Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the effects of the partial commoditisation of natural resources and members of a traditional community in a north-east Namibian conservancy. It explores local efforts to resist minimum wage rates in private partnerships in attempts to secure an equal share of profits.

Paper long abstract:

Following independence in Namibia, several former 'homelands' under the apartheid regime were given 'conservancy' status, and 'traditional communities' were given exclusive de facto rights to manage and utilise the natural resources found within. In the spirit of community-based natural resource management approaches of the time, this handing over of control was to meet two ends: to valorise the preservation of natural resources by local people, and to partially commoditise both natural resources and traditional communities to bring foreign investment and employment. For the Ju|'hoansi of Nyae Nyae Conservancy in north-east Namibia, this approach has seen the establishment of own-use quotas for members, and considerable foreign investment that generate profits shared out among members as annual cash grants. The majority of these profits are secured through hunting concessions and resource harvesting, with the rest accrued through fees gathered from film and research teams and shares generated through enterprise. While the former capitalise on the region's diverse fauna and flora, the latter capitalise on Ju|'hoansi both as keepers of an "ancient culture" and as marginalised minorities in need of development. This paper explores Ju|'hoan attempts to negotiate their terms of employment and increase the value of their labour or the goods they produce for sale, in several investment partnerships. It shows how Ju|'hoansi, rather than establish minimum wages that apply across partnerships, seek to negotiate the terms of each partnership on the basis of how much profit they feel is likely to be generated, and the likely value of an equal share.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines claims to hunting as sustainable development, both ecological and social, through a historical engagement with the hunting’s links to apartheid. It views the game farm, developed as both industry and escape, as a complex point of intersection for race and class, urban and rural.

Paper long abstract:

On July 1st 2015, Walter Palmer, a white hunter from Minnesota shot and killed Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe. The complex responses to this violence in the public sphere regarding the hunting of animals and the hunting down of 'poachers' serves as an unnerving reminder that the hunting of animals and the hunting of humans are not as clearly separated from one another as we may want to think. In the postapartheid era hunting is legitimized through sustainable development arguments, but vestiges of apartheid era inheritances remain in discourses and practices around the hunting of so-called "poachers." This paper examines hunting in the Waterberg District, South Africa over the second half of the 20th century to develop an understanding of how normative categories of progress, social change, and heritage used to support postapartheid claims of hunting as sustainable development are racially and historically mediated in the space of the game farm and the organizing logics of apartheid. Tracking the formation of the Transvaal Game Protection Commission in 1945, the subsequent 1948 election of the National Party and following the implementation of apartheid laws through the 1960's, 70's and 80's, this paper shows how hunting and wildlife management developed within both apartheid structures and the anti-apartheid movements. The continued contestations between Tswana, Pedi, Afrikaner and international hunters over hunting resources provides an opening to investigate whose notions of sustainability, both human and environmental, are being pursued and for what purpose, particularly when claimed in connection to particular pre-colonial and colonial pasts.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways that architecture in Pretoria intersected with the apartheid state’s policy of separate development. It argues that architects from the University of Pretoria acted as trustees of a local Ndebele community, supporting the states’ policies by creating a rural-urban binary.

Paper long abstract:

This paper sets out to explore how vernacular and modern architecture in greater Pretoria, South Africa, intersected with the apartheid state's attempts to guide black South Africans towards "progress" and "development." It examines how, on the eve of apartheid (1943), the University of Pretoria's (UP) architecture department developed a relationship with a local Ndebele community by documenting their forms of vernacular architecture. As this relationship developed, architects from the university, as well as its recent graduates, received lucrative commissions to turn Pretoria into the "modern" capital of the newly-elected apartheid state. On the one hand, architects ensured the "progress" of the city while on the other, maintained the idea of the Ndebele as inherently rural and in danger of losing their culture, and by extension, their unique architectural expression. In addition, university architects aligned themselves with the apartheid state's vision of separate development, in which the Ndebele - and black South Africans in general - would be organized into distinct ethnic groups and would live self-reliantly and separately from whites. Under the trusteeship of whites, they would reach their own level of "development" in their own ethnically designated territories. Drawing on the history and historiography of modern and vernacular architecture in and around Pretoria, this paper argues that UP's architecture department engaged in a relationship of trusteeship with the Ndebele by not only aligning themselves with the policy of separate development, but also creating and sustaining a binary in which the Ndebele would always remain rural.

Paper short abstract:

I will discuss South Africa’s nature conservation policies and the proclamation of two parks in the former Eastern Caprivi homeland (1970s-1980s). The proclamations can be seen as the final outcome of South Africa’s conservation strategies, as well as the basis for recent conservation initiatives.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa exercised its power over the Caprivi through a combination of military force and economic 'development' strategies, both of which called for the intense surveillance, research and mapping of the region. All of these layers of power came together in the late 1970s and 1980s through the research and protection of what was increasingly seen as Caprivi's most valuable asset: the charismatic wildlife. A focus on wildlife conservation in the Eastern Caprivi of the late 1970s grew simultaneously with an emergent global awareness for environmental protection, new policies of community based and market based conservation as well as with the rapidly diminishing numbers in wildlife being mainly caused by the extensive hunting activities of members of the South African Defence Force.

Practices used by the military and civil administration to proclaim the two national parks in the 1980s anticipated discourses that would become dominant in post-independent Namibia. To flesh out such continuities I will specifically discuss the role ascribed to the potential 'economic development for the 'community' in establishing the parks, both of whom play a major role in communal conservancies today. I will argue, that in the 1980s new community and marked based nature conservation policies merged in the Caprivi with the still working South Africa's politics of separate development and self-reliance. Both together providing the basis for a framing of the region as a holiday destination for an urban elite