Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
In March 1998 a group of men were discussing their feelings about Namibia, the political situation and democracy in the country over snacks and soft drinks at Anamulenge in the Ombalantu District of Owambo in northern Namibia. For more than an hour they happily listed, for the researcher's benefit, the numerous changes for the better that had taken place since the country's day of independence eight years earlier: peace and stability, freedom of movement, access to better schooling and health care, and many others. Then, suddenly, one elderly man contested this amiable consensus with an angry comment:
The problem is that they 'empower' [in English] only those of us that went across the borders into exile. But the fact that we remained here does not mean that we did not help to liberate the land. We gave them food, shelter and information to prevent floggings and imprisonment. If our cries were to be weighed up, they would probably weigh more than theirs.
This single moment sparked off my intense curiosity. Had I listened without hearing? Since 1990 I had been constantly in and out of Owambo, conducting research and running adult education programmes with a wide range of residents living in this former main theatre of the Namibian liberation war. Occasionally, people had spoken about 'the war', always emphasizing their suffering caused by the atrocities of the boers.1 They had never said much about their own actions, though. I suddenly realized that I had heard nothing but narratives of victimhood - in informal conversations as much as in the national public discourse - where the war-time experience of civilians in Owambo was concerned. While there was a common acknowledgement that the local population had provided logistical and intelligence support for the PLAN2 guerrillas, this remained rather vague. I had never heard recollections of civilians' specific actions. Had I not heard them, or were there really no narratives of agency to supplement the representations of victimhood? And if there were indeed no audible narratives of local agency, why had they remained muted?
This discussion at Anamulenge was the starting point of a decade-long project, during which I investigated how the experience of war and violence is remembered...