Paper short abstract:

Because of Namibia's violent history, Government sees it as its responsibility to and reproduce its role in liberating Namibia through monuments and state narratives. This allows disruptions and ruptures as artists, authors, and the general public engage with history production.

Paper long abstract:

With the emergence of a culture of (post-colonial) monumentalisation of memory, the state has official authority of how and where history is retold. Heroes Acre, Independence Museum and Sam Nujoma Statues all point to the state's interest in maintaining its version of its "birth" while trying to absorb or undermine other histories. This happens although a number of colonial and apartheid monuments have remained within cityscapes, now being negotiated and made visible through engagement by artists, writers and activists. Besides the Reiterdenkmal, which was in fact relocated, many older tokens of Namibia's colonial history are under protection or have been remodeled or renamed.

Beginning with literary examples of how a nation can narrate itself into being (autobiography and fiction), and moving onto artistic as well as state interventions, this paper will trace how the state is constantly forced to re-tell and re-justify the validity of the power of its narrative. The token production of history (monuments, streets, memorials) facilitate this re-telling, but also allows for ruptures and disruptions in which meaning and signification are negotiated, contested, and reexamined. With this in mind, questions of how the state is able to reproduce itself on a consistent basis and how this becomes a metanarrative will be examined from a literary as well as political science perspective. The visibility of monuments simultaneously anchors the narrative in a visual manner while also creating the ultimate space to reflect on their status as episodes and their emphasis on telling the story of the state.