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Paper short abstract:

The conceptual device of 'threshold' is deployed to critically explore the history of the Owambo region (Namibia/Angola) caught in the sights of different colonial powers, and the means and mediums through which we come to know history, specifically during the South African occupation in WW1.

Paper long abstract:

A framed or outlined space through which one enters another zone, the term threshold suggests a space of dense histories and passages that is constantly negotiated and renegotiated. In many ways a threshold is a zone of partial convergences. This paper looks at an African floodplain caught in the sights of different colonial powers by sounding out aspects of a much longer history of the region. In doing so it also tries to interrogate the means through which we come to know history, where there is ambiguity in relating each archival fragment to any larger picture. At all times we are fundamentally dealing with the thresholds of historical perception, and there are moments when these are very slippery.

As a conceptual device the notion of threshold situates the Owambo region within a larger subcontinental atlas, as a space of partial overlap and liminalities at different times. It is porous, impure, profoundly compromised, engendered by cultural values and historical resources that may or may not have a common measure and which changed and adapted. This is an intense space of cross-group interactions whose components cannot be boiled down to their essences, even though there were competing claims to distinctive origins, genealogies and civilisational values at different moments. How these became embroiled is of interest here, as are the limits to these processes. There were parities and disparities, around which power was very specifically mobilized, especially during the South African occupation during World War 1.