Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire

Modern-day Namibian history has largely been
shaped by three major eras: German colonial rule, South African
apartheid occupation, and the Liberation Struggle. It was, however, not
only military conquest that laid the cornerstone for the colony, but
also how the colony was imagined, the “dream” of this colony. As a tool
of discursive worldmaking, literature has played a major role in
providing a framework in which to “dream” Namibia, first from outside
its borders, and then from within. In Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire,
Renzo Baas employs Henri Lefebvre‘s city-countryside dialectic and
reworks it in order to uncover how fictional texts played an integral
part in the violent acquisition of a foreign territory.

Through
the production of myths around whiteness, German and South African
authors designed a literary space in which control, destruction, and the
dehumanisation of African peoples are understood as a natural order,
one that is dictated by history and its linear continuation. These
European texts are offset by Namibia’s first novel by an African,
offering a counter-narrative to the colonial invention that was (German)
South West Africa.