Nationalism's Exile: Godfrey Nangonya and SWAPO's Sacrifice in Southern Angola

Abstract

Godfrey Nangonya hardly figures in any liberation narrative in southern Africa. Born and educated in the border region of Namibia/Angola, he gravitated to Cape Town and the ferment of radical, nationalist and pan-African politics in the late 1940s. Departing for Angola, he joined militants who founded the MPLA. He was imprisoned twice under the Portuguese and, because of the complications of plural political affiliations, twice after Angolan independence. This article explores Nangonya's transnational political, nationalist and carceral journeys, and especially the years 1974–75 when, as SWAPO's liaison officer with UNITA in southern Angola, he was ‘sacrificed’ by the Namibian liberation movement. It examines the open and volatile southern Angolan frontier region in a time of expanding historical possibilities for national liberation, a space that had to be forcibly stabilised, whether as a buffer zone for the South African military, a zone of passage for SWAPO guerrillas, or...