The liberation narrative and the post return life stories of Namibian former exiles

Abstract

None provided. The following is taken from the author's Introduction:

I will study the relation of the main characteristics of the stories to various forms of self-representation and to different versions of the 'popular history' of 'the struggle', that is, to how the historical and social contexts of one's life are portrayed. This means that I will read the stories simultaneously as narratives about individual trajectories and as a body of historical narration in comparison to Swapo historiography and to scholarly and critical writings about Namibian modern history. I will assume tht in addition to historical circumstances, two other obvious sources go into their construction: narrative gemes and the immediate social and interactional context of narration

Before analyzing the stories, I will outline the contexts of their production and interpretation, as these are indispensable for understanding the stories properly. Chapter 2 deals with the various stages through which this study was produced, including the post-independence social context where the former exiles lived, the conditions of my interaction and interviews with them, and the development of my interests and interpretations from research plan through field practice to later readings of 'the material' produced in the field. I will also provide a theoretical introduction, charting alternative ways of reading life stories, and introducing my own view. In short, I will argue for taking life story as a narrative representation of identity and, at the same time, formative of that identity. It is not a direct reflection (whatever that might be) of the life it supposedly tells about but a form of practice that is directed by various forms of convention and circumstance as well as by intentionality. As such, it is a profoundly social activity. I will clarify what I mean by these arguments that form the basis for reading the stories in the course of the study. Chapter 3 will deal with the wider historical context of the production of the life stories. The 'facts' and 'events' mentioned in them do not emerge in a self-contained universe but only in relation to what academic historiography has long called a 'bias', that is, an interpretive frame, a discourse on social and political identities. Therefore, it is necessary to chart what narratives of recent Namibian history resonate in the background of the ostensibly personal life story narratives. I will focus particularly on the nationalist historiography produced by Swapo and its allies during the 'liberation struggle' and on the autobiographical writings produced as a part of this effort. I will argue that this literature (as well as other forms of representation) constitutes a single narrative representation of collective (and individual) subjectivity, a 'liberation narrative', that grows from the same root with the personal narratives of former exiles and provides a model for them

After having outlined the above contexts, I will move on to analyzing the life stories themselves, reading them for their relation to the 'liberation narrative' and suggesting interpretations of the various narrative 'strategies' that I introduce. In the first part of this analysis, in chapter 4, I will introduce the main variants of liberationist stories through analyzing whole individual stories for their structural characteristics. I distinguish the variants according to the form of their plotting and subject positions. In the second part, in chapter 5, I will look at the appearance of the liberation narrative from another angle, charting how it emerges as a popular history of 'the struggle', as a both concrete and narrative journey, from the stories treated as a single body of material. Simultaneously, I will also attempt to trace some of the historical circumstances that supported its adoption as the narrators' favoured narrative framework. In the third part, in chapter 6, I will discuss the alternative emplotments that are either narrated in direct opposition to the liberation narrative (the dissidents) or deny it by establishing a critical distance or indifference to its heroic collectivism (the deniers)