Violence, Exile and Ethnicity: Nyemba Refugees in Kaisosi and Kehemu (Rundu, Nambia)

In debates about ethnicity it is often taken for granted that Africans developed or imagined an ethnic identity, albeit in different periods and in different forms. In the Kuando-Kubango province in southeastern Angola, however, ethnic ideology does not seem to have acquired the compelling attraction it has had elsewhere in Africa. Among refugees from this area, who now live in Rundu (Namibia), ethnicity is avoided as a category of identity as well. Very different explanations have been given for the uneven development of ethnic consciousness. Thus some have implied that ethnicity meant little for Africans living in areas where colonial control, missionary enterprise, and a migrant economy did not make a great impact. In another interpretation, specifically dealing with refugees, the lack of ethnic identity has been explained as a ‘pragmatics of identity’ intended to counter the ‘labels’ attached to refugees by local citizens. Refugees use the lack of fixed ethnic identity as a means of becoming inconspicuous members of a cosmopolitan culture and so avoid expulsion. In the first interpretation, the limited significance of ethnicity is situated in peripheral conditions; in the second approach, the fear of ending up in such conditions informs a tactics designed to deny ethnic identity. This article attempts to show that it is not only possible but, in the case under discussion, necessary to reconcile the ‘thesis of marginality’ with the ‘thesis of strategy’.