Abstract
As was the case with other Southern African liberation movements, many of those who supported the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) in exile were housed in a series of camps in neighbouring countries. Some of these camps were set up to train guerrilla fighters in how to engage in the armed struggle against colonial rule; other camps primarily housed civilian refugees. After setting out an argument for the importance of camps in general, Christian Williams begins with a detailed chapter on the best-known of the SWAPO camps, that at Cassinga in southern Angola, best-known because of the barbaric raid on it by the South African Defence Force in May 1978, in which over 600 inhabitants of the camp were killed. Williams then goes back in time to consider SWAPO's first camp, at Kongwa in the interior of what is now Tanzania, in the 1960s. He then moves on to SWAPO's camps in Zambia in the 1970s, which received much larger numbers of people fleeing from South African-occupied Namibia, before he turns to SWAPO's most notorious camp, that at Lubango in Southern Angola, where the armed wing of SWAPO, the People's Liberation Army of Namibia, had its regional headquarters. Much of his account of Kongwa, the Zambian camps and Lubango is taken up with presenting them as sites of conflict, where SWAPO ‘securocrats’ perpetrated atrocities against their own people, accusing them of being spies or agents for South Africa, subjecting them to torture and eliciting forced confessions. Though there was good reason for SWAPO to fear spies and agents, large numbers of innocent people suffered and some died. In the third part of his book, Williams tries to relate what happened in the camps to developments in Namibia since independence by turning his attention to the official silence about, or denial of, what happened, to the largely unsuccessful attempts to break that silence, and to the politics of reconciliation in post-colonial Namibia. He shows how the divisions and hierarchies that emerged in the camps influenced Namibia after independence, and how the state has sought to marginalize those Namibians who attempted to challenge the nationalist narrative of a heroic struggle.
Drawing upon insights from anthropology as well as a number of remarkable interviews he conducted with Namibians who had been in exile, Williams's ‘historical ethnography’ is rich and sophisticated. No one concerned with SWAPO's exile history in future will be able to ignore this book. But the approach Williams has chosen to use comes at a cost. This is not a chronological history of all SWAPO's camps, showing how they developed over time. He has very little to say about the largest SWAPO camps, those in Kwanza Sul in central Angola, where most of the inhabitants were not involved in military training and where efforts were made to provide education and health services to the inhabitants. As a result, some of his attempts to generalize about the SWAPO camps do not stand up, while the title of his book is misleading in that its main focus is not post-colonial Namibia, but, as indicated above and in the sub-title, the camps in exile in the years of struggle against colonialism and apartheid. While SWAPO's camps are undoubtedly an important part of the context that helps explain the hegemonic role that the ruling party has played in Namibia since independence, other aspects of the liberation movement's exile history need also to be taken into account.
Williams' last chapter begins to put the SWAPO camps in a broader context, but does not provide any detailed analysis of the camps of other liberation movements or compare the SWAPO camps, and what happened to them and in them, with the roles that camps played in the histories of other liberation movements in exile. (Justin Pearce's chapter on the UNITA camp in Jamba, in his recent book on UNITA in southern and central Angola, provides an opportunity for comparative analysis, as do the memoirs now available of life in the Umkhonto weSizwe camps in Angola. This material could be used to compare the SWAPO camps with those of the African National Congress, for example.) A study of other camps is likely to show that, for all the similarities, there were significant differences, as there were even between the few Namibian camps that Williams examines in depth. Namibia had more people in exile, relative to the overall population, than other Southern African countries – 40,000, of a total population of less than 1.5 million people – and it would seem that the Namibian camps played a more significant role than those of the liberation movements of other Southern African countries, but only a detailed comparative study of the camps of other movements will establish whether that is indeed the case.