‘Eekamba adishe nadi ufanwe, Eendingosho adishe na di ongelwe u pule kwali Nashima’: Nanghili Nashima, The performer and feminist intellectual

Abstract

This article studies Nanghili Nashima’s Oudano practices and public life. We discuss how her autobiographical public performance practices during apartheid and independent Namibia constitute feminism. The study mainly focused on the sound and video recordings currently archived at the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation's Music Library and on YouTube. This work offers critical engagement on themes of migration, sexuality and labour, challenging colonial, Christian, patriarchal and heteronormative norms, and systems in Ovawambo and African societies at large. We unpack her mobile work and public life as defiant and subversive, therefore, speaking truth to multiple forms of power. By listening collectively and closely to her performance work, the study argues that Nanghili Nashima emerged as a trans-local figure who relied on transgression through her Oudano praxis to embody agency and radical imagination as practices of freedom. It is on this basis that her intellectual tradition is situated in what Pumla Gqola has theorised as African feminist imagination.