Namibian Independence Research Articles

Crossing Etosha: a history of donkeys in Namibia’s central north

Donkeys are a common sight in Namibia’s central north and play an important albeit contested role in rural society and economy. Historically, they were one of the few domesticated animals that were allowed to enter today’s Etosha National Park and to cross the veterinary border (Red Line) between the northern communal lands and the Police Zone in central Namibia. In the first half of the twentieth century, migrant workers brought thousands of donkeys from the south to what was then called “Ovamboland.” Even after the import was regulated more strictly in the 1940s, donkeys could still get permission to be used as transport animals to carry goods through Etosha. We retrace the routes of the domesticated donkey through a conservation landscape of wildlife and explore entanglements between donkeys, other livestock and wildlife in and out of Etosha. We ask how the particular legal position of the donkey — and its close links to migrant labour — impacted multispecies entanglements in past rural societies and how this legal position has changed over time, including in independent Namibia. We provide a nuanced understanding of the contested position of the donkey in northern Namibia, using examples from King Nehale Conservancy north of Etosha.

Maltas gear for San leather: an exploratory entrepreneurial experiment three decades after Namibian independence

Maltas gear for San leather: an exploratory entrepreneurial experiment three decades after Namibian independence

Maltas gear for San leather: an exploratory entrepreneurial experiment three decades after Namibian independence

Maltas gear for San leather: an exploratory entrepreneurial experiment three decades after Namibian independence

Performance and Efficiency of Public Sector in Independent Namibia

An analysis of the performance and efficiency of the Namibian government’s interventions after the end of the colonial era has been made in this study for the period 1990 to 2015. Using the Afonso et al. public sector performance (PSP) and public sector efficiency (PSE) method and the Stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), the findings reveal a sluggishly improving efficiency in the public sector in Namibia. However, some performance indicators showed significant improvement, while others did not record any substantial improvement. Progress is recorded in government efforts and programmes to reduce inequality and poverty, but the outputs moved at a plodding pace. Programmes and policies to reduce unemployment failed to produce the expected outcomes. Additionally, technical progress has been very slow since independence, as reflected by the technical efficiency parameter. The findings suggest a need to improve the public sector’s performance and efficiency to ensure stability and accelerate growth in the previously colonized economies with the same features as Namibia. JEL Classification: H00, H11, H89, L38

‘Eekamba adishe nadi ufanwe, Eendingosho adishe na di ongelwe u pule kwali Nashima’: Nanghili Nashima, The performer and feminist intellectual

This article studies Nanghili Nashima’s Oudano practices and public life. We discuss how her autobiographical public performance practices during apartheid and independent Namibia constitute feminism. The study mainly focused on the sound and video recordings currently archived at the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation's Music Library and on YouTube. This work offers critical engagement on themes of migration, sexuality and labour, challenging colonial, Christian, patriarchal and heteronormative norms, and systems in Ovawambo and African societies at large. We unpack her mobile work and public life as defiant and subversive, therefore, speaking truth to multiple forms of power. By listening collectively and closely to her performance work, the study argues that Nanghili Nashima emerged as a trans-local figure who relied on transgression through her Oudano praxis to embody agency and radical imagination as practices of freedom. It is on this basis that her intellectual tradition is situated in what Pumla Gqola has theorised as African feminist imagination.

Remembering the Herero-Nama Genocide in Namibia

Remembering the Herero-Nama Genocide in Namibia

Crossing the Boundary: An Investigation of Transnationalism, Transculturalism and Transracial Marriages in Jane Katjavivi’s Undisciplined Heart and Trudie Amulungu’s Taming My Elephant

ABSTRACT The focus of this paper is to explore the literary portrayal of transnational identities, transculturalism and transracial marriages as presented by two expatriate female writers who have made their niche in the postcolonial Namibian autobiographical (sub) genre, namely, Taming My Elephant by Amulungu (2016) and Undisciplined Heart by Katjavivi (2010). The paper explores the different challenges faced by two migrant and transracial couples from different backgrounds which include issues of communication breakdown, a lack of understanding of the partner’s background, racial differences and indifference in the communities. The couples’ families hesitated to welcome the spouses into their families, whereas the couples’ relationships and motivations varied and are couched in shifting arenas, yet their interactions created opportunities for the circulation, promotion, and adaptation of a wide range of cultural, political, and social influences. Amulungu and Katjavivi are tracing their interactions within and among liberation movements, being hosted as a transmigrants, whilst facing a wider set of external actors, revealing the lasting legacies that have too often been eclipsed by dominant national histories. The paper postulates that the selected autobiographers allied with more than a single culture, and are pioneers as transracial couples in a newly independent Namibia as well as persistent beings who are portrayed as compassionate, assertive, and enduring people.

Südwester Reiter: Fear, Belonging, and Settler Colonial Violence in Namibia

ABSTRACT This article examines the continuities between the Herero and Nama genocide and the history of the Reiterdenkmal statue in Windhoek, Namibia. It interprets the statue as an extension of the lived experience of the genocide and a contested symbol of settler belonging. The Reiterdenkmal reformulated colonial violence as white victimhood and black savagery, and advanced German settler claims over African soil. Violence and the “rider” together remade black African space into white settler space. Yet, this settler belonging was and remains grounded on fears. Uncertainty over belonging and fear of the Natives had driven the killing and exploitation of black Africans in the first place, and settler identities remain uncertain as the legacies and reckonings of past violence continue unresolved in independent Namibia.

A New Chapter in Namibian History: Reflections on Archival Research

AbstractSince Namibian independence in 1990, historians have increasingly made use of Namibian archives to explore the history of the German and South African occupation. Researching the recent past is, however, much more difficult, considering the absence of a SWAPO archive and an embargo on governmental files of thirty years. But now, thirty years after independence, the files from the postcolonial administrations are set to gradually open up. In anticipation of this new chapter of Namibian history, this article examines the state of various archives in Namibia and offers a number of observations that may be of use to scholars who are interested in consulting them.

Challenges to the integration of the Platfontein San in South Africa between 1990 and 2003

This article is based on a narrative case study that explores the controversy in the history surrounding the Platfontein San. During the South African border war, San soldiers joined the South African Defence Force in their fight against African liberation movements in Angola and Namibia. Shortly before Namibian independence, these soldiers and their families were evacuated to a military base in South Africa. Amidst the concurrent political changes in South Africa, the fate of this small San community came to be uncertain and insecure. In their quest for a place to settle permanently, the group experienced different racial, socio-economic and cultural problems. Eventually in 2003, they settled permanently in Platfontein. Overall, the government’s resettlement project was a “quick-fix” decision, not an integrated solution. It shaped many chronic socio-economic problems among the Platfontein community. The article thus seeks to understand how the small group of indigenous inhabitants has been affected by major changes in Southern Africa and reveals the key factors that favoured and hindered its integration in South Africa.

Factors affecting language policy choices in the multilingual context of Namibia

As most African countries, Namibia is multilingual, but the linguistic diversity is not fully appreciated nor supported in the language education policy. Nationalist one nation – one language ideologies and policy makers' desire to remove Afrikaans from its former power position and replacing it with English have affected the choices of the official language and the medium of instruction policies. The current language education policy has contributed to low academic achievements and high school dropout rates. This article discusses the development of the language education policy in independent Namibia within the critical language policy framework. The language education policy is re-evaluated from a historical perspective in order to understand the current situation and the recent developments. The method is historical-structural analysis of institutional texts. The focus is on the choice of the official language and the medium of instruction policy. The covert policy is analysed in light of educational statistics and examination results. The analysis reveals that the language education policy has remained almost the same during the years of independence, and the efforts of extending mother tongue instruction to senior primary have not been successful. Despite the twofold emphasis of the overt policy of promoting the local languages and making the citizens proficient in English, the covert policy is more English-oriented. Multilingual teaching practices and pedagogies, including translanguaging, are discussed as a feasible option to promote more flexible multilingual education and to strengthen the learners' multilingual identities.

The Concept of “Indigenous Land Tenure” Surfaces in Namibia: A Comparative Overview ‒ Agnes Kahimbi Kashela v Katima Mulilo Town Council (SA 15/2017) [2018] NASC 409 (16 November 2018)

The facts in this case, which fell to be decided by the Supreme Court of Namibia in November 2018, can be succinctly put: in 1985, Ms Kashela’s late father was allocated a piece of land as part of communal land by the Mafwe Traditional Authority (MTA) in the Caprivi region of the then-South West Africa (now Namibia). In 1985, the Caprivi region fell under the then-South West Africa Administration. Following the independence of Namibia on 21 March 1990, all communal lands became property of the state of Namibia by virtue of section 124 of the Constitution of Namibia Act 1 of 1990, read with Schedule 5 of the Constitution. Paragraph (3) of Schedule 5 of the Constitution states that the afore-mentioned communal lands became property of the state “subject to any existing right, charge, obligation or trust existing on or over such property”.

#MeToo Activism in Namibia: Sex-Positive Feminism and State Cooperation in the Fight to Stop Rape

#MeToo Activism in Namibia:Sex-Positive Feminism and State Cooperation in the Fight to Stop Rape Ashley Currier (bio), Erin Winchester (bio), and Emily Chien (bio) #MeToo organizing has captivated the imagination of social-media-savvy feminist, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ), and sex worker rights activists who have mobilized against sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) throughout southern Africa (Ajayi 2018). In Namibia, the words "Me Too" have become much more than a hashtag on social media. They name a coalition that has formed to offer support to SGBV survivors, provide a platform for survivors to share their stories, and advocate for sex positivity. Unlike other national manifestations of #MeToo organizing (Fileborn and Loney-Howes 2019; Gieseler 2019), #MeTooNamibia organizing emerged from sex-positive protests of SGBV experienced by cisgender women and girls, LGBTQ people, and sex workers. This essay explores the genealogy of Namibian sex-positive feminist organizing that culminated in the #MeTooNamibia coalition. To explore the dimensions of anti-SGBV and #MeToo organizing, we draw on analyses of Namibian newspaper reports about anti-SGBV organizing and more than forty interviews that the first author conducted with Namibian feminist, LGBTQ, prisoner's rights, and sex worker rights activists in 2019. We consider productive disruptions that #MeToo organizing against SGBV offer for Namibian feminist antirape organizing. By "productive disruptions," we mean the unsettling of anti-SGBV feminist activist spaces, strategies, and tactics in ways that cultivate new feminist activist constituencies and cooperation with different social actors. Inderpal Grewal and Srila Roy highlight how, as an issue, sexual violence is politically "productive" in that it affects so many people and saturates so many social institutions that the potential for feminist resistance continues to multiply (2017, 256). Following Roy and Grewal, we treat innovative, feminist antirape tactics as disruptions that are similarly productive. Productive disruptions include harnessing sex-positive messages to challenge [End Page 271] structures and practices that reproduce sexual violence, mobilizing feminist, queer, and sex worker rights activists through online tactics, and collaborating with political leaders, such as First Lady of Namibia Monica Geingos. We argue that productive disruptions motivate the #MeToo movement in Namibia through advances in sex-positive feminist organizing against SGBV and cooperation with state leaders (Roy 2017; Tripp 2001). Antirape Organizing in Namibia Much feminist organizing in Namibia has remained autonomous from the state, allowing activists to maintain an "'outside' position" from which they can critique state actors' stances, inaction, or campaigns (Beckwith 2000, 442). Predating Namibia's independence from South African rule, which occurred in 1990, early antirape organizing diagnosed and criticized racial disparities in the state's handling of rape cases. Feminist activists launched Rape Crisis Namibia in 1989, after Rape Crisis, a South African feminist antirape organization and the Legal Assistance Centre in Namibia, hosted a workshop in Namibia about organizing against sexual violence (Namises and Feris 2016). Louisa, a Black woman, and feminist activist in her 60s, recalled how the context of "apartheid and colonialism" legitimized the state's racialized decision to prosecute Black men for rape and not to prosecute white men for raping Black women (interview with first author, June 20, 2019, Windhoek, Namibia). According to Louisa, a catalyst for feminist antirape organizing involved the "case of a Black man who raped a white woman, and he was to go to the gallows" if convicted. Louisa stated that Rape Crisis Namibia framed "rape as an act of power [by men] over women" to subdue women. Since independence, multiple feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as Sister Namibia and Women's Solidarity Namibia, have tackled SGBV as NGOs autonomous from the state (Britton and Shook 2014; Hubbard and Solomon 1995). Feminist antirape activists offered two reasons for the persistence of SGBV in Namibia: the fact that perpetrators of wartime rape faced no "accountability" after the end of the struggle against South African apartheid rule and backlash against women's gains in human rights, equality, and employment such that one could interpret rape as men "violently putting women back in their place" (Britton and Shook 2014, 155). Despite their autonomy from the state, feminist antirape activists in Namibia have continually turned to the state as the primary agent for redressing...

The Absolute and Relative Quality of the Namibian Secondary Education: A distributional approach on grade 12 (NSSCH) performance

The Namibian independence in 1990 imparted a massive challenge to reform education and to refresh the system. Each child had to receive a fair chance to succeed in secondary education, fostering the country's human-capital formation to improve economic performance. In this study uses data from 1996 to 2018 period to analyse the Secondary Education system in order to determine the systems’ progress by hypothesizing that educational output is attributed to spatial location, resource allocation and other opportunities. Results show that on a national basis, the average student performance declined. On regional level, results reveal that, (i) general access to secondary education improved significantly, (ii) the educational level of secondary education as reflected in the student points declined continuously, (iii) the narrowing performance variation did not contribute to the national goals, and (iv) that further attention is required to reach the goal of educational democracy. The findings give signals to the need that should urgently assess the drivers of human capital that enables the links secondary education output to economic achievements. On a macro level, the paper shows that, after two decades, the education reform slowly started to show positive results. Meanwhile, on a micro level, the analysis showed that both types of schools and educational support per student explain the level of secondary educational output, which would result into human capital.

Indigenization in a downgraded continuum: Ideologies behind phonetic variation in Namibian Afrikaans

Abstract This study generally looks at indigenization in languages historically introduced and promoted by colonial regimes. The case study that it presents involves Namibia, a Subsaharan African country formerly administered by South Africa, where Afrikaans was the dominant official language before being replaced by English upon independence. Afrikaans in Namibia still functions as an informal urban lingua franca while being spoken as a native language by substantial White and Coloured minorities. To what extent does the downranking of Afrikaans in Namibia co-occur with divergence from standard models historically located in South Africa? To answer this question, the study identifies variation patterns in Namibian Afrikaans phonetic data elicited from ethnically diverse young urban informants and links these patterns with perceptions and language ideologies. The phonetic data reveal divergence between Whites and Non-Whites and some convergence among Black L2 Afrikaans-speakers with Coloured varieties, while suggesting that a distinctive Black variety is emerging. The observed trends generally reflect perceived ethnoracial distinctions and segregation. They must be read against the background of shifting inter-group power relations and sociolinguistic prestige norms in independent Namibia, as well as of emergent ethnically inclusive Black urban identities.

The pre-independence psychological experiences of the Namibian children of the liberation struggle: a qualitative study

The Independence of Namibia in 1990 witnessed the voluntary repatriation of exiled Namibian people back home. Children of the liberation struggle is the term used to refer to the grown-up children of veterans who were under the age of 18 years before Namibian Independence. Since 2008, demonstrations and demands for jobs from government by the children of the liberation struggle have taken place regularly, drawing harsh criticism about the behaviour and demands of the children of the liberation struggle from the general private and public Namibian domain. This study aims to explore the pre-Independence psychological experiences of the Namibian children of the liberation struggle in an attempt to understand their conduct. A qualitative approach was employed where in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 employed children of the liberation struggle in the Khomas region. The collected data were categorised by means of thematic analysis. The results revealed themes which demonstrate that most children of the liberation struggle experienced adversities like growing up separated from their parents, in unstable conditions, having experienced maltreatment, constantly afraid of the enemy and having endured traumatic war-related situations. The study recommends sensitisation of the broad Namibian public on the lived experiences of the children of the liberation struggle. Psycho-education programmes and psychological interventions in the form of therapeutic group sessions and individual sessions with children of the liberation struggle can assist with reflection on the past, making sense of it and find healing to move on with their lives. Government and the private sector should cooperate in rendering training and job opportunities for the children of the liberation struggle.

Fictional Dreams and Harsh Realities

Abstract This paper looks at the novels by Joseph Diescho (Born of the Sun, 1988), Kaleni Hiyalwa (Meekulu’s Children, 2000), and Neshani Andreas (The Purple Violet of Oshaantu, 2001) with a special focus on the access to education and land, but also problems such as Gender Based Violence and poverty. By comparing how an independent Namibia is imagined during South African apartheid rule, during the Liberation Struggle, and post-independence, the novels open up perspectives that empirical studies may overlook or decide not to emphasise. Furthermore, this comparison also allows for a linear, yet non-chronological, view on how the literary visions evolve with concepts such as nation and liberation, but also modernity and nationalism as they ‘enter’ into the characters’ every day. With the protagonists deeply involved in the make-up of their respective villages, they can also be considered prototypical Namibians in their value systems and networks. Through their eyes, it is possible to trace how political promises that were envisioned and imagined prior to 1990 are either realised or disappointed.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall and Namibian Independence

Abstract The Berlin Wall was breached as Namibia’s first democratic election was being conducted. It is therefore wrong to say that the fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in Namibia’s independence. That independence was on track when the Wall fell. But the fall of the Wall, and the associated collapse of the state socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, had significant consequences for the form of independence that emerged in Namibia in 1990.

Vulnerability and Oral History. The Biography of a ‘GDR-Child of Namibia’ as a Narrative of Being Hurt

Oral history adds granularity to the great historical narratives by supplementing them with the everyday stories of contemporary witnesses. It is against this backdrop that this article devotes itself to the story of a young woman who, as a child, was taken from a Namibian refugee camp and sent to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where she spent her childhood and young adulthood in a children’s home, was then returned to Namibia, and who is currently living in Ovamboland in northern Namibia in isolation and poverty. Her biography is indelibly marked by the programme of cooperation which existed between the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) liberation movement and the GDR between 1979 and 1990. This political programme was part of a large-scale international solidarity pact and saw children and teenagers being provided protection in the GDR, where they were educated to be the future elite of an independent Namibia. The narrative related by our contemporary witness is one of vulnerability, a story which stands in stark contrast to the powerful narrative of international solidarity. She tells her story with the help of a photograph album. The album provides her own personal story with pictorial support, without which she would have struggled to tell her story at all. Her story is at one remove from the master-narratives surrounding the cooperation between the GDR and SWAPO; it permits an alternative reading of history and reveals a story of personal injustice, the effects of which are still being felt today.

THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN INDEPENDENT NAMIBIA

The complex agenda of post-colonial Namibia has stimulated debate on the issue of a viable paradigm for the teaching and study of religion in a country with a strong Christian tradition and ethos, but also a progressive secular constitution and an emerging new multi-faith reality. This article reports on some practical and theoretical considerations that were taken into account in developing an appropriate paradigm for teaching and studying religion, on various levels and for different purposes in independent Namibia.