Between Arts, Politics and Spirituality: Young adults and their everyday politics in post-apartheid Windhoek

This dissertation is an ethnographic account of the everyday politics of young adults in post-apartheid Windhoek, Namibia. Starting from three particular ethnographic encounters I show how young Namibians, through everyday politics, sets the future in motion by challenging the current state of the country. In doing so they create alternative channels for political and social engagement and expression. Throughout I challenge portrayals of young Africans stuck in liminal positions, waiting to obtain socially acknowledged adulthood. I show how young people instead act as catalysing agents of novelty, carving out the future from the (past-in-the-)present. In the first three chapters we encounter Frans, a freelance journalist, consultant and political activist; Decolonising Space, an art and activist collective working on spatial issues of unfinished decolonisation in urban Namibia; and the Mountain Iyahs, a group of alternative spiritual practitioners who has found sanctuary in the rugged hand of the Namibian bush. These three (very) different accounts all illustrate how young Namibians, far from waiting for the world to change, constantly carve out their ways through life with a lens clearly pointed towards the future. The following three chapter takes a broader thematic perspective. I start by addressing issues of mistrust, warring imaginaries and persistent racial and ethnic antagonism more than 30 years after apartheid's demolition, and how these issues continues to cause tensions in young peoples' everyday lives. After this I delve deeper into how young Namibians redefine notions of race and spirituality through everyday negotiations that find expression in exchanges with peers. I also reflect on how I became part of these ontological and epistemological (re)negotiations. In the last chapter before my conclusion I deal with intergenerational negotiations between young adult Namibians and a political elite and elderly population with liberation struggle credentials. I suggest that these liberation struggle credentials are mobilised as an exclusionary mechanism meant to keep young Namibians from obtaining a position to amplify their voices and concerns. Yet, rather than passively watching by while being denied a voice, the young people I encountered all sought to create an alternative political order to the one they feel increasingly excluded from. They do this through various forms of everyday politics.

Publication year:2022

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