We are delighted to announce that the open access co-edited collection we've been working on over the last few years is now published!
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast: Conservation Histories, Policies and Practices in North-west Namibia explores the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia.
Published by Open Book Publishers, this cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and conservation practitioners. The volume began with an international online workshop held in July 2022, with the title Etosha-Kunene Conservation Conversations: Knowing, protecting and being-with nature, from Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast.
The book's topics range from colonial histories to water management, perceptions of ‘wildlife’ and the politics of belonging. Together, these essays confront a critical question, namely:
how can the conservation of biodiversity-rich landscapes be reconciled with historical injustices of social exclusion and marginalisation?
The book includes contributions by 13 Namibian authors who lead seven of the 21 chapters, plus a range of international researchers who have worked on conservation issues in Namibia. Here are some of the authors with their copies of the book!
Top, L to R: Dr Kletus Likuwa, Univ. of Namibia (UNAM); Welhemina Suro Ganuses, Save the Rhino Trust and Nami-Daman Traditional Authority; Dr Ute Dieckmann, Univ. of Cologne; Middle: Kenneth |Uiseb, Ministry of Environment, Forestry & Tourism (looking at download figures for the book!), with Dr Jeff Muntifering, Save the Rhino Trust; Mathilde Brassine and Dr John Heydinger, Lion Rangers Programme, with Prof. Sian Sullivan; Bottom: Kahingirisina Maoveka with Sian Sullivan; Dr Elsemi Olwage; Likeleli Zuvee Katjirua, Prof. Selma Lendelvo, Michael Shipepe David, UNAM.
Content and structure
The book opens with an Introduction by the book's editors called Etosha-Kunene conservation conversations: An introduction. Here we outline the structure of the book and its organisation into five parts.
Part 1 sets the scene with a focus on Conservation Histories in Etosha-Kunene, comprised of three chapters by the book's editors. We aim here to provide historical contexts for the detailed case material forming the book’s remaining chapters.
Chapter 1, Etosha-Kunene, from 'pre-colonial' to German colonial times, reviews how the diversity of peoples of north-west Namibia were affected by colonialism. German colonialisam from 1884 onwards led to a dramatic Indigenous Uprising in north-west Namibia in 1897-98, known as the Swartbooi or Grootberg Uprising. In subsequent years, genocidal events preceded the establishment of Game Reserve No. 2 in 1907, involving a huge area stretching from Etosha Pan to the Kaokoveld in the north-west. The chapter also explores establishment of the first 'game' legislation in the territory under the German colonial regime.
Chapter 2 on Spatial severance and nature conservation: Apartheid histories in Etosha-Kunene, considers the many boundary changes associated with settler colonialism, conservation and the 1970s establishment of 'homelands' in north-west Namibia. Covering the period when 'South West Africa' was under South African rule from 1920 until Independence in 1990, the chapter considers the different conservation concerns arising for 'Etosha-Kunene' after German colonialism. The chapter closes with a summary of the new 'community-based' approaches to conservation initiated in the 1980s in north-west Namibia.
In the third and final chapter of Part 1, we focus on CBNRM [Community-Based Natural Resources Management] and landscape approaches to conservation in Kunene Region, post-Independence. This chapter explores how the post-1990 Namibian government and associated organisations (Non-Governmental Organistions, NGOs; the private sector; civil society, etc.) worked to address past inequities, with varying successes.
Part 2 turns to Social Lives of Conservation in Etosha-Kunene, Post-Independence. It brings together five detailed case-studies on different socio-ecological situations to illuminate environmental governance complexities arising in the three decades since Namibia gained Independence.
Chapter 4 by Ute Dieckmann on Haiǁom resettlement, legal action and political representation analyses an Indigenous land claim and farm resettlement case arising from historical displacement associated with the establishment of what is now Etosha National Park. Some efforts have been made to compensate Haiǁom by purchasing several farms for them in the vicinity of Etosha National Park, although most Haiǁom residents of the park resisted their resettlement, fearing they would lose all access to the park, i.e. their ancestral land. It is for this reason that in 2015 they launched a legal land claim which ultimately proved unsuccessful, although the issues linger today.
In Chapter 5, Ruben Schneider shares some of his PhD research on widely varying local perspectives on CBNRM in selected Namibian conservancies (pseudonymised) in Kunene Region. Called Environmentalities of Namibian conservancies: How communal area residents govern conservation in return, the chapter reviews how communal area residents in north-west Namibia experience, understand, and respond to their conservancies and their governance. A key part of Ruben's analysis is to cautions against a simplistic affirmation of the conservation dictum that 'those who benefit also care', especially in situations of stark experiential discrepancies and distributional injustices.
Chapter 6 by Elsemi Olwage also draws on PhD research to explore how drought and historical circumstances evolved into a legal conservancy-related land dispute in Ozundundu Conservancy, north-east of the settlement of Sesfontein on the Hoanib River. Called The politics of authority, belonging and mobility in disputing land in southern Kaoko the chapter delves into the interwoven politics shaping “customary” land-rights in the area of Elsemi's research. She argues that ancestral land-rights need to be understood as social and political, rather than historical, facts; and as relationally established and re-established in practice, over time, and at different scales. These factors are critical for evidence-based decision-making and jurisprudence in a legally pluralistic context.
Chapter 7 by Diego Menestrey Schwieger, Michael Bollig, Elsemi Olwage and Michael Schnegg provides an important analysis of the historical drilling of boreholes in Kaokoveld, north-west Namibia. The emergence of a hybrid hydro-scape in northern Kunene explores both resistance to and uptake of borehole drilling by otjiHerero-speaking pastoralists of the area, and the effects of boreholes on mobility practices and consequently on the area's vegetation. The outcome is a dynamic bricolage of institutions shaped by different practices, power relations, norms, and values. Today, local communities reliably maintain water supply, but not always on an equitable basis for all users.
Chapter 8 by Likeleli Zuvee Katjirua, Michael Shipepe David and Jeff Muntifering, closes Part 2 by reporting on a survey to ascertain perceptions and understandings of 'wildlife' by young people in north-west Namibia. Eliciting empathy and connectedness toward different species in north-west Namibia aims to better understand how young members of communal-area conservancies in Kunene Region know and perceive the value of selected indigenous fauna species in these areas, alongside domestic livestock—specifically goats (Capra hircus). Perceptions of black rhino (Diceros bicornis bicornis), lion (Panthera leo) and oryx (Oryx gazella) are assessed, as are respondents’ sense of connectedness to nature, town, and home.
Part 3 turns to Etosha-Kunene Ecologies, comprising three chapters focusing on different ecological issues & management concerns in north-west Namibia.
In Chapter 9, Kahingirisina Maoveka, Dennis Liebenberg and Sian Sullivan consider Giraffes and their impact on key tree species in the Etendeka Tourism Concession, north-west Namibia. Historically, populations of giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis angolensis) have been amplified in north-west Namibia through translocations intended to enhance the 'tourism product'. Concerns have been raised, however, about their effects on important tree species of the area such as Maerua schinzii and Boscia albitrunca. Drawing on surveys carried out by Maoveka in 2016 and 2021 on the status of these trees in relation to browsing giraffe, this chapter shares Maoveka's findings and explores different techniques of protecting these trees.
Chapter 10 by ǂKîbagu Heinrich Kenneth |Uiseb asks: Are mountain and plains zebra hybridising in north-west Namibia? Focusing on the 'Greater Etosha Landscape' and on interactions between two animal species critical to the ecosystems of 'Etosha- Kunene' – namely mountain zebra (Equus zebra, specifically the subspecies E. z. hartmannae) and plains zebra (E. quagga, specifically the subspecies E. q. burchellii) – the chapter considers the conservation implications of possible hybridisation. This is a context in which large herbivore species are increasingly restricted to fenced protected areas with artificial waterpoints, a situation that limits their opportunities for dispersal and access to natural water sources, with the potential for hybridisation through these constraints.
Chapter 11 focuses on Communities and elephants in the northern highlands, Kunene Region, Namibia. Authored by Michael Wenborn, Roger Collinson, Siegfried Muzuma, Dave Kangombe, Vincent Nijman and Magdalena Svensson, this is a strongly collaborative chapter that foregrounds the wealth of conservancy ranger knowledge for elephant tourism and management. Bringing together information from game guards in 10 conservancies in an area north-east of Etosha National Park known locally as the 'northern highlands', the chapter draws together analysis of conservancy Event Book data on human-elephant conflict incidents reported in Orupupa and Ehi-Rovipuka conservancies.
Part 4 returns to some of the historical themes considered in Part 1, taking a deeper dive into the histories shaping present issues, opportunities and concerns for specific conservation areas across Etosha-Kunene. In Historicising conservation and community territories in Etosha-Kunene, we work from west to east across the area, engaging with varied cultural histories linked with these areas.
Chapter 12 by Sian Sullivan and Welhemina Suro Ganuses documents Cultural heritage & histories of the Northern Namib / Skeleton Coast National Park, reconstructing livelihoods and mobilities in the challenging but beautiful landscapes of the Skeleton Coast. This area has been designated since 1971 as the Skeleton Coast National Park. The chapter draws on two main sources of information, namely historical documents stretching back to the late 1800s, and oral history research with now elderly people who have direct and familial memories of using and living in areas now within the Park boundary. In doing so, the chapter draws into focus human histories of the Northern Namib.
Chapter 13 by Sian Sullivan focuses on historical circumstances underlying the creation of the Palmwag Tourism Concession, an area of >550,000 hectares of the Damaraland Communal Land Area in Kunene Region. Historicising the Palmwag Tourism Concession, north-west Namibia thereby explores competing and overlapping colonial, Indigenous and conservation visions of this landscape. Established under the pre-Independence Damaraland Regional Authority led by Justus ǁGaroëb, part of this landscape formerly comprised a commercial farming area for white settler farmers, the expansion of which was associated with evictions of people living here. The iterative clearance of people from this area helped make possible the 1962 western expansion of Etosha Game Park, followed by the establishment of a large trophy hunting concession between the Hoanib and Ugab rivers in the 1970s; prior to its establishment as a tourism concession in the 1980s.
In Chapter 14, Arthur Hoole and Sian Sullivan focus on what it means to inhabit a communal area conservancy on the boundary of a national park. Living next to Etosha National Park: The case of Ehi-Rovipuka reviews ovaHerero histories in western Etosha, documenting experiences of living next to a park border, and local knowledge of wildlife and 'field foods'. Some aspects of the complex and remembered histories of association with the western part of what is now Etosha National Park are traced via a 'memory mapping' methodology with ovaHerero elders. These methods draw out peoples’ histories of utilising, moving through, being born and desiring to be buried in the western reaches of the park.
In Chapter 15, entitled ‘Walking through places’: Exploring the former lifeworld of Haiǁom in Etosha, Ute Dieckmann draws on ethnographic research to reconstruct the meanings of the Etosha National Park landscape for some of those who formerly lived there. In doing so, the chapter draws into focus the dense relational web of land, kinship, humans, animals, plants & spirit beings that once constituted Indigenous lives in Etosha. In understanding the former lifeworld of Haiǁom in Etosha as an integrated ecology and an almost forgotten past, Dieckmann argues that these understandings should be acknowledged by, and integrated into, future nature conservation policies and practices.
Chapter 16 by Stasja Koot and Moses ǁKhumûb closes Part 4 by reviewing History and social complexities for San at Tsintsabis resettlement farm, Namibia. Tsintsabis resettlement farm is just over a 100 kms east of Etosha National Park, and is home to Haiǁom (and to a lesser degree !Xun) who were 'resettled' on their own ancestral land; some as former evictees from the park. The chapter assesses the history of Tsintsabis is analysed in relation to two pressing, and related, social complexities: namely, ethnic tension and in-migration, and leadership. Arguing that Tsintsabis shows the importance of acknowledging historically built-up injustices when addressing current social complexities, the chapter emphasises the importance of long-term ethno-historical research about resettlement. The aim is to better understand the contextual processes within which resettlement is embedded.
Part 5 forms the final section of the book. Picking up the Etosha-Kunene Ecologies theme in Part 3, we focus in-depth here on People, Lions and CBNRM, through three chapters by authors involved with Namibia's Lion Rangers Programme.
Chapter 17 by John Heydinger focuses on Integrating remote sensing with CBNRM for desert-adapted lion conservation, explaining how GPS and camera-trap data on lion movements can contribute to community-oriented conservation. Remote sensing methods of carnivore monitoring are now contributing to lion conservation and the mitigation of 'human-lion conflict' (HLC) on communal lands in Namibia’s Kunene Region. Here, a significant challenge for lion conservationists is the ability to rigorously monitor lion movements in the unfenced landscapes of north-west Namibia. This effort is assisting trained community conservationists in taking responsibility for monitoring lions and managing HLC on communal lands, where drought and prey decline can raise predator pressure on peoples' livestock.
In Chapter 18, Mathilde Brassine turns to Lion Rangers’ use of SMART [Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool] for lion conservation in Kunene. This chapter reviews how software tools assist collection and analysis of patrol data to help with managing human-lion interactions. The dedicated team of Lion Rangers who patrol the vast Kunene Region on foot, are equipped with little more than smartphones to record lion movement, prey availability, and other environmental observations. The SMART system has increasingly allowed timely data collection to take place, permitting rapid analysis and adaptive management.
Chapter 19 by Uakendisa Muzuma comprises the last of this trio of chapters on lion conservation and CBNRM in north-west Namibia. Entitled Relationships between humans and lions in wildlife corridors through CBNRM in north-west Namibia, the chapter discusses current research from remote sensing of lion and goat movement using satellite-Global Positioning System collars. In doing so it focuses on understanding goat movement ecology within designated conservancy wildlife areas. It is intended that information collected on goat movements within wildlife areas will be used to better manage the shared landscape in the perceived 'corridor' between Etosha National Park and the Skeleton Coast National Park. The research shared here thus focuses on the 'lion-goat space', contributing to evidence-based goat spatial habitat use in communal area conservancies to ensure appropriate deployments of human-lion conflict mitigation measures.
The book's concluding chapter by the editors highlights themes pursued through the book, for example, histories, political economy, belongings, power, exclusions and inclusions. Realising conservation, from Etosha Pan to the Skeleton, emphasises the interplay between local communities, colonial legacies, and global environmental trends in the regional conservation histories, policies and practices discussed in this volume. As we state in the last paragraph of this chapter:
In sum, we need to understand conservation as realised by all these different actors and actants. All of them (including the contributors and editors of this volume) – promoting, negotiating, contesting, resisting or appropriating conservation – play vital roles in how conservation in Etosha- Kunene evolved, what it means, and how it can be read and understood today. All these human and beyond-human actors, combined with conservation and other organisations, donors, investors and the state, will continue to play a pivotal role in the future paths taken for conservation in Namibia: and hopefully, some of the controversial issues discussed and revealed in this volume can be reconciled.
Lastly, the book includes an Appendix comprising a Chronology of conservation legislation and relevant for “Etosha-Kunene”, Namibia. This chronology stretches from the first regulations for commercial hunting issued by the German colonial administration in 1892 to the National Elephant Conservation and Management Plan
2021/2022–2030/2031 issued by the post-Independence Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism (MEFT) in 2021. This chronology covering almost 130 years of legislated conservation and conservation policies can be viewed and downloaded here:
Endorsements and downloads
So far, we've received two generous endorsements of our book, as shared below:
This book 'offers an immense contribution to knowledge on conservation practices in Namibia and beyond. Any ardent seeker of knowledge on conservation practices should take the opportunity to read and become informed by the arguments presented in this book, and thereby become empowered to make informed choices regarding their practices in the conservation arena. I heartily recommend it to academic and other audiences as an addition to our knowledge on conservation histories and transformations in Namibia.'
Dr Kletus Likuwa
University of Namibia
I’m so impressed with the compilation. It is one of the few interdisciplinary contributions that appears genuinely interested in finding solutions to long-standing conservation issues rooted in historical exclusion, colonialism and racial injustice. Despite the criticisms often directed at the conservation sector, the first chapter of this book made it clear that it aims to make a positive and constructive contribution to the debate. In the past, I’ve often felt that critiques of the conservation sector have offered little in the way of compromise, paying only lip service to the biodiversity crisis or dismissing its potential to improve the lives of rural communities. However, this edited volume doesn’t come across like that at all. It also covers an impressive breadth of topics, with contributions from a remarkable array of voices.
M. Timm Hoffman
Leslie Hill Chair of Plant Conservation, University of Cape Town
If you would like to add a review or endorsement of the book, please write to etoshakunenehistories@gmail.com
We're also delighted to see that in less than a month since this volume was published (on 2 August 2024) the complete book has been downloaded more than 600 times:
Usage figures additionally show that to date the most downloads by continent have been in Africa, with Namibia the country that has accessed the book the most:
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the many individuals and organisations who have supported our research and the bringing together of this book. Many of the chapters include acknowledgements specific to those chapters, but let us conclude with some specific thank yous to those who enabled this book to come into existence:
the Etosha-Kunene Histories research project has been supported since 2020 by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) (AH.T013230.1 / DI 2595/1-1);
we could not have carried out our research, or brought this book together, without research permission from Namibia’s National Commission for Research, Science, and Technology (AN202101038) and the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism;
we also thank our universities—Bath Spa University, the University of Cologne and the University of Namibia—for supporting our research;
last but definitely not least, we are very grateful to our editors at Open Book Publishers for their enthusiasm for publishing this volume, and for their extraordinary attention to detail.
References
Denker, H. 2022. An Assessment of the Tourism Potential in the Eastern Ombonde-Hoanib People’s Landscape to Guide Tourism Route Development. Windhoek: GIZ.
Dieckmann, U. 2007. Haiǁom in the Etosha Region: A History of Colonial Settlement, Ethnicity and Nature Conservation. Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien.
Dieckmann U. 2014. Kunene, Oshana and Oshikoto Regions. In Dieckmann, U., Thiem, M., Dirkx, E. and Hays, J. (eds.) Scraping the Pot: San in Namibia Two Decades After Independence. Windhoek: Land Environment and Development Project of the Legal Assistance Centre and Desert Research Foundation of Namibia, 173–232.
Turner, W.C., Périquet, S., Goelst, C.E. et al. Africa’s drylands in a changing world: Challenges for wildlife conservation under climate and land-use changes in the Greater Etosha Landscape. Global Ecology and Conservation 36: e02221.
Weule, K. 1909. Bemerkungen zur Völkerkarte von Deutsch-Südwestafrika, n.p. in Meyer, H. (ed.) Das deutsche Kolonialreich: eine Länderkunde der deutschen Schutzgebiete. Band 2: Togo, Südwestafrika, Schutzgebiete in der Südsee und Kiautschougebiet. unter Mitarb. von Siegfried Passarge, Leonhard Schultze, Wilh. Sievers und Georg Wegener. Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts.
Bình luận