A Luta Continua

In northern Namibia in the late 1990s, many Oshiwambo-speaking people were experiencing problems they had not anticipated during the excitement and hopefulness surrounding independence in 1990. In this article, I describe discourses about threats to health and prosperity, and the solutions people proposed, as they were constructed in private conversations and public song performances, as well as speeches, plays, and radio talk shows. These discourses constitute public opinion about the problems of insufficient educational opportunity, unemployment, crime, excessive alcohol consumption, and HIV/AIDS, and the ways they might be resolved. I focus particularly on the perspectives of Catholic youth, and show that youth were seen as especially endangered by these threats, as both victims and victimizers; their survival was linked to the survival of the nation itself. Rather than turning to discourses of witchcraft or to ‘traditional’ practices in an effort to address contemporary problems, as documented in other African cases, people in this region called for increased government assistance, greater individual initiative, and stronger Christian values.