The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Biographic memorial productions have also transcended the authority of colonial
national boundaries. In Namibia and Angola, the death of Mandume ya Ndemufayo, the
last king of the Kwanyama, in 1917, saw him turned into an iconic figure transcending
the border in a sequence of commemorative productions through memorial artwork,
community oral and visual histories, and an official monument. Mandume had been
killed as part of the upheavals in the Ovambo area, which led to the loss of autonomy,
the bisection of the Kwanyama Kingdom and the entry of South African colonial
authority. 77 Mandume’s biography was circulated in oral memory on both sides of the
Namibia/Angola border as part of a history of colonisation, which sought to challenge
colonial power. While Mandume’s body had been buried in Angola, powerful beliefs
and stories circulated about his alleged beheading, giving rise to a memorial movement
in Namibia from the 1930s, which demanded, over the succeeding decades, spaces of
public memorial, the restoration of Mandume’s head, and sought “a process of
remembering the body politic through a narrative of dismemberment and
commemoration”. 78
The heroic story of Mandume’s life, death and legacy found further fruit in the
biographic linocuts of John Muafangejo and Vilho Tshilongo’s one page laminated
history pamphlets, which contained Kwanyama text and hand‐drawn portraits. 79 In both
77 Patricia Hayes, ‘Order out of Chaos: Mandume Ya Ndemufayo and Oral History’, Journal of
Southern African Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, March 1993. The death of Mandume is the subject of
historical dispute as oral histories have made powerful claims that it was the result of a heroic
suicide.
78 Jeremy Silvester, Marion Wallace and Patricia Hayes, ‘“Trees never Meet”: Mobility and
Containment – An Overview, 1915‐1946’, in Patricia Hayes, Jeremy Silvester, Marion Wallace and
Wolfram Hartmann, Namibia under South African Rule: Mobility and Containment, 1915‐46 (Oxford:
James Currey, 1998), pp 10‐11; Patricia Hayes, ‘Death and the King’s Historians: Mandume, South
Africa and the Kwanyama, 1915‐1994’ (paper presented at the International Oral History
Conference, New York, 17‐22 October 1994.
79 Margo Timm, ‘Transpositions: The Reinterpretation of Colonial Photographs of the Kwanyama
King Mandume ya Ndemufayo in the Art of John Ndevasia Muafangejo’, in Wolfram Hartmann,
Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (eds), The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of
Namibian History (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1998); Patricia Hayes, Jeremy Silvester and Wolfram
Hartmann, ‘“Picturing the Past” in Namibia: The Visual Archive and its Energies’, in Carolyn
Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michelle Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (eds),
Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), pp 121‐123.
78