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Nationalism's Exile: Godfrey Nangonyaand SWAPO's Sacrifice in SouthernAngolaPatricia Hayesa

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To cite this article: Patricia Hayes (2014) Nationalism's Exile: Godfrey Nangonya and SWAPO'sSacrifice in Southern Angola, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40:6, 1305-1324, DOI:10.1080/03057070.2014.970038

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Nationalism’s Exile: Godfrey Nangonya and

SWAPO’s Sacrifice in Southern Angola

Patricia Hayes(University of the Western Cape)

Godfrey Nangonya hardly figures in any liberation narrative in southern Africa. Born and

educated in the border region of Namibia/Angola, he gravitated to Cape Town and the

ferment of radical, nationalist and pan-African politics in the late 1940s. Departing for

Angola, he joined militants who founded the MPLA. He was imprisoned twice under the

Portuguese and, because of the complications of plural political affiliations, twice after

Angolan independence. This article explores Nangonya’s transnational political, nationalist

and carceral journeys, and especially the years 1974–75 when, as SWAPO’s liaison officer

with UNITA in southern Angola, he was ‘sacrificed’ by the Namibian liberation movement.

It examines the open and volatile southern Angolan frontier region in a time of expanding

historical possibilities for national liberation, a space that had to be forcibly stabilised,

whether as a buffer zone for the South African military, a zone of passage for SWAPO

guerrillas, or sovereign territory for the MPLA. The new Cold War dynamics soon resulted

in a hardening of political boundaries and the narrowing of nationalist alignments and

internal debates. Nangonya was exiled by a Namibian nationalism and its history that

was purged of its plural alternative narratives, and which is only now slowly opening up to

debate.

Introduction: Suspension

There is often great difficulty in accommodating figures whose political biographies snarl

up the smooth and successful nationalist narratives with which we live in the postcolonial

subcontinent today. This may be a truism, but it is especially the case when such figures come

out of the milieu of transnational anti-colonial mobilisations in central and southern Africa

from the 1940s, with their jostling ideological positions, mobilities and alignments.

One such figure is Godfrey Absalom Nangonya. Known to his comrades as Diamante

Negro (Black Diamond), Nangonya has existed in a kind of suspension since 1976. After the

first couple of interviews I did with him in Windhoek in 1995, we took a picture outside his

house in Okuryangava where he holds up a bullet (Figure 1).1 He insisted that we should

include the bullet in the portrait as he said it was part of his biography. It narrowly missed

killing him, after Angolan police shot at him in an open-roofed cell in 1992. This was during

his detention in Luanda after the breakdown of peace following the Angolan elections of that

year. By my count, this was the fourth episode of political imprisonment in Nangonya’s

biography. These episodes include his imprisonment by the Portuguese colonial government

in Angola from 1955 to 1960 on Sao Tome; by the Portuguese again from 1961 to 1974; by

q 2014 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies

1 Formal interviews with Godfrey Nangonya took place on the following dates: 19 May 1995, 20 May 1995, 31May 1995, 2 June 1995, 6 February 2003 and 30 January 2004, in both oshiKwanyama and English. Thanks toGodfrey Nangonya, Kandy Nehova, and to co-researcher and interpreter Laban Natangwe Shapange. Citationsused here are drawn from the extended interview over 19–20 May 1995.

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2014

Vol. 40, No. 6, 1305–1324, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2014.970038

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the Movimento Popular de Libertac�ao de Angola (MPLA) government of Angola from 1976

to 1981 and again in 1992. Altogether, this constitutes 23 years in colonial and postcolonial

political detention.

Nangonya was ostensibly detained in 1992 for six weeks because he was associated with

the Uniao Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA), whose president, Jonas

Savimbi, backed out of the new government of national unity after failing to win the

election.2 Serious fighting broke out in Luanda and other parts of the country, between the

government army, the Forc�as Armadas Populares de Libertac�ao de Angola (FAPLA) and

Savimbi’s forces, whose arms had not been surrendered, despite attempts by the United

Nations. It took the combined efforts of Amnesty International and loyal friends in the South

West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), by then in government in Windhoek, to effect

Nangonya’s release. Because of the change in personnel on the Angola desk at Amnesty

International in London over a period of years, the organisation did not grasp, until Nangonya

reminded them, that this was the second time he had been on their books as a prisoner of

conscience. Under a previous desk officer, and in another era of this subcontinental war, they

Figure 1. Godfrey Nangonya outside his house, 1995.

2 See Amnesty International (hereafter AI), ‘Further information on UA 349/92 (AFR 12/16/92, 11 November1992) – Legal concern/Fear of ill-treatment. ANGOLA: Godfrey Absalom Nangonya’, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AFR12/001/1993/en. AI also noted that Nangonya was ‘a leading member of the Angolan CivicAssociation, who, although a UNITA supporter, had denounced deliberate killings and other abuses committedby UNITA’. AI, Amnesty International Report 1994 –Angola, 1 January 1994, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6a9f654.html (accessed 28 June 2013).

1306 Journal of Southern African Studies

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had campaigned for five years (1976–81) to have the MPLA release him from political

detention in Luanda’s fortress, the Castle.

A skeleton outline of Nangonya’s story might read as follows. He was born in 1931 in

Chiede in southern Angola, and his family settled in Ondobe in northern Namibia, where he

attended the local primary school. He studied at Ongwediva Training College from 1947.

Like many northern Namibian men after the Second World War, he chose migration to South

Africa, and arrived in Cape Town in 1949. He was already corresponding with Tom Mboya

and other Kenyan ‘Pan African’ figures while in Ongwediva. He joined the African National

Congress (ANC) Youth League, and Nangonya describes how he was drawn to Robert

Sobukwe’s ideas within the organisation even before the latter formed the Pan African

Congress (PAC) in 1959. He also attended meetings organised by Communist Party of South

Africa (CPSA) members, and helped to distribute their newspaper, The Clarion. In this nexus

of involvements his influences were therefore plural but not always competing, with

emerging militancy in the ANC Youth League, debates around African nationalism and Pan

Africanism, and a taste of discipline and ostensible non-racialism from the CPSA. Cape Town

at this time was also the home of several prominent Namibian nationalists who later formed

the Ovamboland People’s Congress, soon renamed the Ovamboland People’s Organisation

(1959) and later (1960) the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). Hermann

Andimba Toivo ya Toivo was the most prominent among them. Nangonya was of a slightly

younger generation.

Distributing The Clarion for the CPSA resulted in Nangonya’s arrest. With his ‘foreign

nationality’ he ran the risk of deportation and confinement to Ovamboland in northern

Namibia, so, armed with letters from the ANC Youth League addressed to political associates

in Luanda, Nangonya boarded ship in August 1952. His ticket on the Empire took him only as

far as Lobito, but after disembarking he found it to be ‘a village’ after Cape Town, and hurried

back on board to make his way to Luanda. In Luanda, the letters he carried to Conego Manuel

das Neves acted as a potent introduction, and he was soon absorbed in local meetings with

diverse groups and persons who went on to found the MPLA. Among these men were Ilıdio

Tomas Machado, Andre Rodrigues Mingas, Velho Benge, Domingos Van Dunen, and

others.3 One of the key points that Nangonya therefore makes in recounting his political

biography is that he participated in the founding of the MPLA in the 1950s. He was assigned

to organisational duties in the south, but was recognised by the Portuguese as a problem and

sent – for the first time – to prison, in Sao Tome in 1955. He was released in 1960 and headed

back to southern Angola. He stayed in Pereira de Ec�a (later renamed Ondjiva), the capital of

Cunene province, within easy access of the Namibian border. Here he reconnected with

SWAPO friends, some of whom were by then officially confined to the Ovamboland Native

Reserve, and engaged in intensive anti-colonial mobilisation.4

At this juncture it is important to highlight that this account is constructed from interviews

with Nangonya, in a context where little archival or documentary material is available to

cross-reference the different parts of his testimony. The lack of such material goes beyond a

methodological issue: indeed, it reinforces a tendency towards homogenisation in the

dominant nationalist narratives that come with their own political implications, something

that recent research initiatives – including the articles in this issue of JSAS – have sought

3 These names are drawn from Nangonya’s brief and unpublished ‘Political Biography’. Nangonya recentlyspecified that the ANC letters he carried were fromMoses Kotane, Robert Sobukwe, and Albert Luthuli. Personalcommunication, Godfrey Nangonya, Windhoek, 16 January 2014.

4 This account is derived from interviews with Godfrey Nangonya, with archival cross-references from the PoliciaInternacional da Defesa do Estado/Direcc�ao Geral de Seguranc�a (hereafter PIDE/DGS) records of the formerPortuguese secret police at the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon from the early 1960s.

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to counter.5 One part of Nangonya’s testimony, however, resonates very closely with other

documented accounts and indeed modes of narrating, and this is the phase of his life during

which he actively worked with SWAPO colleagues in the late 1950s and early 1960s in

northern Namibia and southern Angola. His vivid style of narrating the meetings, movements

and tense encounters with police, with names of people and places flashing up, is remarkably

similar to oral accounts of this period given by, for example, Andimba Toivo ya Toivo and

Hifikepunye Pohamba.6 The detailed memory of persons and places in all these cases

constitute a striking kind of political mapping. The capacity for such detail retained in

memory might owe something to a kind of ‘settling in place’ that happens when such figures

are removed from these hectic circuits and go into prison or exile, but is also grounded in a

more basic evidentiary need to account for oneself and one’s associates politically and

legally.

In the early 1960s Nangonya was of course known to the South West African (SWA)

Police, from his record in Cape Town, and also to the authorities in Luanda, through the

sharing of intelligence with Portuguese officials. The SWA authorities had notified the latter

in Ondjiva that he was not permitted within a certain distance of the border. This did not

hinder Nangonya’s activities, but his mother, Helena Shihutuka Nangonya, was frequently

harassed by officials as to his whereabouts, and even summoned to a meeting of the local

Council of Headmen and the Native Commissioner Strydom in Onekwaya (Oukwanyama) on

one occasion.7 It was early days, but SWAPO was beginning to organise men going out of the

country for military training, using the old migrant labour routes through Kavango and

Caprivi to get to Zambia, Tanzania and beyond. Angola itself was a swirl of early and

emergent nationalist agitation; Savimbi, for instance, was gaining prominence at this time

with the Uniao das Populac�oes de Angola (UPA), the forerunner of Holden Roberto’s Frente

Nacional de Libertac�ao de Angola (FNLA). Nangonya himself travelled betweenMoc�amedes

(later renamed Namibe) on the Angolan coast and the interior, organising meetings and

strengthening connections with movements in neighbouring countries. In his accounts he

mentions the numerous young men, some of them also known to him as schoolboys in the

early 1950s, whom he mentored at different times in the early 1950s and early 1960s and who

then reappear in the mid 1970s at a climactic point in Nangonya’s narrative (see below).

Nangonya was detained by the Portuguese in October 1961 and formally sentenced in

1962 to seven years’ (later extended to 1974) hard labour in prison camps. Within a few years,

many of his SWAPO comrades, such as ya Toivo and Eliaser Tuhadeleni (Kaxumba ka

Ndola), were caught up in the big Namibian treason trial of 1966 and sentenced in their turn to

years of detention on Robben Island. But while Nangonya was deeply involved in developing

SWAPO networks in the early 1960s, it was for his other activities in Angola that he was in

fact arrested by the Policia Internacional da Defesa do Estado (PIDE), the Portuguese

secret police. This episode takes us into the transnational dimensions of both nationalist

and colonialist organisation in the subcontinent, especially through the latter’s policy of

relocating troublesome figures through forms of dislocation and exile or ‘reterritorialisation’

across colonial spaces. With reference to the Portuguese empire, Ruy Llera Blanes even

5 See C. Leys and J. Saul (eds), Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword (London, James Currey,1995); C.A. Williams, National Liberation in Post-Colonial Southern Africa: An Historical Ethnography ofSWAPO’s Exile Camps (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015 forthcoming); V.A. Shigwedha,‘Enduring Suffering: The Cassinga Massacre of Namibian Exiles in 1978 and the Conflicts Between Survivors’Memories and Testimonies’ (PhD thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2012).

6 See the film Paths to Freedom by film-maker Richard Pakleppa (Windhoek, On Land Productions, 2014), inwhich both Toivo ya Toivo and Pohamba feature. Radio interviews with ya Toivo have also been recorded andarchived by the Namibia Broadcasting Corporation.

7 Interview with Helena Shihutuka Nangonya, Oshatotwa, 7 July 1999.

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writes of a ‘colonial Atlantic’ that went beyond formal colonial borders.8 It was precisely

after the arrest and interrogation of a Mozambican subject, Joao Marques de Almeida

Mendes, in Sa de Bandeira (later renamed Lubango) that the PIDE approached the South

African authorities to pick up Nangonya.

Mendes was born in Lourenc�o Marques and detained as a youth for his activities with the

Movimento de Unidade Democratica Juvenil in Portugal, but because he was too young to

serve his sentence he was deported back to Mozambique. The distribution of ‘subversive’

pamphlets in Lourenc�o Marques in 1947 led to official exile in southern Angola with his wife

Laura, where he set up an umbrella organisation called the Frente da Unidade de Angola.9

The PIDE believed that they had uncovered a plot to overthrow the colonial state in Angola,

and during multiple interrogations of Mendes and those arrested to implicate him, the name of

Godfrey Nangonya surfaced numerous times. Mendes faced severe questioning on recruiting

an ‘indigenous’ African into his organisation, but his only answer was that anyone was

welcome to join the movement, regardless of their colour or creed. The construction put by

the PIDE on Nangonya’s involvement was that his role was to raise Kwanyama soldiers to

launch an attack in southern Angola, as part of the plan of Mendes and other plotters on the

coast. The PIDE conclusion is redolent of much older colonial anxieties about the ‘rebelde

Cuanhama’ (rebellious Kwanyama) before their conquest in 1915.10 This led to their request

to the South African authorities to pick up Nangonya in Ovamboland and hand him over.

He was thus brought across the border from Oshikango to the PIDE station in Sa de Bandeira

for interrogation.

Blanes cautions that while the PIDE archives might seem to offer a new and ‘unedited

historiographical regime’,11 the secret police actively sought polarising effects, and, in the

wake of the 1961 uprisings in Angola, they had extreme if not catastrophic expectations.

Their business was the ‘production of enemies’ and, as Blanes argues, it is the interaction

with PIDE (and now its archives) and their projections that in fact crystallise what later

become distinct ‘resistance histories’ out of multiple and even relatively unformed agendas.12

Blanes makes this point specifically in relation to Tocoistas, members of the prophetic

movement with whom Nangonya and other political activists later shared spaces of

incarceration, but there is a level on which PIDE expectations created their own reality for

thousands of political detainees as well.

In the case of Nangonya, the PIDE officers in Sa de Bandeira initially attempted to

establish his role in the projected southern uprising. When questioned about funds intended to

buy a copying machine in Tsumeb in SWA for Mendes’ group to print more pamphlets,

Nangonya answered that he had argued with Mendes that a scooter would be more useful.

When questioned about raising Kwanyama troops for the revolt in the south, Nangonya

answered that he had disagreed with Mendes’ political approach and argued that

conscientisation and discipline would be needed before any large number of Kwanyama-

speaking adherents might be encouraged to join. A small notebook found in Nangonya’s house

resulted in other people being drawn in, but none implicated Nangonya. Then, as considerable

intelligence on SWAPO was provided by the South Africans (including a photograph of

8 R.L. Llera Blanes, ‘Da confusao a ironia. Expectativas e legados de PIDE em Angola’, Analise Social, 206, 48, 1(2013), pp. 30–55.

9 Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais (hereafter IAN), Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, PIDE/DGS Del Angola Serie PC,137/61. See also the Mozambican newspaper Noticias, 9 October 1947. Mendes later published La Revolution enAfrique, problemes et perspectives (Paris, Joao Mendes, 1970).

10 P. Hayes, ‘A History of the Ovambo of Namibia, c. 1880–1935’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1992),chapter 4; R. Pelissier, Les Guerres Grises. Resistance et Revoltes en Angola (1845–1941) (Orgeval, Pelissier,1977), chapter 17.

11 Blanes, ‘Da confusao a ironia’, p. 51.12 Blanes, ‘Da confusao a ironia’.

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ya Toivo) an entire new line of questioning developed. According to transcripts of his repeated

interrogations, Nangonya at times appeared to lead his interrogators off the scent of important

people. For instance, when under pressure to implicate Tobias Hainyeko (probably instigated

by the South Africans), Nangonya reportedly answered that he came across him in Cape Town

in 1950 but that he was too junior (‘vulgo’) for him to even acknowledge as he dealt only with

Figure 2. Map of Angola, showing presumed MPLA camps and incursions. Source: PIDE/DGS.

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the chefes.13 The PIDE operatives in Sa de Bandeira were granted an extension of the legal

three-month detention period to continue questioning this dangerously subversive character,

but they soon concluded that it was futile because he was ‘too indoctrinated’. In Luanda it was

determined that Nangonya should not be allowed to spread subversion, and he was sentenced

in 1962 with other desterros (exiles) to the labour camp of Missomba, near Serpa Pinto

(later renamed Menongue).14

Nangonya served a lengthy sentence, first at Missomba and then at the ‘recuperation camp’

of Sao Nicolau, north ofMoc�amedes, on the coast. Nangonya describes Sao Nicolau bluntly as a

concentration camp, and claims that by the time he reached there Portuguese security services

had received training from former Nazi German operatives, and new regimes of incarceration,

interrogation and labour were in place. Prisoners there engaged in forced labour in the nearby

salt mines.15 Nangonya was released in 1974, following the Portuguese coup (of which more

below), and returned to Ondjiva to resume his political activity. In the extremely fluid situation

between April 1974 and Angolan independence in November 1975, Nangonya then became the

official liaison officer between SWAPO and UNITA, whose soldiers were at times encamped

and operating together. Prior to the coup, UNITA’s control of parts of central and eastern

Angola had assisted SWAPO cadres in their passage to Zambia.16 But in the volatile situation

following the MPLA’s taking power in Luanda, South African military incursions and the

arrival of Cuban troops, SWAPO faced a stringent dilemma. To provide a guarantee of their

new loyalty solely to the MPLA, and in order to remain in southern Angola, SWAPO

symbolically ended their ‘liaison’ with UNITA by agreeing to the arrest and detention of

Godfrey Nangonya by the new MPLA government in June 1976.

The disavowal has followed Nangonya – who was returned to Luanda in 1976 as the

MPLA’s prisoner – to the present day, as SWAPO thenceforward officially erased any

mention of its past association with UNITA.17 There are, however, a number of prominent

SWAPO figures and senior appointments in the Namibian government who were, and

continue to be, untouched by their association with UNITA. For example, according to

Nangonya, retired Namibian police commissioner Haulyondjaba was in fact Savimbi’s

bodyguard and artillery commander in the early 1970s, an anomaly that is never mentioned.

It was Nangonya who became, as Haulyondjaba himself put it, SWAPO’s sacrifice.18

Hiatuses

As can already be seen, Nangonya’s account works both along and against multiple seams of

nationalist histories. It often revels in a collision of interests and presences where one does not

expect them, whether this is with reference to colonialism or nationalism. While he does

maintain a narrative line through a set of points regarding what happened to him, these points

13 Tobias Hainyeko became head of the South West Africa Liberation Army (later renamed the People’s LiberationArmy of Namibia), but was killed on the Zambezi in 1967 and replaced by Dimo Hamaambo. The PIDEinterrogators did not appear to know that in late 1960 Nangonya had in fact organised a letter to the PortugueseGovernor in Luanda, insisting on Hainyeko’s release from police detention in Sa de Bandeira so that he couldtravel to Zambia.

14 IAN, PIDE/DGS Del Angola Serie PC, 386/61.15 OnMissombo labour camp, see IAN, PIDE/DGS Del Angola, 16.24.A. On Sao Nicolau, see IAN, PIDE/DGSDel

Angola, 16.22A.16 O.O. Namakulu, Armed Liberation Struggle: Some Accounts of PLAN’s Combat Operations (Windhoek,

Gamsberg Macmillan, 2004), pp. 30–34.17 See, for example, S. Nujoma, Where Others Wavered: The Autobiography of Sam Nujoma (London, PANAF,

2001). See also V.A. Shigwedha, this issue of JSAS.18 Author interview with Police Commissioner Nghiyalasha Haulyondjaba, Oshakati Police Headquarters, July

1995. Haulyondjaba’s name sometimes appears as Hauljondjaba, Haulyondjamba, Hauljondjamba.

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Figure 3. Identity photographs, PIDE/DGS Nangonya file.

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are often fleshed out unexpectedly with some political irony, conundrum or bewildering

ambivalence. It might concern the law, borders, nationalists or colonialists. These might stem

from the transnationalism and transhistoricism of colonialism. For instance:

At the end of my prison term [1960] the chief of police in Sao Tome was now promoted toDirector of Security Police in Angola. He did not want to see me in Angola. In Sao Tome, thesecurity section said I should go back to Angola, and the dispute erupted. They sent mydocuments to the Minister of Security in Portugal, who concluded that I had completed my prisonterm so I should go back to Angola. So I was sent to Angola without any travel documents. Theyjust put me in a ship and off I went to Luanda. When I arrived in Luanda the Director of SecurityPolice ordered that the ship must take me back to Sao Tome. The captain of the ship said thataccording to international law, they were not allowed to keep somebody imprisoned on a ship,since slavery was terminated long ago. He said that if you travel by ship you could not be lockedup. I was present when he was telling the police chief these words.19

Alternatively they might concern the other ambitiously modernising colonial master, South

Africa. For example, as noted above, Nangonya was active in Ondjiva in southern Angola in

the early 1950s. South African officials made it known that they wanted him nowhere

near the SWA border. However, a high-level technical meeting was organised in SWA near

Ongwediva, between South African officials and a Portuguese team that included water and

other engineers. They urgently required an interpreter for the meeting, and so Nangonya was

brought in; the only blackman in the room, he found himself translating the entire proceedings

of a very revealing set of negotiations about the future development of the region. This

included plans for a pipeline from Ruacana on the Cunene River to Ondangwa in the east, and

the construction of a town in Oshakati (a name produced by urban planners, meaning ‘in the

middle’). Talk of apartheid’s grand schemes of modernisation flowed, unchecked by any

consciousness of the attentive listening and critique made possible by the unforeseen presence

of a multilingual ‘politician’ in their midst. Some months later the South Africans became

aware that Nangonya had been at the meeting, and it was brought to his attention that they had

complained bitterly to their Portuguese counterparts.

There are also slippages in law, colony and nation. Not only is Nangonya everywhere, he is

also nowhere. Like his file at Amnesty International, Nangonya is a political subject who gets

mislaid. One of the worst instances emerges in his account about the end of his longest period

of imprisonment, from the early 1960s until 1974. He was at Sao Nicolau when his sentence

expired, but no instruction came from Luanda for his release. He was ordered to remain, which

he did until the Portuguese regime fell in 1974. He describes what happened then:

They informed me that I was free, but should remain in the camp for security reasons. Then Iremained in the camp. After the overthrow of the government in Portugal in 1974 they started torelease all political prisoners from jail all over the country. This included those in Portugal itself,Guinea and Mozambique, but I remained in the camp alone.

Everyone in every prison in every part of the Portuguese empire was released following

31 May 1974, except him. After being with thousands of men and their families at Sao

Nicolau, he was now left alone with the guards, dogs, pigs and cats, of which there were

many, now bereft of humans. He remained there for two months after everyone else was

released. For Nangonya, who thrived on contact, these months appear the most abnormal and

intensely strange of any period he recounts.

As a man who falls through the cracks, an ambiguous and semi-forgotten figure,

Nangonya seems the polar opposite of the nationalist ideal implied in the title of Sam

Nujoma’s autobiography,Where Others Wavered. But any individual’s biography from these

19 Author interview with Godfrey Nanyonga, 19–20 May 1995.

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regional political struggles would go against the grain of some putative nationalist norm

implied in such a title. This article is therefore not about a biographical exercise. It takes

upwith a transnational and transnationalist account. The latter includes long episodes in prison

that operate as hiatus periods. This means that Nangonya comes back and is continually

reinserted into later and reconfigured political phases, which makes it a transgenerational

account as well. It is a broken, disrupted, almost atemporal political biography, but it also

connects many things. Nangonya’s multiple and transnational affiliations mean that he

develops a kind of exaggerated proneness to political imprisonment, which also makes him

exceptional in periods of widespread postcolonial detention, because he was not generally the

main target on such occasions. His period of imprisonment in Luanda by the MPLA after

SWAPO handed him over, for example, made him a close witness to the MPLA purges

following theNitoAlves coup scare in 1977.20 He recalls that up to 100 prisoners at a timewere

executed at night, men belonging to UNITA, the FNLA and the MPLA.

There are many strands and phases to explore within Nangonya’s account. Perhaps the most

useful question is also the most difficult one: that of the relationship between southern Angola

and northernNamibia in the period between the Portuguese coup inMay 1974 and the aggressive

South African airborne attack on the SWAPO camp at Cassinga in May 1978,21 two events that

radically reshaped the political geography of this region. The early 1970s in Namibia was a

highly fraught period. Labour histories have dealt with the massive contract workers’ strike of

1971, but this was followed by many workers being bussed back to northern Namibia and

engaging in militant acts such as attacks on headmen and cutting the long border fence

with Angola.22 In 1972 the South African administration pushed the region into homeland

government and Bantustan elections, with public floggings of alleged opponents and

considerable international outcry. Colonialism was under siege in Namibia, and then from 1974

in utter disarray in Angola. The Portuguese coup was followed by the opening up of hundreds of

kilometres of frontier. This represented new and hitherto unimaginable possibilities. This in turn

made nationalisms more fluid and alliances more open to redefinition. It also created seismic

instabilities and uncertainties. The striking thing to emerge from Nangonya’s account of this

period is the confusion and competition over different kinds of sovereignty, ultimately

amounting to the question of who would hand over southern Angola, and to whom?

‘When There Was Nobody in Control in Angola’

For Namibians it seemed that this new geography could unlock history. But it was also

bewildering. Nujoma’s own account of the events of 1974–75, following the military coup in

20 Nito Alves was briefly Minister of the Interior in the MPLA government, favoured stronger ties with the USSR,and is associated with ‘fractionism’. David Birmingham refers suggestively to the shrinking of ‘vitality of debate’in the MPLA at this time; D. Birmingham, ‘The Twenty-Seventh of May: An Historical Note on the Abortive1977 Coup in Angola’, African Affairs, 77, 309 (1978), pp. 554–5.

21 Aside from Operation Savannah in 1976 (whose response was the Cuban–Angolan Operation Death Road),South African resolve hardened with the prospect of UN Resolution 385 and the Western Five ContactGroup timetable for Namibia’s transition to independence starting in 1978. The latter was scuppered byOperation Reindeer, launched by South African forces against the SWAPO camps at Cassinga and Vietnam inMay 1978. This not only constituted a severe blow to SWAPO at the time but also fixed the polarised categoriesof ‘refugee’ and ‘combatant’, a discursive problem that still dominates any public discussion of the aftermath ofCassinga, and forecloses other questions. See V. Shigwedha, ‘The Undisclosed of Cassinga’, Mail & Guardian,Johannesburg, 11 May 2012; G. Baines, ‘A Battle for Perceptions: Revisiting the Cassinga Controversy inSouthern Africa’, in P. Dwyer and L. Ryan (eds), Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocitythroughout History (New York, Berghahn, 2012).

22 See R. Moorsom, Labour Consciousness and the 1971–72 Contract Workers’ Strike in Namibia (The Hague,Institute of Social Studies, 1977); R.J. Gordon, Mines, Masters and Migrants: Life in a Namibian Compound(Johannesburg, Ravan, 1977); G. Bauer, Labour and Democracy in Namibia, 1971–1996 (Athens, OhioUniversity Press, 1998).

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Portugal, refers to the ‘strangeness’ of the welcome and food offered by Portuguese soldiers

to those who were so recently their enemies.23 Nujoma’s autobiography flows seamlessly

over the new unity of SWAPO and the MPLA: ‘In January 1975, Angola’s three rival

movements signed an accord [Alvor] by which, among other provisions, MPLA, to which we

stood closest, opened an office at Ondjiva (formerly known as Pereira de Ec�a), only 30 miles

north of the frontier, and through which Namibia groups travelled’.24 SWAPO’s concern was

to shift operations from Zambia to Angola to take advantage of the open frontier, now 800

kilometres wide from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caprivi Strip. After the South African

Defence Force (SADF) units assisting the FNLA and others were repulsed at Kifangondo and

Ebo by late November 1975, Nujoma went to Luanda. His text goes on: ‘I started to organise

the transfer to Angola of some of our forces. We already had a few there – over 200

volunteers, who were given crash military training in Zambia – whom General Dimo

Hamaambo had brought over the Zambian border during the transitional period when there

was nobody in control in Angola’.25

Nangonya’s account of this period is very different. It is thick with names and

connections. This is true of his political biography more generally, naming influential and

ordinary people alike, the former obviously important as a mesh to hold on to and quote when

depicting a life that has been a series of imprisonments. In the 1970s his old comrades ya

Toivo and Kaxumba kaNdola were in prison on Robben Island, and many in distant exile like

Kaukungwa, so it was a new generation in the thick of things. As mentioned, Nangonya had

already been politically active in the area in the early 1950s and early 1960s, when men who

became generals were then only schoolboys under his political mentorship. These had ended

up in different places and parties in different territories and countries. Among their number

was Antonio Vakulukuta of UNITA.

When he was finally released from Sao Nicolau, Nangonya asked to be taken to Ondjiva,

where, he says, he arrived on 26 August 1974. He recalls that PIDE was still working in the

town but under another name, the Policia de Informac�ao Militar (PIM). This meant that,

despite his wish to return to political life after his release from prison, people he knew were

too afraid to approach him. He presumably needed to make a living, so he went off into the

bush closer to the border with SWA, made bricks, bought dry grass and built a house.

He started a small shop. Then one morning in November his isolation came to an end.

He describes how he was woken up and told he had visitors. Dimo Hamaambo, the senior

commander of SWAPO’s armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN),

had been sent by Sam Nujoma, but another group arrived at about the same time with

Vakulukuta, who had been sent by Jonas Savimbi. Nangonya asked Hamaambo to wait, and

sent for his friend and comrade Usko Nambinga across the border to be with him when he

entertained Nujoma’s party. In the meantime he spoke with Vakulukuta, who wanted him to

come and meet with Savimbi. Nangonya put him off to gain time. In the afternoon Nambinga

arrived, and the meeting with Hamaambo went well. Within a short space of time Nangonya

and Nambinga were assisting numerous Namibians crossing the border to join the liberation

struggle with transport and contacts, to facilitate their journey north and to SWAPO’s camps

in Zambia.

Former trade unionist John ya Otto wrote from Lusaka to ask Nangonya to arrange

for a number of ‘SWAPO wives’ to be brought from Namibia to Zambia. This was a

delicate operation involving two women, Mrs Shoombe and Mrs Ndadi. A present from

Nujoma was brought to Nangonya by Dimo Hamaambo after these women had arrived in

23 Nujoma, Where Others Wavered, p. 229.24 Ibid., p. 230.25 Ibid., p. 232. My emphasis.

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Zambia. Soon, as Nangonya put it, ‘So many of them started to come and see me there by

the border’.26

The next thing that happened, in the months before Angolan independence in November

1975, was a meeting of UNITA and SWAPO in Ondjiva, to which Nangonya was invited by

Savimbi, and where Dimo Hamaambo was also present. There, Nangonya was informed

that he had been chosen by the two parties to work for them. Nangonya specifically asked if

they would help him if he had difficulties, and Savimbi assured him that they would.

Nangonya states that he then became a member of UNITA. Soon afterwards, Savimbi called

on Nangonya to travel with a large UNITA delegation to Luanda, where he was asked to

attend a press conference. Nangonya believes that this was to show the MPLA that he was no

longer one of them.

Upon his return to Ondjiva, Nangonya went as an observer to a meeting convened by local

MPLA, FNLA and also Portuguese officials, who proposed to assemble 3,000 troops each to

attack SWAPO, ‘because SWAPO came there at the invitation of UNITA’. When asked to

speak, Nangonya told them it would be disastrous:

This was an Oukwanyama area and none in this area was without a relative on the other side of

the border. . . . I told them that if they were going to attack SWAPO boys in the bush, that would

only mean no more MPLA, no more FNLA and no more Portuguese in Ondjiva. There would be

only UNITA.

Nangonya says he quickly recommended the formation of a commission of enquiry into the

SWAPO situation in the area, made up of all parties including UNITA. Enquiries duly

revealed that there were no more than 50 SWAPO soldiers in the area around Ondjiva, many

fewer than suspected. Nangonya acknowledges that the Portuguese allowed him to mediate in

the enquiry because ‘I told them I didn’t belong to UNITA’. All parties were pleased at the

outcome and a report was sent to Luanda.

But things were falling apart. Independence celebrations were scheduled for 11

November 1975, and the war which had already broken out had come to Ondjiva: ‘They

[MPLA] lost Ondjiva. The only things which remained were the walls of buildings.

Sometimes the MPLA regain[ed] the town and you find that in the afternoon of the same day

they lose it to UNITA again and so on and so on’. Nangonya now moved his base to

Oshitumba, and went to Huambo to celebrate independence at Savimbi’s invitation. On his

return he found ‘the South Africans had carried out one of their raids into Angola’ and that

matters were escalating. UNITA troops in Namakunde told him that the MPLA was currently

in Ondjiva, and he tried to go there. Nangonya learned that Tome, the FNLA representative in

Ondjiva, had been shot dead and that the MPLA were now looking for him.

On the way to Ondjiva, Nangonya saw a convoy of MPLAmilitary trucks on the road and,

because he was unable to leave the tarmac, he had to run the gauntlet of all eight vehicles that

fired on his car as he passed each one. He managed to get by and then drove into the bush,

where he abandoned his bullet-ridden car and ran for it. His car was apparently brought to

Ondjiva and a message sent to Luanda that he was dead. It is at this point that Ilıdio Tomas

Machado, one of the founders of the MPLA, is said by Nangonya to have cried out, ‘You have

killed my boy!’ Across the border in SWA, the South African Broadcasting Corporation also

announced that he was dead: ‘I had a radio and listened to the news myself’, says Nangonya.

He found his way to the SWAPO base at Omulemba, and then back to Oshitumba.

26 This account is based, as stated earlier, on an interview conducted with Godfrey Nangonya in Windhoek on19–20 May 1995. John Ya-Otto’s published autobiography, Battlefront Namibia (Westport CT, Lawrence Hill &Co, 1981) ends with his own departure from Namibia in June 1974 and does not mention this episode.

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Fighting broke out in Huambo on 10 December 1975 between the FNLA and UNITA.

It died down on 25 December, and a meeting was held between the FNLA and UNITA,

resulting in an accord. Some SWAPO members were there with UNITA. Nangonya states:

‘During that meeting I was appointed liaison officer between SWAPO and UNITA’.

Nangonya was then instructed by Savimbi, through Haulyondjaba, to eat at the same table as

the South African officials who were there: ‘Haulyondjaba knows this very well that there

were South African officers and soldiers working for UNITA that time’. Nangonya says he

was responsible for supplying arms, food and transport to fighting units, but that Savimbi

alone handled the money.

Soon afterwards, Cuban forces took Huambo, and UNITA prepared to retreat from Bihe.

Savimbi summoned Nangonya and instructed him to go to a nearby SWAPO camp at Sandi

and arrange for their removal to Cunene province, without being seen by the South Africans.

He arranged a bus and five trucks. Women took the bus while men climbed on the trucks, and

the SWAPO recruits made their way to Cunene undetected by the South Africans. Nangonya,

Haulyondjaba and two other SWAPO Figures (Nakada and Mbulunganga) went by car. It was

February 1976.

In the meantime matters had become very complicated with the South Africans. For a

liberation fighter, Nangonya was finding himself in extraordinary situations:

While I was still the chief of staff of UNITA the South African government asked me to join theSouth African police. They asked me to take all the people to the South African police. SWAPOin turn said no to the South African request and said I could take the people to SWAPO camps orbases, so that they could be mixed up and that the MPLA would not be able to identify who was amember of SWAPO and who belonged to UNITA. And in this position, to avoid having threeenemies in the area at the same time I have to choose one as a friend. Therefore I went over toSWAPO with members of UNITA. First we discussed and signed the agreement with Dimo[Hamaambo]. The agreement was signed at the place called Oshimbwanya. After the agreement itwas difficult to implement the decisions when it came to move the people and integrate them withthose of SWAPO. At the same time the South Africans used to visit me and urged me to bringseventy officers to their force at Oshikango.27

In a second reference to this problem of South African pressure, Nangonya relates that he

asked the South Africans to invite a number of prominent (and conservative) Kwanyama

headmen to Oshitumba to advise him. Nangonya was presumably stalling for time, but in

addition he ‘wanted to tell them [the headmen] why I did not want to join the South African

forces’. They did not come, however, and Hamaambo advised him to proceed with the

‘liaison’ agreement and mix the SWAPO and UNITA soldiers.

The next part of Nangonya’s account conveys a sense of descent into greater chaos.

He says that the MPLA and the Cubans had information about his movements, and asked

Mbulunganga of SWAPO whether Nangonya was with the movement. Mbulunganga

continually denied it. The MPLA and the Cubans recommended that Mbulunganga should

reconsider his answer because their information was sound:

[They] told him that if SWAPO wanted to liberate Namibia from the Angolan soil with immunitythey should hand over Godfrey to both the Cubans and the MPLA. After two months there wasconfusion even among the soldiers of SWAPO. Some said I could be handed over to the MPLAand the Cubans, some said it should not be done at all.

27 Published references to SWAPO’s collaborationwithUNITA can be found in R.W. Johnson,HowLongWill SouthAfrica Survive? (London,Macmillan, 1978), p. 254, andC.A.Williams, ‘Ordering theNation: SWAPO inZambia,1974–1976’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37, 4 (2011), p. 702 n. 50. The brief overlap or encounter withthe South African military through alliance with UNITA is explicitly taken up in P. Trewhela, ‘The Kissinger/Vorster/Kaunda Detente: The Genesis of the SWAPO “Spy Drama”’, Searchlight South Africa, 2, 2 (January1991), p. 48, and by journalist David Lush in his interviewwith retired Commissioner Haulyondjaba in ‘Caught inthe Eye of a Cold War Hurricane’ and ‘Brothers-in-Arms’, Insight Namibia, Windhoek, 3 February 2011.

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SWAPO then sent an armed group ‘under one boy whom I cannot remember now’, who

overrode Mbulunganga’s objections and simply took Nangonya away.

The group that came to arrest him announced they would take him to the SWAPO camp at

Cassinga. He was put in a car with the brother of Kandy Nehova, both of them tied up.28

When the car stopped in Evale he was recognised by locals who informed the local MPLA

chefes. Clearly the young SWAPO group did not understand certain things about Nangonya’s

local affiliations. Some local MPLA members arrived and asked the SWAPO man in charge

of the group where they were taking Nangonya. This individual informed them that he was to

be ‘charged and fined [sentenced]’ in Cassinga, ‘because I joined UNITA forces’. But the

local MPLA said they would take charge of the matter:

They claimed that SWAPO had no right to make a charge in such a case because it was in Angola.

We just saw them running to their vehicles and nearby houses where they picked up arms and the

battle erupted between SWAPO troops and MPLA troops while I was still in the car.

Two people died in the shooting. The MPLA men then took Nangonya and Nehova out of the

car and rushed them to Ondjiva, leaving the SWAPO men behind.

In Ondjiva, according to Nangonya, the Cubans became involved. They argued that

Nangonya should be handed over to them. But at this point in his account, Nangonya becomes

more explicit about his Angolan MPLA escorts: ‘the Kwanyamas said it was their

responsibility to keep hold of me’. Two days later, some unarmed SWAPO men came to

Ondjiva, but were stopped and lined up by MPLA soldiers. Two were shot dead in front of

Nangonya. The Cubans continued to argue with the Angolans that they should hold

Nangonya in prison in Ondjiva.

At this point Agostinho Neto weighed in, sending a plane to take Nangonya and Nehova

to Luanda. Nangonya describes how he was lying on the floor of the airport, waiting for the

aeroplane, when Dimo Hamaambo arrived from Brazzaville and passed him by without a

word. When I asked Nangonya why Hamaambo did that, he explained: ‘He did so because he

wanted to please the MPLA, to allow his soldiers to remain operating from Angola. I should

remain in the hands of the government so that SWAPO could continue remaining and

operating from the Angolan soil’. In Luanda, Nangonya was taken to the Central Military

Hospital owing to ‘precarious health’.29 From there he went straight to the Castle, the first of

the three different prisons in which he served this stretch of imprisonment, from July 1976 to

November 1981.

Nangonya then returned to the episode in which SWAPO handed him over to the MPLA,

giving more detail:

All SWAPO high-ranking officers know about my stories. . . . At the time I was at [the] SWAPO

base Mr Nujoma came there and said that he did not want to talk to me, but ten months before his

visit, he sent me arms. At this juncture Mbulunganga faced an embarrassing situation, because the

Cubans and the MPLA were asking him that he should hand me over to them. So he thought that

since Mr Nujoma was personally present he could handle the situation. He then informed Mr

Nujoma about my situation and Nujoma just refused to have anything to do with me. So he

[Mbulunganga] went back with the Cubans. SWAPO knew very well what to do with me. Either

to kill me or to hand me over to the MPLA and Cubans so that they could be granted immunity to

stay in Angola. They also had to prove to the government of Angola and the MPLA that they were

not UNITA’s friends.

28 Kandy Nehova was a prominent SWAPO figure who became chairman of the National Council (the upperchamber in Namibia’s bicameral parliament) after independence. He co-founded, together with HidipoHamutenya, the opposition party the Rally for Democracy and Progress in 2007.

29 Godfrey Nangonya, ‘Biografia Polıtica’ (unpublished biography, Luanda, March 2003).

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The details of the local stakes and the implications of jurisdictions and sovereignty in the

midst of all this are suggestive. At the point in his narrative where the Cubans were trying to

take over the Nangonya case in Ondjiva, Nangonya says:

One of the Kwanyama [local MPLA] boys asked them [the Cubans] whether they came to Angolato help the Angolans or . . . to charge them. That particular question caused a big problembetween the Cubans and the MPLA and it took three days of meetings to try and resolve thedispute. After that, the decision was taken that the [MPLA] Kwanyama soldiers could no longer[be] stationed at Ondjiva, but they should be moved to Xangongo. They told the Cubans thatwhen the South African troops entered the southern part of Angola [in Operation Savannah], alltroops from the central and northern regions of Angola had to kick the dust back to Luanda.‘We the Kwanyama soldiers remained in the area and fought heroically against the enemytroops. . . . Now that there are no more South African troops you want to send us to second-classtowns’. So they refused to go there and the fighting broke out again between the MPLAKwanyama section of the soldiers and the Cubans. The fighting took place because theKwanyama soldiers demanded that if they were to be sent to Xangongo they were going to takeme along.

Nangonya alleges that if he had been put in Cuban custody, they would have executed him the

next day. The SWAPO men who had come (unarmed) to Ondjiva in fact came to reiterate

their demand to take him to Cassinga, where, he believes, he would have met the same fate.

In the end, Nangonya was taken by the defiant Kwanyama-speaking MPLA soldiers to

Lusandos, where Neto’s plane arrived to pick him up, and he went back into the Angolan

prison system that he knew so well. In fact, as he says of his arrival in the Castle: ‘Most of the

prison security agents were friends of mine because we spent years together in prisons as

well as at the concentration camps’. But obviously the stakes and his status had changed.

Moreover Nangonya was not really at liberty to explain his defection, as it were. ‘They

[his friends] asked me whether I was a member of UNITA. I said yes. But there was high

secrecy between SWAPO and UNITA. Until today such secrecy is there’.

To return to the dynamics in southern Angola that can hardly be called local, and to which

Nangonya’s testimony keeps winding back, the big question here became, who controls the

area, and to whom do they hand it over? But the issue of sovereignty, in the form of what to do

with the person of Nangonya, was resolved. It was the Angolans who decided, but only with

the intervention of ‘the Kwanyama faction’ in the local MPLA structures who prevented

(as Nangonya thinks) his probable liquidation at the hands of SWAPO or the Cubans.

The House of Nangonya

How are we to think of such a thing as a Kwanyama faction? Nangonya warned the MPLA,

FNLA and Portuguese about the problem in Ondjiva in 1975. In Namibia the issue takes its

own ‘national’ form and is not openly or easily discussed in public, though one can try to

locate the possible origins of such anxiety.

The problem in many ways goes back to the 19th century. The Kwanyama kingdom

emerged as the most populous and dominant group among the cluster of kingdoms and

societies later called ‘Ovamboland’ on the Cuvelai floodplain by the 1850s, but was

bifurcated by the colonial borders produced by Germany and Portugal in the 1880s. Both

colonial cartographies put most of the former Kwanyama kingdom on the Angolan side of the

border, though cartographic inconsistency meant that Germany claimed several miles more

than the Portuguese acknowledged, and vice versa. By the 1890s the Portuguese regarded the

Kwanyama [Cuanhama] as a scourge on southern Angola and a dishonour to their empire.

The Germans did not occupy the north of Deutsche Sudwestafrika, but signed a treaty with

the Kwanyama king, Weyulu ya Hedimbi, and other Ovambo rulers in 1908. The First World

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War gave Portugal its pretext to mobilise a sizeable army and artillery to occupy southern

Angola, with a view to attacking the Germans, who allegedly had designs across the disputed

border.30

In September 1915 the Portuguese army invaded Oukwanyama during a catastrophic

famine and overcame military resistance after a three-day battle at Omongwa. The young

king, Mandume yaNdemufayo, then rode south to negotiate with South African officials,

freshly arrived after the defeat of General Franke’s local German forces. Mandume

reluctantly accepted their protection and agreed to remain in the southern part of his kingdom,

burning his capital at Ondjiva before shifting south. He settled at Oihole, close to the

still-disputed border, but soon ran foul of the South African administration. The evacuation of

northern Oukwanyana and the unmarked border provided umpteen opportunities for banditry

and criminality, suggesting another occasion ‘when there was nobody in control in southern

Angola’. Mandume had been an iron-fisted reformist king with a powerful agenda of dealing

with centrifugal pulls in the nation, and he began crossing the border to punish offenders.31

The Portuguese lost men in one skirmish near Oihole. Pretoria resolved to send a military

expedition to remove him, and South African intelligence officers applied pressure on

numerous Kwanyama headmen.

The story does not end with the battle at Oihole on 6 February 1917, when Mandume died

fighting the South African military expedition. Two stories started circulating immediately,

the first being that Mandume was wounded but then took his own life as he had sworn to do

Figure 4. Map of Ovamboland, 1915.

30 Hayes, ‘History of the Ovambo’, chapter 4; Pelissier, Les Guerres Grises, pp. 482–5; Pereira de Ec�a, Campanhado Sul de Angola (Lisbon, Lusitania, 1922).

31 See P. Hayes, ‘Order Out of Chaos: Mandume ya Ndemufayo and Oral History, 1911–1917’, Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies, 19, 1 (1993).

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rather than surrender. The second story concerned the South Africans cutting off his head and

burying it in Windhoek outside the railway station, leaving the decapitated body buried in

Oihole.32 The resolution of the boundary dispute in 1928 put Oihole in Portuguese territory,

which meant that Mandume’s body was now buried in Angola while his head remained in

Namibia. The body of the resistant king was thus bifurcated between two colonies, in a

strange parallel of what happened to the body politic of what used to be Oukwanyama, an idea

powerfully conveyed by several linocuts by the artist John Muafangejo.33 Mandume is, of

course, a leading star in the later 20th-century nationalist firmament of heroes who fought

against colonialism.

But I wish to rewind for a moment to 1915, and insert another element. When Mandume

burned his palisaded residence at Ondjiva and moved south, among the thousands who went

with him was Absalom Nangonya, the father of Godfrey Nangonya, who later settled in a

newly opened-up area called Ondobe. Absalom was reportedly the illegitimate son of

Mandume’s predecessor as king, Weyulu yaHedimbi, who arranged for the woman he

impregnated to marry another man. Absalom Nangonya was regarded as a leading authority

on Kwanyama history, along with Vilho Kaulinge nearby, from whose accounts I have

largely derived the narrative here concerning Mandume.34

As mentioned, I interviewed Godfrey Nangonya several times in Windhoek, but I also

met him in Ondjiva in 1999 when I visited Angola. In Ondjiva township he showed me a

small photo album that his sister had assembled for him to carry on his travels – he regularly

went by bus from Windhoek to Luanda and back – and there were several photographs that

were very important to him. One was of his late son Johnny in PLAN military uniform in

Zambia. Johnny was four months old when Nangonya was sent to Sao Tome in 1955. He went

to school in Huambo, joined both SWAPO and the MPLA, and was trained in the Soviet

Union. He died in a SWAPO camp in Zambia in 1978 after accidentally detonating a mine.

Another photograph showed Nangonya’s house in Luanda, which he built and lived in

between 1981 and 1992 and of which he was very proud, where he stands with his Angolan

wife Margarita Maria Satanole and another young relative. When this house was hit by

heavy artillery in the resumption of MPLA–UNITA hostilities in 1992, it represented the

destruction of Nangonya’s efforts to build a life and family after more than 20 years of

political incarceration. The resumption of the civil war of course destroyed the brief, fragile

peace in which most Angolans sought to rebuild their lives. The way Nangonya told it,

it would almost have been better if the peace process had not happened, because it was more

painful to be given hope and then have it taken away. Following the resumption of conflict, he

was taken from this house to the Estrada de Catete police station, where he and also his wife

Margarita were beaten in front of their children, before Nangonya disappeared into a

detention cell for six weeks.35

But there was another important photograph in Nangonya’s album. It was of his late

father, Absalom, in Namibia, standing next to his unacknowledged half-brother Victory

Weyulu, the senior headman of Oshikango and son of Weyulu, to whom he bore a striking

resemblance.

32 Hayes, ‘A History of the Ovambo’, chapter 5.33 M. Timm, ‘Transpositions: The Reinterpretation of Colonial Photographs of the Kwanyama King Mandume ya

Ndemufayo in the Art of John Ndevasia Muafangejo’, in Wolfram Hartmann, Patricia Hayes and JeremySilvester (eds), The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Cape Town,University of Cape Town Press, 1998).

34 P. Hayes, ‘When you Shake a Tree: Precolonial and Postcolonial in Northern Namibian History’, in D. Petersonand G. Macola (eds), Recasting the Past (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2009), pp. 75–94.

35 AI, ‘Further information on UA 349/92 (AFR 12/16/92, 11 November 1992) – Legal concern/Fear ofill-treatment. ANGOLA: Godfrey Absalom Nangonya’.

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I am inserting this particular story of an old illegitimacy here simply because the tracks of

secrecy and opacity that constantly cover over politics and history in the region penetrate the

deepest parts of family life as well. Godfrey Nangonya takes considerable pleasure in

uncovering these tracks of secrecy at different levels, and discussing their operation and

motivation. Moreover, illegitimacy in genealogy has its homology in Namibian and other

nationalisms, where the promiscuity of multiple narratives is simply not allowed. Nangonya’s

case amply demonstrates this. One becomes an illegitimate son of the soil, as it were. It goes

without saying that because certain things are covered over, it does not mean they do not

exist. Huge numbers of people on both sides of the Namibia–Angola border are related,

which has become glossed as the so-called Kwanyama problem. The problematic appears in

different ways in SWAPO, the MPLA and UNITA. This is no simple ethnic problem, nor is it

a problem that can be swept under the carpet, as Nangonya states repeatedly.

To get to the more recent history of ‘the Kwanyama problem’, however, one would need

to go into the micropolitics of SWAPO and PLAN in exile in the 1980s.36 Nangonya’s

account cannot help us with detail beyond 1976, because he was in prison (where, as he says,

‘it is difficult to get news’) and then resident in Luanda, working in the archives of the

Angolan state oil company, Sonangol, and avowedly staying out of politics. But a few

germane points can be made in an attempt to understand how rumour and oscillating

references to ethnicity have shaped discussion. For one, there has existed some anxiety

concerning alleged Kwanyama dominance in SWAPO, which has often been cast as an

‘Ovambo’ movement, given its roots in the contract labour system. There is a further

complication in that, linguistically, oshiKwanyama operated for many years as a kind of

semi-official lingua franca among migrant workers, producing the widespread impression

that many more migrants originated from Ouwanyama than was actually the case.37

Questions have hovered over a few oshiKwanyama-speaking politicians, one case perhaps

being Hidipo Hamutenya, head of SWAPO information and publicity in exile, and later

marginalised in postcolonial Namibia, until he co-founded a new opposition party in 2007

(the Rally for Democracy and Progress). Harder to concretise are the rumours around the

SWAPO military, security and intelligence that also connect to the movement’s treatment of

its own detainees in exile. Some journalistic accounts of intra-ethnic tensions in SWAPO

point to the importance of Namibia’s former President, Sam Nujoma, coming from the

smaller precolonial Ovambo polity of Ongandjera, allegedly forming the basis of a smaller

Ovambo grouping with control over party leadership until quite recently.38

An obvious question hovers around the border itself and Namibian claims that might

be made on Angolan territory, possibly culminating in a war between the two nations.

This likelihood is highly debatable, because no ‘problem’ can ever be about the so-called

ovaKwanyama alone, especially as they are not the only group historically affected by

the colonial border. Finally, the matter appears to be seen quite differently from Luanda.

The MPLA came to play very astute heritage politics in Cunene province throughout the civil

war to prevent UNITA getting support, and were largely successful. There is a large memorial

complex dedicated to Mandume in Oihole, for instance.39 From the perspective of Luanda, it

36 See Williams, National Liberation in Post-Colonial Southern Africa; Leys and Saul (eds), Namibia’s LiberationStruggle; S. Groth, Namibia – The Wall of Silence: The Dark Days of the Liberation Struggle (Wuppertal, PeterHammer Verlag, 1995).

37 See Gordon, Mines, Masters and Migrants.38 A questionable but very influential piece in Africa Confidential, 29, 25 (December 1988), however, argues that in

the 1980s Nujoma was in fact dominated by this ‘Kwanyama faction’ and forced to legitimise it.39 Godfrey Nangonya was appointed director of the re-opened Mandume memorial site at Oihole in February 2013.

On the memorial itself, see N. Shiweda, ‘Mandume ya Ndemufayo’s Memorials in Namibia and Angola’(MA dissertation, University of the Western Cape, 2005).

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appears that Kwanyama-speakers in the south tend to feature as an interesting minority,

though in terms of language they have close affiliations with groups in the central highlands,

from where UNITA drew support.

Nangonya’s own thoughts on the matter are complicated. If it was not for the Organisation

for African Unity (OAU) charter, he says, the border should be adjusted, because he disagrees

‘with the present situation’. He reverted to the case of his son Johnny: ‘That was why my son

had to join both MPLA and SWAPO, because of the natural belief. He could be born at

Ohangwena [Namibia] and you find that the next day he joined the MPLA’. Then he mentions

something more sensitive, yet so widely understood that it is hardly even a public secret.

‘There are a lot of people today here [Namibia] who were born in Angola. Many of these

people can be found working in different ministries here, especially the Ministry of Defence.

We know them very well. Some of them occupy ministerial positions’.

To keep this discussion at the level of the border and a supposed ‘Kwanyama problem’ is,

however, ultimately unhelpful. This is often where the issues become ensnared, effectively

limiting the debate to colonial and postcolonial ethnic discourses and de facto national

sovereignties. Something else happens, though, if we take another route through the morass

of these histories. Nangonya’s little-known account is an opportunity to link the official

silencing of SWAPO’s connection with UNITA to other transnational genealogies of

nationalist silence and disavowal.

In this regard, two main episodes stand out and have received considerable attention. First

is the issue of SWAPO detainees who were held mainly in Lubango, especially after the ‘spy

drama’ of the late 1980s. Aside from considerable research and biographical accounts on this

topic, one reason given by SWAPO politician Hidipo Hamutenya for breaking away from

SWAPO and co-founding a new opposition party in 2007 was to end the disavowal of this

episode in SWAPO’s history.40 Second, the Shipanga affair, which caused a convulsion in

SWAPO exile circles in Zambia in 1976, is an even older problem. This episode involved

criticism of the SWAPO leadership by Youth League militants arriving in Zambian camps

from Namibia, a number of whom were denounced, detained and even killed by the Zambian

army. It was raised in 2013 by another former SWAPO member and opposition politician,

Ben Ulenga, as an episode that was seminal in the formation of a closed political culture

within SWAPO, because cadres were discouraged from questioning what happened. As he

put it, ‘but we knew these people’.41 SWAPO’s mode of shutting down a history of close

collaboration with UNITA by allowing Nangonya to be detained by the MPLA may on the

surface appear as an individual historical problem, but it is part of the very same genealogy

whereby members of SWAPO must not then question an entire new version of history.

Nangonya became the prisoner of this new master narrative, albeit dictated by the heat of the

regional Cold War. He became the exile of a nationalism that effectively shut down the

multiplicity of alternative nationalist belongings and trajectories and pan-African

possibilities, and which is only now slowly opening itself up to debate.42

40 For a recent statement by Hamutenya, seeWindhoek Observer, 27 March 2013. On the Lubango detentions, see,inter alia, Leys and Saul (eds), Namibia’s Liberation Struggle; Groth, Namibia – The Wall of Silence; Williams,National Liberation in Post-Colonial Southern Africa; J. Liebenberg and P. Hayes, Bush of Ghosts: Life and Warin Namibia, 1984–90 (Cape Town, Umuzi, 2010), pp. 219–20.

41 See Williams, ‘Ordering the Nation’; C. Leys and J. Saul, ‘Liberation Without Democracy? The SWAPO Crisisof 1976’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 20, 1 (1994), pp. 123–47. Ben Ulenga made the statement in aninterview with Phil ya Nangoloh of Namrights (formerly the National Society for Human Rights), 12 April 2013.

42 A key public moment was the David Lush interview with Haulyondjaba published as ‘Brothers-in-arms’, InsightNamibia, Windhoek, 3 February 2011. Haulyondjaba has also recently deposited his own historic interview withNangonya at the National Archives of Namibia.

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Conclusion

Godfrey Nangonya gives an account of occasions in the mid-1970s when politics itself

became a fluid borderland, where the known and the unknown mingled freely together.

As Nujoma puts it, ‘It was as if a locked door had suddenly swung open’.43 The border of

1884, which was occupied in 1915 and redrawn in 1928, was in a sense completely removed

during this period, suddenly producing new possibilities. But it was also a disturbing, volatile

space that had to be forcibly stabilised, whether into a buffer zone for the South African

military and their friends, a zone of passage for PLAN, or sovereign territory for the MPLA.

Positions were more reified before and after the mid 1970s, with colonialism partially

crumbling and new Cold War dynamics soon redefining Angolan spaces. This transitional

space and time that is key to Nangonya’s narrative seems to have been a zone of

experimentation, uncertainty, danger and potentially even oblivion.

PATRICIA HAYES

History Department, University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17, Bellville 7535, South

Africa. E-mail: pmhayes@mweb.co.za

43 Nujoma, Where Others Wavered, p. 228.

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