A REVIEW OF ‘MAN OF WAR: LEAVE MY HOUSE’ AT THE GOETHE-INSTITUT, WINDHOEK

Words by Bayron van Wyk

Images by Nicola Brandt

On the evening of 10 March 2023, the Man of War: Leave My House exhibition was held at the Goethe-Institut, Windhoek.

The exhibition consisted of a video work, a research wall, and a series of photographs loosely arranged into three chapters: ‘When The Land Speaks’ – a series of earlier works by the artist Nicola Brandt capturing the changing memoryscape of Namibia; ‘Practices Of Self,’ a performance intervention by the artists Gift Uzera, Nicola Brandt, and Muningandu Hoveka on the day a German colonial monument was removed in the CBD; and lastly, a series of photographs from Drag Night and the recent intersectional activist marches in the city.

Windhoek’s popular drag performances at Café Prestige have become a main attraction of the city’s buzzing queer scene. In one of the photos a crowd of protestors can be seen marching up to the Christuskirche, a church constructed during the German colonial period. One of the protestors holds a Rainbow flag high up in the sky. On the adjacent wall facing the video is a research panel consisting of recent images and news clippings regarding the debate around problematic monuments in the country.

At the opening, a group of some fifty guests were invited into the Goethe’s auditorium to view a video with the same title as the exhibition, followed by a performance reading by Gift Uzera and a fire-side discussion with the artists, audience, and guest speaker – the activist and curator – Hildegard Titus.

The performances as embodying acts of resistance

In one of the opening scenes of the approximately eight-minute video, Gift Uzera and Muningand Hoveka stride towards the colonial statue of the German general Curt von François (1852-1931). Hoveka is dressed in a shimmering green Herero dress, while Gift is in a blue undergarment. (Several undergarments are traditionally worn under the Herero dress to give volume to the attire.)

Playing in the background of the video is a song composed by the sound and performance artist Hoveka. The haunting central chord in Omurumendu wovita nga pite mo jandje is a plea for ‘the man of war’ to depart – ‘the man of war needs to leave my house’. The lyrics are clearly directed towards the figure of von François is widely known for his brutal legacy during German colonial occupation. The central chord also speaks to something more contemporary: to the presence of toxic and violent patriarchy in contemporary Namibia. The country has an astonishingly high rate of gender-based violence, rape and femicide.

In a subsequent scene, Uzera and Hoveka climb on top of the statue and engage in embodied movements inspired by the customary Herero rituals known as Outjina – traditionally performed by women, and Omuhiva, performed by men. These hand movements, as Hoveka explained, are part of a dance ritual by the Herero that are traditionally performed in cow pans or kraals and are also popularly performed at weddings. Hoveka described this gesture as also making herself larger and more defiant.

With their performances, Hoveka and Uzera are resisting bounded views of culture and gender, often linked to colonial and patriarchal practices. Hoveka wears a Herero dress to showcase her cultural heritage; however, she does not style it strictly according to traditional customs i.e., she does not wear jewellery or other embellishments in the manner that it is ‘normally’ worn by Herero women. This style therefore differs from the more traditional and acceptable way of wearing the dress. Uzera, on the other hand, wears a skirt and then later a full undergarment of a Herero dress. These transgressive acts oppose expected cultural and gender norms, which have been heavily guarded. This could be seen in the manner in which some of the Herero men present on the day of the removal of the Von François statue responded to Hoveka’s performance.

In one of the vignettes of the performance, Hoveka raises herself onto a ladder to be at equal height with the statue. Two Herero men – one after the other – emerge from the crowd of onlookers and demand that she descends from it and even threatens to push her off if she does not come down immediately. Uzera describes the ordeal: “I was overwhelmed by the whole traumatic experience with this man interrupting Muni’s performance. It was that he was specifically targeting her and not me. I was also on the ladder.” According to Uzera, this attack was in gender-based. Even as a queer man – I remain a ‘man’ in their eyes, whereas Hoveka is a woman and that automatically makes her even more “vulnerable…to express his frustration with her, because he can easily get away with it. (…) especially as power is power. He would just resort to brute force.” Hoveka argues that this confrontation was motivated by the way in which she was wearing the Herero dress and perhaps the fact that she was now raised above the heads of crowds. “I was wearing something (culturally) identifiable: the Herero dress. Whereas Gift wore an undergarment, merging feminine and masculine qualities, something that contemporary Namibians do not easily recognize. So, they felt that they had the right to impose (on me) and tell me that I was not wearing the dress correctly.”

Reclaiming colonial spaces

Namibia experienced more than a century of European colonialism, first by the German Empire (1884-1915) and then by the South African colonial and apartheid regimes (1915-1990). During these colonial periods, monuments and statues were primarily erected in honour of white European men. Similarly, the postcolonial Namibian government has continued with a similar practice – erecting statues primarily by men to glorify men, particularly those who were involved in Namibia’s liberation struggle (1969-1989).

In their attempts to overcome these patriarchal and colonial forms of memorialization, the artists have centrally focused on queer and feminist embodied performances. Brandt, with her background in memory and performance studies and a strong commitment to supporting the activist cause, was key in mobilizing the performance initiative. And yet, as a Namibian of European descent it was not her place to be ‘in the work’ in the same manner. The collaboration was nonetheless an opportunity to show concrete forms of reconciliation and possibilities of working together to create new ‘queer’ presents and futures. Uzera, Hoveka and Brandt’s work therefore is clearly aimed at disrupting conventional (and colonial) forms of memorialization that have dominated the urbanscape of Windhoek, creating alternative and more inclusive forms of remembering.

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Decolonial acts of being’?

These works forms part of a broader initiative in the city to reclaim colonial spaces still existing in contemporary Windhoek’s landscape. A performance intervention of this kind goes beyond the symbolic and transforms the space in real time, even if only over the course of a few hours.

Through this exhibition, the artists are asking a broader question: how can we create more related and decolonial ways of being? In their quest to answer these questions, the artists look to recent decolonial and intersectional activism in Namibia. This is all part of a growing decolonial movement championed by queer activists and their allies that aims at challenging state-sanctioned homophobia. (In Namibia, there still exists a sodomy law – with its origins in South African apartheid colonialism – that criminalizes homosexual relations.)

The artists’ practice offers a vivid reminder of how women and queer persons have been excluded from the memoryscape. The collaborative performance intervention by Uzera, Hoveka, and Brandt has focused on decolonizing Windhoek’s memoryscapes. These are sites and spaces where European colonialists, the apartheid regime – and to a certain extent, the current government – have inscribed and perpetuated landscapes of segregation, racism, and sexism. The artists embodied performance work is central in resisting colonial forms of memorialization and gesture towards creating more inclusive lived environments across cultural backgrounds. In this sense, the artists have been particularly interested in inscribing their own shared – and entangled – narratives on place as feminists and queer allies, and yet are adamant to not replace one hegemonic narrative with another, but to keep the possibilities of place and memorialisation open and porous to the questions and issues of a changing zeitgeist.