Architectural Space in Windhoek, Namibia:Fortification, Monumentalization, Subversion

Julia C. Obert (bio)
University of Wyoming

Abstract

This essay argues that contemporary postcolonial cities are definitive of Anthony Vidler’s “architectural uncanny,” and it forwards Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, as a particularly palpable example of this phenomenon. This essay reads local literary texts and other historical documents to investigate how Windhoek’s architectural spaces condition structures of both power and subversion. It identifies where local bodies are marshaled by the city’s constraints and where they can contest those constraints. Ultimately, despite the fact that Windhoek still bears the inhospitable imprints of two successive colonial powers, its subjects can find ways to take root, at least in part, in their uncanny city.

Namibia was settled for thousands of years by indigenous groups—largely the Damara, Nama, and San—and, from the fourteenth century forward, by immigrating Bantu; German imperial forces declared it a colonial holding in 1884. Seeing their land and cattle appropriated by settlers, the Herero and Nama peoples rose up against German occupation in 1904. The German Schutztruppe, under the command of General Lothar von Trotha, determined to “annihilate” the resistance (von Trotha, qtd. in Mamdani 11), and wiped out the vast majority of both ethnic groups in the first act of genocide of the twentieth century. During World War I’s South-West Africa Campaign, South Africa seized control of the German colony, and administered the area from 1919 onwards as a League of Nations mandate territory. After World War II, South Africa refused to surrender South-West Africa to UN control and continued to occupy the area. When apartheid was implemented in South Africa in 1948, so too was it enforced in South-West Africa, with white settlers, so-called “colored” groups, and black South-West Africans being segregated by race (and with the latter further divided by ethnicity: Ovambo, Damara, Nama, Herero, Ovambanderu, and others). In the 1960s, the military wing of the South-West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) began its armed struggle for independence, and in 1988, South Africa agreed to end its occupation of the country. Namibia became officially independent on March 21, 1990, and SWAPO’s Sam Nujoma took office as the country’s first democratically elected President.

Despite the fact that Namibia has been independent for 25 years, it is in many ways visibly haunted by its colonial past, with its urban spaces in particular remaining redolent of the area’s sedimented political histories. Nearly all colonial regimes are driven by what Edward Said calls a “cartographic impulse”: the notion that redrawing borders, renaming spaces, and rebuilding places can literally shift the ground beneath subjects’ feet, disorienting and dominating local populations (78). 79). This violent “impulse” leaves the proprietary stamp of the imperial center on the spaces of the imagined wild frontier—the fantasy space projected as the postcolony by white power, to rely on Achille Mbembe’s analysis—making it a crucial tool of imperial hegemony, a rule to which both Germany and South Africa held true in South-West Africa (On the Postcolony 4). The built environments of liberated postcolonial spaces retain spectral traces of their subjugation and oppression, and so to some degree these environments remain anxious, unsettling, even inhospitable.

Anthony Vidler refers to “estranging” urban spaces, forms that “express the precarious relationship between psychological and physical home,” as examples of what he calls the “architectural uncanny” (12, xii). Borrowing from Freud, Vidler discusses places that are at once familiar and foreign, using the concept as “a frame of reference that confronts the desire for a home and the struggle for domestic security with its apparent opposite, intellectual and actual homelessness” (12). Although Vidler focuses primarily on neo-avant-garde architecture and its expressions of postwar alienation, contemporary postcolonial cities—spaces that are at once domestic and unhomely, that are both fit for today’s deep dwelling and reminders of yesterday’s displacements—would seem to be virtually definitive of the “architectural uncanny.”¹ Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, is a particularly palpable example of this phenomenon. In its cartography and architecture, it reveals histories of genocide and apartheid as well as its independent present. The scars of the city’s one-time symbolic significance as the headquarters of the German Schutztruppe, as well as of its place as a staging ground for the spatial segregation of South African apartheid, are barely beneath the skin of its post-colonial, post-apartheid built environment.

Literary representations of Windhoek tend to foreground this unhomeliness, often while critiquing the squandered promise of independence. Many texts feature the wide gap between the elite inheritors of the country’s bounty, most of whom live in fortified gated communities on the hills overlooking the city, and chronically poor black Namibians, who live in meager quarters in the old apartheid-era “locations” (the underdeveloped townships to which black communities were relocated under South African rule) and in informal squatter settlements on Windhoek’s outskirts. Frederick Philander’s play The Porridge Queen, for example, stages the “fanfare” of a Presidential motorcade—“ten expensive cars” manned by a “new brand of white collared Black civil servant”—as it blows blithely past a group of township women selling crafts from temporary stalls at “Busy Corner” (48-50). The irony that this makeshift market is located at the intersection of the recently-renamed Sam Nujoma Drive and Independence Avenue is, of course, not lost on Philander; these semantic changes to the post-independence cityscape, he implies, have not yet been matched by substantive progress. Several authors also note that the buffer zones between communities built during apartheid have been reinforced rather than remedied in recent years, and that post-independence city planners have repeated colonial (il)logics of “surveillance” and hygiene (“health, safety, order”) when projecting the future of the city’s poorer districts (Windhoek Municipality Structure Plan). Moreover, while several new monuments have been erected in Windhoek since independence, colonial memorials and buildings—among them Alte Feste, a German fortress, and the Reiterdenkmal, a memorial to the Schutztruppe killed during the Nama and Herero revolt—still dominate the cityscape. Windhoek is, in some ways, a kind of ghost space, an uncanny neocolonial revenant of the colonial city. Brian Harlech-Jones’s novel A Small Space describes dwelling in this space as a feeling of “living in two worlds,” an anxious sense of double vision or “dissonance” (184).

Nevertheless, the power of this unhomely geography is not absolute; it is sometimes destabilized by the subterranean routes and subversive navigational strategies of particular pedestrians. As Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoğlu and Chong Thai Wong remind us, “postcolonial space is both a reminder of a colonial past and a salutary gesture towards the future. It conveys both a negative moment that displays… binary constructions and fixed categories and a positive one of a promise of becoming for new… subject positions and new modes of spatiality” (7). This essay reads local literary texts and other historical documents for these “salutary gestures,” examining, to borrow a term from Guy Debord, how personal “psychogeographies”—“insubordinat[e]” wanderings; “fragmented, subjective, temporal experience[s] of the city”—can potentially work against “the seemingly omnipotent perspective of the planimetric map” in Namibia (Debord, “Introduction” 7; Sant). In other words, it investigates how Windhoek’s architectural spaces condition structures of both power and subversion, identifying where local bodies are marshaled by the city’s constraints and where they can contest its “currents, fixed points and vortexes” (Debord, “Theory” 50). This treatment of geography in Namibian literature echoes Achille Mbembe’s hope, in the South African context, for “the de-racialization of urban spaces”—a hope yet inseparable, Mbembe concedes, from the “interiorize[d] … presence of [past] physical destruction.” Mbembe describes this bifurcated view of place as a means of “giving the theme of the sepulchre its full subversive force,” and defines the sepulchre as a symbol of “the extra bit of life that’s needed to raise the dead which lies at the heart of a new culture that promises never to forget the vanquished” (Eurozine interview). Ultimately, despite the fact that Windhoek still bears the inhospitable imprints of two successive colonial powers, its subjects can find ways to take root, at least in part, in their “sepulchral” city. These subversive ways of being in place, as Mbembe suggests, are ways of “raising the dead”—of simultaneously reckoning with loss and imagining a more settled future.

I. Building Windhoek

The German presence in Windhoek dates back to 1890, when Reichskommissar Curt von François decided to station his garrison in the area. Von François chose the location as a strategic buffer zone between Nama and Herero communities, whom he had determined to fight separately in his effort to “annihilat[e] … the enemy” (44). He laid the foundation stone of the Schutztruppe headquarters, now called the Alte Feste (Old Fortress), in October 1890, thus establishing a German architectural foothold in the region. Designed by von François himself, the fortress’s imposing walls and four surveillance towers, along with its position overlooking the valley, projected German political dominance and military might. After the defeat of the indigenous forces in the early years of the twentieth century, a concentration camp was established in the shadow of the fortress—one of several the Germans built around the country—in which prisoners died by the thousands, a mass murder conspicuously erased from the cityscape in subsequent years (and only commemorated on site for the first time in 2014 with the erection of the Genocide Memorial).

Fig. 1

Once the locals were overpowered, German architects and builders raced to erect what Itohan Osayimwese calls “signifiers of Germanness” in the area, buildings that would lay claim to local territory while reflecting domestic familiarity for incoming settlers (Osayimwese 82). Many scholars note that architecture and design were crucial to asserting political power in colonial outposts under the sign of imperial spectacle. Thomas Metcalf, for example, describes colonial building practices as “political authority t[aking] shape in stone,” and explains their primary objective as “the enhancing of the hold of empire over ruler and ruled alike” (xi). Nevertheless, colonial settings also exerted a troubling “pull of difference” (Metcalf 5), which often prompted anxious efforts to ensure continuity with the imperial center. Although South-West Africa is typically represented in German writing of the time as the uncharted “wild West” (Haarhoff, Wild South-West 2), local architecture often took extreme pains to assert German national identity—a sign that settlers were civilizing the landscape rather than being uncivilized by their frontier. This meant that Windhoek became a prime example of Wilhelmine architectural eclecticism, a revivalist hodgepodge of historical styles with particular reference to Classical and medieval Romanesque forms (Osayimwese 128). Neo-Classical tropes link the Kaiserreich to dominant historical empires, while the neo-Romanesque Rundbogenstil—influenced by Roman and Byzantine techniques and characterized particularly by rounded arches—promotes “an association between the new Reich … and the golden age of the Kaiserreich during the Hohenstaufen period of the Middle Ages” when Romanesque design held sway (Curran 352). Both styles were designed to project German imperial authority and technological prowess, and were used throughout the empire at the behest of Wilhelm II. Windhoek therefore was, and remains today, a striking example of Deutsches Kaiserreich “power architecture” in the middle of the Namib desert (Osayimwese 286).

The Windhoek Turnhalle (Gymnasium), designed by architect Otto Busch and inaugurated in 1909, echoed a number of buildings on the German home front and became an architectural centerpiece of the colony. With a timber-girdered roof and rounded neo-Romanesque arches, the Turnhalle’s elaborate, imposing design was both a “rallying point” for German settlers and a “distinctive symbol of [the colonial] presence to be beheld with respect and even with admiration by the natives of the country” (T. Roger Smith, qtd. in Metcalf 1)—in other words, an explicit mark of racist superiority. The building was used as a practice hall for the Windhoek Gymnastic Club—itself a symbol of robust imperial masculinity—but as an icon of colonial dominion over South-West Africa, it was also appropriated for extravagant celebrations of Kaiser Wilhelm’s birthday each year (Brummer 135). The Turnhalle’s lavish appearance clearly lent itself to authoritative expressions of imperial power, as it was used in turn during WWI by German forces and South African Union troops, and it later housed the 1975-1977 Turnhalle Constitutional Conference, an attempt to reinforce white rule in Namibia’s transition to independence and to stifle the resistance of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (the military wing of SWAPO).² It therefore served for many years as an example of what Mark Crinson calls an “architecture of allegory”: a building that “announce[s]” itself.—and that, by extension, announces the power relations it heralds—by way of “facades, disjunctive form … sheer height, or a new relationship to the city” (229).

Fig. 2

Similarly, the Christuskirche (Christ Church), a German Lutheran church designed by Gottleib Redecker and erected between 1907 and 1910, became a monument to German territorial and ideological expansionism. Located on a promontory above the city, the Christuskirche literally overlooked the local population—an occupation of rarefied air that “enhanced its representational power” (Osayimwese 305). Also designed in the neo-Romanesque style with some fanciful Art Nouveau influence in its undulating roof line, the impressive building signifies the effectiveness of German and Finnish Lutheran missionary efforts in the region—Namibia is one of the most heavily Lutheran countries in the world today—and sets a uniquely German theological tradition in stone. The building’s aims were as much political and ideological as they were religious; the stained glass windows in the sanctuary were a gift from Emperor Wilhelm II, and a plaque (which remains there today) was mounted inside following the Nama and Herero uprising to commemorate the German soldiers who died in the conflict. As Jeremy Silvester points out, the plaque also names the places where each soldier died, and in so doing, it “proclaims both the metaphorical and physical occupation of the land by the German troops” (“Sleep with a Southwester” 275).

Fig. 3

The Germans also erected a number of important monuments in Windhoek in an effort to make their mark on the region. The first was the Kriegerdenkmal, a heavy iron obelisk crowned by an imperial eagle and surrounded by spiked cast-iron fencing, built in 1897 to memorialize the Schutztruppe who died fighting the Nama and Herero. Next, the Reiterdenkmal, an imposing bronze sculpture of a rifle-wielding corporal on horseback atop a stone plinth designed by Berlin artist Adolf Kurle, was inaugurated near Alte Feste during Kaiser Wilhelm II’s 1912 birthday celebrations. It too was constructed, as its commemorative plaque suggests, to honor the German soldiers who died “for emperor and empire to save and protect [South-West Africa] during the Herero and Hottentot uprisings between 1903 and 1907, and during the Kalahari Expedition in 1908,” as well as “German citizens that died [at] the hands of the indigenous [peoples].” The statue looms 31 feet above street level, and its armed rider seems to survey all who move beneath his gaze. These repeated efforts to name and to remember German civilians, and to count German losses, are also efforts to leave unnamed and unrecognized the many thousands Nama and Herero who were killed during the period. The fact that the Reiterdenkmal was erected on the site of a former concentration camp makes this silencing all the more ominous; as Elke Zuern argues, the rider “visibly present[ed] victor’s justice and offer[ed] a warning to those who might continue to resist” (3). Incredibly, this token of “victor’s justice” remained in place until 2009, when the statue was finally removed during the building of the new Independence Museum.³

Fig. 4

Finally, the von François statue, an 18-foot tall sculpture of the former German Reichskommissar rendered in military pose—one hand on hip, the other clutching his sword—was unveiled on Windhoek’s Kaiserstrasse in 1965. Although the street has since been renamed Independence Avenue, the hulking sculpture remains in place. Several writers mention this paradox: can Independence Avenue really be a symbol of postcoloniality with a statue of the first commander of the conquering German Schutztruppe at its heart? Keamogetsi joseph Molapong’s poem “In Search of Questions,” for instance, mentions the “insult” of “standing guard with Von Francois” every time he walks through the heart of downtown Windhoek (95).

As these observations suggest, German monumentalization is dominant in Windhoek even today. Although some few buildings and memorials have been moved or renamed, “[t]he visitor arriving in downtown Windhoek for the first time would be forgiven for wondering if it really had been almost a century since the end of [German] colonial rule” (Zuern 21). The specter of colonial rule hovers menacingly over the postcolonial city; “ghostly reminder[s] of the German colonial state” haunt Windhoek’s post-independence streetscapes (Steinmetz 306). Some of these German buildings are beautiful—the fachwerk (timber-framed) façades in downtown Windhoek that now house shops and restaurants, for example, are of great architectural interest. They are also, however, conspicuous reminders of German rule. Since Germany remains one of Namibia’s most important trading partners and aid donors, and since the relatively privileged German community remains central to the Namibian economy, the Namibian government has often been reluctant to push for the removal of German landmarks (Steinmetz and Hell 158). By and large, then, the city feels painfully unhomely to many of its inhabitants, and this sentiment is frequently reflected in its literature. As Molapong succinctly puts it, Windhoek is full of “[b]uildings and architectures that scream insult, / that harbor artefacts of colonial descent” (“In Search” 95). These “artefacts” motivate both the biting satire and the aching disillusionment of Molapong’s poetic voice; as he puts it elsewhere, the desert’s “white sand” was “paged away” so that a “road … to Hell” could snake through Windhoek’s center (“Omukurukaze’s Thoughts,” Come Talk 95).

When South Africa began administering the area in 1919, Afrikaner settlers slowly trickled in to Windhoek. Although their architectural footprint in the city was smaller than that of the German colonists, they did erect a handful of their own memorials in subsequent years. Foremost among these are the Oudstryder an Bittereinder Monument (1951), which commemorates the Boer diehards who moved to German South-West Africa after the Boer War rather than accept British rule, and the Owambo Campaign Memorial (1919), a monument to the members of the South African Army who died fighting King Mandume Ya Ndemufayo of the Kwanyama Owambo in 1917.

Fig. 5

However, the South Africans played a hugely significant role in the spatial reshaping of the city: in 1948, when officials in South Africa began to implement apartheid at home, the same was mandated for the country’s northern colony. A 1948 housing report compiled by the South-West Africa Administration (SWAA), “Housing for Non-Europeans in Urban Areas,” laid out the principles of urban design by which Windhoek was subsequently organized. It built on the “locations” established for indigenous populations by the Germans and recommended developing further “self-contained…townships” in the area to ensure absolute racial separation. The Natives (Urban Areas) Proclamation, No. 56 (1951), established compulsory segregation of black and “coloured” South-West Africans from white settlers, along with setting curfews, requiring “registration” of location dwellers, establishing “permits” for non-white laborers to enter white areas of the city, and so forth (Simon, “Desegregation in Namibia” 293). The city center was designated “whites only,” and the SWAA took pains to limit “the native population of the town to its actual labour needs” (NAN, “Memorandum for Guidance”) and to “remov[e]…redundant Natives” from urban areas (NAN, “Memorandum on Municipal”).

Following the publication of these reports, South African authorities began to express concerns that the main indigenous location (now known as the “Old Location”) was restricting the westward expansion of the white city, “present[ing] a very serious problem in the future development of the town” (NAN, Windhoek Municipality, 1952). Moreover, a 1952 inspection report of the Old Location delivered to Windhoek’s Chief Native Commissioner describes the location as “depressing” and “nauseating” and tellingly asserts that “the Windhoek location as it stands is a menace not only to the health of its inhabitants but inevitably also to the European community of Windhoek” (NAN, “Inspection Report,” emphasis mine). These racist anxieties led to the construction of Katutura and Khomasdal (“black” and “coloured” locations, with the former further segregated by ethnicity) about five to six kilometers northwest of the city center, a distance that limited non-whites’ contact with “white Windhoek” and restricted access to shared amenities. “[B]uffer zone[s] of at least half a mile” (NAN, “Memorandum for Guidance”), whether green spaces or industrial areas for “noxious trades,” were constructed between segregated communities to minimize interracial contact—zones that have only partially been filled in today and that continue to “reinforce the…geographical and social dislocation” of Windhoek’s urban poor (Frayne 88). When African populations refused to leave the Old Location and began to protest, the government undertook a policy of forced relocation. In December 1959, the police opened fire on protesters, killing 11 and wounding 14 in an event now known as the Old Location Massacre. Mass relocation to Katutura followed, and the Old Location was turned into Hochland Park, a white residential suburb. The name Katutura itself, bestowed by the displaced Africans and meaning “Place Where We Do Not Stay” in Otjiherero, became a symbol of opposition to apartheid in South-West Africa (Pendleton 5). Nevertheless, living in a “place where we do not stay” reinforced a sense of unhomely temporariness for indigenous populations under South African rule.

Katutura was organized around the principle of what might be called “surveillance space,” with streets regularized in a grid pattern, a single road for entrance to and exit from the location, perimeter roads surrounding the community allowing police to encircle the settlement, and floodlights throughout the area (Müller-Friedman, “Deconstructing Windhoek” 6). Dorian Haarhoff’s poem “The Old Location” describes Katutura as being “cemented and segmented / like a blood orange / with tankwide boulevards, / a strong block of offices / plus rented breeze bricks / without ceiling, / single siege quarters / for fenced tenants” (35-42). Beyond the ominous reference to the “blood orange” of the invading Boers, the turn of phrase “tankwide boulevards” suggests the increased militarization of the city, while “fenced tenants” implies that African populations were treated like cattle by South African rule. While the Old Location’s mazy roads, “narrow lanes that def[ied] roadmaking” (NAN, “Inspection Report”), could shield and shelter non-white bodies, Katutura’s “cemented and segmented” streets allowed for no such comfort. As John Ya-Otto, a former trade unionist and SWAPO activist, explains in his memoir, Battlefront Namibia, while the streets in the Old Location “snaked and jogged” around “irregular rows of shacks,” allowing people to “f[ind] a reprieve from the Boers’ efforts to implement their apartheid state,” there was “nowhere to hide” in the new township (35, 44). As displaced communities expanded northward and white suburbs consumed the rest of the city, non-white South-West Africans were further and further distanced from Windhoek’s central amenities. Moreover, the construction of the Western Bypass highway in the late 1970s just west of Katutura and Khomasdal provided “a largely impenetrable barrier between the residential townships…and the rest of Windhoek” and ensured that “native” areas could never be physically contiguous with white suburbs (Frayne 88).

The pattern of segregation established in Windhoek under apartheid troubles the city today; as Jane Katjavivi indicates, this history can still “be seen, and felt” as one moves through the city (5). Insofar as urban space is concerned, the specters of South African rule linger on, such that residents of Windhoek must try to reconcile “the struggle for domestic security with its apparent opposite,” feelings of exile or displacement even at the heart of homeplace (Vidler 12). In other words, Windhoek’s contemporary built environment is at once postcolonial and neocolonial—an uncanny vacillation between heimlichkeit and unheimlichkeit. Indeed, a good deal of apartheid-era (il)logic has been repeated, inadvertently or otherwise, in post-independence city planning. The “politically oppressive urban model [of apartheid is now] regarded as normative and neutral in the post-apartheid era,” meaning that apartheid has effectively been used as a “blueprint” for contemporary urban design (Müller-Friedman, “Just Build it Modern” 49). The 2009-2014 Strategic Plan released by Namibia’s Ministry of Regional and Local Government, Housing, and Rural Development essentially concedes this point, identifying the “lack of proactive town planning” in Namibia’s post-independence period as a barrier to social equality in the country today. As Bruce Frayne puts it, while independent Namibia has had to contend with other “overriding political objectives” that have perhaps prevented the development of more positive planning strategies, the “persistence of elements of colonial city planning” has reinforced a “degenerative cycle of urban fragmentation” in Windhoek (i, 66).

Because independent Namibia is dominated by wealthy whites and by a new class of non-white elites (mostly associated with the SWAPO regime) while the vast majority of black Namibians remain desperately impoverished, it is perhaps unsurprising that “colonial attitudes” are still being “encoded in legislation, building codes, [and] surveillance procedures” in the city (Rogerson 39). The 1996 Windhoek Structure Plan, which is still the city’s guiding urban planning document, often repeats the rhetoric of the SWAA’s housing reports; it promotes “health, safety, order,” proposes “prestige” buildings for the city center and “functionalist” architecture to be erected elsewhere, and suggests that “new street layouts [should] concentrate on designs which improve local surveillance.”⁴ The report also bemoans the fact that rural-to-urban migration is making poverty in Windhoek increasingly “visible” and condemns the building of “unsightly” home businesses in the city. Similarly, Libertina Amathila’s memoir Making a Difference, which focuses on her 20 years as SWAPO’s Minister of Regional and Local Government and Housing, Minister of Health and Social Services, and Deputy Prime Minister, repeatedly articulates her desire for Windhoek to be “clean” rather than “unhygienic.” At one point, Amathila says outright that “[a]s long as [she] was [in office], Windhoek would not be a dirty African town.”

The primary result of this approach to post-independence city planning is the reinforcing of what Fatima Müller-Friedman calls apartheid “archipelagoes” in Windhoek (“Toward a (Post)apartheid Architecture?” 40). These archipelagoes are islands of wealth—often taking the form of fortified, securitized, gated communities, scattered throughout formerly all-white suburbs and proliferating on the southern and eastern edges of the city amidst crushing poverty. White communities and black elites are often tempted towards occupying these gated communities by estate agents’ language of colonial nostalgia (“raising children ‘like many years ago’”; developments called Camelot, Nu Hamlet, Rome, Trafalgar Court), by a fear of urban crime and a desire to “rebuild a sense of territorial control over their direct environment,” or by the presumptions of status ascribed to Gated Residential Developments (GRDs) (Folio, et. al. 894, 899, 891). The titular Dante of Sharon Kasanda’s novel Dante International, for example, lives atop a hill in an “exclusive” estate with an electrified gate and an intercom system for security, an arrangement that reveals “just how decadent and detached the rich in Namibia” are (79-80). Philander caustically describes Windhoek as the “Fort Knox of Africa,” a place where the wealthy retreat behind security fences from the ground-level realities of privation and scarcity (100).

On the other hand, so-called informal settlements,—crowded groups of temporary shacks sanctioned by the city—are largely accepted as a housing solution for Windhoek’s poor, many of whom are black in-migrants from the country’s northern rural areas. (However, there is no tolerance for “illegal” squatting in the city; in 2008, the city demolished shacks in Havana Extension 6 because they had been built without the municipality’s consent.⁵) These settlements typically have little in the way of clean water, electricity, or constructed roads, let alone schools or medical services (CLIP Profile 80-102). Neighborhood names like Five Rand Camp, Illegal, and Sonderwater (Afrikaans for “without water”) are “fitting representations of the lived experience of the places they describe” (Lühl, “The Production of Inequality” 29). There are very few bridges between the spaces occupied by rich and poor in Windhoek, especially because the informal settlements are so far removed from the city center—a stratification that hews closely to the physical segregation enforced under apartheid. Kavevanga Kahengua’s poem “From Within” (from his collection Dreams) makes precisely this point: it identifies the vast physical and psychological distance between the privilege of Klein Windhoek, where “[t]he chosen occupy large spaces / In accordance with the master plan / As laid down to insure / The postcolonial continuum,” and the relative disadvantage of Katutura, where people are huddled “like ants,” where “shelter is a basic need,” and where “days and nights are insecure” (17-20, 41-46).⁶

That said, some of the building that has been overseen by successive postcolonial SWAPO governments has actively contested the scopic regime established under colonial rule. A sprawling new State House complex south of the city center, commissioned by President Sam Nujoma in 2002 and completed in 2008, replaced the South African-built Old State House as the country’s Presidential residence in 2010. As previously indicated, the Reiterdenkmal was moved in 2009 to accommodate the erection of the Independence Museum, the Genocide Memorial, and a statue of Nujoma.⁷ The ponderous, solid museum looms over the nearby Christuskirche, dominating the city’s skyline (a nod to Nujoma’s decree that the museum be taller than any colonial structure in Windhoek) and dwarfing the more curvaceous and decorative German building (Kirkwood 40), while the new commemorative sculptures signal “a state project to transform the memoryscape of the country’s capital city” (Zuern 3).

Fig. 6

Similarly, Heroes’ Acre, a 732-hectare site ten kilometers outside the city organized around a 35-meter-high marble obelisk and an eight-meter-high bronze statue of an Unknown Soldier gripping a grenade and an AK-47, is a testament to both the sacrifices and the successes of the SWAPO revolution (Kirkwood 19). The Windhoek City Council’s website indicates that the site is intended to “foster a spirit of patriotism and nationalism” in future generations of Namibians, and both the militant symbolism and the epic scope of Heroes’ Acre connote the power and grandeur of the postcolonial state (Windhoekcc.org.na).

Fig. 7

Likewise, outside the city’s Parliament Gardens, three bronze statues of indigenous leaders—Herero Chief Hosea Kutako; Reverend Theofilus Hamutumbangela, an Anglican priest and founding member of SWAPO; and Nama hero Hendrik Samuel Witbooi, all of whom led anti-colonial resistance struggles—now jockey with von François for visual command of the city center and for narrative command of the city’s history. Finally, Windhoek’s Street and Place Naming/Renaming Committee has gradually been expunging colonial signifiers from the cityscape: Kaiserstrasse has become Independence Ave.; Curt von François St. has become Sam Nujoma Ave.; Göring St. is now named after Daniel Munamava, a SWANU revolutionary; Louis Botha St. has become Axali Doëseb St., in honor of the composer of the Namibian national anthem; and so on.⁸ All told, the iconography of an independent Namibia appears to be taking hold in the city, at least to some degree, often actively staging a “metaphorical confrontation with [artefacts] of the colonial period” (Kirkwood 40).

Curiously, however, much of this post-independence building has been outsourced to a North Korean company called the Mansudae Overseas Project—the international division of Mansudae Art Studio, North Korea’s state art and architecture firm. As Megan Kirkwood explains, Namibia’s founding President Nujoma traveled to Pyongyang while in exile and became friends with Kim Il Sung. He evidently admired the fact that Mansudae’s work helped to “aesthetically unify the city”—virtually everything in Pyongyang was designed by the firm after the city was nearly leveled during the Korean War—and to “project state ideology” (Kirkwood 9). By hiring Mansudae to design and implement the incipient postcolonial state’s signature building projects, including the State House, Heroes’ Acre, and Independence Museum, Nujoma broke clearly with colonial precedents, but he also ensured that an independent Windhoek would emulate North Korean authoritarian spectacle. Echoing North Korean landmarks like the Kumsusan Memorial Palace and the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery, Windhoek’s Mansudae buildings are hulking Socialist Realist structures that signal state power both in terms of their bulk and heft and in their insistence on a modern, forward-looking aesthetic (a move that counters the Classical nostalgia of colonial building practices). However, they also ring more of dictatorship than of democratic rule; for example, the Unknown Soldier in Heroes’ Acre bears more than a passing resemblance to Nujoma, and the opulence of the State House’s marble floors and grand chandeliers stands in stark contrast to the tin shacks on the city’s northern fringes, suggesting the concentration of postcolonial wealth in the hands of an elite few. Further, while the Namibian Institute of Architects recommended that Independence Museum be erected in Katutura, a location that would allow it to benefit the daily lives of people who participated in the independence struggle, its pride of place in the Central Business District (CBD) distances the museum “from the very people whose freedom it is supposed to represent” (Kirkwood 41). Likewise, the fact that Heroes’ Acre stands at a ten-kilometer remove from the city leaves it almost entirely inaccessible to residents of the black townships, most of whom can little afford the transportation costs associated with such a trip. This explains, in part, why the author’s 2015 visit to Heroes’ Acre found the site eerily underused and falling into disrepair. Rather than becoming a gathering-place in which ordinary Namibians might reflect on their liberation from South African rule, Heroes’ Acre instead has inadvertently come to symbolize the lingering distance of the SWAPO government from the plight of Windhoek’s urban poor.

Many local commentators have remarked on Windhoek’s post-independence “architectural identity crisis”; architect Jaco Wasserfall, for example, argues that “[visually], we are being colonized by the east,” and critiques the city’s failure to draw on indigenous resources in contemporary design and building practices (Wma-arch.com).⁹ In a moment of supposed renaissance, then, Windhoek faces further erasure and loss, missing an opportunity to create “public buildings…[that] reflect…the new Namibian nation, its beliefs, cultures and values, however diverse” (Kisting, The Namibian, 08/27/10). In fact, it might be argued that the Mansudae builds are themselves uncanny, absent as they are of visual references to local landscape and climate, and expressive as they are of the achievements and desires of a select few government officials rather than of democratic nation-building. (Even the new Genocide Memorial, which ought to reflect the cultural and aesthetic practices of the Herero and Nama communities, is overwhelmed by the iconography of the SWAPO freedom struggle.) While this uncanniness is different from that of colonial builds, in that Socialist Realist forms were chosen by the post-independence government precisely because of their refusal to echo European architecture, it nevertheless signals a country estranged from itself—a country willing to outsource control over its built environment to an abusive, authoritarian regime in Pyongyang rather than recognize its own citizens as productive of cultural worth. Similarly, the renaming of streets in Windhoek, while a symbolically significant move, has been satirized by several local authors as a largely cosmetic change to the cityscape. Kahengua’s poem “From Within,” for instance, points to the irony that Klein Windhoek’s Nelson Mandela Avenue signifies stratification rather than liberation for the majority of the city’s residents, given its inaccessible location in a well-heeled suburb (Malaba 21). Likewise, his “The Rumbling Stomach” lists several Windhoek intersections “[w]here great names meet”—“Corner of Robert Mugabe / And Sam Nujoma / Corner of Laurent Kabila / And Nelson Mandela”—but notes that these nominal changes aren’t accompanied by substantive ones, and argues that streets like Sam Nujoma and Laurent Kabila actually shelter those “trapped in their wealth” from Windhoek’s urban poor (17-22, 25). Kahengua’s lines suggest Windhoek’s lingering unhomeliness, noting that despite the changes to the city’s built environment effected since independence, Windhoek still frequently feels like a “precarious,” “estrang[ing]” place (Vidler xi, 12). The supposedly postcolonial city, in other words, is yet haunted by colonial forms; its built environment is shot through with traces of historical persecution and oppression.

II. Writing Windhoek

The power of this unhomely geography can occasionally be shaken by the subterranean itineraries and subversive navigational strategies of individual pedestrians. Although Windhoek’s architectural spaces—its colonial landmarks, apartheid-era townships, and more recent state tendencies towards visual authoritarianism—often seem inhospitable, many local subjects find ways to route through this inhospitality and to take root in their uncanny city. A number of Windhoek writers produce what the Situationists call “psychogeographic maps” of the city: they note the psychic effects of their built environment, revealing the “constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones” and critiquing the seeming coercions of the city’s contours (Debord, “Theory” 50). Others go on to contest these coercions, documenting their unconventional uses of “dominated space”—their efforts to turn “a master’s project” (Lefebvre 164, 165) on its head by way of defiant shortcuts, derisive nicknames, intimate reappropriations of official spaces, or casual “wanderings that express … complete insubordination to habitual influences” (Debord, “Introduction” 7). Therefore, while local bodies are often marshaled by the city’s constraints, the literature also argues that personal geographies can sometimes move against official cartographies.¹⁰ Ground-level experiences of place, in other words, can occasionally oppose the “seemingly omnipotent perspective of the planimetric map” (Sant).

The branch of contemporary Namibian literature that might be referred to as “literature of protest,” work that expresses a sense of disillusionment with the postcolonial regime and that highlights the country’s ongoing social problems, frequently focuses on the psychogeography of place. These texts study the “specific effects of the geographical environment…on the emotions and behavior of individuals,” making visible the often difficult experiences of Windhoek’s architectural spaces, especially outside membership in the city’s elite classes (Debord, “Introduction” 5). In so doing, they undermine the rationalizing, hegemonic viewpoint of city planners, revealing nodes of tension and of prohibition that the Windhoek Structure Plan leaves unremarked. For example, Philander’s spare stage space, along with his work’s disregard for the theatrical fourth wall, suggest Windhoek’s informal settlements as “comfortless world[s]”—overcrowded, desperately impoverished areas where, as his characters’ repeated acknowledgments of the audience’s prying eyes indicate, privacy is at a premium (Oliphant 7). When characters from these settlements try to move into the city’s shared spaces, like The Porridge Queen’s titular figure, who sets up a food stall on Independence Avenue and dreams of getting a loan from the “People’s Bank” to “expand [her] business into a more permanent one,” they are beset by feelings of nervous temporariness—the Porridge Queen’s loan, she accepts, is “[w]ishful thinking,” and her claim to a space along the city’s central corridor is fleeting at best (49). Philander also focuses on spaces excised from maps, like Windhoek’s rubbish dumps, where the city’s overlooked citizens live by scavenging. These otherwise unrepresented places appear, too, in poet Hugh Ellis’s work; Ellis’s poem “Hakahana,” named after one of Windhoek’s northern townships, describes a place where “People are living in small-box houses / People are scavenging dumpsites / … / People are living on borrowed time” (2-17). The poem reminds us that “Hakahana” means “hurry up” in Otjiherero, and this prompt, alongside Ellis’s line about “borrowed time,” indicates the sense of impermanence, indeed of unbelonging, felt by many on their home turf.

Similarly, Kahengua’s “From Within” reveals the prohibitive “currents … and vortexes” that restrict access to Windhoek’s wealthy suburbs (Debord, “Theory” 50). “The affluent are privileged,” Kahengua says, “To live in the privacy of hills, / Among the rocks / Like rock rabbits / Amid the silence of a cemetery. / “BEWARE OF THE DOG” / Snarls at me. / From behind the fortress of walls / Dogs bark at the sound of feet, / Of the presumed poor intruder. / The clack of the electrified fence / Makes me an outright alien” (3-14). Architectural and topographical barriers—here electrified fences and a remote hillside location—condition the poem’s emotional economy; Kahengua’s speaker feels like “an outright alien” in Klein Windhoek, dislocated and disaffected. However, this poem takes its psychogeographic work a step beyond critique or lament: its speaker seems less a “poor intruder” than an unruly wanderer, one whose movements “express…complete insubordination to habitual influences” (Debord, “Introduction” 7). To borrow another Situationist term, Kahengua’s speaker is a recalcitrant dériviste or “drifter”: one who roams the city, “slipping” into “forbidden” places, capitalizing on the “labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction,” and both observing and transgressing the city’s “principal axes of passage…exits and…defenses” (Debord, “Theory” 53). For one thing, the poem is called “From Within,” its very title a rebellious gesture. The speaker has already crossed a seemingly impermeable border; s/he is obviously out of place in this “affluent” suburb, but is nevertheless “within” where s/he should be “without.” Similarly, Kahengua’s repeated use of the word “here” (“Here down Nelson Mandela Avenue,” “Here housing is a status symbol,” “Here streets are wide / As highways” [15, 21, 22-23]) insists on his speaker’s locatedness in Klein Windhoek. Although the easterly hillside suburb is far distant from the speaker’s Katutura home, s/he has drifted “here” and he refuses to be deterred (29). In fact, Kahengua’s speaker goes so far as to refer to Klein Windhoek as “Klein /Ae //Gams,” rebelliously speaking the predominantly white suburb’s name in Khoekhoe, the Nama and Damara language (2). This is a subversive assertion of belonging, even of ownership. Moreover, given that “/Ae //Gams” means “hot springs,” the term in a sense returns Klein Windhoek’s “fortress of walls” to its source, articulating a feature of the landscape—the waters—that no architectural intervention can change.

A number of other Windhoek writers echo Kahengua’s sentiments; both Masule Sibanga and Ellis, for example, feature the figure of the cyclist-dériviste, one who flaunts his mobility on two wheels despite the psychogeographic prohibitions against entering some communities in Windhoek. The cyclist-dériviste covers a wide swathe of territory, offering litanies of street names as he rides to counter the fragmentation of the neo-apartheid city. This tactic also writes back to the difficulty of “casual encounter” in the auto-focused, monofunctional city (Lühl, “The Production of Inequality” 27). . Windhoek’s lack of effective public transit and the distance of its black townships and informal settlements from its central spaces of commerce and leisure tend to set segregation in stone; as Phillip Lühl puts it, “the socio-spatial conditions for different groups to interact and actively negotiate thei r… antagonisms are non-existent” in the city (27). The cyclist-dériviste, however, finds his own means of mobility and generates his own encounters. While Sibanga’s ice-cream man in “The Ice-Cream Seller” does so in service of work, peddling his wares down Independence Avenue and Sam Nujoma Drive, Hugh Ellis’s “Babylon by Bicycle” moves instead in pursuit of pleasure or play. Ellis’s speaker rides between Ludwigsdorf and Katutura, wending his way through the city and observing all passers-by, from “[d]omestic workers” to government officials (7-8). Although he is clearly most comfortable in Katutura, “hit[ting] that famous roundabout” in its “[r]ush hour bustle” and being carried along by its crush of bodies, he is more than willing to breathe the “rarefied air” of the city’s affluent easterly suburbs (14, 18). Although Katutura, he observes, is generally “still a world to herself,” he refuses to be confined to that world, riding under the Western Bypass, through Dorado Park, and towards “[t]he castles of Ludwigsdorf” (13, 1). Ellis’s speaker even describes “[c]linging to the hillside with [his] wheels”—a refusal to be shaken loose, even where he appears not to belong (18). Ellis therefore writes back both to the seeming immobility of neo-apartheid space and, in his leisurely progress, to the history that associates cross-racial movement through the city exclusively with labor—the history of migrant workers moving each morning from black compounds to white-owned houses and businesses and back to their compounds in the evenings before curfew. While Ellis’s speaker can subversively skirt Windhoek’s wealthy GRDs, however, he cannot take root there; although he flaunts the geographical gulf between the city’s northern townships and its affluent suburbs, he recognizes that the economic gulf between those spaces is manifestly unbridgeable. These lingering schisms suggest that the dialectic of homely and unhomely that defines the architectural uncanny cannot be neatly resolved: a city shaped for more than a century by colonial powers cannot be fully domesticated by twenty-five years of independence. The postcolonial city therefore does not present a choice between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Instead it gestures towards a topographical hauntology where even the most familiar of spaces are marked by enduring estrangements.

A number of local writers turn to the process of diversion or détournement when negotiating Windhoek’s architectural spaces, a process that recognizes these estrangements but nevertheless insists on self-presencing. The Situationists originally theorize détournement in broad aesthetic terms: “the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble” (SI Anthology 55). Later, after his break with the Situationist International, Henri Lefebvre borrows the term to describe a set of specifically spatial practices—“divert[ing],” “reappropriat[ing],” or “put[ting space] to a use quite different from its initial one” (167). In Windhoek, colonial landmarks and monuments have frequently been reappropriated in this way, subversively diverted from their intended uses. For example, the Reiterdenkmal was notoriously reclaimed for indigenous protest rather than colonial memorialization on a few occasions. In 1959, after the Old Location Massacre, Herero activists stealthily covered the rider’s head with a linen bag and decorated the rest of the statue with flowers as a show of resistance to the violence of the South African regime.¹¹ In 2008, anonymous protesters erected 51 crosses inscribed with phrases in Otjiherero around the statue, then inserted a Namibian flag into the barrel of the rider’s rifle. This diversion of the Reiterdenkmal from a locus of German nostalgia to one of Namibian nationalism ignited debates about the function of colonial iconography in a postcolonial state, and may have contributed to the recent removal and relocation of the statue.¹² Similarly, while the Ovambo Campaign Memorial, inaugurated by the South Africans in Windhoek in 1919 after the defeat of King Mandume Ya Ndemufayo, last king of the OvaKwanyama people, was intended to be a testament to the power of Union forces, many OvaKwanyama appropriated the site as a memorial to the king himself. Reports that the South Africans had installed the king’s severed head in the monument actually prompted this subversive détournement; the monument was taken as “an affirmation of [the king’s] presence within the capital city,” and became a site of OvaKwanyama pilgrimage (Silvester, The Colonising Camera 147).

In the literature, we often encounter these diversions of official space, along with accounts of “non-places,” places absented from maps of the city, being subversively appropriated as usable spaces (Trigg 107). For instance, Vinnia Ndadi’s Breaking Contract, an “oral life history” of the independence struggle recorded by Dennis Mercer, describes moving through the apartheid-era city by way of these “non-places” in order to evade white surveillance. When Ndadi is contracted to work for Thromb Brothers, a construction company building houses in Klein Windhoek, he cuts a path “through the bush” and slips unseen through it every time he wants to go “to town” (47). Likewise, when he and a friend are being pursued by the police, they hop into a sewer pipe to shake their followers, successfully evading capture. The sewer pipes offer clandestine routes through the city, routes invisible to colonial eyes but carefully mapped by those working against the regime; Ndadi’s friend Erastus knows immediately that the pipe behind Terrace Motors Garage will “le[a]d underground to the railway station” (42). Kahengua employs similar tactics in his writing, suggesting that there are palimpsestic layers to the city even after independence: some itineraries are claimed by Windhoek’s elites, while others—usually subterranean spaces that maps obscure or repress—are used by the city’s poor. To take just one example, Kahengua’s speaker narrates “The Rumbling Stomach” from underneath a bridge—beneath the teeming life of the city, he prophesies his country’s future. Although the poem is set on Independence Day, March 21^st and others are celebrating Namibia’s liberation, Kahengua’s speaker remains skeptical of the SWAPO government. In fact, his lines explicitly connect the corruptions of the postcolonial state to those of the foregoing colonial regime: “Fireworks rock the night / Like colonial gun motors / From underneath the bridge / Inside my empty stomach / Air rumbles like a thunderstorm” (28-32). This liminal perspective can only issue from a liminal space, and so Kahengua’s speaker claims his spot beneath the overpass as a pulpit of a kind, making a (provisional) home of a supposed “non-place.”¹³

Some texts also toggle between different visual perspectives in order to develop “insubordinate” relationships to local space (Debord, “Introduction” 7). Significantly, several authors allow their characters to take a bird’s eye view of the city—a panoptic gaze that only city planners and denizens of wealthy hillside suburbs are authorized to inhabit. Sylvia Schlettwein’s short story “Blood Brothers,” one of a series of supernatural tales collected in Schlettwein and Isabella Morris’s Bullies, Beasts and Beauties, centrally features this top-down point of view. Its main character is Kobus Visagie, an Afrikaaner with “a white South African rugby player’s face” who spends virtually all his time at Kiepie’s, a (real-life) Windhoek dance club off the Hochland Road that caters to an almost exclusively white clientele. However, after being turned by a vampire during a fight at Kiepie’s, he “trie[s] to walk and discover[s] he [can] fly” (15-16). He subsequently soars over Windhoek. Although he is on the hunt, his newfound perspective is revelatory: he finds himself trying to “spot human movement between corrugated iron, plastic and threadbare blankets below” as the depths of the city’s poverty are laid bare to him for the first time (17). The story also provocatively ascribes a kind of vampirism to Windhoek’s elite hillside suburbs: these areas overlook (in both senses of the word) the townships beneath, allowing the city’s wealthy few to live at the expense of, but at arm’s length from, the impoverished many. Harlech-Jones’s 1999 novel A Small Space offers a similar critique of the neo-apartheid city, turning throughout to the bird’s eye view to both illuminate and contest who is granted access to this proprietary perspective. The book frequently points out that “[t]he SWAPO leadership guys are…buying expensive properties” up in the hills—“[t]hey want swimming pools, big entertainment spaces, en suite bathrooms, covered patios with views, the works” (209). However, even Harlech-Jones’s less advantaged characters subversively seek out top-down views of the city, challenging the privilege of surveillance space and staking their own claims to place. Again and again, these characters find elevated sites overlooking Windhoek, sites that seem to give them some purchase on not just someplace, but (to use Vidler’s word) homeplace. For example, when Simon meets a colleague in the Weimann Building in the CBD, he immediately takes the lift to the roof and walks over to the parapet, wanting a view over the downtown area (227-29). 9). He and Julienne rendezvous at a hilltop knoll, admiring how “across the rolling golden-coloured grassland, Windhoek stretche[s] out on a south-north axis, lying low against the backdrop of mountains” and reveling in the “feeling of boundlessness” that this point of view obtains (110, 117). This almost vertiginous perspective allows for a kind of intimacy with place, even for a transgressive sense of ownership—Simon and Julienne now share “the views” coveted by the “SWAPO leadership guys.” From above street level, Windhoek is a thing of beauty, and Simon and Julienne drink in that beauty “with the gorge at their back, surrounded by space, looking over to the city spread out below in the distance” (116).

Although the desire to domesticate an existing hauntology—in other words, to find ways of navigating difficult spaces instead of dismantling those spaces entirely—may read as quietistic rather than revolutionary, I argue that even such small steps represent major transgressions by members of a profoundly marginalized population. Indeed, in the absence of a dominant political will to alter the fabric of the city by desegregating spaces and eliminating apartheid geographies, the insubordinate movements of subaltern bodies through those spaces become significant gestures of resistance. Moreover, if Sara Ahmed’s assertion that “being at home is a matter of how one feels or fails to feel” holds true, then the individualized labor of engaging one’s own structures of feeling is itself a political act (89). Even if this labor is stealthy rather than overt, and even if it takes the body rather than bricks and mortar as an agent of change, it nevertheless insists upon its own homing refrain as a counterpoint to the city’s unheimlichkeit. Some Windhoek writers take this embodied resistance to the city’s visual regime a step further by asserting, as Bachelard does, that “the world exists through the porous retention of our bodies” just as much as it does through the map (11-12). As Dylan Trigg, describing the phenomenology of memory, puts it, “[w]e carry places with us”—including the ghosts of past places that we bear with us into the present (11). Although Windhoek is undeniably a neocolonial revenant of the colonial city, a space sedimented with traces of both German and South African conquest, “the body [is] the original haunted house” (Trigg 321). In other words, we cannot deny the cityscape’s uncanniness, but if we accept that “places live in our bodies, instilling an eerie sense of our own embodied selves as being the sites of a spatial history that is visible and invisible, present and absent,” we can imagine individual bodies as agents rather than objects of this unheimlichkeit (Trigg 33).

Authors who populate the city with their own ghosts can therefore reclaim the uncanny as a more positive affect—their characters may feel a sense of doubleness, but they are the sources of that doubleness. Katjavivi’s story “Louis Botha Store” makes precisely this point: the Hochland Park in which Katjavivi’s protagonist Uapiona lives is overlaid throughout with memories of the Old Location. Uapiona’s grandparents lived in the Old Location before being forcibly relocated to Katutura, and their stories of that place “invite … a no-longer existing world … into the experience of the still-unfolding present” (Trigg 33). Her grandfather constantly superimposes Old Location landmarks on contemporary Hochland Park, despite the fact that current maps of the city would rather repress this history. He tells Uapiona that his old house was “not far from where we live now,” and he reminds her of the “German stores by the bridge into town” that were razed along with the Old Location shacks (3). Even Uapiona’s name, meaning “the one who wipes away the tears,” allows this “[h]istory [to] be seen, and felt”: she was born on the anniversary of the Old Location Massacre, and her very presence provides a spectral reminder of that event (5). Relocating the focal point of place, as Katjavivi does, in the body instead of in the map, is a gesture of reclamation; each pedestrian makes of the city a personal palimpsest, loosing hordes of her own ghosts in its streets.

Harlech-Jones’s A Small Space similarly suggests that “lived spatiality is not a container that can be measured in objective terms, but an expression of our being-in-the-world” (Trigg 4). Just before independence, Harlech-Jones’s Saul is accused by SWAPO leadership of being a South African spy and is imprisoned by his one-time collaborators for months in a dark dungeon. In order to stay sane, he imagines himself moving freely through the city, accessing familiar itineraries in his mind’s eye. Saul later tells Julienne and Simon

I’d plan my days—for example, one day I’d say, okay, today I’m going visiting in Windhoek…. Then, when I decided, I’d make my mind work. Not just general impressions, that was too easy, that wasn’t really working at it. If I was going to see my parents—for example—then I’d imagine all the details of the route, like each building along the way, the colours of the walls, the shape of the road.(182-83)

The routes he envisions embed themselves in his flesh, and he carries them with him even after he is released. This produces, for Saul, a sense of “dissonance”—a feeling that “the past…[is] almost more real than [his] experiences in the present” (184). This feeling is particularly unsettling because “the two worlds [past and present] resemble each other so closely”; the changed streets that Saul moves through after he is freed seem both familiar and foreign—in other words, uncanny (184). While this experience of “doubling” may be vexed (Harlech-Jones 184), it nevertheless asserts Saul’s body as a source of place, reframing “received geography” as lived space (Allen and Kelly 8). Saul, like Katjavivi’s characters, becomes the locus of Windhoek’s uncanniness, and the fact that past “places live in [his] bod[y]” grants him a kind of ghostly agency in his relationship to the city (Trigg 33). His body, that is to say, is a repository of living history, not simply meat to be corralled by urban planners.

Windhoek is in many ways a “precarious” place (Vidler xii). Virtually everywhere one turns, the city is painfully redolent of its histories of genocide and apartheid. From colonial memorials that negate indigenous losses to the entrenched morphology of segregation, Windhoek’s built environment is indelibly shaped by these violent histories. Even postcolonially, the specters of conquest and subjugation have not been fully banished; while streets are being renamed and monuments to a newly independent Namibia raised, apartheid is still being used as a “blueprint” for future urban planning, and state-mandated projects have tended worryingly towards visual authoritarianism (Müller-Friedman, “Just Build it Modern” 49). For many of its residents, Windhoek is therefore both familiar and foreign, both domestic and unhomely: an example of Vidler’s “architectural uncanny” (xii). That said, however, as A Small Space reminds us, place lives “eerily” in bodies just as bodies live in place, and this observation opens even the most forbidding of official cartography to the détournements of individual pedestrians (Vidler 12). Indeed, as Harlech-Jones and other Windhoek writers indicate, the city is as much a private tapestry of cycling paths and scenic overlooks as it is the public spectacle of the German Alte Feste or the Mansudae-built State House. Moreover, these subterranean itineraries invite rebellious intimacies with place; tellingly, Harlech-Jones’s final line reads, “It was time for them [Simon and Julienne] to go home” (292). Ultimately, if the Freudian uncanny is a kind of “oscillation” between heimlichkeit and unheimlichkeit (Trigg 33), many Windhoek writers reach boldly towards the former, forwarding Windhoek as a site of possible belonging, a space beyond “nostalgia, homesickness, exile, or alienation,” a space to call home (Vidler 12).

Footnotes

1. I should note here that my use of Vidler’s argument is slightly different than his own. Vidler is interested in the ways in which neo-avant-garde architects like Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi employ “the presence of absence” (182) as a defamiliarizing tool in their work, their projects intentionally undermining the supposed security that buildings provide in order to comment on the unhomely, unsettled modern condition (182). In so doing, these architects also reflect on that which is repressed by high modernist architectural practice and commentary immediately following WWII: the fact that the barrier between inside and outside that buildings purport to provide is always permeable, and that the home is always (at least potentially) subject to the pressures of not-home. While Vidler is therefore primarily concerned with specific Euro-American builds from about 1960 onward—builds that reveal the pressures of exile and estrangement—I am applying his terms to the entire urban fabric of a postcolonial city. This relocation, I argue, lends new weight to Vidler’s concept of the “architectural uncanny,” as colonial powers’ attempts to rebuild home abroad and colonized subjects’ efforts to resist these architectural impositions evoke precisely the kind of oscillation between intimacy and strangeness to which Vidler refers. Indeed, postcolonial cities, perhaps more than any other built environments, are suggestive of the “architectural uncanny”: they are at once hospitable and uneasy, at once productive of both belonging and alienation.

2. Between 2005 and 2012, the building housed the Southern African Development Community Tribunal, although the courtroom was destroyed when the building caught fire in 2007.

3. The Reiterdenkmal is still the subject of ongoing controversy—the National Heritage Council has been working to deproclaim the statue as a national monument, and several local German organizations threatened the Namibian government with legal action after the rider was removed. See (“Reiterdenkmal disappears overnight”; “Court battle looms over Reiterdenkmal”; “German groups defend Reiterdenkmal legal threat,” Namibian Sun, 12/26/13; 3/23/14; 4/6/14). The statue has since been relocated to the Alte Feste courtyard, where it is out of the public eye; it has been removed from its stone pedestal and is now supported rather less regally by metal posts.

4. See also the 1995 Residents Survey Report (prepared by TRP Associates for the Municipality of Windhoek) and the National Habitat II Committee’s National Plan of Action (March 1996) for similar language and sentiments.

5. See Sasman, “Windhoek in Serious Growth Squeeze,” AllAfrica.com, 8/31/10.

6. Happily, at least some attention is finally being paid to the importance of thoughtful city planning in Windhoek. The Namibian government’s Vision 2030 policy document, which spells out the country’s longer-term development strategies, recognizes the importance of positive experiences of space and place for urban residents’ “well-being” and cautions against the damaging effects of “uncontrolled urban sprawl” (Namibian Govt 172). (However, the document appears to be much more concerned with the growth of so-called “informal areas” than with the unchecked expansion of upper-middle class suburbs [172]—and this national-level concern legitimizes the Municipality of Windhoek’s demolition campaigns against the squatters’ shacks and shanties springing up on the city’s outskirts.) The City of Windhoek has started to respond to Vision 2030’s aims by promoting mixed-use development, at least in the Central Business District (CBD). For example, the construction of Freedom Plaza, a major downtown redevelopment project spanning several blocks, is now underway. The proposed design comprises hotels, office towers, high-end apartment blocks, retail spaces, community resources (a craft market, a bus terminus, etc.), green space, public squares and arcades, a casino, and so on. If these plans are fully realized, Freedom Plaza will become a major draw for tourists, a gathering-place for (at least some of) the city’s residents, and a model for vertical rather than horizontal expansion that may check the outward growth of GRDs and limit the physical marginalization of the city’s poorest citizens. Additionally, during the author’s 2015 visit to Windhoek, a plan called the CBD Urban Design Framework was being advertised on a downtown billboard, promoted by both the City of Windhoek and a company called the Urban Design Institute of Namibia. The billboard claims an interest in “vibrant, integrated, and multifaceted” design in the CBD, mentioning the development of a “CBD residential strategy,” a concern for the area’s “visual identity,” and an investment in “enhancing arrival and movement through the city.” These are all important principles for strengthening the bonds between local bodies and their lived spaces—a particularly important goal in light of non-white Namibians’ long exclusion from the city center. While Windhoek’s Urban Design Framework project has seen little tangible progress thus far, if it moves forward, it will help to counter the apartheid-era logic in which post-independence urban design has been mired.

7. While the Genocide Memorial, which occupies the former site of the Reiterdenkmal, is an important reminder of one of the darkest episodes of Namibia’s colonial history, its efforts at memorialization have proven somewhat unsatisfying to members of the communities most affected by the genocide. Nowhere does the memorial actually use the word “genocide,” and the uninitiated viewer might interpret the sculpture as yet another commemoration of the SWAPO freedom struggle, emblazoned as it is with the struggle’s unofficial motto, “Their Blood Waters Our Freedom.” Also, while the friezes across the sculpture’s plinth do feature imagery of the genocide, the memorial is topped by a bronze man and woman in modern clothing casting off chains—a gesture far more evocative of the anti-apartheid struggle than of the historical violence done to the Nama and Herero peoples.

8. A relatively up-to-date list of renamed streets in Windhoek can be found at http://www.map-of-namibia.com/windhoek-streetrenames.html.

9. Of course, this is not universally true; several new buildings designed by private firms are much more subtle, and a number of them invoke elements of Namibia’s landscape and ecology in their construction. To take just one example, the lovely new Hilton Eliakim Namundjebo Plaza Hotel, designed by Windhoek firm Wasserfall Munting and completed in 2012, privileges “[l]egibility and transparency” and “invite[s]…Nature…into the building” by way of local stone, indigenous plants, and the building’s “arid” color palette (Wasserfall Munting Architects, wma-arch.com). (These design principles are, of course, a far cry from those of the Mansudae projects; the State House’s bordering steel fence and surrounding guard towers, for example, project illegibility and opacity.) Nevertheless, the fact that Mansudae has been tapped for so many marquee state-mandated projects is telling. In fact, Mansudae is now suing the Tender Board of Namibia’s National Planning Commission for awarding a contract for a new Ministry of Information building to a local construction company rather than to Mansudae, indicating its sense of entitlement to Windhoek’s public projects (Menges, The Namibian, 04/01/14).

10. These texts do have an impact on public discourse in Windhoek and around Namibia, although they are read and discussed primarily by the country’s educated elite. Several of the volumes analyzed in this essay, for example, are assigned to students in Namibian Literature in English courses at UNAM, and so are widely known in postsecondary education circles. Plays and poetry tend to reach slightly larger audiences in Namibia than do novels by virtue of being staged and performed; Hugh Ellis and Keamogetsi Molapong often read their work at Spoken Word Namibia—a poetry-in-performance series that has been running for 10 years now in Windhoek—and Frederick Philander’s plays have been mounted on a number of occasions, usually directed by Philander himself. These events often inspire conversation and sometimes controversy about the social issues facing Namibia today. That said, the adult and youth literacy rates in Namibia are 76.5% and 86.9%, respectively, and only 54% of the population attends secondary school, so access to literary texts in country is fairly limited (Unicef.org). Additionally, cultural events are concentrated in urban centers like Windhoek and Swakopmund, so rural populations have far fewer opportunities to come into contact with the materials discussed here, even in oral form.

11. Interestingly, this protest was carried out at a German rather than a South African monument, perhaps to equate the Boers’ violence with earlier German acts of mass killing in Namibia.

12. These stories are recounted in a number of places; I first encountered them in a discussion of the monument at www.waymarking.com.

13. Moreover, from this pulpit, he rebelliously links the routes of rich and poor, collapsing distances that those in power would rather keep prohibitively expansive. In the same breath, he gestures towards Maerua Mall (“Corner of Laurent Kabila / And Nelson Mandela”), a site of up-market investment and privilege, Hage Geingob, an elaborate rugby stadium in the prosperous suburb of Olympia, and Julius Kambarage Nyerere Street, a road on the northwestern fringe of the city that runs through the impoverished township of Maxuilili (19-22). As Debord explains, “the [psychogeographic] distances that actuallyeffectively separate two regions … …may have little relation with the physical distance between them”—and the vernacular map of Windhoek that Kahengua sketches makes precisely this point, competing with official cartographies of the city (“Theory” 53).

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