A History of Namibia by Marion
Wallace with John Kinahan (Jacana)
South Africans have an ambiguous relationship with Namibia today. Mention a trip to Windhoek and responses will range from the incredulous to the sceptical, from the curious to the disinterested.
The northern neighbour at once represents a tourist site for adventure sports and “authentic” African traditions, painful memories of the Border War and barren landscapes dotted with memorials of the short-lived German empire and the ruling “liberation” party. Rarely, if ever, do academic histories reflect this same sense of modernity and tradition, the whole gamut from precolonial to postcolonial pasts. Marion Wallace, the African curator at the British Library, has remedied this problem in a magisterial new book, A History of Namibia.
Her goal here is synthesis and perspective and she succeeds admirably on both fronts. An ever-growing literature already examines the short- and long-term legacies of German and South African colonialism in Namibia and the same may be said to a lesser degree of resistance and struggle histories.
But many of these works suffer from partisanship, on the one hand, or myopia, on the other. Anything critical of the anti-apartheid struggle is unwelcome in what have become “patriotic histories” of resistance, a phrase Terence Ranger once used to describe postcolonial Zimbabwean scholarship. Although they may escape this first trap, in-depth case studies tend to zoom in on certain ethnic groups or non-black actors. Neglected, in turn, is the lengthy duration of human settlement, cross-regional connections and climatic trends throughout the country.
Wallace counters both pitfalls by dedicating the first third of her work to the precolonial era, drawing on the archeological expertise of John Kinahan. The remaining two-thirds of the book traces historical patterns, shifts and incongruities within and among societies under what became a German colonial protectorate and eventually an illegal appendage of apartheid South Africa. At the same time that Namibians across ethnicities are well served by, and well represented in, one of the first survey texts of Namibian history, anyone interested in the development of social systems and African politics writ large will benefit from reading, and rereading, this book.
The hallowed name of tradition
Wallace may barely touch on the postcolonial moment, but the narrative does show how no narrow, one-dimensional account can predict how societies may embrace change or, in the hallowed name of tradition, repeat the same mistakes of the past.
Still, a keen eye for detail has allowed Wallace to draw attention to themes relevant to the present day, such as the distinct roles of women in Namibia. Unlike other colonies in which moral angst centred on illicit relations between African men and white women, Wallace shows how German administrators and the metropolitan press focused more on the malevolence, seduction and dangers of Namibian women.
Born of coercion and consent, interracial sex and marriage were common enough to be treated as the “ultimate disruptive force” in German South West Africa, partly because everyone in the resultant mixed families gained German citizenship and thus undermined the racial superiority associated with “Germanness”.
This grave threat to the colonial imagination is one of myriad reasons why civilian African women never received any humanitarian protection from the Germans during wartime, as perhaps best demonstrated by General Von Trotha’s universal “extermination order” of the Herero.
Wallace explains how women not only moved to cities to challenge African patriarchies, but also mobilised grassroots movements within Namibia throughout the 1980s. Organisations such as the National Women’s Voice fought to “prepare people now” for liberation and to prevent women from accepting any “oppression” as the modus operandi.
These same campaigns fizzled in 1989, just one year before the democratic transition, partly because the male-dominated liberation movement — the South West Africa Political Organisation (Swapo) — felt threatened by their successes and argued that emphasising “development now” weakened the larger fight for political independence. National reconciliation has since replaced self-determination as the foremost reason for women to “shut up”; fortunately, their voices may still be heard in the Parents Committee of Namibia and the Breaking the Wall of Silence movement, two civil-society groups demanding information on children who disappeared in Swapo’s detention camps in the 1980s.
A national trauma
Wallace makes a compelling case for why such microhistories belong in a single constellation of national history. Compared with a recent spate of popular books focused on the Herero Genocide at the dawn of the 20th century, her chapter on the topic — deliberately entitled the “Namibian War, 1904-1908” — helps frame the atrocities as a national trauma, felt and perpetrated by actors across ethnic lines, more in the context of Namibian than German history.
The recent repatriation of 11 Nama and nine Herero skulls, initially taken to Germany for “scientific testing” after the genocide, speaks volumes on the continued importance of this episode in national narratives of resistance, survival and identity.
One could critique Wallace’s decision not to dedicate more attention to transnational actors here, such as the role of coloured soldiers recruited from the Cape Colony, the key roles of British traders in weapons smuggling or the simultaneous Portuguese raids on the Oshikwan-
yama people in the north. In a similar vein scholars have already critiqued Wallace for not including every relevant work — including her own past research on women — in the 34-page bibliography.
At best, these critiques veer towards the academic in the sense that they are both scholarly and irrelevant. Any ambitious attempt to integrate a wide range of literature on Namibia, produced across disciplines and in multiple languages, into a single conversation requires that some voices are quieter than others, or even neglected altogether. Wallace has the humility of a historian, rather than the explanatory power of a social scientist, to acknowledge this inevitable shortcoming.
Despite the breadth and depth of her achievement, the last page of the book notes that uncertainties and debates remain unresolved in Namibian history, and that the ground remains fertile for research. Though she is quite right, she has also left an indelible impression on the field, one that future scholars will need to cultivate to make sense of both the past and the present.
David Bargueo is a Fox Fellow at the University of Cape Town