REVIEW ARTICLE
BESPREKINGSARTIKEL

 

Namibia's liberation struggle and resistance: A critical view of some recent perspectives

 

 

Christopher Saunders

Emeritus Professor at the University of Cape Town, where he taught in the Department of Historical Studies for many years. He has worked at the Centre for Conflict Resolution and he continues to teach at Stanford University's Centre in Cape Town. He is widely published on South African history, being the author of, among other books, The Making of the South African Past (1988) and, with Rodney Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History (2000)

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This review article critically reviews five recent books relating to the history of Namibia's late twentieth-century liberation struggle. One is a general history of that struggle, one focuses on the Cuban role, and another on the role of the United Nations. There is a memoir by someone who turned against the main liberation movement, SWAPO, and a collection of essays on different aspects of resistance in Namibian history. All provide valuable insights, yet all are limited in the contributions they make to our understanding of the struggle. While it is good to see the nationalist interpretation of that struggle being challenged, there remain many topics for future scholars to explore and new perspectives to be opened up.

Key words: Namibia; South West Africa; liberation struggle; resistance; South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO)

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OPSOMMING

Hierdie resensie artikel bied 'n kritiese blik op vyf onlangse publikasies wat handel oor die geskiedenis van Namibië se laat-twintigste eeuse bevrydingstryd. Een is 'n algemene geskiedenis van die bevrydingstryd, een fokus op die Kubaanse rol en 'n ander op die rol van die Verenigde Nasies. Daar is 'n memoire deur iemand wat teen die hoofstroom bevrydingsbeweging, SWAPO, gedraai het en 'n versameling opstelle oor verskillende aspekte van verset in die Namibiese geskiedenis. Iedere een bevat waardevolle insigte, maar terselfdertyd is elkeen se bydrae tot ons begrip van die bevrydingstryd beperk. Dit is positief om te sien hoe die nasionalistiese vertolking van die bevrydingstryd uitgedaag word, maar daar is steeds baie onderwerpe wat toekomstige navorsers moet uitpluis en nuwe perspektiewe wat wag.

Sleutelwoorde: Namibië; Suid-Wes Afrika; bevrydingstryd; verset; South WestAfrica People's Organisation (SWAPO)

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Hans Beukes, Long Road to Liberation:An ExiledNamibianActivist's Perspective

Porcupine Press, Johannesburg, 2014
374pp
ISBN978-1-920609-71-9
R303.00

Richard Dale, The Namibian War of Independence, 1966-1989: Diplomatic, Economic and Military Campaigns

McFarland & Company, Jefferson, North Carolina, 2014
202pp
ISBN978-0-7864-9659-4
R562.00

Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Strugglefor Southern Africa, 1976-1991

University of North Carolina Press and Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2013
655pp
ISBN978-1-86814-749-6
R318.00

Jeremy Silvester (ed.), Re-Viewing Resistance in Namibian History

University of Namibia Press, Windhoek, 2015
317pp
ISBN 978-99916-42-27-7
R480.00

Cleophas J. Tsokodayi, Namibia's Independence Struggle: The Role of the United Nations

Xlibris, Bloomington, Indiana, 2011
396pp
ISBN 978-1456852900
R343.00

 

There is now a large and very diverse literature on the Namibian liberation struggle.¹The continuing interest in publishing books on this theme may at least partly be explained by the fact that there are so many different dimensions to it. As new works on aspects of the struggle appear, one should ask what they add to existing knowledge. The books considered in this review make different contributions, as will be shown. That by the retired American political scientist, Richard Dale, despite its title, which might suggest a major focus on the war as a military conflict, is a general work on the process leading to Namibian independence, which is to be welcomed given that there are so few scholarly surveys of the liberation struggle. The new book by Piero Gleijeses, a professor of International History based in Washington DC, is a major study of the Cubans in Angola, who played a key role in the process leading to Namibia's independence. Hans Beukes, a Namibian who fled South Africa when refused permission to take up a scholarship in Norway and then had a complex relationship with the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO), has written a detailed memoir of his Namibian experiences that throws new light on Namibia's liberation movement. Jeremy Silvester, a historian who now works for the Museums Association of Namibia, has edited a collection of scholarly essays on aspects of anti-colonial resistance in Namibian history, a number of which challenge a nationalist approach to the liberation struggle. And a book by the Zimbabwean former diplomat Cleophas Tsokoyadi on the important role of the United Nations (UN) in relation to the process leading to Namibia's independence is included here because, though published some years ago, it has only recently become available in South Africa.²

Let us begin with Dale's relatively short book. This is the product of decades of work and prodigious reading. No-one has a longer history of scholarly engagement with Namibia, for he tells us that he wrote a Master's thesis on Namibia and the UN as long ago as 1957 (p viii). He has now chosen to use "war" in a very general sense, to include what he calls the "economic battle" and the "symbolic battlefield" (p 20) over the future of Namibia. So his book concerns much more than the war itself, which lasted from 1966 to 1989. Much of that war was fought, not in Namibia but in southern Angola, and his treatment of the military conflict there is very brief. He is equally brief on the background to the liberation struggle before 1966, though in a chapter entitled "The Diplomacy of Resistance" he discusses what he calls "ersatz diplomats" (the Anglican priest Michael Scott being the best known) and others from the late 1940s and even earlier. The bulk of his book on the twenty-three years from 1966, is a sober, highly analytical account which in his words, attempts "to avoid the polemics that characterize much of the writing on the war" (p 3). That he treats the diplomatic, economic and military campaigns separately, and in turn, does, however, mean that the overall sense of development over time tends to be lost.

Dale sets out his aims in the Preface in almost thesis-like fashion: to explore why Namibian "decolonisation" (the use of that word may immediately put off those who will give no credit to South Africa for ending its rule of Namibia, and who see the process as essentially a nationalist struggle for "liberation") was so protracted; how it was internationalised; what was unique about the Namibian case (which means discussing it comparatively, although in fact Dale does relatively little of that); and what its legacies were. After detailed discussion of diplomatic, economic and military aspects of "the war", Dale considers those legacies in a chapter entitled, oddly, "The Art of Bending", then brings together his other answers in a brief final chapter, most of which concerns the relationship between Namibia and South Africa, Namibia's "metropole" in the decades of South African occupation from 1915to 1990.

Presumably confined by his publisher to a text of fewer than 120 pages, Dale inevitably treats many topics very cursorily. The Cold War in particular, is given hardly any attention. Though Dale is up-to-date with most of the relevant recent literature, writing of the South African Defence Force (SADF) he says he has found "few scholarly analyses on the various strategic discourses and counterfactuals that may have driven its policy choices" (p 130). His lengthy and most impressive bibliography includes two articles by Leopold Scholtz, but unfortunately Dale's book was written before the appearance of Scholtz's The SADF in the Border War 19661989 (2013) now the major book on that topic. While Dale's conclusions are convincing, his book is not easy reading. Not only are his sentences often cluttered with endnote numbers (265 in the 19-page chapter 5, for example, with some sentences having a number of endnote numbers embedded in them), but it is often necessary to refer to the endnotes to clarify the meaning of the text.³ Historians may be put off by Dale's political science approach, which includes devoting pages to analysing concepts, for example his discussion on legitimacy (pp 17-18). This is not a book to put into the hands of someone wanting an introduction to the way in which Namibia moved to independence, but any specialist will find something of value here, despite Dale's limited treatment of many relevant topics. To quote the blurb on the back cover, it should provide such readers with "a basis for further investigation of the [Namibian] decolonization process". That there is ample scope for such further investigation is shown, in different ways, by the other books under review here.

Piero Gleijeses's Visionsof Freedom is based on astonishing research in a wide range of archives, including those in Cuba, to which he was given unique access.

Forcefully written, Visions is a mostly chronological narrative account of the role of the Cuban military in Angola and the relevant context, which includes, as a major theme, how the Cuban presence affected the Namibian liberation struggle. Given its evidential base and its brilliance as a work of synthesis, this large monograph has good claim to be called the single most important addition to the literature on the context of the Namibian liberation struggle to have appeared in the last decade.⁴ But it is nevertheless a flawed work. Though Gleijeses claims to be impartial,⁵ his book is marred by its excessive praise for Cuba and by the way in which Gleijeses argues that it was a Cuban "victory in southern Angola" that "changed the dynamic at the negotiating table [in 1988]" and "forced Pretoria to set Namibia free".

His emphasis on the Cubans as being responsible for this great "victory", leading to the independence of Namibia, means he plays down, and sometimes excludes altogether, other factors. At one place he does allow that there were such other reasons why the process began in 1988 leading to Namibian independence, but he does not weigh their relative significance. "It was not Gorbachev's new policy or the presidential elections in the United States", he writes, "it was not constructive engagement nor linkage that overcame South Africa's resistance [to allowing Namibia to move to independence]. It was, rather, forces that Crocker and the Reagan administration abhorred: black militants in South Africa waving the flag of the ANC, the threat of sanctions, and Fidel Castro" (p 507).⁶ Elsewhere he gives all the credit to Castro and the Cubans.

While one can agree that the changed military situation on the ground in southern Angola in early 1988 "turned the tide of the negotiations", it was not only that change that "turned the tide". Scholtz has shown, in part by drawing upon SADF records not seen by Gleijeses, that although the Cuban intervention from November 1987 dramatically altered the military balance of power in southern Angola, there was no military victory in the sense of a rout of the South African forces, similar, say, to the rout of the Angolan forces on the Lomba river in late 1987.⁷ Though the Cuban attack on the Calueque dam close to the Namibian border in late June 1988, in response to a SADF attack on the Cubans near the dam, helped concentrate the minds of the South African negotiators, there is little doubt that the SADF, though now also involved in trying to keep order in the townships in South Africa itself, retained the capacity to defeat any attempt by the Cubans to move into Namibia. We now know of the secret agreement between the Cubans and the Soviet Union that Cuba would not attempt to do that.⁸ Though the Cubans, flying the MIG23s that had been supplied them by the Soviet Union, gained air superiority in southern Angola, any such Cuban invasion of Northern Namibia would have been metwith massive SADF resistance.

That a book on the Cuban role, based largely on Cuban documents, should emphasise the Cuban role is perhaps not surprising, but, in the opinion of this reviewer, the winding down of the Cold War and the changed situation in South Africa deserve more weight than Gleijeses credits them with. He builds a case to suggest that the South African government only came round to thinking of withdrawing from Angola, and then from Namibia, in response to Cuban military action in southern Angola in 1988. The reason why South Africa withdrew from Angola - not for the first time - in August 1988 is, he writes, "abundantly clear in the U.S. and South African archives. It was Cuban military might. Castro's November 15, 1987 decision to send powerful reinforcements to Angola and pursue a more aggressive strategy on the battle-field reversed the military situation" (pp 507-508). Yes, but it was also to help secure a settlement, which the South African government now sought because it promised the Cubans would leave Angola. What was crucial was that it was agreed that the settlement would be monitored and overseen by a Joint Commission made up, inter alia, of the United States and the Soviet Union. A peaceful transition to an independent Namibia posed no threat to South Africa.

Gleijeses believes that until 1988 the South African government continued to wish to topple the MPLA regime in Luanda and replace it with a government headed by Savimbi, leader of the rebel group UNITA. This was certainly what the Angolans and their Cuban allies had long feared. There is no doubt that the SADF wanted to weaken the Angolan government, to prevent it giving support to SWAPO - the commando raid on the Cabinda oil installations in 1985 is the clearest example of this - but that is not the same as working for regime change, especially when the MPLA government was backed by Cuban troops. South Africa's Department of Foreign Affairs remained more significant in the 1980s than Gleijeses allows, and continued to work for a negotiated settlement with Angola. For a time in early 1984 it seemed that such a settlement might be possible, with the signing of the Lusaka Accord, reached largely as a result of American mediation, but that turned out to be a vain hope.

Though many of the highly repressive aspects of apartheid policy remained in place in the late 1980s, there was by then much new thinking among South Africa's ruling elite, and this concerned foreign as well as domestic policy, both of which were highly contested. A book that has appeared since Visions illustrates this: the recently-published memoirs of the head of the National Intelligence Service, Niël Barnard's Secret Revolution.⁹While what Barnard says may at first seem to lend support to Gleijeses's interpretation, in fact it challenges it. Barnard began the first of his 48 meetings with Nelson Mandela in jail on 28 May 1988, some weeks after the crucial negotiations began in London on Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola and South African consent to the process leading to the independence of Namibia. Barnard denies a link between the two,¹⁰ and his book makes clear that he, along with others in the South African government, had seen the necessity to work towards the removal of apartheid some years before 1988, and certainly before the military situation in southern Angola changed against South Africa in the early months of that year.

The South African government had in fact accepted that it had to withdraw from Namibia over a decade earlier; the question was on what terms it would do so. For a time it was tempted to engineer an internal settlement, but it realised that it was in its interests to achieve an internationally recognised independence for Namibia. By 1988, with the winding down of the Cold War, it was no longer concerned about SWAPO coming to power in Namibia, providing it did not win the two-thirds in the election for a constituent assembly that would have enabled it to write the constitution for the independent country on its own, and provided the Cuban troops left Angola. In the negotiations, the South African government secured the major concession from Angola that the ANC's military bases in that country would be closed. So to write, as Gleijeses does, of the South African government in late 1988 having "decided to fold" (p 487) is misleading, for the government was essentially concerned with a transition in Namibia that would be at least relatively peaceful and not lead to a radical government there that would produce instability in the region. By 1988 it could hope this would be achieved, as turned out to be the case. Yes, the liberation movement, SWAPO, would now come to power, but it was the consequences that were of most concern to the South African government, and by the end of 1988 itwas prepared to risk those consequences. In the event, they turned out to be along the lines of what the South African government had hoped: there was no threat to South Africa's essential interests in the way the transition took place. It is incorrect to write, as Gleijeses does, of a South African capitulation, first on the battlefield and then in the negotiations.

Although Gleijeses's book is essential reading for an understanding of how Namibia moved to independence, it needs to be used with caution. Twenty-five years from the end of the Cold War, one might expect historians to try to be non-ideological and balanced. Dale does try to be, but in the opinion of this reviewer, Gleijeses has not used his sources critically enough. Visions is a far more gripping read than Dale's book, in part because the picture it paints is so black and white,¹¹ but for all its rich detail it provides an account that is partial and provocative and lacks nuance.

Beukes's book gives us his personal story. He grew up on a farm in the Rehoboth district, enrolled in Law at the University of Cape Town and then, at 23, was awarded a scholarship by the National Union of Norwegian Students for three years' study at Oslo University. As he was about to board a ship bound for Norway his passport was withdrawn, it seems because the South African government thought he would testify against South Africa before the UN, as two other Namibians had. Back in Cape Town, Beukes met a visiting American activist, Allard Lowenstein, who offered to smuggle him out of the country. He describes in vivid detail his escape into exile, then his experiences at the UN and elsewhere in America. Back in Norway, he was active in anti-apartheid work and in 1966 was elected secretary-general of a new South West African Students Association founded in Uppsala. Talked into joining SWAPO, he attended a meeting of SWAPO representatives in London in 1975 (pp 205-207) before moving to Lusaka, Zambia, later that year. A central section of his book is concerned with what happened there.

In a chapter entitled "Strange Times" he recounts the events leading to his having to flee from Africa a second time in 1976. The reason for this was what he calls a coup by "the Nujoma junta", which "grabbed absolute power over the lives of their countrymen" (p 280). The liberation movement he had joined had, he writes, "become a threat to the very life and liberty of its members" (p 262). He went to New York to confront SWAPO's main representative there, Theo-Ben Gurirab, whom he believed had orchestrated the coup, and pleaded for the release of the Namibians being held in Tanzania and Zambia. He then describes going to a meeting in Sweden to launch a rival political movement, SWAPO-D, but he did not approve of it taking the name of SWAPO and leftthe meetingwhen his views did notprevail (p 309).

Beukes's account is that of an honest man of firm and independent views who, unlike others, did not believe in putting the liberation struggle before all else. He was strongly opposed to the guerrilla war that SWAPO fought, fearing its consequences, but was there an alternative route to "liberation"? When he returned to Namibia in 1989 he was soon disillusioned by what he saw. While his memoir is a valuable account by one who became a harsh critic of SWAPO, and while Beukes shows amazing ability to recall events and conversations after decades, some of his views are extreme, such as the suggestion that the arrest and detention of Shipanga was the result of a CIA-inspired coup in SWAPO to eliminate the radicals in the movement, and that the Soviet Union, when it saw through this, had strengthened Nujoma, who then appointed more pro-Soviet cadres to leading positions in SWAPO (p 307). His book needs to be read with care (and the index is not always reliable).

Silvester's book, attractively published by UNAM Press, has nineteen essays that emerged from a conference held in Windhoek in December 2009 to mark the end of a joint Namibia-German project called Archives of Anti-Colonial Resistance and the Liberation Struggle (AACRLS), based at the National Archives of Namibia. Aware of the limitations of the colonial archive, that project sought to give voice to others, and what is immediately striking about this book is that most of the authors are young Namibians. Silvester writes of a "new wave of Namibian historians", many of whom he has encouraged in their work, and he claims that Namibia is "experiencing a renaissance of interest in history and heritage" (p 3). Let us hope that this is the case.

This is a very wide-ranging collection, with chapters on subjects as diverse as women's narratives, ambiguities in the roles of Hendrik Witbooi and Samuel Maherero, and solidarity movements in Finland, where there was general support for Namibia's struggle, and West Germany, where the government collaborated with the South African regime. This volume not only introduces new voices, but constitutes a new approach to the study of resistance and the liberation struggle, for much Namibian historiography has seen resistance and struggle in rather crude nationalist terms.¹² This book represents a break with that grand narrative to illustrate not only the diversity of resistance but also a range of perspectives, a number of them critical of the nationalist meta-narrative. For example, SWAPO's camps in Zambia and Angola are now seen not only as places were women were trained as combatants, but also as places where women were sexually exploited.¹³ Two chapters concern the early history of the Caprivi African National Union, which joined SWAPO then broke with it. Such work suggests a very welcome willingness to discuss the liberation struggle in all its complexity, tensions, ambiguities and nuances.

This volume also seeks to uncover the "everyday" history of resistance, so includes, for example, a chapter on songs sung during the liberation struggle, songs that continued to be sung even in jail, while another chapter explores the impact of the struggle on civilians in northern Namibia. There are, too, detailed case studies of the impact of the liberation struggle on Okongo, where the SADF had a military base, and on the Kavango region. Two chapters directly concern heritage. The first of these focuses on the equestrian monument in Windhoek (Reiterdenkmal), a memorial to German colonialism that was removed in December 2013 to make place for a new Independence Museum,¹⁴ and to this chapter the leading Namibian scholar Andre du Pisani adds a comment on colonial monuments in general. The second pleads for heritage education to be included in the school curriculum.¹⁵

From a volume that includes local and community aspects of the liberation struggle, let us return to high politics. Tsokayadi's book is a revised version of a PhD awarded by the Russian Institute of African Studies in Moscow in 2004 (p 17). The author served in the Zimbabwe diplomatic service from 1981 and from 1989 was deputy permanent representative for his country at the UN. As chair of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) from September 1986 to September 1989, Zimbabwe headed both the NAM Coordinating Bureau and the NAM Security Council caucus at the UN in New York (p 21). So while Tsokayadi's first two chapters - of four in all, constituting 216 pages of text - add nothing to what is well known, from page 117, at which point the author himself comes into the story, new information is provided. At first information is provided on the role of the NAM and its Coordinating Bureau at the UN, and then on the way the UN's role influenced the implementation of the Namibian settlement plan, for the author was very actively involved in Namibian issues at the UN in the last year before Namibian independence. His bibliography usefully lists relevant UN documents (and should be read with Dale's appendix on UN resolutions on Namibia) and Tsokayadi has included as many as27 appendices.

Tsokayadi's book is written from an anti-Western perspective. He is very critical of the idea that the United States was an "honest broker" in trying to promote Namibian independence. Though he suggests that Namibia, as a Third World country, benefited in some ways from the Cold War (p 215), he suggests that the Cold War prolonged its "agony" and that Namibia was a mere "pawn in the game of superpower rivalry" (p 213). He claims that until 1989 the UN was sidelined in the process by the United States, which had a "virtual veto" in the negotiations over Namibia (p 110) and delayed Namibian independence for "decades" (p 213). Constructive engagement and linkage are, for him, ways to "roll back Soviet influence" and help the United States "win the Cold War in the Third World", to quote the key American diplomat on Namibia and Angola in the 1980s, Chester Crocker.¹⁶ Yet elsewhere Tsokayadi writes that linkage was "conceived by the South Africans" (p 74). While interesting on the April 1989 "tragedy" in which over three hundred SWAPO fighters were killed (pp 146ff and 215), he is weak on South African motivations.¹⁷ Though presented as a scholarly study, this one, too, is a partisan and limited account.

Taken together, however, despite their different weaknesses, this mixed bag of books constitutes a considerable addition to knowledge of the Namibian liberation struggle. As we have seen, many new perspectives have been opened up in what is a vast field of study. Much work, of course, remains to be done. There are many other perspectives to explore. None of these books presents a sustained analysis of the impact of the Cold War on the Namibian struggle, for example. Were the SWAPO archive, now housed in the National Archives, to be opened to researchers we could expect much new information to become available. The relevant American archives will open soon for the late 1980s, after the thirty years closed period, and it is to be hoped that more Russian archives will become accessible, to reveal more of the Soviet role.¹⁸ Furthermore, historians are beginning to exploit the Portuguese records in Lisbon for what they say about the Namibian liberation struggle.¹⁹ The South African dimension requires much more work, for the inner workings of the apartheid regime, as it tried to respond to the crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s, remains to be explored in relation to Namibia.²⁰ Important new work is appearing on memorialisation.²¹More biographies and memoirs will soon be published.²² Gradually, more and more pieces are being inserted into a very large and complex jigsaw.

 

 

1 The best short survey remains the relevant chapter of Marion Wallace's excellent synthesis of the history of Namibia, now available in German as well as English: Marion Wallace, with John Kinahan, A History of Namibia From the Beginnings to 1990 (Hurst and Co., London, 2011). Henning Melber explicitly picks up where Wallace left off, and discusses themes in the history of Namibia since independence, in Understanding Namibia: The Trials of Independence (Hurst&Co., London, 2014).
2 When I ordered it for the library of the University of Cape Town in 2014, there were no copies available in the country.
3 That "The South African regime never defined what it meant by 'terrorist'", he writes, "suggests the power of lexical ambiguity" (p 47). Economic warfare includes "sources of assistance such as moral or normative, theological, financial, military, political and legal support ... a multidimensional zero-sum game, with rewards offset by losses, involving corresponding trade-offs. Who supported whom with what resources would be an apt characterization, as suggested by the title of Harold D. Lasswell's classic book on politics" (p 53).
4 See the reviews by Christopher Lee in the American HistoricalReview and Thula Simpson in the African Historical Review and the H-Diplo Roundtable: http://h-diplo.org/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XV-41.pdf.
5 Foreword in Visions, and his response in the H-Diplo Roundtable.
6 He goes to some lengths to argue that whether the Democrats might come into office in the November 1988 election did not affect the negotiations, but whatever the outcome of that election, Crocker, would no longer be assistant secretary of state, so there was pressure to conclude the negotiations while he was still in office.
7 Leopold Scholtz, The SADF in the Border War (Tafelberg, Cape Town, 2013). On the Lomba battle see David Mannall, Battle on the Lomba 1987 (Helion, Solihull, 2014).
8 Irina Filatova and Apollon Davidson, The Hidden Thread (Jonathan Ball, Johannesburg, 2013).         [ Links ]
9 Niël Barnard, Secret Revolution. Memoirs ofa Spy Boss (Tafelberg, Cape Town, 2015).         [ Links ]
10 Barnard confirmed this in an interview the present author had with him in 2014.
11 Gleijeses writes (p 504): "They [the South Africans] wanted to bring Savimbi to power in Angola and then, with Savimbi's help, they would crush SWAPO and impose an internal solution in Namibia. This was their policy as the 1988 negotiations began. PW Botha was as interested in reaching a modus vivendi with the MPLA as Reagan was in reaching an agreement with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He paid lip service to linkage to mollify the Americans, but he had no intention of subscribing to any settlement that would allow SWAPO to govern Namibia.
12 SWAPO of Namibia, To be Born a Nation (Zed Books, London, 1981); and Peter Katjavivi, A History of Resistance (James Currey, London, 1988).
13 Martha Akawa, "The Gendered Politics of the SWAPO Camps during the Namibian Liberation Struggle", in Silvester (ed). Re-Viewing Resistance.
14 Also treated in say, Reinhart Kössler, Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past (UNAM Press, Windhoek, 2015), chapter 6.
15 On heritage issues see also the chapters by Jan-Bart Gewald and Henning Melber, in Jon Abbink, Mirjam de Bruijn and Klaas van Walraven, Rethinking Resistance: Revoltand Violence in African History (Brill, Leiden, 2003).
16 Chester Crocker, High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighbourhood (Oxford University Press, NewYork, 1992), p 17.
17 Note his use of such phrases as "said to be", "reportedly" and "apparently", e.g. p99.
18 On the Soviet role see especially Vladimir Shubin's The Hot Cold War (Pluto Press, London, 2008), part 4. On the Soviet role in the war in Angola see the chapter on "The Regular War" in Filatova and Davidson, The Hidden Thread; Gennady Shubin and Andrei Tokarev, Bush War. The Road to Cuito Cuanavale: Soviet Soldiers' Accounts of the Angolan War (Jacana Media, Auckland Park, 2011); and Gennady Shubin et al., Cuito Cuanavale: Frontline Accounts by Soviet Soldiers (Jacana Media, Auckland Park, 2014). Mary-Alice Waters (ed.), Fidel Castro, Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa's Freedom and Our Own (Pathfinder, New York, 2013) includes accounts by four Cuban generals involved in Angola.
19 For example, Christian Williams of the University of Free State, who has used them for what they say about the SWAPO camps in Angola.
20 The recent memoir by the former head of the National Intelligence Service is especially disappointing on Namibia: although Barnard was involved in the 1988 negotiations, he says nothing about his involvement. We await more memoirs by South Africans, but see Theresa Papenfus, Pik Botha and His Times (Litera, Pretoria 2010), especially chapters 30-33; and "SWA/Namibia: Twelve Rounds of Jousting" in Pieter Wolvaardt, Tom Wheeler and Werner Scholtz (compilers), From Verwoerd to Mandela South African Diplomats Remember, Volume 1: The WildHoneyofAfrica, chapter 14, 273ff.
21 Kössler, Namibia and Germany. Kössler, Director of the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, Freiburg, and author of In Search of Survival and Dignity: Two Traditional Communities in Southern Namibia underSouth African Rule (2005) is centrally concerned with the genocide of 1904-1908 and the issue of reparations, but his new book does include a discussion of Heroes Acre and the Independence Museum (pp 33-36 and chapter 9).
22 Among recently published biographies are those by Dirk Mudge, Enduitvirn Onafhangklike Namibia (Protea Bookhouse, Pretoria, 2015), soon to be published in an English edition, also by Protea; J.W.F. (Koos) Pretorius, Suidwes-Afrika na Namibie: 'n Politieke Bosoorlog (Olimpiad Publishers, Windhoek, 2015); Gerhard Tötemeyer, Das Werden und Wirken eines Rebellen. Autobiographische und historische Notizen eines Deutsch-Namibiers (Kuiseb Verlag, Windhoek, 2015). The University of Namibia Press is soon to publish the important autobiography of Toivo ya Toivo, and Peter Katjavivi and Theo-Ben Gurirab are both said to be writing their memoirs.