Richardson, Lorna

Lorna Richardson

What happened to the promise?

3 January 2001Comment Lorna Richardson and Richard Pakleppa

Landscape of Memory, a set of videos produced by a coalition of Southern African film-makers and reviewed in PN 2440, covers the different ways that people have found to deal with the great traumas that have been visited on the region through war, apartheid and repression. The Namibian video, Nda Mona (I Have Seen), discusses the difficult and doubly painful issues raised when the repression comes from your comrades, your "own side". The director, Richard Pakleppa, talked to Lorna Richardson.

Richard Pakleppa was a conscientious objector to serving in the South African occupation army, and went to Europe, where he worked as a camera assistant. He then moved to Cape Town, along with other young Namibian radicals, and became involved in “civic youth, working class student struggles, organising mass campaigns, the powerful use of culture, propaganda, theatre, music, stayaways, boycotts”. In 1986 he returned to Namibia and worked for some years as an activist and union organiser for…