Willem Basson III, photographed in Karasburg
PHOTO: B.C. MOORE, 2022
This book is a historical and contemporary narrative of disparate people thrust into contact and conflict in a specific place: the far south of Namibia, just near the Lower Orange River. This is today a far-off place by nearly all definitions of remoteness. It is more than a hundred kilometres from the nearest tarred road; nearly one hundred and fifty kilometres from the closest railway station; almost 1,000 kilometres from any international airport. As remote as it was and is, the far south of Namibia has stood at the crossroads of international connections and global capitalism. For decades, its sheep satiated South Africa’s appetite for mutton and Europe’s desire for luxury lambskin fur coats; its venison and game meat adorned the plates of hotel guests in Cape Town and Paris; its tantalum ores clad nuclear reactors in Europe and ballistic missiles in North America. Today, southern Namibia sits at the forefront of new, private nature conservation schemes, which seek to ‘rewild’ endangered species for a high-wealth tourism clientele, monetising the region’s perceived distance from places of power. In the words of the White Afrikaans-speaking manager of one particular tourism venture: ‘Remoteness is what people seek’. In the words of its English South African owner: ‘Space is the ultimate luxury’.
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To contextualise how this project evolved from unplanned curiosity to a full book – and to be open about our own positions here – it is relevant to first provide some background about how each of us met the Basson family and what made us realise that much more was at stake.
Bernie Meets Basson
In 2021, I was finalising archival and fieldwork for my PhD dissertation in History, looking at the development of the sheep-farming sector in southern Namibia and the relationship between agriculture and apartheid-era homelands in the country. Since 2015, in my capacity as a researcher at Michigan State University in the USA and as a part-time history lecturer at the University of Namibia, I had been conducting extensive documentary and oral history work on this topic. One day at the archives in Cape Town, I stumbled across some documentation from the 1960s and 1970s about an abandoned proposal for an apartheid-era ‘Coloured’ homeland along the Orange River. One particular 1971 letter claimed that there were Bondelswarts (Nama) ‘squatters’ residing on the state-owned farm Hartebeesmund, right at the Orange River where this homeland was planned. Since most of my study had dealt with communal areas farther north, near Karasburg, and the White-owned commercial farms surrounding them, I had never been to this farm. But to write about southern Namibia means writing about the Orange River, so I drove there to see this specific farm with my own eyes.
The whole of southern Namibia is extremely arid, and as you approach the Orange River the level of rainfall drops as the mountains continue to rise. To this day, the 6,500-hectare Hartebeesmund Farm has no owner; it is a remnant
When I pulled up to the farmhouse at KumKum, I was greeted not by a burly, sunburnt Afrikaner – as normally is the case in this part of Namibia – but by a slender young English guy with long hair and a distinguished accent. Also unusual was that there was no sign of sheep, or anything to indicate that there was livestock on the farm at all – like bales of lucerne or kraals/pens filled with manure. It was very weird. He introduced himself as Edward ‘Red’ Barthorp, and he welcomed me inside for some coffee. After more than a year and a half of COVID-pandemic lockdowns, vaccinations and isolation, he was clearly happy to talk with someone from the outside. He lamented the struggles to get a strong enough internet signal to chat with friends back home, and he was considering asking his employers to upgrade the satellite dishes or else build a repeater to tap into the cellular signal from Warmbad village fifty kilometres away. To be honest, Red looked bored.
‘Sorry for barging in on you guys unannounced’, I said, ‘but I’m trying to get through to Hartebeesmund, and I’m hoping you guys can show me a 4x4 path to get down to the river there’. Red said that from KumKum it was not really possible; maybe once upon a time, but not anymore. ‘The only way to get to Hartebeesmund is to go via our business partners at Sandfontein to the west’, said Red, pointing to the location on my map. ‘I can give you Mrs Erika’s phone number. She runs Sandfontein’s camping spot there by the river. It’s a pretty cool place, used to be a church in the old days’.1 Red seemed perplexed by my question, though. ‘Why do you want to go to that place, anyway?’, he asked. ‘There’s nothing really to see there but sharp rocks that’ll puncture your tyres’.
Red said he worked for a company that was developing a nature conservation initiative on KumKum, together with a nearby farm to the south-east called Pelladrift. He explained that it was about outdoor education and ‘adventure tourism’, alongside other more traditional conservationist goals, like
I explained to Red that I was a historian, and that I wanted to follow up on some records that I had found about Africans living outside the state’s purview on Hartebeesmund. I had my laptop computer in the car, and I showed him the letter from the archives. Red could not read Afrikaans, so I quickly translated it for him. According to the letter, the state ethnologist had travelled to Hartebeesmund, where he met the heads of several families, including Gert Witbooi, Abraham August, Matewis Kraai, Piet Botes and Willem Basson II.2 I said that I wanted to see what remained of these living places, since the letter implied that the residents had been staying there for more than six decades.
‘Basson …’, murmured Red. ‘There’s this guy Basson who farms somewhere at the Orange River who my business partners really don’t like. I urged them to just buy him a farm somewhere else’, said Red, ‘I know they’ve got the money to do it, but it seems that they’ve got other plans’. I asked Red what the issue was, and he said that farming and conservation just could not go together; they were ecologically at odds with one another. ‘But it’s bigger than just that’, added Red. ‘My clients don’t want to see some guy with a herd of goats. It’s not what they came to Namibia for’.
At Red’s recommendation, I drove the following day to Homsrivier Farm, where the Sandfontein company runs a camping site and small-scale accommodation, in stark contrast to the hyper-luxury lodge that the company has on their other neighbouring property to the north. Tannie [auntie] Erika Kotze was sitting on the veranda at the main house. She quickly came out and showed me the right place to park, writing my number plate down in a notebook, as well as a description of the vehicle and of me. Erika was clearly used to monitoring everything very carefully, as though this tiny farm road along the Orange River was anything but tiny. I mentioned to her that I was sent by Red about a history project I was doing, that I was trying to get upriver to Hartebeesmund Farm. ‘Oh, you can’t go there’, said Erika. ‘There’s nothing to see that side, plus the road is too poor. We’ve never repaired it since last year’s rains.’ We sat at the table and were served a cup of tea. ‘But if you want to know
Katrina Pieters was in her forties and spoke only Afrikaans. She explained a lot about when Homsrivier was a Roman Catholic mission station. Many Nama, Coloured,4 Damara and Herero people came to the church for Holy Mass, as well as to work on the church’s irrigated fields. ‘You can still see some of the plough marks and furrows on that side of the property’, said Katrina.5 I told her that I had come to look into an old record from the state archives, about some people staying on Hartebeesmund in the 1970s, and I showed her a copy of the document. We read through it together, and upon reaching the name Willem Basson II, Tannie Erika – who was listening from a distance – came closer. ‘Is dit dieselfde Basson?’ [‘Is it the same Basson?’], she asked Katrina in Afrikaans. ‘Nee, dit is sy pa en grootouers’ [‘No, his father and elders’], replied Katrina.
Erika quickly read the rest of the document. The tone of the meeting had clearly changed from one of curious interest in what Katrina knew about the region’s history to one of suspicion. Erika interrogated me about the document. ‘What is this for, and where did you get this?’, she asked. I replied that it was from the plans of an old commission from the apartheid years to make a homeland for Coloureds along the Orange River. During the planning, they had learned that there were these river-folk living on Hartebeesmund. For a number of reasons, the homeland did not come to fruition, but all the farms in this area were once slated to be purchased by the government for that reason. ‘But they can’t do that anymore, right? They can’t make a tuisland [homeland] here anymore. These are private lands!’ Erika said, bordering on anger now. ‘Is Willem Basson kleurling? Hy is Herero of Nama, nee?’ [‘Is Basson even Coloured? He’s Herero or Nama, right?’], Erika asked Katrina (who identifies as Coloured). ‘Ek weet nie. Maar in daai jare, miskien was die familie’ [‘I don’t know, but in those years, maybe his family was’], replied Katrina.
Willem Basson III was clearly well known to the Afrikaner matron, Erika, and my disconnected line of questioning had obviously struck a nerve. It was not going to be possible for me to pass through Homsrivier to the next farm, Girtis (also owned by the same people), and then to Hartebeesmund (owned by the state). Upon returning to Karasburg and the cellular network, I dialled some acquaintances within the Bondelswarts Traditional Authority to see if I
Basson was tall, slender, in his late fifties. He drives a 1997 Nissan Hardbody bakkie [pickup], which, based on the stream of swear-words he directed at its engine, had clearly seen better days. I gave Willem copies of the records I had found in the archives, and he smiled, saying that he remembered when the government officials visited Hartebeesmund. ‘The Willem Basson mentioned in this document is my father’, he said. ‘I was about seven years old when they came to the farm to count us’.6 Basson told me that his people were Bondelswarts people from the Orange River [river-folk], and although the Bassons were the biggest of the families, there were about a dozen extended families who over the years had lived on the banks of the Orange River, coming from time to time to Warmbad, Karasburg as well as other settlements on the South African side of the river. I realised that over the past several years of dissertation research, I had actually met his sister Monika and his aunt Ana, both of whom lived in Warmbad.
Willem Basson said that unfortunately he could not talk for long, because he had to travel north to Windhoek the following morning to deliver some papers. Since I was going in the same direction to return to the university, I offered to take them for him. ‘No’, said Willem. ‘I have to go in person this time to sign some documents at the lawyer’s office. It’s about those people you met at Homsrivier and KumKum. They’ve opened another lawsuit against me and my family’. Concerned, I asked him what it was about. ‘Eviction. It’s always eviction’, said Basson.
Those people there, they say they’re doing conservation, and maybe they are, but really they just want to own the Orange River. They don’t want to see us African people with our animals. But we’re not on their farms, we’re on the state lands at the river. That’s Bondelswarts ancestral land, and it shouldn’t belong to those people.
Willem Basson III departed for the night, but he urged me to visit him the following month, and he would take me to their farming operations at the Orange River, so that I could see it all for myself. When I returned to Windhoek, I called Luregn Lenggenhager in Basel, to update him on what had happened. Luregn
Luregn Meets Basson
Throughout a good chunk of 2019, I was conducting archival and oral history fieldwork in Onseepkans, a small South African village on the Orange River which serves as a border post for car traffic to Namibia. This was part of a larger interdisciplinary project about landscape narratives along the Lower !Garib/Orange River. Onseepkans is about one hundred kilometres upriver from Homsrivier Mission Station. Even though the village is quite isolated – most car traffic en route to Namibia uses the tarred road at Noordoewer – the people really know a lot about all sorts of places along the Orange River. In digging up records of irrigation schemes and missionary endeavours in the 1930s, I kept coming across the same family names of the African workers employed in the fields, which in those days mostly supported lucerne and crop vegetables. The oral history testimonies that I collected revealed that this was not just the case for Onseepkans, but for other mission stations and irrigation schemes along the river, including Pella, Witbank, Homsrivier, Goodhouse, Noordoewer and beyond. Some people moved up and down the river to offer their labour; others travelled up and down the river with their own livestock, earning a living outside the cash economy.
These family ties were not just from the old days; they continued in the twenty-first century. When a funeral takes place in the African communities of Onseepkans or Pella, for example, it is not just a village funeral, it is an Orange River funeral, and all areas are represented. Travelling along the South African side of the river, I constantly met people who traced their roots to Namibians fleeing the genocide of the Nama by the German colonial government, or to labour-related movements over the river, and many had ties to the Bondelswarts communal areas to the north. Some even referred to families who still lived along the Orange River on the north bank. This confused me, because I was under the impression that the Namibian side was just commercial farms owned by Whites, leaving little room for Black residents.
In 2020, I was sitting in the living room of a former politician in Karasburg, interviewing him about his life and the years he had worked on a diamond mine further downriver at Oranjemund. Suddenly, he changed the topic,
We left Karasburg with his sons at 4 am for the long and bumpy trip. As the sun was creeping over the horizon, the pickup was climbing over the last mountain pass before descending to the Orange River near Homsrivier Mission Station. A guard employed by the property owners came to the road and demanded that Basson sign a form in order to pass through Homsrivier Farm. Willem was having none of this and shouted back at the guard that he wasn’t trespassing and wouldn’t sign any forms. Basson’s son quickly opened the gate, and we sped through; they clearly did not want to stop for long at the church building where Willem had been baptised fifty years earlier. By the time we got to Basson’s small homestead next to the Orange River, the thermometer read nearly 50° C; Willem was not kidding about the heat in these parts. After washing our faces in the river and cooling off a bit, Basson and his sons showed us around the area where he and his family had spent most of their upbringing, explaining that we were near to Girtis Farm, but technically on the state lands bordering the river. On the drive home in the evening, though, Basson took us to his family’s graveyard, about 500 metres inland onto Girtis. He said a small prayer, and we continued on back to Karasburg.
When Bernie called me in 2021 to invite me to visit Basson’s kraals, a part of me was hesitant, because November is almost as hot as January. But when he explained the ongoing hostility of Basson’s neighbours, I realised that we needed to learn more about what was going on here. My Onseepkans work was coming to an end, so we decided to team up on this.
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Our curiosity about Willem Basson and his struggles against his ‘conservationist’ neighbours was initially understood by us as an epilogue to our respective PhD and post-doc projects. Indeed, many of our first interviews and communication with the individuals involved in this area were framed on that basis. However, the more we dug into the history of the African families, the surveyed farms and the foreign newcomer capitalists who have been accumulating land in this area, the more we realised that these questions were of equal or greater importance to what originally brought us to this arid corner of southern Namibia. So, we decided to put much of our work on hold to dedicate ourselves
Apart from Hartebeesmund and the Orange River itself, nearly the entirety of the lands south of Warmbad belong to a few wealthy individuals via corporate shareholdings. One company, Sandfontein Lodge & Nature Reserve (Pty) Ltd, owns four massive farms together covering more than 61,000 hectares in size. Marwilben Farming cc owns two large farms totalling more than 19,000 hectares. Tantalite Valley Estates (Pty) Ltd also owns two, measuring more than 16,500 hectares. All these farms are effectively controlled by one prominent English South African businessman, Sean Gilbertson, who is the CEO of Gemfields, the largest supplier of coloured gemstones in the world. Until very recently, he was also CEO of its subsidiaries, including Fabergé, which markets the stones via the famous Romanov-era brand. Another series of four farms, covering more than 45,000 hectares to the east, are either owned by or under custodianship agreement with the company Pelladrift (Edms) Bpk. Pelladrift is effectively controlled by the pioneer of Kenyan private nature conservation, Ian Craig alongside Peter van der Byl Morkel, the world-renowned Rhodesian-born rhinoceros veterinarian. Together, all these companies and properties have entered into an agreement to unify their conservation and business operations under the trade name ORKCA: the Orange River-Karoo Conservation Area (Pty) Ltd. It holds nearly 150,000 hectares of farmland and it is growing in size.7
As we explain in detail in this book, the Basson family – as a stand-in for all families along the Orange River – are being taken to court in Namibia by Gilbertson and Morkel (as representatives of their companies), who are demanding eviction of the river-folk and/or an interdict to prevent them from trekking their livestock from the Orange River to the north, east or west (moving southwards is already illegal, since it would mean crossing into South Africa).8 This is
Present-day land tenure in southern Karasburg District
CARTOGRAPHY BY B.C. MOORE
In their defence, Willem Basson III and his lawyers (Windhoek’s Legal Assistance Centre) have invoked the Roman-Dutch legal principle of Vetustas – sometimes called ‘immemorial usage’ – which refers to a right which has existed continuously since ‘time immemorial’, held against another person, property, or institution. Although this may seem an imprecise way to measure contemporary people’s relationship to the past, there is a specificity to the legal science of it and it necessitates the skills that we historians possess. Vetustas does not need documentary proof in the form of title deeds; rather, it requires showing that the current generation has understood that a practice has existed for so long that neither they nor their forebears could point precisely to when it began. On the other hand, there also has to be no clear evidence that another state of affairs regularly existed. Given these two factors, Vetustas implies and assumes a lawful origin. Willem Basson’s invocation of
One of the current authors (Moore) was brought on by the Legal Assistance Centre in 2022 to submit expert witness reports about the history of the Orange River region and the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial history of the Bondelswarts. In the historian’s reasoning, these reports show that the river-folk’s claim of Vetustas has merit.10 This book reveals that despite losing most of their lands by colonial legal fiat, the river-folk continued to access their ancestral grounds and engage in subsistence farming, as well as wage labour for White farmers and miners on both sides of the river. Apartheid-era legislation made crossing these commercial farms more difficult but not completely impossible. This relationship with their ancestral lands began beyond the living memory of any individual person today or of previously-known generations, and it continues up to the present day, despite the actions of colonial, apartheid and capitalist settlers and/or ‘conservationists’. The plaintiffs, Gilbertson and Morkel, have consistently denied these historical connections which the Bondelswarts claim to have to their ancestral lands, denying Vetustas, ultimately falling back on colonial land tenure as the natural state of affairs.
At the time of writing, the court case is still ongoing, so it is difficult to assess precisely the direction in which things will go. However, the Basson case is one of the first ancestral land cases in Namibian history, and it is the very first to invoke Vetustas as the basis for usufruct land use and/or tenure in resolving the legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Along similar lines, dealing with ancestral land claims on the grounds of Vetustas enables a better collaboration between historians and the court of law. For dispossessed humans, the question of ancestral land is ultimately a question about the past’s relationship with the present. For the ‘conservationist’ enthralled with concepts of ‘rewilding’ land to a purported historical baseline, the same could be said. We historians must be present, doing our part to shape the knowledge necessary to build
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This book seeks to accomplish three main tasks. First, we chart the history of the Orange River border region, stretching across the southern part of Namibia’s Karasburg District and the northernmost part of South Africa’s Northern Cape. Using close readings of archival records from Namibia, South Africa, Germany and beyond, we examine the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial history of these lands. Supplemented with oral history testimonies, we look into livestock farming, mining and irrigation, as well as where these farms fit into the regional apartheid-era economy and global market connections. Doing this enables us to demonstrate the long-term connections that the river-folk maintained with their ancestral lands, connections which have existed since time immemorial. This is not an easy task, and it required that we consult unconventional sorts of records, because the stories of Black Namibians and South Africans are not privileged in the colonial archive. Nevertheless, using varied sources from missionaries, the state, labour and mining inspectors, and even branding iron registers, we show that Vetustas is an apt description of the relationship between the Bassons/river-folk and the lands now falling under ORKCA.
Second, our study examines the complicated personal and financial networks that in the post-apartheid era led to the consolidation of these farm properties in so few hands. Through biographies of people, places and – crucially – companies, we show that post-apartheid land inequalities in southern Namibia depended not just on historically-conditioned processes going back to the colonial/apartheid years, but also upon specific contingent events. There was and is nothing inevitable about land being used in a certain way. This investigation was an equally-difficult task, as the chapters that follow show. It necessitated that we cross-reference the corporate filings of dozens of holding companies with land registry files, title deeds and court affidavits. Tracking the beneficial ownership of land in an era of limited liability companies (whether in Namibia, South Africa, British Virgin Islands, Panama or elsewhere) is a laborious process but one that in time bears fruit.
Third, although this study begins as a human history of land, connections to it and ownership of it, it ends as a story that includes private nature
This book is written as a narrative, introducing the reader to the eccentric, peculiar and charismatic characters who walked within this southern Namibian landscape. From African sheep farmers to colonial settlers, to mining millionaires, to globe-trotting conservationists, all are given equal scrutiny. This has necessitated our stylistic decision to allow characters to appear, disappear and reappear chapter by chapter, enabling us to illustrate the unfolding trajectory of the lands under question. In addition, conflict over land in Namibia and beyond is not abstract; these conflicts concern specific landscapes and even specific surveyed farm parcels. For this reason, we are precise about not just the individuals about whom we write, but also the specific lands upon which they stood. Our fieldwork enabled us to crisscross this arid, mountainous region over and over again, and if we are to understand how African communities understood these unequal historical processes, we must situate these individuals in specific portions of specific landscapes. We provide ample maps, illustrations, and photographs to guide you along this journey with us to Namibia and beyond.
Map of selected locales along the lower Orange River. Bondelswarts communal areas are indicated in yellow
CARTOGRAPHY BY B.C. MOORE
Edward Barthorp, interview with Bernard C. Moore (KumKum farm, 18 September 2021).
Western Cape Archives and Records Service (hereafter, Buro-TBK), Department of Coloured Affairs (hereafter, KUS) B-615 File B26/2/1/3 (vol. 2): K.F.R. Budack, Etnologiese Afdeling van BAO to Hoofbantoesakekommissaris van SWA ‘Nama en Namasprekende Ovaherero op Hartebeesmund 108, Warmbad’ – 11 March 1971.
Erika Kotze, interview with Bernard C. Moore (Homsrivier farm, 19 September 2021).
As we explain in more detail in chapter 7 and chapter 12, ‘Coloured’ in the context of Namibia and South Africa is a category broader than simply ‘mixed race’.
Katrina Pieters, interview with Bernard C. Moore (Homsrivier farm, 19 September 2021).
Willem Basson III, interview with Bernard C. Moore (Karasburg, 21 September 2021).
Information regarding land ownership has been obtained from records at the Windhoek Deeds Office. We explain in more detail in later chapters. From time to time, we use the term ‘effective control’ to signify that individuals with fewer than fifty per cent of company shares may exert disproportionate influence on company operations.
Archives of the Registrar of the Master of the High Court of the Republic of Namibia (hereafter, RoHC) File HC-MD-CIV-ACT-CON-2020/02424: Plaintiffs’ Particulars of Claim – 25 June 2020. Please note that the plaintiffs often use the term ‘ejection’, rather than eviction. However, as will become clear in subsequent chapters, the political, economic and historic contexts render ‘eviction’ – in our judgement – a more apt description of the legal claim.
RoHC File HC-MD-CIV-ACT-CON-2020/02424: Founding Affidavit, Willem Basson – 26 November 2020.
As elaborated in more detail in chapter 4, we use the term ‘river-folk’ to describe the heterogenous community of Bondelswart Nama with historical, familial and material connections to the Orange River. River-folk are a specific grouping of Bondelswarts.
See B. Jewsiewicki, ‘African Historical Studies, Academic Knowledge as a “Usable Past”, and Radical Scholarship’, African Studies Review, 32, 3 (1989), pp. 1–76.