The inaugural work

The heavy past of Namibia is all the more terrible because it is generally unknown. This belated awareness may explain why Niels Labuzan, born in Paris in 1984, decided to devote his first novel to it with the evocative title, Cartographie de l'oubli, published by JC Lattès in 2019 and very favorably received by the public. It all begins with the arrival of Rhineland missionaries in 1820 in Wupperthal. Over the decades, new towns were created and the process of colonization was accentuated in 1884 with the proclamation of the German South West Africa Protectorate. In parallel to this progressive appropriation, indigenous tribes fought over the territory. The newcomers tried to play on these dissensions, but tensions simmered and were concretized in 1893 by the massacre of eighty men, women and children of the Nama tribe. From this initial drama was born what is considered the first painful written and literary work of Namibia, a country where until then the oral tradition dominated and where a few works of settlers flourished, which do not lend themselves well to a contemporary rereading. Hendrick Witbooi, chief of the Nama clan, who mastered all three European languages - German, Afrikaans and English - took up his pen as he had taken up arms, leaving a vast correspondence that shows the same code of honor that he adopted in battle. Much more than formal, these letters are discovered with great emotion by the publisher Le Passager clandestin under an explicit title taken from his last missive: Votre paix sera la mort de ma nation. After his disappearance in 1905, his people would suffer the same fate as that reserved for the Herero by the colonial administration: systematic extermination and confinement in concentration camps. These events, recognized as the first genocide of the twentieth century, are now the subject of a duty of memory on the part of the Germans. The times to come were hardly more serene, since at the end of the First World War, in 1920, the German colony passed under the domination of South Africa. The post-Second World War period saw severe and deadly repression of the wave of denunciation of apartheid that shook Namibia in 1959. The road to independence was then paved by the SWAPO (South West Africa People's Organization), but it took forty long and eventful years before it was proclaimed on March 21, 1990, and a national literature finally emerged.

Independence

The birth of national literature is embodied in the traits of two men, the first of whom was proclaimed national poet, the second is considered the first Namibian novelist. Mvula ya Nangolo was born in 1943 in Onlimwandi. At the age of 18, he obtained a scholarship to study journalism in Germany, a profession he later pursued in Tanzania and Zambia, without abandoning his taste for poetry, which led him to express his political opinions. His first collection, From Exile, was published in 1976 in Lusaka, the second, Thoughts from Exile, was published in Namibia in 1991. Nangolo was the Namibian poet selected to represent his country in the Scottish Poetry Library's 2012 Olympic anthology. In addition to a third collection published in 2008 under the title Watering the Beloved Desert, he is above all the author of a remarkable text in 1995, Kassinga: A Story Untold, written with Tor Sellström, in which he denounces the massacre perpetrated by South African troops in a Namibian refugee camp in 1978 in Angola. Mvula ya Nangolo passed away in 2019. Joseph Diescho was born in 1955 in Andara and published his first novel at age 33. Born of the Sun tells the story of Muronga, married and a young father, who is forced to leave his native village to work in the diamond mines of South Africa in order to pay the taxes that the colonial administration is beginning to demand. In this exile, he is confronted with deprivation and racial discrimination, which leads him to attempt to revolt. The novel has autobiographical overtones, as Diescho helped found a union while working in a mine, before he began studying political science on a scholarship in 1984. Troubled Waters, his second novel - and the second in the history of Namibia - was published in 1993, about the impossible love between a black woman and a white man during apartheid.
Today, Namibia claims English as its official language, but the reality is much more complex, since some twenty dialects coexist with numerous German speakers - whether they use German or Küchendeutsch, a pidgin derived from it. It is therefore not surprising that one of the most famous writers, Giselher W. Hoffmann (1958-2016), chose the language of his ancestors. More surprisingly, it was with his twin, Attila, that he wrote his first novel, Im Bunde der Third, which was self-published in 1983, and addressed the issue of poaching. Giselher pursued his literary career alone and became increasingly interested in reviving his country's sad past, denouncing the suffering of native peoples and advocating reconciliation between cultures. Afrikaans, meanwhile, is revealed in the work ofAnoeschka von Meck, whose novel Vaselinetjie, a story based on the true facts of an abandoned child, was brought to the screen in 2017. Women are indeed beginning to find their place in contemporary literature, as confirmed by the careers of three of them born in the 1960s: Elisabeth Khaxas, an activist who ran Sister Namibia - from which an eponymous magazine emerged - before co-founding the Women's Leadership Center in Windhoek; Ellen Namhila, a librarian and prolix author, who published her autobiography in 1997 under the title The Price of Freedom and then gave voice to Mukwahepo, the first woman to undergo military training in SWAPO; Neshani Andreas, who died prematurely in 2011, and who had made her mark ten years earlier with The Purple Violet of Oshaantu, which sought to encourage friendships between women in a patriarchal society that was violent and contemptuous of them.