At the same time, organizations that had supported SWAPO for years appeared to be breaking ranks with the party. On July 14, a press release by Father Steegman of the Commission of Justice and Peace, a Namibian ecumenical organization, was published in Times of Namibia indicating the

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prisoners” like the 199 that they had dutifully released to the international community. Rather, they were “dissidents.” Although the sixteen who reached the UNHCR’s Lubango offices repatriated with the UNHCR, the sixty-eight and other scattered groups of ex-detainees were repatriated by SWAPO as ordinary refugees (UNHCR BO Angola, 3; VEM, Groth Collection, File No. 1335, “Ex-SWAPO Detainees, Press Statement August 10, 1989”; Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus [Interview, June 17, 2005,  25]). See also Thornberry’s account of these events (A Nation Is Born, 173). Toivo Ya Toivo, July 3, 2008. Leys and Saul, “Lubango and After,” 340, quoted from Times of Namibia, July 19, 1989. Hamutenya, April 2, 2008, 8. Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus (Interview, June 15, 2005, 19).

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commission’s “pain” and “disappointment” in listening to “reports of former detainees about their suffering in camps in Angola” and demanding that “those responsible for any kind of torture . . . be called to account and the victims duly compensated.”77 Over the following weeks and months other organizations in Namibia and abroad expressed similar sentiments, including staunch allies such as West Germany’s Green Party and the LWF.78 At the same time, these and other organizations began to ask questions about persons who, according to the detainees, had been imprisoned by SWAPO but had not yet returned to Namibia. In response to SWAPO President Sam Nujoma’s argument that the so-called missing detainees could be attributed to South African propaganda, UN Secretary General De Cuellar was unapologetically opposed: “I think it is not only a concern of the South African Government, but the [Namibian] population would like to know the whereabouts of 2,000 men.”79 Clearly, the ex-detainees had several advantages in shaping perceptions of what had happened in exile over those who had been opposing dominant representations since the mid-1980s. First, with the war between SWAPO and South Africa over, some detainees were physically able to leave the camps and use their bodies as visual evidence to support their claims. Indeed, Marie Joannidis sees “the marks and scars” on the men at Lubango as evidence of a history: They are “left by torture” at SWAPO’s hands.80 John Liebenberg is more cautious in how he interprets what he sees, indicating that the detainees’ wounds “were obviously the result of lashes.”81 However, his informants, who accompany the marks and scars with a collective story of how they were experienced, assert that the wounds stand for more than this. For the female detainees meeting the press, it is not the wounds that are made to tell a story or affect sympathy, but rather their bodies’ new appendages – their babies. According to Liebenberg, “one of the saddest and most moving moments was when one women [sic] in her twenties pointed towards the baby she held in her arms and told a German television crew that the child was the product of rape by one of the camp guards.”82 The use of the detainees’ wounds and babies as evidence of a history of violation is also apparent in the knowledge production about the detainees immediately after their return to Namibia. For example, during the weekend following the detainees’ press conference, Die Republikien printed an enlarged photo of the detainees’ unclothed bodies with the following caption:  “The naked facts [italics mine] of the cruelty suffered by detainees in

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“Torture Must Be Condemned,” Times of Namibia, July 14, 1989. “Greens Rebuke SWAPO,” The Namibian, August 21, 1989; “LWF Admits Shock and Dismay at Reports of SWAPO Torture,” The Namibian, October 20, 1989. “De Cuellar and Nujoma at Odds,” The Namibian, July 27, 1989. AFP, May 27, 1989. The Namibian, June 9, 1989. Ibid.

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SWAPO’s hell camps in Angola.”83 The Allgemeine Zeitung takes a slightly different approach, accompanying its three-page article on the detainees’ press conference with four blown-up pictures, each of which is interpreted for the reader through short narratives taken from the pictured detainees’ testimony.84 Several months later, South African reporter Nico Basson and former detainee Ben Motinga published a book titled Call Them Spies in which photographs of detainees’ bodies are put to similar use. The book, most of which consists of detainees’ accounts of their experiences and documentary material about their detention is prefaced by two page-size photographs. The first pictures an infant of approximately one year with a sign in her hand that reads “I was born IN JAIL.”85 The other is a photo taken from the July 6 press conference of an unidentified wounded detainee that, according to the captions, “reveal[s] the horrors of the notorious SWAPO security service.”86 In addition to their bodies, detainees’ reputations enhanced the truth value of their stories.87 David Lush offers insight into these dynamics in Last Steps to Uhuru (1993), an account of the author’s work as a journalist with The Namibian during Namibia’s transition to independence. According to Lush, when Liebenberg returned to Windhoek with his materials from the May 25 visit to Lubango, the reporters were ready to accept Garoeb’s justifications for detaining SWAPO members:  these persons were spies and any mistreatment they had experienced was attributable to a harsh war. When reporters began to recognize the detainees in Liebenberg’s photographs, however, their understandings were challenged: “ ‘Hey this is my cousin,’ one staff member said in amazement, pointing to one of the photographs . . . ‘he was a serious comrade, he suffered for the struggle, that’s why he went into exile.’ ” Thereafter, other reporters also discovered ex-detainees whom they knew and trusted, resulting in a row among the staff about whether and how The Namibian should present the story to its overwhelmingly SWAPO supporting readership.88 Lush continues on to narrate his conversations with colleagues and acquaintances over the following weeks in which family and friends of ex-detainees 83

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“DTA Pressure to Free the Rest,” Die Republikien, July 9, 1989. Die Republikien is Namibia’s main Afrikaans language newspaper. The Sunday edition, from which this caption is taken, was printed in English. “Einigen weht nun der Wind ins Gesicht,” Allgemeine Zeitung, July 7, 1989. Allgemeine Zeitung is a German-language daily newspaper, read predominantly by Namibian German-speakers, a minority within the country’s white population. Basson and Motinga, Call Them Spies, 1. Ibid., 3. Already during the 1980s, when letters began circulating in Namibia and abroad about abuses within SWAPO in exile, authors repeatedly used certain names as evidence that those accused of spying were innocent of that label. See, e.g., my discussion of Ben Boys and the power of his reputation for provoking critical questions about SWAPO’s detention of accused spies (Williams, “Exile History,” 192–4). Lush, Last Steps to Uhuru, 201. As previously noted, The Namibian did publish the story on June 9, 1989.

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began to question SWAPO’s representations of the detentions on the basis of their personal knowledge of those who had been accused.89 According to ex-detainees, there were similar reactions shortly after their return to Namibia when they were received by their communities of origin. In Gibeon, Vaalgras, and Gainachas, villages with strong ties to SWAPO and where thirty or more repatriated detainees and many more “missing persons” had family, receptions were held to welcome and honor exiles returning home. During these events “returnees” told stories about their and others’ detentions, which, as firsthand accounts delivered by people known personally to most community members, are likely to have been very persuasive.90 Nevertheless, the detainees faced obstacles to shaping publicly endorsed knowledge about their detentions, obstacles that reflect their marginal status in SWAPO’s camps and in the postcolonial order that these camps have shaped. As noted, after the detainees’ press conference, SWAPO reiterated its official stance that all those released to the international journalists had been spies and that any human rights abuses that had occurred were justified by a brutal war against a notoriously abusive regime. As a result, for many Namibians, accepting the detainees’ stories was taken as sympathy for South Africa and a betrayal of the Namibian nation in utero. This association was strengthened by a history of SWAPO opposition parties raising “the detainee issue” as a political platform during the late 1980s and climaxed in 1989 in the lead up to the Namibian elections. On July 4 when the 153 detainees returned to Namibia, seven political parties were present in Windhoek at the airport to receive them, including the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA), a party launched in the wake of the Turnhalle Conference (1975–6) and SWAPO’s wealthiest competitor.91 Thereafter, the DTA joined the Parents’ Committee as a highly visible nondetainee organization clamoring for further investigation into SWAPO detentions and the release of the hundreds of political prisoners that were unaccounted for. Under the circumstances, few persons who had been affiliated with SWAPO, including many of the closest friends and family of detainees, were willing to support the PCC’s objectives. Some detainees returned to home communities that would not listen to their stories or even allow them to reside there.92 Although better received elsewhere, ex-detainees struggled to gain public 89 90

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Lush, Last Steps to Uhuru, 202. For accounts of these receptions for exiles, see Andries Basson (Interview, September 22, 2007, 28–9); Pauline Dempers (Interview, November 21, 2007, 21); Michael Kahuika and Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus (Interview, September 20, 2007, 14–16); Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus (Interview, September 18, 2007, 38–9); Willem Konjore (Interview, July 22, 2008). “Parents Scorn Politicians,” Times of Namibia, July 5, 1989. The Turnhalle Conference was South Africa’s first attempt to find an “internal solution” to Namibian independence. These talks and the DTA were widely condemned by SWAPO and other opponents of apartheid South Africa. Groth, Wall of Silence, 179.

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support for their initiatives among historically SWAPO-supporting groups. Many communities, especially in southern Namibia, were split between those who felt that they could no longer support SWAPO after hearing the detainees’ revelations and others who maintained that SWAPO was the only party that could effectively challenge South African interests in Namibia and therefore must be supported at all costs. Like those SWAPO leaders from exile who approached ex-detainees, leaders in communities at Gibeon, Vaalgras, and Gainachas argued that SWAPO would address the PCC’s agenda but could only do so once it had come to power.93 Even those who embraced the detainees were not likely to openly challenge SWAPO’s authority to represent Namibia or exile history. David Lush reports, for example, that the returned detainees’ families and friends whom he knew living in Windhoek believed the detainees’ stories and, as a result, decided not to vote for SWAPO. They did not, however, campaign against SWAPO or publicly contest the party’s official justification for its detentions.94 The ex-detainees were, in any event, not well equipped to mobilize dissidents among historically SWAPO-supporting communities. When they returned to Namibia, most had no money and few possessions. As a result, they could do little to publicize their experiences, let alone to pay for basic necessities.95 And although political parties rivaling SWAPO offered the detainees financial support, the PCC would not accept this as a group although individual members apparently did accept DTA offers to pay for their shopping trips and doctor’s appointments.96 Some of the detainees also expected that, based on their reputation when they had been activists in the country, that they would wield more political influence upon their return than they, in fact, did. Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus, who had been a leader in the SWAPO Youth League in the mid-1970s, remembers that he and other detainees of his generation were surprised to see how much the composition of people and political dynamics had changed inside the country since they had left more than ten years before.97 And, after years living abroad and imprisoned in the camps, the detainees had also changed. As Stephanus recalls: “We were malnourished, disoriented, confused, rebellious, disrespectful to the norms and values of our society. Because we were exposed to so many things. The older values no longer made any sense to us. We were disrespectful of the older values in terms of how you are supposed to be as a community member. So, [many in our home communities] just wrote us off.”98

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Dempers, November 21, 2007, 21; Stephanus, September 18, 2007, 38; Steve Swartbooi (Interview, September 21, 2007, 43). Lush, Last Steps to Uhuru, 203–4. Stephanus, June 15, 2005, 23; Willem Meyer (Interview, June 17, 2005, 6). Stephanus, June 15, 2005, 23; Pieters, September 9, 2007, 18. Stephanus, June 15, 2005, 20. Ibid., 19.

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In this environment the ex-detainees split over political strategy. On July 20, 1989 a group of ex-detainees established the Patriotic Unity Movement (PUM). Although the group of 153 had united around the PCC, opinions differed on the PUM. Some ex-detainees thought that participating in a party would associate their stories with political motives even more than they already were. Others were concerned about an alliance that the PUM soon made with the United Democratic Front (UDF), which had been able to assemble the necessary signatures to register as a party and raise funds for months before the ex-detainees’ return from exile. Although the alliance with the UDF was necessary for PUM to be able campaign, it also attached the party to the UDF’s main source of funding, the Namib Foundation, which was suspected by some Namibians to have links with the South African government.99 Also, the UDF was widely seen as a “tribal party” representing Namibia’s Damara community, an association that ruptured cleavages among the ex-detainees’ ethnically and linguistically diverse but majority Damara and Nama members.100 Moreover, there were ideological differences among ex-detainees, shaped by periods of extended training and study in countries on opposite sides of the Cold War, which, for some, came to a head when the PUM’s leadership was selected and its platforms were written.101 Due to such tensions, many ex-detainees did not unite behind the PUM, but rather joined other political parties or distanced themselves from political affiliations altogether. At the same time, organizations that had formally distanced themselves from SWAPO following the detainees’ release, but that had previously reinforced the dominant discourse about SWAPO’s camps, did little to make ex-detainees’ experiences more widely understood and accepted. This point is evident in the interactions of various ex-detainees and church leaders following the former’s repatriation. Although the CCN was responsible for administering the Repatriation, Resettlement, and Rehabilitation program for Namibian exiles, no CCN representatives were at the airport on July 4 to receive the ex-detainees.102 Thereafter, when some ex-detainees approached church leaders to share their experiences and concerns with them, the ex-detainees did not feel accepted by them.103 A number of detainees were in contact with Siegfried 99 100

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Lush, Last Steps to Uhuru, 202. Stephanus, June 15, 2005, 23. Damara and Nama refer to two ethnic categories but one language. In stories about the time of their detention, detainees often contrasted the positions taken by the Damara/Nama detainees and other detainees. Stephanus, June 15, 2005, 22. According to Philip Steenkamp, “The ex-detainees insisted that not a single member of the CCN . . . be allowed to participate in the management of their return” (“The Churches,” 113). Regardless of whether “the ex-detainees” as a whole made a statement to this effect in 1989, some research participants interpreted the lack of CCN involvement in their repatriation as signifying that the churches did not want to associate with the ex-detainees. Steenkamp and Groth refer to a particular meeting at which “the CCN executive met with a group of detainees on August 23” (Steenkamp, “The Churches,” 106; Siegfried Groth, “Menschenrechtsverletzungen in der namibischen Exil-SWAPO  – die Verantwortung der Kirchen,” epd-Dokumentation 40/89 [Frankfurt am Main:  Evangelischer Pressedienst,

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Groth following their repatriation and urged him to make the information about their detentions public.104 When, on September 18, 1989, Groth published a report, he was chastised for it by colleagues in both Namibia and Germany.105 Claims by Groth and others that the churches continued to shirk their responsibility to confront SWAPO about human rights abuses committed in its camps were consistently denied.106 Particularly troubling for ex-detainees were questions about those who had been imprisoned in Lubango with them but who had not yet returned to Namibia and the international community’s failure to help them answer these questions. Following their repatriation on July 4, the PCC and the Parents’ Committee issued a list of 530 names of persons who had been detained in Lubango but had not yet repatriated, including information about each detainee’s age, place of residence, year of arrest, year and place of detention in which last seen, and, in some cases, date of death.107 In August, after more ex-detainees repatriated,108 additional lists were written and meetings held between ex-detainees and UNTAG officials, resulting in the formation of the UN Mission on Detainees (UNMD).109 Despite the involvement of ex-detainees

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September 18, 1989], 12). Research participants refer to meetings between ex-detainees and church leaders more generally (e.g., Kala Gertze [Interview, February 21, 2007,  10]; Emma Kambangula [Interview, February 15, 2007, 13]). Groth, “Menschenrechtsverletzungen,” 1–2, 56; Die Tagezeitung, “Du darfst nicht länger schweigen,” August 28, 1989. For the files of Siegfried Groth’s correspondence with ex-detainees prior to and following their detention, see VEM, Groth Collection, File Nos. 1230 and 1334. Groth, “Menschenrechtsverletzungen.” In Namibia, Bishop Hendrik Frederik of the ELC responded to Groth’s report scathingly. See Ailonga Collection, File Names: “Chaplaincy after Lusaka for Salatiel Ailonga,” “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy,” letter from Bishop Hendrik Frederik to Siegfried Groth, September 22, 1989. In Germany Groth elected to retire from the VEM early due to tensions that developed between him and others in the VEM after he published his report. As he noted in our interviews, he was not asked to represent the VEM on Namibian Independence Day, March 21, 1990, despite the fact that he had been the VEM’s representative responsible for Namibia since 1961 (Siegfried Groth [Interview, October 24, 2006; October 26, 2006, 4]). Ailonga Collection, File Names:  “Chaplaincy after Lusaka for Salatiel Ailonga,” “Political Matters Affecting the Chaplaincy”; letter from Bishop Dumeni, to Times of Namibia, October 13, 1989; “LWF Admits Shock and Dismay at Reports of SWAPO Torture,” The Namibian, October 20, 1989. VEM, Groth Collection, File No. 1335, “Report of the United Nations Mission on Detainees,” October 11, 1989, 3; Pütz et al. Namibia Handbook, 324. It should be noted that prior to the ex-detainees’ return, IGFM, Amnesty International, and SWAPO-D had also printed lists of suspected detainees. These were, however, far less comprehensive than the lists created by the Parents’ Committee and PCC following ex-detainees’ return. VEM, Groth Collection, File No. 1335, “Ex-SWAPO Detainees, Press Statement August 10, 1989.” UNMD, 3; Pütz et al., Namibia Handbook, 324. After the UNMD formed, it compiled two additional lists: one of the 1,077 persons who had allegedly been detained and another of the thirty-two sites where detainees had allegedly been imprisoned. Detention sites are listed in Annex 1 of the UNMD’s report.

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in shaping the knowledge that the UNMD took with it on its mission, detainees had little influence over the UNMD’s research in the field or its final report. On September 2, 1989, the UNMD departed from Windhoek with ten international UN officials, but no ex-detainees, members of human rights organizations, or persons with prior knowledge of the camps or the areas of detention were included.110 SWAPO officials, however, were consulted in Lubango, offering the UNMD a list of ex-detainees “which corresponded almost entirely with the lists relating to the group recorded by UNTAG observers.”111 Although the mission toured Angola and Zambia for nineteen days, only September 6 was spent at the sites outside Lubango where most ex-detainees had been imprisoned and where most of the missing persons were last seen.112 It is not surprising, therefore, that ex-detainees found the UNMD’s research, which concluded that “there were no detainees in any of the alleged detention centres and other places which it visited,” to be “a useless effort.”113 Indeed, the UNMD reproduced the very power relations that had enabled SWAPO officials to deny abuses in its camps and to “disappear” Namibians there in the first place. Despite such obstacles the ex-detainees did manage to achieve some of the goals outlined by the PCC at the time of their return. From July to November 1989, ex-detainees shared their experiences at political rallies across Namibia. Although SWAPO won the November elections, it did not achieve the two-thirds majority that many had predicted and that would have given the party a free hand to write the Namibian Constitution and implement its policies in Parliament.114 Although it is difficult to know how ex-detainees’ stories influenced voters’ choices, SWAPO’s failure to win a two-thirds majority has been attributed to how Namibians reacted to the ex-detainees’ return.115 The PUM-UDF received sufficient votes for the PUM’s president, Eric Biwa, to be given a seat at the Constituent Assembly, where the Constitution was drafted, and in Parliament. Even the UNMD’s report could be interpreted as supporting ex-detainees’ claims, for it identified 315 persons from the comprehensive list of detainees “whose present status is unknown and requiring further investigation.”116 110

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UNMD, Annex 2; “Commission Challenges Swapo to Come Clean,” Times of Namibia, October 16, 1989. UNMD, 5. Ibid., Annex 3. Ibid., 8; Dempers, November 21, 2007, 24. See also Thornberry’s account of the work of UNMD (A Nation Is Born, 173). The following are percentages of the national vote that Namibia’s three largest parties received in the first national election: SWAPO (56.9 percent), DTA (28.3 percent), and UDF (5.6 percent) (Henning Melber, ed., Re-examining Liberation in Namibia [Stockholm:  Elanders Gotab, 2003], 17). Dobell, “Silence in Context,” 373; Hunter, “Dealing with the Past in Namibia,” 411–12. Having discarded the names of “some 110 duplicated entries,” the UNMD’s report accounts for the 1,077 persons on its comprehensive list of detainees in this way:  “(a) 484 persons released and/or repatriated; (b) 71 persons reportedly not detained, including SWAPO officials; (c) 115 persons reported dead; (d) 52 persons who could not be identified due to insufficient

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Nonetheless, public discussion of the ex-detainees’ experiences subsided after 1989. By then, the PCC had dissolved as a political lobby. Some ex-detainees faced pressures to integrate themselves in home communities where their stories were not welcome. Many, who were in their thirties at the time of their release, had professional and family goals that were often difficult to pursue while living in exile and impossible during their detention. SWAPO also began to recruit ex-detainees for mid-level government jobs, which were appealing to many who were financially vulnerable and had been educated in exile to work as public servants upon their return. Under the circumstances there was little impetus for ex-detainees to continue to share their stories openly. Moreover, while “the missing persons” was a topic of debate in Parliament when it convened in 1990,117 the ensuing investigation of the issue by the Red Cross was limited by the same structures that had hindered the UNMD. As the ICRC noted in the June 1993 final report to the Namibian government, which had solicited its intervention, international humanitarian law stipulated that it could only liaise between “the families of missing persons” and the national governments and liberation movements that were “parties to [the] conflict.” Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that this “politically neutral” humanitarian body confirmed SWAPO’s official position that all the detainees had repatriated to Namibia and shed little light on why hundreds of detainees remained missing.118 Breaking the Wall of Silence In 1995 Siegfried Groth published a book, titled in its English translation Namibia – The Wall of Silence.119 Therein, the retired German pastor shared stories that he had collected while serving as the VEM’s representative to Namibia from 1961 to 1990, many of them told by persons detained by SWAPO in Zambia and Angola during the 1970s and 1980s. As several reviewers of the book noted,120 details about Namibia’s exile past narrated in The

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information; (e) 315 persons whose present status is unknown and requiring further investigation” (UNMD, 9). For a discussion of how “the missing persons” were discussed in Parliament from 1990 to 1994, see Leys and Saul, “Lubango and After,” 340–2. It should be noted that the ICRC reported on how uncooperative SWAPO had been in responding to queries about individuals who had “last been seen in SWAPO prisons” and that, as a result, the ICRC’s report “can hardly be considered satisfactory” (ICRC, “Missing Namibians: I.C.R.C. Final Report,” [Geneva: ICRC, 1993], 3, 5). The book was first published in German with the title Namibische Passion: Tragik und Grösse der namibischen Befreiungsbewegung (Wuppertal:  Peter Hammer Verlag, 1995)  and then in English translation. UCT African Studies Library, BAP 322.42 DAU, Timothy Dauth, “Namibia  – the Wall of Silence – Review,” an e-mail submitted to “NUAFRICA: Program of African Studies Mailing List”; Heribert Weiland, “Namibia  – The Wall of Silence. The Dark Days of the Liberation Struggle – Book Review,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22, no. 3 (1996): 501–3; Dobell, “Silence in Context,” 371–82.

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Wall of Silence were not novel to Namibians and others following Namibian news from abroad. Groth had previously published an account of human rights abuses in the SWAPO camps and of the churches’ knowledge of these abuses in his September 18, 1989 report, and this report had received attention at the time in Namibia.121 Nonetheless, Groth’s book, and its release in Namibia in 1995 and 1996, sparked a new initiative to challenge Namibia’s national narrative and to erase the stigma associated with histories of detention in the SWAPO camps. Central to this initiative were two Namibians: Christo Lombard and Samson Ndeikwila. Lombard, who was teaching theology and directing the Ecumenical Institute for Namibia (EIN) at the University of Namibia (UNAM) at the time, obtained a copy of the German version of Groth’s book and was the first person in Namibia to respond to it publicly. In a review printed in the Windhoek Observer on June 24, 1995, Lombard encouraged SWAPO and the churches to take the book’s publication as an opportunity to acknowledge their responsibility for abuses committed during the liberation struggle and, in so doing, to promote “reconciliation.”122 Shortly thereafter, Lombard met with Samson Ndeikwila, his colleague at the CCN and a former exile, one of “the Seven Comrades” who had lived at Kongwa and had been imprisoned in Tanzania during the late 1960s.123 Ndeikwila soon acquired an English translation of Groth’s book, copies of which were first supplied by Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation to a small group of people in Namibia, including several ex-detainees and church leaders, in the middle of 1995.124 Together, Ndeikwila and Lombard decided to contact people they knew who had been affected by histories described in the book and ask them if they wanted to meet and share their experiences. Over the next several months a group of ex-detainees and others interested in their experiences assembled on Saturdays in the main hall at the CCN’s offices in Windhoek.125 As participants in the sessions would later write: 121

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Groth, “Menschenrechtsverletzungen,” September 18, 1989. In addition to the letter from Bishop Hendrik Frederik to Siegfried Groth cited previously, Groth’s report also received attention in the Namibian papers at the time. Christo Lombard, “Alarming Stories from the Darker Side of the Struggle,” Windhoek Observer, June 24, 1995 in “Breaking the Wall of Silence:  Statements and Clippings, February–April 1996” (Windhoek:  BWS, 1996), 1–4 and in “Namibische Passion:  Chronik einer Debatte” (Wuppertal: VEM, 1997), 6–9. Samson Ndeikwila (Interview, February 9, 2007, 7); Christo Lombard (Interview, May 5, 2009). For more on Ndeikwila and the circumstances in which he was detained see the section of Chapter 3 on “the Kongwa Crisis.” “Breaking the Wall of Silence  – A  New Initiative,” February 10, 1996 in “Statements and Clippings,” 8–9. Lombard also makes mention of copies of the book “now also available in English” in his book review in the Windhoek Observer in June 1995. This and other evidence contradicts Justine Hunter’s claim that the English translation of Groth’s book was only published in 1996. See Hunter, “Dealing with the Past,” 416. Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007, 7; Gertze, February 21, 2007, 9–10; Lombard, May 5, 2009.

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We held long and moving meetings, listened to individual stories. We chose the premises of the CCN as our venue because we all felt more at home there. We sat in a big circle, starting with a prayer and short bible reflection. People are bitter towards those who had ordered their arrests and detentions, who had smeared their names and caused their rejection by families and friends. Some cried when telling their stories and many of us shared in their tears. This served as healing to the people who have been traumatised for a long time and whom nobody wanted to listen to.126

By November 1995 participants in these meetings must also have been discussing strategies for confronting the stigma associated with the stories they were telling. In that month, some attended the CCN’s annual general meeting, suggesting that the council launch the book, which would become available commercially in Namibia early the following year, and thereby “initiate a process of reconciliation and healing.”127 On February 21, 1996, shortly after the CCN indicated that it would not participate in the book launch, Lombard issued a media release announcing a “Breaking the Wall of Silence Committee” and stating that the committee would take responsibility for launching the book, a position reiterated in a media release by Ndeikwila the following month, announcing a “Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement” (BWS).128 On Saturday, March 30, at the Kalahari Sands Hotel in downtown Windhoek, the book and BWS were both officially launched. There, in a packed hall, Samson Ndeikwila introduced BWS as “a civil rights pressure movement promoting a democratic culture of openness, freedom, peace and human fellowship.”129 He also offered an account of the movement’s genesis, narrating it through Salatiel Ailonga, the Parents’ Committee, and Siegfried Groth, each of whom was presented “The BWS Award of Merit.”130 Ndeikwila was followed by seven ex-detainees, who gave accounts of their experiences in exile, and by Christo Lombard, who officially launched the book. Finally, the meeting was opened for questions and BWS’s future was discussed, including plans to translate Groth’s book into Afrikaans and Oshiwambo, document the experiences 126 127

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BWS, “Annual Report 1996,” in “Chronik einer Debatte,” 167. “Breaking the Wall of Silence  – A  New Initiative,” 8.  On November 28, 1995 forty-two ex-detainees also addressed a letter to CCN General Secretary Ngeno Nakamhela requesting that the council organize a book launch although the letter was apparently not delivered to him until mid-January the following year (Letter to Ngeno Nakamhela in “Chronik einer Debatte,” 17 and “Statements and Clippings,” 5). “Media Release: Breaking the Wall of Silence Committee,” February 21, 1996 in “Statements and Clippings,” 15; “Media Release: Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement (BWS),” March 20, 1996 in “Statements and Clippings,” 51, 51a, 52. “Wounds reopened,” Tempo, March 31, 1996; “Detainee Book Sparks Strong Public Interest,” The Namibian, April 1, 1996; “Walls Movement Wants to Practise [sic] Civil Action,” The Windhoek Advertiser, April 1, 1996. BWS, “Annual Report 1996,” 170. Salatiel Ailonga was the pastor at Old Farm and was deported from Zambia in 1976 (see Chapter 4). Ailonga’s 1977 letter to Bishop Aula was also read publicly at the launch.

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of Namibians during the liberation struggle, and facilitate “national reconciliation,” possibly through a TRC.131 In some respects BWS was very similar to organizations that had come before it. Many of those who had been most involved in the Committee of Parents, the Parents’ Committee, the PCC, and the PUM took positions of leadership in BWS.132 Especially among those who had been detained at Lubango, the first meetings at the CCN rekindled relationships, bringing together many of those then living in Windhoek and connecting them through mutual friends to others who had settled in different parts of the country.133 There were, however, a variety of people who had not been seen as “ex-detainees” in 1989 and who participated in BWS. For example, Tangeni Nuukuawo and Sheeli Shangula, both of whom fled Namibia in “the exodus” and were imprisoned with Andreas Shipanga from 1976 to 1978, were founding members as, of course, was Samson Ndeikwila, who was well-known to those Namibians who had left Kongwa and migrated to Kenya in the late 1960s and early 1970s.134 Nuukuawo, Shangula, and Ndeikwila were, thus, part of social networks of former exiles that had become alienated from SWAPO and that remained distinct from one another due to their different experiences abroad, the different places where they had lived following their expulsion from SWAPO, and the stigma attached to “dissidents” of previous exile generations. Moreover, Nuukuawo, Shangula, and Ndeikwila, like the majority of SWAPO members detained in exile during the 1960s and 1970s, were Ovambo and from the North, and the majority of Lubango detainees were Nama/Damara and from the South.135 At BWS meetings, participants crossed these social barriers, sharing their particular histories from exile and establishing solidarity around the common aim of erasing the stigma that had been attached to all of them. In addition, some SWAPO activists who had remained inside Namibia attended 131

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Ndeikwila comments on these and other plans discussed at the book launch in BWS’s postlaunch media release (BWS, “Media Release,” April 11, 1996 in “Statements and Clippings,” 84). BWS also did some research before the launch, compiling “Lists of Namibia’s ‘Missing Persons’ ” (Windhoek: BWS, 1996). The lists name 708 people, including 554 SWAPO detainees who had not been accounted for, 93 SWAPO detainees whose deaths had been witnessed by repatriated detainees, and 61 South African detainees who had not been accounted for. One might compare, e.g., the leadership listed for the PUM, Parents’ Committee, and PCC (Pütz et al., Namibia Handbook, 216, 323, 326) with that of the first “Management Committee” of BWS (BWS, “Annual Report 1996,” 173). Dempers, November 21, 2007, 21–2. Ibid.; Tangeni Nuukuawo (Interview, March 10, 2007). See Chapters 3 and 4 for discussion of conflicts in SWAPO’s camps in Tanzania during the 1960s and in Zambia during the 1970s, respectively. It should be noted that among those detained in SWAPO’s camps were Namibians from different regions and ethnic backgrounds. This diversity is captured in the detailed lists compiled by BWS in 1996. See “Lists of Namibia’s ‘Missing Persons’ ” (Windhoek: BWS, 1996). Although BWS brought together Nama/Damara ex-detainees from the South with some (primarily educated) Ovambos from the North, few others have been actively involved in the organization.

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the meetings as did some family and friends of exiles who had not participated in the Committee of Parents/Parents’ Committee, thereby further expanding the communities involved and the perspectives considered.136 The goals and strategies pursued by BWS also differed from its predecessors in subtle but significant ways. Although from its founding BWS publicized the experiences of persons detained in SWAPO’s exile camps and pushed the liberation movement for answers about the “missing persons,” it averred from denouncing or affiliating with political parties, presenting itself explicitly as an organization addressing a human rights issue from a neutral political ground.137 According to Pauline Dempers, the founding vice-chairperson and current chairperson of BWS, this shift in focus was a result of ex-detainees’ experiences since their return, during which time “political parties [had] used this issue for their political gains, not really to bring this to a serious debate with the intention or aim to resolve it.” She also argued that Groth’s book, which framed “the wall of silence” as a human rights issue that Namibia as a society needed to resolve, impacted on BWS’s approach.138 Moreover, BWS was clearly influenced by how similar issues were then being addressed in postapartheid South Africa. In the months following the formation of South Africa’s TRC in December 1995, Namibian papers were flooded with people expressing their support for, or opposition to, forming a similar commission in Namibia.139 From its opening press release BWS weighed in on this debate, indicating that following the book launch, a panel would discuss “the viability and necessity of a Namibian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (or something similar) to deal with the human rights violations inflicted on the Namibian people by both SWAPO and South Africa during the war.”140 Favorable references to the TRC are made in other BWS press releases and publications over the following year and in 1997 the movement invited a TRC commissioner, Dr. Mapule Ramashala, to address its Annual General Meeting about “the relevance of the TRC exercise to the Southern African region.”141

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Dempers, November 21, 2007, 22; Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007, 7; BWS, “Annual Report 1996,” 169. As Godwin Kornes notes, most BWS members were detained at Lubango during the 1980s (“Negotiating Silent Reconciliation:  The Long Struggle for Transitional Justice in Namibia” [Mainz:  Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz 141], 17). Nevertheless, BWS included a sizable minority from earlier exile generations, especially during its early years. See, e.g., BWS’s founding mission statement:  “BWS is a movement of concerned Namibians who endeavor by PEACEFUL means to find a lasting solution for the problem of human rights violations committed and to work towards a truly democratic culture” (BWS, “Annual Report 1996,” 165). Dempers, November 21, 2007, 24–5. E.g., see articles cited in Dobell, “Silence in Context,” 378. BWS, “Media Release,” March 20, 1996 in “Statements and Clippings,” 51, 51a, 52 and “Chronik einer Debatte,” 45–7. Leys and Saul, “Lubango and After,” 346.

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Thus, the TRC was important in shaping BWS’s approach to the detainee issue and, probably, in legitimizing BWS’s project among some Namibians.142 BWS’s interest in the TRC also reflected the movement’s close relationship to the church. From its origins through the initiative of a theologian and church employee following their discussion of a pastor’s book, BWS associated itself closely with Christian institutions and teachings. This point is evident from the previously cited passage about BWS’s earliest gatherings drawn from the organization’s 1996 annual report, which emphasizes that meetings took place at the CCN “because [participants] felt most at home there” and that they started “with a prayer and short biblical reflection.” Similarly BWS’s opening press release on March 20, 1996 cites from a letter that the organization had sent to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of the TRC: “We wish to ensure you that we are no radical group, bent on damaging SWAPO as such. We have no ulterior political agenda. The leaders of this initiative are committed Christians. . . . We are inspired by Scripture readings and prayer and fellowship.”143 Moreover, BWS, unlike the Committee of Parents and Lubango ex-detainees before it, achieved some success in mobilizing Namibian church leaders to support its initiatives. Following a request from persons participating in the first BWS meetings, CCN General Secretary Ngeno Nakamhela began to attend these meetings regularly.144 Although the CCN declined a request to launch Groth’s book, it did agree after its November 1995 meeting that it would take measures “to address the detainee issue” the following year. On February 19, 1996 the CCN issued a press statement encouraging its members and the broader public to read the book, whose English translation had just become available in Windhoek bookshops. And the CCN announced its sponsorship of a series of conferences “on issues related to the ex-detainees,” the first of which would take place between May and July of that year.145 If there was any question as to whether Groth’s book and BWS presented a threat to SWAPO leaders, this was soon answered. On March 6, 1996, Namibian President Sam Nujoma delivered a twenty-minute address on 142

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In “Silence in Context” Lauren Dobell argues that many Namibians’ interest in, and SWAPO’s rejection of, Groth’s book was shaped significantly by the timing of the book’s publication just prior to the start of the TRC (Dobell, “Silence in Context,” 377–8). Nevertheless, Dobell’s account suggests, as mine does here, that the circulation of Groth’s book among certain Namibians initiated BWS and not the TRC model. BWS, “Media Release,” March 20, 1996; letter from Christo Lombard to Desmond Tutu, March 13, 1996 (gift to the author). Ngeno Nakamhela (Interview, February 21, 2007, 3); Gertze, February 21, 2007, 9–10; Kambangula, November 26, 2007, 14; Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007, 9. CCN, “CCN to Sponsor Conference on Ex-detainees,” February 19, 1996 in “Chronik einer Debatte,” 20 and “BWS Statements and Clippings,” 11–12. It should be noted that in BWS’s account of the CCN annual general meeting, Abisai Shejavali, the former CCN General Secretary and author of the 1985 letter that had sharply criticized the Committee of Parents, is described as having been particularly supportive of the ex-detainees’ proposal (letter from Christo Lombard to Ngeno Nakamhela, January 21, 1996 in BWS 1996, 7).

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national television in which he denounced The Wall of Silence, declaring it a “false history.”146 The following week SWAPO Secretary General Moses Garoeb issued a press release in which he criticized the book and people seen as promoting it in similar terms.147 Later that month, during Namibia’s Independence Day celebrations, SWAPO members at a rally in Oshakati called for the book to be banned and burnt.148 In each instance, histories presented in The Wall of Silence were discredited based on the national standing of those rendering them and the deleterious effects that they would supposedly have on the nation. For example, in his televised speech, Nujoma began by narrating his own responsibilities and accomplishments as president of SWAPO. He then contrasted this with other histories  – about German wars with Nama, Herero, and Ovambo people, about the Deutsche Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche (DELK) and about the Academy before it became UNAM149 – each of which associated Groth or Lombard to a colonial regime. Having made this case for who has the interests of the Namibian people at heart, Nujoma pronounced his verdict on Groth’s book: “[it] is a well-calculated move to open up old wounds and bring about racial and ethnic hatred in Namibian society. . . . It does not tell the truth.”150 Nujoma made no mention of Siegfried Groth or Christo Lombard’s work opposing apartheid, let alone respond to any specific content of the book with which their names had become associated.151 These and related efforts to discredit the histories narrated in Groth’s book appear only to have increased some Namibians’ interest in and exposure to it. The day after Nujoma’s televised address, Namibian bookstores reported that sales of the book had been brisk. The book also became the focal point for letters to the editor and editorials in Namibian newspapers and for the chat shows of the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC).152 Later in the year, in conjunction with Namibia’s Heroes’ Day celebration, Swapo published its own book, Their Blood Waters Our Freedom,153 listing the names of 7,792 146

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Sam Nujoma, “Response to Pastor Siegfried Groth’s book, The Wall of Silence,” March 6, 1996 in “Chronik einer Debatte,” 22–3 and “His Excellency President Sam Nujoma’s Response to Pastor Siegfried Groth’s Book: ‘The Wall of Silence’ ” in “Statements and Clippings.” “Media Statement by SWAPO Party on the So-called Detainee Issue,” March 12, 1996 in “Statements and Clippings,” 33–6. “Calls for Groth Book to Be Burnt,” The Namibian, March 26, 1996 in “Statements and Clippings,” 58. As VEM representative to Namibia, Groth worked primarily with the ELC and the ELOC, both of which became members of the CCN and outspoken critics of apartheid, not with the DELK. Nujoma in “Chronik einer Debatte,” 22–3. While at the Academy in the 1980s, Lombard was part of a campaign to allow political activity on campus. He also was a founding member of NPP 435, a civil pressure group that campaigned for the implementation of Resolution 435, the UN peace plan for Namibia supported by SWAPO. Dobell, “Silence in Context,” 379. Lauren Dobell was in Windhoek at the time when Namibia – The Wall of Silence was published and offers a detailed description of reactions to it. SWAPO Party, Their Blood Waters Our Freedom (Windhoek: SWAPO Party, 1996).

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PLAN combatants who perished between the beginning of Namibia’s armed liberation struggle in 1966 and its conclusion in 1989. The timing of the publication, which had been announced by President Nujoma as early as 1990 and was expected as early as 1991,154 suggests that it was motivated as a response to the public debate about exile following the publication of Groth’s book. For those who read Their Blood looking for answers to “the missing persons,” however, it only presented more questions and material for discussion. As the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR), led by former Parents’ Committee spokesperson Phil Ya Nangoloh, observed, only 140 of the 772 missing detainees that NSHR had listed in its records, had been registered in the government publication.155 Moreover, among those listed were some of the most widely touted “spies,” who were now included in a book commemorating heroes without any explanation for this discrepancy or any attempt to clear their names.156 Such points also became objects of discussion in the Namibian media over the months that followed. Nonetheless, even as national leaders were struggling to control the dispersal of controversial histories through BWS, they did ultimately maintain the allegiance of key church allies. Correspondence among representatives of the CCN member churches about whether the organization should involve itself in the launch of The Wall of Silence indicates that opinions differed over what it would mean to “address the detainee issue” in 1996.157 Divisions among church leaders appear to have widened further after the CCN’s February 19 press release, when President Nujoma invited a group of CCN representatives, excluding General Secretary Nakamhela, to a private meeting with him.158 Thereafter, participants in this meeting pressured Nakamhela to drop the conferences on the ex-detainees, and Nujoma applied pressure directly when a second meeting, including representatives of all CCN churches, was held with the president on August 13.159 Around the same time Nakamhela became the object of personal attacks and threats on NBC’s Oshiwambo Radio service, and SWAPO members were told at public gatherings not to take part in any 154 155 156

157

158

159

See “ ‘The Supreme Price’ Listed,” The Namibian, August 27, 1990. NSHR, “Critical Analysis,” 14. One of the most frequently mentioned contradictions in Their Blood Waters Our Freedom involves Tauno Hatuikulipi, the former political commissar at SWAPO Defence Headquarters in Lubango. In July 1984 President Nujoma announced that Hatuikulipi had committed suicide by swallowing a poison capsule hidden in a gold-filled tooth (Angula, “Brutalised Innocence,” 95–6; “A Report to the Namibian People,” 15–16). In Their Blood Waters Our Freedom Hatuikulipi is listed among other Namibian heroes and is reported to have died from bronchitis. Leys and Saul, “Lubango and After,” 345; Breaking the Wall of Silence Committee, “Media Release,” February 29, 1996 in “Statements and Clippings,” 16. Breaking the Wall of Silence Committee, “Media Release”; letter from Christo Lombard to Desmond Tutu, March 13, 1996; Leys and Saul, “Lubango and After,” 345; Nakamhela, February 21, 2007, 4. Nakamhela, 21 February 2007, 4

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reconciliation events sponsored by the CCN.160 Through all this, plans for the conferences continued to be made, and, after several delays, they were scheduled for 1997, which the CCN declared the “Year of God’s Grace.” Without the participation of most CCN church representatives, let alone SWAPO or South African government officials, however, the conferences remained a far cry from the dialogue that BWS desired and were disappointing to many who participated.161 In a statement issued following its 1997 general meeting, BWS criticized the CCN “for failing to adequately address the Swapo detainee issue,” stating bluntly that “the ‘Year of God’s Grace’ . . . has not borne any fruit and is a fiasco.”162 Looking back on these years from a recent perspective, some BWS members see them as a turning point in the way Namibians relate to their history. Pauline Dempers recalls that the early 1990s “were very difficult. There was intimidation. There were stages when people were also followed [by state security]. . . . There was no space in Namibia where we could openly express ourselves. . . . We were like a plague, something that people could not associate with.”163 Dempers and others cite BWS’s efforts to inform Namibians about happenings in the SWAPO camps as important to the increased acceptance of ex-detainees in Namibian society and to the increased willingness of Namibians detained in exile at different times and places to identify themselves openly as “ex-detainees.”164 Certainly, BWS has focused attention on “the detainee issue” and fostered a community of ex-detainees over the years since its founding. The organization has held general meetings to discuss its concerns and organized social gatherings on July 4, the day that the first group returned from Lubango. Its members have taken public events as opportunities to share their histories and to raise related concerns in the Namibian media. These events include the trial of Dr.  Wouter Basson in South Africa (2000), the discovery of unmarked graves in Eenhana, Namibia (2005), the NSHR’s application to the International Criminal Court (ICC) (2006), and the formation of Namibia’s Ministry of Veterans Affairs (2008) – each of which generated public discussion of contested exile histories.165 BWS has also welcomed people interested

160 161 162 163 164

165

Ibid.; Leys and Saul, “Lubango and After,” 346. Ndeikwila, February 9, 2007, 8; Nakamhela, February 21, 2007, 5. Leys and Saul, “Lubango and After,” 346, printed in The Namibian, October 21, 1997. Dempers, November 21, 2007, 25. It should be noted that the terms detainee and ex-detainee are still often used in Namibia to refer to those persons who returned from the dungeons of Lubango and embraced an ex-detainee identity to the exclusion of many others who were detained. At the same time, as some people not detained in Lubango have asserted their identity as “ex-detainees,” their experiences have been conflated with those detained in Lubango. See, e.g., Samson Ndeikwila’s “A Swapo Detainee Speaks Out,” The Namibian, October 17, 2006. For discussion of the Wouter Basson trial, see Leys and Saul, “Lubango and After,” 333–4, 350; Hunter, “Dealing with the Past,” 427–30. For discussion of the discovery of mass graves, see Williams, “Exile History,” 8–10; Hunter, “Dealing with the Past,” 428–30. For discussion

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in its members’ experiences and who have, in turn, dispersed these experiences more widely. For example, members worked closely with filmmaker Richard Pakleppa to prepare Nda mona, a documentary on the Lubango detentions, which was screened in Windhoek in October 1999.166 It has collaborated with lawyers and law professors to consider how its members’ concerns may in the future be addressed through international legal instruments. And clearly this book, like the previously cited texts by Dobell, Leys and Saul, Hunter, and Kornes, have been shaped by interactions with BWS members, whose perspectives are now being shared with others through it. Despite these efforts and some accomplishments, however, BWS remains far from achieving its central goal: to make histories of human rights abuses committed in SWAPO’s exile camps accepted by all Namibians. Like the Lubango ex-detainees and the Committee of Parents before it, the organization has failed to gain support not only from SWAPO leaders, who are implicated in the histories that BWS members tell, but also from members of other institutions whose authority remains closely tied to the ruling party and from an international system that has upheld this status quo. For a moment in the mid-1990s, the Namibian churches, with their widespread membership among Namibians, close ties to SWAPO, and affiliation with bodies leading truth commissions elsewhere, appeared as if they might use their position to apply pressure on SWAPO to participate in a dialogue with BWS about the SWAPO camps. However, without unity among the churches and under pressure from the nation’s president, the opportunity was lost. And while the experiences articulated by the Committee of Parents, the Lubango ex-detainees, and BWS cannot, based on the evidence gathered here, be described as hidden behind “a wall of silence,” the boundary dividing stigmatized and accepted histories of camps remains firmly intact.

166

of the NSHR submission to the ICC, see Kornes, “Negotiating Silent Reconciliation.” For discussion of the Ministry of Veterans Affairs, including their subsequent recognition of (some) ex-detainees, see Kornes, “Negotiating Silent Reconciliation,” 18–19. “Nda mona” is Oshiwambo for ‘I have seen.’ Leys and Saul discuss the reception of Nda mona at the time of its release in “Lubango and After,” 347–9. Since the making of Nda mona, BWS has also produced another documentary, titled Testimony (2003).

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7 Reconciliation in Namibia? Narrating the Past in a Postcamp Nation

On May 23, 1989 the SWAPO Central Committee issued a press release announcing that it would “adopt a policy of national reconciliation.”1 According to the release, the committee had met to discuss the policy in Luanda in February of that year as part of “an in-depth review of the political situation within Namibia and . . . the diplomatic efforts aimed at the implementation of the United Nations plan for Namibia.” In turn, it had decided that a reconciliation policy was necessary “to enhance the chances of peace” and “to heal the wounds of war.” The resolution included the following measures: 6. The Central Committee, within the frame-work of the policy of national reconciliation, issued a general pardon to all the misguided elements who infiltrated the rank and file of SWAPO with the aim of serving the war efforts of the adversary . . . 9. They have been freed and are already registered with the UNHCR to return to Namibia like all other Namibians in exile who voluntarily decided to return to their motherland – Namibia. 10. The Central Committee of SWAPO calls all Namibians to return to the people’s fold and work for peace, unity and national reconciliation.2

In the two days following this policy announcement, UN officials and international press visited 199 of “the misguided elements” at the camps where they were being held outside Lubango in southern Angola. Two weeks later South Africa announced an amnesty provision immunizing SWAPO leaders from prosecution for any crimes committed prior to the implementation of Resolution 435. Finally, on February 9, 1990, with the adoption of Namibia’s Constitution, this provision was extended to both sides in the war, and the

1

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BAB, SWAPO of Namibia Collection, 89fSLuPR1, “SWAPO Press Release on the Resolution of the Central Committee of SWAPO Luanda, May 23, 1989.” Ibid., 2–3. Five of the ten paragraphs of this policy statement focus on the detainee issue directly.

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Namibian government formally committed itself to promoting “national reconciliation.”3 From these beginnings, reconciliation has been associated with a particular discourse in Namibia.4 This discourse calls on Namibians to repeat an official narrative of the liberation struggle, embedded in SWAPO policy statements and the Namibian Constitution, and to eschew any histories that might threaten this narrative  – especially histories of violence perpetrated at Lubango and other SWAPO camps. There is some variation in how this discourse has been articulated by SWAPO leaders over more than two decades. To one extreme are utterances, directly in line with the 1989 Central Committee statement, that claim that there are no contradictions to the one true history told by SWAPO about the liberation struggle. At the other are comments that acknowledge that SWAPO made “mistakes” during the struggle and that some individuals were “caught in the crossfire.”5 Nevertheless, the ruling party has repeatedly resisted attempts to investigate how “mistakes” were made and their impact on people’s lives in the name of a reconciliation policy articulated in conjunction with the Lubango detainees’ release.6 This chapter examines social consequences of reconciliation discourse in Namibia through three of my ethnographic encounters. The chapter begins with my visit to Kaufilwa Nepelilo, a former exile from northern Namibia, whose experiences at Kongwa from 1964 to 1971 remain largely outside repeated histories of Namibia’s liberation struggle, including both an official 3

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For discussion of the negotiation of Namibia’s amnesty provision and the reference to “national reconciliation” in the Namibian Constitution, see Cedric Thornberry, A Nation Is Born: The Inside Story of Namibia’s Independence (Windhoek:  Gamsberg Macmillan, 2004), 175–6; Justine Hunter, Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia:  Umgang mit schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen der Ära des bewaffneten Befreiungskampfes, 1966 bis 1989 (Frankfurt am Main:  P. Lang, 2008), 130; Godwin Kornes, “Negotiating Silent Reconciliation: The Long Struggle for Transitional Justice in Namibia,” in Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz 141 (2013), 12. Unlike in South Africa, the Namibian government did not pass any act or create any formal mechanisms to promote reconciliation following independence. See, e.g., the contrasting references to the detainee issue and reconciliation in Sam Nujoma’s autobiography, Where Others Wavered (London: Panaf Books, 2001), 356–7 and in Nahas Angula’s opening of a parliamentary debate on reconciliation in September 2007 (“Some Namibians ‘Caught in Crossfire’ during Struggle: PM,” The Namibian, September 19, 2007). Other scholars have also argued that SWAPO’s approach to national reconciliation must be understood in the context of SWAPO’s detentions in exile. See Lauren Dobell, “Silence in Context: Truth and/or Reconciliation in Namibia,” Journal of Southern African Studies 23, no. 2 (1997): 371–82; Colin Leys and John S. Saul, “Lubango and After: ‘Forgotten History’ as Politics in Namibia,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 2 (2003):  300–25; Justine Hunter, “Dealing with the Past in Namibia: Getting the Balance Right between Justice and Sustainable Peace?,” in André Du Pisani, Reinhart Kössler, and William A. Lindeke, eds., The Long Aftermath of War  – Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia (Freiburg:  Arnold Bergstraesser Institut, 2010), 403–33; Hunter, Die Politik; Kornes, “Negotiating Silent Reconciliation.”

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narrative and a counternarrative that opposes it. It then sketches my experience of Emil Appolus’s funeral in Vaalgras, a village in southern Namibia from which originated several SWAPO officials associated with betraying the struggle, including Appolus, who was dismissed from SWAPO during the “Shipanga Crisis” of 1976, and “spies” detained at Lubango during the 1980s. Finally, the chapter considers responses to my photo exhibition “Living in Exile,” drawing from them to discuss how Namibians who never lived in exile, including detainees’ own family members, experience “Lubango.” Seen from these perspectives, Namibia’s reconciliation discourse shapes social relations that defy reconciliation by any normative measure. Nevertheless, and as I emphasize in the chapter’s conclusion, it is not silence, imposed by a discourse on reconciliation, that undermines reconciliation per se. Rather, it is the terms that this discourse foists on how Namibians articulate histories in their ongoing conversations about their nation with one another. This view tends to be overlooked in human rights literature on reconciliation that focuses on the need for “victims” to voice experiences that have previously been “silenced” in order to heal a social body. And this view is crucial for analyzing the manner in which people relate to one another in the aftermath of violent conflicts. In Namibia and elsewhere, camps have shaped nations, forming the grounds on which citizens talk about the past and negotiate relationships with one another in the present. They are, therefore, a key space from which to critique reconciliation discourse in Namibia and to reexamine approaches to reconciliation across national contexts. Outside History: The Story of Kaufilwa Nepelilo Before I  met Kaufilwa Nepelilo in August 2007, I  did not know that he, or anyone quite like him, exists. At the time I was living in Windhoek, conducting interviews with former exiles scattered across Namibia. Nepelilo was living in Tsumeb, one of the towns I passed through on my frequent trips to Ovamboland. He and I were introduced by Abed Hauwanga, an exodus generation (1974–5) exile, resident of Tsumeb, and avid participant in my research. As Abed mentioned during one of my overnights in Tsumeb, he knew a man then residing in the Tsumeb Old Age Home who had lived at Kongwa camp during the 1960s and whose history I should record. The following morning, Abed and I visited Nepelilo, and Nepelilo suggested that I interview him through Abed, who could translate between his Oshikwanyama and my English. As Nepelilo made clear, he wanted me to interview him and had “nothing to hide.” (See Photo 15.) For the next six hours Abed and I sat with Tate Nepelilo, talking with him about his past.7 Although listed on his Namibian identity card as having been 7

Unless otherwise noted, the story that follows derives from my interview with Kaufilwa Nepelilo on August 4, 2007. Direct quotations are Abed Hauwanga’s translation of Nepelilo’s testimony. “Tate” is the title used in Oshiwambo to refer to an older man. Abed and I  both addressed Nepelilo with this title.

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Photo 15. This photo pictures Kaufilwa Nepelilo and Abed Hauwanga. It was taken by the author at the Tsumeb Old Age Home in April 2008.

born on January 16, 1922, Nepelilo does not know his date of birth. He believes, however, that he was born sometime around 1930. He grew up in Eshoke, a village in Ovamboland to the west of Oshikango, the main border crossing for Namibia and Angola. As a child he, like many boys in his community, was responsible for looking after his family’s cattle, and he did not attend school. In 1954 Nepelilo traveled south of the Red Line as a contract laborer for the first time, and in the late 1950s, while working a contract at a fish processing plant in Walvis Bay, he encountered the Ovamboland People’s Organization (OPO) and began to attend its covert meetings. It was then, or shortly thereafter, that he first heard activists talk about “abroad.”8 According to Nepelilo, “They said if you go 8

Here Nepelilo used the English word.

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abroad, if you get educated, your situation will automatically change. . . . Once [the South Africans] will leave our country, then we can have the opportunity to replace their positions.” Further, he recalls thinking, “The white life, surely, is a good life. And that’s what motivate[d] [me] to go abroad. [I] wanted to live comfortably as the whites.”9 In 1962 Nepelilo did travel “abroad.” Departing from Windhoek he stopped in Otjiwarongo, where he and others received information for their journey from SWAPO activists. From there the group was transported through Grootfontein to Rundu, the town in northeastern Namibia where WENELA registered contract workers for the South African mines. After registering, they were flown to Francistown in Bechuanaland where laborers recruited by WENELA from throughout Southern African collected. There, Nepelilo’s group, like many other Namibians who fled into exile during the early 1960s, left the camp in which contract workers were housed and found their way to Maxton Mutongulume Joseph, the SWAPO official then administering SWAPO’s Francistown office. Nepelilo and others were then placed in a refugee camp on the edge of town where they waited for SWAPO to arrange transport to Tanzania.10 After waiting for several months, Nepelilo and other SWAPO members in the camp traveled by truck from Francistown through Livingstone and Northern Rhodesia to Dar es Salaam, where the liberation movement’s headquarters were located. After spending some time at a refugee camp outside Dar es Salaam,11 Nepelilo and others from his group were transported by truck to Kongwa. As discussed in Chapter 3, Kongwa was the site of a collection of camps administered by Southern Africa’s liberation movements from 1964. Nepelilo maintains that, when he arrived at Kongwa late that year, there were more than one hundred Namibians living in the SWAPO camp alongside camps administered by FRELIMO and the ANC. All of the camps were overseen by the Tanzanian government’s representative Major Chongambele, and the SWAPO camp was led by Leonard Philemon “Castro” Nangolo and fourteen other commanders, who had established the camp after completing military training earlier that year. Even before he arrived at Kongwa, Nepelilo seems to have been concerned about what he was and was not finding “abroad.” Shortly after his group arrived in Dar es Salaam, they were divided into two. Those with sufficient

9 10

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Nepelilo, August 4, 2007, 3. This migration route into exile is discussed in Chapter 3 and in Johann Müller, The Inevitable Pipeline into Exile: Botswana’s Role in the Namibian Liberation Struggle (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2012), 148–69. Nepelilo and others referred to this camp as “Temeke” (Nepelilo, 4 August 2007, 11; John Otto Nankudhu and Helao Shityuwete, Interview 2 June 2011, 13–14). It appears to be the same camp that Silas Shikongo identified as “Salvation” and to have been located in the Temeke District of Dar es Salaam (Silas Shikongo, Interview 26 July 2007, 24–27).

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education and within certain age parameters were assigned to attend Kurasini, a school established in Dar es Salaam by the African-American Institute to provide exiles from Namibia and other Southern African countries with the training necessary to attend tertiary institutions in the United States and elsewhere. The others were assigned to Kongwa. Nepelilo remembers listening to Namibians he found in Tanzania who were already studying at Kurasini, warning those who had been assigned to Kongwa: “Please, if you hear that you are going to Kongwa, don’t agree!  . . . There’s no education. It’s only a bush for fighting.”12 At Kongwa, Nepelilo was put through the paces of becoming a “freedom fighter,” participating in daily training activities and other camp routines. However, what impressed Nepelilo most about his early days at Kongwa, at least in retrospect, was the means by which the commanders controlled the camp’s inhabitants. As he repeated throughout our meeting, the camp commanders were contract workers just like he had been, and few had any formal education. They were not older than many of those who were in the camp, most of whom were aged thirty and higher. Rather, their authority was based on their having arrived in exile, received military training first, and having been given positions by the SWAPO leaders. On this basis, “they can just order you [to do] something which you really [don’t want to do]” or discount questions with refrains such as “this is a military camp” or “soldiers never speak.”13 Nepelilo’s and others’ questions collected around several issues related to camp daily life. Although soldiers were restricted by their training schedules and limited resources from income-generating activities, they did have free time during afternoons and weekends, which they often spent in the village of Kongwa. Requests for pocket money for use on such trips were not well received, however. According to Nepelilo, “Once you make a point of money, then the leader [says,] ‘You like so much money.’ Even while he’s talking, his whole pocket is full of money. But you, you don’t even have a single cent.”14 Apparently, these discrepancies were difficult to hide. Although the commanders slept in quarters that were separate from the other soldiers and often ate separately as well, they lived in the same camp and also spent free time in Kongwa village. Such living conditions also made it difficult for commanders to keep other aspects of their lives private. Although the commanders warned soldiers, almost all of whom were men, against having sexual relationships with women, the soldiers thought that some commanders were having such relationships, especially when they did not report to the parade and were not found in the camp in the morning.

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Nepelilo, August 4, 2007, 5–6. Ibid., 7, 9. Ibid., 16.

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Other concerns, especially in later years, centered on the war. Nepelilo remembers being in the camp on March 4, 1965 when the first six SWALA members departed from Kongwa through Zambia to the Namibian border, which they infiltrated some months later.15 When asked, Nepelilo indicated that he did feel some excitement at the time that the first group departed for Namibia. Nevertheless, his comments focused primarily on the problems that he and other combatants experienced in the years that followed. Although Group 1 (G1) managed to establish several bases in northern Namibia, most of G2, which departed from Kongwa in February 1966, was arrested by the South African Police in Namibia’s Kavango Region that May as were the members of several subsequent groups. As Kongwa’s inhabitants learned about these arrests, rumors spread that they had been picked up “like frogs,” that is, led unwittingly to their capture through the work of a South African agent or agents. Suspicions focused on “Castro,” who had participated in the G2 mission but had somehow managed to return to Tanzania and had led subsequent groups of soldiers from Kongwa to Namibia. In this context, Kongwa’s order gradually collapsed. Groups were not sent from Kongwa to enter Namibia, and Namibians stopped traveling into exile and entering Kongwa. Soldiers absconded from the parade, and participation in this and other camp activities was not enforced, when such activities took place at all. Some persons were openly critical of how the camp was being administered and were detained. Among these early detainees, Nepelilo mentioned “the Seven Comrades,” identifying the names of each of these individuals (see Chapter 3). Nevertheless, Nepelilo had been unaware of the comrades’ confrontation with the camp leadership at the time when it occurred – a result, Nepelilo surmises, of the comrades’ education and the unlikelihood that “intellectuals” would consult illiterate people like himself in preparing and presenting a memorandum. Many Namibians at Kongwa, Nepelilo further noted, began to escape from the camp, some making their way to Kenya, where they received scholarships to study (see Chapter 3). Nepelilo, however, did not consider going to Kenya because those who traveled there were at least “a little bit educated” and could speak some English. Without this background or skill, he stayed in the camp with others who spoke his language and where he received food from the Tanzanian government. With the exception of a trip to the USSR for further military training in 1969,16 Nepelilo remained at Kongwa until February 1971. 15

16

For accounts of the first mission of SWALA members, known as Group 1 or G1, into Namibia see Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (Trenton:  Africa World Press, 1988), 59–60; Nujoma, Where Others Wavered, 159–62. The ANC also deployed its members living in Kongwa to the USSR in 1969 due to pressure placed on the liberation movement by the Tanzanian government. See Vladimir Shubin, ANC: A View from Moscow (Johannesburg:  Jacana, 1999), 78–9; Stephen Ellis, External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960–1990 (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012), 83.

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In that month, Nepelilo and forty-nine other Namibians still living in Kongwa received a visit from several SWAPO leaders, including Secretary of Defence Peter Nanyemba, Administrative Secretary Moses Garoeb, and Political Secretary Jesaya Nyamu. The visit had been requested by Namibians at Kongwa through the office of Major Chongambele, and the leaders met with them one by one in the camp hall, listening to their grievances and presenting Nyamu as the new commander of the camp.17 During his turn Nepelilo recalls Peter Nanyemba explaining the leadership’s choice to him:  “[We] brought some new leadership, new commanders, those that are well trained and well educated . . . because you people don’t respect us because we are not well educated.”18 The course of events changed, however, when another Kongwa inhabitant, Nakale Hukuwonga, took his turn in the hall. Drawing a knife that he had concealed, Hukuwonga charged at Peter Nanyemba. Nanyemba managed to avoid the attack, but, thereafter, the SWAPO delegation stopped meeting with the soldiers and left the camp. Two days later, the remaining camp inhabitants were picked up by Tanzanian officials and transported to state prisons in Dodoma and Mbeya. Nepelilo was imprisoned in Mbeya until 197219 when he was transferred to Lusaka and imprisoned in a Zambian state prison until 1977. “Six years in prison. . . . Who on earth is six years without doing anything? Who?  . . . They put me innocently in prison for six years. Why? They didn’t bring [me] to the court if [I] did something. Six years!”20 In 1976 Nepelilo and others imprisoned with him in Lusaka received a visit from Richard Kapelwa, a SWAPO official, who offered Nepelilo and other inmates the opportunity to join soldiers at the front line. Although some accepted the offer, Nepelilo declined, and shortly thereafter registered with the United Nations as a refugee. In so doing, Nepelilo asserted his agency vis-àvis SWAPO, which he felt had grossly mistreated him, but, at the same time, stepped irrevocably outside the organization and any opportunities that it might have been able to offer him in the future. In 1977 Nepelilo was transferred from Lusaka to the UN-administered Meheba Refugee Camp in northwestern Zambia. Although some of the camp’s Namibian inhabitants were able to access scholarships for further training, Nepelilo did not have the basic education that he would have needed to access these and, within a year, he and some others with whom he had been imprisoned in Lusaka, left the camp. Eventually they made their way to Ondjiva, a town fifty kilometers from the Namibian border in the predominantly Oshikwanyama-speaking part of 17

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According to Nepelilo, SWAPO’s Kongwa camp had no commander at all at the time of the February 1971 visit and had not had one since Castro was imprisoned by the Tanzanian government at SWAPO’s request in 1969. Nepelilo, August 4, 2007, 28. Nyamu had just returned from the United States where he had recently completed a bachelor’s degree at the University of San Francisco. It seems most likely that Nepelilo was transferred in 1972 in conjunction with the move of SWAPO’s base of operations to Zambia in that year. Nepelilo, August 4, 2007, 9–10.

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southern Angola, where they lived for several years. In the early 1980s in the context of rising violence around Ondjiva, Nepelilo reentered Namibia registered as an “Angolan refugee” and returned to his childhood home in rural Ovamboland. After twenty years away from home, Nepelilo struggled to reconnect with his family – not least because many people perceived that Nepelilo had “deserted” SWAPO and that he could not be trusted. Moreover, due to the manner in which Nepelilo had left and returned to Namibia, the state did not recognize him as a Namibian citizen either before or after independence. As Chapter 3 suggests, there is considerable evidence to support central elements of Nepelilo’s story. During the early 1960s many Namibians traveled into exile in pursuit of opportunities abroad without any knowledge that SWAPO was training combatants for an armed liberation struggle. Once in Tanzania they were assigned to Kongwa without being offered a choice or having a clear understanding of where they were going although some were warned by students at Kurasini to avoid Kongwa. In the camp, soldiers came into conflict with commanders who were thought to be overly interested in asserting their own authority and disinterested in addressing soldiers’ needs and concerns. Conflict developed around matters emphasized by Nepelilo, such as money, women, and suspected spies, as well as other issues. By 1967 camp routines, such as attendance at the parade and participation in training activities had broken down, and inhabitants were migrating from the camp. Even Nepelilo’s account of the meeting with SWAPO officials in February 1971, which is not discussed in Chapter  3 or previous historiography, is corroborated in detail by Jesaya Nyamu, the official presented to the soldiers at the meeting as their new camp commander.21 And Nepelilo is far from the only Namibian exile of the 1960s generation to have repatriated outside processes led by the United Nations in 1989.22 Despite these and other overlapping accounts, Nepelilo’s experiences in exile remain unknown to all but a few Namibians. Clearly, the story that Nepelilo tells does not fit into a dominant national narrative about “freedom fighters,” who went abroad so that they could liberate their country through arms, and of “comrades,” who were united in their commitment to “the struggle.” Rather Nepelilo’s story unsettles this narrative and threatens those whose social status is invested in a single, narrow reading of it. More strikingly, Nepelilo’s story has also, to a considerable extent, been excluded from a counternarrative, focused on abuses committed by SWAPO officials in exile. As we have 21 22

Jesaya Nyamu (Interview, April 2, 2008, 5); Williams, “Exile History,” 233–4. E.g., some of the Namibians studying in Kenya accepted amnesty offered by the South African government and returned to Namibia from the mid-1970s (Toivo Ashipala [Interview, March 16, 2007]; Silas Shikongo [Interview, March 16, 2007]; Samson Ndeikwila [Interview, February 9, 2007; July 21, 2007]); The Agony of Truth: Autobiography of Samson Ndeikwila (Windhoek: Kuiseb Publishers, 2014), 74–6, 79. I have also encountered multiple references to people, associated at some point with SWAPO in exile, crossing from Angola back into Namibia as “Angolan refugees.”

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seen, critical historiography presents Kongwa primarily through “the Kongwa Crisis” of 1968 and at the expense of everyday life and camp histories that shaped a broader range of conflicts over a longer period of time (see Chapter 3). Moreover, even former Kongwa inhabitants who narrated camp histories to me are largely unaware of developments at the camp from 1969 to 1971 and of Nepelilo’s and others’ imprisonment thereafter. There are several reasons why stories like Nepelilo’s remain so obscure, each of them related to the social geography of exile and its reproduction as national history. During the late 1960s, as increasing numbers of Namibians left Kongwa for other places, Nairobi became a hub for knowledge about Kongwa among those who were no longer living in the camp. New groups would depart from Kongwa for Nairobi, and correspondence was maintained between Namibians in Nairobi and Kongwa through trusted third parties living in Kongwa Village, who received and mailed letters on their behalf.23 From 1969, however, this communication broke down. Among the causes of this breakdown may have been the deployment of guerrillas at Kongwa to the USSR for further training and stricter regulation of immigration into Kenya at this time.24 In any event, research participants who lived at Kongwa during earlier years offer vague and/or inaccurate accounts of what they think happened to those still living in the camp from 1969. Paralleling these developments was the hardening of SWAPO’s official history of controversies that occurred at Kongwa. From 1974, as large numbers of Namibians joined SWAPO in Zambia and as tensions emerged there, it became increasingly important for the liberation movement’s established leaders to label exiles outside SWAPO camps as subversive to the struggle. From camp parade grounds and other public sites, SWAPO officials identified those Namibians living in Kenya as “deserters,” and SWAPO members were instructed to have no contact with them.25 Similarly, “the Seven Comrades” were made an object of public derision and rumors circulated among Namibian exiles that they had been spies. Under the circumstances, those SWAPO members who understood the context of conflicts among Namibians at Kongwa were compelled to remain quiet or to discuss these matters within closed social networks. Nairobi, of course, was a different space where Namibians who had previously lived at Kongwa were residing independently of SWAPO and spoke with one another about their shared experiences. Nevertheless, they and other exiled Namibians who were not under SWAPO’s direct control were often inclined to tread 23 24

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Toivo Ashipala (Interview, July 25, 2007, 35–6). According to Samson Ndeikwila, around this time a group of Namibians from Kongwa tried to travel to Kenya but were refused entrance by the Kenyan government. Eventually, they reconnected with SWAPO guerrillas and joined them at the front (July 21, 2007, 41–3). See, e.g., Nambinga Kati’s account of an encounter in 1975 between the Namibian exile community in Kenya (of which Kati was a part) and a group of Namibians who entered exile during the “exodus” and who were sent to Kenya for education (Nambinga Kati, Interview, August 11, 2007).

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cautiously. On entering Kenya many avoided mentioning that they had had any prior association with SWAPO because it might lead government officials to deny them entrance or to reject their scholarship applications on the premise that they were the responsibility of their liberation movement and should return to SWAPO headquarters in Dar es Salaam.26 At the same time, some hoped to retain an affiliation with SWAPO and were cautious to make public statements about experiences at Kongwa that might foreclose that possibility.27 Decades later, when Namibian exiles began to make public statements about Kongwa, drawing the camp into a narrative that challenged SWAPO’s official history of the liberation struggle, those involved knew little about Kongwa. In June 1989 while the 153  “ex-detainees” were at the UNHCR’s offices in Lubango awaiting their repatriation to Namibia, a group of them drafted “A Report to the Namibian People” (see Chapter  5).28 Therein, the authors identify “the Kongwa Crisis” of 1968 as the precedent for a series of crises among SWAPO in exile climaxing in “the SWAPO Spy-drama” at Lubango. Their account of “the Crisis” is void of details, however, noting only that “a veil of secrecy prevails over it.”29 Several years later, in 1996, the Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement formed, and Samson Ndeikwila, one of “the Seven Comrades” who lived in Kongwa from 1966 to 1968 and in Nairobi from 1970 to 1978, became its founding chairperson (see Chapter  6). Few other exiles from Kongwa, however, have participated in BWS and most are highly reliant on political allegiances to SWAPO in order to maintain social networks and meet daily needs. As a result, the history of Kongwa articulated by BWS members has tended to focus on a narrow range of years and experiences, mirrored in a critical historiography that makes use of many of the same sources (see Chapter 3).30 Such gaps in national narratives of exile have made Nepelilo  – and others whose cross-border movements and political (de)mobilization during the 26 27

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Ashipala, March 16, 2007, 1–2; Ndeikwila, July 21, 2007, 41. The ambiguous relationship of Namibian exiles in Kenya vis-à-vis SWAPO is evident in the document that they released on behalf of those detained at Mboroma in April 1977 (see Chapter 4). Therein, the authors draw attention to the testimonies of Hizipo Shikondombolo and Elias Sakarias about conditions at Mboroma but do not draw these points into a broader discussion addressing the authors’ experiences with SWAPO prior to their migration to Kenya. Also, the authors refer to themselves at one point as “we Namibian SWAPO members in Kenya” (UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 5, File 8, “Appeal for the Release of over 1,000 Namibians in Detentions in Zambia and in Tanzania”). Hans Pieters (Interview, July 22, 2008). “A Report to the Namibian People:  Historical Account of the Swapo Spy-Drama” (Windhoek: 1989, repr. 1997), 11. Lauren Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle for Namibia, 1960–1991:  War by Other Means (Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 1991), 37–8; Colin Leys and John S. Saul, eds., Namibia’s Liberation Struggle:  The Two-Edged Sword (London:  James Currey, 1995), 43–4; Justine Hunter, Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia:  Umgang mit schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen der Ära des bewaffneten Befreiungskampfes, 1966 bis 1989 (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2008), 77–80.

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struggle defy nationalism’s expectations  – highly vulnerable.31 Nevertheless, Nepelilo has not been “silenced.” As Abed Hauwanga explained in the course of translating our interview, he first met Nepelilo at Meheba Refugee Camp in Zambia in 1977. Abed was part of a group of two hundred Namibians who refused to return to SWAPO after the schism in Zambia that resulted in the arrest of more than one thousand PLAN guerrillas at Mboroma (see Chapter 4). At Meheba, Nepelilo and Abed shared stories from their experiences in exile, especially experiences of mistreatment and detention. Twenty-eight years later Abed encountered Nepelilo by chance on a street corner in Tsumeb. By then, Abed was working for the Ministry of Home Affairs and Nepelilo was living from hand-to-mouth without any income. Through his connections at Home Affairs, Abed arranged an identity card for Nepelilo, allowing him to access the pension to which he should previously have been entitled as a Namibian citizen. Abed also arranged accommodation for Nepelilo at the Tsumeb Old Age Home, where in lieu of a family, he could have a bed and receive regular meals. Since then, Abed had been making regular visits to the home to visit Nepelilo and bring small items that he requested  – such as disposable razors so that Nepelilo could appear presentable for church services on Sundays. After handing our host a new package of razors, Abed and I stood up to leave. As we said our good-byes, I told Tate Nepelilo that I would be transcribing our interview and that I planned to return to him and Abed with a transcript to check if I had understood all the information that he had shared with me correctly. Nepelilo replied that he hoped that I would return, adding “I look forward to seeing my history.” Peripheral Community: Remembering Emil Appolus in Vaalgras About eighty kilometers northeast of Keetmanshoop and fifty kilometers east of Tses lies a place called Vaalgras.32 Like the surrounding region, Vaalgras is dry, rocky and sparsely populated, with several hundred people living in modest homes of brick and corrugated iron scattered across a communal land area.33 Most of Vaalgras’s inhabitants live off of a mixed-economy of small livestock herding and remittances sent by family members who reside in Namibia’s urban areas or who work on land owned by white farmers outside 31

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See, e.g., Patricia Hayes, “Nationalism’s Exile:  Godfrey Nangonya and SWAPO’s Sacrifice in Southern Angola,” Journal of Southern African Studies 40, no. 6 (2014): 1305–24. Vaalgras is also sometimes referred to by its name in Khoekhoegowab, “/Hei- /gâseb” and German “Fahlgras,” meaning faded grass. Vaalgras is located on the Tses Reserve but is distinct from Tses Village, where St. Therese Secondary School and a Catholic mission station are located. In 1993 the population of Vaalgras was estimated to be 607 persons. See Santos Joas, Historical and Political Background Research on Five Community Schools in Namibia (Windhoek: Africa Groups of Sweden, 1994). The community has remained fairly stable since then, and, if anything, may have decreased in size as increasing numbers of people move to urban areas.

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the communal area. Vaalgras also supports a few small shops, churches, and a primary school in Koichas, an area of more concentrated settlement within Vaalgras. Despite its peripheral location, people from Vaalgras have played a central role at key moments in Namibia’s liberation struggle. In 1957 a group of Namibians living in Cape Town formed the Ovamboland People’s Congress (OPC), a nationalist organization focused on the plight of Ovambo workers most directly affected by the contract labor system. Among the founding members of the OPC and one of the only non-Ovambos was Emil Appolus, a young man from Vaalgras, who was studying journalism in Cape Town at that time.34 After his return to Namibia in 1959, Appolus was elected an Executive Committee member of the South West African National Union (SWANU), an umbrella for nationalist organizations established under the auspices of the Herero Chiefs’ Council.35 Appolus also became the founding editor of South West News, Namibia’s first nationalist newspaper, which appeared in print briefly in 1960.36 Following December 10, 1959, when residents from Windhoek’s Old Location were killed during a protest of their forced removal to the apartheid township of Katutura, Appolus and other prominent Namibian nationalists fled into exile, making their way to Dar es Salaam. There, Appolus was named SWAPO’s first secretary for information and publicity and later assigned to open the organization’s office in Cairo, where some of the first SWAPO guerrillas were trained, and in Francistown, where many of SWAPO’s first guerrillas were recruited.37 On July 18, 1966 Appolus drafted the response to the International Court of Justice’s verdict in favor of the status quo in Namibia, formally inaugurating Namibia’s armed liberation struggle.38 Thereafter, his words were repeated as inspiration by SWAPO members committed to resisting South African oppression through armed struggle: “The course has been set. We have no alternative but to rise in arms and bring about our own 34

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Katjavivi, A History of Resistance, 20; Paul Helmuth (Interview, July 13, 2007, 13). Appolus is widely credited with authoring OPC’s Constitution. Katjavivi, A History of Resistance, 43; Hildegard Pütz, Paul and Sandra Caplan, and Ralph and Adeline von Egidy, eds., Namibia Handbook and Political Who’s Who (Windhoek: The Magnus Company, 1989), 124. Katjavivi, A History of Resistance, 30; Johannes Katzao (Interview, May 3, 2007, 2–3); Wallace, A History of Namibia, 249. Helmuth, July 13, 2007, 8; Pütz et al. Namibia Handbook, 124. In December 1960 the governments of Liberia and Ethiopia initiated a case against the South African government at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), challenging the legal status of South Africa’s continued rule over Namibia. On July 18, 1966 the ICJ decided that it could not issue a ruling on the case, effectively supporting the status quo in Namibia. SWAPO issued a response to the ruling on the same day. The document was signed by Peter Nanyemba, then SWAPO’s chief representative to East Africa, on behalf of the party. According to Peter Katjavivi, deputy representative to East Africa at that time, it was Appolus who actually wrote the document while he and Nanyemba offered some comments on it (Peter Katjavivi, “Tribute to Emil Appolus,” New Era, May 31, 2005; [Interview, July 23, 2008]).

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liberation. The supreme test must be faced and we must at once begin to cross the many rivers of blood on our march towards freedom.”39 During the 1970s, the nationalist political activity of people from Vaalgras expanded. From the early years of that decade, the apartheid government began to implement the Odendaal Plan (1964), its blueprint for ethnic homelands in Namibia. According to the plan, people from Vaalgras were to be located in “Namaland,” the homeland set aside for Namibia’s “Nama people.” Vaalgras’s inhabitants, who descend in part from Herero pastoralists,40 did not fit neatly into the Nama category, however, and were at risk of being categorized as “Herero” or “Damara” and forcibly moved to these groups’ respective homelands, hundreds of kilometers away. The Vaalgras community managed to resist removal on the basis of its members’ cultural characteristics, above all the fact that they spoke Khoekhoegowab rather than Otjiherero,41 and the authority of a treaty made between community leaders and the German government in 1908.42 In turn, the process of resisting removal politicized people in Vaalgras and other communities south of Windhoek, many of which were similarly threatened by the Odendaal Plan.43 In 1974 Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus, a student from Vaalgras studying at St. Therese in Tses (see Chapter 5), established a chapter of the SWAPO Youth League, and he and other St. Therese students began to canvass support for SWAPO in neighboring communities.44 In October 1976 Vaalgras Chief Jöel 39

40

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UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series A, “Unregistered Correspondence 1961–1969,” “Press Release by the South West African People’s Organisation, Dar es Salaam, 18th July, 1966.” For deeper histories of the Vaalgras community, see Jeremy Silvester, “Assembling and Resembling: Herero History in Vaalgras, Southern Namibia,” in Michael Bollig and Jan-Bart Gewald, eds., People, Cattle and Land- Transformations of a Pastoral Society in Southwestern Africa (Köln: Rudiger Koppe Verlag, 2000); Sarafina Biwa, “The History of the Vaalgras People of Namibia” (paper presented at “Public History, Forgotten History,” a conference at the UNAM History Department, 2000); K. F. R. H. Budack, “N Volkekundige studie van die Tses Reservaat (Distrik Keetmanshoop, Suidwes Afrika) met besondere verwysing na die geskiedenis en die iner – etniese verhouding van die bewoners,” MA thesis, University of Pretoria, 1965; Williams, “Living in Exile,” 240–1. Khoekhoegowab is often referred to in Namibia simply as “Nama” or “Damara,” depending on the ethnic identity attributed to the speaker. There were a small number of people living in Vaalgras who spoke Otjiherero at that time, but Khoekhoegowab and Afrikaans, rather than Otjiherero, were the shared languages of the community (Andries Basson [Interview, May 30, 2007]). Silvester, “Assembling and Resembling,” 491; Christian A. Williams, “Student Political Consciousness: Lessons from a Namibian Mission School,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 3 (2004): 548. For a review of efforts to implement and resist the Odendaal Plan in Namaland, see Reinhart Kößler, “From Reserve to Homeland:  Local Identities and South African Policy in Southern Namibia,” Journal of Southern African Studies 26, no. 3 (2000):  447–62; Williams, “Student Political Consciousness,” 548–9. For an analysis of how political consciousness developed among St. Therese students during the mid-1970s and students’ interactions with groups outside the mission, see Williams, “Student Political Consciousness” and Remembering St. Therese (Windhoek:  Out of Africa, 2003). Immanuel Hinda also offers an account of how St. Therese students’ meetings were received in Vaalgras at this time (Interview, September 19, 2007, 3–4).

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Stefanus stood alongside other traditional leaders in pledging his support for SWAPO and in denouncing Turnhalle, the meetings organized by South Africa as an “internal solution” to Namibia’s future government.45 On November 5, 1976, Willem Konjore from Vaalgras traveled with other teachers to Gibeon to protest racial discrimination under the South African education system,46 and, on November 11, St. Therese pupils led a strike in solidarity with students in Soweto, and several fled into exile.47 By the 1980s at least twenty-five persons from Vaalgras were living with SWAPO in exile,48 including Ben Boys, Eric Biwa, and Lukas Stephanus, who were appointed to the SWAPO Central Committee, and Andries Basson, who became a high-ranking PLAN officer. Despite this past, the struggle credentials of the Vaalgras community today are nothing if not ambiguous. In 1970, following the meeting of SWAPO leaders at the Tanga Conference, Emil Appolus was dropped as SWAPO secretary for information and publicity in favor of Andreas Shipanga.49 Thereafter, Appolus made a living as a freelance journalist in New  York and London, retaining his SWAPO membership but working outside the organization’s formal structures. However, in August 1976, following major upheavals among 45

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Katjavivi, A History of Resistance, 99–100; Basson, May 30, 2007, 4–6; Willem Konjore (Interview, July 22, 2008). Pastor Hendrik Witbooi from Gibeon, Stefanus Goliath from Berseba, and H. Noeteb from Hoachanas also pledged their support to SWAPO on behalf of their communities at a meeting in October 1976. Andries Basson, Eric Biwa, Ben Boys, and Lukas Stefanus, all of whom hailed from Vaalgras and had studied at St. Therese, played a critical role in the lead up to the October 1976 meeting by establishing a SWAPO cell in Gibeon and encouraging local leaders to take a stand on national political issues (Basson, May 30, 2007, 4–6). Konjore, July 22, 2008. According to Minister Konjore, who was the vice-chairperson of the Nama Teachers’ Association, he and others traveled to Gibeon on November 5, 1976 to meet the education inspector and discuss the unequal dispensation for teachers classified by the government as “Nama” and “Coloured” under the Department for Coloured, Baster and Nama Affairs. When the inspector did not come to the meeting, many of the teachers remained in Gibeon on strike from November until January the following year. Accounts of the strike and St. Therese students’ flight into exile are presented in Williams, Remembering St. Therese, 80–2 and “Student Political Consciousness,” 555–7. Joesph “Pereb” Stephanus (Interview, September 18, 2007, 35, 40). In this interview Stephanus offered the following list of names of Vaalgras exiles:  Emil Appolus, Dominicus Stephanus, Damianus Stephanus, Willem Rukero, Joseph Katzao, Joseph “Boetieman” Katzao, Joseph Hange, Aaron “Hage” Stephanus, Pius Stephanus, Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus, Jan Stephanus, Laurencia “Ounooi” Stephanus, Joseph Pieters, Theresia Basson, Isaack Basson, Andries Basson, Ben Boys, Eric Biwa, Richard Biwa, Elias !Goraseb, Lukas Stephanus of the Konjore family, the other Lukas Stephanus, Dominikus Appolus, and Johannes Konjore. The list excludes former exiles from neighboring communities whose families have more distant connections with Vaalgras. According to sources close to Appolus, he and Hage Geingob were held up at the airport in Dar es Salaam en route from New  York to Tanga. By the time they arrived at the conference, SWAPO’s new Central Committee had already been selected, leading to suspicions of foul play. Regardless, the position of secretary of information and publicity was highly coveted, and Appolus may have been at a disadvantage to retain it from his base in New York, where he was then representing SWAPO at the United Nations (Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus [Interview, August 18, 2014]).

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Namibians in Zambia and in the context of SWAPO elites’ efforts to centralize power (see Chapter  4), Appolus received a letter from SWAPO indicating that he had been expelled from the party.50 In November of that year, as Vaalgras students who led the St. Therese strike were leaving for exile, Appolus returned to Namibia.51 No sooner had he arrived, than he was condemned by SWAPO and associated with the Turnhalle process, in which he participated. On November 27, 1976 SWAPO’s Gibeon Branch issued a statement addressed to “Comrades of Vaalgras” on the topic of Emil Appolus’s repatriation: This is not the same Emil Appolus who left the country many years ago. Then he was a fighter and a person who had the interests of Namibia at heart. Today, he is an instrument of a South African government plan to confuse the Namibians, following the failure of Turnhalle. . . . He used to be a patriot, but his weaknesses allowed the imperialist and colonial agents to buy him over. . . . Be warned, people of Namibia: do not listen to or waste time with this mouthpiece for imperialism and colonialism.

In December 1976 this statement was published in Namibia News, the newsletter sent by SWAPO from its London office to supporters all over the world, as was a cartoon titled “Turnhalle Puppets,” which pictures Appolus and other prominent exiles who returned to Namibia in 1976 as marionettes attached by strings to South African Prime Minister John Vorster.52 Later, Apollus represented several political parties inside Namibia, including Andreas Shipanga’s SWAPO-Democrats (SWAPO-D) and the DTA. But he faded from public view after Namibian independence and, thereby, from SWAPO’s withering critique.53 Meanwhile, in southern Angola during the 1980s, exiles from Vaalgras were among hundreds of Namibian exiles who were detained as alleged spies in SWAPO camps. They were also some of the best-known figures to become associated with spying. The disappearance of SWAPO officials from Vaalgras was widely reported in letters circulating between Namibians at home and abroad as was the reappearance of Ben Boys who “confessed” on the infamous 50

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Stephanus, September 18, 2007, 41–2; August 18, 2014; “Returned Exiles Are Tools of SA Plot,” Namibia News 9, no. 12 (December 1976): 9. Apparently, SWAPO leaders resolved at the organization’s Enlarged Central Committee at Nampundwe in July 1976 to expel Emil Appolus and several other exiles who were seen as “rebellious.” Willem Konjore recalls encountering Appolus in Gibeon while he was on strike there with other teachers. According to Konjore, when Appolus returned from exile, Chief Jöel Stefanus drove to Windhoek to pick Appolus up from the airport. Later, the two of them stopped in Gibeon while traveling en route to Vaalgras (Konjore, July 22, 2008). For further references to Appolus in SWAPO documents during this period, see UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 4, “Memorandum from SWAPO Department of Information to Governments, National and International Organizations, 11th January, 1977” and “Statement by Comrade Mishake Muyongo, SWAPO Vice-President, Before the Committee of 24, on 25th February, 1977.” In his autobiography Sam Nujoma offers the following assessment of Emil Appolus: “Appolus turned out to be a playboy and useless to us. He drifted away from SWAPO and years later came back to join the South African colonial administration of local bantustan political schemes” (Nujoma, Where Others Wavered, 147).

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film that SWAPO screened before Namibian exiles in Lusaka in March 1985 and international journalists during its London press conference in February 1986 (see Chapter 6). Despite efforts made by some Vaalgras leaders to glean more information from SWAPO leaders about community members living in the liberation movement’s camps in exile, their circumstances remained unclear before exiles’ repatriation. In 1989 only nine exiles from Vaalgras returned to Namibia.54 Like most exiles from Khoekhoe-speaking communities, all of them had been detained in SWAPO’s Lubango camps, where they had been accused of spying, tortured into making false confessions, and detained for years in extremely inhumane conditions. The “missing persons” from Vaalgras have not returned to Namibia, and are widely believed to have been killed by SWAPO officials in exile.55 These histories and their enduring significance were all on display on the occasion of Emil Appolus’s funeral. On Sunday May 29, 2005 I  was in Keetmanshoop visiting Joseph Stephanus when I learned from him that Emil Appolus had died the previous day. Stephanus and others were arranging the funeral service, scheduled to take place the following weekend in Vaalgras. On Friday, June 3, I traveled to Vaalgras with several former St. Therese students whom I had known since my years as a volunteer teacher at that school and who hailed from the Vaalgras community. From our arrival it was clear that people in Vaalgras were preparing for a national event. As Andries Biwa, the presiding minister, repeated throughout an informal worship service that evening, everyone must be on their “best behavior” at the following day’s funeral service. “VIPs” from all over Namibia would be there and the community’s “reputation” was at stake. The next morning shiny Mercedes with tinted windows drove past donkey carts on the dirt road leading to Vaalgras. By 9 AM people had assembled at the house of a family member of the deceased and began walking toward the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) where most of us packed into wooden pews in the church’s nave. Thirty-three guests, however, entered the church through a separate door and were seated in front of the congregation in chairs on a raised stage. Three of those on the platform were pastors; two were cameramen affiliated with NBC, who were covering the funeral for a national television audience; six were family members of the deceased; and the rest were dignitaries. The latter included OPC founder Andimba Toivo Ya Toivo, Namibia’s former prime minister (now president) Hage Geingob, and the then chief whip for SWAPO in Parliament, Ben Amathila. 54

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Stephanus, September 18, 2007, 40. According to Stephanus, the group that returned at this time consisted of Aaron “Hage” Stephanus, Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus, Damianus Stephanus, Theresia Basson, Andries Basson, Ben Boys, Eric Biwa, Dominikus Appolus, and Johannes Konjore. One former exile from Vaalgras, Laurencia “Ounooi” Stephanus, was sent to Nigeria as a school pupil. As he was known to be studying there, he was never seen as a “missing person.” He returned to Namibia long after most exiles repatriated (Stephanus, September 18, 2007, 40).

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Throughout the service speakers associated with the local community made considerable effort to engage their national elite guests. All remarks in Khoekhoegowab and Afrikaans, the primary languages in Vaalgras and the surrounding region, were translated into English, the national language. Comments welcoming and expressing appreciation to guests were made repeatedly, and particular visitors, above all Toivo Ya Toivo, Geingob, and Amathila, were often singled out. Andries Biwa and his son announced the church’s plan to build a guest house in Vaalgras, where dignitaries could stay when they next visited  – above all Jomo and Norah Appolus, Emil Appolus’s children, who had never lived in Vaalgras but who presumably would need to look after their father’s grave. The offering presented yet another opportunity for the pastors to address elites, suggesting that they give gifts “appropriate to their place and station.” It was through histories of Emil Appolus’s life, however, that members of the Vaalgras community asserted reciprocal relations between themselves and national elites most forcefully. Consider, for example, the tribute to Appolus delivered by his niece, Maureen Hinda. Hinda’s comments focused on a story of Appolus’s life that she claimed he had told her shortly before his death. Like many other stories about Appolus presented at the funeral, Hinda’s focused on Appolus’s involvement in national politics, from his time in Cape Town during the 1950s through his leadership with SWAPO in exile during the 1960s. In contrast to other stories, however, Hinda focused primarily on a brief period during which Appolus lived in Namibia between his years in Cape Town and in exile, especially on Appolus’s activities in Vaalgras during this time. According to Hinda, in 1959 Appolus had shared his political views with people in Vaalgras and established a “SWAPO cell,” the first in Namibia.56 Through Appolus’s “cell,” Hinda associated Vaalgras with SWAPO at the very beginning of the liberation movement’s rise to power and long before Chief Jöel Stefanus had pledged his support for SWAPO in 1976. A second theme that ran through Hinda’s account was the importance that Appolus placed on his relationship with Vaalgras. According to Hinda, before his death, Appolus had spoken to her specifically about the significance he placed on his ties to the community. His words were repeated as a mantra throughout Hinda’s oration: “I have been to the top and I have been to the bottom. But my roots were always here in Vaalgras.” Hinda also spoke at some length about Appolus’s belief in God  – a point that she used to counter the 56

In this and other instances, Hinda did not make distinctions between SWAPO and other nationalist organizations, including the OPC, the OPO, and SWANU with which Appolus was affiliated in the late 1950s and 1960s. When asked about Emil Appolus’s political activities in Vaalgras, Immanuel Hinda mentioned that Appolus had held some meetings with Vaalgras leaders before he went into exile and that Toivo Ya Toivo had once come to Vaalgras and participated in a meeting. He emphasized that the meetings were closed, however, and that he and others in Vaalgras were largely unaware of Appolus’s perspective on politics (Hinda, September 19, 2007, 3).

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alleged concern of Vaalgras inhabitants that Appolus had lost his faith because he had not attended Sunday worship services since his return from exile. By emphasizing Appolus’s belonging to Vaalgras in such ways, Hinda attempted to bridge the gap that had developed between Appolus and Vaalgras, both in the minds of local residents and of visiting SWAPO leaders. Another illuminating tribute was offered by Chief Jöel Stefanus. Like Hinda, Stefanus offered a history of Appolus’s involvement with SWAPO, including his activities in Vaalgras prior to leaving for exile. Unlike Hinda, however, Stefanus was living in Vaalgras in 1959 and therefore could lend added detail and credibility to Hinda’s story. Remembering his encounters with Appolus at that time, Stefanus described him as a leader whose vision of politics and the future were beyond what Stefanus and his peers could see. Stefanus also discussed the decision to support SWAPO in October 1976. While acknowledging that, as chief, he had formally taken this stand on behalf of Vaalgras, Stefanus credited Appolus for influencing his and other traditional leaders’ decisions. The chief further emphasized that the choice had not only been important for Vaalgras, but also for SWAPO, establishing it as the premier political party among Khoekhoe-speaking communities living south of Windhoek. Later, Chief Stefanus referred generally to the costs of this choice: the harassment of various community members by the South African Police, the closing of the school in Koichas, and the exclusion of the community from various government services.57 He also mentioned the ongoing poverty in Vaalgras and the lack of development projects in the community. In juxtaposing such remarks, Chief Stefanus suggested that SWAPO owed something to Vaalgras for the community’s loyalty and sacrifices over many years. Unlike Hinda and other speakers at the funeral, Stefanus also briefly discussed Appolus’s return from exile in 1976. As the chief explained, he was surprised when Appolus returned to Namibia only a few weeks after he had thrown Vaalgras’s allegiance behind SWAPO. Stefanus carefully skirted the issue of why Appolus had left exile, indicating that Appolus had never told him. Rather, he focused on a lesson that he had apparently learned from 57

In January 1977, following the Nama Teachers’ Association Strike at Gibeon, the South African government issued instructions that Willem Konjore, the school principal at Koichas and a staunch critic of South African policies, must transfer from Koichas to Witkrans. In response, Konjore resigned from his post, and parents pulled their children out of the school. In 1983, when the school reopened as the Ecumenical Community School Koichas, one of five community schools in Namibia to adopt an alternative to the South African syllabus and offer English medium instruction prior to independence, school teachers and pupils were subject to harassment from soldiers (Konjore, July 22, 2008; Joas, Historical and Political Background Research, 19, 55). In 1978 following an extensive drought, the South African government refused to offer fodder to farmers in Vaalgras unless they were willing to support the Turnhalle government. Later, the state also refused to maintain Vaalgras’s windmills, the means by which people accessed water through boreholes deep in the ground although the CCN intervened to assist Vaalgras with this essential service (Konjore, July 22, 2008).

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Appolus: “There are some things better left unsaid in politics.” The chief further indicated that Appolus told him that he was “doing the right thing” in aligning Vaalgras with SWAPO and gave him his blessing to carry on with the party, which, according to Stefanus, he has done faithfully ever since. In this manner Stefanus turned himself into Appolus’s flag bearer, eclipsing the broken relationship between Appolus and the liberation movement. At only one point during the funeral proceedings did someone direct attention to histories that could unravel the carefully interwoven narratives binding Appolus, Vaalgras, and SWAPO. At the cemetery, immediately before the internment of Appolus’s body, Immanuel Hinda, a Vaalgras elder who grew up in the same house as Appolus, offered a final tribute. While thanking God for the life of Emil Appolus and his contributions to the Namibian nation, Hinda stated that Appolus belonged “with those killed at Cassinga and those killed at Lubango.” Merely by stating the word “Lubango,” Hinda drew attention to a site of suffering for the Vaalgras community that could not be acknowledged in the tributes to Appolus at the funeral, constructed as they were to secure a heroic position for Vaalgras in an official national narrative. Moreover, by associating “Lubango” with “Cassinga,” Hinda suggested that Lubango should occupy a similar place in the Namibian imagination but could not until Namibians profess a new history, in which Lubango’s “spies” and Cassinga’s “refugees” become similarly honored subjects. There was a time when references to Lubango were easier to hear in Vaalgras. Shortly after the ex-detainees flew from Lubango to Windhoek on July 4, 1989, Jöel Stefanus and other village elders met them in the Namibian capital and drove those from Vaalgras home. A  special service was held at the AME Church to mark their homecoming. From their seats on the raised platform, Vaalgras exiles shared stories about what had happened to them in the Lubango camps and about those who had disappeared there.58 Many in the congregation wept openly, and the presiding ministers, Andries Biwa and Willem Konjore, offered words of consolation and encouragement to those who had survived.59 In the days following the service, people from the community spoke with returned exiles about the latter’s experiences and debated how they should relate to their stories. Some were determined that ex-detainees speak openly with the Namibian public about their experiences and oppose SWAPO in the elections. Others, including Chief Stefanus, tried to dissuade them from this strategy, suggesting that they should support SWAPO at least until it had won the elections at which point it might address ex-detainees’ and 58 59

Stephanus, September 18, 2007, 40; Basson, September 22, 2007, 28–9; Konjore, July 22, 2008. Joseph “Pereb” Stephanus (Interview, June 15, 2005, 19–20); September 18, 2007, 40; Basson, September 22, 2007, 28–9; Konjore, September 22, 2008. According to Stephanus, after the returned exiles had told their stories, Willem Konjore said that “as far as he is concerned, these guys are not spies. They are heroes.” Konjore recalls telling the congregation that “these people are coming from a difficult situation. They need healing. We need to calm down these people . . . bring them to a normal life.”

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the community’s concerns.60 Emil Appolus also weighed in on these debates in his visits with exiles from Vaalgras shortly after their return. Apparently, Appolus encouraged them to speak out about Lubango, and he shared his own bitter experiences of exile, including stories about the circumstances in which he had been dismissed from SWAPO during the “Shipanga Crisis.”61 Sixteen years later, at Emil Appolus’s funeral, such histories were more difficult to hear. And yet, behind every comment about Appolus’s contribution to SWAPO and every request to assist the Vaalgras community, they were there. Drawing from shared knowledge of past wrongs in SWAPO camps, spokespersons for Vaalgras appealed to Namibian leaders’ sense of responsibility to the community of Emil Appolus, a father of the nation. But Appolus’s qualifications as a national hero are tainted, and Vaalgras’s past of SWAPO support is undermined through an official history that associates people from the community with “puppets” and “spies.” As a result, Vaalgras residents have little leverage to make claims on those who govern the nation. They rather hope that their leaders will be benevolent. Exile at Home: “Where Is Lubango?” In 2007, while conducting fieldwork in Namibia, I  assembled a photo exhibition titled “Living in Exile.” The exhibition drew from photographs housed at the National Archives of Namibia (NAN) and a few private donations, all of which depict Namibians living in SWAPO camps in Zambia and Angola during the 1970s and 1980s. Photos were collected under several headings titled: “Where were the camps?,” “Who lived in the camps?,” What did people do in the camps?,” and “How did war affect the camps?” Photos were accompanied by a map of Southern Africa, which marked where some camps were located; brief captions, which offered contextual information collected through my research; and questions, which invited viewers to share additional information with me for a public record. Content was selected that would be acceptable to Namibian government and SWAPO Party officials involved in organizing that year’s national commemoration of Heroes’ Day (August 26) at Eenhana, the capital of the Ohangwena Region in Ovamboland, and that might interest others in far-flung locations where I would display the exhibition following its Heroes’ Day launch.62 60

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Ex-detainees ultimately split over this issue. Within a few weeks of their return Eric Biwa became the president of the PUM, a political party founded by ex-detainees that aligned with the UDF; Joseph Stephanus joined SWAPO-D led by former SWAPO leader and detainee Andreas Shipanga; Ben Boys formally made amends with SWAPO and rejoined the party; and others partially or totally withdrew from the political limelight. Stephanus, September 18, 2007, 40–2. For further discussion of the politics that shaped the content, display and reception of this exhibition, see the introductory chapter of my doctoral thesis “Exile History: An Ethnography of the SWAPO Camps and the Namibian Nation,” University of Michigan, 2009, 1–28. The exhibition is also reproduced in the thesis (284–317).

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Photo 16. This photo depicts Namibians receiving instruction in a classroom at Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre outside Lubango (NAN/IDAF 12396).

Among the images displayed in the exhibition is a photo presented here. (See Photo 16.) According to the caption attached to the image at the NAN, the photo pictures “commanders of SWAPO detachments receiving political indoctrination and military training at an Angolan base near the Namibian border.”63 While preparing “Living in Exile,” several research participants had questioned that the photo pictures a site “near the Namibian border” because SWAPO members did not occupy any large brick structures there. It was far more likely, they suggested, that it pictured a building near the Angolan city of Lubango, where PLAN combatants received military training during the late 1970s and 1980s. In turn, these interlocutors and others who viewed the exhibition during its launch at Eenhana used their knowledge of the SWAPO camps near Lubango and their relationships with the people pictured in the photo to associate themselves with this image and, through it, with other Namibians who had resisted South African rule. Thus, by the time I  departed from Eenhana with the “Living in Exile” exhibition, I was fairly certain that this photograph was, in fact, “a photo of Lubango.” And yet, it was clearly not a photo of the Lubango that some of my exhibition’s viewers had in mind. This point came into sharp relief when, on September 17, I moved with the exhibition to Keetmanshoop and displayed it 63

NAN, Photo Archive, No. 12396.

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Photo 17. This photo, taken by the author, depicts people at the “Living in Exile” exhibition while the exhibition was displayed on a wall in Keetmanshoop on September 17, 2007.

on an open wall in the center of town. (See Photo 17.) There I was confronted by a woman who, after viewing the exhibition for several minutes, walked up to me and asked in an agitated voice, “Where is Lubango?” When I showed her to the photograph under discussion, the one photo of Lubango included in the exhibition, she responded “That’s not Lubango” and walked away. I cannot know for certain what my interlocutor expected to see in a photo of “Lubango.” It seems more than likely, however, that she was imagining the Lubango that is best known to Namibians who have never lived in the Huila Province of southern Angola. This is the Lubango of “the Lubango Spy-Drama,” of “the Lubango dungeons,” and of Solomon Hawala, “the Butcher of Lubango.”64 As we have seen (Chapter  6), those who suffered at this Lubango offered accounts of their experiences of torture at the time of their release and undressed themselves in front of journalists who took photographs of their wounded bodies. In turn, some of these accounts and photos 64

It appears that the ex-detainees played an important role in coining these expressions. See Political Consultative Council, “A Report to the Namibian People: Historical Account of the SWAPO Spy-Drama” (Windhoek: Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement, 1989, repr. 1997).

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circulated widely in the Namibian papers, drawing the word “Lubango” into a discourse about violence that SWAPO perpetrated on its own members in exile.65 The photos on display in the “Living in Exile” exhibition bore no obvious trace of this violence and may have been seen as part of a Namibian government project that, in the name of reconciliation, hides Lubango from public view. In places like Keetmanshoop and Vaalgras, which lie far from SWAPO’s center of power among Oshiwambo speakers in northern Namibia and which produced a disproportionate number of activists detained by SWAPO in exile,66 Lubango has become a powerful symbol, associated with feelings of exclusion from the nation based on region, language, and ethnicity. Responses to “Living in Exile” during its display in Keetmanshoop made these feelings palpable. For example, two research assistants and I overheard the following comments on the exhibition, most of them made in Khoekhoegowab, over the course of a few hours:67 “We do not see ourselves in these exhibits,” “So many people left for exile from the South but I do not see any such persons here,” “Are there only Vambos here?,” “Is this a Vambo thing?,”68 “Where are the Nama people?,” “Where are our children?,” and “Where are our people?” Such comments suggest that many viewers saw “Living in Exile” as having excluded local histories and that the question posed to me – “Where is Lubango?” – was a potent expression of this critique. And yet, the question “Where is Lubango?” may also ask more of us than this. For thousands of Namibians who remained inside Namibia during Namibia’s liberation struggle, “Lubango” is not merely a symbol of social exclusion. It is also a personal experience of violence perpetrated on intimate social relations. This violence has impacted most subtly and powerfully on female relatives of detainees, many of whose lives revolve around homemaking and care for family. Consider, for example, the story of Julia Thomas, another woman from Keetmanshoop who spoke with me about Lubango.69 In July 1978 Julia’s brothers Samuel and Cornelius, her sister Wilhelmina, and her neighbor and friend Maria “Amies” Isaacks departed for exile.70 For 65

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Although “the camps” and “Angola” became objects of knowledge for many following abuses among SWAPO members in exile during the 1980s, it appears that it was only in 1989, when ex-detainees returned to Namibia, that references began to focus more specifically on the word Lubango. As the largest town in Namibia south of Windhoek, Keetmanshoop was a home and site of activism for many people from across this part of Namibia who were mobilizing support for SWAPO (including the exiles from Vaalgras discussed in the previous section). Almost all people from Keetmanshoop who joined SWAPO in exile were detained or left SWAPO to avoid detention. The two research assistants were Steve Swartbooi, a political activist, ex-detainee, and native speaker of Khoekhoegowab, and Antoinette Mostert, then curator of the Keetmanshoop Museum and a native speaker of Afrikaans. “Vambos” is a derogatory version of the ethnic label Ovambo. Julia Thomas (Interview, September 20, 2007). According to Siegfried Groth, who narrates in his journal entries conversations between him and Samuel Thomas, including several accounts of Thomas’s journey into exile, Thomas and his siblings left Namibia on July 10, 1978 (VEM, Groth Collection, File Nos. 1369a, 1369b, “Tagebuchaufzeichnungen”).

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several years Julia remained in contact with her exiled siblings through letters and calls from Samuel, who had been appointed SWAPO’s chief logistics officer in Lusaka and was, therefore, able to keep in touch, unlike Wilhelmina and Cornelius, who, after receiving basic military training, were sent to SWAPO camps to teach and fight, respectively. In 1984, however, a letter sent by Julia’s sister, Elizabeth, to Samuel was returned to the family home in Keetmanshoop with Zambian stamps attached, indicating that the letter had not reached its intended recipient. In response, Elizabeth made phone calls to the SWAPO Office in Lusaka and to the International Red Cross, but none could shed light on the whereabouts of Samuel and other family and friends living in exile. About a year later, when the family finally received news, it came through a letter sent from Amies Isaacks to Wilhelmina Thomas. By that time, Amies was living in a UN refugee camp in Lusaka and Wilhelmina was living in England where she had received a scholarship to study. Both Amies and Wilhelmina had recently left SWAPO, and the letter focuses on Amies’ perceptions of what was happening to those whom they knew who had disappeared “in Angola,” including both Samuel and Cornelius. Although it is not clear how the letter traveled from Wilhelmina in England to her family in Keetmanshoop,71 once it arrived it became a source of conversation among Julia, Elizabeth, Amies’s mother, and a few others with whom they thought they could discuss it in confidence. Among those shown the letter was Hendrik Witbooi, chief of the Thomas’s home village of Gibeon and a prominent SWAPO leader who traveled on several occasions to visit the liberation movement’s leadership in exile. According to Julia Thomas, when the Thomas family asked Witbooi what he knew about incidents described in the letter, he responded that “these people are confined [at] one place with all the privileges. . . . What you were probably told about the deplorable conditions, those things are not true. Those people are being kept in a protective care situation.”72 On May 25, 1989, when SWAPO released the detainees from its “care” at Lubango, Samuel Thomas was among their number. On July 4 he repatriated with the UNHCR’s official entourage of ex-detainees, many of whom were known to Julia Thomas because they, like Samuel, had been prominent SWAPO activists in Keetmanshoop and neighboring rural communities. Wilhelmina also returned from England (where she had married and become a permanent resident) to visit Namibia at roughly this time. Cornelius, however, remained 71

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Julia Thomas believes that the letter was delivered to the family by Willem Konjore (Thomas, September 20, 2007, 3). Konjore, however, does not recall the letter (Konjore, July 22, 2008). A copy of the letter is in my possession. Thomas, September 20, 2007, 3–4. According to Julia Thomas, those who participated in this meeting included herself, her sister Elizabeth, Amies Isaacks’s mother, Jöel Stephanus, and Sunny Witbooi, Hendrick Witbooi’s first wife. This is one of several reported instances in which exiles’ families met with Hendrick Witbooi to request information about close relations missing in Angola.

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missing and, as the family learned from Samuel, had last been seen by fellow detainees in 1986 in one of “the Lubango dungeons.”73 As Julia explains, Samuel was “a free talker” and often spoke with people about what had happened to him and others at Lubango, but she, his sister, did not want to hear: “I was emotionally overwhelmed. . . . My children used to go visit [Samuel]; so many children used to crowd around him. But I personally decided to remain aloof. I had already had enough.” Only more than a decade later, in the weeks preceding Samuel’s death in 2002, was she compelled to see “a serious, big wound that he sustained while he was in exile” and to cleanse it when she washed his ailing body.74 For Julia Thomas, then, “Lubango” has been an intensely personal experience. And the pain associated with this experience has been compounded by the manner in which Lubango is and is not discussed in the public domain. As she explains, whenever the Namibian media addresses the country’s liberation struggle, it reminds her of family and friends whose sacrifices are effaced, if not besmirched, by the history that it presents. National holidays – above all Independence Day (March 21), Cassinga Day (May 4), and Heroes’ Day (August 26), when Namibian “heroes” are decorated and South African “spies” are excluded – are especially difficult to bear. This condition is deeply ironic when one considers Samuel Thomas’s role in strengthening SWAPO’s position in and around Keetmanshoop and the entire family’s reputation as SWAPO supporters during the struggle years.75 Even today, Julia Thomas retains a SWAPO Party membership, but the party leaders who used to be regular visitors at her home during the 1970s and 1980s do not come and visit any more. As she laments, the Thomases are “a forgotten family” and narrating how they have been forgotten “opens wounds that may not be healed but [were] somehow smoothing away.”76 Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Julia Thomas has preferred to keep her “Lubango” to herself and not to solicit information about the “Lubango” of others. She knows little about the Angolan city of that name, about the network of camps that SWAPO administered outside of it, and about the particular locations where her brothers were detained or where Cornelius may be buried. She avoids speaking about Lubango with her surviving siblings (Wilhelmina, Elizabeth, and a third brother, Zacheus) or their children, and she has not attempted to raise issues pertaining to Lubango with public figures. In all these respects Julia Thomas resembles other relatives of

73

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According to the “Lists of Namibia’s ‘Missing Persons,’ ” compiled by the Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement (Windhoek:  BWS, 1996), “Kornelius” Thomas of Keetmanshoop was detained in 1984 at Minya and was last seen by fellow detainees in 1986. Thomas, September 20, 2007, 5. Samuel Thomas’s work as a political activist is well-known among older inhabitants of Keetmanshoop, and Siegfried Groth refers to this work often in his writings. Thomas, September, 20, 2007, 5–6.

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SWAPO ex-detainees, especially female relatives, whom I met over the course of my research.77 And yet, Julia Thomas and others could have something to gain from focusing attention on the Lubango depicted in the aforementioned photograph. For this image is not merely a photo of someone else’s Lubango. It is a photo of the same Lubango that shapes her family’s ongoing relationship to other Namibians. Of those who discussed the photo with me, none imparted more information, or raised more questions, than Hans Pieters, a former exile from the Thomas’s home village of Gibeon. According to Pieters, the photo depicts the only brick building at Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre outside Lubango at the time when he served there as a political commissar in 1979.78 The building was built by SWAPO with materials supplied by the Soviet Union whose government was strongly asserting its influence within PLAN at that time. The room was a gathering place for all manner of functions involving the training of PLAN combatants, including the political education classes that commissars taught. Hans particularly remembers having a conversation with one of the men pictured in the photo at a neighboring camp where they both lived: “I said, ‘Something terrible is happening here. It’s busy destroying our party. I believe that most people who [are] arrested are innocent. Just listen to me.’ He said, ‘No Hans, I can assure you that they are indeed spies’. . . . Next week I was in prison.”79 Reconciliation? As these cases illustrate, “reconciliation” in Namibia is far from a politically neutral nation-building policy. Rather, it is the product of an armed struggle that generated stark divisions among Namibians and that are reinforced through a highly selective reading of the struggle past. The irony of Namibia’s reconciliation discourse is most apparent in the case of SWAPO’s Lubango detainees whose 1989 release compelled SWAPO to generate a reconciliation policy that stigmatized them directly and that impeded their subsequent attempts to gain recognition for their suffering (see Chapter 6). At the same time, this discourse bears heavily on a broader range of Namibians and a wider field of social relations than are encompassed by “the detainee issue” narrowly defined. 77

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Together Steve Swartbooi and I  visited and interviewed fourteen families of ex-detainees in Keetmanshoop, Vaalgras, Tses, Berseba, and Gainachas between July and September 2007. Most of these interviews were not transcribed for a public record due to the preferences of research participants but a few were:  Maria Higoam, Sophia Kahuika, and Emma Motinga [Interview, September 14, 2007]; Hinda, September 19, 2007; Thomas, September 20, 2007. Apparently, the building was bombed by the SADF during the late 1970s and replaced by the a new Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre during the 1980s (Hans Pieters [Interview, November 14, 2007, 38]). Han Pieters (Interview, May 21, 2007, 35; November 14, 2007, 38–9).

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One might conclude from these observations that Namibians as a whole are “victims” of the “silence” surrounding their nation’s history. Indeed, Colin Leys, John Saul, Justine Hunter, and others have made similar points, drawing from a widely accepted notion that SWAPO’s approach to Namibia’s violent past is “reconciliation by silence.”80 Nevertheless, to use this language, so prevalent in the field of human rights, overlooks the fact that Namibian citizens are speaking with one another about the past prodigiously and establishing diverse social relationships through reference to it. To render those whose histories have been excluded from an accepted national narrative as “victims” and to reduce their histories to “silence” divests marginalized subjects of the agency that they assert through narrating their experiences to others.81 Moreover, it obscures the social contexts that shape these moments of narration and that may open new possibilities for dialogue and recognition between divided people. Such perspectives should be important not only for analyzing reconciliation discourse in Namibia, but also for inquiries into the efficacy or effects of policies aimed at achieving reconciliation elsewhere. Most literature on the topic has done little to attend to such issues, however. Shaped by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the field of transitional justice that has formed around it,82 work focuses largely on whether the TRC enabled those that it defined as “the victims” to voice their experiences of apartheid-era violence or if it in fact imposed new “silences” on them. In turn, the literature projects from the TRC to “reconciliation,” associating a complex social phenomenon with one or another analysis of the commission’s public hearings.83 While such debates about “silence” and “victims” may have some 80

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Leys and Saul, “Lubango and After”; Hunter, Die Politik; “Dealing with the Past in Namibia”; Sabine Höhn, “International Justice and Reconciliation in Namibia: The ICC Submission and Public Memory,” African Affairs 109, no. 436 (2010): 471–88; André du Pisani, Reinhart Kössler, and William A. Lindeke, “Introduction,” in The Long Aftermath of War – Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia (Freiburg: Arnold Bergstrasser Institut, 2010), xi. Godwin Kornes also advances this argument working with my previous articulation of it in my doctoral thesis. See Kornes, “Negotiating Silent Reconciliation,” 19–21. Although preceded by other truth commissions, the TRC was the first to hold public hearings that made stories told by “victims” and “perpetrators” widely accessible. Following the completion of TRC hearings in 1998, organizations promoting similar approaches to political transition have been formed, including the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), established in New York by the TRC’s deputy chairperson, Alex Boraine. The ICTJ has been involved in establishing truth commissions in several countries and in asserting “the right to truth” as a basic human right. See, e.g., Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (New  York:  Doubleday, 1999); Mahmood Mamdani, “Reconciliation without Justice,” Southern African Review of Books 46 (1997):  3–5; Deborah Posel and Graeme Simpson, eds., Commissioning the Past (Johannesburg:  Witwatersrand University Press, 2002); Richard Wilson,“The Sizwe Will Not Go Away: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights and Nation-Building in South Africa,” African Studies 55, no. 2 (1996): 1–20; The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge

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value for analyzing the TRC or other truth commissions as objects unto themselves, they privilege what participants do or do not say during a particular kind of event at the expense of other occasions and locations in which people establish social relations through reference to the past wherein they do not necessarily act as “victims” and certainly are not “silent.”84 As the cases considered here suggest, reconciliation in Namibia is undermined not through the silencing of history, but rather through a kind of historical production. This production revolves, to a great extent, around the SWAPO camps where Namibian exiles lived. There, hierarchies formed among Namibians that differentiate histories that have been incorporated into an official narrative from others that are articulated only within closed social networks. Even the networks in which histories of camps are expressed tend to reflect the diffuse geography and temporality of the camps and the manner in which this geography/temporality has joined itself to communities in postcolonial Namibia. Thus, Nepelilo’s experiences remain largely unknown not because Nepelilo or others have never talked about them, but rather because Nepelilo’s experiences at Kongwa cannot be accommodated by an official narrative of the first “freedom fighters” and have remained isolated from ex-detainees publicly articulating an alternative to this narrative. Similarly, Vaalgras residents struggle to make claims on the state not because experiences of exiles from the community have been silenced, but rather because these histories are not official knowledge and community members’ responses to this condition reflect differences of opinion and status within the community. Even family members of those who disappeared in exile and who rarely speak of their lost kin communicate their deeply felt experiences of “Lubango” in what they do, and do not, say. It follows that one challenge in studying “reconciliation” and its effects in Namibia is tracing how people articulate histories across locations in the present with different relationships to camps in the past. Once I was introduced to Kaufilwa Nepelilo through Abed Hauwanga, Nepelilo’s trusted friend from Meheba Refugee Camp in Zambia, the space of a formal interview was sufficient for eliciting stories whose circulation had been confined to a small number of living persons. Contextualizing memories of Emil Appolus in Vaalgras required moving across a range of spaces, including Emil Appolus’s public

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University Press, 2001); Claire Moon, Narrating Political Reconciliation: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). Silence, moreover, may have a language of its own. For discussion of this language in the context of “reconciliation,” see Fiona Ross, “Speech and Silence: Women’s Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in Veena Das et  al. eds., Remaking a World:  Violence, Social Suffering and Recovery (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2001); Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (London: Pluto Press, 2003). For a broader discussion of “Silence after Violence,” see Yehonatan Alsheh, Robert Gordon, Anja Henebury, and Christian A. Williams, eds., Special Issue on “Silence after Violence,” Acta Academica 47, no. 1 (2015).

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funeral, archives and libraries that have printed information about him, and formal and informal conversations with people from the community of different political affiliations and with whom I have established relationships over years. “Living in Exile” created a context wherein people whom I did not previously know reacted to a presentation of their history even as the exhibition opened opportunities for me to speak with new people in other contexts as well. In each case, effort was made to access histories that are audible to few. If such histories seem to have been silent, however, it is only due to a national narrative that has been projected so loudly that the many histories that contradict it have become too difficult or jarring to hear.

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8 The Camp and the Postcolony

As Namibia reaches the twenty-fifth anniversary of its independence from colonial rule, the country remains far from the society that many contributing to its liberation had imagined. From scholarly publications to the popular “SMS of the Day” section of The Namibian newspaper, from the discourse of SWAPO leaders and supporters to that of the party’s outspoken critics, Namibians maintain that their country has yet to become “One Namibia, One Nation” and may be moving further away from that oft-repeated goal. Certainly, Namibia remains one of the most unequal countries in the world with an extraordinarily large portion of its wealth held in the hands of an extraordinarily small portion of its population.1 Although some wealthy elites are now black, the great majority of black Namibians have not yet benefitted substantially in material terms from independence, and the number who live in desperate poverty, struggling to meet their most basic human needs, appears to be growing.2 “Tribalism” and “regionalism” remain defining features of Namibia’s political landscape, reflected in the secessionist violence in Namibia’s Caprivi Region in 1999 and the government’s response, echoed in the constituencies of political parties, the rhetoric of politicians, and the processes through which state resources are distributed.3 Even relations among 1

2

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For recent statistics highlighting socioeconomic inequality from various perspectives, see Henning Melber, Understanding Namibia: The Trials of Independence (Jacana:  Johannesburg, 2014), 145–8. For evidence of deteriorating living conditions among the most impoverished Namibians, see Melber, Understanding Namibia, 156–9. For discussion of the attempted secession in Caprivi and the Namibian government’s response, see Henning Melber, “One Namibia, One Nation? The Caprivi as Contested Territory,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 27, no. 4 (2009):  463–81; Understanding Namibia, 70–83; Bennett Kangumu, Contesting Caprivi:  A  History of Colonial Isolation and Regional Nationalism in Namibia (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2011), 214–36. For a discussion of ethnic and regional dynamics in Namibia’s current politics, see Understanding Namibia, 37–88.

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SWAPO members have turned openly hostile and violent, as evidenced in the unfolding conflict between the Namibian government and “the Children of the Liberation Struggle” and in the fatal shooting of Frieda Ndatipo.4 In the face of such social divisions and in fear of further postcolonial decay, there is a tendency among commentators with different political views, articulating opposing arguments, to appeal to the liberation struggle as a period of unity and idealism whose spirit should be reclaimed. To cite one instructive debate: in February 2008, shortly after the eruption of postelection ethnic violence in Kenya and the formation of the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP), an opposition party in Namibia, Namibia’s then prime minister, Nahas Angula, published a series of articles in New Era.5 Therein, Angula warned readers that the RDP, led by former SWAPO leaders Hidipo Hamutenya and Jesaya Nyamu, risked setting Namibia on “the same political development trajectory” as Kenya through the RDP’s alleged “ethnic project” of appealing to Ovakwanyama voters.6 Nonetheless, the prime minister reminded Namibians that “the spirit of the liberation struggle” could guide them through these difficult times  – a spirit rooted in “personal sacrifice, selflessness and commitment to all the people.” Several weeks later, Namibian political scientist Alfredo Hengari wrote a column in The Namibian wherein he replied to the prime minister and other SWAPO officials accusing the RDP of tribalism. As Hengari noted, SWAPO’s leaders were not articulating “a transformative or ethical discussion about tribalism” and were, therefore, contradicting “the raison d’être of resistance against colonialism and later the liberation struggle.”7 Thereafter, Gwen Lister, founding editor of The Namibian, also made SWAPO officials’ comments about Kwanyamas the focus of her weekly column “Political Perspective.” As she argued there, in language similar to Angula’s, “anti-Kwanyama sentiments” not only contradict the Namibian Constitution, 4

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“The Children of the Liberation Struggle” is a collection of young adults who, since late 2008, have sought employment and other forms of assistance from the Namibian government on the premise that, as children born under SWAPO’s care in exile, the SWAPO-led government has a special responsibility to provide for their needs. Interface between public officials and a faction of “the Struggle Kids” (as they are popularly known) has become increasingly antagonistic, and on August 27, 2014, one protestor, Frieda Ndatipo, was shot by Namibian police outside SWAPO’s Katutura office. Some commentators have dubbed this event Namibia’s “Marikana,” referencing the South African Police’s fatal shooting of thirty-four striking miners at Lonmin’s Marikana mine on August 16, 2012 (e.g., Radical Teachers, “From Marikana and Ferguson to Katutura,” The Namibian, September 5, 2014). “Citizen” Nahas Angula, “Which Way African? Multi Party Democracy and Violence in Africa,” New Era, February 1, 2008; “Namibia at Political Crossroads,” New Era, February 8, 2008; “Threat Posed by Ethnic Political Entrepreneurship in Namibia:  Part  2,” New Era, February 15, 2008; “Towards an Inclusive, Fair and Just Political Order in Africa,” New Era, February 22, 2008. Allegedly, RDP leaders were appealing to the Ovakwanyama, the largest of the seven subunits among the dominant Ovambo ethnic group, to divide the Ovambo and attain power. Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari, “Namibia Needs a Transformative Discussion about Tribalism,” The Namibian, April 4, 2008.

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but also “the spirit of the liberation struggle, which held aloft the idea of ‘One Namibia, One Nation.’ ”8 Clearly, all sides in this debate present the liberation struggle in a similar way. And yet, behind such rhetoric lies a past that often contradicts it and that bears heavily on the present.9 One space shaping the relationship between past and present is the camps where Namibian exiles lived. There, in the midst of war, with resources limited and possibilities for misfortune high, the liberation movement first governed Namibian citizens. Through encounters in camps, a social hierarchy emerged in which certain individuals and groups were granted power to look after their fellow Namibians. At the same time, a national history formed through which those at the nation’s pinnacle legitimated their own position of power at the expense of others with competing claims. This hierarchy and this history have reproduced themselves in an independent Namibia, where citizens continue to access resources from the leaders of a liberation movement whose authority derives from socially accepted narratives about their contribution to, and others’ subversion of, a nation. To equate “personal sacrifice, selflessness and commitment to all people” or “One Namibia, One Nation” with the “raison d’être” or “spirit of the liberation struggle” is to overlook qualities of the struggle era that undermine inclusive and just social relations in Namibia today. This book highlights this paradox at the heart of contemporary Namibia while suggesting how its features may illuminate postcolonial conditions elsewhere. As previously noted, liberation movement camps appear to be significant sites in defining nationalisms and overdetermining historical narratives across Southern Africa. Moreover, camps have become an increasingly important feature in the social landscape of the colonial and postcolonial world, managing and “knowing” vast numbers of people even as they generate political subjectivities that defy these forms of knowledge. This conclusion, therefore, not only consolidates key arguments about the significance of the SWAPO camps for comprehending postcolonial Namibia, but also suggests how “the camp” may generate new insights on “the postcolony” more broadly conceived. Interpreting the Postcolony through the Liberation Movement Camp SWAPO did not begin to govern Namibians when Namibia achieved independence in 1990. It began to govern more than twenty-five years earlier while administering its own members in its exile camps. In this regard it resembles

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Gwen Lister, “Political Perspective,” The Namibian, June 13, 2008. Angula’s articles briefly drew these contradictions and entanglements to the surface of Namibian public life when Keshii Nathanael, the head of the SYL at the time of “the exodus”, responded from Sweden (where Nathanael was granted political asylum), denouncing Angula’s reading of the SYL’s actions in 1970s Zambia as a prehistory to “ethnic entrepreneurship” in Namibia. See Keshii Nathanael, “PM Angula Must Provide Proof,” New Era, February 22, 2008; Nahas Angula, “He Should Read the Article,” New Era, February 29, 2008; Keshii Nathanael, “PM Angula Should Own Up to Swapo’s Dark History,” Informanté, March 20, 2008.

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the liberation movements, and now ruling parties, of Southern Africa’s other postliberation nations:  Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. These movements were part of a regional system in which camps were administered in the frontline states on similar and sometimes overlapping terrain over a common period of time. There are important differences between the camps that liberation movements governed, which, in SWAPO’s case, should be evident from the body of this text. Some were established primarily to house civilians whereas others were intended for quartering guerrillas or for detaining accused spies. Some, like camps in the war zones of southwestern Zambia and southern Angola, could be quickly abandoned, while others like Nyango and Kwanza Sul became semipermanent, accommodating thousands of people for a decade or more. Camp demographics varied not only according to camps’ intended purposes, but also to the shifting flows of exiles, like in the case of Cassinga, where a site originally created for the logistical and transit purposes of a guerrilla army establishing itself in southern Angola came to accommodate a flood of exiles fleeing violence in northern Namibia. Camps, moreover, were embedded in different pasts, reflecting the various conditions prevailing in Tanzania during the 1960s, Zambia during the 1970s, and Angola during the 1980s as well as more specific local histories. There are also important differences in camps across the liberation movements that should be recalled. For example, Mozambique and Angola achieved their independence in 1975 and, thereafter, became frontline states hosting camps for Zimbabwean, South African, and Namibian movements. Prior to 1975 many of the camplike spaces that FRELIMO and the MPLA administered were not in exile at all, but rather in “liberated zones” within their own countries.10 Only the ANC and SWAPO had the 1980s experience in Angola – where and when the regional war escalated dramatically and security apparatuses in both movements ran amok. Also, the ANC and SWAPO’s more extended period of exile and extraordinary international support resulted in camps with a greater degree of permanency than those created by other liberation movements such as Nyango and Kwanza Sul (SWAPO) and the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (ANC).11 10

11

SWAPO also claimed to administer liberated zones, which featured in Per Sanden’s 1978 film Here Is Namibia: Inside the Liberated Areas and Beyond. Scholarship confirms that there were “no-go areas” for South African forces in Ovamboland between 1978 and 1980. See Susan Brown, “Diplomacy by Other Means,” in Colin Leys and John S. Saul eds., Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword (London: James Currey, 1995), 29. If these constituted “liberated zones,” however, they were different from those in Angola and Mozambique where liberation movements established a range of services for fellow nationals over much larger tracks of land for more extended periods of time. For more information about Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College, or SOMAFCO as it is better known, see Sean Morrow, Brown Maaba, and Loyiso Pulumani, Education in Exile: SOMAFCO, the ANC School in Tanzania, 1978 to 1992 (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2004).

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By drawing attention to the liberation movement camp as a kind of space through which to discuss all these sites, this text does not wish to efface differences between them. Rather, it intends to illuminate differences by promoting a dialogue around sites that SWAPO and other liberation movements administered at distinct times and places. Moreover, it aims to highlight power dynamics that have emerged in and around camps, enabling a great diversity of sites to become associated with one or another side of a binary opposition, presenting camps as models of social transformation or oppression – without acknowledging that camps were both, often at the same time. Consider, for example, the parade at Cassinga discussed at the beginning of Chapter 2 and depicted on this book’s cover. There we find ourselves at a site where postcolonial subjects were being formed. Whereas the subjects of South African rule had been divided by the racial, ethnic, and gender categories of the apartheid state, Cassinga’s inhabitants were constituting themselves as “Namibians” united by their country of origin and commitment to a national liberation struggle led by SWAPO. In return for inhabitants’ loyalty, demonstrated through strict adherence to camp rules, SWAPO was offering protection and basic education and health services  – all of which were elusive for most black inhabitants of Namibia and had been further undermined through exiles’ flight to Angola. Discourse often returned to visions of a utopian future that the liberation movement was calling into being in the camp and that was professed fervently at the camp parade. Although most Namibian exiles never entered Cassinga and those who did had different degrees of access to its internal geography, almost all can identify at some level with this kind of experience. Even former exiles who have become ardent critics of an official exile history sometimes speak of camps where they lived as sites of liberating practice from which they hopefully imagined a postcolonial future. Such impressions and experiences were not incidental. They reflected the manner in which SWAPO officials articulated the purpose of their camps, especially from the mid-1970s when the liberation movement became responsible for administering increasing numbers of Namibians who were not appropriate for guerrilla training. As SWAPO wrote in a proposal aimed at establishing the Old Farm in 1973: “The philosophical basis of this Center is to germinate a model nuclear community which would form a foundation for the future Namibian society. . . . [There] SWAPO envisages to reorient Namibians with different cultural, social and educational backgrounds towards the ideals of one Namibia, one People, and one Nation.”12 In articulating this vision, SWAPO drew from an established body of theory for anticolonial guerrillas engaging with civilian populations that had been put into practice elsewhere.13 12

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UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 2, “Namibian Educational and Health Centre,” 1973, 3.  The Old Farm is the first camp that SWAPO created explicitly for exiled Namibians who were not trained or training as guerrillas. Importantly, Mao Tse-Tung theorized these ideas in On Guerrilla Warfare, trans. Samuel Griffith (Champagne: University of Illinois, 2000).

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In the Southern African context, FRELIMO became especially associated with radically transformed social relations in the places that it administered prior to independence. Through these sites, the liberation movement asserted its will not only to create a new social order, but also a “new man,” a new kind of human being that would be better than the traditional and colonial beings that had come before and would shape the postcolonial future. As scholars of Mozambique have noted, and as this book also suggests, threats of violence, both colonial and national, did not undermine these aims. Rather, they were a precondition for them, compelling people to unite with one another and submit to the vision of a vanguard movement.14 Nevertheless, camps were simultaneously producing new power relations that were pulling the nation apart, utilizing and refracting the very categories through which colonial regimes had divided their subjects. Each episode considered in Part II of this text presents an example of the manner in which these relations could play out, and, collectively, they demonstrate how abuses of power developed a momentum of their own within SWAPO. From as early as 1964, when SWALA guerrillas first entered Kongwa, this camp was a site of conflict. Initially conflict stemmed from camp inhabitants’ unequal access to everyday commodities and freedom to move outside the camp’s perimeter, and later it became greatly exacerbated by setbacks in SWAPO’s armed struggle and concerns about South African espionage. In response, camp leaders, supported by SWAPO and Tanzanian officials, used their control over resources, movement, and knowledge to manage tensions at Kongwa, isolating difficult groups, imprisoning those who openly criticized the status quo, and stigmatizing those who had been imprisoned. The arrival of “the exodus” in Zambia in 1974 created new tensions among exiled Namibians, reflecting the youthful and educated demographics of, and the presence of women among, the new exile generation. Moreover, the resolution of these tensions drew on new methods, including cutting off much of SWAPO’s guerrilla army from food and weapons, scapegoating critics through a formal commission of inquiry, and eliminating some dissidents. Nevertheless, camps were again the sites at which conflicts emerged and through which SWAPO and Zambian officials used their ability to manage resources, movement, and knowledge to resolve them. Angola and the 1980s created further conditions for conflict within SWAPO, enabling officials affiliated with PLAN’s Command Headquarters to assert power within the movement through a purge of alleged spies who were compelled through torture to make “confessions” and then secretly detained and/or 14

Harry West, “Girls with Guns:  Narrating the Experience of War of FRELIMO’s ‘Female Detachment,’ ” Special Issue on Youth and Social Imagination, Anthropological Quarterly 73, no.  4 (2000):  180–94; Kupilikula:  Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 133–63; Michael G. Panzer, “A Nation in Name, a ‘State’ in Exile: The FRELIMO Proto-State, Youth, Gender and the Liberation of Mozambique, 1962–1975” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Albany, 2013).

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eliminated outside Lubango. Again, the capacity of SWAPO officials to abuse power through spy accusations relied, to a great extent, on everyday camp life and on the discourses, often attributable to apartheid divisions and violence, which could be mobilized in that space. While the particular trajectory traced here is unique to SWAPO, the social dynamics that shaped it clearly resemble those of other Southern African liberation movements. As noted in the discussion of exile historiography in the opening chapter, camps were sites of extensive internal conflict for every armed liberation movement, with conflicts revolving around the same kinds of issues and the same types of social difference. Moreover, there are more specific similarities in conflicts within different liberation movements at sites where their respective camps overlapped. Consider, for example, recent literature on the ANC camp at Kongwa and resonances with the SWAPO camp there.15 Like their compatriots in SWAPO, MK guerrillas remained stuck at Kongwa for years following failed attempts to infiltrate South Africa, part of the long shadow cast by the arrest of ANC leaders at Rivonia. As both Sifiso Ndlovu and Stephen Ellis suggest, conflict emerged in the camp through everyday interactions – drinking in the location, visiting local women, and selling secondhand clothes  – all of which resulted in, or accentuated, factional and ethnic tensions. Moreover, as Ellis astutely notes, “Kongwa camp with its 400 to 500 residents was the main concentration of ANC personnel in exile, and mastery of the camp therefore provided a platform for influence within the organization as a whole” – a platform that some ANC officials used to dismiss widespread grievances about camp life and identify those who expressed them as threats to ANC security.16 Moving to Zambia and the 1970s, literature on Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle suggests strong resemblances between the conditions in SWAPO’s and ZANU’s camps that precipitated uprisings within both movements – conditions that appear to have been influenced by (but are not reducible to) the Vorster-Kaunda détente.17 The Zambian government’s detention of more than one thousand guerrillas affiliated with ZANU at Mboroma camp from March to December 1975 and descriptions of living conditions and Zambian soldiers’ use of violence on detainees there also bear striking similarity with PLAN guerrillas’ experiences at Mboroma a few months later.18 Similarly, in another context, the evolution of the ANC’s security apparatus during the late 1970s and 1980s in Angola bears similarity with the SWAPO 15

16 17

18

Sifiso Ndlovu, “The ANC in Exile, 1960–1970,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 1 (1960–1970) (Cape Town:  Zebra Press, 2004), 463–9; Stephen Ellis, External Mission:  The ANC in Exile, 1960–1990 (Johannesburg and Cape Town:  Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012), 51–7. Ellis, External Mission, 54–5. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe (London:  Faber and Faber, 1981), 159–68; Luise White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo:  Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 17–40. Martin and Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe, 197–202.

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case. According to Steve Davis and Stephen Ellis, following a training course with the East German government, ANC Security began reading everyday conditions and breaches of discipline in MK’s Angolan camps as evidence of espionage.19 And it created secret detention camps, most infamously Camp 32 or “Quatro,” where it detained, tortured, and sometimes killed its suspects.20 These similar and intersecting qualities of liberation movement camps reflect an international system that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century that both created them and could not account for their extraordinary contradictions. In this system, the United Nations, Soviet and nonaligned governments, and independent solidarity movements all supported liberation movements opposing intractable white minority regimes to administer their own exiled populations in camps. In turn, the liberation movements used the camps as a kind of site through which to project themselves to the world as victims of colonial violence and as liberators of oppressed peoples – an image that many enthusiastically embraced. Of course, not all governments and organizations accepted this image, utilizing reports from the camps to denounce movements and draw attention to the Soviet Union’s hidden hand in their oppressive activities. And yet, it was not only conservative Western governments and allied organizations that insisted on seeing the camps, and Southern Africa’s liberation struggles more generally, through a Cold War lens. It was also influential entities in a global antiapartheid movement, that, in the name of presenting Southern Africa’s struggles as a human rights, and not a Cold War, issue, dismissed evidence of extensive abuses occurring in the liberation movements’ camps. As a result, it became nearly impossible to present the camps in a way that encompassed their extremes and revealed how inconvenient truths were being concealed from view. As we have seen, SWAPO drew from this context to manage perceptions within the liberation movements’ camps among far-flung audiences. In the wake of mass detentions in Zambia in 1976, SWAPO organized a commission of inquiry whose report solidified relationships with its international allies – so much so that by the end of that year, the United Nations could identify SWAPO as “the sole and authentic representative of the Namibian people.”21 The harsh treatment of detained guerrillas in Zambia remained hidden from the international press for months and, when it was finally reported, reports did not prevent SWAPO from stigmatizing those whom it had imprisoned and from “disappearing” alleged ringleaders. During the mid- and late 1980s,

19

20 21

Steve Davis especially makes this point in the fourth chapter of his doctoral thesis. See “Losing the Plot: Mystery, Narrativity and Investigation in Novo Catengue, May 1977–March 1979,” in “Cosmopolitans in Close Quarters:  Everyday Life in the Ranks of Umkhonto we Sizwe (1961–Present),” University of Florida, 2010, 139–85. Ellis details all these developments within NAT in Chapter 5 of External Mission, 151–204. UN General Assembly Resolution 31/146; Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988), 100.

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when reports of SWAPO Security’s abuses circulated widely, SWAPO’s influential allies dismissed them as apartheid propaganda and vilified those like the Committee of Parents who voiced them in the public domain. Trips to “the camps,” which SWAPO led for foreign observers, projected impressions from short visits to Kwanza Sul and Nyango onto the entire exile landscape, making qualities of the national community emerging across widely scattered and carefully regulated sites even more difficult to see. Efforts to challenge the dominant view by those with personal histories of SWAPO membership or solidarity work were dismissed by SWAPO supporters and adopted by platforms that flattened all liberating practice and utopian dreams in the camps into leftist propaganda. Although literature on how other liberation movements managed perceptions of their internal conflicts is sparse, recent publications suggest the extent to which some movements managed to shape views of these conflicts among international allies.22 In 1989, twenty-five years after sending its first detachment of guerrillas to Kongwa, SWAPO closed its camps and most exiles returned home to participate in the country’s first democratic elections. These events corresponded with major global events, including the signing of the Geneva Accord, which brokered the end of international involvement in the war in Angola, and the collapse of the Soviet Union more generally. Nevertheless, conflicts and hierarchies that first emerged in the camps remain pervasive in Namibia, undermining democratic governance and social transformation in the post–Cold War era. The release of SWAPO’s detainees at Lubango in May 1989 offered early evidence of these enduring conflicts and hierarchies. Although SWAPO released detainees under the auspice of its policy of national reconciliation, the liberation movement continued to present the detainees as spies and justify the activities of its security apparatus. Although churches, solidarity groups, and other influential international bodies that had dismissed critical reports of the SWAPO camps began to criticize SWAPO’s abuses and distance themselves from the liberation movement, they did little to assist the detainees in addressing their concerns – above all, making their own histories of violation accepted among Namibians and locating the missing persons in Angola. Rather, they deferred these issues to “neutral” instruments like the UN Mission on Detainees and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which addressed these matters by interfacing with SWAPO and other government officials and marginalizing the detainees from these processes. Such practices reinforced the authority of

22

See, e.g., Drew Thompson’s discussion of how FRELIMO used photographs of the liberated zones to project a unified image and efface internal divisions within the movement: “Visualizing FRELIMO’s liberated zones in Mozambique, 1962–1974,” Special Section on Camps and Liberation in Southern Africa, Social Dynamics 39, no. 1 (2013): 24–50. Other previously cited texts that discuss how liberation movements managed international perceptions of internal conflicts include White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo; Ellis, External Mission; Davis, “Cosmopolitans in Close Quarters.”

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national elites to render Namibia’s liberation struggle, including the persistently crucial terrain of the SWAPO camps. These conditions have not prevented ex-detainees from contesting an accepted history but have shaped and limited the terms of this contestation. When ex-detainees wrote their “Report to the Namibian People” from the UNHCR’s offices in Lubango in June 1989, they could not collaborate with others who had also been marginalized through experiences in exile at different times and places. Following the publication of Siegfried Groth’s book in 1995, the Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement has crossed some of these divides, drawing together detainees from Lubango, “the Shipanga Crisis,” and “the Kongwa Crisis” to articulate experiences of violation at SWAPO’s hands in exile. Nevertheless, the conditions in which BWS operates have made it difficult to incorporate the varied experiences of former exiles who have retained an affiliation with SWAPO, including many others who were imprisoned by the liberation movement in its camps. Moreover, BWS and a few scholars drawing heavily from BWS members have produced a history that inverts the meaning of key events and figures in an official national narrative but has yet to move outside this framework for narrating the past. The results of this historical production are a memory landscape defined by a dubious official history, a verifiable but stigmatized counternarrative, and a subterranean world of accusation, rumor, and suspicion that is mobilized by some Namibians against others whose relationship to the nation is more vulnerable. This landscape has become deeply embedded in all manner of social relations among Namibians, several of which are analyzed here. For example, the way in which former exiles relate to fellow nationals is shaped by how their histories are told both inside and outside the public domain. This point clearly applies to “ex-detainees” who are widely associated with having betrayed the liberation struggle and who have, in some cases, been excluded from professional opportunities and threatened with violence. But it also pertains to a far broader array of former exiles whose experiences have not been incorporated into a counternarrative due to the diffuse geographies of exile and/or the allegiance that they maintain with SWAPO. Such dynamics not only shape the politics of recognition that have unfolded between Namibia’s ruling party and former exiles, but also the manner in which exiles relate to local community and family, which often rely heavily on ties with SWAPO to access material resources and social capital. It follows that Namibians who never traveled into exile are nevertheless greatly impacted by official and unofficial histories of what happened there. Stigma that became associated with certain social markers in the camps has been transferred to the postcolony where entire categories of people bear the burden of what has and has not been said about happenings in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola several decades ago. And ties between former exiles and their close relations are inflected by formative experiences in the camps and the history of a nation that prescribes the terms on which they make sense of, and respond to, this past.

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Camps and the Production of Postcolonial Knowledge These and other historical perspectives on the postcolony in Africa – perspectives that illuminate processes that have unfolded on the continent since the mid-twentieth century  – remain marginal to scholarly research. As several scholars have noted, historians of Africa have directed relatively little attention to historical developments since the period of Africa’s formal decolonization.23 To some extent, this gap reflects the origins of African history as a subdiscipline. From its beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s, African history has contested the view that Africans had no history prior to colonialism and no verifiable sources through which a prior history could be reconstructed. In turn, the field came to rely on “African voices,” which could counter dominant Eurocentric views and enable emancipatory politics, imagined in the form of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial nationalism. Such a conceptual and political framework could not easily accommodate dynamics that soon emerged on the continent, however – including conflicts and violence within exiled liberation movements.24 Moreover, the sources through which scholarly histories of postcolonial Africa may be written present unique challenges. The archival records of Africa’s postcolonial states, parties, and liberation movements are often inaccessible to researchers and/or poorly maintained where they have been recorded at all. Materials produced by international organizations following African affairs are scattered across widely dispersed sites and shaped by their distinctive, and sometimes very narrow, fields of vision. And oral histories pertaining to current or recent regimes are often highly politicized, entailing interpretive difficulties, if not personal risks, for those who draw from them to produce historical knowledge.25 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that knowledge about postcolonial Africa has been captured, to a large extent, by discourses that present contemporary issues with only superficial reference to their longer pedigrees. Clearly, this 23

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Stephen Ellis, “Writing Histories of Contemporary Africa,” Journal of African History 43, no. 1 (2002):  1–26; Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940 (Cambridge and New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), xi–xii; Christopher J. Lee, “Introduction,” in Christopher J. Lee, ed. Making A World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 1–42; “Decolonization of a Special Type: Rethinking Cold War History in Southern Africa,” Kronos:  Southern African Histories 37 (2011):  6–11. According to Lee, this point also applies to historical scholarship on Asia and Afro-Asian relations. See Making a World after Empire, 20–2. Christian A. Williams, “Exile History: An Ethnography of the SWAPO Camps and the Namibian Nation,” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2009, 20–1. Christopher Lee makes a similar point about writing histories of postcolonial Africa in “Decolonization of a Special Type,” 8. There are historical texts that have both observed the challenges of writing histories of postcolonial Africa and opened new perspectives on historical developments that cross the colonial and postcolonial periods. See, e.g., Jean Allman, The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Cooper, Africa since 1940; Baz Lecocq, Disputed Desert: Decolonisation, Disputed Nationalisms and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali (Leiden, The Netherlands and Boston: Brill, 2010).

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point pertains to applied fields of knowledge and the language of humanitarianism, human rights, and development that shape dominant perceptions of Africa.26 Social science disciplines focused on theoretical questions also easily reproduce Euro-American theories without effectively engaging Africa’s particular historical trajectories or evolving relationship to the rest of the globe.27 Even fields of knowledge explicitly committed to understanding legacies of the colonial past often dehistoricize the postcolonial world. As Fred Cooper notes in his historical critique of postcolonial studies, there is a tendency for scholars in that interdisciplinary domain to “leapfrog” the transition from colonial to postcolonial rule, thereby overlooking how the colonized confronted the particular forms of colonial power that they faced and the aftermaths of these struggles.28 Such work may easily reproduce a singular view of “the colonial” and “the postcolonial” at the expense of grappling with entanglements between past and present that complicate or evade these categories. Seen from this perspective, the critical historiography of exile discussed in Chapter 1 is a significant intervention. Collectively, it has expanded the body of publicly accessible knowledge about processes that fundamentally shape Southern African societies but that have, to a large extent, been elided by official narratives and discussed only within closed social networks. In so doing, it opens new terrain on which to map relationships between past and present, challenging us to orient ourselves outside some familiar, but potentially misleading, coordinates. For example, the study of liberation movements opposing colonial or apartheid rule from recently decolonized countries does not allow for a clear break between a “colonial” and a “postcolonial” era. Similarly, such scholarship cannot easily describe its objects through the familiar binary of “colonizer” and “colonized,” but rather must develop different language for 26

27

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For seminal texts that critique humanitarian, human rights, and development discourse in Africa, see Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile:  Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1995); Richard Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State (Cambridge and New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2001); James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine:  “Development,” Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For a similar point about the relationship between African history and the social sciences, see Stephen Ellis, “Writing Histories,” 8. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2005), 17–18; “Postcolonial Studies and the Study of History,” in Antoinette Burton et  al. eds., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (New Delhi:  Permanent Black, 2006), 401–22. Cooper’s specific point about “leapfrogging” is central to his critique of Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject:  Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) that draws direct causal connections between colonial policies of the 1920s and 1930s and authoritarian rule in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s but does not engage the interim period, thereby missing “not only the sequence of processes in the decolonization era, but the tragedy of recent African history, people’s heightened sense of possibility and the thwarting of their hopes” (406).

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rendering people and power in the post-1945 world.29 Also, although it is now common for scholars of all stripes to identify contradictions between the emancipatory claims of African nationalists and their performances in government, the emerging historiography (and the “limits to liberation” literature) maintains that these contradictions were shaped by the very process of anticolonial resistance – a crucial, but less conventional argument. Moreover, some of the new literature attends to particular exile communities and everyday life, thereby countering dominant modes of representation that have rendered “exile” a single, generalizable experience. Despite these contributions, however, scholars writing histories of postcolonial Africa need to reflect further on how social structures shaped by colonialism bear on the knowledge that we produce about the postcolony. As I have argued throughout this text, the manner in which we conceive nations prefigures ideas about how people will be included in a given nation’s history and what the arc of that history will be. The discipline of history is not removed from this conceptual apparatus, but rather is an integral part of it, influencing the manner in which claims about the past are made and directing them toward historiographies, organized around nation-states. This point is especially significant to consider when examining “exile,” a primary site through which nations and historiographies define themselves. Although historians of Southern Africa are developing increasingly critical and nuanced views of the region’s exiled nationalist movements, we have accepted the nation as our primary unit of study. In so doing, we tend to obscure diverse social relations among migrant populations, the systems that shape them, and the manner in which these systems inflect our modes of analysis. And we may contribute to the reproduction of social boundaries through which colonial regimes first divided their subject populations and wielded power.30 Camps have the potential to open “the nation” and related colonially derived categories to critical scrutiny. As I maintain, the camps administered by SWAPO and Southern Africa’s other exiled liberation movements are not merely places where people once lived and that have now been incorporated into one or another national history. Rather, they are a kind of space in and around which these histories have been produced, structuring knowledge and mediating relationships among a nation’s citizens. Through their considerable control over camps, national elites have affirmed this form of community and 29

30

Christopher Lee makes a similar point in his call for writing histories of Africa through a Cold War lens. See “Decolonization of a Special Type,” 6–11. These points about the reproduction of “the nation” as a conceptual category are central to the work of scholars drawing from postcolonial theory to rethink the discipline of history. For seminal work developing this perspective in the South(ern) African context, see Premesh Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa:  Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2009).

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protected their interests. And yet, camps’ relationship to nation and history may be utilized to critique national forms of knowledge and to open new opportunities for dialogue and recognition. These observations apply not only to the camps at the center of this study, but also to other sites that have produced social relations and histories similarly across time and place. Although this text makes a case for seeing the liberation movement camp as distinctive, it takes as a starting point a body of literature pertaining to camps administered for refugees. As Liisa Malkki first highlighted, refugee camps have played a vital role in shaping an international system since the mid-twentieth century, simultaneously affirming “the national order of things” around people displaced from a nation and generating powerful national histories that contradict this system’s prevailing humanitarian discourse. In turn, she and others have collected refugees’ stories, thereby drawing attention to diverse voices and to that which impedes our ability to hear them. Liberation movement camps are products and producers of this same system. Granted recognition on the basis of their opposition to antiquated colonial regimes and mobilizing the language of humanitarianism and human rights, liberation movements created nations in exile that perpetrated abuses on their own members and have effaced these abuses through histories articulated by national elites. In both cases, camp, nation, and history are deeply intertwined, and the work of disentangling this triad should be done through projects that draw the anthropology of refugees and the historiography of exile into conversation with one another. Camps established by European powers during colonial wars are enmeshed in similar relationships. For example, the Afrikaner nationalism that produced apartheid rested heavily on a history of the concentration camps where the British detained Boer women and children between 1900 and 1902. As recent scholarship suggests, the capacity of certain people and sources to speak for these camps enabled the creation of a dominant narrative that transformed people’s different experiences over two years into a tale of common, unmitigated suffering.31 Other colonial-era camps have also become linked to powerful histories, many of which lurk beneath the surface of dominant national narratives. For example, although the war of 1904–8 is central to Namibia’s national history, little had been written until recently about the concentration camps that the German government created during that war and memories of the camps remain marginal to national commemorative practices despite their 31

Clearly camp inhabitants’ experiences were often harrowing, but they were not uniform and they affected both whites and blacks, the latter of whom generally lived and died in worse conditions and have not been commemorated. For recent work on life in concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War and how they have been remembered, see Liz Stanley, Mourning Becomes . . . Post/Memory and Commemoration of the Concentration Camps of the South African War 1899–1902 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006) and Elizabeth van Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2013).

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ongoing significance in some communities.32 Similarly, the detention camps and barbed-wire villages in which the British government held Mau Mau suspects and many Kikuyu during the 1950s evoke powerful histories despite the overlapping interest of the British and Kenyan governments to efface this past.33 Recently, each of these cases has been considered in relation to the camps created by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the mid-twentieth century,34 but only the camps of the Anglo-Boer War have been drawn into a sustained discussion about nationalism in Africa. There are also similarities and connections between sites commonly referred to as camps and other camplike spaces that have shaped African nationalisms.35 For example, labor compounds predate detention and concentration camps in Southern Africa and bear important resemblances with them.36 Although easily incorporated into a narrative of black, male suffering and national resistance, compounds are sites through which one may attend to the construction of these narratives as people living in and around them rework their representation.37 Similarly, colonial prisons might be seen as a kind of camp that has shaped African nations across time and place and that may open new perspectives on these nations’ histories. In some respects these prisons appear to be the opposite of liberation movement camps, drawing prisoners into relationships that 32

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For the first full-length study focused on the German concentration camps in Namibia, see Casper Erichsen, “The Angel of Death Has Descended Violently among Them”: Concentration Camps and Prisoners-of-War in Namibia, 1904–1908 (Leiden, The Netherlands:  African Studies Centre, 2005). For further references to the camps and a summary of historiography, see Marion Wallace, A History of Namibia (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2011), 172–7. For discussion of how public commemorative practices involving camps have been mobilized by ethnically defined communities in their efforts to achieve reparation from the German government, see Reinhart Kössler, “Genocide and Reparations:  Dilemmas and Exigencies in Namibian-German Relations,” in André du Pisani, Reinhart Kössler, and William A. Lindeke, eds., The Long Aftermath of War – Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia (Freiburg: Arnold Bergstrasser Institut, 2010), 238. See Caroline Elkins, “Detention, Rehabilitation, and the Destruction of Kikuyu Society,” in John Lonsdale and Atieno Odhiambo, eds., Mau Mau and Nationhood (London: James Currey, 2003); Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2005). Hannah Arendt first drew this connection between concentration camps in the colonies and in Europe in her seminal book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1951). Broader comparisons might also be made between camps and other disciplinary institutions, which are not necessarily linked to nationalism but which use similar forms of government and produce new subjectivities. See Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile, 236–8. See Charles van Onselen, Chibaro:  African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933 (London:  Pluto Press, 1976); Tilman Dedering, “Compounds, Camps, Colonialism,” Journal of Namibian Studies 12 (2012):  29–46; Noëleen Murray and Leslie Witz, “Camp Lwandle: Rehabilitating a Migrant Labour Hostel at the Seaside,” Special Section on Camps and Liberation in Southern Africa, Social Dynamics 39, no. 1 (2013): 51–74. Murray and Witz, “Camp Lwandle.”

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bridged colonial divisions far more than they accentuated them.38 Nevertheless, prisons too have been drawn into national histories that defy historicization. Here Robben Island stands out as a prison that has become so integral to a narrative of antiapartheid resistance and postapartheid reconciliation that the prison’s significance for shaping different schools of thought about South Africa’s past and particular relationships among its emerging leaders has barely been considered.39 In all these cases, camps are poised to open new perspectives on nations and their histories by drawing attention to colonialism’s reach into the narratives that previously colonized people tell about their suffering during a prior era. And opening these views demands attention to paradoxical relationships between camp, nation, and history, several of which I have explored in this text through SWAPO and Namibia. First, despite the fact that camps are incorporated into the history of a given nation, they are often located outside of its territorial borders. In such instances, like the circumstances in which people live in exile more generally, camp representations may be directed away from isolated nations and toward other communities of which they are also a part. As suggested, each of the camps that SWAPO administered across the frontline states over three decades was distinctive, creating social ties particular to that time and place. Moreover, there were microcommunities within camps whose activities were largely or entirely unknown to fellow nationals living at the same site. Frequently, camp inhabitants developed complex relationships with host populations, and some interacted with UN bodies, journalists, solidarity movements, and church leaders who mediated knowledge about the camps in a wider world. By illuminating such relationships, it is possible to see social entities that have remained outside or have been collapsed into a national narrative. And it becomes easier to recognize the nationally embedded language through which these communities have been systematically obscured. Second, by virtue of their reliance on identification with a nation to access resources in a camp, camp inhabitants are often presented as having had a united, collective experience. At the same time, the forces pulling inhabitants toward unity frequently generate divisions as people who differ with leaders assert their interests and as leaders use suspicions of difference to consolidate power. This book has examined a number of differences and divisions, concealed by histories of a united liberation struggle. As I suggest, camps had a potent capacity to produce tensions even at moments when inhabitants’ solidarity was most evident, and abuses of power in this space easily developed their own agency, spiraling out of the control even of those who wished to 38

39

See Jocelyn Alexander and Gary Kynoch, “Introduction: Histories and Legacies of Punishment in Southern Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 3 (2011):  395–413; Jocelyn Alexander, “Nationalism and Self-Government in Rhodesian Detention, Gonakudzingwa, 1964–1974,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 3 (2011): 551–69. See Crain Soudien, “Robben Island University Revisited,” in Arianna Lissoni, Jon Soske, Natasha Erlank, Noor Nieftagodien and Omar Badsha, eds., One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), 211–30.

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contain them. By highlighting these points, this text illuminates how people can claim that they were united during the liberation struggle, even as fellow nationals, and sometimes the same individuals, articulate conflicts that divided their liberation movement as they seek to understand the past and find recognition in the present. Third, by virtue of their significance in the suffering and triumph of a given nation, camps are frequently the site of “events” that have shaped a nation’s fate. At the same time, they are also the locations where most exiles lived and whose everyday lives event-focused histories tend to obscure. Violence perpetrated in camps often heightens this discrepancy, drawing them into histories whose meaning is overdetermined by national politics at the expense of daily life and experiences. This dynamic is especially pronounced for Cassinga, a camp that has become so embedded in memories of the SADF attack that it has become difficult, if not unthinkable, to extricate the camp from the event to examine the manner in which people lived there prior to it. Nevertheless, histories of other sites considered here have become associated with events – “the Kongwa Crisis,” “the Shipanga Crisis,” and “the Spy Drama” – that obscure mundane conditions that produced the very social ruptures that could be perceived as events and incorporated into a national narrative in the first place. It follows that camps are ideally situated to unravel event-based histories, illuminating simultaneously how people lived in the past and how oppressive narratives have been created. Fourth, due to the power that national elites wield over camp images and their importance in national narratives, representations that do not align with an official history often seem to be silent. And yet, it is precisely these “silenced” histories that former camp inhabitants voice as they seek recognition for their previous experiences in a postcamp nation and that I heard often in the course of my research. Accessing these voices not only required mining archives and building fieldwork networks, staple methods of history and anthropology, respectively, but also drawing various sources produced in locations with different relationships to the nation into a dialogue with one another. Through this dialogue it was possible to reconstruct controversial camp histories and to trace powerful forces shaping camp perceptions among far-flung audiences. More than corroborating a counternarrative, however, “silenced” histories point to diffuse experiences that have not been drawn into any narrative and that complicate the grounds on which all claims about “the camps” are made. As such, they are poised to draw attention back to the paradoxes noted here, returning us to ongoing conversations about the past and ensuring that national histories are continuously deconstructed. The emphasis here on producing postcolonial knowledge that deconstructs a nation should not demean those who have attempted to overcome colonialism by building one. Over the past few centuries nationalism has inspired both the worst and best in humanity, and Namibia has been the focus of some of nationalism’s better moments, joining diverse people in that country and

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around the world to liberate themselves from apartheid rule and to create a national community based on individual equality and social justice. Historians, anthropologists, and others committed to developing a critical perspective on history must have a different vocation, however – particularly those who work in Southern Africa today, where national histories, saturated in the struggle, are so often used to legitimate inequality and to support injustice. In such a context, the critique of nationalism is far from nihilistic. Rather, it is a prerequisite for imagining kinds of political community that, heretofore, have been conflated with nationalism. And it is essential for breathing new life into “the postcolony” and other dreams that otherwise may be strangled by the nation’s embrace.

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* With two exceptions (noted in the preceding text), I  have conducted each of these interviews myself, sometimes with the assistance of a translator. Most interviews were taped with an audio recorder although, in a few instances, research participants requested that I  not record. Interview dates marked in italics are transcribed and accessible at the National Archives of Namibia and at the Mayibuye Centre of the University of the Western Cape under the title “Namibian Exile History, Williams Collection.” These transcriptions were prepared from 2005 through early 2008 when I found the time and support to transcribe the interviews myself. Archives** Ailonga, Salatiel, Private Collection, Outapi, Namibia*** Basel Afrika Bibliographien, Basel, Switzerland Fort Hare University, Alice, South Africa ANC Morogoro Papers NBC Television and Radio Archives, Windhoek, Namibia National Archives of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia Photo Archive South African National Defence Force Documentation Centre, Pretoria, South Africa SWAPO Party Archives, Windhoek, Namibia University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia

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Index

the Academy, 181. See also University of Namibia (UNAM) African-American Institute, 77, 78, 190 African Methodist Episcopal (AME), 201, 204 African National Congress (ANC), 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 71, 71n24, 72, 221, 222 Afrikaans, 84, 129, 130, 136, 177, 202 Agamben, Giorgio, 20 Agence France-Presse (AFP), 164 Ailonga, Anita, 101, 117 Ailonga, Salatiel, 106, 177, 177n130 Ailonga, Salatiel and Anita, 102–5, 115, 117 Alexander, Jocelyn, 9 Algeria, 75, 88 Alice, 23 Allgemeine Zeitung, 169, 169n84 Amathila, Ben, 201, 202 Amnesty International, 50, 158, 159 Amsterdam, 45 Amutenya, Willy Mary, 53–55, 53n78 Anglo-Boer War, 229 Angola, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 16, 18, 23, 28, 30, 35, 36, 40, 43, 49, 52, 55, 57, 61, 71, 72, 94, 97, 105, 106, 107, 110, 119, 122, 124, 134, 137, 140, 143, 152, 156, 164, 168, 169, 174, 175, 185, 193, 200, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224. See also Cassinga; Lubango Angolan civil war, 105n41, 110–11, 121 Angolan government, 134, 156, 160, 165 Angolan-Namibian border, 4, 34, 35, 37, 55, 94, 96, 134, 188, 206 Angolan refugees, 193

Angula, Nahas, 98, 101, 104, 116, 216, 217n9 Angula, Oiva, 138, 139, 145 Ansprenger, Franz, 7 anthropology, 13–14 the anthropology of refugees, 19–21, 21n67, 122, 228 antiapartheid movement, 222 Appolus, Emil, 29, 197–98, 199–200, 213 Emil Appolus’s funeral, 187, 201–5 Appolus, Jomo, 202 Appolus, Norah, 202 Baines, Gary, 52 Bantu Education, 123 Basel, 23 Basson, Andries, 138, 139, 199 Basson, Nico, 169 Basson, Wouter, 183 Baster, 129 Bechuanaland, 76, 189. See also Botswana Benin, 124 Bergh, Tommy, 40, 41, 44 Beukes, Attie, 151–54, 155, 157, 158, 158n39, 167 Beukes, Erica, 151–54, 153n17, 155, 157, 158, 158n39, 167 Beukes, Hans, 115 Beukes, Hans and Adel, 115 Beukes, Hewat, 157, 167 biopolitics, 20 Biwa, Andries, 201, 202, 204 Biwa, Eric, 174, 199 Bond, Patrick, 15 Boois, Stella Maria, 158

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252 the Border War, 51. See also SADF Botswana, 123, 153. See also Bechuanaland Boys, Ben, 169n87, 199, 200 Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement (BWS), 28, 150, 175–84, 195, 224 Britain, 48, 56, 158, 209, 229 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 44 Buitepos, 123 Burundi, 19 Bushmen, 129 Caetano, Marcelo, 94 Cairo, 197 Call Them Spies, 169 camps, passim  colonial prisons, 229 concentration camps, 149, 155, 228, 229 detention camps, 12, 229 labor compounds, 229 liberation movement camps, 5, 11–13, 19–22, 52, 217–24, 228 military camps, 12 refugee camps, 12, 20, 21, 25, 228 transit camps, 12 Canada, 48 Cape Town, 4, 23, 87, 197, 202 Caprivi African National Union (CANU), 82–87, 129, 140 CANU’s merging with SWAPO, 83, 83n93 exchanges between CANU and Zamibian nationalists, 84 Caprivians, 82–87, 88, 92, 103, 129, 140 Caprivi Region, 82, 84, 86, 91n135, 97, 107, 140, 215 Cassinga, 5, 27, 30–61, 120, 126, 127, 134, 156, 204, 218, 231 the Battle of Cassinga, 50 camp office, 35–36, 38, 39–40, 42, 58 Cassinga Day, 50, 52, 54, 58, 210 Cassinga detainees, 50, 52, 53, 54, 54n80, 54n82 Cassinga survivors, 50 mass grave photos, 45–46 neighboring village, 35 parade, 32–36, 38, 40, 44, 219 PLAN office, 36–40, 58, 59 reporting on Cassinga, 44–49 a second Cassinga, 55, 56, 128 the South African attack on Cassinga, 30, 40, 41, 58, 59, 120 spy accusations following the Cassinga attack, 52–58

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Castro, 87–90, 91, 92, 128, 189, 191 Central Base, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118 Chaplaincy to Namibians, 101, 102–5 Chetequera, 48. See also Vietnam (camp) Children of the Liberation Struggle, 216, 216n4 China, 75, 90 Chitepo, Herbert, 114, 114n81, 115 Chona, Mainza, 116 Chongamble, Major, 74, 74n41, 75, 76, 80, 81, 86, 88, 189, 192 Christian Council of Angola, 156 Christian Council of Zambia (CCZ), 102, 103 Cold War, 3, 79n71, 158, 172, 222, 223, 227. See also Western countries; Western Five; Eastern bloc Coloured, 129 The Combatant, 55, 139 Committee of Parents, 28, 57, 149, 150, 151–60, 178, 180, 184, 223. See also Parents’ Committee Comrades Against Apartheid, 7 Congo (Kinshasa), 84. See also Zaire Congo, Democratic Republic, 53. See also Zaire contract labor system, 77, 83, 197 Cooper, Fred, 226 Council of Churches of Namibia (CCN), 151, 152, 152n14, 155, 172, 176, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183 Cuba, 4n5, 50, 140 Cubans, 40, 40n28 Cuilonga River, 33, 35 Damara, 172, 172n100, 198. See also Khoekhoegowab Dar es Salaam, 56, 69, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 103, 116, 189, 190, 195, 197 Dar es Salaam Police Station, 90 Davis, Steve, 13, 222 de Cuellar, Perez, 153, 159, 168 Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA), 170, 171, 200 Dempers, Pauline, 160, 161, 179, 183 the detainee issue. See SWAPO ex-detainees détente, 106–7 conflict within PLAN during détente, 107–13 Die Republikien, 168, 169n83 disciplinary institutions, 20 Dobell, Lauren, 7, 184

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253

Dodoma, 65, 84, 192 dungeons, 124, 125, 138, 141–42, 145, 163, 207, 210. See also Lubango East African Groundnut Scheme, 65n1, 70 Eastern bloc, 48, 75, 79, 122, 137, 140 East Germany, 50, 137, 222 Eenhana, 41, 183, 205, 206 Efitu, 40n30 Egypt, 71, 75, 87, 88 Elago, Sakarias, 119, 119n114 Ellis, Stephen, 7, 8, 11, 221, 222 Ellis, Justin, 53 Elundu, 41 England. See Britain English (language), 26, 84, 84n97, 85, 88, 129, 175, 176, 180, 187, 191, 202 Eshoke, 188 ethnography. See historical ethnography Evangelical Lutheran Ovambo-Kavango Church (ELOC), 102, 102n26, 104n37 ex-detainees. See SWAPO ex-detainees exile, passim  the archive of exile, 23–24 exile historiography, 5–14, 16, 17, 121, 226–27, 228 the politics of exile, 6, 10 External Mission, 8 Finnish Missionary Society, 102, 102n26 France, 48, 160 Francistown, 76, 189, 197 Frankfurt, 154, 158 freedom fighters, 21, 72, 78, 100, 190, 193, 213 Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), 68, 70, 71, 71n24, 72, 189, 218, 220 Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 176 frontline states, 3, 218, 230 funerals. See Appolus, Emil Gaes, Stella, 158 Gainachas, 170, 171 Garoeb, Moses, 144, 157, 157n36, 160, 166, 169, 181, 192 Geingob, Hage, 201, 202 Geneva, 156 Geneva Accord, 149, 160, 223 Genscher, Hans Dietrich, 117 Germany, 23, 83, 155, 162, 168, 173, 176, 181, 198, 228, 229. See also East Germany; West Germany

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Ghana, 75, 88 Gibeon, 170, 171, 199, 200, 209, 211 Gogo, 70 Green Party (West Germany), 168 Grootfontein, 189 Groth, Siegfried, 150, 152, 152n15, 153, 153n17, 158, 158n39, 159, 172, 173, 173n105, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182, 224 Group 1 (G1), 191 Group 2 (G2), 89, 191 The Guardian, 45 Guinea-Bissau, 94 Gurirab, Theo-Ben, 154, 155, 167 The Hague, 115 Haikali, Erastus, 106 Hainyeko, Tobias, 80, 89, 91. See also Lubango (Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre) Hamaambo, Dimo, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 88, 88n124, 89, 137 Hambiya, Peter, 89 Hampembe, Jackson, 117 Hamutenya, Hidipo, 144, 145, 154, 155, 155n25, 157, 157n36, 167, 216 Hashim Mbita project, 10n26 Hatuikulipi, Tauno, 138, 139, 145, 182n156 Hauwanga, Abed, 187, 196, 213 Hawala, Solomon “Jesus,” 56, 137, 138, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 160, 164, 167, 207 Hengari, Alfredo, 216 “Here is Namibia,” 44 Herero, 181, 198 Herero Chiefs’ Council, 197 Heroes’ Day, 181, 205, 210 Hinda, Immanuel, 204 Hinda, Maureen, 202–3 Hirson, Baruch, 7 historical ethnography, 23–26, 213–14 photographs and historical ethnography, 25–26, 205–8 history. See national history; exile historiography A History of Resistance in Namibia, 65 Holy Family Mission School, 82 Homo Sacer, 20 hosts host governments, 8, 10, 21, 93, 117, 132 local hosts, 13, 108, 230 Huambo, 37 Hukuwonga, Nakale, 192 humanitarianism humanitarian aid, 122, 165

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254 humanitarianism (cont.) humanitarian aid in SWAPO camps, 50, 75, 101–6 humanitarian agencies, 21, 175 humanitarian discourse, 28, 49, 150, 154, 155–57, 226, 228 humanitarian law, 175 human rights, 29, 50, 151, 154, 176, 179. See also reconciliation, silence human rights and the Cold War, 222 human rights discourse, 18, 20, 28, 49, 150, 153–55, 158–60, 173, 212, 226, 228 human rights organizations, 150, 154, 174 human rights literature on reconciliation, 187 Hunter, Justine, 143, 144, 184, 212 Hutu, 19 Iita, George, 53, 53n78 Independence Day, 181, 210 Inside Quatro, 8 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). See Red Cross international community, 50, 57, 60, 65, 70, 74, 90, 132, 136, 173. See also international system International Court of Justice (ICJ), 197, 197n38 International Criminal Court (ICC), 183 International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), 30 Internationalle Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte (IGFM), 154, 155, 158, 159, 164 international system, 28, 113, 150, 151, 159, 184, 222, 228. See also international community Isaacks, Maria “Amies,” 208, 209 Jamba, 34, 43, 44 Joannidis, Marie, 162, 164, 164n54, 165, 168 Joseph, Maxton Mutongulume, 76, 189 Journal of Southern African Studies, 9 Kaakunga, Riundja Ali, 162, 163, 165, 166 Kalabo, 97 Kalimba, Canner, 34 Kambode, Jackson, 81 Kapelwa, Richard, 192 Kassinga, 30n3. See Cassinga Kati, Nambinga, 92 Katima Mulilo, 82 Katjavivi, Peter, 65, 95

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Katutura, 197 Kaunda, Kenneth, 106, 113, 114, 114n81, 221 Kaunga Mash, 111, 112 Kavango Region, 83, 84, 89, 191 Keetmanshoop, 196, 201, 206, 208, 208n66, 209, 210 Keikanachab Prison, 53 Keko Prison, 80n77, 81, 82, 87, 90, 91 Kenya, 81, 82, 90, 119, 178, 191, 194, 195, 216, 229 Namibian exiles in Kenya, 194n25, 195n27 Kenya Christian Refugee Services, 82 Khoekhoegowab, 129, 198, 198n41, 201, 202, 203, 208 Khomasdal, 165 Kigoma, 19 Koevoet, 136, 136n53 Koichas, 197, 203 Kongwa, 4, 27, 29, 65–93, 108, 109, 121, 122, 126, 127, 129, 140, 176, 178, 186, 187, 189–92, 193–95, 213, 220, 221, 223 everyday life in SWAPO’s camp, 72–73 international relations of everyday life, 74–76 the Kongwa Crisis, 27, 67, 68, 90–93, 194, 195, 224, 231 Kongwa village, 65, 190, 194 origins of Kongwa Camp, 68–72 the Seven Comrades, 67, 90, 91, 92, 176, 191, 194, 195 suspicions of spies at Kongwa, 89–90 Konjore, Willem, 199, 199n46, 203n57, 204 Kornes, Godwin, 184 Kuhangua, Jacob, 78–79, 79n71, 81 Kurasini International Education Centre, 77, 77n58, 77n60, 78–79, 80n77, 190, 193 Kwando River, 110, 111, 112 kwangara. 129, 130 Kwanyama, 137n60, 140, 216 Kwanza Sul, 55, 56, 59, 134, 156, 157, 218, 223 Lake Tanganyika, 69 Last Steps to Uhuru, 169 Leipzig, 45 Leys, Colin, 8, 11, 15, 18, 67, 95, 121, 143, 144, 184, 212 liberated zones, 70, 218, 218n10 liberation movement camps. See camps Liberation Movements in Power, 16 Liebenberg, John, 161, 164, 164n54, 165, 168, 169

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255

Limits to Liberation, 14–15 Lister, Gwen, 216 “Living in Exile” (exhibition), 187, 205–8, 214 Livingstone, 189 Lodge, Tom, 7 Lombard, Christo, 176, 177, 181, 181n151 London, 7, 44, 45, 53, 56, 149, 154, 167, 199, 200, 201 Luanda, 44, 124, 134, 137, 140, 156, 164, 167, 185 Lubango, 5, 18, 28, 29, 34, 41, 43, 44, 56, 59, 60, 124–25, 126, 130, 149, 151, 153, 157, 159, 178, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 195, 201, 204, 205, 206, 221, 224 Defence Headquarters, 43, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139 the Lubango detainees’ release, 160–75, 186, 209, 223 families of Lubango detainees, 208–11, 213 Karl Marx Reception Centre, 124, 138, 141 Lubango as a symbol, 206–8, 213 Mungakwiyu, 145 Nakada Base, 162, 165 Old Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre, 160, 165 SWAPO’s detentions at Lubango, 134–46 Tobias Hainyeko Training Centre, 134, 137, 138, 145, 211 Lusaka, 4, 9, 12, 82, 86, 87, 94, 95, 97, 100, 103, 105, 106, 109, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 124, 140, 192, 201, 209 Lusaka Conference, 151, 151n5, 152 The Lusaka Years, 8 Lush, David, 169, 171 Luso, 96 Lutheran World Federation (LWF), 102, 103, 156, 157, 158, 168 Machel, Samora, 68, 70 Macmillan, Hugh, 8, 9, 12 Malkki, Liisa, 19–21, 24, 25, 122, 228 Mamuno, 123 Marcum, John, 6 Mariental, 53 Matongo, Frederick, 84 Matongo, Greenwell, 43, 84, 84n100 Mau Mau, 229 Maun, 123 Mayibuye Centre, 30 Mbeya, 83, 83n94, 192 Mbolondondo, 35, 36, 41, 43, 44, 58–60

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Mboroma, 43n44, 57, 118, 118n108, 119, 120, 196, 221. See also SWAPO ex-detainees mbwiti, 130, 130n22 McGregor, JoAnne, 9 Meheba, 100, 120, 192, 196, 213 Melber, Henning, 14–15, 17 memory. See national history Memory and the Postcolony, 17 Ministry of Veterans Affairs, 54, 54n80, 54n82, 183 Mishamo, 19, 25 Mobutu Sese Seko, 105 Mombasa, 117 Motinga, Ben, 169 Movimento Popular para Libertação de Angola (MPLA), 9, 35, 71, 72, 72n31, 106, 111, 134, 218 Mozambique, 3, 16, 68, 70, 94, 218, 220 Muailelpeni, Titus, 85 Muchimba, Aaron, 141 Muchongo, Lieutenant, 74, 74n41, 90 Mueshihange, Peter, 99, 100, 144, 160, 167 Muganga, Lieutenant, 74, 74n41 Mulopa, Major, 114, 115 Munamava, Raja, 161 Mupopiwa, Mwetufa “Cabral,” 37 Mutwa, George, 86, 87, 87n113 Muyongo, Mishake, 82, 83n92, 85, 86, 87, 116, 128n14, 140 Mwinilunga, 109 Nairobi, 81, 117, 119, 194, 195 Nakamhela, Ngeno, 177n127, 180, 182 Nalinkonkole, 36 Nama, 129, 172, 172n100, 178, 181, 198, 208. See also Khoekhoegowab Namaland, 198 Nama Teachers’ Association Strike, 199, 199n46, 203n57 Namib Foundation, 172 Namibia, passim  northern Namibia, 38, 40, 76, 89, 128, 129, 130, 136, 178, 186, 191, 208, 218 southern Namibia, 123, 128, 129, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 171, 178, 187, 208 Namibia Day, 100, 101. See also Heroes’ Day The Namibian, 161, 161n45, 164, 164n54, 169, 215, 216 Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), 50, 58, 181, 182, 201 Namibian Constitution, 174, 185, 186, 216 Namibia News, 200

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256 Namibian Parliament, 174, 175 Namibia’s Liberation Struggle, 8 Namibia – The Wall of Silence, 150, 175, 176, 181, 182 Namibia Today, 45 Namoloh, Charles “Ho Chi Minh,” 37, 60n93 Nampundwe, 115, 116, 118 Nangolo, Leonard Philemon “Castro,” See Castro Nankudhu, John Otto, 68, 69 Nanyemba, Peter, 79, 81, 104, 105, 112, 116, 136, 137, 138, 139, 139n73, 140, 192 Nathanael, Keshii, 99, 100, 105, 106, 113, 115, 217n9 National Archives of Namibia (NAN), 26, 30, 61, 205, 206 national history, 3, 61 camps and the production of national history, 22, 60, 151, 194–96, 213, 224 history, camps and Afrikaner nationalism, 228 history, camps and Hutu nationalism, 19 camps and the critique of national history, 227–31 national history and Cassinga, 55, 60 national history and SWAPO detentions, 125 national history in Southern Africa, 16–17, 217, 225, 227 nationalism. See national history national reconciliation. See reconciliation National Society for Human Rights (NSHR), 159n41, 182, 183 Nda mona, 184, 184n166 Ndatipo, Frieda, 216, 216n4 Ndebaro, 90 Ndeikwila, Samson, 92, 176, 177, 178, 195 Ndlovu, Sifiso, 221 Ndonga, 137, 137n60, 140 Nelengani, Louis, 79, 79n71 Nepelilo, Kaufilwa, 29, 186, 187–96, 213 New Era. 52, 216 new man, 220 New York, 199 Nkandi, Victor, 140 Nordic Africa Institute, 14 Northern Rhodesia, 189. See also Zambia Norway, 155 Nujoma, Kowambo, 141, 143 Nujoma, Sam, 17, 55, 73, 80, 86, 88, 100, 101, 105, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 120, 139, 141, 143, 144–45, 156, 159, 167, 168, 181, 182

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Nuukuawo, Tangeni, 114, 115, 178 Nyamu, Jesaya, 41, 43, 52, 192, 192n18, 193, 216 Odendaal Plan, 198 Odibo, 79, 84n97 Old Farm, 98, 100–1, 103–6, 113, 114, 120, 122, 127, 219 Old Location, 197 Omgulumbashe, 89 Ondjiva, 37, 192, 193 Ongandjera, 80 Operation Askari, 139 Operation Reindeer, 48. See also Cassinga, Vietnam (camp) Organization of African Unity (OAU), 4, 27, 74, 86, 107, 113, 115, 116 OAU Liberation Committee, 65, 74, 75, 86, 116 Oshakati, 53, 181 Oshatotwa, 112, 114, 123, 127 the South African attack on Oshatotwa, 120 Oshikango, 188 Oshikwanyama, 187, 192 Oshiwambo, 58, 83, 84, 85, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 136, 177, 182, 208 Otjiherero, 198 Otjiwarongo, 189 Ottawa, 45 Outapi, 23 Ovambo, 84, 86, 96, 99, 130, 178, 181, 197 Ovamboland, 23, 23n69, 38, 41, 42, 80, 83, 84, 128, 130, 137, 187, 188, 193, 205. See also northern Namibia election boycott of 1973, 94, 94n1, 96, 96n7 Ovamboland People’s Congress (OPC), 4, 197, 201 Ovamboland People’s Organization (OPO), 4n3, 188 Oxfam, 155 Pakleppa, Richard, 184 Paratus, 53, 53n76, 54n78 Parents’ Committee, 159, 159n41, 165, 170, 173, 177, 178, 179, 182. See also Committee of Parents Patriotic Unity Movement (PUM), 172, 174, 178 Pawson, Lara, 9 People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44,

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257

52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 88n124, 94, 95, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 121, 124, 127, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 145, 146, 157, 160, 164, 182, 196, 199, 206, 211, 221. See also South West Africa Liberation Army (SWALA) Pieters, Hans, 138, 139, 145, 211 PLAN Command Headquarters, 136, 137, 140, 146, 220 PLAN Investigation Committee, 111–12, 113, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121 Political Consultative Council (PCC), 166, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178 political science, 6, 14 Portugal, 3, 4, 35, 37, 94, 96, 97, 106, 120, 134 postcolonial studies, 226 postcolony, 3, 16, 17, 19, 22, 29, 217, 225–32 postcolonial Southern Africa, 217–24 Pretoria, 23 Purity and Exile, 21 Quatro, 222 Rally for Democracy and Progess (RDP), 53n78, 54n82, 216 Ramashala, Mapule, 179 reconciliation, 17, 18, 28–29, 150, 176, 177, 178, 183, 208, 223, 230 reconciliation policy and discourse in Namibia, 185–87, 211–12 Red Cross, 50, 165, 175, 175n118, 209, 223 Red Line, 123, 123n3, 188 refugees. See camps (refugee camps); anthropology of refugees A Report to the Namibian People. 143, 165n66, 195, 224 Rivonia, 221 Robben Island, 90, 151, 230 Ruakera, 109, 110, 110n57, 115, 118 Rundu, 189 Rwanda, 21 Salvation Camp, 79, 189n11 Sanden, Per, 40–41, 44–45, 46, 52–5, 58, 59 Sapire, Hilary, 9 Saul, John, 8, 11, 15, 16, 18, 67, 95, 121, 143, 144, 184, 212 Saunders, Chris, 9 Savimbi, Jonas, 83n95 Schmidt, Talida, 159

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Searchlight South Africa, 7, 8 Sechaba, Tsepo, 7 Senanga, 97–100, 109, 120 sexual politics, 78, 99, 99n15, 109, 130, 190, 221 Shafooli, Karistus, 117 Shangula, Sheeli, 97, 98, 99, 105, 106, 115, 178 Shikondombolo, Hizipo, 119, 119n114 Shikongo, Silas, 79–82 Shikongo, Darius “Mbolondondo,” See Mbolondondo Shipanga, Andreas, 27, 56, 95, 105, 106, 113, 115, 116, 117, 120, 128, 178, 199, 200 the Shipanga Crisis, 27, 56, 95, 118, 121, 122, 187, 205, 224, 231 Shipanga’s people, 120 Shipanga, Esme, 116 Shityuwete, Helao, 71n23, 87, 88, 89 silence, 18, 22, 29, 187, 212–14, 231 Simbwaye, Brendan, 82, 83n92 Sithole, Masipule, 7, 11 Social Dynamics, 9 Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College, 218 South Africa, passim,  postapartheid South Africa, 3, 8, 50, 179 the South African attack on Cassinga, 30, 40, 41, 58, 59 the South African attack on Omgulumbashe, 89 the South African attack on Oshatotwa, 120 South African reporting on Cassinga, 44, 46, 48 South African-Zambian détente, 106–7 South African Communist Party, 8 South African Defence Force (SADF), 5, 27, 30, 31, 41, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 107, 108, 120, 126, 127, 134, 136, 139, 166, 231 South African Democracy and Education Trust (SADET), 10n26 South African Police, 89, 127, 191, 203 Southall, Roger, 15, 16 Southern Africa, passim  exiles, 190 migrant laborers, 65, 72, 77, 79, 189 regional legacies of liberation struggles, 3–22, 217–24 Southern African Liberation Struggles, 9 Southern Rhodesia, 3. See also Zimbabwe

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Index

258 South West Africa Liberation Army (SWALA), 73, 80, 87, 89, 91, 191, 220. See also People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) Military Council, 73, 73n38 South West African National Union (SWANU), 77n60, 197 South West African Territorial Force (SWATF), 136 South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), passim, 4, 53 South West News, 197 Soviet Union, 8, 48, 75, 79, 87, 106, 109, 111, 137, 191, 194, 211, 222, 223, 229 Soweto, 123, 136, 199 spies and spying, 5, 10, 18, 21, 28, 29, 54, 59, 89, 90, 91, 122, 124, 125, 126, 129, 134, 149, 154, 157, 157n36, 162, 166, 187, 191, 193, 194, 200, 204, 205, 210, 211, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223 explaining misfortune in SWAPO camps, 126–33 overlapping discourses on witchcraft and spying, 131–32 spy accusations following the Cassinga attack, 52–58 the Spy Drama, 28, 122, 165, 166, 195, 207, 231 suspicions of spies at Kongwa, 89–90 SWAPO’s detention of accused spies at Lubango, 137–46 SWAPO’s spy film, 155, 201 Spínola, António, 94 St. Mary’s Mission School, 79, 84n97 St. Therese Secondary School, 123, 140n81, 198, 201 St. Therese strike, 199, 200 Staalsett, Gunner, 157 Steegman, Father, 167 Stefanus, Jöel, 199, 202, 203–4 Stephanus, Joseph ‘Pereb’, 123–25, 129, 134, 140, 171, 198, 201 Stephanus, Lukas, 199 A Struggle Betrayed, 157 Subia, 84 SWAPO camps passim. See also camps a general history of the SWAPO camps, 4–5 SWAPO Central Commitee, 104n38, 118, 137, 138, 140, 141, 164, 185, 186, 199 SWAPO-Democrats (SWAPO-D), 200 SWAPO ex-detainees, 18, 28, 29, 57, 125, 143, 144, 145, 150, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 204, 209, 213, 223, 224

/ 4787 9C BD, 8C D 9 D8 4 4 45 8 4

BD,

Lubango ex-detainees, 150, 160–75, 178, 180, 184, 186, 195, 211 Mboroma ex-detainees, 57, 57n89, 118 SWAPO National Executive Committee (Exco), 104, 117 SWAPO Party Archive (SPARC), 53 SWAPO Political Bureau, 124, 124n5, 138, 144 SWAPO Security, 56, 59, 122, 137–46, 150, 151, 169, 223 SWAPO Women’s Council, 57, 155 SWAPO Youth League (SYL), 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 117, 121, 124, 198 Sweden, 44, 45, 52, 155 “Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA),” 156n30 Switzerland, 23 Taneni, Martin, 115 Tanga Consultative Congress, 91, 95, 199, 199n49 Tanzania, 4, 19, 23, 27, 61, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 76, 77, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 95, 102, 103, 109, 111, 116, 119, 176, 189, 190, 191, 193, 218, 224. See also Kongwa Tanzanian government, 4, 27, 65, 67, 68, 69, 74, 75, 76, 79, 81, 86, 87, 90, 92, 116, 189, 191, 192, 220 Tanzanian police, 74 Tanzanian prisons, 81, 192 Tanzanian Defence Force, 74 Techamutete, 40 Terrorism Trial, 90n134 Their Blood Waters Our Freedom, 181, 182 Thiro, Walter, 151 Thlabanello, Mokganedi, 156 Thomas, Julia, 208–11 Thomas, Samuel, 208–10 Thomas family, 208–10 Thornberry, Cedric, 164 Times of Namibia, 167 Tjipahura, Caleb, 88, 89 Toivo Ya Toivo, Andimba, 89, 90, 90n134, 151, 160, 162, 167, 201, 202 Tongo, Nalishua, 86, 87, 87n113 transitional justice, 18, 212–13. See also reconciliation Trewhela, Paul, 7, 8, 11, 120, 121 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 8, 23, 52n70, 178, 179, 180, 212–13 Tses, 23, 29, 123, 196, 198 Tsumeb, 187, 196 Turnhalle Conference, 170, 199, 200

64 5C 7:8 C: 6 C8 3 58C .C 04 0 5C4C 64 5C 7:8 C: 6 C8 8C D BD, 7 C:

14

. 2

4

,

,

D 5 86

8 .4 5C 7:8 . C8

Index

259

Tutsi, 19 Tutu, Desmond, 180 Ukonga Prison, 56 Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), 8, 12, 71, 221, 222 União Nacional para a Independençia Total de Angola (UNITA), 35, 35n14, 97, 107, 111, 134 UNITA and SWAPO, 97, 97n9, 107, 110–11 United Democratic Front (UDF), 172, 174 United Kingdom, See Britain United National Independence Party (UNIP), 84, 86 United Nations (UN), 34, 48, 49, 81, 116, 185, 192, 193, 209, 222, 230 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 34, 104 United Nations Commissioner to Namibia, 104 United Nations Council for South West Africa, 82, 82n88 United Nations General Assembly, 118 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), 158, 164, 165, 166, 166n72, 185, 195, 209, 224 United Nations Institute for Namibia (UNIN), 4n5, 124, 140 United Nations Mission on Detainees (UNMD), 173, 173n109, 174, 175, 223 United Nations Resolution 435, 125, 125n7, 143, 149, 159, 160, 185 United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG), 164, 164n57, 165, 173, 174 United States, 48, 78, 141, 190. See also African-American Institute University of Namibia (UNAM), 176 Uppsala, 14 USSR, 71. See Soviet Union Vaalgras, 29, 170, 171, 187, 196–205, 208, 213 van der Mescht, Johan, 41 Vereinigte Evangelische Mission (VEM), 102, 102n26, 103, 153, 153n16, 158, 175 Viana, 140n80 Vietnam (camp), 48, 50, 52, 53, 54 Voice of Namibia, 132 Vorster, John, 200, 221 Wagogo. See Gogo Waldheim, Kurt, 49

/ 4787 9C BD, 8C D 9 D8 4 4 45 8 4

BD,

Walvis Bay, 118, 188 contract workers’ strike of 1971–1972, 96, 96n7, 100 Werbner, Richard, 17 Western countries, 132, 140, 152, 158 Western Five, 49, 49n62 West Germany, 48, 95, 106, 117, 158 Windhoek, 23, 30, 53, 54, 59, 151, 152, 155, 164, 165, 169, 170, 171, 174, 176, 177, 178, 180, 184, 187, 189, 197, 204 Windhoek Observer, 176 Witbooi, Hendrik, 209 witchcraft, 28, 126, 133 overlapping discourses on witchcraft and spying, 131–32 witchcraft discourse in northern Namibia, 130–31 Witwatersrand, 76 Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WENELA), 76, 76n52, 189 World Council of Churches, 106 Wuppertal, 23 Ya Nangoloh, Phil, 159n41, 182 Ya Otto, John, 116 Ya Otto Commission, 116–17, 118 Zaire, 105. See also Congo, Democratic Republic and Congo (Kinshasa) Zambezi River, 82, 89, 97 Zambia, 4, 27, 30, 36, 43, 49, 56, 57, 61, 71, 72, 82, 83, 84, 87, 94, 95, 96, 101, 103, 106, 109, 110, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 153, 156, 174, 175, 191, 192, 194, 196, 200, 205, 209, 213, 218, 220, 221, 222, 224 Namibians’ exodus into Zambia, 96–101, 121 South African-Zambian détente, 106–7 SWAPO camps in southwestern Zambia, 94, 95, 104, 107, 109 Zambian army, 95, 100, 101, 109, 114, 115, 118, 119, 221 Zambian government, 71, 86, 100, 101, 109, 111, 112, 113–16, 119, 220, 221 Zambian police, 115 Zambian prisons, 192 Zimbabwe, 3, 7, 14, 16, 17, 218, 221 Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), 9, 16, 72n32, 114, 114n81, 115, 118n108, 221 Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), 9, 71, 72, 72n32, 114n81, 118n108

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