Narrowing the Liberation Agenda: Women, Corporal Punishment, and Scandal in Namibia's Struggle for Independence

Abstract

Anti-colonial campaigns that use existing patriarchal norms to shame colonial regimes can narrow the liberation agenda for women. Based on court documents and oral histories conducted in Namibia, this article examines the corporal punishment of women in Ovamboland during the period of South African colonial occupation. Centred on the 1973 flogging of four female political activists in the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO), the article places the public beating of women in the broader context of histories of spousal abuse in the region. In this way, the article argues that the public flogging of women in Ovamboland demonstrated the extent to which the liberation struggle empowered women to enter spaces previously defined as masculine, thus underscoring the potential for women's liberation through the anti-colonial upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, in the scandal that emerged in the wake of the 1973 floggings, male activists and allies sought to use the floggings...