The Aftermath of the Cassinga Massacre: Survivors, Deniers and Injustices, by Vilho Amukwaya Shigwedha, explores the unresolved afterlives of colonial and apartheid violence in independent Namibia. It also examines the problems and impossibilities of adequately sharing, representing, and conveying the realities of lived trauma. The event that inspires the study took place in 1978, when South African forces attacked a South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) camp at Cassinga, Angola, which housed at that time over 4,000 civilians, primarily women and children, who had fled from Namibia. A brutal massacre ensued, leaving at least 400 noncombatants dead. From the moment of the assault (and as archival sources demonstrate, from the earliest stages of its planning), Cassinga has been deeply controversial. Shigwedha delves into these entangled conflicts by examining how the dominant narratives and representations of the attack by both South African Defence Force (SADF) and SWAPO caused survivors continued suffering, because those official accounts denied their memories of the event and actively ignored, concealed, or obscured the horrors they had lived.

The Aftermath of the Cassinga Massacre is deceptively dense. Comprised of seven chapters plus an Introduction, Conclusion, and excellent Foreword by Ellen Namhila, the book interrogates different modalities of narration, representation, and remembrance related to the massacre: eyewitness accounts, photographs, physical scars, commemorations, and public debates. Shigwedha's intention is not to provide a comprehensive or ‘true’ account of Cassinga, something his book suggests is futile, but instead to ‘emphasize dialogue over a narrative structure’ based on ‘ambivalence and silence rather than positive evidence’ (2). His dialogic approach juxtaposes different sources of what might be considered evidence with the testimonies of survivors and perpetrators. Indeed, the book shines in its presentation of extended oral histories, survivors’ reactions to photographs, and their narrations of ongoing physical and emotional pain. As Shigwedha explores these different dimensions of the event and the ways in which it has been constructed and reconstrued over time, he builds an argument underscoring the impossibilities of adequately transmitting the memories of survivors and the experiences of violence without flattening, obscuring, and damaging them. The dominant narratives of the SADF and SWAPO amplify these effects in ways that are particularly hurtful to survivors.

Shigwedha's admirable effort to simultaneously complicate and problematize both the event of the Cassinga Massacre as well as its afterlives presents several challenges. Since his central argument is that adequately conveying or communicating violence is impossible, and that efforts to do so are rife with troubling complications, Shigwedha arguably sets himself a Sisyphean task in his attempts to unpack Cassinga's many facets. If lived experience can never be fully articulated and related to another, and if all forms of evidence and narration are deeply problematic, what is the purpose or role of the historian? Even if the public can never fully experience Cassinga in the same way as did each individual survivor, is there no value to efforts that attempt to educate the public and pay respect to the victims? These questions are left unanswered, and readers may be left to wonder why they are reading a book whose very argument undermines its existence. Additionally, there is an unresolved tension in the book in the relationship between theory and history. Is it possible for an impressive array of theory to illuminate the many historical challenges posed by Cassinga, or does Cassinga and its complexities serve as a lens to explore the implications and limits of theoretical analysis? While this tension sometimes causes the book to lose its way, it nevertheless generates its own illuminating sets of questions. Finally, although survivors’ reactions to the iconic photo of the mass grave are one of the strongest parts of the book, they reveal an unacknowledged methodological problem: Shigwedha gathered these reactions decades after the event and showed survivors a photo they had almost certainly seen many times before. The author needs to account in his analysis for the effects of this time lapse, as well as for the way that prior familiarity with the photo may have shaped survivors’ responses to it.

Despite these issues, The Aftermath of the Cassinga Massacre is an informative, fascinating, deeply sensitive, and moving investigation into the event of Cassinga and the forms and memories it has continued to assume and produce into the present. The book is well-written but, since it delves into a considerable amount of theory, it is more appropriate for a graduate or highly advanced undergraduate audience than for general undergraduates. The book builds on well-established literature of memory, representation, and justice in Namibian history, but also pushes Namibianist scholarship and scholars into more complex theoretical discussions of those topics. Overall, the Aftermath of the Cassinga Massacre is an impressive and provocative work that substantially contributes to modern southern African history.