11.04.1982
Dear G...
I'm back from Namibia and a bit choked up about it all. I have fascinating data primarily in the form of extensive life histories that allowed me to examine more closely than ever before the social and psychological problems from which Herero-speakers suffer. The state of mind of these people is what it is as a result of an all-embracing politics of ethnicity or of separate development. It expresses itself not only as political, social, spatial, and educational fragmentation, but importantly also as a fragmentation of the sense of self.
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I might attempt to write a book called, "We Live In Pain: the Herero of Katutura." The aim would be to explain their sense of self, or selves, in terms of the all-encompassing politics there.
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But, one could say, I am still in a state of mental "paralysis." It is so difficult to read comparative material upon return from the field -- everything sounds wrong somehow.
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The story that the Herero talk about ivariably has to do with freeing themselves from South Africa and what remained of the apartheid system. Their tool is to be their political party SWANU whose core members are primarily returnees from Sweden, although most had spent time in Tanzania, the U.S.A, even Canada and East Germany.
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When I asked them what they would do should SWAPO rather than SWANU win, the answer was, in that event they would go with the genocide and reparations from Germany story...
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Now it is 2012 and their story changed as promised. It became one centered on genocide and reparations. Indeed, several historians have taken it a step further. It has become part of a historical genealogy based on loose person to person connections like Kaiser, Eugen Fischer, Hitler. Thus some talk about the first Black Holocaust of the Second Reich, which is seen as the forerunner of the Jewish Holocaust perpetrated by the Third Reich.
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Maybe, the Herero will benefit. Certain is, political rhetoric has won; careful research has lost. And I say this even though the 1904-1907 war in Namibia was brutal and had long lasting consequences, beyond the collection camps into the present.
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