Limpricht, C & M. Biesele
(eds.) (2008). Heritage and Cultures in Modern
Namibia
- In-depth Views of the Country. A TUCSIN-Festschrift.
Windhoek-Goettingen
(ISBN Europe: 9783933117397; ISBN Namibia:
9789991657271)
Content
Issues concerning the whole country
Wade Pendleton: Migration in and Urban Governance in Windhoek (9-22)
Michael Bollig: Beyond Development – Global Visions and Local
Adaptations of a Contested Concept (23-36)
Jürgen Richter & Ralf Vogelsang: Rock Art in North-Western Central Namibia
– its Age and Cultural Background (37-46)
Issues arranged along a regional approach from north
to south
Eileen Kose: “We are not Looking for Diamonds – We are Looking
for Red Stones”. Archaeology of Iron in Kavango (47-63)
Michael Pröpper: Trust, Sharing, and Cooperation in the Central
Kavango Region, North-East Namibia. Linking the Results of Experimental
Economics with Ethnographic Research (64-77)
Wilhelm Möhlig: Naming Modern Concepts in RuManyo (Bantu Language of
the Kavango) (78-89)
Hildi Hendrickson: Toward a Cross-Cultural Analysis of Dress in 19th
and 20th Century in Namibia (88-102)
Glenn Conroy: The Discovery of Otavipithecus,
Southern Africa’s first Fossil Ape (103-108)
Julia Pauli & Michael Schnegg: Living Together, Writing Together: An Ethnographic
Project on Culture and History in Fransfontein (109-115)
Megan Biesele: The Nyae Nyae Village Schools Project of the
Ju/´Hoan San: A Community-Based Education Programme in Namibia (116-126)
Richard B. Lee: A Brief Historyof the TUCSIN-Based UNAM-Toronto
Programme on Social and Cultural Aspects of HIV/AIDS (127-131)
Jason Owens and Monica Nambelela: Can’t Namibia’s (Ex)-GDR-Kids be Called
Adults in this, the Year Namibia Itself Turned 18 Years Old? (132-140)
Cornelia Limpricht & Hartmut Lang: Farms and Families – Land Tenure in
Rehoboth (141-154)
Alan Morris: The Cairns of Rehoboth, Central Namibia (155-169)
Duncan Miller: Searching for the Source of the Oanob Copper
(170-173)
Sabine Klocke-Daffa: The Modernity of Traditionalists. Culture Change, Identity
and the Impact of the State among the Namibian Khoekoen (174-182)
Ralf Vogelsang: The Rock-Shelter “Apollo 11” – Evidence of Early
Humans in South-Western Namibia (183-193)
Abstracts:
Wade Pendleton: Migration in
and Urban Governance in Windhoek (9-22)
This paper will focus on the
migration dynamics to Windhoek.
A background overview of Windhoek
is followed by a discussion of the demography and socio-economic features of Windhoek’s areas.
Migration issues are discussed including the extent of migration, where
migrants come from, where they settle, why they migrate and the impact of
HIV/AIDS on migration. The paper ends with a discussion of municipal responses
to migration since 1990.
Michael Bollig: Beyond
Development – Global Visions and Local Adaptations of a Contested Concept
(23-36)
Bollig analyses the often used terms ‛development' and 'progress' in
the context of Namibian case studies:
privatisation of rangelands in the Rehoboth community; fencing in Namibia's Eastern Otjozondjupa region; and conservancies and
community based natural resource management in Namibia's Kunene
region. He follows up the origins of the term ‛development' in early natural
sciences; its applications in early evolutionary sociology and anthropology
(two paradigms informing colonialism); and its close association with modernity
in debates about socio-economic change and attempts at its deconstruction by
social scientists in the 1990s. Taking examples from South Africa and Namibia
he goes on to juxtapose local efforts at cultural and socio-economic change
with nationally and globally defined aims and measures of development, and
finally explores how local aspirations and
global/national standards could be harmonised.
Jürgen Richter & Ralf Vogelsang: Rock
Art in North-Western Central Namibia – its Age and Cultural Background (37-46)
When it comes to rock art, Namibia is among the most prominent areas
on earth. The multiple relations between archaeological findings and landscapes
permit a detailed reconstruction of human land-use in central Namibia during
the second and first millennium BC. The individual ecological zones and regions
correspond to different functions within the settlement system of a highly
mobile hunter-gatherer society. The authors give detailed account of motifs,
styles and modes as well as of regional distribution of rock art in Namibia. They conclude with an outline of the cultural
sequences in north-western Central Namibia during the last 10,000 years.
Eileen Kose: “We are not
Looking for Diamonds – We are Looking for Red Stones”. Archaeology of Iron in
Kavango (47-63)
1500 years ago the first iron producers of Namibia were
found close to the Kavango river. They seemed culturally attached to the Okavango delta. Archaeological evidence from centuries
before proves that present Kavango people settled themselves in the Kavango 500
years ago. Their knowledge and traditions about iron producing and processing
are closely connected with the people of southern Angola. In the 20th
century these techniques of metallurgy had nearly fallen into oblivion due to
increasing migrant labour work. Research between 2005 and 2007 focused on
archaeological remains of former iron smelting sites as well as on oral
histories in order to reconstruct the history of metallurgy in the Kavango.
Michael Pröpper: Trust,
Sharing, and Cooperation in the Central Kavango Region, North-East Namibia.
Linking the Results of Experimental Economics with Ethnographic Research
(64-77)
To establish sustainable institutions for the protection of
threatened biological resources - e.g. timber - people in the Kavango Region of
Namibia
cannot rely on state control alone. A successful management requires
self-management and self-control based on collective action which again must be
grounded on the awareness that the valuable resources of Kavango need to be
saved. Collective action is based on intra community trust and social cohesion.
Existing community based natural resource management concepts tend to
overestimate these factors and presuppose the existence of communities where
there are villages. This article explores the willingness of villagers to trust
each other and to cooperate by outlining the results of various economic
experiments that have been conducted in the Kavango. By looking at the
constraints that actors express the paper explores and explains the limits of
'Communities'. This is crucial information for any future project design.
Wilhelm Möhlig: Naming Modern
Concepts in RuManyo (Bantu Language of the Kavango) (78-89)
In comparison with other Bantu languages, RuManyo has proved to be
very flexible in adjusting to the communicative needs of modern life. There are
nowadays own terms at hand for all semantic fields, be it politics, government,
science, medicine, arts, linguistics, agriculture etc. This wealth of specific
terms could only be achieved by systematic language planning and engineering.
However, the etymological history of many names denoting technical or trade
items shows that the spirit of modernization and the readiness of the RuManyo
speaking population for constant adjustment must be older than the period of
colonial influence. On the basis of the relevant lexicon we can distinguish
several periods of terminological adjustment and innovation.
During the different periods of history, various African and
European contact languages became dominant, such as Afrikaans, English, German,
Herero, Kwangali, Nyemba, and Portuguese. It is interesting to note that the
preference for specific strategies and techniques of coining new names seems to
coincide with single historical periods. In this contribution, we demonstrate
the various strategies with the help of practical examples and also discuss the
aspect of interrelationship between history and the techniques of coining new
terms.
Hildi Hendrickson: Toward a
Cross-Cultural Analysis of Dress in 19th and 20th Century
in Namibia (88-102)
Namibia has had rich pre-colonial clothing
traditions, a colonial history in which dress has played an integral part and a
post-colonial landscape in which dress continues to be a critical medium for the
assertion of social and political identities. First however, a comprehensive
account of pre-colonial dress and adornment in the region must be given. In
this paper, the author begins to synthesize cross-cultural details on dress
culled from primary 19th and early 20th century sources. Among
her findings are that indigenous people in what is now Namibia used an
incredible and mostly unremarked-upon array of materials found in the natural
environment in their construction of dress. By looking
at multiple cultures in the region, it is possible to begin to characterize the
differing factors affecting a change in self and social representation.
Glenn Conroy: The Discovery
of Otavipithecus, Southern Africa’s
first Fossil Ape (103-108)
The discovery of Otavipithecus namibiensis
from Berg Aukas (near Grootfontein) is arguably the most significant fossil
find ever made in Namibia, and one of the most important from southern Africa.
It provided the first, and still the only, incontrovertible evidence that pre-human
"apes" roamed the southern African veld millions of years before the
first australopiths made their appearance in the region. It is the only Miocene
hominoid ever discovered on the African continent south of equatorial East
Africa.
Julia Pauli & Michael Schnegg: Living
Together, Writing Together: An Ethnographic Project on Culture and History in
Fransfontein (109-115)
The central aim of this
ethnographic research project is to explore similarities between people of
different ethnic origin. In collaboration with five local researchers, Fiona
Ilonga, Francois Dawids, Titus Kaumunika, Jorries Seibeb and Otto /Uirab, we
have elicited oral histories, expert interviews and visual material to document
the culture of sharing in Fransfontein, a multiethnic community in Northwestern Namibia. While the public discourses in
Fransfontein all too often stress the differences between ethnic groups, many
cultural practices are shared by the multiethnic people of Fransfontein.
Similarities can be observed for example in common marriage rituals, shared
healing knowledge and similar food customs. Sharing creates similarity and eventually
leads to feelings of belonging and identity.
Megan Biesele: The Nyae Nyae
Village Schools Project of the Ju/´Hoan San: A Community-Based Education
Programme in Namibia (116-126)
This paper outlines the history of the Nyae Nyae Village Schools
Project (VSP) begun in the late 1980s in the Ju/’hoan San communities of
north-eastern Namibia. This ambitious experimental project, now a part of the national
school system of Namibia, was begun under the auspices of the Nyae Nyae
Development Foundation of Namibia.
The VSP resulted from a collaboration among an anthropologist, a
linguist; several educators, writers, and development workers, and the Ju/’hoan
community as represented by their people’s organization, the Nyae Nyae Farmers
Cooperative, which in 1998 become the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, the first
community conservancy established in Namibia. In the paper, the Ju/’hoan language
and curriculum work, along with the teacher training that made the Village
Schools Project possible, are detailed, and a bibliography is presented with a
selection for further reading
Richard B. Lee: A Brief
Historyof the TUCSIN-Based UNAM-Toronto Programme on Social and Cultural
Aspects of HIV/AIDS (127-131)
The author addresses ongoing research efforts on the prevention, care and management of HIV/AIDS in Namibia. Combined activities (workshops, lectures,
reports and research procedures and methods) of Canadian and Namibian students
from UNAM and TUCSIN lead to mutual capacity building on a range of public
health issues to fight
AIDS more effectively. The University of Toronto and UNAM (University of
Namibia) will expand AIDS programming to include student and faculty exchanges,
certificate programs and curriculum development.
Jason Owens and Monica Nambelela: Can’t
Namibia’s (Ex)-GDR-Kids be Called Adults in this, the Year Namibia Itself
Turned 18 Years Old? (132-140)
In 1990, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a group of 428 Namibian children returned from exile
from the then-dissolved former German Democratic Republic. Black children
brought up in a German environment as future socialistic leaders clashed with
the newly formed Namibian society that had just gained political independence.
This article chronicles the journey of these "DDR-Kinder" and
explores the extent to which, having integrated
these and other Namibian German institutions, the GDR Kids altered the margins
of what was considered German in Namibia.
Cornelia Limpricht & Hartmut Lang: Farms
and Families – Land Tenure in Rehoboth (141-154)
The Basters are the only indigenous
group in Namibia who developed land tenure of privately owned farms and plots
by the end of the 19th century after more than 20 years of communal
farming. The article describes the history of land tenure in the Rehoboth Gebiet and the farming system (farm
typology) based on survey data collected in 2000.
The main focus of the paper is whether the
Rehoboth-Odendaal farms can serve as a good example in land re-distribution today. During the late 1960s, the
South African Government purchased six white owned farms – the so-called white
islands of the Baster Gebiet –
comprising more than seventy thousand hectares. They were subdivided into
twenty-six units, which were leased and later sold to Baster farmers. This
re-distribution from private to private land provides results and sheds light
on aspects of the economical and ecological viability of this process,
resulting from historic intervention.
Alan Morris: The Cairns of
Rehoboth, Central Namibia (155-169)
This article gives first hand results of excavations south of
Rehoboth: Isolated cairns are a common feature throughout much of the dry
hinterland of southern and south-western Africa. The 14 cairns excavated in Rehoboth between 1985 and
1990 have demonstrated quite clearly the difference between burial cairns and more enigmatic
non-burial cairns.
The skeletons of the 8 individuals excavated provide data that supports an
ethnic identity of Khoekhoe for these people. They are not particularly ancient
and the available dates suggest that they represent the people who lived in the
Rehoboth area just before the arrival of the Baster community in the 1870’s.
Duncan Miller: Searching for
the Source of the Oanob Copper (170-173)
The paper focuses on the excavation of the Drierivier site on the
banks of the Oanob river south of Rehoboth done by Beatrice Sandelowsky in
1970. This metal working site at Drierivier turned out to be a copper production
workshop. The author describes “the hunt” for the
original source of ore used in the production of copper at the smelting site of
Drierivier. These activities can be linked to a pre-Baster population.
Sabine Klocke-Daffa: The Modernity
of Traditionalists. Culture Change, Identity and the Impact of the State among
the Namibian Khoekoen (174-182)
In most western societies, modernity came to be understood as the
opposite of traditionalism. Among the Namibian Khoekoen (Nama), however, being
modern and at the same time being traditional does not seem to be a
contradiction. Change, if coming from the outside, is openly accepted and in
many cases highly valued. The Nama seem to worry little over what this mixing
means to their traditions. Culture for them is an ongoing, ever changing
process, initiated by themselves as well as others. Why is that so? The answer
can be found in a specific system of exchange relations. It is not only their
way of "communicating with one another", but is the ultimate goal in
life. Traditional as it is, the integration of the "other" plays a
central part in it und makes the Nama way of living extremely flexible,
allowing to adjust to changing economic, social and political conditions.
Ralf Vogelsang: The
Rock-Shelter “Apollo 11” – Evidence of Early Humans in South-Western Namibia
(183-193)
The Middle Stone Age (MSA) of southern Africa started around 200.000
years ago and lasted until 25.000 years ago. This general period has become one
of major interest, because human fossils and genetic evidence seem to indicate
that modern humans originated during this time in Africa.
In coincidence with the physical development signs for modern behaviour occur
in the archaeological evidence.
The rockshelter "Apollo 11", situated
in the southwestern part of Namibia,
exhibits one of the most important Middle Stone Age stratigraphies in southern Africa. This is not only due to the finding of painted
slabs with an age of around 27000 years, but also because of its
extraordinarily comprehensive cultural sequence that covers all major Middle
Stone Age phases. Thus, the archaeological finds of this Namibian site provide
a vital insight into one of the most interesting periods of human history.
How
to order the book:
Limpricht, C
& M. Biesele (eds.) (2008). Heritage and Cultures
in Modern
Namibia
- In-depth Views of the Country. A TUCSIN-Festschrift.
Windhoek-Goettingen (ISBN
Europe: 9783933117397; ISBN Namibia: 9789991657271)
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