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Papers by Christian Williams

Research paper thumbnail of Conclusion: What is telling “if telling is all there is?”

From text: Slham Ataschi raises a similar question in her contribution to this special issue of A... more From text: Slham Ataschi raises a similar question in her contribution to this special issue of Acta Academica on “Silence after violence”. As she writes, drawingfrom her study of Afghanistan, “efforts such as truth telling, documenting and recording of individual memory in relation to past violence provide a voice for women’s narrative and personal memories during war and conflict. However, what if telling is all there is?” (page no). For Ataschi, this question opens a discussion on how stories of violence perpetrated on Afghani women during the country’s successive wars and under the Taliban regime have been drawn into human rights reports and truth-commission proceedings without commensurate efforts to develop meaningful public dialogue or address past injustices. As she suggests, the interests of “the international community” which issues these reports and organizes these proceedings remain distant from the people whose narratives they collect. In this context, “telling” risks r...

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Research paper thumbnail of Defining and Aiding ‘the Namibian Refugee’: A History of the Chaplaincy to Namibians in Exile, 1974-76

Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 2021

This article presents a history of the Chaplaincy to Namibians in Exile, focused on how the Chapl... more This article presents a history of the Chaplaincy to Namibians in Exile, focused on how the Chaplaincy's first leader, Salatiel Ailonga, and his Finnish missionary wife, Anita Ailonga, defined and aided "the Namibian refugee." The article discusses how Southern African libera-CONTACT Christian A. Williams

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Research paper thumbnail of Dissident Refugees: A History of 200 Namibians in Zambia, 1977-1989

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2020

To date, scholarship on Southern Africa's exile history has maintained a largely national focus, ... more To date, scholarship on Southern Africa's exile history has maintained a largely national focus, organised around liberation movements and their narratives. Nevertheless, many exile experiences do not fit neatly within this frame. This article examines such experiences through 200 Namibians who lived in Zambia during the late 1970s and 1980s. These Namibians were among the guerrilla soldiers whom SWAPO detained during its internal crisis of 1976. Rather than 'confess' to betraying the liberation struggle and returning to SWAPO, they chose to leave SWAPO in 1977 and were transported by the Zambian army to UNHCR's Meheba Camp. Most left the camp within a few years, living primarily in the Copperbelt and Lusaka prior to their repatriation to Namibia in 1989. Drawing from Siegfried Groth's archives and the author's oral history interviews, the article traces a particular group of exiled Namibians and their experiences of insecurity and solidarity. As I argue, these 'dissident refugees' lived in uniquely insecure circumstances, vulnerable to declining socioeconomic conditions in Zambia and openly threatened by SWAPO members, who targeted some of them with violence. At the same time, they cocreated a global solidarity community that was largely distinct from the solidarity community supporting SWAPO and other liberation movements during the same period, enabling them to access humanitarian aid, education and protection. By drawing attention to these social dynamics, the article challenges assumptions about what it meant to be a 'Namibian refugee' during the late 1970s and 1980s. It advocates micro-historical research aimed at nuancing liberation movement-focused accounts of southern Africa's exile past.

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Research paper thumbnail of Decolonising Knowledge: Reflections on Colonial Anthropology and a Humanities Seminar at the University of the Free State

The Strategic Review for Southern Africa, 2020

This paper discusses the Decolonising Knowledge Seminar, a seminar which I initiatedin the Humani... more This paper discusses the Decolonising Knowledge Seminar, a seminar which I initiatedin the Humanities Faculty at the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Bloemfontein campus in 2017. The paper’s opening sections present a rationale for the seminar. I maintain that there is considerable scholarship illuminating how colonialpower shaped the knowledge which academic disciplines generated about Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of it is focused on anthropology, the discipline centred on Europe’s non-Western ‘others’ and implicated in latecolonial government. Despite the influence of this and related critiques globally, with their focus on power-knowledge relationships, such work has not substantially permeated South Africa’s Afrikaans universities. There, humanities disciplineswere largely isolated from global knowledge flows during the apartheid era and continue to emerge from this insular past. The paper then discusses the seminar itself and what I see as its ...

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Research paper thumbnail of André du Pisani, Reinhart Kössler and William A. Lindeke, (eds.), The Long Aftermath of War – Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia, Freiburg, Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut, 2010

Journal of Namibian Studies : History Politics Culture, 2010

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Research paper thumbnail of Education in Exile: International Scholarships, Cold War Politics, and Conflicts among SWAPO Members in Tanzania, 1961–1968

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2017

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Research paper thumbnail of Contesting Caprivi: A History of Colonial Isolation and Regional Nationalism in Namibia

South African Historical Journal, 2013

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Research paper thumbnail of A History of Namibia

South African Historical Journal, 2013

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Research paper thumbnail of Silence, Voices, and “the Camp”: Perspectives on and from Southern Africa’s Exile Histories

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 2012

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Research paper thumbnail of Imagining the Post-Apartheid State: An ethnographic account of Namibia

African Affairs, 2012

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Research paper thumbnail of Inside African Anthropology

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Research paper thumbnail of Remember Cassinga?': an exhibition of photographs and histories

Kronos Journal of Cape History, Nov 1, 2010

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Research paper thumbnail of Living in Exile: Life and Crisis at SWAPO's Kongwa Camp, 1964–1968

A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO's Exile Camps

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Research paper thumbnail of The Politics of Heritage in Africa

Heritage work has had a uniquely wide currency in Africa's politics. Secure within the pages ... more Heritage work has had a uniquely wide currency in Africa's politics. Secure within the pages of books, encoded in legal statutes, encased in glass display cases and enacted in the panoply of court ritual, the artefacts produced by the heritage domain have become a resource for government administration, a library for traditionalists and a marketable source of value for cultural entrepreneurs. The Politics of Heritage in Africa draws together disparate fields of study - history, archaeology, linguistics, the performing arts and cinema - to show how the lifeways of the past were made into capital, a store of authentic knowledge that political and cultural entrepreneurs could draw from. This book shows African heritage to be a mode of political organisation, a means by which the relics of the past are shored up, reconstructed and revalued as commodities, as tradition, as morality or as patrimony.

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Research paper thumbnail of Exile history: An ethnography of the SWAPO camps and the Namibian nation

UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissert... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Exile history: An ethnography of the SWAPO camps and the Namibian nation. by Williams ...

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Research paper thumbnail of National history in Southern Africa: reflections on the'Remember Cassinga?'exhibition

Kronos (Bellville), 2010

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Research paper thumbnail of Refugees and social theory: from the politics of “bare life” to refugees as political subjects

This article explores theoretical literature on refugees, noting a significant distinction betwee... more This article explores theoretical literature on refugees, noting a significant distinction between an abstract body of work critiquing the politics of humanitarianism and an ethnographic literature focused on refugee subjects. As I argue, refugees should be seen not simply as "bare life" which has been removed from political life, but rather as political subjects whose subjectivities are shaped by the social environments in which they live. To illustrate this point, I draw on Liisa Malkki's Purity and exile and my own work on exile camps administered by the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) during Namibia's liberation struggle. Collectively, this and other ethnographic literature highlight limits to social theory which works with highly abstract notions of "the refugee" and suggests that more significant scholarly interventions are now to be made through carefully contextualised work, tracing political subjectivities, in particular refu...

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Research paper thumbnail of Nathan Riley Carpenter and Benjamin N. Lawrance. Africans in Exile: Mobility, Law and Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. xviii + 337 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $85.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978-0253038074

African Studies Review

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Research paper thumbnail of Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s

Christian Williams has produced a comprehensive study of the SWAPO camps established in the ‘Fron... more Christian Williams has produced a comprehensive study of the SWAPO camps established in the ‘Frontline States’ during the course of the struggle for Namibia’s independence. His purview spans a period of 25 years from the establishment of SWAPO’s first camp for Namibian exiles in Kongwa in a remote region in Tanzania as early as 1964, through to a string of camps in Zambia and Angola during the 1970s and 1980s. The earliest residents of these sites were political refugees and PLAN recruits, but once the war against the occupying South African forces was stepped up, their numbers were swelled by civilians, including women and children, fleeing the colony.

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Research paper thumbnail of Nationalism in Namibia - Oiva Angula. SWAPO Captive: A Comrade’s Experience of Betrayal and Torture. Cape Town: Penguin Random House, 2018. xvi + 179 pp. Illustrations. Preface. Postscript. Bibliography. Index. $18.00. Paper. ISBN: 978-1-77609-361-8. - Wendi A. Haugh. Lyrical Nationalism in Post-...

African Studies Review

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Research paper thumbnail of Conclusion: What is telling “if telling is all there is?”

From text: Slham Ataschi raises a similar question in her contribution to this special issue of A... more From text: Slham Ataschi raises a similar question in her contribution to this special issue of Acta Academica on “Silence after violence”. As she writes, drawingfrom her study of Afghanistan, “efforts such as truth telling, documenting and recording of individual memory in relation to past violence provide a voice for women’s narrative and personal memories during war and conflict. However, what if telling is all there is?” (page no). For Ataschi, this question opens a discussion on how stories of violence perpetrated on Afghani women during the country’s successive wars and under the Taliban regime have been drawn into human rights reports and truth-commission proceedings without commensurate efforts to develop meaningful public dialogue or address past injustices. As she suggests, the interests of “the international community” which issues these reports and organizes these proceedings remain distant from the people whose narratives they collect. In this context, “telling” risks r...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Defining and Aiding ‘the Namibian Refugee’: A History of the Chaplaincy to Namibians in Exile, 1974-76

Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 2021

This article presents a history of the Chaplaincy to Namibians in Exile, focused on how the Chapl... more This article presents a history of the Chaplaincy to Namibians in Exile, focused on how the Chaplaincy's first leader, Salatiel Ailonga, and his Finnish missionary wife, Anita Ailonga, defined and aided "the Namibian refugee." The article discusses how Southern African libera-CONTACT Christian A. Williams

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Research paper thumbnail of Dissident Refugees: A History of 200 Namibians in Zambia, 1977-1989

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2020

To date, scholarship on Southern Africa's exile history has maintained a largely national focus, ... more To date, scholarship on Southern Africa's exile history has maintained a largely national focus, organised around liberation movements and their narratives. Nevertheless, many exile experiences do not fit neatly within this frame. This article examines such experiences through 200 Namibians who lived in Zambia during the late 1970s and 1980s. These Namibians were among the guerrilla soldiers whom SWAPO detained during its internal crisis of 1976. Rather than 'confess' to betraying the liberation struggle and returning to SWAPO, they chose to leave SWAPO in 1977 and were transported by the Zambian army to UNHCR's Meheba Camp. Most left the camp within a few years, living primarily in the Copperbelt and Lusaka prior to their repatriation to Namibia in 1989. Drawing from Siegfried Groth's archives and the author's oral history interviews, the article traces a particular group of exiled Namibians and their experiences of insecurity and solidarity. As I argue, these 'dissident refugees' lived in uniquely insecure circumstances, vulnerable to declining socioeconomic conditions in Zambia and openly threatened by SWAPO members, who targeted some of them with violence. At the same time, they cocreated a global solidarity community that was largely distinct from the solidarity community supporting SWAPO and other liberation movements during the same period, enabling them to access humanitarian aid, education and protection. By drawing attention to these social dynamics, the article challenges assumptions about what it meant to be a 'Namibian refugee' during the late 1970s and 1980s. It advocates micro-historical research aimed at nuancing liberation movement-focused accounts of southern Africa's exile past.

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Research paper thumbnail of Decolonising Knowledge: Reflections on Colonial Anthropology and a Humanities Seminar at the University of the Free State

The Strategic Review for Southern Africa, 2020

This paper discusses the Decolonising Knowledge Seminar, a seminar which I initiatedin the Humani... more This paper discusses the Decolonising Knowledge Seminar, a seminar which I initiatedin the Humanities Faculty at the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Bloemfontein campus in 2017. The paper’s opening sections present a rationale for the seminar. I maintain that there is considerable scholarship illuminating how colonialpower shaped the knowledge which academic disciplines generated about Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of it is focused on anthropology, the discipline centred on Europe’s non-Western ‘others’ and implicated in latecolonial government. Despite the influence of this and related critiques globally, with their focus on power-knowledge relationships, such work has not substantially permeated South Africa’s Afrikaans universities. There, humanities disciplineswere largely isolated from global knowledge flows during the apartheid era and continue to emerge from this insular past. The paper then discusses the seminar itself and what I see as its ...

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Research paper thumbnail of André du Pisani, Reinhart Kössler and William A. Lindeke, (eds.), The Long Aftermath of War – Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia, Freiburg, Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut, 2010

Journal of Namibian Studies : History Politics Culture, 2010

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Education in Exile: International Scholarships, Cold War Politics, and Conflicts among SWAPO Members in Tanzania, 1961–1968

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2017

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Contesting Caprivi: A History of Colonial Isolation and Regional Nationalism in Namibia

South African Historical Journal, 2013

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of A History of Namibia

South African Historical Journal, 2013

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Silence, Voices, and “the Camp”: Perspectives on and from Southern Africa’s Exile Histories

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 2012

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Imagining the Post-Apartheid State: An ethnographic account of Namibia

African Affairs, 2012

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Inside African Anthropology

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Remember Cassinga?': an exhibition of photographs and histories

Kronos Journal of Cape History, Nov 1, 2010

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Living in Exile: Life and Crisis at SWAPO's Kongwa Camp, 1964–1968

A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO's Exile Camps

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of The Politics of Heritage in Africa

Heritage work has had a uniquely wide currency in Africa's politics. Secure within the pages ... more Heritage work has had a uniquely wide currency in Africa's politics. Secure within the pages of books, encoded in legal statutes, encased in glass display cases and enacted in the panoply of court ritual, the artefacts produced by the heritage domain have become a resource for government administration, a library for traditionalists and a marketable source of value for cultural entrepreneurs. The Politics of Heritage in Africa draws together disparate fields of study - history, archaeology, linguistics, the performing arts and cinema - to show how the lifeways of the past were made into capital, a store of authentic knowledge that political and cultural entrepreneurs could draw from. This book shows African heritage to be a mode of political organisation, a means by which the relics of the past are shored up, reconstructed and revalued as commodities, as tradition, as morality or as patrimony.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Exile history: An ethnography of the SWAPO camps and the Namibian nation

UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissert... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Exile history: An ethnography of the SWAPO camps and the Namibian nation. by Williams ...

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Research paper thumbnail of National history in Southern Africa: reflections on the'Remember Cassinga?'exhibition

Kronos (Bellville), 2010

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Refugees and social theory: from the politics of “bare life” to refugees as political subjects

This article explores theoretical literature on refugees, noting a significant distinction betwee... more This article explores theoretical literature on refugees, noting a significant distinction between an abstract body of work critiquing the politics of humanitarianism and an ethnographic literature focused on refugee subjects. As I argue, refugees should be seen not simply as "bare life" which has been removed from political life, but rather as political subjects whose subjectivities are shaped by the social environments in which they live. To illustrate this point, I draw on Liisa Malkki's Purity and exile and my own work on exile camps administered by the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) during Namibia's liberation struggle. Collectively, this and other ethnographic literature highlight limits to social theory which works with highly abstract notions of "the refugee" and suggests that more significant scholarly interventions are now to be made through carefully contextualised work, tracing political subjectivities, in particular refu...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Nathan Riley Carpenter and Benjamin N. Lawrance. Africans in Exile: Mobility, Law and Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. xviii + 337 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $85.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978-0253038074

African Studies Review

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s

Christian Williams has produced a comprehensive study of the SWAPO camps established in the ‘Fron... more Christian Williams has produced a comprehensive study of the SWAPO camps established in the ‘Frontline States’ during the course of the struggle for Namibia’s independence. His purview spans a period of 25 years from the establishment of SWAPO’s first camp for Namibian exiles in Kongwa in a remote region in Tanzania as early as 1964, through to a string of camps in Zambia and Angola during the 1970s and 1980s. The earliest residents of these sites were political refugees and PLAN recruits, but once the war against the occupying South African forces was stepped up, their numbers were swelled by civilians, including women and children, fleeing the colony.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Nationalism in Namibia - Oiva Angula. SWAPO Captive: A Comrade’s Experience of Betrayal and Torture. Cape Town: Penguin Random House, 2018. xvi + 179 pp. Illustrations. Preface. Postscript. Bibliography. Index. $18.00. Paper. ISBN: 978-1-77609-361-8. - Wendi A. Haugh. Lyrical Nationalism in Post-...

African Studies Review

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Research paper thumbnail of Review of Lennart Bolliger's Apartheid's Black Soldiers

Southern Journal for Contemporary History, 2023

Apartheid's Black Soldiers examines the experiences of combatants from Namibia and Angola who fou... more Apartheid's Black Soldiers examines the experiences of combatants from Namibia and Angola who fought in the security forces of the apartheid regime, above all the Southwest Africa Territorial Force (SWATF), Koevoet, and 32 "Buffalo" Battalion. As the author, Lennart Bolliger, argues, these experiences challenge the dominant notion that southern Africa's decolonisation should be understood in terms of "national liberation" struggles, wherein liberation movements representing distinct African nations fought against colonial regimes and their "collaborators." Rather, the encounters and trajectories of Bolligers's research participants point to the complex and highly constrained circumstances in which black men joined the security forces and the social alienation which they have collectively experienced in postapartheid Namibia and South Africa, the countries in which most now live.

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Research paper thumbnail of The Namibian Independence Memorial Museum

American Historical Review, 2019

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