Singing the nation: Discourses of identity and community in northern Namibia

This study examines discourses about the nation in songs composed and performed by young people living in a former ethnic homeland in recently independent Namibia. In the multidisciplinary scholarship on nationalism, the efforts of nationalist leaders, intellectuals, and officials have figured prominently, but it is equally crucial to study the perspectives of those they seek to shape or mobilize. How do they imagine the nation? In what style do they claim national identities or construct national communities? To address this question, I recorded and analyzed naturally occurring discourse about the nation in Owambo between August 1997 and November 1998. Owambo is a relatively densely populated area on the northern border whose residents have been centrally involved in the migrant labor economy and the nationalist movement. Nearly all identified as Christian, and associated Christianity with education, biomedicine, and other aspects of 'modernity' opposed to 'pagan' or 'traditional' ways of life. I focus in particular on songs composed and performed by members of the Namibian Catholic Youth League. I discuss the grammatical and metaphorical construction of the nation, the relationship between national and Christian communities, and the resonance between nationalist and indigenous political discourses. I found that the nation portrayed in NACAYUL songs could be understood in terms familiar from Richard Handler's study of Quebecois nationalist discourse, though in this case as a collective individual which owned resources rather than took action, and a collection of individuals who shared material interests rather than culture or language. NACAYUL members also imagined Namibia as both modern and Christian, situating it simultaneously within a transnational Christian community and an international system of nation-states, and linking the health of the nation to the faith of its members. Finally, they drew on indigenous discourses about the collective ownership of clans and the religious, political, and economic leadership of kings in imagining the nation as owner and the president as leader. The result is a locally specific and distinctively modern vision of the nation.