'With hard work and determination you can make it here': narratives of identity among German immigrants in post-colonial Namibia

Armbruster, Heidi (2008) 'With hard work and determination you can make it here': narratives of identity among German immigrants in post-colonial Namibia. Journal of Southern African Studies, 34 (3), 611-628. (doi:10.1080/03057070802259852).

Record type: Article

Abstract

This article is based on ethnographic pilot research among German immigrants in Namibia. It employs content and discourse analysis of interview narratives emerging in conversations with two generations of German migrants: individuals who settled in the 1950s and 1960s and a younger cohort who immigrated in the 1980s and 1990s. Interview extracts in which respondents address their arrival and adjustment are chosen to explore narrative reconstructions of integration in (post)-colonial Namibia. However, integration is largely sought in the social and symbolic context defined as ‘German’ and ‘white’, and in dissociation from Namibia as ‘Africa’. Silences, ambivalences, and contradictions at the narrative level reveal these generational cohorts to be slightly different, yet equally evasive about the problematic inheritance of white privilege. While, in contrast to the earlier migrants, the more recent arrivals maintain appeals to liberalism, these interviews suggest that 16 years after independence Namibian whites have not yet begun a process of critical self-reflection.

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