Nationalism's Exile: Godfrey Nangonya and SWAPO's Sacrifice in Southern Angola

Godfrey Nangonya hardly figures in any liberation narrative in southern Africa. Born and educated in the border region of Namibia/Angola, he gravitated to Cape Town and the ferment of radical, nationalist and pan-African politics in the late 1940s. Departing for Angola, he joined militants who founded the MPLA. He was imprisoned twice under the Portuguese and, because of the complications of plural political affiliations, twice after Angolan independence. This article explores Nangonya's transnational political, nationalist and carceral journeys, and especially the years 1974–75 when, as SWAPO's liaison officer with UNITA in southern Angola, he was ‘sacrificed’ by the Namibian liberation movement. It examines the open and volatile southern Angolan frontier region in a time of expanding historical possibilities for national liberation, a space that had to be forcibly stabilised, whether as a buffer zone for the South African military, a zone of passage for SWAPO guerrillas, or sovereign territory for the MPLA. The new Cold War dynamics soon resulted in a hardening of political boundaries and the narrowing of nationalist alignments and internal debates. Nangonya was exiled by a Namibian nationalism and its history that was purged of its plural alternative narratives, and which is only now slowly opening up to debate.