Heritage, Identity and Youth in Postcolonial Namibia

Abstract

Namibia was the last nation in Africa to achieve independence from a colonial power in 1990. The new state's attempts to appropriate indigenous cultural practices into its project of nation building through the rhetoric of ‘a national culture’ has freed the notion of ‘cultural heritage’ from its prior association with apartheid divisions, and the ever-increasing stream of ‘cultural tourists’ willing to pay to witness the spectacle of Namibia's much proclaimed cultural diversity has provided new opportunities for the performance and display of indigenous heritage. Increasingly this spectacle is being performed by a young generation for whom, this article demonstrates, local cultural practices, understood as heritage, constitute a resource on which they can draw in their interactions with an increasingly de-localised world. Although the state seeks to include the cultural identities of its diverse subjects whilst at the same time subsuming them in a unified national culture, heritage performances, by providing opportunities for the production of ‘style’, can subvert or even contest dominant narratives. In this article, I argue that these performances have a far more complex role in the production of postcolonial subjects than simply reproducing colonial ways of organising experience, and foreground the role of the rapidly developing heritage sector in enabling young postcolonial Namibian subjects to negotiate the local, national and global contexts in which their identities are performed.