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Practicing pan-Africanism: ananthropological perspective on exile-host relations at Kongwa, TanzaniaChristian A. Williamsa

a Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice, University of theFree State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Email:Published online: 07 Jan 2015.

To cite this article: Christian A. Williams (2014) Practicing pan-Africanism: an anthropologicalperspective on exile-host relations at Kongwa, Tanzania, Anthropology Southern Africa, 37:3-4,223-238, DOI: 10.1080/23323256.2014.993808

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Anthropology Southern Africa is co-published by NISC (Pty) Ltd and Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group

Anthropology Southern Africa, 2014Vol. 37, No. 3&4, 223–238, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2014.993808© 2014 Anthropology Southern Africa

Practicing pan-Africanism: an anthropological perspective on exile-host relations at Kongwa, Tanzania

Christian A. Williams

Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa Email: williamsca@ufs.ac.za

This paper explores exile-host relations at Kongwa, where southern Africa’s first guerrilla soldiers lived alongside villagers in rural, central Tanzania between 1964 and 1978. Drawing from the author’s previous research on SWAPO’s exile camps, recent publications about the ANC in exile and fieldwork conducted at Kongwa, the paper argues that Kongwa became a “pan-African community” in which inhabitants originating from eastern and southern African countries developed complex and meaningful relationships across national borders. Nevertheless, this community was vulnerable to the narrow interests of national elites and the frameworks of national histories, which have undermined subsequent recognition of the international relations which formed at Kongwa. In highlighting these points, the paper identifies tensions inherent to Pan-Africanism as discourse and practice and models an ethnographic approach to studying southern Africa’s liberation struggles and their aftermath.

Keywords: ANC; exile; international relations; Pan-Africanism; SWAPO; Tanzania

The concept of total African freedom and of African unity remains an accepted objective for indepen-dent Africa. Tanzania, for its part, has taken this lesson of unity and integrated it into the very core of its foreign policies. (Nyerere 1967, 5)

We have a number of different principles guiding our actions, and a number of different objectives: sometimes these principles and objectives clash. What should a nation — or a responsible individual — do under such circumstances? There is nothing theoretical about this matter. It is a daily problem for every Government. (Nyerere 1967, 6)

During the 1960s, Tanzania’s commitment to Pan-Africanism was well known. From the beginning of that decade, exiles from southern Africa had been streaming into the country, seeking refuge from oppressive white minority regimes and support for their liberation movements from the Tanzanian government. From 25 May 1963, the day the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was founded, Tanzania was responsible for hosting the OAU’s Liberation Committee in Dar es Salaam. Dar es Salaam had also increasingly become a haven for people from across the globe who were opposing racism and imperialism and were imagining new, transnational solidarities. Moreover, Tanzania’s President, Julius Nyerere, had established himself as one of the most eloquent and influential advocates of a Pan-African future, in which the interests of the individual, village and nation would be tied to those of a united Africa which, in turn, would serve each of these domains.

This article examines how Pan-Africanism unfolded in the practice of members of a partic-ular “Pan-African community” established in rural, central Tanzania in 1964. In that year the Tanzanian government allocated a piece of land for the liberation movements it then hosted within its borders. The land was located at a place called Kongwa, just over a kilometre west of a village of the same name and 80 kilometres east of the capital Dodoma. By 1965, guerrillas affiliated with FRELIMO, SWAPO, the ANC, the MPLA and ZAPU — liberation movements representing each of the nations in southern Africa then under white minority rule — were living in camps at Kongwa. By 1978, when the ANC finally closed its camp, Kongwa’s local inhabitants had

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lived alongside exiles belonging to various liberation movements for 14 years and had developed complex and meaningful relationships with them. These relationships may not have led to a deep or widespread commitment to Pan-African ideology among people living in and near Kongwa camp. But they did generate affective ties and shared allegiances among Africans of different nationalities and, in so doing, exposed the often narrowly nationalist interests of political elites articulating “Pan-Africanism.”

In developing these points, this article offers a uniquely anthropological perspective not only on Kongwa, but also on southern Africa’s exile past more broadly. Despite a growing historiog-raphy focused on the experiences of exiles from southern Africa who were compelled to leave their countries of origin during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, this literature is organised in terms of distinct nations and rarely crosses national boundaries in any substantive way. Even recent histor-ical work which espouses a “transnational approach” to the region’s exile past has barely begun to consider interactions between exiles from southern Africa and their hosts in Africa’s front-line states or the complex legacies of these encounters (Sapire 2009; Sapire and Saunders 2013).1 By contrast, the interplay between social space, nationalism and international relations has been central to anthropological work on refugees (Malkki 1995a, 1995b; Hyndman 2000; Agier 2002, 2008; Ong 2003; Jansen and Löfving 2009). But that work focuses on current day refugees and has not been applied by other authors to the liberation struggles of southern Africa and their aftermath.

This text develops such a perspective through an ethnography of exile-host relations at a significant historical site. Drawing on extended prior research with former exiles in Namibia (see Williams 2009, 2011, forthcoming), recent publications about the ANC in exile and current fieldwork conducted at Kongwa, the article draws Kongwa’s former exiles and hosts into dialogue with one another about their collective past. Hosts were interviewed at Kongwa with the assistance of local translators in August 2012 and June 2013. Research participants were initially identified via the Kongwa District Council and its Chairman, White Zuberi Mwanzalila, who himself grew up in the village alongside exiles. Although initial interviews were dominated by recognised (male) authorities on Kongwa’s history, other views were also gleaned, especially those of women who had born children with exile men and who, in some cases, sought me out to request information about family members now living in Namibia or South Africa. Attention was paid particularly to the geography of Kongwa and remnants of the camps, which became focal points of interview questions. Drawing on these research encounters, the paper renders Kongwa’s exile-host relations and the legacies they hold for particular people before examining broader issues, including how anthropology may contribute to future work on southern Africa’s exile past.

Founding a pan-African communityAccording to current inhabitants of Kongwa village, the community had two special visitors in the months preceding the first arrival of exiles. The first was Oscar Kambona, then Tanzania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Chairman of the OAU Liberation Committee. At a public meeting held at the parade ground in Kongwa village centre, Kambona spoke about the Liberation Committee and the responsibility which Tanzania had taken to host and support wapiganyi wauhuru [Swahili for freedom fighters].2 The second, in March 1964, was Julius Nyerere. At the same parade ground, Nyerere informed Kongwa’s residents that they had a special role to play in Africa’s liberation: the village was to host a camp3 where the liberation movements’ nascent guerrilla armies could prepare to liberate their countries from colonial and apartheid rule. As on other occasions, Nyerere explained the importance of this endeavour for all Tanzanians, maintaining that white minority regimes in southern Africa threatened Tanzania’s freedom and that Tanzania could not be free until all of Africa was free.4 Nyerere also requested that the people of Kongwa support the freedom fighters in two specific ways. First, locals should extend their hospitality so that the freedom fighters would feel “at home” in Kongwa and not be impeded in the pursuit of their mission. Second, the camp should be kept “a secret” and locals should be watchful for strangers who might

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share information with the enemy.5 As for the camp itself, Nyerere announced that it would be administered by two Tanzanian Defence Force officers, Major Chongambele and Lieutenant Muganga, both of whom he introduced to the community at this time.6

There are several reasons why the OAU Liberation Committee and the Tanzanian govern-ment chose Kongwa as the site for the camp. The village is located in rural central Tanzania, far from any borders with the countries of origin of the exiles, thus preventing them from being easily threatened by the militaries of these countries. It also lay distant from urban centres, above all from Dar es Salaam, where it would be more difficult to hide the camp from enemy intelli-gence networks and where the presence of armed guerrillas might be perceived as a threat to the Tanzanian state, especially in the wake of the Tanzanian army mutinies of January 1964.7 In addition, Kongwa had infrastructure available which was quite extensive given its remote location. From 1947 to 1951, Kongwa had been the centre of a large British development project, the East African Groundnut Scheme, which had built facilities that could now be used for purposes of the camps. For example, during the late 1940s a large police station, prison and government administrative offices had been built at Kongwa which, after independence, had been utilised by the Tanzanian government.8 There were various abandoned buildings from the Groundnut Scheme that could be used by exiles, including the remains of the Kongwa railway station, which had briefly connected Kongwa to Tanzania’s main east-west line and could be now renovated for the purposes of the camps. Even the most popular location for drinking and roasting meat among exiles at Kongwa had apparently been built for foreign workers who had come to Kongwa to work for the Groundnut Scheme.9

More than this, the Tanzanian government may have perceived Kongwa to be a particularly hospitable place to host a diverse community of exiles. According to Michael Mbijima, a local expert on Kongwa’s history, the village had been associated with foreign visitors since the early twentieth century when Anglican British missionaries established one of the first mission stations of the region at Kongwa.10 The Groundnut Scheme heightened and extended that reputation. For several years Kongwa was home to migrant labourers and merchants drawn not only from different parts of Tanganyika, but also from across East Africa and the Indian Ocean, including Malawi, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, Mauritius and India.11

In turn, Kiswahili became the predominant language used among Africans at Kongwa, in contrast to the surrounding region where Kigogo was predominant while Kiswahili was hardly spoken prior to Tanganyika’s independence. Also, a considerable number of workers had moved to Kongwa from the United Kingdom and a school, St. George’s, was formed at Kongwa that brought whites living in Tanzania to Kongwa for secondary school. This influx of outsiders, Mbijima maintains, gave Kongwa’s more permanent inhabitants the reputation of being “peaceful people,” accommodating of foreigners and, therefore, a good choice for hosting the camp.12

In early April 1964, the first exiles arrived at Kongwa. The majority of them were FRELIMO cadres led by Samora Machel, but they also included a small group of SWAPO members who had recently completed military training in China and the Soviet Union and arrived two days before the Mozambicans.13 There they set up tents around the site of the abandoned railway station located 1–2 kilometres west of Kongwa village. Over several weeks, SWAPO and FRELIMO members renovated the existing buildings into soldiers’ barracks, constructed new buildings to be used as offices and kitchens, and separated the area allocated for the two movements into two camps, divided by a barbed wire fence.14 In all these activities, the liberation movements were aided by Tanzanians. According to John Otto Nankudhu, one of the first Namibians at Kongwa, Major Chongambele and Lieutenant Muganga mobilised locals to help with the renovation and construc-tion of the buildings, with the assistance of the Kongwa branch of the Tanganyikan African National Union (TANU).15 Tanzanians also provided food and drink for the workers and led them to a local pub to take their meals.16

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By May 1964 the Mozambicans and Namibians had moved out of their tents and into their respective camps.17 There they were soon joined by the ANC, the MPLA and ZAPU, each of which established a camp neighbouring those already administered by FRELIMO and SWAPO. By 1965, over 1 000 exiles, the great majority of them men originating from the five southern African countries then under white minority rule, were inhabiting the camps at Kongwa.18 Some exiles remained at Kongwa only briefly before being sent to infiltrate their countries of origin, while FRELIMO, the MPLA and ZAPU closed their respective camps by the end of the 1960s, moving to other sites which were more strategically located for their respective armed struggles.19 SWAPO and the ANC suffered setbacks which compelled them to accommodate many of their cadres at Kongwa for years. Despite the Tanzanian government’s closure of the ANC and SWAPO camps at Kongwa in 1969 and the redeployment of the cadres for training in the USSR, both camps reopened again shortly thereafter (Shubin 1999, 78–79).20 While Namibians moved in and out of Kongwa during the early and mid-1970s with little continuity of personnel, many South Africans remained at the camp for much of the 1970s.21 In 1978, when the ANC camp finally closed, some cadres had lived at Kongwa for over ten years.22

During this period, and especially in the early years, the number of exiles living at Kongwa was comparable to the number of Tanzanians living in the local community itself. Estimates of the population of Kongwa village during the 1960s by locals and former exiles suggest that the village was inhabited by no more than 2 000 people, and perhaps closer to 1 000.23 The territory surrounding Kongwa was sparsely populated, consisting primarily of Wagogo farmers making their living through a combination of agriculture, cattle-raising and migration in a region prone to extended droughts and killing famines (Rigby 1967, 20; Maddox 1996, 43; Peterson 2006, 988–990).24 The area was peripheral by many measures. Most of the shops, traders and merchants who had entered Kongwa village in conjunction with the Groundnut Scheme departed shortly after the Scheme collapsed, along with the immigrants who had briefly opened new economic opportu-nities to long-standing local inhabitants.25 Although some people in and around Kongwa were travelling to other parts of Tanzania as migrant labourers and were selling karanga groundnuts in a cash economy, Kongwa remained at the distant margins of the Tanzanian economy and the world system (Rigby 1967, 20, 22, 23; Maddox 1996, 54, 56–57).

Nevertheless, Kongwa was now at the centre of a new international community shaped by Julius Nyerere’s Pan-African vision. For Kongwa’s inhabitants, this vision was experienced primarily in the form of everyday encounters and interpersonal relationships with their new neighbours. Through such encounters and relations, “Pan-Africanism” was put into practice.

Hosting “the freedom fighters” Despite Nyerere and other Tanzanian officials’ caution that the freedom fighters’ presence at Kongwa should remain “a secret,” the latter were hardly hidden from locals and others who were passing through the village. Although locals were forbidden to enter the camps without special permission, on weekends Kongwa village often swarmed with men from the camps when these had no training routines and were permitted to walk to neighbouring areas. Some men wore their military uniforms into the village, but even for those who dressed in civilian clothes the thick soled military boots made them easily distinguishable from local people, even at a distance.26 Similarly, their activities marked them as a distinct category of people and made them the focus of consider-able attention.

For locals who were looking to sell their crops or goods, the newcomers were promising customers. Although the basic food, shelter and (sometimes) clothing needs of the exiles were provided for in their respective camps, all other commodities which they might desire could only be accessed through exchanges with people in Kongwa village and neighbouring communities. It was, therefore, common for exiles to use whatever they had to purchase commodities which were not supplied to them in the camp.27 Beer was especially popular, and the Kongwa shebeens

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did good business, including a large open-air bar owned by the Tanzanian government (the one previously created during the Groundnut Scheme) and many privately owned pombe shops (selling locally brewed beer) which quickly opened in Kongwa’s Ugogoni section.28 Two Indian men, “Ali Smahili” and “Shamshuru,” both of whom had remained at Kongwa after the collapse of the Groundnut Scheme, were recipients of tenders to supply food for the camps and hired local people to help them with their businesses.29 There were also locals who found employment in the camps, some as manual labourers for short-term construction projects and others in more permanent capacities as masons and switch-board operators.30

At the same time the liberation movements offered services to the local community. For example, Tanzanians at Kongwa were not only impressed by the success of farms which some of the liberation movements established in their camps, but also learned new farming methods through collaboration with them (Williams 2011, 69).31 Although locals maintained that they usually received medical attention at the Tanzanian government clinic in Kongwa village, they also sought help from clinics established by various liberation movements, especially when the Tanzanian clinic ran out of needed supplies.32 Exiles also took the lead in constructing several large buildings in Kongwa, including a community hall near the Kongwa police station and the TANU office.33

Locals had ample opportunity to observe and/or interact with their new neighbours in other settings as well. For example, from the time of their arrival, the liberation movements were regular participants in Kongwa’s commemoration of national holidays, including Africa Day, Independence Day and Saba Saba Day (marking the founding date of TANU as well as the Dar es Salaam International Trade Fair). On these days the guerrillas marched in procession into the village parade ground under the direction of Major Chongambele, who would instruct them by shouting out commands in Kiswahili like “Kupanda!” [Attention!] and “Kusawa!” [At ease!].34 Locals remember these events as important occasions which drew neighbouring Tanzanian communities’ attention to Kongwa and its special contribution to Africa’s liberation.

Exiles were also valued participants on local soccer teams. During the 1960s and 1970s Kongwa and surrounding areas supported a robust league, which exiles joined through squads representing particular liberation movements and, eventually, through “Ujamaa,” a team whose players included some of the best talent of the liberation movements and local community. These teams were very successful, regularly winning the local league and drawing large crowds to Kongwa village for matches.35 Also, Kongwa District formed a combined team, composed of top local players, to compete annually in a tournament with other teams from the Dodoma Region for the opportunity to represent it in a national competition. According to research participants, the Kongwa Combined team of that era, composed largely of exiles, was the best team in the region ever and its fame drew teams from other parts of Tanzania to Kongwa to compete against it.36

Through such activities, meaningful relationships between locals and exiles formed, shaping affective ties and shared allegiances. For example, many male research participants who grew up in Kongwa during the 1960s and 1970s emphasise that “the freedom fighters” were the heroes and role-models for the local youth of their generation. According to White Zuberi Mwanzalila, who was eight years old when the first freedom fighters arrived at Kongwa, “We need[ed] to be like them: [to imitate] how they live; what they like; what they didn’t like.”37 Imitation focused on practices and styles, including how freedom fighters walked and spoke, what songs they sang and what clothes they wore. As Mwanzalila and his peers became older, some developed more substantial relationships with exiles, socializing with particular individuals, learning about their military training abroad and the situation in South Africa.38 Other local men, ten to twenty years older than Mwanzalila, suggest that they formed friendships with exile age-mates over drinks at the pombe shops and through shared experiences on the soccer field.39 Ujamaa and the Kongwa Combined team received support at matches from fans who included hosts and exiles alike. Sexual relationships between exile men and local women were also widespread and, as I discuss below, drew locals and exiles into complex and sustained relationships.

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Some interactions between locals and exiles, however, strained the Kongwa community, causing resentment among locals of their new neighbours. Although largely excluded from present-day oral histories of the inhabitants of Kongwa, there is evidence that exiles engaged in, and were arrested for, criminal activities, especially theft and the sale of stolen goods from locals (Sibeko 1996; Ndlovu 2004, 466, 468). Fights were common after extended drinking bouts at the pombe shops, and some resulted in exiles assaulting local people and being detained at Kongwa Prison.40 Some Kongwa elders accused local women of engaging in prostitution with exiles, thereby accentuating pre-existing generational and ethnic tensions at Kongwa.41 Activities threatening the local social order appear to have increased in the late 1960s when setbacks in the liberation struggles of SWAPO and the ANC correlated with camp inhabitants avoiding camp activities which were no longer strictly enforced and loitering in Kongwa village during weekdays and at all hours (Sibeko 1996, 485; Ndlovu 2004, 461–462; Lissoni 2009, 297; Williams 2011, 77; Ellis 2012, 51–57). In 1969 when the Tanzanian government required the ANC and SWAPO to close their camps temporarily, it cited the “hooliganism and crime” of exiles as among the reasons for (at least the ANC camp’s) closure (Shubin 1999, 78–79; Ellis 2012, 83).42 And there appear to have been on-going discussions among Tanzanians at Kongwa and elsewhere about whether they should call exiles “wapiganyi wauhuru,” as their national leaders asserted, or rather “wakimbizi” [“refugees” or “runaways”], a term with negative connotations used to suggest that freedom fighters were not living up to their reputations.43

Despite these tensions, locals at Kongwa became interconnected with, and in some cases deeply reliant upon, their exiled neighbours. Materially, many locals benefitted from the presence of the exiles, through the opening of markets and services on a scale comparable to that from which the community had briefly profited during the Groundnut Scheme. Holiday parades and successful soccer teams enriched life at Kongwa and drew attention to Kongwa’s “freedom fighters,” thereby distinguishing the village from others in rural central Tanzania and generating local pride. Interpersonal relationships drew locals and exiles into shared social networks, which expanded and deepened over their years living together at Kongwa.

Entering KongwaExiles were, on the whole, more ambivalent about their placement at Kongwa than their hosts were about receiving them. There are different reasons for such feelings, contingent upon the expecta-tions of particular individuals for what they would find in exile and the trajectories of different national liberation struggles, which shaped how long and under what circumstances certain exiles remained in the camps. Generally, however, the ambivalence, and in some cases outright discon-tent, felt by exiles focused on Kongwa’s remote location, far removed from the more central places where they would rather have been. For example, former inhabitants of SWAPO’s Kongwa camp frequently refer to Kongwa as “the bush.” In so doing they not only identify Kongwa as rural, but also as distant from sites which were (and remain) more central to Namibian imaginaries of the liberation struggle — such as Dar es Salaam, where their leaders were based and their peers were studying, the USSR, China and other countries where guerrillas were attending military training courses with foreign instructors and, of course, Namibia, the “home” which they were preparing to liberate. Similar themes are accentuated in accounts narrated by former inhabitants of the ANC’s camp at Kongwa. For example, Isaac Maphoto, a former MK cadre interviewed for an oral history project by the South African Democracy and Education Trust (SADET), describes Kongwa as a place “no different from prison … far away from civilisation” (Ndlovu 2004, 482; SADET 2008, 239). Similarly, Fanele Mbali, in his recently published autobiography In Transit, presents Kongwa as “extremely hot, dry and isolated from all normal social activity … No one wanted to remain there for any length of time” (Mbali 2012, 126).

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in their accounts former exiles often represent Kongwa’s inhabitants as subjects appropriate for a rural backwater, and Kongwa as a place where they were

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isolated from important developments in the modern world. Although some former exiles praise those who lived near Kongwa as “kind,” “gentle” and “peaceful” people, they also tend to slip into tropes which resemble colonial representations of Africans. For example, Isaac Makopo maintains that Tanzanians at Kongwa “could not believe [the ANC farm], because it was the very first of its kind. They didn’t know that people could till that arid piece of land” (SADET 2008, 211) — a comment which overlooks the fact that local people had been farming the arid land around Kongwa for generations, albeit with different technologies.44 Similarly, sources maintain that the ANC clinic “did much to cement relations between the ANC and the local population, who preferred the clinic to their own state hospital” (Ndlovu 2004, 465; SADET 2008, 211), despite evidence suggesting that ANC members and other exiles benefitted at least as much from Tanzanian government medical facilities around Kongwa as the locals did from the ANC clinic.45 Some sources also significantly distort and/or demean how locals were living around Kongwa. According to Mbali, Kongwa village was inhabited by “the Wagogo tribes-people” who “led a simple life but a kind, difficult to explain, for while some were hunting and gathering, others kept a few chickens or a goat or a single donkey” (Mbali 2012, 127). According to Maphoto, at Kongwa “You could hardly see a person with a suit and most of the women we had access to were prosti-tutes” (SADET 2008, 239).

Despite such glib representations, most exiles placed at Kongwa had much to gain from engaging with their new neighbours. Unlike locals, who had at least some degree of mobility, most guerrillas stationed in the camp were restricted to Kongwa and places they could reach by foot but required special authorisation from their respective liberation movements and the Tanzanian government to travel further afield. They were, therefore, highly reliant on locals to access commodities that were not made available in the camps and which they might desire. It was common for camp inhabitants, who often lacked pocket money, to barter their own clothing for cash in the village which, in turn, they used to buy beer and other items.46 Kongwa village provided a market for crops — including groundnuts, maize, beans, potatoes, onions and tomatoes — which were grown inside the camps both on liberation movement farms and on small personal plots.47 Exiles benefitted from the services provided at Kongwa village by the Tanzanian govern-ment, including the village clinic and a local doctor where treatment was for free.48 Exiles also accessed activities and institutions in Kongwa, including not only soccer clubs, but also churches which some guerrillas attended on Sundays, defying the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of many camp commanders.49 And all of these interactions were facilitated by locals who engaged with exiles in daily conversation, enabling some exiles to become fluent in Kiswahili.50

Through such activities, exiles were drawn into interpersonal relationships with locals that, in some respects, mirror those already described. Exiles might have valued these relationships for different reasons than their hosts, however. As previously noted, some guerrillas lived at Kongwa for years. This applied especially to SWAPO and ANC cadres who were unable to infiltrate their respective countries of origin due to setbacks faced by their liberation movements, but who were bound to the camps by the prescription of the Tanzanian government that the liberation movements look after their fellow nationals at the prescribed camps. This predicament contrasted significantly with the future which exiles imagined for themselves when they entered Kongwa, which they saw as a stop en route to engaging the enemy in combat and/or to pursuing other ambitions in exile before returning to their country of origin.51 Under the circumstances, sustained relationships with local people enabled exiles to develop useful social networks and some kind of home in an unstable, foreign environment.52

Sexual relationships were especially significant for enabling exiles to create a sense of home at Kongwa. During the fourteen years when the liberation movements were based there, many exile men became sexually involved with local women, both from the village of Kongwa itself as well as from smaller villages scattered across a radius of approximately ten kilometres. Although some of these relationships were short-lived and involved little or no sustained interactions between

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sexual partners, others were maintained for years and shaped enduring social ties. From as early as 1966, it was well known to SWAPO members living at Kongwa that several of their commanders spent weekends with women in the village, and some knew the identity and residence of their commanders’ partners. By the 1970s, rank-and-file members of the ANC at Kongwa had tacit, if not explicit, permission to visit their partners in homes where they were living outside the camps and to spend weekends there.53 Locals remember particular exiles who fathered children with women at Kongwa and were drawn into the lives of their partners’ extended families. Similarly, some locals first came to know individual exiles through a female family member who had born a child with an exile partner.54

Important as such relationships were to exiles and their hosts, they were always precarious. Before the late 1970s none of the liberation movements formally permitted their members to marry in exile (Hassim 2006; Akawa 2010; Lissoni and Suriano 2014). Pocket money for exiles at Kongwa was notoriously sporadic and did not take spousal or child support into consideration — conditions which generated considerable conflict both within SWAPO and the ANC.55 The liberation movements’ legitimacy internationally rested on their having exiles under their control, and the movements’ capacity to lead armed resistance to white minority rule required them to have guerrilla soldiers who could be deployed anywhere at any time. Even the Tanzanian government, whose President had first urged locals at Kongwa to make exiles feel “at home,” appears to have been concerned about the security implications of unregulated interactions between exiles and hosts at Kongwa.56 Thus, while the ANC and SWAPO allowed camp rules to slide during the late 1960s and the 1970s, neither they nor the host government had much incentive to recognise the kinds of bonds which were forming between exiles and their hosts as a result.

The story of Loisa Kamwaya and Nashakale NghaamwaAmong local women who became involved in sexual relationships with exile men at Kongwa is Loisa Kamwaya.57 According to her, she met the father of her children, Erastus “Namara” Nghaamwa,58 in 1966 at Mlanga, a small village located five kilometres south of Kongwa village. Namara was living at SWAPO’s Kongwa camp, where he was stationed as a commander. According to Kamwaya, Namara was a friend of her father and brother, and he used to come to the family’s homestead to visit them. At that time, Kamwaya was a young woman responsible for the domestic duties at home where she had lived her entire life. Namara was older and had been among the first Namibians to arrive in Tanzania in the early 1960s; he had left again on the order of SWAPO to complete military training in China, and returned to Kongwa in 1964 or 1965. In the camp, Namara was responsible for leading several kinds of training, including hands-on instruction in how to use explosives as well as classroom courses on political education and mass mobilisation.59

According to Kamwaya, her father was glad for her to “marry” Namara — despite the fact that SWAPO did not officially endorse the marriage and that Kamwaya’s family did not receive mahali [bride wealth].60 In 1967 they had their first child, Chikanawa, and Namara moved Kamwaya from Mlanga to Kongwa village. In 1969 they had a second child, Nashakale, and in 1971 a third, Nangula. Namara himself lived in Kongwa camp until 1969 at which time he was transferred to Dar es Salaam. Kamwaya and the children moved between Dar es Salaam and Kongwa for several years. In 1972 Namara left Tanzania. According to Kamwaya, his initial move was to the United Kingdom (UK) where he had obtained a bursary to study. Within two years he was in south-western Zambia, whereto SWAPO had shifted its base of operations, and in the late 1970s he moved with SWAPO to southern Angola.61 Kamwaya says that she was unaware of Namara’s movements after he left for the UK and received no word of him for many years.

In 1986, a SWAPO delegation led by Simon “Mzee” Kaukungwa came to Kongwa. It was then that she learned that Namara had died in December 1983 while on a combat mission in southern Angola. Kaukungwa had returned to Kongwa to collect the children of Namara and other Namibian exiles who had lived at Kongwa to take them to Nyango, a SWAPO camp in western

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Zambia. Apparently, Kaukungwa’s mission did not come to Kamwaya as a complete surprise. Namara had told her that, were he to die, SWAPO would be responsible for taking care of their children. Kamwaya may also have known that SWAPO maintained a record of children fathered by Namibians at Kongwa and that some of these children had already been collected by SWAPO in the previous year.62 Nevertheless, the arrival of the SWAPO delegation at this time, and the events which followed, were unexpected. Kaukungwa and a Tanzanian official led Kamwaya and other mothers to the offices of Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the successor to TANU and the ruling party of Tanzania. There they were compelled to sign documents and to hand their children over to SWAPO, the liberation movement to which these children allegedly belonged. Although the exact content and current whereabouts of these documents are unknown, Kamwaya and other mothers had the understanding that SWAPO was to provide them with education and, following their studies, facilitate their return to their families in Tanzania.

Kamwaya’s oldest and youngest children, Chikanawa and Nangula, left with Kaukungwa and others for Nyango. Her middle child, Nashakale, who was pregnant at the time of Kaukungwa’s arrival, left for Nyango the following year. There they were given basic education and worked on the camp’s farm for three years, remaining in regular contact with their family in Tanzania via postal exchange facilitated by SWAPO. In 1989, SWAPO and the international community began to implement UN Resolution 435 and its provisions for democratic elections in Namibia. In conjunction with this resolution, Chikanawa and Nangula returned briefly to their mother at Kongwa for a visit before travelling with SWAPO to Namibia for the elections. Nashakale too travelled to Namibia for the elections but was then granted permission by SWAPO to visit her family in Tanzania where she remained. Letter exchanges between the Namibia-based children and their Tanzanian family became scattered. In 1993 Kamwaya and Nashakale received a letter from Nangula indicating that Chikanawa had died following injuries sustained in an accident while driving a truck. Thereafter, Kamwaya and Nashakale heard nothing again from Nangula.

On July 3, 2000 Namibian President Sam Nujoma, accompanied by then Tanzanian Foreign Minister (and now President) Jakaya Kikwete, visited Kongwa to celebrate Tanzania’s contri-bution to Namibia’s liberation struggle. At this event, Nashakale was introduced to Nujoma as “the daughter of Namara,” a Namibian hero. Nujoma, in turn, urged his Tanzanian colleagues to look after Nashakale and to facilitate a trip for her to Namibia where she might reconnect with her siblings. After the dignitaries’ departure from Kongwa, however, the family heard no news. Subsequent efforts to speak with Kikwete at the parliament in Dodoma and with Namibia’s Ambassador to Tanzania during a visit to Kongwa also were of no avail. Only in 2012, following the production of a Tanzanian Broadcasting Corporation (TBC) film about Kongwa, did the family finally receive news of Nangula via a social network forged during the making of the film, extending from White Zuberi Mwanzalila in Kongwa, over a TBC filmmaker in Dar es Salaam to a former exile and archivist based at the National Archives of Namibia in Windhoek.63 As the family learned, Nangula had died in 2001, following a gradual decline in her health over the 1990s. But Nangula had given birth to a daughter, Olivia, who in turn had given birth to a daughter of her own. Both Nangula’s daughter and granddaughter were (and are) still alive.

Although unique in some of its details, Loisa Kamwaya’s and Nashakale Nghaamwa’s story resembles that of many others. Over the course of two visits to Kongwa, I spoke with seven families who sought assistance in tracing relatives now scattered across Namibia and South Africa, and learned of other families with similar stories. In March 2012, following the TBC film, Mwanzalila approached the Namibian Embassy in Dar es Salaam on behalf of Loisa Kamwaya and other mothers at Kongwa, requesting information and support to visit their children and their children’s graves in Namibia. More than a year later, this request had received no reply.64 The sense of betrayal which these families — and especially the mothers — have experienced is palpable. As Kamwaya and other mothers indicated in our interviews, they did not want their children to go with SWAPO to Zambia, but their wishes were disregarded by SWAPO and Tanzanian

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officials. Likewise, the mothers expressed resentment towards politicians who had visited Kongwa to celebrate the site’s significance for Africa’s liberation but who had done nothing to help them reconnect with children who were born, quite literally, of these liberation struggles.

The historiography of exile and the anthropology of refugees Stories such as these strike at the heart of a contradiction which many have endured. Products of a Pan-African discourse which encouraged people to cross national borders in pursuit of an African cause, families such as Loisa Kamwaya’s have been torn apart and abandoned by post-colonial nations and the national elites who define their interests. One can imagine the predicament that SWAPO, the ANC and the Tanzanian government found themselves in as liberation struggles bogged down and as guerrillas became stuck indefinitely in host countries. Likewise, one can understand the need that the liberation movements had for mobile members who could be sent anywhere at any time, whether to be utilised as soldiers on the front or as workers and students in rear camps. Nevertheless, in the absence of public knowledge about how people lived at sites like Kongwa, it has become possible for national leaders to pretend as if families like Kamwaya’s never existed and to dismiss any responsibility which the post-colony should have for these and other relationships that formed there.

Historiography struggles to illuminate these relationships. “Exile,” a location with deep resonance in the narratives of many nations, is consistently rendered a topic of study for “history,” a discipline organised around the past of distinct nation-states. Because nation, exile and history are so intimately bound, however, historical work on exile tends to affirm existing national units and obscure the particular sites where exiles have lived and interna-tional relations have formed.65 Clearly, such perspectives are overlooked in existing historical scholarship on southern Africa which, as previously noted, organises histories of exile around separate nations and national liberation movements. Similarly, the few references to Kongwa in historiography focus on exiles belonging to one or another nation, presenting local people as objects affected by exiles’ activities and without distinct agencies of their own.66 Histories of late apartheid era migration presented from the perspective of Africa’s front-line states could shift this literature, opening new topics of study and generating fresh debates. But if, like SADET’s recent volume (2013) on African solidarity, this literature focuses on host nations, it will merely conflate the nation-states which administered exiles and the various local communities which interacted with them, reinforcing dominant national frameworks. In turn, the concerns of these and other distinct entities will continue to blur, and the tensions inherent to a Pan-African political project aimed at liberating African nations and carried out at particular locations will remain unexplored.

Anthropology is well positioned to address these shortcomings and advance this literature. As anthropologists and other anthropologically minded scholars have emphasised, nations are not natural units of socio-political life, but rather a transnational cultural form constituted at particular times and places (e.g. Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Malkki 1995a). Liisa Malkki’s observations are particularly relevant here. As Malkki first argued, drawing on fieldwork with Burundian Hutu refugees living in western Tanzania, “the refugee” should not be seen as “an objectively self-delimiting field of study,” but rather as a discursive object, shaped by “the national order of things” (1995b, 496; also 1995a). Camps, towns and other spaces where refugees live are ideal sites through which to examine this order for it is there that people create meaning on the basis of refugees’ displacement from a national “home.” Importantly, organisations which administer refugees often frame their interventions in terms of “humanitarianism” — an ideal which transcends the boundaries of sovereign nation-states in the name of caring for a suffering humanity. But, as Malkki’s ethnography demonstrates, this ideal has become deeply embedded in “the national order of things,” and humanitarian interventions

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have contributed not only to the reproduction of nationalism, but also to genocidal violence inspired by nationalist ideology.67

Since Malkki published her seminal work in the mid-1990s, anthropologists have taken up a range of studies which consider how nationalism and international relations are constituted through everyday life among refugees. Nevertheless, anthropologists have confined themselves almost exclusively to research with present-day refugee communities — people living in places which ethnographers can physically inhabit to conduct research according to traditional ethnographic techniques. In so doing, anthropologists have made critical interventions into work on refugees, mobility, humanitarianism and human rights, illuminating problematic national logics which frame dominant discourses on these topics. By focusing exclusively on sites where refugees and other transnational migrants now live, however, we overlook topics of study which could illuminate legacies of southern Africa’s liberation struggles and deepen our understanding of what is at stake regionally in a critique of “the national order of things.”

This article draws the historiography of exile and the anthropology of refugees into conversa-tion with one another through an examination of exile-host relations at a particular site with regional significance. It does not claim to be a definitive study of these relations and their impact on Kongwa’s inhabitants today — topics which would require more extensive fieldwork at Kongwa. Nevertheless, it does demonstrate that Kongwa’s exile-host relations were substantial and have had enduring consequences for people who lived and live there. These consequences have received little attention in the memory politics currently surrounding exile in southern Africa. To mention only the most relevant example to this study: over the past five years a vibrant political movement has emerged in Namibia focused on children who were born in exile. Rallying under the banner “Children of the Liberation Struggle,” these young adults are seeking recognition from the Namibian government on the premise that, as children born under SWAPO’s care abroad, the SWAPO-led government has a responsibility to provide for their current needs. Discussion about who the “Children of the Liberation Struggle” are, what they want, and how the Namibian government should respond, has taken various forms. But all of this discussion has framed the issue in terms of its relevance for the Namibian national community. There has been no public recognition of, let alone debate about, how “the Children of the Liberation Struggle” are entangled with families living at Kongwa and other sites scattered across Africa’s front-line states. Most of these family members are not Namibian citizens, but they and their local communities have been shaped fundamentally by the liberation struggle of Namibia (as well as those of other neighbouring countries). By looking in detail at exile-host relations at one place, we may begin to comprehend the extent to which certain people and experiences are marginalised by the national terms which dominate public discourse on historical recognition, reparation and reconciliation in southern Africa.

In order to advance a more regional approach to the exile past of southern Africa, it will be necessary to open up the language through which national and transnational ideologies have been conflated with one another. This article draws attention to this conflation by framing its observa-tions about Kongwa in the context of “Pan-Africanism.” As I have suggested, Pan-Africanism may not only be seen as an ideology which African political thinkers have used to draw national, continental and other objectives into a coherent whole, but may also be seen as constructed by everyday social relations that cross national borders and illuminate tensions between national and transnational forms of belonging. This research has highlighted such tensions in one context, drawing especially from the poignant story of an exile-host couple, whose condition of possibility was Pan-Africanism but whose family was dismembered by a government and liberation movement professing Pan-African ideology. Scholarship could further illuminate these dynamics, examining strains inherent in national liberation struggles articulated through ideals of transcending national belonging and exposing social relations formed in the shadow of such ideals at particular sites. Anthropology is well positioned to speak meaningfully on such issues, but it has yet to do so.

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AcknowledgementsI wish to extend special thanks to Beauty Matongo at the National Archives of Namibia, Godfrey Nago at the Tanzanian Broadcasting Corporation, Elias Tarimo at the District Commissioner’s Office in Morogoro, Neville Reuben at the Open University in Dar es Salaam, and White Zuberi Mwanzalila and Paolo Mtutuwi at the Office of the Kongwa District Council for their assistance in making the contacts necessary to write this article. I am also grateful to South Africa’s National Research Foundation for providing financial assistance to support research conducted in 2012 and 2013 and to colleagues who read drafts of this paper. These include participants in the colloquium “Mobile Soldiers and the Un-National Liberation of Southern Africa” organised by Luise White and Miles Larmer at the University of Sheffield, and participants at a seminar organised by Musa Sadock in the History Department of the University of Dar es Salaam.

Notes1. Morrow, Maaba and Pulumani (2004) and Lissoni and Suriano (2014) consider everyday interactions

between exiles from southern Africa and their hosts in Tanzania. 2. Interviews with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe, Kongwa, 8 August 2012; White

Zuberi Mwanzalila, Kongwa, 9 August 2012. According to one account, Tanzanian Vice President Rashididi Kawawa also visited Kongwa during the same trip with Oscar Kambona.

3. Generally, Tanzanian research participants presented the place where exiles lived at Kongwa as “the camp,” in its singular form. There were, however, several autonomous units administered by different liberation movements at Kongwa. Therefore, unless referring to Tanzanian representations, this paper presents where exiles lived at Kongwa as “the camps,” in the plural form.

4. Interview with John Madebe, Kongwa, 8 August 2012.5. Interview with John Madebe; Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe.6. Interview with John Madebe.7. One of my research participants drew this connection, suggesting that exiles may have been moved to

Kongwa as a security measure in the wake of the coup (Interview with Helao Shityuwete, Windhoek, 24 July 2007).

8. Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe.9. Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila.10. Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe.11. Interview with John Madebe; Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila.12. Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe.13. Note that my interviews with exiles and locals who lived at Kongwa (twenty-seven research participants

in all) indicate that Kongwa was founded in 1964 and not in 1962 as stated in the introduction to volume 5 of SADET’s The Road to Democracy in South Africa (2013, xxi) as well as in Tarimo and Reuben’s article in that same volume (2013, 217). Sources offering eye witness accounts of the camp’s founding include “Kongwa: Berço da Revolução” (1976, 19) and the interview with John Otto Nankudhu and Helao Shityuwete, Windhoek, 2 June 2011.

14. “Kongwa: Berço da Revolução” (1976, 19, 21); Interview with John Nankudhu and Helao Shityuwete. Nankudhu maintains that these buildings included a dilapidated school building, but research participants from Kongwa speak only of the railway station. Interestingly, there is no reference in the “Kongwa: Berço da Revolução” (1976) article to the existing buildings which exiles found present on the site when they arrived at Kongwa, but Otto Nankudhu and Tanzanian research participants speak of these buildings.

15. Interview with John Otto Nankudhu and Helao Shityuwete. People who lived at Kongwa during these years indicate that Chongambele usually mobilised people for projects in the camp through the local TANU branch (Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe).

16. Interview with John Otto Nankudhu and Helao Shityuwete.17. “Kongwa: Berço da Revolução” (1976, 20); Interview with John Otto Nankudhu and Helao Shityuwete. 18. For further details about the different camps at Kongwa and their demographics, see Williams (2011,

64–66).19. During the early 1970s ZANU also briefly administered a camp at Kongwa. See, for example, Wilfred

Mhanda’s (1971) account of his experiences at Kongwa in 1971.20. See also interview with Kaufilwa Nepelilo, Tsumeb, 4 August 2007. Whereas Shubin (1999) argues that

MK cadres only returned from the USSR in 1971 or 1972, Nepelilo suggests that SWAPO members returned earlier, probably in 1970.

21. Most Namibians at Kongwa were relocated in 1971 following a riot in the camp (see Williams 2009, 230–231, 233–234; 2011, 85). Later, Namibia’s “exodus” generation compelled authorities to reopen the SWAPO camp in 1974–1975. Mukwanangobe “Mukwahepo” YaImmanuel, the only woman living

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in SWAPO’s Kongwa camp for years, maintains that she remained at Kongwa from 1965 to 1974 (see Namhila 2013).

22. The ANC camp closed in conjunction with the opening in 1978 of the ANC’s school, later named the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO), at Mazimbu (Interview with John Madebe; Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila; Interview with Festus Lunga, Kongwa, 18 June 2013; Morrow, Maaba and Pulumani 2004, 15). These sources contradict Tarimo and Reuben’s claims that the “harsh arid climate at Kongwa and the danger of malaria led to the abandonment of the camp in 1976” (2013, 233–234). Similarly, Tarimo and Reuben’s account of why liberation movements initially based at Kongwa moved from there to other camps is misleading, eliding important detail about why specific moves were made (217–218; 233).

23. Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila; Interview with Samson Ndeikwila, Windhoek, 21 July 2007; Interview with Helao Shityuwete, Windhoek, 14 December 2010.

24. Maddox (1996) emphasises that the region is the most famine prone region in all of Tanzania with an average annual rainfall of about 500 ml per year, just surpassing the minimum for supporting agriculture.

25. Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe; Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila.

26. Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila. There were also differences between liberation movements with regard to how their members dressed when moving outside the camp. As Helao Shityuwete of SWAPO recalls, “It wasn’t even a secret. The FRELIMO guys used to say, ‘You guys are not a fighting force.’ Because we [SWAPO] used to dress like civilians especially during a day off to go into the township. They always wore their uniforms wherever they went, the FRELIMOs” (24 July 2007).

27. Interview with Ya Toivo Ashipala, Tsumeb, 16 March 2007; Interview with Nambinga Kati, Windhoek, 11 August 2007; Interview with Kaufilwa Nepelilo; Interview with Helao Shityuwete (24 July 2007); Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe; Interview with John Madebe; Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila.

28. Interview with John Madebe; Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila.29. Interview with John Madebe.30. Interview with John Otto Otto Nankudhu and Helao Shityuwete; Interview with John Madebe; Interview

with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe.31. Interview with John Madebe. 32. Interview with John Madebe. 33. Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe; Interview with White Zuberi

Mwanzalila.34. Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe; Interview with Simon “Mzee”

Kaukungwa, Olukonda, 25 August 2012; see also Ndlovu (2004, 466).35. Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe; Interview with White Zuberi

Mwanzalila; Ndlovu (2004, 464). 36. Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe; Interview with White Zuberi

Mwanzalila. See also Ndlovu (2004, 464).37. Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila.38. Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila. 39. Interview with John Madebe; Interview with Michael Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe.40. Interview with Helao Shityuwete; Interview with Samson Ndeikwila, Windhoek, 2 March 2007. Some

SWAPO members at Kongwa referred to these incidents in our interviews generically as “the weekend problems.”

41. According to my sources, these tensions extended from the era of the Groundnut Scheme when unmarried women from outside the Dodoma region migrated into Kongwa. Accusations of prostitu-tion then, and later when the exiles arrived, focused largely on women of Hiya ethnicity (Interview with Michael Mbijima and Ozmanda Boma, Kongwa, 13 June 2013).

42. See also interview with Kaufilwa Nepelilo.43. Interview with Michael Mbijima and Ozmanda Boma, Kongwa, 13 June 2013; Interview with Festus

Lunga; Ndlovu (2004, 465).44. As Makopo and others indicate, the ANC benefitted from access to insecticides and seeds provided by

the OAU (Ndlovu 2004, 463).45. Interview with Helao Shityuwete (14 December 2010); Interview with John Otto Nankudhu and Helao

Shityuwete; Interview with John Madebe.46. Interview with Helao Shityuwete (14 December 2010); Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila (9

August 2012).

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47. Interview with Nankudhu and Shityuwete; Interview with Simon “Mzee” Kaukungwa; Interview with John Madebe; see also Ndlovu (2004, 463).

48. Interview with John Otto Nankudhu and Helao Shityuwete; Interview with Helao Shityuwete (14 December 2010); Interview with John Madebe.

49. Interview with Simeon Nashilongo, Windhoek, 11 December 2010 (see also Namhila 2013, 57). Views on the possibilities of religious identification and practice among former exiles stationed at Kongwa differ. Tanzanians at Kongwa often mentioned their discussions with exiles about religion and how, generally, the latter dismissed it.

50. By contrast, Samson Ndeikwila and Michael Mbijima et al. indicate that most freedom fighters’ knowledge of Kigogo was quite limited (Interview with Ndeikwila, 25 July 2012, 18–19; Interview with Mbijima, Ozmanda Boma and John Madebe (46).

51. For a discussion of the extent to which educational aspirations motivated travel into exile among Namibians living in SWAPO’s Kongwa camp, see Williams (2011, 73–78).

52. Arianna Lissoni makes a similar point, drawing from her interview with Terry Bell who interacted closely with many ANC members who moved to SOMAFCO when it was founded in 1978 (Lissoni and Suriano 2014, 135–136).

53. Interview with Festus Lunga; Interview White Zubereri Mwanzalila (19 June 2013). This point is also generally supported by Terry Bell (as quoted in Lissoni and Suriano 2014, 135).

54. These details, and others involving sexual relationships between locals and exiles, draw primarily on interviews which I conducted with local women who mothered children with exiles and with their family members: Interviews with Phoebe Kalaita and Leya William, Kongwa, 9 August 2012; Loisa Kamwaya and Nashakale Nghaamwa, Kongwa, 9 August 2012; Mama Seche, Kongwa, 11 June 2013; Ndina “Nyangoma” Mpanga, Kongwa, 12 June 2013; Mary Kululu “Chucki” Shikongo, 14 June 2013; Saul and Madeleine Kongawadodo, Ibwaga, 15 June 2013; Festus Lunga, Kongwa, 18 June 2013. I also conducted a follow-up interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila (Kongwa, 19 June 2013) which corrob-orated and contextualised these prior interviews.

55. For example, the twin issues of pocket money and freedom of movement were central to the conflicts within SWAPO at Kongwa during the 1960s (Williams 2011, 82–85). Similarly, a report on “the state of affairs in MK [Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing] in East Africa” filed in 1975 identifies guerrillas’ inability to provide support for local women and children as a primary source of discontent (University of Fort Hare, ANC Morogoro Papers, Box 29, J.P. Metshabi and S. Molifi, Interim Report of the Commission of the Regional Command Secretariat, Morogoro, 21 April–2 May 1975).

56. As the Tanzanian government maintained when it instructed the ANC to close its camp in 1969, the quality of exile-host interactions had made “the camp … a lucrative ground for enemy agents” (Ellis 2012, 83).

57. Unless otherwise noted, all information below draws on my interviews with Loisa Kamwaya and her daughter Nashakale Nghaamwa (9 August 2012 and 9 June 2013).

58. “Namara” is Erastus Ngaamwa’s combat name. He is best known by that name among Namibians.59. Interview with Samson Ndeikwila, Windhoek, 20 July 2012.60. Mwanzalila suggests that Kamwaya’s and other families probably received some kind of remuneration

from SWAPO for a child. Such payment would not only help pay expenses, but also have symbolic value as “a half mahali” (Interview with White Zuberi Mwanzalila, 19 June 2013).

61. Kamwaya mentioned nothing of Namara’s assignment to Zambia, but this point is well known to many who participated in my doctoral research and trained at SWAPO’s Oshatotwa camp at that time.

62. Interviews with Pheobe Kalaita and Leya William; Simon “Mzee” Kaukungwa (25 August 2012); White Zuberi Mwanzalila (19 June 2013); Mawazo “Grenice” Nakathiru, Windhoek, 2 November, 2013.

63. In tracing this story I interviewed Mwanzalila as well as the filmmaker, Godfrey Nago (Dar es Salaam, 27 July 2013; Dar es Salaam, 4 August 2013) and the archivist, Beauty Matongo (Windhoek, 29 October 2013).

64. Interviews with White Zuberi Mwanzalila (9 August 2012; 19 June 2013).65. For a more extended development of this and related points, see Williams (2009).66. I include my own previous article on Kongwa (Williams 2011) in this critique as well as the two cited

publications attending to daily life in the ANC camp (Ndlovu 2004; Ellis 2012).67. For further theoretical discussion of the “tension between ‘the internationalism of nations and the

internationalism of transcendent values,’” see Malkki (1994).

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