Can Environmental Injustices be Addressed in Conservation? Settlement History and Conservation-Induced Displacement in the Case of Lyanshulu in the Zambezi Region, Namibia (original) (raw)

The making of a conservation landscape: the emergence of a conservationist environmental infrastructure along the Kwando River in Namibia's Zambezi region

Africa, 2021

The Kwando Basin of north-eastern Namibia is firmly embedded in current national and international conservation agendas. It is a key part of the world's largest transboundary conservation area, the Kavango–Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area, and the home of seven community-based conservation areas (conservancies) and three smaller national parks (Mudumu, Nkasa Rupara and Bwabwata). While conservation agendas often start from the assumption that an authentic part of African nature is conserved as an assemblage of biota that has not been gravely impacted by subsistence agriculture, colonialism and global value chains, we show that environmental infrastructure along the Namibian side of the Kwando Valley has been shaped by the impact of administrative measures and the gradual decoupling of humans and wildlife in a vast wetland. The way towards today's conservation landscape was marked and marred by the enforced reordering of human–environment relations; clearing the...

Conservation and human rights — the case of the ‡ Khomani San ( bushmen ) and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park , South Africa

2007

This paper outlines the dispossession of the southern Kalahari San of their ancestral lands, due to colonisation, the development of the conservation estate, and South Africa’s apartheid policies. The San (or Bushmen as they more usually call themselves) are the first peoples of southern Africa and there is evidence of their widespread distribution over the sub-continent, dating back at least 30 000 years. With the establishment of the Kalahari Gemsbok Park in 1931, people’s rights to live and hunt on the land were gradually eroded until their final eviction from the park in the mid 1970s. Under the new democratic government, the ‡Khomani San Community submitted a land claim for 400 000 ha in the park, which was vindicated and formally settled with major modifications in March 1999. The paper considers whether progress has been made since then, if in fact the rights of the San have been fully restored to them, and what factors are driving such outcomes. A look into the past... Most ...

In the way: Perpetuating land dispossession of the indigenous Hai//om and the collective action lawsuit for Etosha National Park and Mangetti West, Namibia

Nomadic Peoples, 2019

As former mobile foraging peoples, the indigenous Hai//om San of Namibia lost most of their land-including Etosha National Park and Mangetti West-to other groups and the state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After independence (1990), the government redistributed some of this land to various expropriated groups. In the following overview , we delve into this complex history to argue that the recent decision by the Hai//om (2015) to file a collective action lawsuit against the government of Namibia over Etosha and Mangetti West must be seen in a context of ongoing, often subtle, processes of land dispossession simultaneously taking place as a result of marginalisation and structural disempowerment.

Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and its land claimants: a pre- and post-land claim conservation and development history

Environmental Research Letters, 2011

Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park is located in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and neighbouring Botswana. The local communities on the South African side, the Khomani San (Bushmen) and Mier living adjacent to the park have land rights inside and outside the park. The path from a history of land dispossession to being land owners has created conservation challenges manifested through heightened inter-and intra-community conflicts. The contestations for land and tourism development opportunities in and outside the park have drawn in powerful institutions such as the governments, South African National Parks, private safari companies, local interest groups and NGOs against relatively powerless local communities. This has consequently attracted national and international interest since it may result in further marginalization of the communities who lack the power to negotiate resource access. Moreover, the social and political system of the San is romanticized while little is reported about the Mier, who are an integral part of the park management system. To make these issues more accessible to a growing audience of interested parties and to better understand present conservation and development challenges and opportunities, this paper synthesizes information on the pre-and post-land restitution history of the park and the adjacent communities.

Maps and memory, rights and relationships: articulations of global modernity and local dwelling in delineating land for a communal-area conservancy in north-west Namibia

2008

Mapping new administrative domains for integrating conservation and development, and defining rights in terms of both new policy and the citizenry governed thereby, are central to current neoliberal environment and development programmes known as Community Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM). Examples now abound of the ambiguous and frequently contested outcomes of such initiatives and processes. In this paper I draw on historical and ethnographic material for north-west Namibia, and particularly in relation to Damara/≠Nū Khoen, to explore two issues. First, I highlight an historical context of multiple displacements and mapped reorganisations of landscapes and human populations, and an associated politicising of alternative memories of land access and use. Second, I consider a nexus of constitutive and affective relationships with landscape that tend to be displaced by the economistic ‘culture complex’ of neoliberalism. Acknowledging epistemological and ontological disjunctions in conceptions and experiences of people-land relationships might go some way towards generating nuanced understanding regarding why conflict emerges in these contexts; as well as constituting a frame for thinking through who and what wins or loses given contemporary globalising trajectories.

Thinking with relations in nature conservation? A case study of the Etosha National Park and Haiǁom

2023

The area of the Etosha National Park in Namibia has been inhabited for many centuries by Haiǁom, a group of (now former) hunter-gatherers. In 1907, Etosha was proclaimed as a game reserve, although Haiǁom were still allowed to live in the area until they were expelled in the 1950s due to then-dominant ideas of fortress conservation. In recent years, Haiǁom have been provided with several resettlement farms by the Namibian government as a reaction to the colonial land dispossession. In this article, I explore the onto-epistemology of Haiǁom (i.e. their being in and knowing the Etosha area), focusing on their relations with the land and with human and beyond-the-human beings before their eviction. I argue that the eviction implies not only economic marginalization but also social deprivation, which is inadequately addressed with resettlement. I suggest that thinking with relations, illustrated with the Haiǁom case, would call for other solutions in the context of measures taken for past land dispossessions and would open new paths for Namibia's nature conservation initiatives.

Model Tribes’ and Iconic Conservationists? The Makuleke Restitution Case in Kruger National Park

Development and Change, 2008

This article investigates how the Makuleke community in Limpopo Province achieved iconic status in relation to land reform and community-based conservation discourses in South Africa and beyond. It argues that the situation may be more complex than it first appears, and the ways in which the Makuleke story has been deployed by NGOs, activists, academics, conservationists, the state and business may be too simplistic. The authors discuss historical representations of the Makuleke ‘tribe’ against the backdrop of their experiences of living in the borderland Pafuri region of the Kruger National Park prior to their forced removal. After investigating the ways in which the chieftaincy, and its relation to communal land, has been strengthened by local mobilizations against threats from the neighbouring Mhinga Tribal Authority, the authors suggest that a central tension in the Makuleke area is the conflict between democratic principles governing the legal entity in control of the land (i.e., the Communal Property Association), and traditionalist patriarchal principles of the Tribal Authority. The article shows how these restitution-linked processes became implicated in the establishment in 2002 of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. The authors also argue that the image of the Makuleke as a ‘model tribe’ is both a product of changing historical circumstances and a contributor to contemporary discourses on land restitution and conservation.