‘I don’t understand why they would kraal ostriches in the church. It was a terrible thing to do. That’s a sacred place’.1
Near the confluence of Namibia’s small ephemeral Hom River and the Orange River, there stands a small Roman Catholic mission station, called Homsrivier. Founded during the Great Depression by the Austrian branch of the Oblates of St Francis de Sales, it was to serve a dual purpose for the emerging Catholic community in southern Namibia and the Northern Cape of South Africa. First, using the waters from the mighty Orange River, furrows could be dug, and flood irrigation could be used to grow vegetables, grain and fodder to supply the churches and mission schools across the region. Second, the mission station could provide jobs and Catholic schooling for the several hundred Nama, OvaHerero and Coloured families living along the fringes of the lower Orange River. Most had already been baptised Catholic, though a one-hundred-kilometre mountainous trek to the mother station, Pella (on the South African side of the river), made attending Mass, services and school difficult for subsistence pastoralists in this parched corner of southern Africa. After all, mission stations were usually built where there were already souls to be attended to.
Not long after Namibia successfully shook off the shackles of formal apartheid and obtained its independence from South Africa in 1990, the church was being used by the new farm owner as a storage pen for ostriches rather than for Mass. Homsrivier Mission was closed and sold off in 1992 by the diocese to a foreign investor. Funds were needed to establish the post-apartheid Vicariate of Keetmanshoop, since Namibian churches would no longer fall under the South African hierarchy.
Katrina Pieters, whose statement begins this chapter, grew up between Homsrivier – where her father worked as an irrigation labourer – and Warmbad, where she attended school during the 1980s. She recollected how, each
Homsrivier Roman Catholic Mission station
PHOTO: B.C. MOORE, 2021
Thousands of chipped recesses mark the floor of Homsrivier’s Church of the Visitation. They were made by ostrich beaks pecking the floor in the late 1990s
PHOTO: B.C. MOORE, 2021
Traces of narrow footpaths [trekpaaitjies] line the landscape between Warmbad and the Orange River, and they give credence to the continuity of pastoralism and mobility in southern Namibia. For the pastoralists in this region, sheep, goats and cattle are a walking larder and, following the seasonal grazing availability, they have to be moved on the hoof between Warmbad and nearby communal areas and the Orange River, where water and grazing are sufficient, especially during the early summer months of November and December. These trekpaaitjies formed the basis of Namibia’s network of small two track [tweespoor] farm roads, many of which – such as #217 and #284 – were proclaimed public roads in the mid-1950s, during the height of apartheid-era farm subsidies.2
Many trekpaaitjies were constructed within or alongside ephemeral riverbeds; these would enable livestock to avoid climbing over steep passes and also ensure sufficient grazing and browsing during transhumance between locales. The Hom River was the most important of these for the Bondelswarts throughout the precolonial and early colonial era, because it runs in a more-or-less direct line from the Orange River to Homsrivier, Sandfontein and Norechab, through to Warmbad and other Nama communal areas like ǂGâbes. Furthermore, the Hom River has several small natural springs along its bed, ensuring that livestock that travel along it reach Warmbad in a healthy condition.3 Warmbad, as its name implies, represents the largest of these natural hot springs, hence its centrality in Bondelswarts history.
Although this kind of transhumance is far from rare today, it is a shadow of the former practice. During the 18th and 19th centuries, travellers, traders and scientists encountered Nama, Herero and San communities living along the
It is not climate or geography that have made Bondelswart Nama movements between the Orange River and communal areas to the north well-nigh impossible; rather, it is capitalism, colonialism, apartheid and their legacies. For settler colonialists, Namibia (called South West Africa before independence) would not remain a distant frontier for long. By the end of the 19th century, the Bondelswarts were caught between the informal colonial ambitions of the British authorities in Cape Town and Springbok, the increasingly militarised German colonial regime in Windhoek, and exploitative and fraudulent businessmen representing land speculation syndicates. Many of the Nama nations in southern Namibia at that time were connected with the British – such as Bondelswart Kaptein Willem Christiaan, who was on the payroll of the magistrate at Springbok.6
Despite extensive discussion about whether or not the British should simply annex Namibia,7 they decided to roll back their colonial ambitions, allowing the Germans to colonise the territory, apart from the port of Walvis Bay. These terms were finally laid out in the Anglo-German Treaty of 1890 (known colloquially as the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty), which demarcated the boundary between the Cape Colony and German South West Africa8 – the Orange River. But unlike virtually all treaties and legislation preceding it or emerging after
For the river-folk who were grazing their animals along the Orange River, collecting honey and foods from the foliage, or hunting game using sophisticated traps and pitfalls, the 1890 treaty did not change the ecology or the cultural significance of their transhumance between the river and Warmbad; it changed the political nature of it. They were not just crossing terrain; they were now crossing an international boundary. The Orange River and the strip of land on either side of it were legally South African, and this remains so to this day. But a line on a map is only as significant as its enforcement on the ground. This book reveals various ways in which that boundary has over the decades been reinforced, challenged or simply ignored.
For pastoralists along the Orange River, the 1890 boundary demarcation has meant far less than what has taken place north of that boundary. With the turn of the 20th century, the German colonial government and affiliated land-speculation syndicates began to sell off farmland to White settlers. This began on a small, ad-hoc basis in precolonial years – which was even supported in isolated instances by Bondelswart leadership – but these processes gathered momentum after the 1903–1908 genocide of the Nama by the German military.9 By the time of the First World War, significant portions of the Bondelswarts lands had been seized by the government and sold off. The process continued when South Africa took over Namibia in 1919. Even peripheral, unproductive mountainous farmlands were gazetted for sale and sold off to ‘poor Whites’ immigrating into Namibia from South Africa. The Nama, who had lived on these ancestral lands for generations, were expected to either become a tenant labour force or simply vanish from sight into the communal areas, reduced in size after the genocide. By the end of the 1940s, the entirety of southern Namibia was demarcated into private commercial farms and sold to White settlers, and while the demographics of farm ownership have been slightly less monochromatic in the post-apartheid years, a land tenure system of massive, private, surveyed and fenced farmland exists to this day.
Surveyed farmland makes transhumance difficult, though not impossible. Legal procedures exist to enable movement of livestock across private
Extract of cadastral farm map of southern Karasburg District, with properties near the Orange River to the south. Note the farms Sandfontein, Homsrivier and Norechab, and Warmbad village
OFFICE OF THE SURVEYOR-GENERAL, WINDHOEK, 1972
A thread which runs throughout the following chapters is the struggle of the Basson family to maintain their transhumant existence along the Orange River. Led by family head Willem Basson III, himself a raadslid (councillor) for the Bondelswarts Traditional Authority, the extended network of families (Basson, Botes, Roos, Agus, Simboya, Witbooi, Kordom, Van Rhyn, Kraai and others) keep subsistence numbers of goats, sheep, cattle and donkeys, which graze along the state lands bordering the Orange River.11 For at least two centuries,
Unlike the flatter, alluvial Orange River lands farther upriver, near Upington, Keimoes and Kakamas, the lands along the lower Orange River, which form the boundary between Namibia and South Africa, are a sharp, rough landscape where the mountains abut right up to the river. For this reason, irrigation works are difficult to build along the Namibian side of the Orange River, and most of those that do exist, or have existed, are on small farm parcels where the mountains open up to land that can be contoured for irrigation. The productive portions of these surveyed and demarcated commercial farms were not traditionally the areas that bordered the river because these were hard to access, and only small portions were regularly used by White settlers for planting vegetables or fodder, or for grazing livestock.
Thus, throughout the 20th century, the Bassons and their forebears were able to eke out a sort of autarchic existence on the fringes of White-owned lands – albeit with difficulty. Whites turned a blind eye to ‘squatting’ – illegal under apartheid legislation – as long as they could occasionally tap into the Basson family’s labour. ‘Squatters’ or not, the Catholic Church at Homsrivier continued to serve these river-folk along the Orange. The living situation of the Bassons was isolated enough that in 1971 the Warmbad police ‘discovered’ more than forty five residents staying near the river bordering state lands at Hartebeesmund Farm.12 Although apartheid racism and governance structures made life difficult for the river-folk, they were able to live on the fringes of the state, disappearing when required and appearing when convenient. Like the highland societies in Southeast Asia described by social scientist James C. Scott, the Bassons had mastered ‘the art of not being governed’.13
Whereas the Orange River was an international boundary under German colonialism, it was not under South African apartheid. When river waters were low, the Bassons could graze their animals on some of the large islands in the Orange River, like Marten and Krapohl islands, and they could easily cross to visit relatives in Witbank and Pella on the South African side. With the collapse of official apartheid and the coming of Namibia’s independence from South Africa in 1990, democracy and economic openness have become a
Date production on Haakiesdoorn (in the foreground) gives way to lucerne under pivot irrigation at Ramansdrift. The Orange River is visible in the background
PHOTO: B.C. MOORE, 2021
Namibia’s independence has meant the removal of apartheid-era economic sanctions and improved transport networks; new economic opportunities have emerged within this remote corner of southern Namibia. Irrigation is no longer intended solely for the production of lucerne for livestock feed or vegetables for supermarkets and school hostels. New irrigation works along the lower Orange River – such as at Haakiesdoorn, Ramansdrift, Stolzenfels and Aussenkehr – focus on capital-intensive, export-oriented cash crops, particularly Medjool dates, table grapes and sultana raisins.15 These crops are less reliant on land-levelling schemes for flood irrigation because they can survive on drip sprinklers, which can bring peripheral mountainous lands under production, increasing property values and the commercial viability of lands on
Since the late 1980s, Namibia and South Africa have encouraged the expansion of cash-crop irrigation works along the lower Orange River, a process facilitated by the completion of the Gariep Dam in 1971 and ancillary water works in later years. The region’s arid climate and perennial irrigation waters have made it attractive for producing varieties of grapes and dates that cannot thrive in the more humid and fertile parts of southern Africa. The European Union has willingly imported this produce because southern hemisphere crops are picked when local variants are not yet ripe. It is hard to overemphasise the significance of this transformation for some portions of the river. On the South African side, Klein Pella (now owned by multinational farming company Karsten Boerdery (Pty) Ltd) is the largest date plantation in the southern hemisphere. Slightly more modest, similar changes have occurred on the Namibian side. In 1985, Aussenkehr and Noordoewer had, respectively, 275 and 224 hectares of land under irrigation for lucerne, and virtually no dates or grapes were grown.16 By comparison, in 2014, Noordoewer had more than 154 hectares of grapes under irrigation, and in 2018 Aussenkehr had 950 hectares of grapes under irrigation (with proposals to expand grapes and dates up to 4,800 hectares by 2030).17 This growth replaced much of the lucerne production and claimed more land for irrigation.
As more land has come under irrigation since independence – especially to produce crops that are more valuable than lucerne or vegetables – denser settlements have meant more security and more fencing to protect properties, extended as far as pump infrastructure at the river. For the Bassons and other families who had followed traditional pastoral geographies, this new situation has meant reduced mobility, reduced grazing and the increased risk of stock theft and stock seizure by private security if the animals strayed from the river’s edge. The traditional transhumance of the Bassons once reached as far as Haakiesdoorn, Noordoewer and even Aussenkehr to the west, and to
Emerging date and citrus irrigation on Gaidip Farm, to the west of Homsrivier
PHOTO: B.C. MOORE, 2021
In 2002, the company Frontier Farming (Pty) Ltd purchased Khaais Farm (upriver from Homsrivier) with plans to establish date irrigation schemes surrounded by electric razor-wire fencing.18 Gates were built across the traditional Bondelswarts trekpaaitjies and were locked and/or electrified. Accessing the river became increasingly difficult.19 Conflicts reached breaking point in September 2009, when Frontier Farming’s White foreman allegedly threatened to murder Basson’s shepherd, Fransiskus Matroos, if he did not leave with the livestock immediately, despite the fact that Khaais Farm does not own the river frontage. Gesturing to the vast mountains behind him, the foreman said to Matroos: ‘There is more than enough space for me to bury you here’.20
In the years since Namibian independence, the Bassons have been increasingly constrained, even trapped, inside a smaller and smaller area next to the Orange River. Crossing to the south bank is now illegal, and irrigation farmers
Small goat kraal belonging to the Basson family, near Girtis Farm
PHOTO: B.C. MOORE, 2021
However, irrigation is not the only new development in post-apartheid southern Namibia and not the sole reason capitalists want exclusive access to the Orange River. Since independence, most of the farms within the Basson’s ancestral corridor – stretching north along the Hom River nearly as far as Warmbad – have been purchased for a very different use: private, hyper-luxury nature conservation and tourism operations. Apart from occasional trophy-hunting, which is now being phased out on these properties, these new operations are a form of private, commercial land tenure that expressly does not wish to exploit the land for personal or communal gain, and which prides itself on this fact.
This is not a competition for the most profitable use of the lands – whether to irrigate or graze. Immediate profit means little to the companies and the individuals involved in purchasing this corridor of farmland, which measures an expanse exceeding 150,000 hectares. These newcomers have made their money elsewhere. However, it is a form of land tenure which demands exclusive use of the land, built on the aesthetic, philosophical and economic frameworks of what Dan Brockington and others have designated ‘Fortress
Evictions do not constitute merely the loss of livelihoods derived from the land, which would be reason enough to fight companies pursuing accumulation by dispossession. Evictions also constitute a loss of cultural grounding and historical reference points. As a fairly successful communal farmer, Willem Basson likely could hire grazing elsewhere or obtain additional rights in the other Bondelswarts communal areas. But the land represents more than just grazing. ‘I was born near the river, at KumKum’, he said. ‘My parents and ancestors are buried near Girtis. If I give it up, I’ll never see the graveyard again.’ Whether for Basson fearing a loss of connection to his ancestors’ graves or Katrina Peters witnessing her church become a storage pen for ostriches to be released as game for international trophy hunters, the loss of land through colonial or post-colonial processes constitutes a loss of both livelihood and ancestral grounding.
This book is about human connections to the lands that conservationists seek to rewild, and the winding historical trajectory that gradually centralised a massive area of farmland in an arid, mountainous corner of Africa into just a few hands. It is a story of global flows of ideas, individuals and investment capital that have conditioned and facilitated these historical events as well as contemporary and future trends on the horizon. This book is not a traditional critical history of nature conservation in Africa, in part because we are looking into processes that are in a state of flux, changing and developing as we
Visiting family graves along the !Garib/Orange River
PHOTO: L. LENGGENHAGER, 2020
The greater part of critical historical research on nature conservation in Africa considers case studies of national parks, as well as those individuals and groups living near to – or displaced by – the establishment and operations of these conservation areas.23 These scholars and others rightly show how the national parks of the early twentieth century were intimately bound to
Scholars have examined an abundance of reasons – both implicit and explicit – why conservationists promote securing land exclusively for occupation by flora and fauna at the expense of human residents. These reasons and interpretations vary, from simple aesthetics25 to socioeconomic and political factors, such as veterinary considerations,26 military and counterinsurgency operations27 or even the intent to conscript evicted residents to create an industrial reserve army to work as labourers for colonial capitalist enterprises.28 It is not our intention to systematically interrogate each of these.
Notwithstanding, most scholars have framed these transformations as a form of state capture, whereby 1) the land as commons is transformed into state-managed national parks, and 2) game legislation reconfigures wild animals as a kind of res nullius – conceived of as ownerless – and converts them into state property, epitomised by the term ‘royal game’. This historical trajectory was popularised and brought into the mainstream through the pioneering work of Scottish historian John M. MacKenzie, who characterised this period of the early twentieth century as a time of increasing state custodianship over game and game reserves.29 Scholars could thereby approach
Other, more practical, factors have facilitated the historian’s fascination with national parks across the continent. A rich paper trail can be exhumed from within the colonial and postcolonial archive, covering historical events in relation to the operations of the parks. For example, in the National Archives of Namibia, the Natuurbewaring (Nature Conservation, NTB) collection holds thousands of files pertaining to various national parks established during the twentieth century and general environmental issues of interest to the state. Furthermore, regional and magisterial archival holdings contain additional information relating to parks and state-sponsored conservation initiatives, such as soil conservation schemes. A historian focusing on Namibia’s famous parks, such as Etosha National Park or the ǀAi-ǀAis/Richtersveld Transfrontier Conservation Area, can find nearly all the historical data relating to these within the National Archives of Namibia. The state’s custodianship over nature runs parallel to the state’s custodianship over archival records about nature.
However, the framework of nature conservation under state custodianship, what historian Lance van Sittert calls the ‘MacKenzian Orthodoxy’, is only one side of the story. State-sponsored game reserves and national parks are not the only structures that have defined legal and economic relationships between people and the non-human world during the colonial and post-colonial era. Van Sittert critiques this framework, showing that within South Africa’s Cape Colony (later, the Cape Province) there was a precedent for the privatisation of game for commercial use, and the impetus behind this legislation – conservation for commercialisation – did not come from urban cosmopolitan elites but rather from rural landowners.30 Game law was formulated and reformulated not to remove game from market pressures into the custodianship of the state for preservation purposes, but rather to increase the process of privatisation and commercialisation, ultimately enabled by enclosure and fencing legislation in order to dictate ownership.31
As later chapters of this book explain in greater detail, Namibia went along with the Cape Colony in pushing for the privatisation of game, the privatisation of nature conservation, and the commercialisation of each. Although Namibia had national parks and other conservation areas under state custodianship, the vast majority of game – from the lowliest springbok to the grandest
After the moment of independence and the end of apartheid-era sanctions in 1990, the profitability and therefore attraction of private nature conservation – whether for trophy-hunting, photographic safaris or forms of ecotourism – would only grow, and it became an avenue for White farmers from apartheid-era families to shore up their land tenure in a new era of multiracial democracy. Private enterprise also underwrote the emergence of an international elite who sought to treat nature conservation as ‘connoisseur conservation’, as sociologist Justin Farrell terms it, whereby, for the ultra-wealthy, ‘nature provides a special dispensation for purchases and practices that may otherwise be viewed as morally suspect, opulent, or greedy. Nature is priceless, but priceless experiences can be quite expensive’.33 In this model, nature conservation businesses need not be profitable to be sustainable, for they are supplemented with funds reaped from other sectors.
None of the landscapes described in this book fall within, or border on, any national park in the Republic of Namibia, which means that we cannot easily fall back on the state’s archival collections detailing conservation operations. Apart from the Orange River itself, all Namibian lands described here are surveyed, demarcated, privately owned commercial farmland, or else remnants of Bondelswarts communal areas boxed-in by White-owned farms surrounding them on all sides. To understand the history of this area in a holistic sense requires one to research the history of private lands, private individuals and, crucially, that of private companies.
This is a most difficult task, and it requires exhaustive excavation of governmental records from the National Archives of Namibia (NAN), the National Library of Namibia (NLN), the National Archives of South Africa (NASA), and the Western Cape Archives and Records Service (TBK). These records include
Outside of national governmental collections, we obtained additional historical and contemporary documents from other public repositories and records centres, such as the archives of the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME), the Registrar of the High Court of the Republic of Namibia (RoHC), the Windhoek Deeds Office Archives at the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform (WDO), and the archives of the Business and Intellectual Property Authority of the Republic of Namibia (BIPA). Records from the MME vary from mine inspection notes, annual reports and exclusive prospecting licence applications to environmental impact assessments, dating back to the 1960s. RoHC records concern ongoing and past court cases, company liquidations and occasionally police investigations. WDO files primarily comprise title deeds of farms, certificates of transfer and other documents relating to land tenure and land sale. BIPA records include company filings, such as articles of association, annual filings and director and/or shareholder data, among others. Virtually none of these collections have been previously consulted by historians.
Finally, additional documents were obtained from private institutional collections, such as the Namibia Scientific Society (NSS), the Erfdeel Argief en Kultuursentrum (EAKS), the Legal Assistance Centre (LAC) in Windhoek, and collections belonging to private individuals in Namibia and South Africa. We also sourced corporate documents by way of stock-exchange filings, public annual reports and press releases, and others. We complemented our archival and documentary research with several dozen formal and semi-formal interviews, and informal conversations with key individuals involved with these lands, currently and in the past. Most of these interviews were conducted in person, others were done over the phone, and a few were via email communication.34
In short, specifically targeted chapters, this book explores the background of one of the largest private conservation schemes currently in development on the African continent: the Orange River-Karoo Conservation Area (ORKCA), which mainly comprises lands belonging to two Namibia-registered companies: Sandfontein Lodge & Nature Reserve (Pty) Ltd and Pelladrift (Edms) Bpk. We explore land use in this area from a historical standpoint, examining ways in which the properties were used as ancestral transhumance lands by pastoralists like the Bassons, eventually changing under colonialism to become massive karakul sheep ranches, producing lambskin pelts that are sold to overseas fur merchants. We look at the long history of mining and prospecting in the region, observing how this remote corner of Namibia was intricately bound to global technological shifts in manufacturing and in the production of weapons of mass destruction. We examine the history of human interactions with wildlife in these areas, taking game-farming into account as well as subsistence and commercial hunting.
We also explore the foundations of post-apartheid nature conservation in southern Africa. We look at the networks of individuals and ideas that shaped the emergence of a broadly defined ‘ecotourism’ sector within the Namibian economy, and we consider the ethical and financial motivations of those involved. We examine, too, the changing ways in which nature conservation is
Ultimately, through deep biographies of people and place, we unmask the process of capital accumulation over the past two centuries and the gradual consolidation of land ownership near the Orange River into fewer and fewer hands. The narrative clearly reveals that there was nothing inevitable about these lands being used for conservation purposes. Only after more than a century of rural enclosure and colonial capitalism does conservation start to gain traction. This story does not begin as a history of nature conservation, rather it becomes one.
A thread running through this narrative is the ways in which the Bassons and other pastoralists and river-folk in southern Namibia managed to withstand the privatisation of their ancestral lands, whether to syndicates, missionary societies, private White farmers, mining companies or private conservationists. Only in facing the last have the Bassons struggled to maintain their residence along the river. Only fortress conservation allows no space for African pastoralists seeking to maintain a connection with their ancestral lands.
Acknowledging this does not mean romanticising the relationship between the Bondelswarts and White farmers in the area during colonial and apartheid periods: Willem Basson surely does not. Remembering the head of a prominent White farming family, Gerrit Luttig, he said, ‘That man was an apartheid fanatic. If he saw us anywhere near Pelgrimsrust Farm, he would seize our animals and force us to pay weifooie en skuldgeld [grazing fees and penalties]’. Nevertheless, Whites regularly needed labourers, and if one farmer was not willing to have tenant residents or so-called ‘squatters’ on his property, another likely would. Hence the Bassons’ gradual migration up and down the Orange River, carefully observing where they were welcome and where they were not.
For many people, White farmers in post-apartheid Namibia are personae non gratae, a legacy of the old regime quietly clinging to racist views and apartheid-era privileges. The low wages and atrocious working conditions of employees of White farmers are rarely looked upon with sympathetic eyes by those outside the White farming community itself. Landowners like Gerrit Luttig may have been quite wealthy men by the coming of Namibia’s independence, but they lacked the moral capital to justify their treatment of Black Namibians, their relationship to the land and their position in society, especially when observed from cosmopolitan cities and the international community. In an era in which the majority of Black Namibians lack access to agricultural land while
In her ethnographic account of White property-owners in post-Fast Track Land Reform Zimbabwe, Yuka Suzuki observes that through transforming their businesses from cattle and crop production into game-farming, safari tourism and trophy-hunting, Whites in Zimbabwe have exploited their alleged custodianship of nature to justify their place in society.35 Land ownership by Whites is thereby discursively depoliticised as they reposition themselves away from being capitalist farmers towards being private environmentalists. Property rights move from one of verifiable colonial inheritance to one of perceived technocratic expertise. Under private conservation, White landowners in postcolonial and post-apartheid southern Africa regain the moral capital they had lost through their dispossession and exploitation of Black citizens. It would be a great controversy for a farmer to evict a Black family like the Bassons, but for conservationists to do so, clothing their actions in vague references alluding to the protection of endangered wildlife, it might attract little to no attention at all.
The ultra-wealthy capitalist ‘conservationists’ who have purchased these properties now exercise complete control. Their massive wealth allows them to transform the land as they please, with the law behind them, justifying their purchases, their land tenure and their ability to use the land as they wish. Finally, as ‘conservationists’, they now have the moral capital that enables them to remove more than 150,000 hectares from agricultural production and transform this area into a hyper-luxury ‘conservation’ operation. Compared to the power relations under White farmers, there has been a distinct shift under the regime of conservation. Historically, the scales rarely tipped in favour of people like the Bassons, but today they have tipped completely to their detriment. Whereas the river-folk families could once bargain with individual White farmers during the apartheid era, under the regime of private conservation – where ORKCA is directed by influential global capitalists – there is little place for the ancestral rights of the Bassons today.
…
In this book, through our sensitivity and attention to time, space, species and place, we historicise private nature conservation in Namibia. We show that while the state custodianship model is not dead, the state increasingly cedes ground to a corporate model or towards private initiatives by the ultra-rich for whom ownership of conservation land is more a form of ‘connoisseur conservation’ and conspicuous consumption. Furthermore, we show that despite the private nature of these presently operating and planned schemes, the history of the state is still present through the longevity of apartheid-era land-tenure laws and practices.
Nature conservation is in itself a claim about the past, the present and the future. Conservationists justify their presence and their actions based on a particular interpretation of the past ways in which humans have used and interacted with the natural environment. This interpretation is often formulated through simplistic binaries of degradation versus regeneration, and conservationists regard themselves as agents who provide a return to a particular kind of ‘healthy’ environment. From youths doing a ‘gap year’ volunteer project during which they rip up farm fencing, to multimillionaires buying up land for ‘conservation initiatives’, they all regard themselves as champions of regeneration, or rewilding, broadly-defined. When they declare that they believe in this binary and in the validity of their restorative efforts, we are expected to take what they say at face value. This binary and their participation are often framed in catastrophic terms, as though the work that they are doing is one of the last defences preventing a global rise of another one or two degrees Celsius.
For many individuals who are active in this sector, commitment is ideological, scientific and personal, which is part of what makes criticism of
As we show in this book, when nature conservationists make claims about the past, present or future, we as historians must interrogate these claims, expand on their implications and challenge them when necessary. Conservation itself is not actually the problem here. Protecting nature and working to slow, reverse and ultimately cease the colossal damage that we humans have done to our planet is of utmost importance and a noble cause. The problem with private nature conservation – especially the Namibian cases described here – is that the individuals and institutions involved refuse to challenge or work outside of the two systems that created most of our present environmental chaos: capitalism and colonialism. By simultaneously ignoring, perpetuating and honouring these destructive systems, private nature conservation reduces itself to being less about nature conservation and more about being private.
Historians have a role to play in framing how we understand the present and the future, and not just how we view the past. In a postcolonial, post-apartheid country such as Namibia, the present is intrinsically linked to the past. Merely abolishing apartheid legislation does not automatically democratise the economy or society. We are not the first to argue and demonstrate how contemporary conservation schemes like ORKCA reinforce colonial or apartheid economic and social structures, and we will certainly not be the last. In the chapters and the stories that follow, we transport the reader to southern Namibia and beyond, illustrating the ways in which the past lives on in the present. As long as a system exists, which allows a small number of individuals to buy up massive tracts of land and unilaterally determine the exclusive use of whole landscapes, there is little possibility of social and ecological sustainability.
Katrina Pieters, interview with Bernard C. Moore (Homsrivier Farm, 19 September 2021).
Legal Assistance Centre Archives (hereafter, LAC) M/B: Offisiële Koerant van Suidwes-Afrika (15 February 1955).
Surveyor General Windhoek, Warmbad, 2818 (1:250,000), 1990.
On the politics and history of ethnicity in this region during the 18th and 19th centuries, consult A. Rosengarten, ‘Entangled Networks: Ethnicity, Mobility, and Exchange in the Lower !Garib/Orange River Region in the Late-18th Century’, in L. Lenggenhager et. al. (eds.), The Lower !Garib/Orange River: Pasts & Presents of a Southern African Border Region (Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag, 2023), pp. 27–50..
The Journals of Brink and Rhenius, ed. E.E. Mossop (Cape Town, Van Riebeeck Society, 1947), pp. 31–33.
National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew (hereafter, NAUK) Colonial Office (hereafter, CO) 879/21: J.T. Eustace, Resident Magistrate at Namaqualand to Hon. John X Merriman – 26 December 1883.
See E.L.P. Stals, Môrewind oor die Karasberge: ‘n Kultuurhistoriese Verkenning van die Karassreek van die laat Negentiende Eeu (Pretoria, Protea Boekhuis, 2009). W.J. de Kock, ‘Ekstraterritorial Vraagstukke van die Kaapse Regering (1872–1885) met Besondere Verwysing na die Transgariep en Betsjoeanaland’ (PhD thesis, Stellenbosch University, 1948).
Abkommen zwischen Deutschland und England von 1 Juli 1890 (Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty), Article 3, in Die Deutsche Kolonialgesetzgebung: Sammlung […], ed. K. von Gerstmeyer (1893).
Windhoek Deeds Office Archives (hereafter, WDO), ‘Übersicht über die Farmverkäufe und Verpachtungen der Landgesellschaften in Deutsch-Südwestafrika’ (File originally from Windhoek Magistrate’s Office, 1913).
LAC BCF: Witness Statement of Mattheus Veldskoen – 2016.
LAC BCF: B.E. Simboya, Pella ‘Verblyf teen die Oranje-Rivier’ – 16 July 2004. As will be made clear throughout this text, for simplicity’s sake we will refer to these families collectively as ‘the Bassons’; not only are many of these individuals interrelated but all are facing the same issues as their spokesman, Willem Basson III.
TBK KUS B-615 File B26/2/1/3 (vol. 2): Landdros, Karasburg to Streekverteenwoordiger, Dept. KbRa ‘Ongeoorloofde Verblyf op Staatseiendom’ – 13 August 1970.
J.C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, Yale, 2009).
L. Lenggenhager and A. Rosengarten, ‘Flood Lines and Borderlines: Livestock Farming and Evictions Resistance at the !Garib/Orange River in Southern Africa’, Environment & Society: Arcadia (Summer 2020).
For more on these economic changes, consult B.C. Moore, ‘Swimming Upstream: From “Poor Whites” to “Coloureds” along South Africa’s Lower Orange River’, in L. Lenggenhager et. al. (eds.) The Lower !Garib/Orange River: Pasts and Presents of a Southern African Border Region (Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag, 2023), pp. 119–144.
Aussenkjer Plase (Pty) Ltd, The Potential for Agricultural Development of the Aussenkjer-Noordoewer Area (Stellenbosch, 1985), pp. 28–31.
Vioolsdrift-Noordoewer Joint Irrigation Authority Scheme, Water Management Plan (Orange-Senqu River Commission, March 2014), p. 14. Orange River Vineyard Investments (Pty) Ltd et al., ‘Aussenkehr Agricultural Developments: Environmental Assessment Scoping Report’ (November 2018), p. 3.
WDO File T6719/2002: Khaais no. 153, Deed of Transfer – 2 October 2002.
LAC BCF: Lesle Jansen (LAC) to Adv. N. Bassingthwaigte ‘re: Consultation with Bondelswarts Community Leaders’ – 21 July 2010.
‘Hier is genoeg plek waar ek jou kan begrawe.’ LAC BCF: Willem Basson to Lesle Jansen, Legal Assistance Centre ‘Khaais 143’ – undated letter, likely August 2010. Quote is verbatim from reports to the Legal Assistance Centre.
D. Brockington, Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania (Oxford, James Currey, 2002).
Willem Basson III, interview with Bernard C. Moore and Luregn Lenggenhager (Karasburg, 11 November 2021).
See Brockington, Fortress Conservation. J.B. Shetler, Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape and Memory in Tanzania from the Earliest Times to the Present (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2007). K.G. Nustad, Creating Africas: Struggles over Nature, Conservation, and Land (London, Hurst, 2015). J. Carruthers, The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 1995). J. Dlamini, Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park (Johannesburg, Jacana, 2020). U. Dieckmann, Haiǁom in the Etosha Region: A History of Colonial Settlement, Ethnicity, and Nature Conservation in Namibia (Basel, Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2007). Others have considered conservation in communal areas, as well as links between conservation and militarisation. See M. Bollig. Shaping the African Savannah: From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020).
M. Cioc, The Game of Conservation: International Treaties to Protect the World’s Migratory Animals (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2009).
R.P. Neumann, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998).
G. Miescher, Namibia’s Red Line: A History of a Veterinary and Settlement Border (New York, Palgrave, 2012).
L. Lenggenhager, Ruling Nature, Controlling People: Nature Conservation, Development, and War in Northeastern Namibia since the 1920s (Basel, Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2018).
A.B. Kelly, ‘Conservation Practice as Primitive Accumulation’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 38, 4 (2011), pp. 683–701. A.B. Kelly and N.L. Peluso, ‘Frontiers of Commodification: State Lands and their Formalization’, Society & Natural Resources, 28 (2015), pp. 473–495.
J.M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988).
L. van Sittert, ‘Bringing in the Wild: The Commodification of Wild Animals in the Cape Colony/Province c. 1850–1950’, Journal of African History, 46 (2005), pp. 269–291.
Ibid, p. 284.
National Library of Namibia (hereafter, NLN) TXX 0742: Department of Agriculture and Nature Conservation: Annual Report, 1988, p. 8.
J. Farrell, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2020), pp. 100–101.
Some, such as the Bassons, repeatedly requested to be named and identified, because they recognise the need for specificity in understanding the region. Across the board, interviews were not conducted on the basis that anonymity would be guaranteed. Furthermore, anonymity, confidentiality and discretion are not necessarily relevant when research is in the public interest, as this project is. In addition, anonymity for individuals who hold prominent and/or elite positions in companies, government or society compromises the quality of research and the very point of anonymity in the first place. These practices are in line with codes of journalism and research ethics published within the Republic of Namibia, as well as by international bodies. See Namibia Press Agency, NAMPA Editorial Guide and Style Book (Windhoek, John Meinert, 2015), pp. 40–41. See also, New Zealand Media Council, Statement of Principles, paras. 8–9. Agence France Presse, AFP Editorial Standards and Best Practices (22 June 2016), p. 9. C. le Roux, ‘Oral History Research Ethics: Should Anonymity and Confidentiality Issues be Dealt with on their Own Merit?’ Africa Education Review, 12, 4 (2015), pp. 552–566. C.H. Ellersgaard et al., ‘Say My Name? Anonymity or not in Elite Interviewing’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 5 (2022), pp. 673–686. Quotations from interviews – or translation thereof – maintain the meaning of the interviewee, and precise phrasing is maintained as close as possible to the original. Copies of all archival documentation and notes from all interviews are in the possession of the authors, and they can be shared if required.
Y. Suzuki, The Nature of Whiteness: Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2017). For a similar observation about Whites in Kenya, see G.R. Fox, ‘The 2017 Shooting of Kuki Gallmann and the Politics of Conservation in Northern Kenya’, African Studies Review, 61, 2 (2018), pp. 210–236.