Enduring trauma of attack on Cassinga re-examined

4 MAY 1978: A day of infamy in the history of Namibia.

The cold, neutral facts are that it was on that day that the apartheid-era South African Defence Force killed hundreds of Namibians – more than 600 according to some accounts; more than 800 according to others – in an aerial bombing and paratrooper attack on a Swapo base at Cassinga in Angola.

But almost 40 years after the event, the clashing narratives about the nature of the Cassinga attack still continue.

From the perspective of the SADF, the attack on Cassinga was a hugely successful raid on a Swapo military base in which a heavy blow was inflicted on the organisation’s armed wing and its capacity to operate in northern Namibia.

Swapo’s version – also the one generally accepted now – was that a refugee camp, or at least a predominantly civilian camp, housing thousands of Namibians who had left their homes to get away from racist oppression and to join a movement to liberate their country, had been attacked, and that hundreds of civilians – most of them women and children – were massacred in the bloodbath that was the SADF’s raid on Cassinga.

In ‘The Aftermath of the Cassinga Massacre – Survivors, Deniers and Injustices’, historian Vilho Amukwaya Shigwedha re-examines the bloodiest day of Namibia’s pre-independence war and the enduring impact it has not only on survivors but also on some of the men who took part in the attack.

Published by Basler Afrika Bibliographien as part of its Basel Namibia Studies Series, ‘The Aftermath of the Cassinga Massacre’ is based on research done by Shigwedha as part of his doctoral studies.

He not only interviewed Cassinga survivors and some of the paratroopers who were part of the attack, but also had access to previously classified material held at the former SADF archive in Pretoria, which helps give new insight into the SA military chiefs’ view of the nature of Cassinga and their motivation for choosing it as their target.

Survivors interviewed by Shigwedha give accounts of a day of horror and trauma that is still continuing, decades later.

On the other side of this tragedy, some of the soldiers who carried out the attack remain defiant and unrepentant in justifying the raid and denying that a massacre took place that day. The position of paratrooper commander colonel Jan Breytenbach appears to have become more nuanced with the passing of time, with Shigwedha quoting some of his writing in which he acknowledged that slaughter on a horrific scale took place when his soldiers cleared the trenches where inhabitants of Cassinga tried to seek shelter after the initial aerial bombardment of the camp. However, Breytenbach remains insistent that it was a Swapo military base, and not a refugee camp, that he and his men attacked and wiped out.

On this score, Shigwedha refers to a formerly secret memorandum with the title ‘the role of Cassinga in the military onslaught against South West Africa’ that the chief of the SA Army addressed to the chief of the SADF in March 1978. While that would probably be instructive to see how the SA military chiefs viewed Cassinga in choosing it as a target, the memo is unfortunately not included in the appendices at the end of the book.

Having dealt with first-hand accounts from both sides of the conflict, Shigwedha goes on to examine the enduring trauma experienced by survivors of the massacre, their unfulfilled wishes for justice to be done, and the problematic consequences of the brand of reconciliation that Namibia adopted – or that was chosen for it – at the end of the war that led to independence. He concludes that Namibia has failed to deal with the aftermath of colonial violence in an unbiased and fair manner, and that Cassinga survivors have embraced “passive victimhood” as a result of political manipulation. Naturally, Shigwedha’s inferences and conclusions would be debatable.

By its very nature, any work on Cassinga would not make for comforting reading. The academic bent of many parts of this work would probably not make it easily accessible for the ‘ordinary’ reader either, but Shigwedha touches on some important and challenging questions around memory, reconciliation and justice, and this is a valuable contribution to literature on a dark and deeply painful part of our past.

The damage done by military men lives on long after their victims have been covered up in mass graves, their soldiers have been airlifted off the scene, and their political masters are no longer in power.