In Search of Survival and Dignity: Two Traditional Communities in Southern Namibia under South African Rule

Abstract

In Search of Survival and Dignity: Two Traditional Communities in Southern Namibia under South African Rule, by Rheinhart Kosler. Frankfurt: IKO Verlag fur Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 2006. xvi + 374 pp. ISBN pbk 3-88938811-1. Rheinhart Kosler has produced a rich history of southern Namibia in the twentieth century, concentrating on two impoverished Nama-speaking communities living on land designated as native The book represents careful, thorough and observant research into hitherto untapped archival sources, mainly in the National Archives of Namibia. Kosler focuses on the people at Berseba and at Gibeon (with the adjoining Krantzplatz reserve). The Berseba people had refused to rise against the German authorities during the Namibian War - the great uprising - that began in 1904, and as a result retained their land; the Witboois at Gibeon, on the other hand, had led the opposition to the Germans in the south and had thus been victims of the ensuing genocide, losing all their territory. The survivors returned only after the South African conquest in 1915. These differing histories resulted in different policies toward the South African colonial administration. The Berseba people, led by the Goliath and Isaak families, pursued a relatively conciliatory strategy, while the Witboois from the start favoured what Kosler calls a revindicatory directly claiming land and rights that had been taken from them. In both cases, the reserves represented more than an apartheid dispensation; they also constituted a social and symbolic nexus (p. 49) involving long-standing claims to land. Their significance still resonates in contemporary politics, as the author briefly outlines. In both cases, too, the leaders' autonomy, already restricted, was gradually but systematically undermined by the South African authorities. For example, requests to expend the reserve funds (accrued mainly from grazing fees paid by residents) were frequently turned down, to the point where, by 1934, the government was holding a balance of £17,000 from all the reserves effectively a subsidy to the state during the Depression. In Berseba, longstanding conflict between the two leading families, exacerbated by state intervention, also led to the weakening of African authority. As Kosler points out, it is important to understand that during the inter-war years Namibia was exceptional in that segregationist policies created ethnically mixed reserves. (He is on less secure ground, however, when he argues (p. 40) that Namibia was a testing ground for South African policies; the truth is that South African policy was usually applied, with some modifications, to Namibia. …