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ABSTRACT
In the history of Namibia’s liberation struggle, Kaufilwa Nepelilo’s story is largely unintelligible. As one of hundreds of contract laborers to leave Namibia during the early 1960s in search of opportunities in postcolonial Tanzania, Nepelilo soon found himself living at Kongwa, the site of the first guerrilla camp granted to the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) and other liberation movements then supported by the Organization of African Unity. A reluctant “freedom fighter” at best, Nepelilo’s account of life at Kongwa focuses not on preparations to liberate Namibia from colonialism but rather on escalating tensions between rank-in-file guerrillas and the camp command. Nepelilo’s story is not a well-worn “dissident” narrative either, however. In contrast to this narrative, which introduces Kongwa in the context of SWAPO’s 1968 “Kongwa Crisis,” Nepelilo focuses on the inequities of camp daily life over seven years. Moreover, he highlights other personal experiences of exile which have fallen outside repeated narratives, including his motivation for traveling to Tanzania in the 1960s, his imprisonment in Tanzanian and Zambian jails in the 1970s, and his repatriation as an “Angolan refugee” in the 1980s. As I maintain, the discrepancy between Nepelilo’s story and Namibian struggle histories reflects both the politics of exile in contemporary Southern Africa and the times and places where exiles lived in Africa’s frontline states. Nepelilo’s story has not been “silenced,” however. Rather, it has been repeated often among friends who share stories about their experiences in exile to establish valuable relationships. The biographical details articulated in such stories may easily be drawn into a new national history. At the same time, they have the potential to push against nationalism altogether, allowing for different forms of historical narration and new insight into struggle pasts and their transnational legacies.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Kaufilwa Nepelilo and Abed Hauwanga for the encounters that led to my writing this article. I wish only that I could have consulted with them further, but by the time I began preparing the article in early 2015 both were deceased. I would also like to thank all those whose comments have enriched the article, including the two anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Eastern African Studies and participants involved in several conferences, above all a panel on “Biography” at “Legacies of Struggle in Southern and Eastern Africa” (British Institute for East Africa, March 2015) and a panel on “Biography and Histories of the Armed Struggle” at “Politics of the Armed Struggle in Southern Africa” (University of the Witwatersrand, November 2016).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For further discussion of Kaufilwa Nepelilo’s story, see Williams, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa, 187–96. Unlike this article, the discussion there revolves around reconciliation and “silence” in Namibia.
2. White and Larmer, Part Special Issue on “Mobile Soldiers and the Un-National Liberation of Southern Africa.” For further discussion of this issue and overlapping literatures, see the latter two sections of this article.
3. Unless otherwise noted, the story that follows derives from my interview with Kaufilwa Nepelilo, translated by Abed Hauwanga, on 4 August 2007. Direct quotations are Abed Hauwanga’s translation of Nepelilo’s testimony.
4. Despite the fact that Nepelilo spoke to Abed and me in Oshikwanyama, he used the English word “abroad.”
5. Nepelilo, 4 August 2007, 3.
6. This migration route into exile is discussed in Müller, The Inevitable Pipeline into Exile, 148–69.
7. Nepelilo referred to the camp where he stayed as “Temeke” (Nepelilo, 4 August 2007, 11). It may have been Salvation Army, a camp/hostel located near Dar es Salaam’s Temeke neighborhood where Namibians and others resided for short periods of time.
8. See Williams, “Living in Exile;” Williams, “Practicing Pan-Africanism;” Williams, National Liberation. For scholarship focused on Kongwa from the perspective of the ANC’s camp, see Ndlovu, “The ANC in Exile” and Ellis, External Mission, 51–7.
9. Research participants living in and around Kongwa indicated that Major Chongambele’s name is spelled with a “Ch,” correcting my previous spelling in “Living in Exile.”
10. For further discussion of Kurasini and the pursuit of education among 1960s generation Namibian exiles, see Williams, “Education in Exile.”
11. Nepelilo, 4 August 2007, 5, 6.
12. Ibid., 7, 9.
13. Ibid., 16.
14. SWALA was later renamed the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN).
15. For accounts of the first mission of SWALA members, known as Group 1, into Namibia, see Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia, 59–60; Nujoma, Where Others Wavered, 159–62.
16. The “Kongwa Crisis” occurred in November 1968 following the return of seven guerrillas to Tanzania from military training in China. After spending several months at Kongwa, “the Seven Comrades” wrote a critical memorandum intended for the SWAPO leadership. Therein, and in their resignation statement which followed, they raised a variety of issues, accusing SWAPO officials of corruption, poor military strategy and of spying for South Africa. They presented these documents to SWAPO commanders at Kongwa and requested an audience with SWAPO’s political leadership in Dar es Salaam. Instead, they were picked up by a Tanzanian official, Lieutenant Muchongo, and driven directly to the Dar es Salaam Police Station where they were detained for six months followed by an additional nine months at Keko Prison. Only in early 1970, after their transfer from Keko to Ndebaro refugee camp in northern Tanzania, were they able to escape their confinement and make their way to Kenya. For discussion of how the “Kongwa Crisis” figures in Namibian historiography, see the following section.
17. These scholarships were granted by the United Nations Council for South West Africa (later UN Council for Namibia) and channeled through the Kenya Christian Refugee Services. By the early 1970s, there were more than 50 Namibians living in Nairobi who had previously lived at Kongwa, most or all of them were studying through UN scholarships.
18. The ANC also deployed its members living in Kongwa to the USSR in 1969 due to pressure placed on the liberation movement by the Tanzanian government. See Shubin, ANC: A View, 78–9; Ellis, External Mission, 83.
19. According to Nepelilo, SWAPO’s Kongwa camp had no commander at all at the time of the February 1971 visit, and had not had one since Castro was imprisoned by the Tanzanian government at SWAPO’s request in 1969.
20. Nepelilo, 4 August 2007, 28. Nyamu had just returned from the United States where he had recently completed a bachelor’s degree at the University of San Francisco.
21. It seems most likely that Nepelilo was transferred in 1972 in conjunction with the move of SWAPO’s base of operations to Zambia in that year.
22. Nepelilo, 4 August 2007, 9–10.
23. For discussion of these points and supporting evidence, see Williams, “Living in Exile,” 60–86; Williams, National Liberation, 65–93; “Education in Exile.”
24. Jesaya Nyamu, Interview 2 April 2008, 5; Williams, National Liberation, 192–3.
25. During the 1980s in the context of escalating violence in southern Angola, thousands of Angolans entered Namibia as refugees. For discussion of this refugee flow, see Brinkman, “Violence, Exile and Ethnicity.” I have encountered multiple references to people who were at some point associated with SWAPO in exile, crossing from Angola back into Namibia as “Angolan refugees,” including personal accounts. For example, Emilia Ainjala, Interview 27 August 2014.
26. In the year following my interview with Nepelilo, I shared his story with many of my research participants, including more than 30 individuals from different exile generations and regional backgrounds who are actively engaged in articulating a counter-narrative to SWAPO’s liberation history. Most were unfamiliar with his story, and none, including former Kongwa inhabitants, knew his trajectory after he departed from the camp.
27. For historiography that presents this counter-narrative, see Dobell, Swapo’s Struggle, 37–8; Leys and Saul, “SWAPO: The Politics,” 43–4; Hunter, Die Politik, 77–80; Trewhela, Inside Quatro,143, 189; Wallace, A History of Namibia, 271; Williams, National Liberation, 90–3.
28. By late 1968, most of SWAPO’s internal leadership, including Andimba Toivo Ya Toivo and others who played a key role in facilitating Namibians’ travel into exile, had been sentenced to lengthy prison terms on Robben Island. Also, several consecutive groups that had attempted to infiltrate Namibia from exile had been captured and Castro, then camp commander, was widely distrusted.
29. For further discussion of the historical terrain shaping historical narration of exile and the limits of scholarship that analyses current memory politics without engaging that terrain, see Williams, National Liberation, 16–19.
30. Toivo Ashipala, Interview 25 July 2007, 35–6.
31. According to Samson Ndeikwila, around this time a group of Namibians from Kongwa tried to travel to Kenya but were refused entrance by the Kenyan government. Eventually, they reconnected with SWAPO guerrillas and joined them at the front (Interview 21 July 2007, 41–3).
32. Williams, “Ordering the Nation;” Williams, National Liberation, 94–122.
33. See, for example, Nambinga Kati’s account of an encounter in 1975 between the Namibian exile community in Kenya (of which Kati was a part) and a group of Namibians who entered exile during the “exodus” (1974–1975), and who were sent to Kenya for education (Nambinga Kati, Interview 11 August 2007).
34. Ashipala, 16 March 2007, 1–2; Ndeikwila, 21 July 2007, 41.
35. The ambiguous relationship of Namibian exiles in Kenya vis-à-vis SWAPO is evident in the document which they released on behalf of those Namibians detained at Mboroma in northwestern Zambia in April 1977. Therein, the authors draw attention to the testimonies of Hizipo Shikondombolo and Elias Sakarias about conditions at Mboroma, but do not draw these points into a broader discussion addressing the authors’ experiences with SWAPO prior to their migration to Kenya. Also, the authors refer to themselves at one point as “we Namibian SWAPO members in Kenya” (UNAM, Katjavivi Collection, Series B1, Category 5, File 8, “Appeal for the Release of over 1,000 Namibians in Detentions in Zambia and in Tanzania”).
36. Hans Pieters, Interview 22 July 2008. For a detailed account of the Lubango detainees’ release, see Williams, National Liberation, 160–73.
37. Ex-SWAPO Detainees, “A Report to the Namibian People: Historical Account of the Swapo Spy-Drama” (Windhoek: 1989, 1997), 11.
38. White and Larmer, “Introduction: Mobile Soldiers,” 1271.
39. For further details see Leys and Saul, “Liberation without Democracy;” Williams, “Ordering the Nation,” 693–713; National Liberation, 94–122.
40. Patricia Hayes also makes this point about Godfrey Nangonya, another notably “un-national” former exile from the Namibia-Angola border region. As she writes in her contribution to “Mobile Soldiers and Un-national Liberation,” “Nangonya seems the polar opposite of the nationalist ideal … But any individual’s biography from these regional political struggles would go against the grain of some putative nationalist norm implied in such a title” (“Nationalism’s Exile,” 1313–4).
41. Williams, National Liberation, 22; 58–60.
42. For relevant discussions, see Werbner, “Beyond Oblivion;” Becker, “Commemorating Heroes.”
43. For further discussion of how Tanzania was perceived among 1960s generation Namibian exiles, see “Education in Exile”.
44. Again, see White and Larmer, “Introduction: Mobile Soldiers.”
45. Marx, “The Social World of Refugees;” Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries;” Englund, From War to Peace; Barrett, “The Social Significance.”
46. Tarimo and Reuben, “Tanzania’s Solidarity;” Temu, Reuben, and Seme, “Tanzania and the Liberation Struggle.”