Lingering Presence of the Colonial

The Windhoek Old Location, History and Photographs – Henning Melber, Dieter Hinrichs

The late enlightened historian Tony Judt, who wrote with remarkable insight on the past century and a host of other topics, remarked that: “The bigger your frame of reference, the flimsier your grasp of detail and local knowledge.”

He continued to say: “It is the middle ground that matters – the space between local detail and global theorem – and this tends even today to be nationally determined.”

‘A Symbol of a People’s Determination, The Windhoek Old Location, History and Photographs’ mines with reasoning power the ‘middle ground’, the memories and political space between the local and the wider international canvas.

In doing so, the collaborative book excavates the tracks of memory through a fragmented historical landscape forged by space, infrastructure, demography, ‘native’ governance, social interaction, church life and apartheid social engineering.

Visitations to the Old Location Dance Hall, the GO Bowker Municipal Beer Hall and the township jazz of the band inspired by Andreas Johannes ‘Warmgat’ Mureko recall the vibrancy of social life in what was then an apartheid space.

These visitations bring out the subjectivity and agency of real people as they defied and transcended the impulse to objectify on the basis of ethnicity, language, cultural diversity and race.

Both the preface penned by noted human rights lawyer and social activist Bience Gawanas and the postscript by Ewald Katjivena add meaningfully to the narrative by emphasising what it meant to experience rupture, to lose dignity and a sense of community and place in the aftermath of gratuitous violence and the political economy of brutality.

The social documentary photographs by Dieter Hinrichs add a graphic quality to the narrative and reminds the reader of the lingering presence of the colonial in postcolonial Namibia.

Text and images show that the entanglement is not only temporal, but also extends to the spatial realm; these identify historical links and connect to cultural, political and environmental geographies.

The forced relocation from the Old Location to Katutura – a process that formally ended in late August 1968 – left markers that continue to define social life in that part of greater Windhoek’s social and urban geography. The past, present and future are indeed connected through an umbilical cord of fractured memory.

Another redeeming feature of the narrative is that it does not descend into history writing of the kind that is fully compatible with the patriotic self-image of the most recent liberation struggle for independence.

The agency of a diversity of actors is recognised, even if the tragic events of December 1959 formed part of a broader canvas of resistance that later culminated in independence for the country.

The author retains a critical stance towards the official narrative at the time as chronicled in the Hall Commission of Inquiry and local media reports, as well as to subsequent historiography that elevates the agency of precious few individuals of note in the liberation struggle.

By doing so, the author transcends the pitfalls of thinking politically, while providing an opening for ethical questions of consequentialism; showing how the aftermath of the brutal events found their expression on different registers in present-day Katutura and beyond.

‘A Symbol of a People’s Determination, The Windhoek Old Location, History and Photographs’, notwithstanding lacunae in the historiography, graciously acknowledged by the author, building on existing scholarship, offers a vignette into the making of an apartheid city, Windhoek, and invites space for a conversation that transcends space and time.

It deserves to be widely read, for while the book is about the past, it is also an argument for the kind of future Namibians should strive for.

Finally, it will be amiss on the part of this reviewer if he does not acknowledge the sustained scholarly contribution of the author and the Basler Afrika Bibliographien through their Namibia Resource Centre, Southern Africa Library, to research and literature on Namibia.

Basel has built an impressive archive on Namibia that sets it apart from other publishing houses.

– André du Pisani is an emeritus professor of politics at the University of Namibia (Unam).

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