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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Waking the dead: Documenting and archiving the civilian casualties of the Namibian liberation struggle
| Panel |
46. Shaping collections, producing alternative histories: The example of Namibia as a contested research entity
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| Paper ID | 670 |
| Author(s) |
Akawa, Martha Ndeyapanda
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | The memories of war haunt us in many ways - faded photographs on our walls, stories told in smoke-filled bars, tangled wreckage lying on the roadside, rusting watchtowers in abandoned army bases and austere monuments to those whose `blood waters our freedom?. Yet the Namibian Liberation Struggle is also marked by an archival absence. Public access to many of the documents that would detail the events of the war remains limited as the South Africans destroyed a great many of their military records of the war and the SWAPO archives remained closed to public access.
In the absence of the possibility of systematic historical analysis of conflicting archival evidence, history is created with a broad brush on a monumental landscape. In terms of public history the emphasis has been placed on the memory of the soldiers who died fighting in the liberation struggle. A post-war publication has listed their names, although those who died on Namibian soil remain buried in anonymous graves. The internet provides a virtual graveyard which attempts to unite all those who died on the South African side during their `Border War?. Such lists suggest that the compilers have been able to enter inaccessible archives and/or contact knowledgeable informants. Yet many of the soldiers who died, on both sides, during the Namibian Liberation Struggle died in Southern Angola and the community memory of the war in Namibia is more closely linked to the many incidents in which civilians were killed inside Namibia during the conflict.
In Namibia, almost a generation after the end of the war, it remains unknown how many Namibian civilians died during the Namibian Liberation Struggle. Where estimates are provided, the victims are reduced to nameless numbers. The absence of a consolidated archival record of these deaths mean that an important dimension of the war remains hidden. Our paper will present the work that has been done to create an archive of Civilian Casualties of the Namibian Liberation Struggle and discuss some of the challenges and difficulties associated with the project. It will argue that combining a range of sources into a new collection of consolidated information on individual deaths can challenge one of the archival absences on the liberation struggle and shape the historiography of the Namibian liberation struggle that is being created by a new generation of Namibian historians.
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