The inaugural work
Namibia's dark past is all the more terrible for the fact that it is generally unknown. This belated awareness perhaps explains why Niels Labuzan, born in Paris in 1984, decided to devote his first novel to it, with its 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 Wupperthal in 1820. Over the decades, new towns were created, and the colonization process gained momentum in 1884 with the proclamation of the German South-West African Protectorate. In parallel with this gradual appropriation, native tribes fought over the territory. The new arrivals tried to play on this dissension, but tensions simmered and came to a head in 1893 with the massacre of eighty men, women and children from the Nama tribe. This initial tragedy gave rise to what is considered to be the first painful written and literary work in Namibia, a country where oral tradition dominated until then, and where a few works by settlers flourished, lending themselves poorly to a contemporary rereading. Hendrick Witbooi, chief of the Nama clan and master of all three European languages - German, Afrikaans and English - took up the pen as he had taken up arms, leaving a vast correspondence that demonstrates the same code of honor he adopted in battle. More than just formal, these letters are published by Le Passager clandestin under the explicit title of his last letter: Votre paix sera la mort de ma nation (Your peace will be the death of my nation). After his death 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 20th century, are now the object of a duty of remembrance on the part of the Germans. The times to come were hardly more serene, since in 1920, after the First World War, the German colony came under the domination of South Africa. The post-Second World War period saw severe and deadly repression of the wave of apartheid denunciations that rocked Namibia in 1959. The road to independence led by SWAPO (South West Africa People's Organization) then took shape, but it would be forty long, eventful years before independence was proclaimed on March 21, 1990, and a national literature finally emerged.
Independence
The birth of national literature is embodied in two men, the first proclaimed national poet, the second considered Namibia's first novelist. Mvula ya Nangolo was born in 1943 in Onlimwandi. At the age of 18, he won 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, appeared in Lusaka in 1976, while his second, Thoughts from Exile, was published in Namibia in 1991. Nangolo was the Namibian poet selected to represent his country in the anthology published by the Scottish Poetry Library for the 2012 Olympic Games. In addition to a third collection published in 2008 under the title Watering the Beloved Desert, he is above all the author of Kassinga: A Story Untold, written in 1995 with Tor Sellström, in which he denounces the massacre perpetrated by South African troops in a Namibian refugee camp in Angola in 1978. Mvula ya Nangolo passed away in 2019. Equally committed, Joseph Diescho was born in 1955 in Andara and published his first novel at the age of 33. Born of the Sun tells the story of Muronga, a married man and very 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. During this exile, he is confronted with deprivation and racial discrimination, leading him to attempt to rebel. The novel has autobiographical overtones, as Diescho helped to set up a trade union while working in a mine, before taking up political science studies on a scholarship in 1984. Troubled Waters, his second novel - and the second in Namibian history - was published in 1993, and tells the story of the impossible love between a black woman and a white man during the apartheid era.
Today, Namibia claims English as its official language, but the reality is far more complex, with some twenty dialects cohabiting with numerous German speakers - whether they use German or Küchendeutsch, a pidgin derived from it. So it's not surprising that one of the most renowned 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 on the issue of poaching, Im Bunde der Third, self-published in 1983. Giselher pursued his literary career alone, and became increasingly interested in reawakening his country's sad past, denouncing the suffering of native peoples and advocating reconciliation between cultures. Afrikaans, meanwhile, comes to the fore in the work of Anoeschka 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 women 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 prolific 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, 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.
