ABSTRACT
The personal archive of professional photographer John Liebenberg relating to his work in Namibia from 1984–92 is coming to represent the most comprehensive visual documentation of the national liberation struggle in that country. The photographs were taken in 1984, in a Namibian compound known as the okombone in Windhoek. Ironically, one of the pivotal subjects in the historic rise of social documentary photography in southern Africa was precisely the compound. The compound template was extended and applied to the prison-like controlled residence camps of the gold mines around Johannesburg in the 1880s, and then further afield in the mines of Zimbabwe, Namibia, the Zambian and Katanga in the Belgian Congo in the twentieth century. The isolation of migrant workers and conditions in compounds were central to vehement demands raised in the epoch-making contract workers strike of 1971, which was incubated and organized in the migrant compounds and hostels around the country.
