Children as Participants in the Liberation Struggle: Lydia Shaketange’s Walking the Boeing 707 (2008) and Ellen Namhila’s The Price of Freedom (1997)

Abstract

This paper explores how two Namibian female-authored autobiographical texts represent children as active participants in the liberation struggle. It interrogates whether children are portrayed as agents in the liberation struggle or simply objects of pity and victims in the exilic environment. The findings in this study reveal that during the liberation struggle, children were active agents and subjects. As such, the study debunks the portrayal of children as passive victims of the exilic environment, as often portrayed in some literary and academic texts. Although, to some extent, they suffer victimisation and the brutality of the struggle, the child characters in the autobiographies have proven agency by taking part in activities that enable the country to attain independence, for instance, the maintenance of the camps, working as teachers and material developers, and as nurses. It has further been revealed that children are intelligent and perseverant beings. Implicitly, they are portrayed as compassionate, assertive, full of endurance, as well as “s/heroes.” Therefore, the study re-versions the representation of children simply as weak, passive, and objects and victims of life’s historical events. The paper also argues that issues of child subjectivity in the struggle are rarely foregrounded in Namibian literary studies; hence this study has proven to be a platform to interrogate the conventional objectification of child characters in the autobiographical works of Shaketange and Namhila.