This is the second in what we hope will be a series of posts drawing on a recent forum on African refugee history published in the African Studies Review. You can read an open access summary of the introduction here: refugee debates, it suggests, have an African history problem.

Across the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) opposed apartheid South African rule in Namibia and administered camps for Namibian exiles then living in neighbouring countries. Most of these exiles repatriated to Namibia in preparation for Namibia’s first democratic elections in 1989 and political independence in 1990. Nevertheless, many former exiles continue to appeal to Namibia’s SWAPO-led government for assistance with their basic needs. 

Among these former exiles are ‘the children of the liberation struggle’. Consisting of roughly ten thousand people who were born to at least one Namibian parent in exile, the struggle children emerged as a distinct group in 2008, presenting themselves to SWAPO as sons and daughters to whom the liberation movement and government bears an ongoing parental responsibility. In so doing, the struggle children draw from a powerful discourse in postcolonial Namibia, shaped heavily by the camps where most of them were raised. There, notions of family were used to unite a nation around a moral order, wherein SWAPO was responsible for caring for its ‘children’ who, in turn, were to obey Sam Nujoma, SWAPO’s ‘Founding Father’, and reclaim their ‘homeland’ from South Africa.

One of these struggle children is Mawazo Nakadhilu. Mawazo was born in 1972 near Kongwa Camp – a camp set aside for SWAPO and several other Southern African liberation movements in central Tanzania. Her father, Nicodemus Tapopi Nakadhilu, was a member of SWAPO’s guerrilla army, based at the camp. Her mother, Esther Mkasanga, hailed from a family of peasant farmers residing near the camp. The parents could not marry (SWAPO would not have permitted such a marriage at the time), but they had two children and remained a couple for about five years until, just before Mawazo’s birth, her father was sent on a new mission for SWAPO. Shortly after she was born, Mawazo’s Tanzanian family sent her to the home of her mother’s sister, roughly 80 kilometres away, where she was raised for eleven years without any knowledge of her father’s identity or of the liberation movement to which he belonged. 

Then, one day in 1983, Mawazo’s father arrived. Nicodemus Nakadhilu had returned to central Tanzania to collect his children with support from his liberation movement and the Tanzanian government. Despite resistance from Mawazo’s Tanzanian family, who feared that if Mawazo and her sister left, they might never return, the father took the children and sent them to live with SWAPO officials in Dar es Salaam. After about a year there, SWAPO moved Mawazo to Nyango in Zambia, the liberation movement’s second-largest camp, established to provide health and education services to several thousand Namibian refugees then living in Zambia. Initially, Mawazo struggled at Nyango, where she was a ‘Tanzanian’ misfit in a camp set aside for ‘Namibians’. Gradually, however, she adapted. Many children at Nyango were separated from their families and looked after by matrons in the school hostel. Mawazo attended the camp’s schools, learned the camp’s languages (Oshiwambo and English) and participated in the camp’s rituals, aimed at building a nation and returning to a ‘home’ that most of Nyango’s children had never seen.

In June 1989, the time came to go ‘home’. Mawazo, her father and her newborn son were driven to Lusaka and boarded a plane for Grootfontein, one of the reception points for more than 40,000 people then repatriating to Namibia. What they experienced in Namibia was no homecoming, however. Nicodemus Nakadhilu’s Namibian wife had long since remarried and the family’s land near Oshigambo (in Ovamboland, north-central Namibia) had been given away to strangers, following threats from the South African security forces, who correctly suspected that the family had links with SWAPO guerrillas. In addition, Nicodemus had been seriously injured in a landmine explosion during the guerrilla war against South Africa, and afterwards suffered from a recurring, crippling fear that ‘the Boers are coming’. His wounds proved a burden that his surviving family members were unwilling to accommodate in their homes for long.

Eventually, Mawazo married and settled with a Namibian man, but she has remained exceptionally vulnerable in Namibia. In 2002 she was diagnosed as HIV-positive and abandoned by her husband. Her life was only saved through anti-retroviral medication and one of her father’s granddaughters, who nursed her back to health. In 2007, Mawazo’s father passed away. She received none of her father’s cattle, however, as an elder sibling falsely claimed that the Namibia-born children were her father’s only heirs. Throughout these and other travails, Mawazo’s ‘SWAPO family’ – who took care of her for years in exile – have remained present but distant, unable to assist her with daily needs or help her to visit family in Tanzania, whom she has not seen since 1983.

I first met Mawazo in 2013 in ‘Havana’, an informal settlement on the outskirts of Windhoek’s Katutura township. Earlier that year I had spent a month conducting fieldwork at Kongwa, learning about the liberation era camp and the neighbouring community. Many at Kongwa sought news of family members who had been taken by their fathers’ liberation movements to Namibia or South Africa. Among these families were Mawazo’s aunts, uncles, siblings and cousins, who hoped that I might help them contact Mawazo and her sister, who had also returned to Namibia. When I eventually located Mawazo, my aim was to share news with her of her Tanzanian family, not to intervene in the ‘struggle children’ debate capturing headlines in Namibia. Nevertheless, Mawazo’s story speaks powerfully to this and related refugee issues. 

According to some of the Namibian public, the struggle children should be treated no differently than other Namibians of their age, many of whom are also unemployed and face similar personal problems. People who advance this argument have a point: much of the working-age Namibian population is unemployed, including over 50 per cent of Namibian youth. Nevertheless, some of the issues that SWAPO’s struggle children face distinguish them from Namibians who were not displaced during the struggle years or who entered exile only as adults. Significantly, contestations over family and home have followed many struggle children from their childhood in exile, through their adult life in Namibia, undermining their ability to access rights as Namibian citizens and familial support in an unjust, precarious socio-economic system. Moreover, the families of many ‘struggle children’ are not merely ‘struggling’; they have been separated through war and remain scattered across long distances and international borders. Mawazo’s story highlights these patterns of suffering inherited from the apartheid past, and it deserves attention as people from across the region decide how to address ‘the struggle children’ issue.

Mawazo’s story also touches on wider-ranging refugee issues. As anthropologist Liisa Malkki has argued, refugees tend to be presented as a generic category of victims, rather than as distinct persons with unique and important stories to tell. Such stories matter for many reasons – perhaps, above all, because they highlight aspects of refugees’ circumstances that are not easily grasped in decontextualised humanitarian imagery or overbearing national histories, but are nonetheless crucial for understanding the challenges which refugee and host communities face. Mawazo’s story (which I’ve explored in a recent article) draws our attention to people born in exile whose home nation in the eyes of the international community has never fully felt like ‘home’, and to processes of home-making which unfold in such exile contexts. Her biography not only contributes to our understanding of displacement in Southern Africa, but also highlights this significant, underexplored theme in refugee history more broadly.

Mawazo’s name is not a pseudonym—her real name is used at her request.

The banner image shows Namibian youth on their way to the Nyango camp, Zambia. Source: National Archives of Namibia via International Defence and Aid Fund.