Christian Williams’ historical ethnography of SWAPO's exile camps in Tanzania, Zambia and Angola takes up the paradoxical trajectories of the camps, which were set up by Southern African liberation movements from the 1960s onwards. The book demonstrates the capacity of liberation movement camps to open new perspectives on Southern Africa's recent past and its legacy, which bind subjectivities and nation together. They bring out personal narratives and shed new light on highly politicized, often controversial accounts of national liberation struggles. Camps also ‘illuminate the very processes through which exiled nations have formed and histories of exile have been constructed, shaping how citizens relate to one another today’ (p. 5).
The book is divided into three parts. In Part 1 Williams delineates his ideas about ‘the camp’ as a significant location in Southern African liberation struggles. He argues that camps were central social spaces for the internal contestations and conflicts through which authority and hierarchy were established within the emerging national community, and which continue to be narrated in competing histories. His research focuses on relationships and shared activities with former exiles. This includes the circulation of historical resources, memories, documents and photographs, which Williams shared with his interlocutors. Theoretical and methodological concerns are exemplified in Chapter 2, with a discussion of the SWAPO camp at Cassinga. Accounts of its former inhabitants elucidate the divergence between dominant and alternative narratives about Cassinga, a key site of Namibian nationhood discourse since the camp was attacked by the South African Defence Force (SADF) on 4 May 1978.
Part 2 takes us to Namibian exile camps in Tanzania, Zambia and Angola from the 1960s through to repatriation in 1989. It offers an alternative history of SWAPO in exile with the camps’ impact on the formation of social hierarchies within the Namibian nation as the central theme. Chapter 3 narrates the making of a Namibian community at Kongwa, Tanzania, in the 1960s, where SWAPO and Tanzanian officials used control over resources from outside the camp to bolster positions of power. This led up to the first significant ‘crisis’, and its suppression, within the exiled SWAPO in 1968. The following chapter shows the substantial conflict within SWAPO in exile, which surfaced in the mid-1970s in Zambia, when a new generation of Namibian exiles challenged the SWAPO hierarchical order; again, ‘the camp’ manifested as the social space of conflict and eventual suppression. In Chapter 5, Williams depicts the 1980s ‘spy drama’ in Lubango, Angola, locating it within the camp as a social space. This critical moment in Namibian exile history played itself out as gross abuse of power, and the devastating incarceration of hundreds of SWAPO members. In his careful discussion of the accusations, Williams employs the anthropological literature on witchcraft and concludes that ‘members of an emerging nation living in camps may be compelled to mobilize the ethnic, racial, and gendered categories of a colonial government that they are opposing’ (p. 28).
In Part 3, Williams investigates camps and the production of history in the postcolony. Chapter 6 traces the trajectories of three overlapping groups of people who confronted SWAPO for the abuses committed at Lubango. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, activists presented an abundance of evidence; they were, however, continually dismissed by SWAPO and postcolonial government officials. Williams argues that the failure of these initiatives was largely due to the international system of nation states and the human rights language it marshals, which enabled the liberation movement, now the country's ruling party, to resist investigations of the abuses committed in the exile camps. As Williams demonstrates in Chapter 7, the prevalence of both the dominant historical narrative and a particular discourse of ‘reconciliation’ was retained in the Namibian postcolony.
This is a fascinating study. The historical ethnography provides intriguing details of the solidification of nation and power during the exile years. Williams points out, significantly, that aid delivery, spatial control and knowledge production provided ‘powerful mechanisms through which SWAPO's emerging national elite asserted its authority to represent Namibians during its exile years’ (p. 122).
Williams also shows the significance of the camps for the production of history in the contestations over knowledge, recognition and power in the postcolony: ‘Through their considerable control over camps, national elites have affirmed this form of community and protected their interests. And yet, camps’ relationship to nation and history may be utilized to critique national forms of knowledge and to open new opportunities for dialogue and recognition’ (pp. 227–8).
This study differs from earlier accounts of the SWAPO leadership's authoritarian control mainly because of its ethnographic approach. Williams has been able to show that the politics of abuse were closely connected to everyday life and the control of resources in the camps. This provides a broader context for what Williams calls the ‘paradoxical relationships between camp, nation, and history’ (p. 230).
Williams’ long-term work has been dedicated to Namibia and the people who experienced the country's liberation struggle. The publication's main title notwithstanding, this is, first and foremost, a study of the Namibian experience, where the exile camp experience had more long-term impact than in other Southern African liberation struggles. Of special importance was the international system's official designation of SWAPO as the ‘sole and authentic representative of the Namibian people’, which gave the exiled SWAPO hierarchy an extraordinary amount of authority. Whether or not Williams’ discussion of the Namibian camp experience can be transferred to other Southern African instances will have to await detailed historical ethnographies of other exile experiences.
