The wife of the king of Ondonga, Immanuel Kauluma Elifas of Ondonga, shows the remains of her pantry after a firefight between SADF soldiers and PLAN combatants. Onamungundo, 1986. Photo: John Liebenberg.
Namibia received its independence from South Africa in 1990, after fighting a cruel and highly censored war that lasted more than two decades. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, artists and historians have begun shedding light on what has been hidden for far too long. Julie Taylor, curator of “(Not) Remembering Namibia”, speaks with Crave about the process of persevering the past and bringing it into the present to question the power that memory, trauma, and silence hold over collective understanding.
Mass Grave 1 by Christo Doherty. 2011. Reproduced with permission from the artist.
CraveOnline: The title “(Not) Remembering Namibia” is very intense. It speaks to the way in which stories that not are told simply vanish into thin air. What was the inspiration for it?
The inspiration for the title came from the fact that I was struck by the lack of awareness, remembering, and engagement today among South Africans with their own country’s long and traumatic relationship with neighboring Namibia. Furthermore, this year Namibia celebrates its 25th anniversary of Independence, calling for a moment of reflection and remembrance, into which this exhibition/curatorial project feeds.
The curatorial statement describes the war for independence as “highly censored”; can you speak further about this? What was made public, and what was hidden?
Censorship has a long history in South Africa. Between 1948 and 1985, press freedom was increasingly curtailed by over one hundred different laws restricting the flow of information. By October 1977, as the war in Namibia escalated, the government had, among other things, banned 17 black consciousness organizations in SA, various newspapers and editors, and detained a number of journalists and editors.
Civilian Incident 1 by Christo Doherty. 2011. Reproduced with permission from the artist.
With regards to South Africa’s occupation of and war in Namibia, as academic Gary Baines has written, South African newspapers were permitted to publish little besides the most innocuous information about the South African Defence Force (SADF). Conscripted soldiers were also subject to censorship and forbidden to share information about their activities, including with their families and loved ones.
Photographer John Liebenberg thus worked in a severely censored environment where – under South African law at the time – many of his photographs were taken illegally in clandestine conditions, and often at enormous personal risk. Whilst the apartheid government tried to isolate the kinds of images he (and others) produced, broader international anti-apartheid activism made this hard to enforce.
Security Branch record Cassinga Day Commemoration, Katutura, Windhoek. 4 May 1988. Photo: John Liebenberg.
Christo Doherty’s inspiration for his photographic reconstructions stems from his perception that, “The war had been kept hidden through official censorship (particularly of photographs) and that there was this disjuncture between the few photographs that appeared in the SA media during the war and the actual experience and memory of the war amongst ex-combatants.” Also, as a photographer, he is “skeptical of the documentary validity of any photograph; yet also painfully aware that these visual fragments are all that we have to make sense of the past.”
Please speak to the idea of curation as a political act, both in general and in reference to “(Not) Remembering Namibia”.
With this project, I wanted to challenge the apparent lack of South African public consciousness about regional history. I had both personal and academic frustrations about this absence. South Africa has an extraordinarily rich and frequently difficult history itself. Yet due to apartheid’s legacy – particularly political and cultural isolation from other African states – and also in grappling with its own momentous history, South Africa has become insular and perhaps “forgetful” about its neighboring states, which played an important role in bringing down apartheid. So yes, the curation here is political – I want the exhibition to challenge people, especially South Africans, and encourage them to ask questions of others and of themselves.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
