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Copyright

Elsemi Olwage

Published On

2024-08-02

Page Range

pp. 191–218

Language

  • English

Print Length

28 pages

6. The politics of authority, belonging and mobility in disputing land in southern Kaoko

  • Elsemi Olwage (author)
Chapter of: Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast: Conservation Histories, Policies and Practices in North-west Namibia(pp. 191–218)
The focus of this chapter concerns the interwoven politics of authority, belonging and mobility in shaping ‘customary’ land-rights in southern Kaoko. I argue that ancestral land-rights need to be understood as a social and political rather than a historical fact, and one which is relationally established and re-established in practice, over time, and at different scales. The chapter draws on research conducted from 2014 to 2016 comprising a situational analysis of a land and grazing dispute in southern Kaoko, in and around Ozondundu Conservancy. It shows how persons and groups were navigating overlapping institutions of land governance during an extended drought period, in a context shaped by regional pastoral migrations and mobility. This case material illuminates how conservancies and state courts have become key technologies mobilised to re-establish the interwoven authority and land-rights of particular groups. This dynamic is especially so, given a post-Independence shift towards more centralised state-driven land governance, amidst deeply rooted political fragmentation in most places, and land-grabbing by some migrating pastoralists. The chapter concludes by arguing for the importance of engaging socially legitimate occupation and use rights, and decentralised practices of land governance, towards co-producing ‘communal’ tenure and land-rights between the state and localities. This emphasis is critical for evidence-based decision-making and jurisprudence in a legally pluralistic context.

Contributors

Elsemi Olwage

(author)
Post-doctoral Researcher at University of Namibia

Elsemi Olwage is a Namibian Social Anthropologist, with a background in Development Studies and Political and Environmental Anthropology. She is currently based at the University of Namibia as a post-doctoral researcher in the One Ocean Hub Project. Within this project she is focusing on histories of exclusion and erasure in Walvis Bay, and questions of memory, place, and culture within human rights and global paradigms of ocean governance. She conducted her PhD research in the Kunene Region in 2014-2016 on a land and grazing dispute. Her present and past research interests include post-colonial and post-apartheid land-relations, spatiality, and place-making, in both rural and urban contexts, and its intersections with questions of social and environmental justice, institutional change, the politics of belonging, mobility and migration, ecology, and self- and grass-roots organisation. In the last years she has worked in both academia and consultancy.