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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Namibia’s Decolonisation: Emancipation Lite?
| Panel |
19. New Perspectives on Liberation in Southern Africa
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| Paper ID | 678 |
| Author(s) |
Melber, Henning
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | SWAPO of Namibia gained support and legitimacy as an anti-colonial movement opposing – even by means of an armed struggle – the continued illegal South African occupation of the former German colony South West Africa. Under a United Nations supervised transition it secured an absolute majority of votes in the country’s first general elections in November 1989. It has ever since consolidated and expanded its rule in three subsequent general parliamentary elections (1994, 1999 and 2004), from which it emerged each time with more than two-thirds of votes. The slogan of the “struggle days”, that SWAPO is the nation and the nation is SWAPO, has 15 years into Independence translated into the understanding that the party is the government and the government is the state.
This paper explores the origins and forms of the party’s dominance and its impacts on the political culture. Furthermore, it scrutinises the degree of socio-economic transformation in transition to a society that was expected to create less unequal structures and living conditions for the majority of its people. It presents evidence that the (lack of) achievements so far cannot only blamed on the former colonisers and thereby illustrates the limits to liberation as reflected by the post-colonial Namibian political and economic realities.
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