As of yet no one has published an Oshikwanyama-English dictionary, so as I have been taking my language lessons over the last few weeks I have been forced to construct sentences based on the vocabulary terms provided in the grammar notebooks available to me. One of these gave me the correct Oshikwanyama terms for “proletarian revolution” and “right-wing reactionary,” so I was able to impress my teacher this morning by telling her, in Oshikwanyama, that “We will have a proletarian revolution next year.” (Because I am sure this will come up in your own day-to-day lives, the correct way to inform an Oshikwanyama speaker about the impending dictatorship of the proletariat is “Ohatu ka kala tu na elunduluko lovanailonga moudwaali.” Maybe next week I will let you know how to tell Oshikwanayama speakers that all right-wing reactionaries will be executed.
After my morning Oshikwanyama lesson, it was off to the archives, where the complexities of punishment in the absence of penal institutions continues to spark my curiosity. It seems safe to say that by the late 1930s, a sort of dual system of judicial punishment existed in the north. While chiefs and headmen dispensed with the minor cases on their own, all cases of rape, murder, and treason were referred to the white administrators. But the white administrators, concerned with running tight budgets, frequently threw such cases right back to the “tribal” authorities. Cases of rape and murder were frequently dealt with as civil complaints, with the accused charged with paying a fine to the victim’s family. However, cases that were either considered particularly heinous or where it was felt that the accused had deliberately challenged chiefly authority also resulted in public floggings. Here, the calculus of crime to punishment can become quite tangled. A rapist might be fined two head of cattle and beaten with “a palm stick,” (the epokolo, a six-foot long branch of the Makalani tree) six times, while a man who had failed to pay previous fines and who was suspected of having consensual sex with another man’s wife would be beaten 12 to 15 times.
Then another fascinating element to this form of punishment emerges: the criminal, having been beaten, perhaps even banished from the community, does not disappear into that deep dungeon that is the modern prison. He remains at war with the chiefs, constantly sneaking back into their communities, causing trouble, sending them threatening letters. When the authorities go to investigate, such individuals frequently crossed over the border into Angola, only to reemerge again a few months later. Some of their letters are collected in the archives. The letters of one criminal, written in a neat Oshikwanyama that suggests rather thorough mission training, talk threateningly of killing the chiefs and headmen who had wronged him. They talk of leading a revolution against the “Ovabenguelas,” his term for the Angolans who had supposedly hijacked the Kwanyama polity and used it for their own personal enrichment. When English translations of these letters reached the white authorities, they demanded that the man be brought in to face charges of treason. But then he slips away again, disappears into Angola and vanishes from the archives.
When Foucault wrote about corporal punishment, he talked of a “dramaturgy of power” between the criminal and the sovereign; the punishment served to reaffirm the absolute control of the latter over the former. Such punishments usually resulted in the death of the criminal, which, for Foucault, represented the “limit” of the state’s power. It would also, then, suggest the “limit” of the criminal’s resistance. But what of the situation in northern Namibia in the twentieth century? As soon as they established effective administrative control of the area known as “Ovamboland,” the South African government removed the power of execution from the chief’s arsenal, while allowing him to retain other powers with which to punish the criminal body. But those powers had no effective limit: a flogging continues for as long as the person conducting the flogging wishes it to continue. Once a flogging is complete, it can be done again, should the chief capture the criminal and wish to punish him once more. But this kind of “limitless” punishment came with a much more dangerous potential: the possibility of “limitless” resistance, not within the confines of the judicial system, but in a physical landscape where the boundaries of sovereignty and legitimacy were themselves ambiguous. Free to leave the chief’s kraal after their punishment had been effected, flogging victims could not only resist the authority that punished, they could also efface the very definition of “criminal” that in other societies would have defined them as outside the moral community. In northern Namibia the boundaries were much more porous. Surely in academia this has become an overloaded term, but it seems to suitably fit such a landscape of indefinite endings and beginnings. What’s more, this landscape was one that was largely constructed and maintained by the South African state, a government which clearly prided itself on its ability to clearly demarcate, define, and categorize.
Pictured Above: The “Ovamboland” flag created by South Africa in the late 1960s. The seven vertical green bars refer to the seven “tribes” which comprised “Ovamboland.”
