The social relationships of changing Hai¦om hunter-gatherers in Northern Namibia, 1990-1994

The history of the Hai//om and the Ju/'hoansi San of Namibia over the past century has been a constant series of challenges-from the state, the environments in which they live, and from their San and non-San neighbors. Both Hai//om and Ju/'hoansi experienced removals from their ancestral lands in the 20 th and 21 st centuries at the hands of the colonial and post-colonial states. More recently, they have had to cope with incursions of other groups moving into what remained of their traditional areas.

Godwin Kornes, Review of: Reinhart Kößler, In Search of Survival and Dignity: Two Traditional Communities in Southern Namibia Under South African Rule, Frankfurt, IKO, 2006

‘Neither Here Nor There’: Indigeneity, Marginalisation and Land Rights in Post-independence Namibia., 2020

Damara / ≠Nūkhoen peoples are usually understood in historical and ethnographic texts for Namibia to be amongst the territory’s ‘oldest’ or ‘original’ inhabitants. Similarly, histories written or narrated by Damara / ≠Nūkhoen peoples include their self-identification as original inhabitants of large swathes of Namibia’s central and north-westerly landscapes. All these contributions understand that Damara / ≠Nūkhoen access to ancestral land areas has been severely constrained through historical processes of marginalization. These processes included pre-colonial in-migration by Oorlam Nama and Herero-speaking cattle-herding peoples, exacerbated by accelerating land appropriation by European settlers under conditions of state colonialism. The present chapter responds to these gaps and exclusions through providing overviews of the following issues: - circumstances of early presence in Namibia, drawing on literatures in archaeology and history; - social organisation of Damara / ≠Nūkhoen into lineage groups (!haoti) linked with specific land areas (!hūs), and relevance for understanding issues of identity and displacement; - historical processes of displacement and marginalization which mean that in the present a high proportion of Damara / ≠Nūkhoen and ||Ubun do not now occupy their ancestral areas; - detail for specific 20th century historical evictions linked with land and resource management strategies associated with providing land and grazing to settler farmers, and with clearing land for nature conservation and/or in relation to the control of livestock diseases; - consideration of land access and administration issues associated with the post-Odendaal creation of the Damaraland ‘homeland’ (from early 1970s to 1990); - subsequent post-independence changes in administration of land in the former ‘homeland’; - review of reasons for a continuing discrimination against Damara / ≠Nūkhoen in terms of their inclusion in discourses of indigeneity and marginalization in Namibia.

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2019

The Hai
//om are the largest and most widely dispersed San population in Namibia. Like many other San peoples in Southern Africa, the Hai
//om were dispossessed, marginalised, and discriminated against by other groups and by the colonial state. In 1949, the South West African administration appointed a Commission for the Preservation of the Bushmen, chaired by a former Stellenbosch University professor, P.J. Schoeman, one of the architects of apartheid in South Africa. When the final report of the Commission was published in 1953, the Hai
//om were ignored, in part because Schoeman did not see them as ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ Bushmen. The Hai
om were removed from their ancestral homeland in what was designated as Etosha National Park in 1953–1954. This paper examines the efforts of the Hai
//om to seek land and resource rights and political recognition from the 1980s to the present. The Namibian government appointed a Hai//
om Traditional Authority, David//Khamuxab, in 2004, established a San Development Office in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2005, and in 2007 began purchasing commercial farms for purposes of resettlement of Hai//
om. Statements by Namibian government officials underscore the importance of humanity and compassion in the ways in which the Hai
//om San issue has been addressed. It remains to be seen, however, whether the Hai
//om of Etosha will be treated the same way as other Hai
//om

This paper provides a selective overview of the social science literature produced on Namibia since the start of the millennium with a particular focus on anthropology. While still concerned with 'peripheral areas' like Kunene and Bushmanland, more recent studies have shifted their focus to the north, the most densely populated region. On the basis of this overview, suggestions are made concerning future topics. Speculation is also offered on how priorities are established, and concerns are raised about the increasing bifurcation of outputs between Namibian-and non-Namibian-based researchers. The possible smothering of local researchers has implications as the Government's efforts to control research take on new forms. In Namibia, the millennium started with promise for the social sciences, marked by the formation of the Association for Southern African Anthropology (ASNA) at its highly successful meeting in Windhoek. 1 But how justified was this optimism? This brief essay attempts to assess selectively recent developments in Namibian social science. 2 It has to be selective because a preliminary bibliographical search yielded over 200 items of anthropological interest published post-2000. 3 By default, the focus of this article is on social and cultural anthropology, rather than sociology, for the simple reason that the former disciplines have swamped sociology in terms of academic output. As a rough gauge, during the past years there have been only three traceable sociology doctorates awarded, compared to more than 30 in anthropology. 4 After broadly surveying these

Journal of Namibian Studies, 10, (2011), 7-29, 2011

!Xoon are a group of former hunter-gatherers who live in the dry southern Kalahari in eastern Namibia. They have been largely overlooked in both the extensive body of anthropological publications on the San and in Namibian historiography. The documentation of former !Xoon land use patterns presented here was undertaken with the aim of countering the invisibility of the !Xoon and is based on biographical and historical narratives describing how the !Xoon adapted their territories, settlement patterns, subsistence activities and identity strategies during the period under scrutiny. By placing these strategies in academic discussions about San territoriality it will be shown how territorial behaviour was entangled in the historical process. I will then go on to argue that through both geographical and social mobility the !Xoon not only reacted to but also consolidated the expropriation of their lands, reinforced precast ethnic categories and thus contributed to the fashioning of their own invisibility. Current pressures on San in Namibia to conform to stereotypes of 'Bushmanness' in order to be visible and eligible for state benefits are an ironic reflection of former pressures on San not to be identifiable as stereotypical Bushmen in order to escape state repression.

The present study focuses on the G|ui and Gǁana, two neighbouring groups among the San people, who are indigenous to the central region of the Kalahari Desert. In a region of scant rainfall that varies greatly by location and year, the G|ui/Gǁana developed a vast body of ecological knowledge that allowed them to acquire ample bush foods by moving frequently and flexibly within their immense living area, now encompassed by the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR). However, since the implementation of Botswana's development program in the 1970s, which encouraged permanent settlement in villages, the lifestyle of the G|ui/Gǁana has been altered. By 1997, most CKGR residents had moved to a new settlement founded outside the reserve. I examined how the G|ui/Gǁana applied their environmental knowledge in this new geographical setting. Given the lack of knowledge of landmarks, the scarcity of traditional foods and the promotion of other subsistence activities, their foraging activities appeared to have declined. However, several G|ui/Gǁana people remained eager to form foraging excursions. These hunters began accumulating knowledge of trees as landmarks, as they had in their previous living area. They also used the trail of Tswana merchants as a frame of reference to ascertain their relative location. The use of the trail is analogous to the G|ui/Gǁana's use of |qāā (a dry valley)-an important landform for wayfinding in their previous living area. The analysis of conversations recorded during foraging excursions indicates that the G|ui/Gǁana activate their keen sense of the environment through their distinctive use of utterances, gestures, and other signs. This sense is necessary to use both |qāā and the Tswana merchant trail as frames of reference in the relatively flat terrain of the Kalahari. Moreover, this sense has motivated the G|ui/Gǁana to transform a new geographical setting into their personal environment.

The OvaHimba of Namibia’s Kunene Region live without modern conveniences, solely depending on cattle for their livelihoods. Since Namibian independence, the Himba have become subject to a growing onslaught of Western influences. The imperative question is, “How do the Himba want to develop and to what extent should they embrace the conveniences and entanglements of modernity?” By ignoring this question, the Himba risk becoming pawns of aid agencies and government initiatives, forgetting their culture, and succumbing to alcoholism. If interested in cultural preservation, the Himba must clarify their collective goals. This article will demonstrate how all Himba desire modern conveniences of some sort and none fully understand what development entails. It will also show a divide between the Himba, with the youth unworried about cultural changes brought by modernization, and older community members finding their culture’s inevitable disappearance less than ideal. Simultaneously and fatalistically, the collective Himba worldview generally accepts whatever changes time brings.