Silence, Voices and "the Camp": Perspectives on and from Southern Africa's Exile Histories

l n , V , nd “th p : P r p t v n ndfr th rn fr x l H t r

Christian A. Williams

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism,and Development, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 65-80 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania PressDOI: 10.1353/hum.2012.0001

For additional information about this article

Access provided by University of the Free State (12 Oct 2014 09:13 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hum/summary/v003/3.1.williams.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hum/summary/v003/3.1.williams.html

Christian A. Williams

Silence, Voices, and ‘‘the Camp’’:

Perspectives on and from Southern Africa’s Exile Histories

Between 1960 and 1990, thousands of people from present-day Angola, Mozambique,Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe fled oppressive white minority regimes for‘‘exile,’’ a place located outside their national ‘‘home.’’ Many exiles settled in Africa’s‘‘front-line states,’’ including Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana, and, following their inde-pendence, Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. There, national liberationmovements were granted resources from allies to lead a liberation war and to lookafter fellow nationals in camps. Although some exiles eventually made their way toother places, receiving scholarships or representing their liberation movements acrossthe globe, almost all spent time in camps, and many lived there for years prior to theircountry’s independence and the fall of apartheid. Camps, therefore, were central tothe national communities which formed among Southern African exiles during the1960s–80s. And they became key sites in the histories which the liberation movements,now ruling parties, have constructed about their respective nations’ resistance to colo-nialism in the recent past.

In some respects, the camps administered by Southern Africa’s liberation move-ments resemble other sites referenced in a growing literature on ‘‘the camp.’’ Theywere enclosed spaces in which people lived under a sovereign with control over allresources necessary for maintaining human life. Like refugee camps, they were openonly to those who had been displaced from a particular national home, and theygenerated nationalism as their inhabitants accessed limited resources and facedcommon threats through their association with a nation.1 In other respects, however,Southern Africa’s liberation movement camps are unique. They were governed directlyby a liberation movement with little or no oversight from a host nation or transna-tional humanitarian agency. Inhabitants belonged to an organization leading aliberation war and might identify themselves not only as ‘‘refugees’’ fleeing frompolitical violence but also as ‘‘freedom fighters’’ liberating their country of origin fromcolonial rule. And, in Southern Africa’s postcolonial nations they have assumed newmeanings as citizens seek recognition for their contributions during the liberationstruggle. These qualities of liberation movement camps call into question the idea of‘‘the camp’’ as a space which, because it separates inhabitants from a broader socialworld, can be abstracted from the particular histories which have generated it andshaped its modes of representation. And they open perspectives from which to seecamps in new ways, undermining tropes that define ‘‘the subject’’ which ‘‘the camp’’will produce.

This essay examines camps administered by one liberation movement, the South

PAGE 65

65

................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:17 PS

66 Humanity Spring 2012

West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO), in order to critique one trope, ‘‘thevoiceless refugee.’’2 In contrast to literature which emphasizes how camps and humani-tarian discourse render refugees silent by removing them from political life,3 I viewcamps as sites which have produced multiple voices as inhabitants make claims tobelonging in a national community.4 Drawing from histories of SWAPO settlementsat Cassinga and Lubango, Angola, I demonstrate how Namibians have voiced claimsin and through these camps even as certain voices have repeatedly been privileged bynationalist discourse and the global system of nation-states which structures it. Thus,camp inhabitants may sound silent, and the humanitarian (and human rights)language deployed to represent camps may appear to have silenced Namibians, butthese ‘‘refugees’’ have been far from voiceless. Following these observations withrespect to SWAPO camps, the essay returns to liberation movement camps and to‘‘the camp’’ broadly conceived. As I maintain, the voices encountered in my researchreflect qualities both of liberation movement camps and of the ethnographic/historicalresearch methods through which one may study them in Southern Africa today. Theyare, therefore, especially productive sites from which to rethink ‘‘the camp’’ as well asthe nationalist and humanitarian discourses through which camps and their inhabi-tants are consistently portrayed.

Camp, Nation, and Voices: Remember Cassinga?

Since May 4, 1978, the day it was attacked by the South African Defense Force,SWAPO’s camp at Cassinga, Angola, has been remembered through two competingnational narratives. Within a few days of the attack, SWAPO and its supporterspresented Cassinga to the world as a ‘‘refugee camp,’’ highlighting the brutality of theapartheid regime and its raid, which resulted in the deaths of more than six hundredNamibians, many of them women and children. Meanwhile, the former South Africangovernment dispersed its own version of events according to which it had attackedCassinga ‘‘military camp,’’ a legitimate target. Over the subsequent years, memoriesof Cassinga have continued to be channeled into one of these two narratives. Therefugee camp has become a key site in Namibia’s liberation struggle history, whileapologists of the apartheid regime and critics of SWAPO have invoked the militarycamp to justify their positions. Even historiography, which pushes beyond simpleapplication of the labels ‘‘refugee’’ and ‘‘military’’ to Cassinga, remains caught in adebate over the two national narratives, obscuring a more complex view of thecommunity which formed at the camp prior to the South African attack.5

Under the circumstances, one might presume that other histories of Cassinga havebeen silenced. And yet, within weeks of beginning research in Namibia in January2007, I found myself accessing voices which both undermine and illuminate the‘‘refugee’’ and ‘‘military’’ camp narratives. One research participant who opened thesevoices to me was Darius ‘‘Mbolondondo’’ Shikongo, a former camp commander atCassinga. Over the course of formal interviews and other visits, Mbolondondodescribed his role in administering the Cassinga camp office, where he and others hadbeen responsible for the day-to-day life of Cassinga’s inhabitants, most of them youthwithout military training who were traveling between Namibia and SWAPO settle-ments deeper in Angola. Describing his role in the camp office required Mbolondondo

................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:19 PS

to detail that office’s relationship to the office of the People’s Liberation Army ofNamibia (PLAN), SWAPO’s guerrilla army. As he explained through memories of hisexperience, the PLAN office had been established in 1976 to coordinate the transferof SWAPO guerrillas from Zambia to Angola and the transport of soldiers, supplies,and information to and from the Angolan-Namibian border. The PLAN officepredated the camp office, which was created alongside it to accommodate the growingnumber of people fleeing from Namibia into exile via Cassinga.

Despite narrating a history that diverged from the refugee (and military) story ofCassinga, Mbolondondo clearly did not aim to undermine the dominant Namibiannarrative by relating his experiences. On the contrary, he was trying to place himselfwithin this narrative through me, a researcher writing a book about Namibian history.As he volunteered during our first meeting, he had been approached only once sincereturning from exile to tell his story about Cassinga, a brief interview with theNamibian Broadcasting Corporation’s Oshiwambo radio service just after indepen-dence in 1990. For Mbolondondo, journalists’ interest in others’ stories at the expenseof his own was a point of concern which he associated with his social status in postco-lonial Namibia. Although he had worked volunteer positions with SWAPO and hadenough standing with the party to be invited to several party congresses, he had neverbeen offered a paid appointment in the SWAPO-led government. As a result, he wasstruggling to make ends meet through a combination of subsistence farming and self-employment. Mbolondondo sympathized openly with the SWAPO ex-combatants,who, in mid-2007, were demonstrating on the streets of Windhoek and receivingmuch attention from the media. According to him, the ex-combatants ought to becompensated for their sacrifices during the liberation struggle, particularly since many,like himself, had not had the opportunity to study abroad because of their duties assoldiers. If he and others were not qualified to take up posts in independent Namibia,that was because they were in the bush, risking their lives for the nation.

In some respects, Mbolondondo’s history of Cassinga is unique, drawing on hisparticular position of authority within the camp and relationship to the postcolonialNamibian nation. Although officials who founded the PLAN office corroboratedmuch of his account, few are able and willing to comment on such matters, due bothto the control of information by SWAPO at Cassinga in the past and the reliance ofpeople who lived in Cassinga on SWAPO in the present.6 Nevertheless, throughoutmy research, the same dynamics that elicited Mbolondondo’s story generated campvoices across social contexts. Repeatedly, former exiles placed themselves within anational narrative by drawing attention to the contributions which they had made tothe Namibian liberation struggle while living in camps and by criticizing others’betrayal of the liberation cause there. As I observed, even vulnerable former exileslocated in public settings may voice narratives that complicate dominant histories asthey negotiate their relationship to other members of a national community.

Consider, for example, my first encounter with ‘‘the Cassinga survivors’’ at thegovernment’s annual commemoration of Cassinga Day in 2007. The event beganmuch as many Cassinga commemorations had before. All of us in the audience roseto our feet as SWAPO leaders entered the United Nations Plaza in the Windhoektownship of Katutura. The leaders advanced to the seats set aside for them while ‘‘We

PAGE 67

Williams: Perspectives on and from Southern Africa’s Exile Histories 67

................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:19 PS


Remember Cassinga,’’ a song first recorded by Namibians in exile, played over theloudspeaker. After we had sung the Namibian national anthem and African Unionanthem and listened to an opening prayer, the stories began. The first was deliveredby Sophia Shaningwa, the governor of the Khomas Region, who was responsible forthe ‘‘introductory remarks.’’ After acknowledging the various dignitaries present,Shaningwa proceeded to narrate ‘‘Cassinga’’:

At 7 am 30 minutes on a bitterly cold day . . . SWAPO cadres and supporters atthe Cassinga refugee camp were gathered at the parade for their daily work assign-ments, unaware of South Africa’s sinister plan to attack them. That early morningquiet was wrought havoc by the screaming, rolling and diving of jetfighters . . . and other aircrafts. They were dropping bombs indiscriminately.Within a few minutes, everything was turned into a nightmare of destruction andhuman massacre. Hundreds of mutilated human bodies of women, children andelderly people were just what remained lying around.

Having presented listeners with this image of anonymous, disfigured corpses atCassinga, Shaningwa distilled meaning on their behalf. According to her, on CassingaDay it was important to remember ‘‘the act of brutality against the Namibian peoplein particular, against human kind in general,’’ and ‘‘our fallen heroes and heroines.’’Libertine Amathila, Namibia’s then deputy prime minister, who delivered the keynoteaddress, offered a similar interpretation. Having rendered a story of the attack likeShaningwa’s, Amathila stated that the anniversary of ‘‘the massacre’’ should be a ‘‘dayof reflection’’ both on ‘‘the long and hard journey through which we have come tofree this land’’ and ‘‘how we want the future of this country to be.’’ On the first topic,Amathila had little to say outside repeating assertions about the ‘‘cold-blooded’’ attackon the ‘‘refugee center.’’ On the second, Amathila maintained that ‘‘the victims ofCassinga and other victims of the liberation war’’ had sacrificed themselves for ‘‘ourfreedom,’’ and it was the responsibility of the living to protect and further realize‘‘their dream.’’ Whereas for Cassinga’s generation the goal had been political indepen-dence, it must now be ‘‘economic and social stability.’’ And the road to this social andeconomic stability was, as Amathila repeated, ‘‘the SWAPO party government’s policyof national reconciliation’’ through which ‘‘we can build our nation together.’’

The final speaker at the event was Agnes Kafula, spokesperson for ‘‘the Cassingasurvivors.’’ With thirty other survivors all wearing identical white T-shirts assembledin two lines behind her, Kafula offered a well-worn story about the attack on therefugee camp which resembled the preceding stories. Nonetheless, Kafula’s narrationof the events on May 4, 1978, differed from Shaningwa’s and Amathila’s stories inimportant ways. Consider, for example, her account of how Cassinga’s inhabitantsresponded to the attack:

We heard a strange sound approaching from the south[ern] and eastern side of thesettlement. This strange sound was from the oncoming enemy jet fighters, andwhen they suddenly started bombing, tear-gassing and dropping soldiers, itbecame clear that the settlement was under attack. Our seniors, who were adminis-tering the settlement, gave us directions [about] where to run for safety. To be

................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:20 PS

more specific . . . these were comrades: Darius Shikongo, he’s still living, and hewas well known as Mbolondondo; Comrade Max Nekongo, he is one of the coun-cilors in the North; the late Dimo Hamaambo; the late Greenwell Matongo;Mocks Schivute, he was . . . the secretary of the camp; Anna Immanuel andKauluma . . . While the jet fighters were busy bombing, a young, brave girl by thename of Paulina ran to the office to rescue the party flag. She grabbed it andwrapped it around her waist and she ran as fast as she could, not only to save herlife, but also to save the party flag . . . Brave as she was, she managed to evade theenemy soldiers. Unfortunately, Comrade Paulina and many others would not liveto see the independence of our country and enjoy the fruits of their bravery.

In contrast to those who have rendered Cassinga a symbol for anonymous refugeeswho died for the nation, Kafula presents the camp as a site where particular personslived who ought to be remembered by the nation’s members. By mentioning the nameof camp commanders like Mbolondondo, by telling the story about Paulina, Kafulaoffers a glimpse of those who lived at Cassinga and their unheralded acts of bravery.In so doing, she not only incorporates the memory of these persons into a predictablenational narrative but also draws from them to assert the status of Cassinga survivorsin the Namibian nation. Her concluding remarks reinforce the point: ‘‘In light of thesignificant contributions and deep psychological trauma [of Cassinga survivors], wecall on our leaders to come up with any kind of recognition. We are not saying thatCassinga survivors should be compensated in monetary terms, but . . . we the Cassingasurvivors should be consulted in what we think would be useful recognition.’’

Kafula’s comments strike at a fundamental contradiction of national history andits relationship to camps in Southern Africa. Cassinga survivors are part of a politicalorder, shaped in spaces like Cassinga itself, in which they are reliant on ‘‘any kind ofrecognition’’ that national representatives grant them. At the same time, they, like somany groups marginalized within a national community, are compelled by this orderto voice histories that may offer them some leverage over the recognition that they aregranted. The resulting histories are deeply embedded in the national narrative whichinvokes them, siphoning representations into binary oppositions such as that betweenthe refugee and military camp. But the voices which articulate these histories are notsilent. And they do offer material which may be used to remember Cassinga in itscomplexity—if one is only able to hear them outside the binaries through whichbelonging is defined in a national community.

Human(itarian)ism and History: SWAPO’s Lubango Detentions

In developing a critical perspective on ‘‘the camp,’’ scholars have often appealed to abinary opposition of their own construction, juxtaposing the terms ‘‘humanitari-anism’’ and ‘‘history.’’ In so doing, they emphasize the inability of humanitarianorganizations to account for the past of the conflicts in which they intervene or thehistorical subjectivities of those whom they endeavor to assist. One of the first andmost sophisticated versions of this argument is that presented by Liisa Malkki in herseminal work Purity and Exile. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in1985–86 among Burundian refugees in Mishamo, a camp in western Tanzania, Malkki

PAGE 69


................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:21 PS


discusses how Mishamo’s inhabitants encountered ‘‘the national order of things’’through the camp’s daily social interactions. Inhabitants, in turn, developed a nationalhistory, constituting themselves as members of an exiled Hutu nation that had beendenied its own state by rival Tutsis, as a means of understanding and giving meaningto their lives in the camp. Malkki juxtaposes the national history espoused by thoseliving in the camp with other ideologies and communities—including the ‘‘dehistori-cizing humanitarianism’’ of international aid workers, who saw the refugees primarilyas ‘‘victims’’ of a ‘‘human’’ tragedy. As Malkki indicates in this and other texts, thehistorical sensibility of those living in the camp has been ‘‘silenced’’ and may, if leftunaccounted, unleash further violence.7

One could develop a similar line of analysis for Cassinga. As previously suggested,the humanitarian logic which makes the bombing of Cassinga ‘‘refugee camp’’ such apoignant symbol of apartheid South Africa’s brutality also obscures former campinhabitants’ diverse historical knowledge of the place in which they have lived and thepolitics which surround their representations of it. Nevertheless, in regard to the studyof liberation movement camps at least, it is less fruitful to juxtapose humanitarianismand history than it is to consider how different claims about camp pasts have beenorganized around notions of a shared humanity. Far from silencing histories, theseclaims (referred to here collectively as ‘‘humanist’’) have provided the languagethrough which histories in and of camps have often been articulated. And althoughmany of these histories have not been widely heard, it is their marginal status withinthe global system of nation-states—rather than their appeal to a ‘‘human’’subject—that muffles them.

Consider, for example, the case of SWAPO’s detention of accused spies in itscamps outside Lubango, Angola. During the mid- to late 1980s, claims that SWAPOwas unjustly detaining, torturing, and eliminating its own members in exile consti-tuted the focal point of criticism of the liberation movement and its authority torepresent the Namibian people. Among those making and circulating these claims wasa group called ‘‘the Committee of Parents.’’ Composed primarily of family membersof those believed to be detained by SWAPO, the Committee of Parents wrote letters,reports, and other documents which it sent, along with supporting source material, toorganizations following Namibia’s liberation struggle. The Committee drew heavilyon the language of human rights, detailing histories of ‘‘abuses’’ in camps, and empha-sizing the victims’ legal status as ‘‘refugees’’ and, therefore, as ‘‘innocent life’’—alanguage familiar to the intended readership, above all church, solidarity movement,and UN officials who, from the mid-1970s, opposed the South African governmenton the premise that apartheid was a violation of fundamental human rights.8 Theorganization’s name, ‘‘the Committee of Parents,’’ further appealed to the sharedhuman emotions of interlocutors, drawing attention away from the politics of thewarring parties and toward a tragedy with which any parent should empathize.9

Even as the Committee of Parents was presenting histories to advocate for aninvestigation of human rights abuses occurring in SWAPO’s camps, it found itself upagainst arguments that privileged other interpretations of human rights and theirmoral imperatives. According to one dominant line of thought, supporting SWAPOwas equivalent to supporting human rights, since SWAPO represented the Namibian

................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:23 PS

people, whose rights had been violated by apartheid South Africa and the Germancolonial government which preceded it. Thus, accusations of abuses committed bySWAPO in its camps were, in fact, a threat to human rights because they underminedthe movement capable of protecting these rights by liberating Namibia from colonialrule. Moreover, this argument was reinforced by descriptions of the SWAPO campsthemselves as presented by representatives of the organizations which the liberationmovement had invited to visit them. Repeatedly, these groups offered glowing reportsabout the schools, clinics, and other ‘‘humanitarian work’’ which SWAPO was doingon behalf of the Namibian people. As representatives from UNICEF put it in a reporton Cassinga which they submitted shortly before the South African attack: ‘‘Theirspeeches, their songs, their processions, the defence of their camps and the organi-zation of their health services, their education and sanitation bore witness to or werepresage of what an independent Namibia would be.’’10

Such representations of the camps, and of the human rights imperativessurrounding them, were far more palatable to most organizations following SouthernAfrican affairs during the 1980s than those presented by the Committee of Parents.After 1976, the year the United Nations recognized SWAPO as ‘‘the sole and authenticrepresentative of the Namibian people,’’ the constellation of international institutionssupporting the liberation movement was firmly in place. Thereafter, any organizationwhich criticized SWAPO risked being accused of undermining Namibian liberationand of aiding apartheid South Africa—the international pariah. Moreover, by the1980s South Africa and its allies were deploying the language of human rights toposition themselves in the Cold War conflict, contrasting the rights granted to indi-viduals in liberal democracies with the violation of these rights by communist regimessupporting the liberation movements.11 Under the circumstances, there was littleimpetus for any organization critical of South Africa to look into the Committee ofParents’ allegations of abuses occurring in the SWAPO camps—or even to considerthat human rights abuses could be committed by a recognized liberation movement.

Nevertheless, the Committee of Parents and the histories it narrated were not‘‘silenced.’’ They were, rather, discredited through arguments made and evaluated byrepresentatives of SWAPO and its constellation of allies at particular points in time.For example, in November 1985 Ninan Koshy, president of the World Council ofChurches, sent a letter to the secretary of the Council of Churches of Namibia, AbisaiShejavali, requesting an appraisal of contradictory reports over what was happening inSWAPO’s exile camps in general and of the Committee of Parents and documents ithad received from them in particular. In his reply, later circulated among SWAPO’sallies around the world, Shejavali called into question the interests of the Committeeof Parents and the significance of its allegations in comparison to SWAPO’s and theCouncil of Churches’ larger goals. Shejavali framed his arguments in humanitarianterms: ‘‘I really request that those who have been supporting SWAPO financiallycontinue to do so, which is in my opinion a valuable contribution towards the exiledand suppressed. These allegations should not stop us or threaten us from doing thecharity work for our fellow men and women.’’ Clearly, such arguments presented apowerful response to the Committee of Parents—if not for their persuasive quality,then for their acceptability to organizations whose members did not want to criticize

PAGE 71


................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:23 PS


SWAPO. And the kinds of arguments that Shejavali made were often repeated todiscredit the Committee of Parents in the months and years to come.

Even human rights organizations that gave the Committee of Parents a voicedistorted what the Committee, and its sources in the camps, had to say. In March1986, following a press release by SWAPO denouncing the Committee of Parents andits accusations, the Committee received an invitation from the Internationale Gesell-schaft fur Menschenrechte (IGFM) to visit its offices in Frankfurt. The Committee ofParents, as an organization, declined the invitation due to the IGFM’s ‘‘right-winglinks’’ and the chairperson’s wish to keep the Committee free from any associationswhich might compromise its political neutrality.12 Nevertheless, three of its memberstraveled with the IGFM’s support to West Germany and Britain, attending aconference on human rights abuses and Namibia. Thereafter, the IGFM became aprimary vehicle through which the Committee of Parents’ knowledge of abuses withinSWAPO camps was dispersed globally. At the same time, SWAPO and its allies drewon Committee members’ involvement with the IGFM to link the organization withthe South African regime. Particularly, the IGFM’s reports—which challenged theidea that SWAPO was administering ‘‘refugee camps,’’ appealing instead to images of‘‘concentration’’ and ‘‘breeding camps’’—were used to depict the Committee ofParents as an organization out of touch with the humane ideals and practices ofSWAPO.13

Since the mid-1980s, there have been several moments at which histories of deten-tions in SWAPO camps have been reevaluated by those who had initially dismissedthem. Namibia’s transition from apartheid rule to nonracial democracy inauguratedone such moment. According to the provisions for Namibian independence outlinedby UN Security Council Resolution 435 (1978), both South Africa and SWAPO wereobliged to release their political prisoners prior to United Nations–supervised elec-tions. On May 25, 1989, less than six months before the November election date, anentourage of international journalists, Angolan government officials, and SWAPOleaders traveled to SWAPO’s camps outside Lubango to confirm the release of abouttwo hundred detainees. In two separate episodes with women and men, detaineesinformed their visitors that they were not spies, that they had been falsely accused,tortured, and detained in ‘‘dungeons’’ by SWAPO officials, and that many otherdetainees had ‘‘disappeared.’’ The revelations and resulting press caused a chain ofreactions in which various people and organizations—especially churches, solidaritymovements, and other groups which had supported SWAPO on the premise that, inso doing, they were defending Namibians’ human rights—acknowledged abusescommitted by SWAPO and distanced themselves from the organization. EvenSWAPO leaders were divided over how to respond to persuasive evidence that theliberation movement had grievously mistreated its own members in its camps.

It should be noted, moreover, that in effecting these responses, the detainees usedtheir bodies ‘‘to speak.’’ For example, on the day journalists first encountered thedetainees in Lubango, some of the male detainees undressed in front of their visitors,revealing wounds on their backs, legs, and buttocks. For at least some of the journalistspresent, the cause of the wounds was self-evident after hearing the detainees’ stories;they were ‘‘marks and scars’’ ‘‘left by torture.’’14 For the female detainees meeting the

................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:25 PS

press, it was not wounds which were made to tell a story or affect sympathy but rathertheir bodies’ new appendages—their babies. As one journalist reported, ‘‘One of thesaddest and most moving moments was when one women [sic] in her twenties pointedtowards the baby she held in her arms and told a German television crew that thechild was a product of rape by one of the camp guards.’’15 In these and other instances,bodily evidence, captured in photographs, lent credibility to detainees’ accounts oftheir own suffering.16 And the reputations of individuals pictured in the photos, someof whom were well-known political activists, strengthened the authority of testimoniesamong particular communities in Namibia and solidarity workers abroad.17

Nevertheless, the detainees have faced obstacles to shaping publicly endorsedknowledge about their detentions, obstacles which reflect their marginal status in thecamp past and in the postcolonial present. For example, following their release, somedetainees organized themselves as a pressure group called ‘‘the Political ConsultativeCouncil’’ (PCC), which, among other things, committed itself to investigating andeffecting the release of hundreds of other detainees whom its members had last seenin the SWAPO camps near Lubango. The PCC played a critical role in advocatingfor the United Nations to lead an investigation of the ‘‘detainee issue’’ prior toNamibia’s first elections in 1989 and in promoting another investigation led by theRed Cross (ICRC) in the early 1990s. Both investigations were hampered, however,by international humanitarian law, which excluded key sources of knowledge fromtheir studies. In the case of the United Nations Mission on Detainees (UNMD) in1989, its members included ten UN officials who traveled to recently vacated SWAPOcamps in Angola and Zambia, but no ex-detainees, members of human rights organi-zations, or persons with prior knowledge of the areas of detention were included inthe investigation.18 Similarly, according to the Red Cross’s mandate, it could onlyliaise between ‘‘the families of missing persons’’ and the national governments andliberation movements that were ‘‘parties to the conflict.’’ Under the circumstances, itis hardly surprising that these ‘‘politically neutral’’ humanitarian bodies confirmSWAPO’s official position that all the detainees had been repatriated to Namibia andshed little light on why hundreds of detainees have remained missing.19

At the same time, SWAPO established its own discourse, couched in both nation-alist and humanist language, which associated further discussion of the Lubangodetentions with stigma. On May 23, 1989, SWAPO’s Central Committee issued apress release from Luanda announcing its ‘‘policy of national reconciliation.’’Intended, ostensibly, ‘‘to enhance the chances of peace in Namibia’’ and ‘‘to heal thewounds of war,’’ the document is organized around a discussion of the detainees.According to it, SWAPO’s Central Committee had ‘‘issued a general pardon to all themisguided elements who infiltrated the rank and file of SWAPO with the aim ofserving the enemy.’’ They were now ‘‘registered with the UNHCR to return toNamibia like all other Namibians’’ and urged ‘‘to return to the people’s fold.’’20

When, two days after the Central Committee’s press release, the detainees testified tojournalists outside Lubango that they had never infiltrated SWAPO but rather hadbeen abused by the liberation movement, leading SWAPO officials described theiractions as a threat to national reconciliation. As they and others have since argued,stories of the Lubango camps endanger the well-being of Namibians who were violated

PAGE 73


................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:26 PS


under colonial rule but are now protected by a democratically elected government. Insuch arguments, they draw from some camp histories, including a history of ‘‘therefugee camp’’ at Cassinga, while obscuring others, such as those of SWAPO deten-tions at Lubango. Meanwhile, Lubango has become the focal point of an alternativereconciliation discourse, associated with South Africa’s Truth and ReconciliationCommission, which advocates public exposure of abuses committed by ‘‘both’’ sidesof the liberation struggle.21

Surely, in circumstances such as these, wherein competing narratives are inextri-cable from claims about what it means to be ‘‘humane’’ and to protect ‘‘humanity,’’humanitarianism cannot be said to silence history. Rather, histories, framed inhumanist terms, are mediated such that some of the voices articulating them are privi-leged over others in an ongoing, dialectical process. For Southern Africa’s liberationmovement camps, this process reflects the unique circumstances in which people affil-iated with SWAPO and other movements have mobilized humanist discourse to gainsupport for their positions. Nevertheless, many different refugees appeal to others’shared humanity and speak in ways that scholarship has not, as yet, permitted us tohear.

Liberation Movement Camps and Historical Ethnography

To some extent, the tendency to associate camps with silence may reflect the kind ofcamps which scholars have previously studied. For example, in his highly influentialtext Homo Sacer, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben draws from descriptions of Naziconcentration camps to theorize ‘‘the camp’’ as a space marked by radical disparitybetween its ‘‘sovereign’’ and the ‘‘bare life’’ inhabiting it.22 Similarly, the ethnographicliterature on refugee camps emphasizes the discrepancy between sovereign humani-tarians and the refugee populations under their control.23 Mention of socialdifferentiation among refugees is not entirely absent from this literature. As IlanaFeldman argues in Governing Gaza, services delivered to refugees and others ‘‘in crisis’’are, by nature, hierarchical, strengthening the authority not only of the governingbody responsible for administering aid but also of the social networks through whichaid is administered.24 Similarly, Michel Agier and Aihwa Ong consider how suchnetworks form in the particular camps which they study, noting how various groupsof refugees access sources of capital from outside the camp and privileges from admin-istrators within it.25 Nevertheless, these and other scholars do not focus on contestingvoices among refugee populations—perhaps because the different voices within thecamps they study are negligible in comparison to the silencing of all who live there.

In contrast, liberation movement camps may be particularly ‘‘vocal’’ sites. Unlikemost refugee camps, which are administered by a host nation and/or transnationalhumanitarian agency, Southern Africa’s liberation movements governed exiles fromtheir countries of origin directly. As the liberation movements distributed resources,monitored movement, and dispersed knowledge among their people, national hierar-chies formed and voices competed for influence over emerging nations. Withindependence from colonial rule and the fall of apartheid, the liberation movementsbecame ruling parties of nation-states, placing their role in liberating their countriesfrom exile at the center of national narratives. Thus, while the physical camps ceased

................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:28 PS

to exist, camp histories have proliferated as people seek recognition for themselves andtheir communities through narratives of the liberation struggle. This kind of historicalproduction, which binds camp communities in the past to national governments andtheir citizens in the present, is unique to Southern Africa. As such, it highlights thelimitations of literature which, in the name of developing a single theory of ‘‘thecamp,’’ obscures important distinctions between camps and the different potentialtrajectories of camp space.

Nevertheless, the multiple voices presented here should not be seen merely as areflection of a different kind of camp. As demonstrated above, dominant representa-tions of Cassinga and Lubango muffle voices that have spoken in and around thesesites. The same point also applies to camps administered by the liberation movementsgenerally. During the struggle years, liberation movements and the organizationssupporting them repeatedly portrayed the movements’ ‘‘refugee camps’’ and ‘‘liberatedzones’’ as sites where people had transcended social barriers to create a single, unifiednation.26 Inhabitants were said to share work tasks according to their abilities andmaterial items according to their needs, which were met with efficiency despite thecircumstances in which exiles lived. Women were taking a leading role in runningthese sites and accessing levels of education previously only available to men. Tribaldivisions, through which colonialism and apartheid had divided Africans, had becomeinsignificant, if they retained any meaning at all. Of course, Southern Africa’s whiteminority regimes countered the liberation movements’ picture of the camps. But theycreated a single, contrasting picture at the expense of multiple voices and complexhistories. Even scholarship which touches on the liberation movements’ camps doeslittle to illuminate this complexity. Rather, the camps have been incorporated intonational historiographies, compelling scholars to replace one national history withanother rather than to examine spaces, like exile camps, wherein nations have formedand through which their historical production has been structured.27

At the same time, there may be more voices speaking in other kinds of camps thanprevious scholarship has acknowledged. For example, as Mia Green notes in her reviewof Purity and Exile, Liisa Malkki does not consider the possibility that her researchparticipants, most of them highly politicized adult men, have used the camp atMishamo to propagate their narratives of the Hutu nation at the expense of competinghistories.28 If the camp was the site in which such histories were articulated, ratherthan a town where Malkki also conducted research, it may be a reflection not only ofthe national ideology that formed in the camp but also the ability of certain people tocontrol the representations of camp and nation that Malkki heard within this space.As Malkki herself indicates in descriptions of her fieldwork at Mishamo, she and herresearch participants were significantly constrained in their interactions. It wasnecessary for Malkki to leave the refugees before sunset and return to her assignedhouse, located next to the settlement commandant. Refugees had the sense that theywere under surveillance, a sense which influenced both how they perceived Malkkiand how they would and would not gather in groups.29 Under such circumstances,and similar ones described by anthropologists who have worked inside other refugeecamps, there may be considerable limitations to what most of them have been able tohear.

PAGE 75


................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:29 PS


Figure 1. This photograph was taken at Cassinga by the Swedish filmmaker Per Sanden on May

3, 1978, during a special parade held in honor of him and his colleague Tommy Bergh (Per

Sanden, interview on February 5, 2008). The photo was later displayed in several SWAPO

publications, including the front page of SWAPO’s newsletter Namibia Today in the issue

published immediately after the South African attack. Source: National Archives of Namibia,

Photo Archive, No. 12778.

The difference between others’ camp research and my own, therefore, may notonly be the kind of camps which we have studied but also the research methodsthrough which we have been able to study them. Unlike Liisa Malkki and other campethnographers, most of whom conduct research in existing camps, I work with formercamp inhabitants, moving with them across social spaces with different relationshipsto the nation and comparing how, in various contexts, they represent the camps wherethey once lived.30 As a result, my research elicits voices that may appear ‘‘silent’’ toothers who are restricted to camps or similar sites, dominated by national elites. Theresulting knowledge production is certainly ethnographic, relying as it does on devel-oping complex relationships with research participants over many months in the field.But it is not limited by those who are able to control representations in camp spaceand time.

Moving outside the camp presents opportunities to hear voices embedded in otherkinds of sources as well. For example, the National Archives of Namibia (NAN)houses photographs of Namibians living in exile. The captions applied to these photos

................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:46:44 PS

Figure 2. This photograph depicts a building where PLAN combatants received military training

at Tobias Hainyeko Training Center outside Lubango. Although the National Archives of Namibia

refers to it generally as ‘‘an Angolan base near the Namibian border,’’ research participants

described their experiences in and around this specific building and at neighboring sites,

including the camps where SWAPO detained accused spies. National Archives of Namibia,

Photo Archive, No. 12396.

are sparse, including few details about the particular people and places that werephotographed, of the contexts in which the photos were taken, and of the photos’subsequent circulation. Nevertheless, photos may elicit these and other histories whenthey are drawn from the camp/nation and circulate among people negotiating theirrelationships to one another in a national community. Thus, in my research one ofthe NAN’s photos of ‘‘Namibian refugees at the Cassinga camp’’ (fig. 1) invokedcomplex histories as people described their meetings at the camp parade, the occasionwhen the photograph was taken, and the people and events which were and were notcaptured in the photographer’s frame. Similarly, a photo of ‘‘Commanders . . . at anAngolan base near the Namibian border’’ (fig. 2) initiated conversations about theexact location outside Lubango which the photo depicts, the detention sites foraccused spies located nearby, and an individual pictured in the photo who was laterdetained there. In these and other instances, former exiles use photographs, and othersources of historical knowledge, to highlight aspects of camp life which are critical foran ethnography of camps. And they draw from the relative freedom of their locationoutside the camp to comment on camp images in a manner they might well haveavoided were they still living on the inside.

PAGE 77


................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:47:00 PS


This essay draws from such details about one liberation movement’s camps tocritique a recurring trope in a broader humanitarian and human rights literature. As Ihave argued, literature contrasts the ‘‘voice’’ of those engaged in normal political lifewith the ‘‘silence’’ of refugees living in camps, thereby overlooking the many ways inwhich people break silence in and through the camps where they have lived. Opportu-nities to rethink ‘‘the camp’’ are abundant in Southern Africa, where voices are notrestricted to physical camps but circulate more freely as citizens draw from camphistories to position themselves toward other members of a national community. Butthese opportunities cannot be grasped through Southern Africa’s nationally orientedhistoriographies or through notions of the field commonly accepted by anthropolo-gists. Rather, they require a historical ethnography which draws from the many voicesand complex politics surrounding camps to engage with camp communities in thepast and their multiple, unfolding legacies.

N O T E S

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Annual Conference of Anthropology

Southern Africa in September 2010 and ‘‘Love and Revolution,’’ a conference hosted at the Centre

for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape in October 2010. Related themes

were also discussed at ‘‘Camps, Liberation Movements, Politics,’’ which I convened at UWC in

August 2011. I am thankful to all conference participants for their insights and to Miriam Ticktin

and anonymous reviewers who shared such thoughtful comments on this essay.

1. Here I am thinking particularly of overlaps between my work on liberation movement

camps and Liisa Malkki’s work on Mishamo refugee camp as described in Purity and Exile:

Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1995). I discuss this and other publications by Liisa Malkki in the body of this

essay.

2. Established in 1960, SWAPO was recognized by the United Nations in 1976 as ‘‘the sole

and authentic representative of the Namibian people’’ and was elected the ruling party of inde-

pendent Namibia in 1990. Since these elections the organization has adopted the name ‘‘Swapo

Party.’’

3. As Liisa Malkki puts it in her seminal article ‘‘Speechless Emissaries,’’ ‘‘In universalizing

particular displaced persons into ‘refugees’—in abstracting their predicaments from specific

political, historical and cultural contexts—humanitarian practices tend to silence refugees.’’

Malkki, ‘‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization,’’ Cultural

Anthropology 11, no. 3 (1996): 378.

4. Christian A. Williams, ‘‘Exile History: An Ethnography of the SWAPO Camps and the

Namibian Nation’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2009).

5. Annemarie Heywood, The Cassinga Event: An Investigation of the Records (Windhoek:

National Archives, 1994); Mvula ya Nangolo and Tor Sellstrom, Kassinga: A Story Untold

(Windhoek: Namibia Book Development Council, 1995); Edward George McGill Alexander,

‘‘The Cassinga Raid’’ (M.A. thesis, University of South Africa, 2003); Colin Leys and John Saul,

Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword (London: James Currey, 1995), 53–54, 63;

Justine Hunter, Die Politik der Erinnerung und des Vergessens in Namibia: Umgang mit schweren

Menschenrechtsverletzungen der Ara des bewaffneten Befreiungskampfes, 1966 bis 1989 (Frankfurt am

Main: Lang, 2008), 57–58; South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Truth and Recon-

................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:47:02 PS

ciliation Commission of South Africa Report (Cape Town: The Commission, 1998–2003), vol. 2,

Operation Reindeer: The Attacks on Kassinga and Chetequera Camps, 46–55; Gary Baines,

‘‘Conflicting Memories, Competing Narratives and Complicating Histories: Revisiting the

Cassinga Controversy,’’ Journal of Namibian Studies 6 (2009): 7–26.

6. Mwetufa Mupopiwa, interview, July 26, 2008; Charles Namoloh, interview, June 19, 2008.

7. See especially Malkki, ‘‘Speechless Emissaries.’’

8. As Jan Eckel argues in ‘‘Utopie der Moral: Kalkul der Macht,’’ Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte

49 (2009): 437–84, the 1970s were a turning point in the use of human rights as a moral discourse

internationally, and the anti-apartheid movement was an important node for the emerging

discourse of human rights.

9. When, in 1986, some members of the Committee of Parents defected to form another

group with a different strategy for distributing information about the SWAPO detainees, it

adopted almost the same name as its predecessor, ‘‘the Parents’ Committee.’’

10. National Archives of Namibia (NAN), File A.614, UNICEF Area Office Brazzaville,

‘‘Report on a mission to SWAPO centres for Namibian refugees in Angola from 10 to 14 April

1978,’’ 7.

11. SWAPO was among the Southern African liberation movements recognized by the Soviet

Union. Despite SWAPO’s nominally socialist ideology from 1976, most scholarship emphasizes

that SWAPO was, first and foremost, a national movement and that it was the exigencies of exile

politics, rather than a particular ideological commitment, which shaped its policy statements in

exile.

12. Erica Beukes, interview, May 13, 2007.

13. IGFM, ‘‘Namibia: Human Rights in Conflict’’ (Frankfurt am Main: IGFM, 1985).

14. ‘‘Report by AFP on May 27, 1989,’’ in Call Them Spies: A Documentary Account of the

SWAPO Spy Drama, ed. Nico Basson and Ben Motinga (Windhoek: Africa Communications

Project, 1989), 86–87.

15. John Liebenberg, ‘‘Detainees Speak of Ordeal,’’ The Namibian, June 9, 1989. The article

is also included in Basson and Motinga, Call Them Spies, 87–88.

16. It should be noted that press coverage of the detainees, and of their bodies, was more

extensive after they returned to Namibia and held a press conference in Khomasdal on July 6,

1989, than it was after their initial release to the press on May 25 in Lubango.

17. This point contrasts with representational practices observed by Liisa Malkki in which

photographs render refugees anonymous and detached from the histories of those who view them.

Malkki, ‘‘Speechless Emissaries,’’ 352–55.

18. Vereinigte Evangelische Mission (VEM), Groth Collection, File No. 1335, ‘‘Report of the

United Nations Mission on Detainees,’’ October 11, 1989, 3.

19. Ibid., 8.

20. Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB), SWAPO of Namibia Collection, 89fSLuPR1,

‘‘SWAPO Press Release on the Resolution of the Central Committee of SWAPO Luanda, May 23,

1989.’’

21. In addition to South Africa’s TRC, other happenings in the mid-1990s initiated a debate

in Namibia over the meaning of reconciliation. Key events included the publication of a book by

a German pastor, Siegfried Groth, titled Namibia: The Wall of Silence (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer

Verlag, 1995), and the formation of a human rights organization led by former exiles and civil

PAGE 79


................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:47:03 PS


society leaders called ‘‘Breaking the Wall of Silence.’’ For more details and references, see Williams,

‘‘Exile History,’’ 203–17.

22. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1998).

23. See, for example, Liisa Malkki’s discussion of the hierarchy that forms at Mishamo

between the Burundian Hutu refugees governed in the camp and the Tanzanian officials authorized

by the UN to govern them, in Purity and Exile, 105–52; Jennifer Hyndman’s account of how

refugee camps are ‘‘structured according to supralocal understandings of local needs,’’ in Managing

Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2000), 87–116; Aihwa Ong’s analysis of the relationships that formed among representatives

of humanitarian agencies, Thai soldiers, and the Cambodian refugees whom she studies, in The

Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship and the New America (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2003), 48–65; and Michel Agier’s treatment of relations among refugees and NGO workers

in the Somali camp Dadaab, in ‘‘Between War and City: Towards an Urban Anthropology of

Refugee Camps,’’ Ethnography 3, no. 3 (2002): 324–32; as well as Agier, On the Margins of the

World: The Refugee Experience Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 50–57.

24. Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967

(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). The formation of hierarchy through aid delivery

is a central theme in her chapter ‘‘Service in Crisis,’’ in ibid., 123–54.

25. Agier, ‘‘Between War and City,’’ 329–32; Agier, On the Margins of the World, 53–57; Ong,

The Buddha Is Hiding, 53–55.

26. The term ‘‘liberated zones’’ was used to refer to parts of the liberation movements’ coun-

tries of origin which the movements had freed from colonial rule. Liberated zones were especially

significant in literature on Mozambique and Angola, where the liberation movements, in fact,

controlled sizable territories inside their countries of origin before independence. For work that

considers the camp-like conditions in the liberated zones, see Harry West, Kupilikula: Governance

and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 133–63.

27. I develop this point at greater length in Williams, ‘‘Exile History,’’ 20–22, 270–72.

28. Mia Green, ‘‘Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu

Refugees in Tanzania (Book Review),’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 23, no. 2 (1997): 386–88.

29. Malkki, Purity and Exile, 47–51.

30. One notable exception is Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in

French Guiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 76–108, in which Redfield

considers life among French Guiana’s prisoners, who were also organized in camps.

................. 18187$ $CH4 01-20-12 09:47:05 PS

Silence, Voices and "the Camp": Perspectives on and from Southern Africa's Exile Histories

Documents

Transcript of Silence, Voices and "the Camp": Perspectives on and from Southern Africa's Exile Histories