Exile History: An Ethnography of the SWAPO Camps and the Namibian Nation.

Abstract

From 1960 to 1989 thousands of Namibians fled South African apartheid rule and traveled into “exile,” a space located outside their country of origin. Most exiles lived in camps administered by the Namibian liberation movement SWAPO in Tanzania, Zambia and Angola. Through the distribution of resources, management of interactions and control of information in these camps, a national hierarchy formed which empowered internationally recognized SWAPO leaders and endangered other camp inhabitants, especially those who were already marked as culturally different. Histories of exile have, in turn, become a medium through which Namibians reproduce, contest and negotiate their position in the hierarchy formed in the camps. It is this relationship between the exile past and present that I call “exile history.” These observations are significant not only for Namibia, but also for other nations and the scholars who study and influence social relations in them. Like SWAPO, liberation movements representing South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique first governed their citizens in exile camps before becoming the ruling parties of independent countries. Moreover, “exile” and “the camp” highlight paradoxical qualities of national history generally, with its tendency to form outside national borders, insistence on a unity that produces and masks divisions, and capacity to “silence” even as it evokes competing narratives. Such qualities present challenges to the researcher which are best addressed through ethnographic methods. For while national histories tend to be dominated by hierarchies formed in exile, camps and similar spaces, ethnography enables the researcher to cross sites of historical production and elicit new ones. Histories accessed in this way may, in turn, be used to illuminate nationalism's contradictions and create space for other forms of community.