JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Regents of the University of Wisconsin Systemare collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African Economic History.property introduced by European traders, missionaries, and officials. Africans experienced goods such as clothing, guns, liquor, blankets and bicycles not only as new objects to be owned, but also as embodying new methods of property accumulation, whether through the sale of humans, the marketing of agricultural produce, or labor migrancy. And yet while Europeans introduced these goods and often shaped the means by which they were obtained, they could not control their meaning and distribution within African societies. Instead, local dynamics and power relationships provided the context within which these products were assigned both value and ownership.This article examines these new forms of property within the framework of one such local relationship: cross-generational interactions and conflicts within the northern Namibian societies of Ombalantu and Ongandjera, situated in the region commonly known as Ovamboland. Relationships between old and young were crucial in shaping the meanings European objects acquired in the late precolonial period and in shaping access to and control over the objects themselves when they became more widely available in the colonial period. In particular, the era of long-distance trade, intensive raiding, and impoverishment which occurred from about 1880 to 1917 resulted in widespread generational conflict. The sense of instability and deprivation left young peoplechildren and unmarried adultsopen to outside influences and hence to the alternative definitions of status and identity posited by missionaries and labor recruiters. It was these disaffected young people, largely excluded from traditional forms of wealth by the raiding economy and sociopolitical change, who created the system of meanings and value associated with European goods.The transformation in generational relations during these decades forms the context of a second focus of this studythe way in which generational faultlines affected access to these goods. After South Africa effectively colonized northern Namibia and ended raiding in 1917, these generational divisions continued to have relevance and young people continued to seek out European products. They flocked to join churches against their parents' wishes, in order to obtain European goods from missionaries handing them out as "gifts" to attract converts. But the contract labor economy, which was regulated and expanded after 1917, provided a new and more reliable source of European goods whereby recruits could earn cash wages and...
In 1938 or 1939, an uninitiated and unwed girl named Nangombe living in the Uukwaluudhi district of Ovamboland, northern Namibia, became pregnant. If mission and colonial accounts are to be believed, it was not an unusual occurrence at this time, but it had profound consequences for Nangombe and those close to her. By the 1930s, the belief that pre-initiation pregnancies boded ill fortune for clan, chief and community was highly contested, but it was far from extinct. When the chief discovered the pregnancy, he expelled Nangombe. She took refuge in a neighboring society and bore a daughter. While such infants were often killed at birth, Nangombe's was not. Mother and daughter returned home within the year. The chief, enraged by their reappearance, then expelled the entire family.The problems created by Nangombe's child caused tension in her household and the family was driven to begging for food. Nangombe's mother, seeing the catastrophes already caused by the presence of her illegitimate granddaughter and fearing that worse would come, urged her daughter to kill the child. Nangombe refused, while her mother continued to offer dire predictions that their lineage would be destroyed if the child were left alive. Finally, in July 1941, Nangombe gave into her mother's pressure and strangled her daughter. Her father and the local chief reported her act to colonial officials. The colonial government of South West Africa investigated and sent her to trial with her mother, who was charged as an accessory to murder.The nature of the case changed abruptly in the colonial capital of Windhoek. Instead of trying Nangombe for murder, the Supreme Court convened to decide whether she was insane, despite testimony from her village asserting that she was sane and that the murder had been a rational act. Her mother was transformed from a co-defendant to a witness to her daughter's physical and mental health. Nangombe was diagnosed as epileptic and, on this basis, committed to a native asylum in Fort Beaufort, South Africa. She remained there until 1946, when she was released and returned home. She lived out the rest of her life in relative anonymity, little noticed in the communities where she lived and invisible to the colonial administration – a far cry from the scrutiny and public interventions which attended her young adulthood.
This article examines traditions of origin among riparian communities living in a semi-arid environment as a means of exploring how the environment and socio-political identities are mutually constituted. Within Namibian Kavango communities over the past half century, such traditions have fallen into two general categories: those of the royal clans (accepted by most residents) which state that they were the first to settle this section of the river, and those of other groups who claim that their own clans were the real first-comers but were later subordinated by the immigrant kings. Each group of traditions claims prior origins from similar riparian environments as a means of demonstrating how their group was able to tame the wilderness. Indeed, both the royalist and the indigenous traditions rest on shared assumptions about how ownership is established: through first-comer status and through creating 'country', or a place fit for human communities, out of 'bush' or wilderness. Autochthon -immigrant relationships were probably long fraught with tension here, as they were in other parts of southern Africa. Embedded within some of the indigenous traditions are hints of 'charters' establishing relations between the two groups.
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