Paper short abstract:

In 1971, and again in 1977, hundreds of "white and coloured" fishermen in Walvis Bay in present-day Namibia illegally stopped work to protest "overexploitation" amid declining pilchard catch. How should we "read against the archival grain" to understand this event?

Paper long abstract:

The Walvis Bay fishery for sardines (pilchard) and anchovies in present-day Namibia is a case study in environmental mismanagement, interracial labor activism and archival silences. The fishery was developed in the 1950s and initially managed conservatively, with a quota around 200,000 tons, but in the late 1950s South African capital put pressure on fishery administrators to increase quotas. By 1968 the South West African pilchard fishery was taking 1.4 million tons of pilchard and making record profits (almost none of which stayed in Namibia).

The fishery employed over a thousand white and coloured fishers, and up to eight thousand seasonal Ovambo contract laborers in fish processing plants and related work. In a surprising twist for fisheries history, workers organized multiple labor stoppages framed in explicitly conservationist terms. In 1971 the fishers observed a decline in total catch and increase in time and effort spent fishing; they perceived managers as engaging in as unsustainable overexploitation, and organized a labor stoppage to reduce the quota. In 1977, with the fishery in even more dire straits, another "stayaway" was carried out. The following year the fishery was closed; it did not recover for decades.

This paper explores the voices and silences that emerge in the archive. Much attention was paid to the population of the nonhuman actors - the fish - but little was recorded about the Ovambo workers, while the "strikers" engaged in self-silencing for their own protection. The events have been ignored in both fisheries and historical literature until now.