Part 1: Camp, nation, history. . - 1. Liberation movement camps and the past of the present in Southern Africa 3. - 2. Revisiting an image of a camp : remember Cassinga? 30. - Part 2: Camps and the formation of a nation. - 3. Living in exile : life and crisis at SWAPO's Kongwa Camp, 1964-1968 65. - 4. Ordering the nation : SWAPO in Zambia, 1974-1976 94. - 5. "The spy" and the camp : SWAPO in Angola, 1980-1989 123. - Part 3: Camps and the production of history. - 6. Namibia's "wall of silence" : challenging national history in the international system 149. - 7. Reconciliation in Namibia? : narrating the past in a postcamp nation 185. - 8. The camp and the post-colony 215
This paper discusses the Decolonising Knowledge Seminar, a seminar which I initiatedin the Humanities Faculty at the University of the Free State's (UFS) Bloemfontein campus in 2017. The paper's opening sections present a rationale for the seminar. I maintain that there is considerable scholarship illuminating how colonialpower shaped the knowledge which academic disciplines generated about Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of it is focused on anthropology, the discipline centred on Europe's non-Western 'others' and implicated in latecolonial government. Despite the influence of this and related critiques globally, with their focus on power-knowledge relationships, such work has not substantially permeated South Africa's Afrikaans universities. There, humanities disciplineswere largely isolated from global knowledge flows during the apartheid era and continue to emerge from this insular past. The paper then discusses the seminar itself and what I see as its three main contributions: creating space for an open-endedexchange about colonial knowledge and its legacies, engaging critically with the language of decolonisation, and grounding discussion of decolonisation in scholarship on Africa's colonial history, including the history of anthropology. Bytracing these dynamics, the paper offers a unique perspective on the unfolding conversation about decolonisation in South Africa, highlighting a specific initiative aimed at contributing to decolonising knowledge at one South African university.Moreover, the paper suggests how historical literature pertaining to anthropology speaks to decolonising knowledge at the UFS and Afrikaans universities generally, where questions of colonial knowledge and power have long been obscured. In this manner, the paper moves the topic of decolonisation from highly abstract and/or politically symbolic claims into a specific context, where engaging certain scholarly texts may make a demonstrable intervention.
From text: The Politics of Heritage in Africa offers a wide-ranging analysis of how heritage has been defined in Africa and of the on-going significance of heritage work on the continent. In presenting their project in this manner, the authors differentiate it from scholarship focused more narrowly on heritage as museum studies, and they illuminate domains outside the museum which may be understood as contributing to heritage as a form of knowledge production, including scientific disciplines and performing arts.
This article explores theoretical literature on refugees, noting a significant distinction between an abstract body of work critiquing the politics of humanitarianism and an ethnographic literature focused on refugee subjects. As I argue, refugees should be seen not simply as "bare life" which has been removed from political life, but rather as political subjects whose subjectivities are shaped by the social environments in which they live. To illustrate this point, I draw on Liisa Malkki's Purity and exile and my own work on exile camps administered by the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) during Namibia's liberation struggle. Collectively, this and other ethnographic literature highlight limits to social theory which works with highly abstract notions of "the refugee" and suggests that more significant scholarly interventions are now to be made through carefully contextualised work, tracing political subjectivities, in particular refugee communities, and how these subjectivities have been abstracted.
Upon entering the military recruits are challenged physically, this is exceptionally difficult for women as their anatomy predisposes them to more impact injuries than men. Female military recruits are placed at a higher risk for shin splints, a repetition injury known in the medical field as medial tibial stress syndrome (MTSS). This review paper explores studies about MTSS, its prevalence, and expression in military recruits, particularly as its expression differs across gender. This paper will cover how the external environment of boot camp results in a higher prevalence of MTSS than the general population and how increased occurrence of MTSS in females has been attributed to specific physical attributes. This includes smaller tibial cross-sectional dimensions, greater than average hip range of motion, and differences in lower extremity mechanics during running and other repetitive physical activities. The external environment of boot camp coupled with these intrinsic factors highlight the importance of providing running education for women prior to arrival at boot camp and designing training regiments that account for these physiological differences.
Available evidence highlights the importance of emotion regulation (ER) in psychological well-being. However, translation of the beneficial effects of ER from laboratory to real-life remains scarce. Here, we present proof-of-principle evidence from a novel cognitive-emotional training intervention targeting the development of ER skills aimed at increasing resilience against emotional distress. This pilot intervention involved training military veterans over 5–8 weeks in applying two effective ER strategies [Focused Attention (FA) and Cognitive Reappraisal (CR)] to scenarios presenting emotional conflicts (constructed with both external and internal cues). Training was preceded and followed by neuropsychological, personality, and clinical assessments, and resting-state functional MRI data were also collected from a subsample of the participants. Results show enhanced executive function and psychological well-being following training, reflected in increased working memory (WM), post-traumatic growth (PTG), and general self-efficacy (GSE). Brain imaging results showed evidence of diminished bottom-up influences from emotional and perceptual brain regions, along with evidence of normalized functional connectivity in the large-scale functional networks following training. The latter was reflected in increased connectivity among cognitive and emotion control regions and across regions of self-referential and control networks. Overall, our results provide proof-of-concept evidence that resilience and well-being can be learned through ER training, and that training-related improvements manifested in both behavioral change and neuroplasticity can translate into real-life benefits.
