A More-Than-Human History of Apartheid-Era Planning in Etosha-Kaokoveld, Namibia, c.1960–1970s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Following the release and implementation of the ‘Report of the Commission of Enquiry into South West Africa Affairs’ (Odendaal Plan) in 1964, humans and non-humans in Etosha-Kaokoveld (northwest Namibia) undermined South African rule. Drawing on published, archival, government, and limited-circulation sources, this more-than-human history examines how responses among scientists, pastoralists, and wildlife revealed the technocratic state’s incomplete assessment of human–non-human relationships in its efforts to spatially rearrange the landscape. In response to South African volkekunde ‘science’, former Etosha ecologist Ken Tinley presented an ecologically informed alternative to the Odendaal Plan. Herero pastoralists, led by Headman Kephas Muzuma, resisted new land designations by continuing to practice semi-nomadic pastoralism. Within Etosha, ungulates died in unprecedented numbers, exposing the non-human effects of apartheid technocratic planning. The legacies of South Africa’s flawed approaches to governing humans and non-humans persist. Drawing on Emily O'Gorman and Andrea Gaynor's argument for the importance of more-than-human histories, Latour's concept of the collective and call for developing perspectives relevant to the Anthropocene, and Scott’s critique of the high modernist state, this article contributes to human–animal histories and the historiography of Namibia and the South African empire, and discusses the need for subaltern perspectives in the Anthropocene.