Narrative
The Price of Freedom
Ellen Ndeshi Namhila · 1997
Synopsis
The author recounts her childhood caught up in Namibia's liberation struggle, from a Sunday morning in April 1976, and her flight from a violence that shattered her child's trust in the protection of adults. The narrative follows her exile, in which friends and camp leaders replace the extended family, then her studies in the Gambia and in Finland.
Context
Published in 1997 by New Namibia Books, the book received a Mbapira award the same year. The national university has used it for years in its English course, and the author gave a reading from it in Basel in 1998, at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien. Readers see it as the model for the Namibian exile narratives that followed, and retain what it teaches about the sufferings of war and the value of the bonds between exiles.
Who it is for
For understanding, through a child's testimony, the exile of Namibians during the war of liberation.
Prizes and reception
Its readers praise a frank and vulnerable testimony, hard to read but precious.
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