Narrowing the Liberation Agenda: Women, Corporal Punishment, and Scandal in Namibia’s Struggle for Independence

Anti-colonial campaigns that use existing patriarchal norms to shame colonial regimes can narrow the liberation agenda for women. Based on court documents and oral histories conducted in Namibia, this article examines the corporal punishment of women in Ovamboland during the period of South African colonial occupation. Centred on the 1973 flogging of four female political activists in the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), the article places the public beating of women in the broader context of histories of spousal abuse in the region. In this way, the article argues that the public flogging of women in Ovamboland demonstrated the extent to which the liberation struggle empowered women to enter spaces previously defined as masculine, thus underscoring the potential for women’s liberation through the anti-colonial upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, in the scandal that emerged in the wake of the 1973 floggings, male activists and allies sought to use the floggings to reassert patriarchal values within the liberation movement. Given this contradiction, the article explores the limitations of scandal as a mechanism for liberation, arguing that scandal’s emphasis on achieving change through appeals to established norms and group consensus worked to narrow the liberation agenda away from the revolutionary overthrow of the colonial order and towards nationalist and statist projects that have preserved structures of colonial rule.