Modern-day Namibian history has largely been shaped by three major eras:
German colonial rule, South African apartheid occupation, and the
Liberation Struggle. It was, however, not only military conquest that
laid the cornerstone for the colony, but also how the colony was
imagined, the "dream" of this colony. As a tool of discursive
worldmaking, literature has played a major role in providing a framework
in which to "dream" Namibia, first from outside its borders, and then
from within. In Fictioning Namibia as a Space of Desire, Renzo Baas
employs Henri Lefebvre's city-countryside dialectic and reworks it in
order to uncover how fictional texts played an integral part in the
violent acquisition of a foreign territory.
Through the production of myths around whiteness, German and South
African authors designed a literary space in which control, destruction,
and the dehumanisation of African peoples are understood as a natural
order, one that is dictated by history and its linear continuation.
These European texts are offset by Namibia's first novel by an African,
offering a counter-narrative to the colonial invention that was (German)
South West Africa.