Enduring war: Heroes’ Acre, ‘the empty throne’, and the politics of disappearance

Abstract

ABSTRACTWar memorials are a common and often controversial part of the commemoration of past wars. In order to better grasp their importance for the way war endures below the surface of peace, this article stages an ethnographic encounter with a Namibian monument: Heroes’ Acre. The memorial embodies the official Namibian narrative on past wars by emphasizing a nationalist and quasi-religious symbolism, a framing that has been challenged by a number of writers pointing to the need for going beyond the state discourse. This article complements and complicates the way Heroes’ Acre appears in discourse by focusing on the interstices and absences at the site. By drawing upon my own visit to the monument as well as theoretical engagements, most notably Georgio Agamben’s discussion of ‘the empty throne’, I read Heroes’ Acre as a place where political power functions through emptiness, as it allows the future of war to endure in the present. Engaging particularly with the empty graveyard at the site, I argue that its emptiness needs to be understood as a guarantee for war – not in case it occurs – but as a ready-made symbol of glory, always virtually there, waiting to be fulfilled.