Exile, Refugees, and Biography in Southern Africa

In the introduction to their recent volume Africans in Exile (2018), Nathan Carpenter and Benjamin Lawrance compare dominant discourses on exile with the experiences of African exiles. As they maintain, drawing from a wide range of contexts and literatures, exile (understood here as political exile) is widely associated with elite individuals, displaced and isolated from a homeland due to their opposition to a ruling government. Nevertheless, many exiles have not been elites, especially in Africa, where forced removal has been a widespread and often defining experience. Moreover, exile has been generative, producing “unintended and unanticipated consequences,” including new political movements and social identities (7–8, 21–23).Footnote ³ It follows that critically examining exile requires engaging an exile archive that extends to categories of people and forms of experience excluded from most government-sponsored archival repositories. Moreover, in Southern Africa, it demands understanding a regional context, wherein exiled liberation movements that have become ruling parties are deeply invested in repeating exile histories that legitimate their rule and in obscuring historical knowledge which may challenge or complicate these histories (Williams Reference Williams2009, Reference Williams2015).

On the surface, biography may appear a strange choice for scholars seeking to move beyond nationalist discourse on exile. Indeed, since its genesis as a genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biography has been integral to the project of solidifying national communities through stories of the political leaders who shaped them. Exile, moreover, has often figured prominently in such biographical projects, presenting an entire nation’s history in terms of one or a few individuals expelled from it.Footnote ⁴ Nevertheless, biography also offers another possibility when it draws attention to exiles at the margins of national communities and/or to the processes through which exiles’ varying, personal experiences are packaged into a national narrative.Footnote ⁵

Although these points have been largely overlooked in Southern African exile historiography, they are well reflected in anthropological scholarship on refugees.Footnote ⁶ As Liisa Malkki first argued in her foundational work, refugees do not share “a singular experience” but rather are shaped by diverse histories which may be studied through listening to individual refugees’ stories (Malkki Reference Malkki1995b, Reference Malkki1996).Footnote ⁷ Seen from this angle, refugee biography has a significant, subversive potential, for it exposes the limits of any representation that reduces complex, personal experiences of transnational displacement into a homogenizing, nationalist discourse. As such, it is well positioned to critique not only enduring international humanitarian discourse (the focus of Malkki’s work), but also a historically distinct frontline state discourse, which presents Africans with varying ties to exiled liberation movements and their ideologies as “freedom fighter refugees.”Footnote ⁸

It is from such a biographical perspective that this article explores Southern Africa’s exile history, especially the social dynamics surrounding the exile family. While historical scholarship on family relations among Southern Africans in exile does exist, it is nationalist in its orientation. Indeed, if there is one theme that unites this literature across different national historiographies, it is the recurring focus on the gender struggles within national liberation movements. This is not to say that there are no international or transnational themes that emerge from the literature. Indeed, in writing on SWAPO, the African National Congress (ANC), and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in exile, authors repeatedly note men’s concern with women dating or marrying foreign men and the different standards applied to men and women with regard to marrying outside one’s national community (Akawa Reference Akawa2014; Amathila Reference Amathila2012; Hassim Reference Hassim2006; Morrow, Maaba & Pulumani Reference Morrow, Maaba and Pulumani2004; Munguambe Reference Munguambe2017; Namhila Reference Namhila1997; Nhongo-Simbanegavi Reference Nhongo-Simbanegavi2000). The issue, however, is discussed almost entirely in terms of the unequal gender relations within a given nation, not in terms of the transnational dimensions of these relations and their legacy today.Footnote ⁹

Also, the exile family literature is curiously silent on recurring tensions among families, liberation movements, and host governments over children. To highlight the case most relevant to this study, Namibian historiography on exile and family has emphasized the opportunities which SWAPO camps offered to women through child care, enabling them to pursue studies and leadership roles within the liberation movement that would have been closed to them if they had been required to look after a baby or perform other domestic chores (Akawa Reference Akawa2014:60, 120, 149–50; Silvester, Akawa & Shiweda Reference Silvester, Akawa, Shiweda, Temu and Tembe2014:182). It ignores, however, the many instances in which Namibian women and men sought to locate family members without success and disputed the liberation movement’s capacity to parent and control “their” children. Emerging historiography on the frontline states has also not yet engaged these issues, presenting children born to exile-host couples as part of a host nation’s contribution to Southern Africa’s liberation, and overlooking conflicts between exiles and hosts over family (see, e.g., Tarimo & Reuben Reference Tarimo and Reuben2013; Temu, Reuben & Seme Reference Temu, Reuben, Seme, Temu and Tembe2015).

By contrast, anthropological literature on refugees has addressed such concerns in other settings, highlighting how people make homes in contexts of transnational displacement and the tensions that emerge as refugee communities, nation-states, and humanitarian agencies define where, and with whom, refugees belong (see e.g., Malkki Reference Malkki1995a; Englund Reference Englund2002; Lubkemann Reference Lubkemann2008; Jansen & Löfving Reference Jansen and Löfving2009). Nevertheless, in the Southern African exile context, wherein home-making occurred in relation to national liberation movements, these topics remain unexplored. Indeed, as I have discussed elsewhere, anthropologists studying refugees have confined themselves almost exclusively to research in refugee communities which they have accessed through participant-observation fieldwork since the 1980s (Williams Reference Williams2014). As a result, this work mirrors the shallow historical foundation of scholarship on refugees generally, especially in Africa, where refuge seeking is only now emerging as a field of historical study (Shadle Reference Shadle, Worger, Ambler and Achebe2019).Footnote ¹⁰ Thus, while anthropology offers compelling questions and methods for historians to consider—not least, the call to examine individual refugees’ lives—it has focused on contexts that differ considerably from the late-twentieth-century Southern African context addressed here.

Map 1. Key Sites in Mawazo Nakadhilu’s Refugee Biography. Key: 1) Kongwa; 2) Nyango; 3) Oshigambo.

At Home in Tanzania

In April 1964, the Tanzanian government, on behalf of the Organization of African Unity’s Liberation Committee, set aside a tract of land for the liberation movements hosted within Tanzania’s borders. This land was situated at the site of an abandoned railway station located less than two kilometers west of Kongwa village and eighty kilometers east of Dodoma (see Map 1, “Key Sites in Mawazo Nakadhilu’s Refugee Biography”). The Kongwa camp was explicitly intended as a site for Southern Africa’s nascent guerrilla armies, where movements were allotted separate spaces to train and care for the needs of their respective members. At the same time, by allocating land to liberation movements in 1964, the Tanzanian government was responding to pressures produced by the increasing numbers of people from Southern Africa’s still-colonized countries residing in Dar es Salaam, all of whom were routinely classified as “refugees” by the Tanzanian government.Footnote ¹¹ By the middle of 1965, more than one thousand people affiliated with SWAPO, ANC, FRELIMO, MPLA, and ZAPU were living at Kongwa camp, including nearly three hundred SWAPO members, by far the largest concentration of Namibians in exile at this time. All but one of these Namibians living at Kongwa camp were men (Williams Reference Williams2015:68–72).

Until recently, Kongwa has been presented in historical literature as a place that guerrillas passed through for military training en route to somewhere else. Nevertheless, in the cases of SWAPO and the ANC, the liberation movements struggled to infiltrate cadres into their countries of origin, suffering further setbacks during the late 1960s, which compelled them to accommodate many of their cohort at Kongwa for years. Indeed, with the exception of a period of months in 1969 when the Tanzanian government closed Kongwa camp and sent its inhabitants to the Soviet Union, SWAPO retained cadres at Kongwa continuously from 1964 through 1971.Footnote ¹² Also, although training routines were quite regimented during the early years at Kongwa, with cadres only permitted to leave the camp at certain times during weekends or with special permission, these routines softened across the years as hierarchies in the camp broke down and as Namibian and South African men sought to create lives for themselves across the camp’s increasingly porous borders (Williams Reference Williams2014; Williams Reference Williams2015:76–93).

It is in this context that Mawazo Nakadhilu’s parents met. Mawazo’s father, Nicodemus Tapopi Nakadhilu, departed from his family’s home near Oshigambo in Ovamboland for exile in 1966.Footnote ¹³ Although Mawazo does not know the exact circumstances that compelled her father to leave Namibia, it is likely that he was drawn to possibilities open to Southern Africans in independent Tanzania, including the possibility to study. Like most Southern Africans who did not receive scholarships, however, Nakadhilu was sent to Kongwa camp (Williams Reference Williams2017a). Known by the combat name “John,” Nakadhilu lived in the camp for several years.Footnote ¹⁴ At the time when Nakadhilu arrived in Tanzania, Mawazo’s mother, Esther Mkasanga, was living with her family in Ibwaga, a village of peasant farmers located five to six kilometers from Kongwa. According to Madeleine and Saul Kongawadodo, the sister of Mawazo’s mother and her husband, the relationship began like many other romantic encounters between exiled “freedom fighters” and Tanzanian hosts, around the “pombe shops” where people went for beer. By 1968 Esther Mkasanga had given birth to Eva, her first child with Nakadhilu, and by 1972, she had given birth to a second child, Mawazo. Although the couple did not marry, it was well known to the family that they were together. Apparently, Nakadhilu stayed with the family at Ibwaga sometimes on weekends before SWAPO sent him on assignment away from Tanzania (Saul and Madeleine Kongawadodo, Interview, Ibwaga, June 15, 2013).Footnote ¹⁵

Although much of Mawazo’s family remained at Ibwaga, she was not raised there, but rather at the home of Maragarete Mkasanga, one of her mother’s sisters. Mawazo can no longer remember the name of her aunt’s home, but apparently it was a small village near Dodoma. Mawazo knew that she had family in Ibwaga and remembers them from visits at family gatherings, including Eva, who lived with their mother there. For the most part, however, Mawazo was raised separately from her biological mother and sister, not to mention her Namibian family. Indeed, Mawazo has no memory of her father for the first eleven years of life, and apparently she was, during these years, entirely unaware of her father’s identity.Footnote ¹⁶

Such family circumstances were not unusual for Namibians born in exile at that time and place. Although numbers are difficult to determine, oral histories with former exiles and hosts alike suggest that many Namibian men fathered children with Tanzanian women during their time at Kongwa. None of the fathers married the mothers of these children, and none of the children were raised in the camp. Although some fathers were actively involved in raising their children and interacted with the children’s Tanzanian families, few remained at Kongwa after 1971. From the middle of 1974, the demographics of the Namibian exile community changed significantly, as thousands of Namibians, including many women and some children, departed from their country of origin via Angola for SWAPO’s headquarters and camps, which by then were located in Zambia.Footnote ¹⁷ Within a few years, SWAPO had drawn up an official “Family Act” (1977), encouraging marriage and child-bearing among exiled Namibians (Akawa Reference Akawa2014:141–42). Moreover, SWAPO had established a new system of camps, several of which focused on offering health and educational services to Namibians in Zambia and Angola and whose inhabitants were presented to the international community as a distinct “refugee” population. Nevertheless, children of Namibian exile parents continued to live outside the SWAPO camps, including Mawazo and others residing in rural central Tanzania.

With SWAPO in Exile

For Mawazo, all this changed one day in 1983. At some point in that year, Nicodemus Nakadhilu traveled to Tanzania. There, he made his way to Ibwaga in search of his two daughters, whom he sought to take with him to the camps which SWAPO was administering for Namibian refugees. Apparently, he located Eva at Esther Mkasanga’s Ibwaga home, but he struggled to find Mawazo. What follows is Mawazo’s version of this struggle as shared with me in an interview:

Several points from Mawazo’s story resonate with accounts of other Namibian struggle children who were taken from their families in Tanzania and moved to SWAPO camps during the mid-1980s. First, the father figure, in this case Nicodemus Nakadhilu, entered Ibwaga with the expectation that he would be able to take “his” children from the family of the children’s mother without this family’s consent. Second, he was supported in this pursuit both by SWAPO officials and Tanzanian police, who helped to remove the children from their homes. Third, the Tanzanian families resisted efforts to take the children, including by attempting to hide them from their biological father, SWAPO officials, and Tanzanian police.Footnote ¹⁸

Other aspects of Mawazo’s story are more ambiguous. First, why did Nicodemus Nakadhilu travel to Tanzania to pick up Eva and Mawazo at this time? As previously noted, during the mid-1970s, SWAPO had established a new system of camps in Zambia and Angola, some of which focused primarily on providing health care and education to “Namibian refugees.” Moreover, by the mid-1980s, international support for this system had expanded further and become increasingly focused on projects aimed at improving primary and secondary school education for Namibian refugee children (Sellström Reference Sellström2002:373–77). In this context, children were a key resource through which SWAPO made claims to humanitarian aid and asserted its legitimacy as the future government of Namibia.Footnote ¹⁹ The role of Simon “Mzee” Kaukungwa, one of SWAPO’s founders, who represented the liberation movement during much of the 1980s at its Dar es Salaam office, further suggests SWAPO’s central role in removing youth from their Tanzanian families. Indeed, as Kaukungwa maintained in an interview shortly before his death, he had collected “the Namibians” living in Tanzania and moved them to SWAPO camps because “the party instructed” him to “look after… its children.” (Interview, Windhoek, November 5, 2013).

Nevertheless, the timing and manner in which Kaukungwa collected the Namibian children at Kongwa raises questions about how exactly the process evolved and about the role of various father figures in shaping it. Importantly, the children were picked up in three separate groups between 1983 and 1985, long after SWAPO had approved its Family Act and established its “refugee camps” in the mid-1970s. In the first two cases, the biological fathers were directly involved in picking up their children. In the last case, Kaukungwa picked up the children on behalf of their deceased fathers, a task that he was well prepared to do given his experience at Kongwa over time, including as a former guerrilla commander who had lived with the fathers in the camp during the 1960s. The three trips resulted in only eleven children being transferred to SWAPO, a small number if seen in relation to the effort required for SWAPO members to track them down in rural central Tanzania, but not if viewed from the perspective of fathers claiming “their” children.

This excerpt from Mawazo’s story also prompts another significant question, namely, to what extent did her family and other families anticipate SWAPO’s return, and how did they respond to this possibility? Generally, the narratives rendered by Tanzanian families of Namibian struggle children’s displacement revolve around the unexpected arrival of SWAPO members at their homes after years in which the families raised the children without any interaction with their biological fathers or with their liberation movement. Nevertheless, one detail in Mawazo’s story points to a more complex picture, namely, that the grandfather had told her mother that “she cannot give all those kids because those child[ren]… are going to be killed.” As Mawazo elaborated at other moments during our interviews, the rationale for her to grow up with her aunt was motivated by her Tanzanian family’s long-standing concern that the father or another SWAPO member might return to collect the children and that the family should, therefore, hide the youngest (and therefore least easily identified) child. Apparently, Mawazo’s mother’s father had been most vocal in advancing this position, echoing a broader discourse at Kongwa: that the guerrillas “cooked” people, drawing special powers from preparing and eating human flesh (Interview, Nakadhilu, Windhoek, September 3, 2014).Footnote ²⁰ Beyond the response of Mawazo’s family, there are also other families whose children were never collected by SWAPO.Footnote ²¹ To what extent these families actively tried to prevent SWAPO from finding their children and to what extent geographical factors made it difficult for SWAPO to locate children in the rural locations where they lived is unclear.Footnote ²² But the fact that some families were aware of the possibility of SWAPO’s return for the children and sought to avoid this scenario is beyond question.

Finally, the excerpted story does not, in fact, tell us much directly about Mawazo’s experience. How did she feel about leaving her mother’s family to be with her father and SWAPO? In the memories of members of the mother’s family in Ibwaga, Mawazo “cried a lot” before she was taken away, which they explained by saying that Mawazo wanted to be with “her mother.” They also contrast Mawazo’s reaction to that of Eva, who, apparently, wanted to be with her father, whom she remembered from her early childhood (Interview, Kongawadodos, Ibwaga, June 15, 2013). Mawazo remembers how she cried at the time she left with her father but offers a different explanation for her tears; she claims that she had not recognized until that moment who her “real mother” was (Interview, Nakadhilu, Windhoek, April 15, 2017). Clearly, her narration of what happened that day is significantly influenced by her father, who first shared what had unfolded during the encounter at the family’s Ibwaga home and at the graveyard while staying with her at the Kongwa police station. Nevertheless, how she felt about her father’s claim to custody at the time or the new world to which he introduced her with SWAPO is not entirely clear.

Following several days living at the Kongwa prison, Mawazo and Eva traveled to Dar es Salaam, accompanied by Mzee Kaukungwa and Maxton Joseph, another prominent 1960s generation exile and SWAPO leader. In Dar they were met by their father and his new Namibian “wife.”Footnote ²³ After a relatively short period staying with his father’s new exile family at a home in Dar es Salaam, Nicodemus Nakadhilu was sent back to the front in Angola, and arrangements were made for the children to move to the home of the Kaukungwa family and Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, SWAPO’s Chief Representative in East Africa at the time. According to Mawazo, she remained at this home for a long period, perhaps a year. Apparently, her stay was longer than anticipated because SWAPO was awaiting the arrival of the liberation movement’s other children from Kongwa in Dar es Salaam before arranging to escort them together to the SWAPO camps. Also, at some point during that year, Eva traveled with SWAPO officials for schooling at SWAPO’s Kwanza Sul camp in Angola, leaving Mawazo on her own. The most memorable event for Mawazo during this entire period appears to be the occasion when she visited Ibwaga, a trip arranged by Johanna Kaukungwa, Mzee Kaukungwa’s wife. Mawazo recalls her grandfather’s suspicion about her sister’s absence, but her aunt, “the mother who loved her,” was encouraging, praising Mawazo for the English that she had learned while living in Dar es Salaam and suggesting that Mawazo “go and study… and then come back… and get a job this side” (Interview, Nakadhilu, Windhoek, April 15, 2017).

Shortly thereafter, Mawazo’s studies with SWAPO began in earnest. Following the arrival of the third group of SWAPO’s Tanzanian children in Dar es Salaam, Mawazo traveled with the others by plane to Lusaka. After some days there, arrangements were made to send most or all of the children to Nyango, a camp located in a remote area of Zambia’s Western District, more than 500 kilometers away.Footnote ²⁴ Established by SWAPO in 1976 to provide health and education services for the rapidly expanding Namibian exile population, Nyango was, by the mid-1980s, the liberation movement’s second-largest camp, accommodating several thousand people.Footnote ²⁵ With the exception of guerrillas assigned to protect the camp from enemy attack, most camp inhabitants would have been involved in education, health, and other essential services. Moreover, the majority would have been youth enrolled in the camp’s primary or secondary school, where Mawazo was also soon enrolled.

In some respects, Mawazo was clearly an outsider in this new world, a “Tanzanian” misfit in a camp set aside for “Namibians.” Mawazo’s strongest early memories of life at Nyango involve struggles to communicate in Namibian languages. As she recalls, at the time when she arrived there, she spoke Kigogo and Kiswahili, her mother tongue and Tanzania’s national language respectively. English, the language which SWAPO promoted for an independent Namibia and taught in its schools, was still largely unfamiliar to her, and Oshiwambo, the dominant language of camp everyday life, was unknown.Footnote ²⁶ Nevertheless, Mawazo learned these languages and adjusted. At Nyango her material needs were consistently met, and she was looked after by several matrons in the girls’ hostel. Indeed, in her relationship to the matrons, she was not an outsider or an exception. Most children at Nyango lived in the hostel and had limited contact with their families, who were scattered across an array of locations where Namibian exiles lived, often with little control over their movement and with their capacity to communicate with their children curtailed. So, like many others at Nyango, Mawazo spent her early teenage years with parental figures who were not from her biological family—that is, until shortly before her “repatriation.”

“Repatriation” to Namibia

At some point in 1988, Nicodemus Nakadhilu suffered a serious injury. According to Mawazo, his unit had been involved in a military operation near the Namibian-Angolan border when it hit a land mine. He was evacuated to one of SWAPO’s rear camps, where doctors operated on both his legs and added splints. From there he was transported to Lusaka, where arrangements were made for him to meet Mawazo. This was the first time that Mawazo had met or even communicated with her father since they parted in Dar es Salaam five years earlier.

According to Mawazo, at the time she and her father were reunited, Namibian exiles were preparing to repatriate—a process that unfolded between the signing of the Geneva Accord in December 1988 and the middle of 1989. Beyond the transition from life in exile to life at home for which everyone was then preparing, Mawazo and her father were also “in transition” in other respects. Nicodemus Nakadhilu was transitioning from the life of a guerrilla soldier to the life of a civilian cripple; Mawazo was transitioning from childhood to motherhood. Mawazo had conceived a child in 1988, altering SWAPO’s plans to send her to Nigeria for high school.Footnote ²⁷ Nicodemus’s struggles to adjust to his new condition and to his daughter’s pregnancy both figure prominently in Mawazo’s story, as highlighted in the following excerpt:

If there was not some uncertainty about where and with whom to send Mawazo prior to this encounter with her father, then there certainly should have been thereafter. Indeed, although Mawazo had been socialized for several years in a SWAPO camp, learning Namibian languages and cultural practices and developing a Namibian social network, she had met only one Namibian member of her biological family, her father, and he demonstrably was not well. Nevertheless, at no point in her story does Mawazo suggest that she or anyone else considered an alternative. People in the camps were told that they “must go back to Namibia,” a point that appears to have been made to all children born to Tanzanian mothers at Kongwa.Footnote ²⁸ Mawazo also indicates that she was hopeful about moving to Namibia with her father. As she put it: “I’m going with my father; my father is my family… What will happen?” (Interview, Nakadhilu, Windhoek, September 3, 2014).

In June of 1989, Mawazo traveled to Namibia with both her father and her newborn son, but not with Eva, who was still in Angola and who was repatriated to Namibia with her father’s half-brother. Mawazo remembers the flight from Lusaka to Grootfontein, one of the primary reception points for Namibians returning from exile, and waiting for her father’s family to pick them up and take them to her father’s old home near Oshigambo. What they encountered there was far from “home,” however. At some point after his departure for Tanzania, Nicodemus Nakadhilu’s Namibian wife had remarried, and she had moved to the home of her new husband. Although there were other family members who may have remained at Nakadhilu’s homestead thereafter, the social dynamics of the war eventually pushed them all to leave. As Mawazo noted in one of our interviews, none of Nakadhilu’s five children with this wife lived near Oshigambo, due to the fact that they had been threatened by the South African security forces on account of their alleged links with the SWAPO guerrillas.Footnote ²⁹ Thereafter, the home and adjoining land had been passed on to strangers with no links to the family.

To address Nicodemus and Eva Nakadhilu’s immediate need for a place to live, one of Nakadhilu’s granddaughters offered that they could stay with her and her family at her home in Onankali, roughly 100 kilometers south of Oshigambo. This arrangement, however, only worked for some months. As Mawazo emphasized, even after repatriation, her father lived his nights in fear that “the Boers… are coming” and insisted that she and her son join him in the bush lest they be the targets of a South African raid. This behavior eventually wore on her granddaughter’s husband, who insisted that they leave his home. From there, Mawazo moved with her father to the homes of other family members until, finally, they procured a small plot of land where she, Eva, and her father attempted to farm, drawing from her father’s small pension. It’s unclear how long the family tried to live like this, but clearly, from Mawazo’s perspective, it did not go well, and one day she set out looking for other parental figures from her time in exile: Mzee and Johanna Kaukungwa. Mawazo had developed a relationship with the Kaukungwas during her time living together with them in Dar es Salaam, and she is likely to have been in touch with other Tanzanian-Namibian children for whom the Kaukungwas had acted as surrogate parents at the time of repatriation and as a source of some assistance in the years immediately following independence.Footnote ³⁰ Mawazo found Johanna Kaukungwa in Oniipa, a peri-urban area approximately 40 kilometers from Oshigambo. After explaining the circumstances in which she and her father were living and her father’s ongoing struggles to cope with wartime experiences, Mawazo was invited to move in with the Kaukungwas.

This relocation was the beginning of a more pleasant period for Mawazo. After an extended residency with the Kaukungwas, she married a local man, with whom she lived first in Oniipa and later in Wanaheda, part of Windhoek’s Katutura township. Nevertheless, Mawazo remained especially vulnerable in her Namibian “home,” a point which she illustrated in our interviews through her narrations of two important life events. First, in 2002, Mawazo was diagnosed as HIV positive. Although Mawazo had been in poor health for some time prior to the diagnosis, thereafter her husband began to ignore her, leaving Mawazo home alone with her (by then) two children for extended periods of time. Eventually, Mawazo found help through her father’s granddaughter, who looked after her (and later her children) in Onankali. Despite the caring relationship that Mawazo describes between herself and this woman, it’s clear that Mawazo also felt uncomfortable about being dependent on a member of her father’s family, with whom ties have remained tenuous. And yet, for years this family was Mawazo’s only means of support. From the time when Mawazo moved from Windhoek to Onankali, her husband left and the house was cleared of all her material possessions. Only years later, after her health had begun to stabilize through use of anti-retroviral medication, was Mawazo able to earn a small income from a Namibian non-profit organization and establish a home in Havana, an informal settlement on the outskirts of Katutura.Footnote ³¹

Then, in 2007, Mawazo’s father died. Although Mawazo had ceased to live with her father from the time when she moved to the Kaukungwas in the early 1990s, she had visited him intermittently and appears to have retained warm feelings for him, as suggested by her willingness to explain his indiscretions in terms of wartime injuries. Nevertheless, when her father died, Mawazo received no inheritance. According to Mawazo, a few years prior to his death, he held a meeting with a SWAPO official in Windhoek, during which he arranged to transfer the twenty-eight cattle that he had received from the Namibian government as a retired ex-combatant to Francina, the oldest child from his first marriage.Footnote ³² Francina, her father assured her, would distribute the cattle among all his children. When the time came to distribute the cattle, however, Francina reported to Mawazo and Eva that they had died because “there was no food, no rain” (Interview, Nakadhilu, Windhoek, April 15, 2017). Distrusting her half-sister’s story, Mawazo and Eva attempted to track down the cattle, leading Mawazo eventually to the office of Frederick Matongo, the man who made the arrangement with her father for the inheritance of his cattle and who knew her father from exile. What follows is Mawazo’s story of their encounter:

As scholars of inheritance in Namibia have maintained, the transfer of property from the deceased to his or her family is a highly fractious issue; stories of family members “robbed” of cattle and other forms of property abound (Gordon Reference Gordon2005).Footnote ³³ One issue that has not been explored, however, and which is clearly relevant to many Namibian citizens born in exile is the extent to which the circumstances of their exile births have made them vulnerable in inheritance disputes. As this case illustrates, birth to a foreign woman in exile undermined Mawazo’s capacity to access her father’s cattle, for the eldest descendent of her father’s first wife could claim the cattle on behalf of the “legal, Namibian children” without even acknowledging the existence of children from exile.Footnote ³⁴ Mawazo might have been able to use her repatriation form to make a counter-claim, and, apparently, she had traveled to Windhoek with the form and other documents in preparation for her father’s initial meeting with the SWAPO official (i.e., Frederick Matongo). But Mawazo was cut out of this meeting, and the repatriation form was lost, allegedly stolen by Francina. Even Frederick Matongo’s experience of exile, and indeed of Kongwa, where he had also trained as a guerilla soldier during the mid-1960s, did not lead to an investigation of Nicodemus Nakadhilu’s potential heirs from exile.

Such experiences of being marginalized both by the father’s relatives and by the larger SWAPO “family” may, over the years, have intensified Mawazo’s desire to reconnect with her family in Tanzania. Indeed, since at least the early 2000s, she has attempted to engage SWAPO officials in conversation about the circumstances in which she is living in Namibia and the possibility of traveling to Tanzania with SWAPO’s support. The responses that she has received are slight variations on the refrain of an official at the Ministry of Veteran Affairs a few years ago: “You children of liberation, you don’t have respect… SWAPO didn’t request anybody to bring his children from exile to Namibia… When you came here, it’s because you wanted to come” (Interview, Nakadhilu, Windhoek, November 2, 2013). Such dismissive language, combined with Mawazo’s life experiences, make her identify readily with other “children of the liberation struggle,” and she has registered with the Namibian government as one of their number in the hope that, through them, she might find regular employment. Nevertheless, Mawazo continues to eke out a living on the outskirts of Katutura with little to secure her well-being beyond her precarious ties to some family and friends.

The Value of Refugee Biography

Stories such as Mawazo’s are all but overlooked today, not because they are so unusual or difficult to find, but rather because they require viewing Southern Africa’s exile history from an unconventional perspective. Rather than focusing directly on exiled liberation movements and the nation-states associated with them—the current focal point of public historical debates and regional exile historiographies—we should draw our attention more to individual exiles/refugees whose lives extend beyond the contours of this national frame. Among the persons from whom we can learn is Mawazo Nakadhilu, whose life in Namibia continues to unfold in the shadow of her exile childhood.

Mawazo’s biography speaks to national narratives of exile and their limitations in at least two important respects. First, it illuminates experiences common to many Namibians born in exile which are marginal to Namibia’s official exile history and should be carefully considered. Although roughly ten thousand people have successfully registered with the Namibian government as “children of the liberation struggle,” struggle kids’ calls for government assistance have met resistance from much of the Namibian public, which has argued that these “children” should be treated no differently than other Namibians of their age, many of whom are also unemployed and face similar personal problems.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, people who advance this argument have a point; much of the Namibian population of working-age is unemployed, including 50 percent or more of Namibian youth.Footnote ³⁶ Under the circumstances, unemployed struggle children appear similar to many Africans from across the continent, whose aspirations for social mobility have been blocked and whose lives appear to be caught between childhood and adulthood (Honwana & de Boeck Reference Honwana, Boeck, Honwana and Boeck2005; Fumanti Reference Fumanti and Melber2007; Metsola Reference Metsola2015:214–23).

Nevertheless, some of the issues which SWAPO’s struggle children have faced distinguish them from Namibians who did not live in exile and from Namibians who entered exile only as adults. Here it is crucial to note the significance of “confounded kinship” in Mawazo’s biography.Footnote ³⁷ Contestations surrounding Mawazo’s familial belonging did not end with her exile childhood, but rather have followed her into her adult life in Namibia, undermining her ability to access rights as a Namibian citizen and familial support in a socio-economic system that undercuts her efforts to meet her basic needs. It follows that Mawazo, and other struggle children like her, carry an especially heavy burden in their ongoing efforts to become full adults in Namibia. Their stories, therefore, are worthy of special consideration in Namibia today.

Second, Mawazo’s biography draws attention to “home” and home-making among exiled Southern Africans, a topic easily overlooked when the experiences of exiles are channeled into national narratives but clearly visible when tracing the trajectory of an individual exile/refugee’s life. For example, Mawazo, by virtue of her father’s choice to travel to Tanzania in the 1960s, was born a Namibian refugee, but she could never have claimed Tanzanian refugee status because the organization that forcibly removed her from her and her mother’s country of birth was her father’s internationally recognized (Namibian) liberation movement. Although Mawazo’s story presents a particularly dramatic inversion of categories, such inversions are mirrored in the stories of many former exiles, not least of the struggle children, who did not need to cross any borders to be labeled refugees, but who were often displaced from countries where they lived under the orders of a liberation movement. Repeatedly, these orders were couched in the language of familial obligation, such as when Mzee Kaukungwa described his removal of Mawazo and others from Tanzania as part of SWAPO’s efforts to “look after… its children.” In this manner, understandings of children’s belonging to a national family and home were asserted among the members of an exile community.

Other features of exile home-making in Mawazo’s biography are similarly striking. For Nicodemus Nakadhilu and other Namibians based at the Kongwa camp from the mid-1960s, Kongwa became not only a place of exile, but also a home. This sense of “home-ness” was created through relationships that exiles developed with people in the surrounding community, above all through local women with whom they had sexual relationships and parented children. Although, for a time, political circumstances obliged SWAPO to turn a blind eye to these budding families, the latter were a threat to the liberation movement because they presented the possibility that it would not be able to mobilize these exiles to liberate the homeland, for they might have begun to feel that they were not “in exile” at all. Once large numbers of Namibian women had entered exile and SWAPO had established its broader system of camps, exile home-making presented new possibilities, allowing SWAPO to promote families as an extension of the nation, with offspring who could be shaped into national subjects in the camp environment. Distinctions between family as liberation movement and family as kin never ceased to exist, however, and tensions over these distinctions repeatedly emerged. Mawazo’s removal from her Tanzanian family highlights these tensions sharply, because those who raised her for her first eleven years were never part of SWAPO’s nation-building project. Nevertheless, it is important to note that Nicodemus Nakadhilu, Mzee Kaukungwa, and Johanna Kaukungwa (among others) were not simply functionaries of their liberation movement, but also individuals with whom Mawazo had interpersonal, parent-child relationships. Since “repatriation,” SWAPO’s significance as family has become diluted. Nevertheless, it remains poignant, shaped not only by expectations of parental care created in the camps, but also by the vulnerability of the struggle children, some of whom have rarely felt at home among families in Namibia.

Such perspectives will remain marginal as long as exile is associated with generic or clichéd figures rather than specific persons who sought refuge and made lives across international borders. Here I have drawn attention especially to Southern African exile historiography, which, despite the increasing input of (auto)biographies, has barely explored how biography as a genre may open up the field and speak to public concerns. The same point also applies to wider refugee scholarship, which, as previously noted, focuses on a historically shallow range of refugee experiences. Mawazo’s contribution to these bodies of literature is to highlight how people created homes in a late-twentieth-century Southern African exile context and the aftermath of this exile home-making. As such, she draws attention not only to histories and historical legacies in Southern Africa, but also to how refugee scholarship may be enriched through engaging this regional African past.