Colonial Namibia Research Articles

The ‘Coloured’ connection of Namibian English

AbstractAmong the first English speakers in Namibia, South African Coloureds came to form an essential part of an ethnically fluid intermediate social class in colonial Namibia. This study seeks to pinpoint to what extent Coloured English varieties have been contributing to Namibian English and how much prestige is attached to them. To this end, this study simultaneously uses linguistic and perceptual data. One dataset consists of English phonetic data elicited from a representative urban sample of young Namibians. That dataset is analysed to establish what phonetic features mark out Coloured Namibian English varieties and to what extent they are found in other ethnolinguistic varieties and across social classes. The study then reports on a verbal guise experiment whose aim is to establish how young Namibians rate Coloured Namibian English varieties. Finally, the study analyses folk comments on Namibian English accents elicited from young Namibian focus groups. The study finds that, in terms of vowel realization patterns, Coloured Namibian English varieties sit in between White and Black Namibian English varieties, forming part of a continuum of which one extremity displays a White South African English imprint. The less ‘Afrikaans‐accented’ Coloured English varieties—associated with women—are developing middle‐class indexicalities. The fact that these varieties are targeted by young Black women and are perceived as ‘General Namibian English’, the study concludes, confirms that Namibian English is norm‐developing, as befits any Outer Circle variety. It is loosely tied to (South African) Inner Circle norms and has entered Phase 4 (‘endonormative stabilization’) of E. Schneider's Dynamic Model. The normative influence of Namibian Coloured English, the study argues, shows that the Dynamic Model needs fundamental adjustment to properly account for the role of non‐Europeans in Outer Circle dynamics.

Jürgen Zimmerer, German Rule, African Subjects. State Aspirations and the Reality of Power in Colonial Namibia. Oxford, Berghahn 2021

Jürgen Zimmerer, German Rule, African Subjects. State Aspirations and the Reality of Power in Colonial Namibia. Oxford, Berghahn 2021

The Herero Genocide: War, Emotion, and Extreme Violence in Colonial Namibia By Matthias Häussler. Translated from the German by Elizabeth Janik. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2021. Pp. 306. Hardback $179.00. ISBN: 978-1800730236.

The Herero Genocide: War, Emotion, and Extreme Violence in Colonial Namibia By Matthias Häussler. Translated from the German by Elizabeth Janik. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2021. Pp. 306. Hardback $179.00. ISBN: 978-1800730236. - Volume 55 Issue 4

Emotion and Violence in German Colonial Southwest Africa - The Herero Genocide: War, Emotion, and Extreme Violence in Colonial Namibia By Matthias Häussler. Trans. from German by Elizabeth Janik (War and Genocide, Volume 31). New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2021. $179.00, hardcover (ISBN: 9781800730236); $39.95, e-book (ISBN: 9781800730243).

Emotion and Violence in German Colonial Southwest Africa - The Herero Genocide: War, Emotion, and Extreme Violence in Colonial Namibia By Matthias Häussler. Trans. from German by Elizabeth Janik (War and Genocide, Volume 31). New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2021. 39.95, e-book (ISBN: 9781800730243). - Volume 63 Issue 1

International Beef Packing in the Age of Empire: LEMCO in South West Africa, 1906–c.1940

ABSTRACT From 1906, the Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company (LEMCO), parent of the Oxo and Fray Bentos brands, entered colonial Namibia as an export-oriented ranching and beef-processing enterprise, purchasing pastureland recently emptied by the Nama-Herero war, with the goal of replicating its successful South American operations in Africa. While LEMCO hoped to expand its markets in Germany and South Africa, the German colonial government anticipated that LEMCO would improve cattle and landscapes in South West Africa and offer German settlers an industrial outlet for their cattle. Unlike the major global beef suppliers, LEMCO relied on arid environments, using natural pastures and low-grade cattle, making Namibia supposedly ideal for its production. Yet ecological and human factors specific to South West Africa, including recurrent severe drought, sparse human populations, and international and transborder disease controls challenged these ambitions. While LEMCO’s multinational scope enabled it to navigate Anglo-German rivalries during the First World War, South African regional imperialism leading up to the Second World War, coupled with severe droughts during the interwar period, expedited the company’s exit from South West Africa in 1940. Its model of beef packing continued into the apartheid and post-independence periods.

Technical and Vocational Education and the Place of Indigenous Labour in the Mining Industry of Namibia, 1970–1990

Technical and vocational education in colonial Namibia was intricately linked with the growing need for labour in the colonial economy, especially the mining sector. The colonial administration, through the provision of technical education to indigenous Namibians, intended to train able yet docile hands who would provide cheap, unskilled labour to the colonial economy. The inherent flaw in the confinement of the majority of the population to the unskilled labour category unravelled in the 1970s and the 1980s, with internal and external events contributing to an increasing shortage of skilled and semi-skilled labour. The mining industry, in putting forth training initiatives to curb these labour shortages, did not, however, fundamentally deviate from the educational policy set out by the colonial administration. The mines insisted that the solution to the labour shortages was the provision of education to the indigenous population and ‘in most cases, practical rather than academic’ education, a continuation of, rather than a significant break from, prior education policies. Technical and vocational education was thus emphasised by both the colonial administration and the industry to subjugate indigenous labour to its place in the colonial economy.

From Labour Elites to Garveyites: West African Migrant Labour in Namibia, 1892–1925

This article focuses on the aftermath of the First World War for West African Kru in colonial Namibia. It posits that Kru had been a ‘labour elite’ in the colony under German rule and that the war and resulting years of South African occupation led to their economic decline. By the early 1920s, this situation was a strong factor in West Africans’ robust engagement and leadership within the colony’s ‘Africa for the Africans’ Garveyite movement. Economic troubles after the First World War, as well as an increasing tendency towards intermarriage between Kru and local Namibians, factored into Kru workers’ decisions to join political ranks with the Herero and other groups who had suffered under German rule. Both local and migrant Africans saw Garveyism as a possible solution for their new economic and societal challenges. The article utilises a South West African migrant worker database that I compiled for this research (WBL Namibian Worker Database) and micro-histories to give insight into individual workers’ experiences between 1892 and 1925. On a broader note, this work expands research on the role of West African labour in colonial Namibia, bringing regional historiography more firmly into the scope of the discipline of global history.

‘Vermin’: Predator Eradication as an Expression of White Supremacy in Colonial Namibia, 1921–1952

In the first half of the 20th century, the racialised policies of apartheid affected not only the people of South West Africa but the predator population as well. This article explores how South West Africa’s colonial administration enabled the destruction of predators on white settler farmland while frustrating African efforts to combat livestock depredation by predators in ‘native’ reserves. Drawing upon archival sources and published government documents, the persecution of predators is shown to be an expression of white supremacist policies founded primarily in economic concerns. In particular, the cases of African wild dogs on settler farmland and African lions on ‘native’ reserves are contrasted. The effects of predator eradication policies from this era are still visible in the geography of these two species within Namibia. This article deepens historical understanding of the more-than-human effects of apartheid and of social policies in general. It also contributes to scholarly understanding of historical human–animal relationships in non-urban spaces.

Singing “The Song of Chief Iipumbu”

Abstract This essay addresses “The Song of Chief Iipumbu,” an oral poem performed by a woman named Nekwaya Loide Shikongo in North-Central Namibia in 1953. It argues that “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” acted as an astute analysis of local power relations, employing scornful commentary on a deposed native chief as a cover for subtle but profound criticisms of European colonial institutions to which Shikongo, as a African Christian woman, was subject. Through a brief history of colonialism in Namibia and detailed attention to the linguistic and discursive webs woven by the poem’s author, this essay shows that Shikongo’s censure of oppressive authorities was not an attempt to undermine the networks of power operating in colonial Namibia. Rather, it was an effort to affect acceptance of (or at least resignation to) her subordination in order to achieve the renewal of psychological and social equilibrium.

Constructing the State: Macro Strategies, Micro Incentives, and the Creation of Police Forces in Colonial Namibia

How do states build a security apparatus after violent resistance against state rule? This article argues that in early periods of state building two main factors shape the process: the macro-strategic goals of the state and administrative challenges of personnel management. These dynamics are studied in the context of the establishment of police forces in the settler colony of German Southwest Africa, present-day Namibia. The empirical analysis relies on information about the location of police stations and a near full census of police forces, compiled from the German Federal Archives. A mismatch is found between the allocation of police presence and the allocation of police personnel. The first was driven by the strategic value of locations in terms of extractive potential, political importance, and the presence of critical infrastructure, whereas the allocation of individual officers was likely affected by adverse selection, which led to the assignment of low-quality recruits to strategically important locations.

Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa

This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body—physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.

Facing Barbarians: A Narrative of Spatial Segregation in Colonial Namibia

Under South African rule Namibia was divided by a border into two territorial entities, both physically and symbolically. This article explores the establishment of this border, the so-called Red Line, which separated the settler society's heartland in central Namibia from the ‘native territories’ in the far north. Beginning as a mere cartographic construction, the Red Line eventually materialised in a double fence. I argue that veterinary science and practice played a pivotal role in the discursive and material enforcement of the resulting territorial segregation, and this case study exemplifies how segregation based on medical, i.e. veterinary, grounds transmuted into political segregation. Drawing from a broad scholarly debate on border histories I also argue for an interpretation that qualifies the Red Line as an imperial barbarian border. Accordingly, white settlers conceptualised the inner-Namibian border of the Red Line as the limit of an expanding South African settler society. Beyond that border they faced black Africa.

‘With Hard Work and Determination You Can Make it Here’: Narratives of Identity among German Immigrants in Post-Colonial Namibia**

This article is based on ethnographic pilot research among German immigrants in Namibia. It employs content and discourse analysis of interview narratives emerging in conversations with two generations of German migrants: individuals who settled in the 1950s and 1960s and a younger cohort who immigrated in the 1980s and 1990s. Interview extracts in which respondents address their arrival and adjustment are chosen to explore narrative reconstructions of integration in (post)-colonial Namibia. However, integration is largely sought in the social and symbolic context defined as ‘German’ and ‘white’, and in dissociation from Namibia as ‘Africa’. Silences, ambivalences, and contradictions at the narrative level reveal these generational cohorts to be slightly different, yet equally evasive about the problematic inheritance of white privilege. While, in contrast to the earlier migrants, the more recent arrivals maintain appeals to liberalism, these interviews suggest that 16 years after independence Namibian whites have not yet begun a process of critical self-reflection.

People and the Environment in Colonial Namibia

(2005). People and the Environment in Colonial Namibia. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 52, No. 1, pp. 170-190.

Crosscurrents: African Americans, Africa, and Germany in the Modern World.

Hans W. Debrunner. Africa, Europe, and America: The Modern Roots from a European Perspective - Katherine Faull Eze. Self-Encounters: Two Eighteenth-Century African Memoirs from Moravian Bethlehem - Bruce Levine. Against All Slavery, Whether White or Black: German-American's and the Irrepressible Conflict - Leroy Hopkins. Black Prussians: Germany and African American Education from James W.C. Pennington to Angela Davis - Lawrence Scaff. Weber's Amerikabild and the African American Experience - Christine Naumann. African American Performers and Culture in Weimar Germany - C. Aisha Blackshire-Belay. In Search of Africa in the German World: Transcultural Migrations - David McBride. Missions, Medicine, and Colonial Technologies: Africa and German Colonialism in the Mittel-Afrika Era - Emmanuel Matateyou. King Njoya and the Kingdom of Bamum in German-African Relations 1902-1915 - Kathleen J. Reich. Racially Mixed Marriages in Colonial Namibia - William J. Baker. Jesse Owens and the Germans: A Political Love Story - Monroe H. Little Jr. The Black Military Experience in Germany: From the First World War to the Present - Hamilton H.H. Beck. Censoring Your Ally: W.E.B. Du Bois in the German Democratic Republic - Nicole Waltraud Watson. Afro-Americans in Germany: A Private Perspective - Ali A. Mazrui. The German Factor in the Global Black Experience: From the Berlin Conference to the Berlin Wall.

“Ons hele volksverhaal”: Writing Afrikaner nationalism on the periphery

Summary The article looks at the construction of an Afrikaner national identity in W.A. de Klerk's Die Gésel van Namaland, an Afrikaans novel for juvenile readers published in the early fifties. Dealing with the Nama uprising in colonial Namibia, the novel is fundamentally concerned with interpreting a part of Namibian history as the paradigm of the pioneering history of the Afrikaners. Mediated by an avuncular narrator, it is a tale of adventure and romance in which Afrikaner identity is given the appearance of a natural fact. National identity becomes the intertext which is reinforced by a host of subsidiary texts drawn from Afrikaner mythology and history. Like most colonising narratives the text operates with binary oppositions, but the proximity of the Nama, Afrikaans‐speaking, Christian inhabitants of the land constantly threatens the hegemony and exclusivity of the nationalist discourse. In this process, language, history and divine selection become important foci of the discourse. Yet what is disguised as a conflict between Christianity and barbarism is in effect a struggle for possession and control of the land in which nationalism is inscribed as the ideology of the dominant group.

The political economy of health care: Colonial Namibia 1915–1961

The political economy of health care services in colonial Namibia during 1915–1961 closely reflected the extreme racial and class imbalance of power in a conquest state. The colonial power allocated to the indigene nine-tenths, the poorest nine-tenths of the people, an average 43% of the health care budget between 1922 and 1954. The League of Nations mandate proved toothless in pressuring the Mandatory power to rectify this or other inequalities.