AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	44. Negotiating statehood in Africa
Paper ID	504
Author(s)	Metsola, Lalli
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	Memory politics are continually important in Namibian postcolonial reality. Historical events are seen as significant to current socio-political relations and used to legitimate or contest them. In this field, a dominant historical narrative of liberation is more or less openly contested by an array of alternative ways to remember. This paper deals with these issues as they appear in the case of ex-combatant ‘reintegration’. Symbolic casting of Swapo ex-combatants as liberation heroes has been a central aspect of the ruling party's attempted containment of them. This frame has both prescribed limits to ex-combatants’ and other former exiles’ public representation of themselves and ‘the struggle’ and relegated those who fought on the South African side to a secondary category in ‘reintegration’. On the other hand, memories that do not fit this prescribed mould appear strongly in the remembrances of those not captured by ‘reintegration’. In this way, the legacy of liberation reverberates in the present, setting constraints to bureaucratic tendencies of ‘reintegration’ that are based on the conceptualisation of ex-combatants and former fighters as a social problem and security threat. However, this contradiction does not question the biopolitical agenda of ‘reintegration’ per se but is rather built into the way in which ‘reintegration’ has been practically carried out, in other words, the particular governmentality that emerges in Namibian ‘reintegration’ arrangements. Therefore, the paper argues, emotionally charged narratives of history become part of biopolitics alongside more material and formal techniques, similarly defining and arranging people into included and excluded groups on the basis of their relation to the history of liberation.

The struggle continues? The spectre of liberation, public memory, and ex-combatant 'reintegration' in Namibia