“Ghost Spaces”

Abstract This chapter argues that Windhoek is indelibly marked by its histories of genocide and apartheid (enacted under German and South African rule, respectively), and that those histories live on in the city alongside its post-independence present. Namibia gained its independence in 1990, and much has been done in the last decades to decolonize its capital city’s symbolism. Nonetheless, thirty years of postcoloniality can hardly fully heal the wounds of more than a century’s colonial violence—and today, the scars of these periods are barely beneath the skin of the city’s built environment. Literary representations of Windhoek tend to foreground these scars, often critiquing the seemingly squandered promise of Namibia’s independence by featuring the income gap—which also manifests itself as a geographical gap—between the city’s postcolonial elites and its chronically poor. This means that Windhoek is a haunted space: an uncanny neocolonial revenant of the colonial city. While many Windhoek writers dwell with this discomfort, others indicate that the power of the “architectural uncanny” in the city is far from absolute. Several texts set in Windhoek feature a recalcitrant dériviste or “drifter”: one who roams the city, slipping into “forbidden” places. Others relocate the focal point of place in the body instead of in the map, allowing each pedestrian to turn the city into a personal palimpsest, loosing hordes of her own ghosts in its streets. These texts treat “ghost space” as vibrant space, one in which individuals reanimate submerged histories as part of a vital collective present.