Posted on May 7, 2012
Over the past few years a rapidly growing body of fiction, autobiographical and scholarly literature has begun to address the memories of former South African Defence Force (SADF) conscripts who fought in the 'border war'. There is no doubt that these young men suffered often persistent trauma. They were caught up in a troublesome war, which took them far from their protected, comfortable lives in 'the States' (as South Africa was commonly referred to by those in the old SADF) into what much of the contemporary memorial literature remembers as the porous, violent frontiers of civilization in northern Namibia and Angola.
While I feel with the former conscripts, I keep wondering why the 'others' seem to be missing from these accounts, apart from a few references to SWAPO guerrillas encountered in contact. More particularly I am concerned that the local populations in whose midst the 'border war' was fought are the unspoken of this new archive. Where are the references about what this war meant, and what it still means to them?
Throughout most of the first decade of Namibian independence I lived and worked in the country. I was constantly in and out of Owambo (the colonial 'Ovamboland'), the main theatre of the violent conflict between the SWAPO guerrilla People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) and the South African occupation forces, which lasted from 1966 through to 1989. Having visited northern Namibia first for my doctoral research on gender and nationalism, I later was engaged in applied social science research and adult education programmes across Owambo. Frequently, people I met started speaking about their painful experiences during the liberation war, as the period is generally referred to in Namibia. To residents of northern Namibia the suffering caused by the atrocities of the Boers constituted a persistent memory.
Between 1998 and 2004, I interviewed dozens of people in the former war-zone. Most of my interlocutors had lived through the war in the former war-zone as civilians. I soon learnt that, clearly, all those who lived in this hotbed of liberation war violence in the 1980s, in one way or another, had been affected by the violence and the actions of the SWAPO guerrilla, and those of eembulu and koevoet . People described assaults by soldiers and Koevoet when they suspected that rural residents refused to disclose the whereabouts of PLAN combatants in the area. Some had their houses burnt down. Women particularly recounted severe beatings they were subjected to because the 'security forces' suspected them to have prepared food for the guerrilla. Some people also recalled incidents where soldiers of the occupation forces, and sometimes SWAPO guerrillas too, had shot and killed local residents. There were stories of internal strife within the local community and within families; among others, I was told about relatives who had chased young people belonging to a 'bicycle brigade' that provided day-to-day intelligence for PLAN, from their home for fear of reprisals by the South African army. Some had been caught particularly badly within the complex web of war-time violent politics: my research assistant's elderly grandfather, for instance, had suffered detention, locked up by the boers, and had been beaten up, by the boers and koevoet, as well as by PLAN guerrillas who were suspicious of his connections with the bantustan administration and the 'tribal authorities'. These were complex histories of suffering and betrayal.
Many of the stories I heard were about hurt and injury. Not all though. Young men, who were still children when the war came to an end in 1989, described in great detail how they had met PLAN fighters while out herding cattle, or how the guerillas had first woken up the young boys sleeping close to the cattle enclosure when they came to their homes in the dark of the night. Others, women, men, and adolescents, had taken on vital supportive roles to the guerrilla. I heard innumerable narratives of bravery and cunning trickster tales of local residents' actions during the war. Residents prided themselves in moving with me around the plains of the border landscape, pointing out sites of encounters they had with ovamati , or eembulu and koevoet. Some showed me unrecognised burial sites of PLAN fighters and local residents alike. Others took me across the border into Angola to show me how they had ducked soldiers in their pursuit. One elderly woman told me how she had walked into the army base at Oshakati to bravely reclaim her watch, which had been taken by soldiers who had violated her home, and how she made the army remove a bomb, planted by the same soldiers, that threatened life in her homestead.
I also experienced resounding anger. When a friend took me to Oniimwandi base in Oshakati, a notorious locus of torture during the war; now a site where Namibian Police force members lived in prefabricated containers, we were immediately eyed with open suspicion. Soon we were stopped by an officer who was unabashedly angry: Why was I here, he asked my companion: "What does she want here? They used to oppress us; why do they come here now?"
Memories of the violent colonial past reverberate in more recent fears of re-colonisation. South African retail chains such as Shoprite or Game, which have set up shop in Owambo threaten the viability of local businesses. At an individual level, white, male South Africans have made use of the local knowledge, which they acquired as SADF members in the 1980s, and dominate the emerging IT and cell phone sectors in northern Namibia. Such entanglements of South African and Namibian histories call for more sensitive and inclusive approaches to the emerging public archive of memories of the violent past. Even more significantly, perhaps, this question needs to be asked: Why are South Africans excruciatingly silent about the pain of others?
Heike Becker is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape.
