‘Realising the Self and Developing the African’: German Immigrants in Namibia

Abstract

This paper is based on research among German immigrants in Namibia, a country with a long history of colonisation. After Germany, the first colonial power, ceded the territory as a consequence of the First World War, South Africa effectively ruled the country until 1990. Both former colonial powers established principles of white rule and initiated settler communities, whose descendants still live in the country. This article examines biographical narratives of German immigrants who have settled in Namibia since the 1950s. It focuses on their discourses of self-understanding in this postcolonial, post-apartheid context. The discussion follows two related issues: the cultural models of personhood that narrators use to represent their historical selves, and the ways in which these models are applied to recent historical change in Namibia. The article concludes by showing how both perspectives work to recycle colonial imaginations.

Keywords:

• Expatriate
• Postcolonial
• Namibia
• Germans
• Identities

Notes

1. All interview transcripts are translations from the German and based on tape recordings. […] indicates additions by the author of this paper; CAPITALS indicate emphasis. All personal names are pseudonyms.

2. The South African army invaded the territory in 1915. In 1920 South Africa was granted a Mandate by the League of Nations to govern South West Africa. The South African administration imposed a range of further land, labour and tax policies with the aim of solidifying white rule (Silvester et al. 1998; for apartheid, see Diener and Graefe 2001). The UN revoked South Africa's right to administer the territory in the 1960s, yet South Africa maintained its rule, defying a series of UN resolutions. The UN renamed the territory Namibia in 1968, and acknowledged SWAPO as Namibia's only legitimate representative in 1973 (Dreyer 1994).

3. The land reform programme safeguards existing land ownership rights and accounts for a slow process of change, a factor that has been widely criticised by those whose ancestors lost land through colonial theft (Kaapama 2007; Werner 1993).

4. Different, not entirely recent, sources generally quote figures of about 75,000 Namibian whites, 50,000 Afrikaners, 20,000 Germans and about 5,000 British. This amounts to less than 4 per cent of the population.

5. The German Federal Office for Statistics gives figures of between 200 and 400 emigrants per year since 1990 (email communication).

6. The professions ranged from hairdressers to carpenters, electricians, plumbers and engineers; interviewees also worked in diverse sectors of trade, the building industry, banking, and tourism. More recently, regulations for work and residence permits in Namibia have tightened, linking them to migrants' financial means and ability to create jobs.

7. Similar practices of identity that deny any form of interdependence between immigrants/settlers and host populations on the basis of racial constructions have been found more widely in colonial and postcolonial settler contexts in Africa and elsewhere (see e.g. Crapanzano 1985; Kennedy 1987; Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis 1995). Evidently apartheid institutionalised this stance.

8. Several interviewees who ran businesses, including Anja, expressed discontent with Namibia's new labour laws and their protection of workers from indiscriminate ‘hire and fire’. Her comment about not wanting to create employment is also to be seen within this context.

9. This Westernising stance is evidently not confined to these narratives in Namibia. See, for instance, the critical development literature for related issues (e.g. Goudge 2003; Kothari 2005).