Remember Mboroma? Narrating a fragmented exile past via UNHCR and SWAPO camps

Abstract

This article traces how Namibians, once affiliated with the Namibian liberation movement SWAPO, remember violence perpetrated on them while detained at Mboroma Camp in mid-1970s Zambia. The article begins with an account of a Mboroma commemorative event held in Windhoek on 5 August 2012, before presenting context for this event and how it has subsequently been remembered. Context includes a narrative of SWAPO’s 1976 Crisis and discussion of how memories of Namibians’ detention at Mboroma during that crisis have been narrated subsequently at UNHCR and SWAPO camps. Finally, the article returns to the 2012 commemorative event, analysing it in terms of the aforementioned exile past and fieldwork conducted with Mboroma ex-detainees since 2007. As I argue, camps illuminate processes of identity formation that are more geographically and temporally dispersed than scholarship has yet grasped, limiting efforts to challenge a dominant national history through group memory in postcolonial Namibia.

Introduction

On 5 August 2012, Hizipo Shikondombolo, a Namibian formerly detained at Mboroma Camp in Zambia, addressed an audience at the Commando Hall in Windhoek’s Katutura township. The occasion was the anniversary of ‘the Mboroma Massacre’, an event remembered annually by hundreds of Namibians who served as guerrilla soldiers with the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) in Zambia during the mid-1970s. Following an opening prayer and a few remarks by the master of ceremonies, Shikondombolo delivered his eye-witness account of what had occurred on that day at Mboroma 36 years ago:

On 5 August 1976 the Zambian army captain in charge of the camp came to inform us that our request to go to Angola was granted provided we guarantee that we would walk in two files while on the Zambian soil. We quickly organised ourselves into detachments and formed two files and started moving out of the camp. When the first detachment reached the gate-way of the camp where the Zambian soldiers had pitched up their tents, order was given and fire was opened on us by the Zambian soldiers. As soldiers we all took cover at once. Unfortunately, the following four Namibians were killed: Jerry Mwiiyale, Johannes Kadhila, Abner Nangolo, and Johannes Kanyemba. Fifteen among us were wounded . . . The Zambian captain in charge of the camp later remarked that those killed were far below the number of people they had intended to kill. ¹

This article traces how the incident which Shikondombolo describes and related events have been remembered by specific groups of Namibians across several times and places. As scholars of SWAPO have maintained, the mass detention of Namibians at Mboroma Camp and the violence perpetrated there and at other sites in Zambia in 1976 marks a turning point – some would say the turning point – in the trajectory of Namibian nationalism, inaugurating an era in which SWAPO officials wielded extensive power to define belonging and eliminate rivals within a Namibian exile community. Although Namibia inaugurated a new era as a postcolonial democracy in 1990, SWAPO’s authoritarian turn in exile continues to cast a long shadow over the country’s political life, shaping the official narrative of Namibia’s liberation struggle and stigmatising those once detained at Mboroma and other camps (see Ansprenger, 1984: 111–118; Dobell, 1998; Hunter, 2008: 80–92; Leys and Saul, 1994; Sellström, 2002: 308–337; Soiri and Peltola, 1999: 123–127; Trewhela, 1990, 2009; Williams, 2009: 73–118, 2011, 2015: 94–122, 2025).

This article extends these arguments, highlighting camps and uses of camp memory that have largely been overlooked in the aforementioned literature. As I emphasise here, Hizipo Shikondombolo belonged not only to a group of at least 1000 Namibians detained at Mboroma Camp, but also a group of 200 Namibians, who in the aftermath their detention at Mboroma, left SWAPO and registered with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) at Meheba Camp near Solwezi before moving on to the Copperbelt, Lusaka, and other locations, primarily in Zambia. ²

While living as UNHCR refugees and communicating with one another and others at Meheba, many of these 200 began to see themselves as a distinct group responsible for bearing the memory of Mboroma for the Namibian public. Moreover, they started to present themselves to others as part of a wider collection of ‘SWAPO dissidents’ and eventually, as ‘ex-detainees’ – a Namibian social identity referring to people imprisoned in exile at SWAPO’s behest. ³ At the same time, at least 800 other Namibians who were detained at Mboroma returned to SWAPO, most of whom eventually integrated with the larger SWAPO community at SWAPO’s Nyango camp near Kaoma and never became ‘ex-detainees’ as such. Rather, these Namibians have been very reluctant to remember Mboroma before wider audiences, for to do so would undermine any protection and standing that they might achieve through their affiliation with SWAPO and its guerrilla army, the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN). Even today, with SWAPO’s capacity to discipline its members weaker than it once was in exile, members of this group are very selective in when and how they choose to ‘remember Mboroma’.

These distinct, camp-linked trajectories for remembering national liberation are missing not only from scholarship on Namibia, but also on postcolonial Africa broadly. Of course, politicised memory has figured prominently in Africanist scholarship over the last three decades. ⁴ Moreover, several ethnographies have examined the ‘hyper-politicised’ memories generated around allegedly apolitical camp spaces in Africa. ⁵ Most camp ethnographies, however, have focused on camps administered by the UNHCR and other transnational humanitarian agencies since the 1980s – not on other kinds of camps during earlier periods of time. Moreover, scholarship has primarily examined memory produced in camps during the postcolonial era – not on how camps became entangled in confrontations with colonial power and how these confrontations reverberate at new sites in colonialism’s aftermath. ⁶ By contrast, this text examines UNHCR and liberation movement camps during the 1970s alongside each other, considering how different kinds of camps have shaped collective memory differently and how mnemonic communities forged in different camps have reconstituted themselves within a national community over time and place. As such, the text contributes to emerging historical and anthropological work on decolonisation, challenging the tendency within postcolonial studies to map colonialism’s impact by ‘leapfrog[ing]’ the transition from colonial to postcolonial rule, thereby overlooking the social processes through which colonialism ended and their lingering effects. ⁷

To advance this perspective, the article draws from Reinhart Kössler’s work on postcolonial, post-apartheid memory in Namibia (see, for example, Kössler, 2007, 2015b: 13–48). As Kössler emphasises, colonial rule and anti-colonial resistance in Namibia was exceptionally fragmented, reflecting not only the social identities through which successive German (1884–1915) and South African (1915–1990) colonial regimes governed, but also regional differences in how opposition to colonialism unfolded. These differences continue to shape differing expressions of collective memory in southern/central Namibia, where the German government perpetrated genocide and where people of European descent settled, and in northern Namibia, which remained relatively unscathed by German colonial violence but was later drawn into South West Africa’s (SWA) migrant labour system, resulting in the formation of SWAPO and an armed struggle along SWA’s northern border. To Kössler’s (2010) mapping of this fragmented historical and mnemonic terrain, I suggest adding ‘exile’ – not simply as a sub-topic within SWAPO’s ‘patriotic history’ (see Melber, 2014: 23–36; Ranger, 2004), but as a highly fragmented domain in its own right. In Namibia, and indeed in Southern Africa more broadly, this domain has shaped mnemonic communities linked to diverse exile locations and temporalities. And, although the locations and temporalities associated with Southern Africa’s late-twentieth century exile past have spanned the globe, very many of them are tied to camps located at specific sites in Africa’s frontline states. It follows that, although the nation is a primary framework for how former exiles remember the past in Namibia and neighbouring countries, national commemorations in these countries are ‘inseparably intertwined with sub- and transnational frames of belonging’ (Kornes, 2023: 8). ⁸

From this standpoint, the article traces the historical experiences and memory practices of SWAPO members once detained at Mboroma Camp across several sites and moments. It begins by contextualising the event that occurred at Mboroma Camp on 5 August 1976 in relation to SWAPO’s 1976 Crisis and Mboroma Camp’s history and discussing the immediate aftermath of that event for the Namibians who experienced it. Thereafter, the piece examines the primary sites where Namibians detained at Mboroma were relocated and where memories of Mboroma have proliferated, beginning with those who registered as UNCHR refugees and were sent to Meheba Camp and then turning to those who returned to SWAPO and lived at Nyango Camp. Finally, the article returns to the commemorative event in 2012 at Commando Hall, contextualising it both in terms of how another anthropologist, Godwin Kornes, observed this event and in terms of fieldwork that I have conducted intermittently since 2007 with Namibians once detained at Mboroma. As I argue, camps illuminate processes of postcolonial identity formation that are more geographically and temporally dispersed than scholarship has yet grasped, limiting efforts to challenge a dominant national history through group memory in postcolonial Namibia.

SWAPO’s 1976 crisis and Mboroma camp

Namibian memories of Mboroma Camp are intertwined with memories of SWAPO’s 1976 Crisis and the geopolitical events that precipitated it. ⁹ On 25 April 1974, the Portuguese armed forces led by General António Spínola, overthrew Marcelo Caetano and his regime. Influenced by the pressures placed on Portugal over years of fighting liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, the interim government began to prepare its former colonies for independence. For Namibians living along the Namibian-Angolan border and suffering from the violence that followed the Ovamboland election boycott of 1973, ¹⁰ the revolution in Portugal presented an opportunity for the oppressed to flee into exile. In 1974 and 1975 between 4000 and 6000 Namibians fled through Angola to Zambia to join SWAPO. As SWAPO’s numbers in Zambia expanded significantly, tensions emerged within the liberation movement. Shortly after their arrival in Zambia, leaders of SWAPO in Ovamboland and of the SWAPO Youth League (SYL) began to express concern about how the liberation movement was administering its affairs in exile, including its lack of a clear political programme and misuse of funds. They called on the movement to discuss these issues and to integrate its leadership structures at a party congress, which based on resolutions passed at SWAPO’s previous congress, should convene by the end of 1974. As new arrivals joined PLAN and were stationed at camps in western Zambia, the call for a congress came to carry further weight. From early 1975 onwards, soldiers complained about a severe lack of food and military supplies in SWAPO’s camps. Moreover, they discovered that SWAPO was delivering weapons to the União Nacional para a Independênçia Total de Angola (UNITA) even after UNITA had begun to stage joint operations in Angola with the South African Defence Force (SADF), SWAPO’s arch enemy.

Some members of SWAPO’s exile leadership openly expressed concern about these issues and supported the calls for a party congress, among them SWAPO’s Secretary for Information Andreas Shipanga. SWAPO President Sam Nujoma and his supporters did not support the call for a congress, however. Multiple contexts shaped SWAPO officials’ different responses to the party congress issue. Here it is sufficient to note that, during the mid-1970s, SWAPO and its allies were trying to consolidate SWAPO’s image internationally as a united, ‘authentic’ representative of the Namibian people even as the South African government championed the Turnhalle Talks, aimed at resolving the Namibia conflict inside the country without SWAPO’s involvement. At the same time, SWAPO was under pressure to align itself with the détente negotiations between Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda and South African Prime Minister B.J. Vorster, resulting in the restriction of SWAPO military operations on Zambian soil and assistance for UNITA.

In this context, the Zambian government began to detain Namibians seen by Nujoma and his supporters as backing calls for a party congress. On 21 April 1976, the Zambian Police raided the home of Andreas Shipanga and five other senior SWAPO members and detained them at Nampundwe camp on Lusaka’s outskirts. Concurrently, from 21 to 23 April, the Zambian army transported forty-eight soldiers affiliated with PLAN to Ruakera, a detention camp located 30 kilometres outside Mwinilunga in north-western Zambia. Also, during that same week, the army began to disarm roughly 1000 PLAN soldiers at the front near the Namibian border in southwestern Zambia. In July these soldiers, together with the detainees at Mwinilunga, were transported to Mboroma, a camp located on a mountain in the Kabwe District, northeast of Lusaka. ¹¹

By the time of the Namibians’ arrival at Mboroma, the camp was an established detention site, having been used by the Zambian government to detain ‘dangerous’ members of liberation movements residing in the country and perhaps also by the British government to detain opponents during the colonial era. ¹² Prior to the Namibians’ experience, the best recorded incident of mass detention at Mboroma involves the Zambian government crack-downs on exiled Zimbabweans living in the country at the time of Herbert Chitepo’s assassination in March 1975. Chitepo’s murder precipitated the detention not only of 1300 guerrillas affiliated with the liberation movement that he led, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), but also of smaller groups of soldiers affiliated with the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and the Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI). Zambian soldiers were immediately responsible for rounding up and confining exiled Zimbabweans, for distributing and withholding meagre food supplies from them, and for opening fire on them in the camp (See Alexander, 2017: 176; Martin and Johnson, 1981: 197–202; Macmillan, 2013: 115; Tendi, 2020: 58–60). ¹³

Namibians’ experiences of Mboroma just a few months after the Zimbabweans’ departure were remarkably similar. ¹⁴ The camp was surrounded by three barracks of Zambian soldiers, who were responsible for guarding the camp’s inhabitants and ensuring that no one escaped (Groth, 1995: 58). ¹⁵ Anyone who attempted to do so would be ‘would be shot’ the Namibians were warned (Groth, 1995: 57). ¹⁶ Food was both poor in quality and scarce in quantity. On days when the Zambian soldiers delivered a meal to the camp, detainees’ diet consisted of mealie-mail and beans, prepared without salt or cooking oil. Often, however, the Zambians did not provide the detainees with food at all, and as a result, the latter foraged for whatever they could find on the mountain to fill their stomachs, including grass, leaves, and flowers. Many were so hungry that ‘they had swollen stomachs and lost their voices’ and some died of starvation and gastro-intestinal diseases (Groth, 1995: 57–58). ¹⁷ Commodities such as blankets, clothes, and tobacco were very rare, not only because they were not provided to Mboroma’s inhabitants, but also because of the circumstances in which soldiers had been surviving at the front in the months before arriving at Mboroma (Williams, 2015: 106–113). ¹⁸ In enforcing these rules, the Zambian soldiers ‘admit[ted] readily that they were following orders as laid down by SWAPO’s top leaders in Lusaka’. ¹⁹

Amid these dire circumstances, detainees sought to inform wider audiences of their plight. On 20 July 1976, several detainees addressed a letter to the Zambian government and the Liberation Committee of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Lusaka informing them of dire conditions in the camp and requesting permission to leave Zambia for Angola, where, by then, more than 1000 PLAN soldiers were deployed near the Namibian border with the support of the Angolan government (Brown, 1995: 27; Groth, 1995: 58; Williams, 2015: 36–38, 134). ²⁰ As the letter reports:

We are pessimistic about the solution to our problems to be found here in Zambia. [S]ince we presented our problems to the Zambian government five months ago, the government has not shown any sign of solving our problems . . . The last experience with the Zambian government was the ditention [sic] of the whole 900-1000 anti-corruption fighters who were abducted from the front and put in a concentration camp in Kabwe District where our people are in grave need of blankets, boots, soap, tobacco, foodstuff and completely cut off of [sic] from the outside world . . . In conclusion we would like to inform you about our belief that our problems will only be solved provided we leave this country . . . We therefore reitarate [sic] our application to be allowed to move to Angola to join our comrades who are there in oreder [sic] to fight for the liberation of our country, and not to be refuges [sic] and not to be kept in concentration camps. ²¹

On 5 August, after consulting with the Zambian captain in charge of the camp, the Namibians arranged themselves according to their military units and began to depart for Angola. Before passing through the camp gate, however, the Zambian army fired into the soldiers’ ranks, killing four, wounding, perhaps, thirteen. ²² It was weeks before any information about this event, or the ever-worsening situation at Mboroma, reached the press, however, and even longer until the Namibians were permitted to leave the camp. In October 1976, news of the mass detention and killing of Namibians at Mboroma first reached the attention of the international community via a Namibian mother who smuggled several letters out of Mboroma inside the clothing of her dead baby and mailed them to foreign journalists following her child’s post-mortem examination. ²³ In May 1977, Hizipo Shikondombolo and Sekarias Elago, another Mboroma detainee, escaped from the camp and, without any money or supplies, walked and hitchhiked more than two thousand kilometres from Mboroma to Nairobi, where they presented themselves to a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reporter. ²⁴ Their stories, carried on news reports around the world, finally prompted the Zambian government and SWAPO to intervene. Together, they offered Mboroma’s detainees a choice. Those who wished to leave SWAPO and register with the UNHCR could do so. Those who did not could return to SWAPO following a SWAPO-led ‘rehabilitation’ programme.

Remembering Mboroma as UNHCR refugees at Meheba camp

In early June 1977, 200 Namibians were transported by truck from Mboroma to Meheba, located near Solwezi and the border of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in northwestern Zambia. ²⁵ There they found a UNHCR camp administered by the Zambian Christian Refugee Service (ZCRS) and Zambia’s Ministry of Home Affairs, and already inhabited by thousands of refugees. Most were Angolans who had been displaced during the lead-up to, and aftermath of, Angolan independence, but there were refugees from other countries as well, including some Namibians. The 200 new arrivals were dropped on a patch of open land near Road 25 on the edge of the camp and given several items to aid them in settling there: a pot, a hoe, an axe without a handle, seeds, fertilisers, and insecticides. Also, they were given blankets and food, including dry maize, cooking oil, beans, salt, and dried fish. The newcomers were informed that they would continue to receive food rations but that these rations would be cut in half after one year and stopped entirely after two on the premise that Meheba’s refugees should be able to sustain themselves through their own farming activities by that time. ²⁶

The Namibians responded to their new life at Meheba with mixed feelings. On the one hand, some remember their elation upon arriving at the UNHCR camp. As one later narrated to Siegfried Groth (1995), a German Lutheran pastor who ministered to exiled Namibians at Meheba and other sites in Zambia: ‘When we arrived, we were greeted by bold letters saying “Welcome to Meheba!” We all read the words aloud in unison . . . After leaving the prison in Mboroma, we were finally free . . . We could live without fear!’ (p. 69). Another reported that, upon arrival at Meheba, the group’s ‘back-to-life feelings overwhelmed’ them. There was ‘nothing peculiar’ about being dropped in the bush to make a new life as this is what they had done as soldiers ‘to camp at the front’. ²⁷ Nevertheless, most of the Namibians detained at Mboroma and sent to Meheba soon came to feel compromised by the circumstances in which they were compelled to live there. The vast majority were men under 40 years of age, and many hoped to access education in exile in pursuit of a better life upon return to Namibia. As one commented to Groth: ‘There [in Meheba], one cannot live, not if one is young, wants further education, if one wants to build a future. In Meheba one is cut off from the world’. ²⁸

Despite feeling isolated at Meheba, the group clearly strengthened existing social bonds with one another and established new bonds with others there through narrating what had occurred to them at Mboroma. From their arrival, the 200 Namibians lived alongside one another, grouping themselves according to the same military units that they had used to organise themselves at their previous encampments. Although most were single or had been separated from their spouses and children by the war, they accommodated the camp authorities by claiming plots in ‘family’ units, consisting of three individuals and a designated ‘family head’. ²⁹ As a result, the 200 Namibians established their farm plots and socialised as a highly cohesive unit. When members of the group moved to other locations in the camp that were seen as more desirable than the plots where they had been placed upon arrival, some made extra efforts to organise these moves so that they were done collectively. As Jackson Mwalundange, one of my research participants, noted: remaining proximate to others from Mboroma at Meheba was crucial for maintaining ‘group unity and focus’ – a unity and focus that rested heavily on narrating shared experiences of violence perpetrated on the group by SWAPO and the Zambian government and on imagining how group members might create a future in the aftermath of these defining historical events. ³⁰

Narrating histories of camp violence was crucial to this group’s engagement with their new neighbours at Meheba as well. Among these neighbours were two large groups of Angolan refugees, including a first-wave that had fled Moxico Province in eastern Angola amid violence during the Portuguese colonial period and the second-wave of UNITA supporters from Angola’s central highlands, who, following the MPLA’s successful bid for power in Luanda, had fled to Namibia and then via the Caprivi Strip to Zambia. Although the Namibians established relationships with members of both groups, drawing from mutually intelligible languages and shared regional histories, members of the Moxico group became the more important interlocutors. More established economically in the camp and not burdened by on-going liberation movement allegiances, ³¹ the Moxico group could assist the Namibians establish their farm plots during their early months in the camp. Requesting assistance, however, involved establishing some degree of mutual empathy and trust – social relations best achieved, in one of my research participant’s views, by conversations about the political events in which each group was entangled. These conversations were frequently held in Mbunda, the camp’s most widely spoken language, over local beer and gin. ³² There was also intense interest in connecting with the other Namibians in the camp, some of whom had previously been SWAPO members themselves but had been detained by the Tanzanian government at SWAPO’s Kongwa Camp in Tanzania during the late 1960s and early 1970s before being transferred to Zambian government prisons and eventually to Meheba (see Williams, 2015: 65–93, 187–196, 2017). ³³ Although these Namibians were scattered across plots in other portions of the camp, they actively sought out one another to trade notes about their experiences of SWAPO – experiences again presented in the form of shared story telling about detention in exile (Williams, 2017: 160). ³⁴

Through developing relationships over story-telling at Meheba, the Namibians previously detained at Mboroma eventually found a path to pursue educational opportunities outside the camp. Crucial in this regard were the Namibians at Meheba who had first been detained in Tanzania and who were in contact with a group of former SWAPO members residing in Nairobi who had successfully accessed scholarships via the UN Council for Namibia. ³⁵ As the former Mboroma detainees learned via ‘the Nairobi group’, the Otto Benecke Stiftung (OBS), a charitable organisation focused on refugee issues and based in Bonn, was interested in supporting education for Namibian refugees and would soon be visiting Lusaka. ³⁶ After meeting OBS’s representative in the Zambian capital, Jackson Mwlaundange organised a Namibian ‘scholarship committee’ at Meheba and submitted a group application to the OBS. The application was accepted and arrangements were made for the OBS to sponsor 5–10 Namibians to complete their secondary schooling in Zambia. ³⁷

In 1979 the first group of former Mboroma detainees left Meheba for the Zambian Copperbelt to pursue further studies. ³⁸ The students’ initial destination was the city of Ndola, where they enrolled at a local secondary school alongside Zambian students. ³⁹ After registering several complaints about the school, the Namibians were transferred to a secondary school at Kitwe, where, by 1981, more than 40 Namibian refugees were studying, again with the support of the OBS. ⁴⁰ The number of Namibian refugee students at Kitwe continued to increase during the early 1980s as those who were initially reluctant to leave Meheba decided to pursue studies and as the OBS extended its funding to Namibian refugees who had not previously qualified for scholarships, including those who had not completed primary schooling. ⁴¹ Nor did the movement of this group of 200 Namibian refugees end there. By 1981, some had completed their secondary schooling at Kitwe and, in 1982, the OBS began to offer scholarship for these graduates to attend vocational training institutes or ‘colleges’, most of which were located in Lusaka. Within a few years, the majority of the 200 Namibians were living in Lusaka, some as students, others as employees in the fields in which they had trained, still others as small business owners, supported by modest UNHCR subsistence grants. ⁴² Moreover, from the mid-1980s, as many as 30 secured scholarships to pursue academic studies in Western countries, above all the United States, where they were funded by Desmond Tutu scholarships (Groth, 1995: 70). ⁴³

Despite these movements, this group of 200 Namibians retained a strong sense of community with one another and a broader group identifying as ‘SWAPO dissidents’ throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. There is ample evidence of group members travelling between Meheba, the Copperbet, and Lusaka to visit one another during this period, especially for funerals and to attend Christian worship services (See, e.g. Groth, 1995: 71). ⁴⁴ At the same time, the group gradually became part of a global dissident network, including individuals who had relocated to northern Europe and begun to organise socially around Siegfried Groth, who many knew from his pastoral work in Zambia, and Salatiel Ailonga, SWAPO’s first exile chaplain, who was deported to Finland amid the liberation movement’s 1976 Crisis. Especially from 1986, as global awareness increased of SWAPO’s mass detention of its own members in camps near Lubango, Angola, SWAPO dissidents in northern Europe and in Zambia corresponded extensively, returning often in their correspondence to narratives of what had occurred to them in mid-1970s Zambia and how that conflict related to the conflict then unfolding within SWAPO (Williams, 2025). At the same time, tensions emerged among the dissidents once detained at Mboroma, especially from 14 May 1988 following the murder of Kally Shafooli, a former Mboroma detainee, outside UNHCR’s Makeni Transit Centre in Lusaka (Williams, 2020b: 874–877). Although the dissidents widely attributed Shafooli’s death to SWAPO’s security apparatus, there were accusations that some of the dissidents had become SWAPO agents and orchestrated the murder. ⁴⁵ Far from disbanding the group, however, the event appears to have drawn most of them and the wider community of SWAPO dissidents still closer together, evoking a repeated historical narrative that might elicit promises for UNHCR to send dissidents in Zambia to Western Europe or North America for protection (Williams, 2020b: 875). ⁴⁶ In the end, these efforts were halted by the New York Accords of December 1988, which resulted in the repatriation of c. 43,000 displaced Namibians the following year in anticipation of Namibian elections and independence. ⁴⁷ On 4 July 1989 roughly 100 of these Namibians, all individuals who had been detained at Mboroma before leaving SWAPO, flew from to Lusaka to Windhoek under UNHCR’s auspice. Others from the group eventually repatriated to Namibia with other groups of Namibian refugees or remained in Zambia (Williams, 2020b: 875).

Remembering Mboroma as SWAPO exiles at Nyango camp

Even as a collective narrative of Mboroma Camp solidified and was deployed by one group of Namibian refugees/exiles, a very different story was accepted among a separate and much larger group. On 23 May 1976, SWAPO established a commission of inquiry to investigate events that had resulted in ‘the revolt of SWAPO Cadres’ in Zambia. ⁴⁸ Two weeks later, the commission, chaired by SWAPO Labour Secretary John Ya Otto, submitted its report to SWAPO leaders and their international allies. Although the report predated the detention of the first Namibians at Mboroma Camp by a month, it offers a narrative of the events that precipitated their detention, establishing socially accepted knowledge of Mboroma among SWAPO supporters. According to the report, South Africa and West Germany had infiltrated the liberation movement, targeting ‘reactionary, opportunistic, ambitious and disgruntled elements within SWAPO’. ‘Collaborators’ included not only Andreas Shipanga and SWAPO officials aligned to him, but also a few rank-in-file members of the liberation movement’s guerrilla army. The remaining guerrillas involved in the revolt were labelled ‘misguided elements’–cadres who had been misled by collaborators within their movement, resulting in their betrayal of the liberation struggle. ⁴⁹

It follows that, for those who accepted the Ya Otto Report’s account of SWAPO’s 1976 crisis, the Namibians detained at Mboroma were inherently suspect. ⁵⁰ This impression was reinforced from May 1977, when SWAPO began to implement its detainee ‘rehabilitation’ programme. Within a few weeks of Shikdombolo’s and Elago’s report to the BBC, SWAPO Administrative Secretary Moses Garoeb and SWAPO Vice President Mishake Muyongo visited Mboroma. There, at the camp parade, they informed the detainees who wished to rejoin SWAPO that they must sign a five-point confession, indicating among other things, that they ‘had been misled by Andreas Shipanga’ and that they ‘had collaborated with the enemy’ in an attack by the South African military on SWAPO’s Oshatotwa Camp. Approximately 800 detainees at Mboroma signed this confession before being sent in several trucks over several days to Nyango, a SWAPO camp located near Kaoma in western Zambia (Nathanael, 2002: 181–182; Williams, 2015: 120). ⁵¹

Even more significant for solidifying a dominant narrative of Mboroma was the organisation of daily life at Nyango – a camp order that stigmatised former Mboroma detainees on a daily basis. Upon arrival in the camp, members of this group were placed in the same location, separated from Nyango’s other camp inhabitants, numbering a few thousand. Three days after the first truck arrived, SWAPO President Sam Nujoma visited the camp and called for a meeting at the parade, wherein he announced that ‘he had given orders for [this group] to be brought to Nyango’. Members of the group ‘could eat’ if they ‘worked hard’, Nujoma said (Nathanael, 2002: 182). ⁵² At the same time, Nujoma and other SWAPO officials made clear that this group was not to be treated as equal to other Namibians affiliated with SWAPO. For the next two years ‘the Shipanga rebels’, as the group was commonly called in the camp, were ineligible to receive scholarships, as most similarly educated Namibians in SWAPO’s camps were, and were not permitted to talk to other camp inhabitants, including their own siblings, spouses, and children who, in some instances, were among the other Namibians residing at Nyango (Nathanael, 2002: 182–183; Williams, 2020b: 871–872). ⁵³ PLAN guards were assigned to the group to enforce these rules and to flog anyone observed breaking them (Nathanael, 2002: 182).

Whether SWAPO officials intended even to preserve the lives of ‘the Shipanga rebels’ was also placed in question at Nyango. Shortly after the arrival of the first truck from Mboroma, PLAN’s Intelligence Officer, James Awala, ordered a meeting at a Nyango parade, wherein he separated 14 of the newcomers from the collective and informed those assembled that he was taking this group to the front. Thereafter, as other trucks arrived at Nyango from Mboroma, PLAN soldiers under Hawala’s command siphoned off others who were sent first to the Nyango Camp Prison and then to the front. Although SWAPO never reported on the fate of these groups, they were never seen again by Nyango’s inhabitants and rumours abounded about their executions (Nathanael, 2002: 182–184; Williams, 2015: 120). ⁵⁴ Later, in April/May 1978, PLAN sent an unarmed detachment of ‘Shipanga rebels’ from Nyango to Cassinga, Angola, arriving at SWAPO’s Cassinga Camp on 3 May 1978 – the night before the South African military’s attack. Most members of this detachment died the following day. Although it is unlikely that the attack on Cassinga and the arrival of the Mboroma detachment from Nyango were planned to coincide, this conjuncture of events, combined with the group’s repeated experiences of discrimination, constituted grounds for suspicion that leading SWAPO officials were working together with the South African government to eliminate them. ⁵⁵

Under the circumstances, it is, perhaps, not surprising that my sources offer no evidence of this group of Namibians speaking openly about their experiences at Mboroma while living at Nyango. There are, however, references to performances of Mboroma memory among members of this group during the 1980s. By that time, SWAPO had permitted some members of the group to access scholarships to study outside the camp and Siegfried Groth was meeting with some of these students in Lusaka, several of whom felt comfortable to confide in him about their experiences while detained at Mboroma and since their return to SWAPO. ⁵⁶ For example, Mamcy Angula, one of Groth’s interlocutors, shared that she and several others studying at the United Nations Institute for Namibia (UNIN) in Lusaka often remembered Mboroma in song. ⁵⁷ The song included the words ‘You were also in Mboroma’ (in Oshiwambo) and was sung by her and other students who had been detained at Mboroma during mornings while bathing in a UNIN bathroom. Her testimony suggests the potential for song to convey shared memories of suffering among victims of the violence perpetrated at Mboroma while evading censors in a nationalist movement that, from 1976, had become increasingly violent towards any members questioning its version of history. ⁵⁸

Important though such anecdotes are for tracing how some ‘Shipanga rebels’ remembered Mboroma, they appear to have had little or no impact on the wider memory politics surrounding the camp. Unlike the 200 Namibians who left SWAPO to join UNHCR and who repeatedly were able to share a common story of Mboroma with one another and other audiences, the opportunities for those who returned to SWAPO to share stories of Mboroma were tightly circumscribed. Moreover, nothing held the latter Namibians together as a group once the camp order at Nyango began to change. From 1979, SWAPO officials permitted ‘rebels’ still inhabiting Nyango to live alongside other inhabitants of the camp and began offering scholarships to those who met schooling and age requirements. Others rejoined PLAN and were incorporated into the fighting force then assembled in Angola. As a result, these Namibians were scattered, incorporated into the global SWAPO exile community and the political order shaping dominant narratives of SWAPO’s armed struggle. Thus, regardless of how those who rejoined SWAPO remembered Mboroma privately or in small groups of trusted comrades, their memories did not compete for attention in the global discourse about Namibia’s liberation struggle shaped by SWAPO’s exile leadership. In the middle of 1989, most of these Namibians repatriated with other SWAPO members. Many eventually identified as ‘SWAPO exiles’ or ‘SWAPO veterans’, requesting compensation from Namibia’s SWAPO-led government for sacrifices made during the liberation struggle, but very few associated publicly with ‘ex-detainees’. ⁵⁹

Remembering Mboroma in Namibia while facing a fragmented exile past

In some respects, the commemorative ceremony in Katutura on 5 August 2012 – the event with which this article began – is a notable instance of unity among those countering SWAPO’s national narrative in postcolonial Namibia through group memory. Before narrating ‘the Mboroma Massacre’, the centrepiece of his keynote address, Hizipo Shikondombolo announced that he and other organisers of the ceremony were in the process of forming a new civic organisation called the Namibia Truth and Justice Association (NAMTJA). NAMTJA, he announced, was committed not only to commemorating 5 August annually, but also 4 July – the day when not only he and some other UNHCR refugees, but also a larger group of Namibians imprisoned at Lubango, repatriated to Namibia. Moreover, as Shikondomobolo made clear, NAMTJA would use the occasion to remember other groups who had died during Namibia’s liberation struggle and whose memory had been effaced by the nation’s primary liberation movement turned ruling party. Shikondombolo’s list of forgotten Namibians was long with references to an array of people killed during the German and South African colonial periods extending to contexts beyond the scope of this article. The list is notable, however, for its inclusion of ethnic and regional groups marginal to SWAPO’s strongest support base in northern Namibia and of individuals with differing relationships to SWAPO, among them staunch SWAPO supporters and black Namibians who once belonged the apartheid government’s military. ⁶⁰

Such inclusivity among groups marginalised in SWAPO’s national narrative is also reflected in the audience who assembled for the 2012 Mboroma commemorative event. Although less than 100 people attended the event, those present included white and black Namibians, representing churches, civil society organisations, opposition political parties, and genocide committees associated with the movement then demanding reparations from the German government for violence perpetrated in SWA from 1904 to 1908 (Kornes, 2023: 137). ⁶¹ Also, and most significantly for the argument advanced here, the audience included a range of former exiles, among them not only individuals who had been detained at Mboroma in 1976-1977, but also those imprisoned at SWAPO’s behest in late 1960s Tanzania, and in SWAPO’s Lubango ‘dungeons’ in 1980s Angola. Although another organisation, the Breaking the Wall of Silence Movement (BWS), had during the mid-1990s drawn together people from these three generations of Namibians imprisoned by SWAPO in exile, few BWS members have belonged to the group once detained at Mboroma (Williams, 2015: 178–179). Moreover, by the time I conducted my doctoral fieldwork in 2007–2008, BWS was less active than it had been during the mid-1990s and the former detainees of Mboroma with whom I conducted research often commented on their inability to contribute meaningfully to the movement – either because they had insufficient resources to travel from northern Namibia to Windhoek for BWS meetings, or because they felt marginalised from the social networks determining BWS’s activities, or both. ⁶² In light of this context, a multi-generational public gathering of ex-detainees led by Shikondombolo, a rank-in-file PLAN member detained at Mboroma and a hero to many belonging to that group, was and is a milestone.

At the same time, the commemorative event and its immediate aftermath are also evidence of the fracturing of group solidarities in and after exile – a fracturing that is more complex than the Namibian literature’s dichotomy between ‘SWAPO exiles’ and ‘ex-detainees’ can allow. Importantly, most if not all of the Namibians detained at Mboroma who attended the 5 August commemorative event were individuals who left SWAPO for UNHCR’s Meheba Camp after their detention. Certainly those witnesses of 5 August 1976 who spoke during the ceremony, including several who contributed to a lengthy discussion after Shikondombolo’s keynote address, were all part of the Meheba group. ⁶³ This pattern reflects the different exile social pressures surrounding Mboroma detainees who left SWAPO and who returned to SWAPO as discussed above – dynamics very evident during my fieldwork in Namibia. For example, when I began doctoral fieldwork in January 2007, I approached individuals from both groups of Mboroma detainees, inviting them to discuss their experiences in exile with me. Those who had left SWAPO were very eager to talk, enlisting others to speak with me as I travelled across Windhoek and various locations in northern Namibia and resulting in twenty-two research participants. No one who had returned to SWAPO after detention at Mboroma wished to participate in the project, however, and this despite strong participation in my research from loyal SWAPO members more generally. Moreover, on a few occasions, members of the Meheba group initiated meetings between me and those detained at Mboroma who had returned to SWAPO in the hope that I, as a researcher external to SWAPO’s internal conflicts, might be able to initiate conversations about occurrences in exile which they had not managed to have with their own neighbours in Namibia. Repeatedly, these conversations were short and elicited little historical detail. As Jackson Mwalundange later maintained, those who returned to SWAPO had long been ‘shy’ towards those who had left SWAPO, not only because they were trying to ‘keep themselves clean in the eyes of the party’, but also because things had turned out differently in exile than those who returned to SWAPO had imagined with many who left accessing better educations and jobs than those who returned. ⁶⁴

Also, among those who identify as ‘ex-detainees’, there continue to be divisions, rooted in Namibia’s exile and post-exile past, that have weakened a shared sense of ex-detainee group-ness and that may have undermined the initiative to create NAMTJA. For example, although Shikondombolo announced BWS as one of the event’s co-hosts, BWS’s leaders were not present at the Commando Hall for the occasion. Two weeks later, BWS’s President and former Lubango detainee Oiva Angula noted in conversation with Godwin Kornes that he did not see the founding of a new organisation agitating for ex-detainees as ‘entirely sensible’, as it was, in his estimation preferable at that stage not to antagonise the Namibian government further, but rather to work towards cooperation. ⁶⁵ Other differences, not mentioned by Angula, may also have undermined cooperation between those detained at Lubango during the 1980s and at Mboroma and others sites in Zambia during the 1970s. For example, most individuals who have been active in BWS reside in, or travel often to, Windhoek, and many are ethnic minorities living in communities where SWAPO’s support base is less strong than in Ovamboland, northern Namibia, where most individuals once detained at Mboroma now live. ⁶⁶ Moreover, many differ in their historical interpretations, above all of former PLAN leader Peter Nanyemba, whom those detained at Mboroma tend to criticise for his role in supporting the Zambian government’s détente policy and perpetrating violence on PLAN members and who Lubango ex-detainees have often seen as their advocate within the liberation army before his untimely and mysterious death in Angola in April 1984 (Williams, 2015: 134–142). ⁶⁷ Such differences may begin to explain why NAMTJA did not co-host any subsequent events with BWS and effectively disappeared from the Namibian public’s view following its August 2012 launch.

Moreover, the difficulty of sustaining such public history initiatives for most Namibian former exiles, including the vast majority of those detained at Mboroma, should not be underestimated. Central to the initiative of creating NAMTJA was Hizipo Shikdombolo himself who, from the time we first met in June 2007, was intensely devoted to collecting archival documents concerning developments within SWAPO in-mid 1970s Zambia, including documents which I had then recently accessed. Over the next few years I became more aware of his personal drive to bring the history of Mboroma Camp to the attention of the Namibian public and to ground that history in evidence. ⁶⁸ At the same time, I also became aware that Shikondombolo was struggling with health problems that were difficult for him to address, especially as an inhabitant of an informal settlement in Oshakati without a steady income. On 29 July 2013, less than a year after the Mboroma commemorative event, Hizipo Shikondombolo died. Although his initiative had been widely supported by those detained at Mboroma involved in my research, none were able to take up the mantle of organising events to remember Mboroma publicly alongside other pressing commitments and amid, in most cases, precarious economic circumstances.

All this is not to say, of course, that Mboroma has been ‘forgotten’. Since 2007 research participants who lived at Mboroma have often gathered with other ‘survivors’ to remember what had transpired at that camp and at other sites of exile through informal story-telling – gatherings in which I have also participated, albeit with an overlapping research focus. Sometimes this story telling has occurred consciously on 5 August, but more often it takes place at weddings, funerals, and other major life events that draw those formerly detained at Mboroma, and especially the Meheba group, together. ⁶⁹ Such narrations of history do not capture public attention and are easily missed by those who do not have personal ties to the mnemonic communities involved. Also, they are not focused entirely or even primarily on ‘Namibia’ as their frame of reference. Rather, like many of the anecdotes about Mboroma story-telling recorded above, these stories re-establish ties between people who have shared profound personal experiences at specific exile times and places – contexts of which most of their fellow citizens are, at best, dimly aware. These stories reflect the fragmentation of memory which Namibia and neighbouring countries have inherited from exile even as they remain largely hidden from public view due, in no small part, to that same exile past.