National Liberation In Post Colonial Southern Africa

Williams traces the South West Africa People's Organization of Namibia across three decades in exile in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola.

National liberation, one of the grand narratives of the twentieth century, has left a weighty legacy of unfulfilled dreams. This book explores the ongoing struggle for legitimate, accountable political leaders in postcolonial Southern Africa, focusing on dilemmas arising when ex-liberation movements form the governments. While the spread of multi-party democracy to most countries in the region is to be celebrated, democratic practice often has been superficial - a limited, elitist politics that relies on the symbols of the liberation struggle to legitimate de facto one-party rule and authoritarian practices. Using country cases from Tanzania, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Zambia, the collection explores three subthemes relevant to postcolonial governance in Southern Africa: how the struggle for liberation shapes the character of political transformation, the nature of rule in one-party dominant states headed by former liberation movements, and the processes of governance and resistance in post-liberation contexts. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

Transnational Histories of Southern Africa’s Liberation Movements offers new perspectives on southern Africa’s wars of national liberation, drawing on extensive oral historical and archival research. Assuming neither the primacy of nationalist loyalties as they exist today nor any single path to liberation, the book unpicks any notion of a straightforward imposition of Cold War ideologies or strategic interests on liberation wars. This approach adds new dimensions to the rich literatures on the Global Cold War and on solidarity movements. The contributors trace the ways that ideas and practices were made, adopted, and circulated through time and space through a focus on African soldiers, politicians and diplomats. The book also asks what motivated the men and women who crossed borders to join liberation movements, how Cold War influences were acted upon, interpreted and used, and why certain moments, venues and relations took on exaggerated importance. The connections among liberation movements, between them and their hosts, and across an extraordinarily diverse set of external actors reveal surprising exchanges and lasting legacies that have too often been obscured by the assertion of monolithic national histories. Tracing an extraordinarily diverse set of interactions and exchanges, Transnational Histories of Southern Africa’s Liberation Movements will be of great interest to scholars of Southern Africa, Transnational History, the Cold War and African Politics. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

This book traces the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) across its three decades in exile through rich, local histories of the camps where Namibian exiles lived in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola. Christian A. Williams highlights how different Namibians experienced these sites, as well as the tensions that developed within SWAPO as Namibians encountered one another and as officials asserted their power and protected their interests within a national community. The book then follows Namibians who lived in exile into post-colonial Namibia, examining the extent to which divisions and hierarchies that emerged in the camps continue to shape how Namibians relate to one another today, undermining the more just and humane society that many had imagined. In developing these points about SWAPO, the book draws attention to Southern African literature more widely, suggesting parallels across the region and defining a field of study that examines post-colonial Africa through 'the camp'.

Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this collection of essays intends to enrich and move our understanding of southern African societies, and to contribute to the policies and scholarship of the region, in a pan-African context.

Finland's special characteristics as a Nordic, non-aligned welfare state gave it the resources and motivation to support liberation movements - in spite of restrictions arising from trade interests and a reluctance to jeopardise the country's neutral image. The study shows that, although it is not an easy task, in a democracy ordinary, dedicated people can, over time, influence political decision making at its most closed and guarded area, foreign politics.

This is a useful bibliography for students of the liberation movements in the period 1961-1971, listing a large number of books, articles, and documents originating from UN and from the liberation movements themselves. The bibliography is confined to material published in English. The main focus of the Namibia section (p. 8-38) is on UN reports, resolutions and petitions which are listed in chronological order. (Eriksen/Moorsom 1989).

The interviews in this book were conducted for the Nordic Africa Institute’s research project ‘National Liberation in Southern Africa—The role of the Nordic countries’. Around 80 representatives of the Southern African liberation movements, as well as Swedish and other opinion makers, administrators and politicians, reflect on the Nordic support to these struggles. Prominent contemporary leaders—among them Joaquim Chissano from Mozambique, Kenneth Kaunda from Zambia and Thabo Mbeki from South Africa—give their views on a relationship that largely developed outside the public arena and of which there is scant evidence in open sources. The book is a reference source to a unique North-South relationship in the Cold War period.