Imagining Decolonization: Historical Narrative and the Future in South West Africa

Following a brutal genocide under German colonial rule at the turn of the twentieth century, the League of Nations placed South West Africa (modern Namibia) under South African trusteeship. During seventy-five years of South African rule, Southwest Africans were subjected to the injustices of apartheid. Between the end of WWII and Namibian independence in 1990, the territory’s fate was unclear. Apartheid South Africa attempted to annex Southwest while the United Nations sought to place the it under trusteeship in preparation for independence. This resulting “South West Africa Question” was one of the longest decolonization dilemmas of the Cold War and created an atmosphere of deep uncertainty about the future within Southwest. This paper explores how South West Africans negotiated this insecurity by tracing how Herero-speaking peoples constructed historical narrative paradigms to imagine post-colonial futures. As political circumstances shifted between 1945 and 1990, Herero actors selectively embellished and edited collective remembrances of the past to suit changing visions of the future. Ultimately, these imagined futures failed to materialize. As Hereros confront the realities of post-colonial, post-apartheid Namibia, they are once again re-inventing the past to re-imagine the future.