In the previous chapter, I described the conflict that developed in Namibia about how to commemorate Herero experiences during 1904 to 1907. At issue was not only the question of how to categorize the violence perpetrated by German troops during this time, but also who rightfully had a stake in claiming and mobilizing particular meanings of this past in Namibia today. These conflicts had to do not only with what happened between 1904 and 1907 in South West Africa (SWA), but also with the meanings and significance of these experiences for present day Namibians. In other words, it was both the history in the sense of what had happened and its significance that sparked controversies around the 2004
commemorations.
In this chapter I elaborate on the bases for such conflicts. Certainly, in part these depended on the simultaneous circulation among different communities of several notions of what had happened. Therefore, in this chapter I will characterize the different histories about this past that are most prominent to highlight different understandings of what happened, which informed the 2004 conflicts. I also, however, will illuminate how different meanings have been assigned to these histories by different groups. It is through such history-makers that these different meanings of particular moments of 1904 to 1907 or the period broadly came to hold their present importance (or have become irrelevant to present actors).
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Another component to the conflict around the 2004 commemorations, however, requires examining what was at stake, what provided the fuel for contestation. As I suggested in the last chapter, the 2004 commemorations themselves formed a way to produce an
account of the past. Thus, conflict about these commemorations was a contest over control of (memory- and) history-making, for the creation of this past’s significance to the present. In other words, the 2004 commemorations served to create certain understandings in Namibia and elsewhere about how this past should be understood to impact the present.
Further, while the 2004 commemoration preparations brought some visibility to the competing knowledges about and meanings of this past in Namibia, I suggest that it was the question of restorative justice (and perhaps reparations, in particular) more broadly that prompted the intersection of different communities of history- and memory-production in new and complicated ways. Indeed, Historian Jan-Bart Gewald traces the past use of memories of the Herero genocide in Namibia to suggest that these memories have been mobilized in various contexts over the 20th-century by different socio-political actors with varying goals (2003). In this most recent use of memories of the Herero genocide as the foundation of the Herero restorative justice project, interested or affected groups have engaged with this past in new ways. In other words, as this particular use of the past of 1904- 1907 and German colonialism broadly has become increasingly supported domestically and internationally, the question of restorative justice has become increasingly salient for interested or affected groups. In contributing to discussions about restorative justice for Ovaherero, these different groups’ understandings of this past and its significance in the present have increasingly come into conversation and conflict.
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In what follows, I first want to briefly explain my approach to memory and history before going on to trace the veins of this conflict among different history-making
communities. It was largely because the 2004 commemorations were recognized by many interested parties as a site of history-production about the forms of interaction between Germans and Ovaherero during the 1904-1907 period (with socio-political implications beyond 2004) that groups struggled for control over the form of the commemorations. I will identify several groups engaged in talking about the past of German colonialism in Namibia and 1904 to 1907, in particular, and the historical contexts in which these groups produce knowledges about this past. I will also outline these groups’ various understandings of this particular past. In doing so, I aim to illuminate the features of this conflict over the use of memory and history in Namibia today.
Ways of Knowing the Past
Before proceeding I will explain what I mean by history and memory since I suggest both varieties of historical knowledge circulate among the multiplicities of knowledges about the German-Herero past. An enormous body of literature, from a variety of disciplinary traditions in the humanities and social sciences has arisen around the vague notions of memory (my focus is on what is variously referred to as collective, social, popular, or cultural) and history. Distinctions between what I choose to term social memory and history remain somewhat jumbled within academic literature. I will distinguish between social memory and history for clarity, but most especially because these terms may hold real and distinct meanings amidst social contests over historical truth. By social memory, I refer to understandings of the past, both narrative and fragmented accounts, shared by members of a community by virtue of their membership in this community.1 These memories may be
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discursive, bodily, or emotional. By history, I mean narrative accounts of the past (written, oral, or visual) that may constitute the products of experts, such as local oral historians or academic historians (the products of whom I refer to as History).
Some scholars distinguish memory as the raw material of history (LeGoff 1992), while others identify memory and history as two kinds of historical consciousness that may affect one another (Olick 2003). In other words, history is not only an expert’s composition of memories, and memories are not only the material of historians.
I take history and memory to be outcomes of particular processes of knowledge production. It is the process creating these different forms of knowledge about the past that particularly distinguishes them rather than something inherent about their form or truth- value.
Much recent scholarship on history and memory tends to leave these terms more vaguely defined because their distinctions are less important within broader inquiries about how people produce understandings of the past. For the purposes of this project, I also prefer to concentrate on the processes by which knowledges of the past are created rather than categorizing their end products. However, I will make a particular effort to distinguish the two terms as my informants do as well as to demarcate History, emerging out of Euro- American disciplinary practices.
Production of History as Knowledge
Commonly, history might be understood as the result of a professional historian sifting through information about the past to sort fact from fiction and then composing a narrative ordering of these facts. However, this positivist notion of history, as is widely critiqued by scholars of history, glances over the ambiguities of how fact is established or
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distinguished as well as the subjectivity required to order information. Some critiques retort that a history is merely a narrative. However, this constructionist perspective fails to account for the acceptance of some histories over others and the variability among winner’s histories, for example.
Many scholars have focused on the role of power in producing historical truths as an alternative interpretation of history as a process that creates particular types of knowledge.2 Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) offers a particularly helpful investigation into the making of history as he describes the workings of power in the production of Haitian history to suggest how certain aspects of the Haitian Revolution were effectively silenced in Haiti’s historiography. Trouillot outlines the process of history production with four
conceptual phases, which he examines particularly for the role of each in creating silences in history: the creation of historical fact (what criteria is used to determine what counts as fact), the assembly of fact (archiving), the retrieval of facts (narrating), and the creation of
significance (history) (Trouillot 1995:26). These phases illuminate something of the contours of forces producing histories generally and highlight that history is created in a historical context by people, behaving in the capacity of agents, actors, and subjects (Trouillot 1995:22-24).
Although a thorough description of the relevant processes of history-making in and about Namibia are beyond the scope of this project, I approach this contest over the history of 1904-1907 as an intersection of different processes of history-production as Trouillot and others have theorized. What are the sites of Namibian history-making and who is producing history in each context? How and why do some Ovaherero (and German-Namibians)
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the events of 1904-1907 in SWA been silenced and trumpeted at different times and in different histories? My interest is in the various contexts, people, and power of history- making about this period of German and Namibian history. I also seek to describe this contest as a part of history-making especially relevant to post-colonial contexts as well as being a feature of practicing restorative justice.
Production of memory
Analogous to history, remembering is not the simple recollection of previous
experiences. Social memories are malleable and responsive to, or constituent of, the context of their telling (Olick 2003, Popular Memory Group 1982, Matsuda 1996, Bloch 1998, Halbwachs 1992, Tonkin 1992, Hodgkin and Radstone 2003, Climo and Cattell 2002, Werbner 1998).
Virtually all scholars working on problems of social memory trace this literature’s origins to the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs on what he termed collective memory (1992). Collective memory for Halbwachs is thoughts about the past that are shared within a group. It is through interactions among individuals as group members that collective memory is created and changed. Collective memory, then, is the product of individuals remembering as group members, and not of individual recollections unified in a singular group memory. When group members come to together to reflect on the past, collective memories may change to fit with changes in the group’s interests or thinking. Collective memories, Halbwachs argues, are socially produced at particular times, or epochs, in order to meet current social needs and are conditioned by the socio-cultural context at that moment.
Anthropologist Maurice Bloch argues that many social memories about a particular part of the past circulate simultaneously. Among multiple suitable narratives of the past,
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different narratives dominate in different contexts (Bloch 1998:110). It is wrong, he elaborates, to consider multiple accounts contradictory for each is suitable to particular contexts. For example, among Zafimaniry accounts in Madagascar, he distinguishes one account that is “official” and expressed in formal, ritual contexts and another that is constituted by interwoven elements of memory that are passed down from ancestors and expressed in more everyday contexts (Bloch 1998:108-9).
The possibilities of memories are not, however, endless. Some anthropologists
critique Halbwachs’ notion of memory and assert that there are limitations on what constitute plausible memories for a given group and that the form of social memory varies according to the context of its telling. In their studies of conflicts over memory, anthropologistsMary Steedly (1993) and Jennifer Cole (1998; 2001) argue that cultural meanings, narrative traditions, and social context condition which memories are plausible formations. Cole furthers this consideration of the context of memory telling and suggests that particular constructions of the past are, in fact, used selectively in different contexts as discursive resources (1998:112). Similarly, Anthropologist Elizabeth Tonkin (1992) argues that a particular account of the past is not separable from the teller or audience in which it was relayed, that subjectivity has much to do with telling memories.
Histories and history
While some memories or histories produced may enjoy “official” recognition as singular, hegemonic understandings within a community, multiple competing histories and memories are always crosscutting these (Popular Memory Group 1982, Olick 2003, Werbner 1998). Thus, struggles over history and memory also include the negotiation of hegemonic versions of the past from multiple versions, as was a subject of dispute in Namibia in the
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context of planning to commemorate in 2004, both amidst smaller communities and within the Namibian nation-state. However, as with any hegemonic knowledge, this status comes of particular workings of power at a given moment. In short, even more hegemonic memories or histories emerge out of particular contexts and are not in any way permanently so or without association to their context.
Thus, different groups may aim to try to control memory- and history- making because to do so lends some control over interpretations of the past (Climo and Cattell
2002:30, LeGoff 1992:xi). Indeed some scholars particularly attend to the politics of memory production, and trace the political effects of memory production and reproduction --
“politicized memory” (Werbner 1998). In other words, memory embodies political power (i.e., to build nations or challenge a regime’s legitimacy), making the stakes great regarding the telling and reproduction of social memories (Werbner 1998, Hodgkin and Radstone 2003, LeGoff 1992).
In particular, some argue that memory challenges power and it is for this reason that African states in the recent past have often contested the moral right of citizens to public remembering, or the public recognition of memory (Werbner 1998:1). Public remembering, they suggest, has been utilized by some Africans to contest power in postcolonial
transformations, challenge a regime’s legitimacy, build nations, and create documented records of accountability (Werbner 1998).
This is how I see memories and histories of the German-Herero war being mobilized today in Namibia. Public tellings of the past have clearly been used to document claims about accountability for this past by both the German state and some Ovaherero. However, various groups have used politicized memory to make broader critiques. For example, some
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Ovaherero have also utilized memories and histories of this past politically to challenge the Namibian state’s role in controlling citizens’ relationships with Germany, to critique the state’s silencing of particular notions of this past, or to allege the Namibian state’s
marginalization of some citizen populations, particularly Ovaherero. The Namibian state has also used politicized remembering to forward the claims that it is the appropriate
representative of any of its citizens’ concerns to other nation-states as well as to promote nation-building in particular ways.
In Namibia, one of the most vocal differences in understandings about the history of 1904-1907 pertains to the nature of the fighting between German troops and Ovaherero. Such interpretations are interested in both the extent of the violence and the culpability of the parties involved. Especially within much of the German-speaking community of Namibia, the notion of a Herero “uprising” still finds supporters, although the less specific depiction of this history as a war is the most predominately used. At the present, public tellings of the war in Namibia forward a version of the history that both refers predominately to a massacre or genocide and at the same time to Herero resistance efforts against the Germans. Even amidst speeches at Herero Day during the past two years that commemorate heroes of this war, various Herero participants described the war as genocide, an uprising, and a massacre. However, many also assert that within Herero communities, this war is known as Otjindjandja, which I have been told means “many people died together.”
A second highly contentious difference in understanding this past has to do with the nature of this violence in a different way. As I particularly highlighted in the previous chapter’s review of disputes about how to commemorate in 2004, some interpret 1904-1907 as primarily a period of (failed) anti-colonial resistance which continued for almost 90 years
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while others, particularly some Ovaherero, see Herero experiences at this time as singular in Namibian history, not to be trivialized by association with (less violent or dehumanizing) experiences of the liberation struggle.
Both of these examples of contestation over the history of 1904-1907 in Namibia came to the fore in the context of negotiating an official history of sorts to be used in restorative justice or commemorative efforts. However, similar negotiations of multiple histories into single versions have been ongoing in communities who have a stake in these histories. In other words, German-Namibians and Ovaherero communities have also had to settle on particular versions of this past for various purposes over time. For example, within Herero communities a “Herero perspective” had to be sorted out in order to forward Herero claims against Germany.