Remember Mboroma? Narrating a fragmented exile past via UNHCR and SWAPO camps

This article traces how Namibians, once affiliated with the Namibian liberation movement SWAPO, remember violence perpetrated on them while detained at Mboroma Camp in mid-1970s Zambia. The article begins with an account of a Mboroma commemorative event held in Windhoek on 5 August 2012, before presenting context for this event and how it has subsequently been remembered. Context includes a narrative of SWAPO’s 1976 Crisis and discussion of how memories of Namibians’ detention at Mboroma during that crisis have been narrated subsequently at UNHCR and SWAPO camps. Finally, the article returns to the 2012 commemorative event, analysing it in terms of the aforementioned exile past and fieldwork conducted with Mboroma ex-detainees since 2007. As I argue, camps illuminate processes of identity formation that are more geographically and temporally dispersed than scholarship has yet grasped, limiting efforts to challenge a dominant national history through group memory in postcolonial Namibia.