Exile and Repatriation: Experiences from the Zambezi Region, Namibia

ABSTRACT

The Namibian Zambezi region, formerly Eastern Caprivi, has an exceptional borderland geohistory. It resulted from the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty between Great Britain and Germany in 1890, to give Germany a corridor to the Zambezi River linking German East and South-West Africa. The Caprivi Strip as it was called proved useless, but has remained part of the geopolitical setting of Southern Africa to date. During the struggle for independence from the 1960s to 1989 the area soon became a strategic asset of the South African Defense Force and was heavily militarized. Due to increasing repression, many young adults, men and women, left the area to join SWAPO in Zambia. They crossed the border to Zambia and Botswana and were transported between camps to receive basic military training. Many were sent abroad to get additional training both military and civilian. Most also served in Angola, on the so-called northern front. The interviews of ten former exiles are the empirical data for this paper, most of them served in the armed struggle, but some served as nurses, teachers and as SWAPO envoys. The key concepts here are the experiences of the border people reflecting the decision to leave, the camp life, comradeship, and the common cause. After repatriation most suffered from a sense of being an outsider, and it took time to reconcile the leavers and remainers. The education and training in the Soviet Union, Finland, North Korea and elsewhere, were certainly beneficial for both the rebuilding of the new Namibia, but also for their personal life.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Kone Foundation for funding the research. The director of the Katima Campus of the University of Namibia, Dr Bennett Kamungu for his assistance during the fieldwork. Keith, Mary and Heather Rooken-Smith, with whom we had countless conversations on many issues, regarding both the nature and history of the Caprivi area.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Alfred Colpaert http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5833-7309

Notes

1 Oscar Martinez has identified four types of border regions: alienated border regions separated by a physical barrier, such as a fence, co-existent borderlands, interdependent borderlands, and integrated borderlands.

2 Microhistory is the intensive historical investigation of a well-defined smaller unit of research (most often a single event, the community of a village, or an individual). In its ambition, however, microhistory can be distinguished from a simple case study insofar as microhistory aspires to ask large questions in small places. The research genre increased already in the 1970s.

3 The recordings of interviews, as well as the written versions of them, will be handed over to be stored by at least one archive in Namibia and one in Finland after the end of the current research project. However, because of the informant confidentiality, the use of interview material will be subject to permission for five years after the end of the project.

4 Nowadays the digital age is extending the purpose of oral history, from offering collections as historical records, typically used on location by individuals, mostly scholars, who choose to visit an archive, to on-the-spot accessible renditions of culture, history, and human experience accessible by any of the 2.4 billion people currently with access to the web.

5 In the 1940s American Allan Nevins and in the 1950s British George Ewart Evans used oral history in their studies dealing with so-called great men and ordinary people: the British historian used the method in his world famous study on the English working class.

6 Very similar thoughts were expressed by one of Metsola’s informants, David. When asked why he decided to leave the country, he cited: “ … we used to work with White people. The Whites got more money, and I only got some cents … White people had their own schools and the black people had different schools … when you bought a bread you bought a black bread and the white would buy white bread, and you would not buy at the same place.”

7 Some scattered pieces of information point towards a conclusion that in the mid-1970s providing education was not yet high on the SWAPO agenda, and that there were contemptuous attitudes towards “intellectuals.”

8 According to our informants, they were not being kept incarcerated because they would have been regarded as criminals or a security threat. It was for their own safety. Cells were the safest places if the South Africans attempted to abduct the exiles back into Namibia (to face justice).

Additional information

Funding

This study was financially supported by the Kone Foundation [grant number 79.711].