Lubango and After: 'Forgotten History' as Politics in Contemporary Namibia*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the considerable efforts made by some Namibians (notably the 'Breaking the Wall of Silence' committee) throughout the 1990s to keep alive the issue of the Swapo leadership's alleged abuses of power when in exile. These activists' key focus has been the torture and killing of many innocent cadres (labelled 'spies') of Swapo in the movement's detention centre at Lubango, Angola, in the 1980s. The article reviews the difficulties such critics have had - within both the formal political arena and within civil society (including the churches, so important a sphere of Namibian life) - in setting the record straight about such events and/or in obtaining any kind of redress of grievances. The chief obstacles have been the unwillingness of the SWAPO leadership to allow its own record in exile to be opened up to public scrutiny and, indeed, its active role in discouraging any such outcome. The leadership's advocacy of the wisdom of silence on these matters has tended to be cast in terms of the presumed imperatives of 'reconciliation', but it is argued here that this policy may have at least as much to do with the leadership's seeking to hide the blood of the past that it has on its own hands. The article alludes to the possible applicability of such models as South Africa's process of 'Truth and Reconciliation' to resolving such issues, and to the considerable challenge of realising any such outcome in the immediate future in Namibia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".