Memoria collettiva e identità etnica degli Herero nella Namibia post-coloniale: pratiche cerimoniali, paesaggi della memoria e “variazioni di confine”

This article proposes a reflection on two founding dimensions of social and cultural life: memory and identity. Such a reflection particularly focuses on the relationship that memory and identity maintain with places and landscape. Among material and symbolic places where the link between memory and identity can be critically understood, this article will refer to boundaries. Not only is this about territorial boundaries and the exercise of the sovereign authority, but it also regards boundaries taken as ethnic, socio-cultural, and symbolic entities expressing social categorizations that can be referred to the changing politics of identity. Within this framework, this essay examines the relationship between collective memory and ethnic identity of the Hereros within the contemporary post-colonial Namibian scenario. Such a relationship will be explained by describing multiple “variations” of ethnic and socio-cultural boundaries that are territorialized through different memory strategies in the Namibian landscape. The territorialization of the Herero memory is linked to the experience of the colonial war between the Hereros and the German colonial troops from 1904 to 1908; to the diaspora of the Hereros due to the colonial conflict with the Germans; and to the German construction of concentration camps for the Herero prisoners between 1904 and 1908 throughout Namibia. This way, the issues in the heart of the territorialization of the Herero memory are strictly connected with the “genocide” of these people. In this light, the Herero memory can be concerned as a tool for creating a contemporary representation of social and political unity of the Herero group that is legitimated by various commemorative practices and rituals held in different areas of Namibia and organized by a ritual and social network established in the aftermath of the colonial war. At the same time these commemorative rituals contribute to allow the Hereros to resist the political and social marginalization they have been experiencing in post-colonial Namibia as a legacy of the colonial period, struggling against their subordination to the Owambo power for the definition of Namibian national identity.