LIBERATION WITHOUT DEMOCRACY - THE SWAPO CRISIS OF 1976

This article examines the internal convulsions that racked the Namibia n liberation movement, Swapo, in Zambian exile in the mid-1970s. This was a crisis that saw the Zambian army link up with the Swapo leadersh ip to arrest, as 'dissidents', well over a thousand of the movement's cadres. Often misleadingly labelled 'the Shipanga crisis' (because of the alleged central role in the events of then senior Swapo leader And reas Shipanga) the crisis actually represented something far more impo rtant than a mere power struggle within the leadership. For, crucially , it turned on the demands for democratic accountability within the mo vement articulated by that generation of young Namibians who flooded i nto exile, and into 'external Swapo', from 1974 on - in the wake of So uth Africa's brutal repression of the youth-led upsurge that had defin ed politics inside Namibia in the early 1970s. This article, drawing o n a wide range of recent interviews with key participants in the Zambi an events and on hitherto unpublished documentary sources, seeks to re construct the evolution of this 'democratic crisis' within Swapo, focu sing on the critical role played both by newly arrived Swapo Youth Lea gue leaders and, crucially, by combatants in Swapo's military camps. T he article also locates the 1974-76 crisis within the context of the h istory of Swapo's prior development (when based in Tanzania in the 196 0s, for example) and of the complex dynamics of southern Africa throug hout the period. It concludes by sketching briefly some of the implica tions of the nature of this crisis and the manner of its resolution fo r Swapo's subsequent development, in Angola and beyond. In doing so, i t evokes broader questions regarding the contradictions - especially a round issues of democratic practice - inherent, more generally, in the liberation struggles that came to define the 'thirty-years war'(1960- 1990) against white minority rule in southern Africa.