Neither This Nor That

Neither this nor that. Reflections on cattle, colonisation, and contradiction Steven Van Wolputte, K.U.Leuven Paper presented at the ASC seminar, March 8, Leiden. Draft, please do not quote Table of contents 1 INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................2 2 SITUATING ..................................................................................................2 3 ARGUMENT..................................................................................................3 4 CATTLE AND COLONISATION........................................................................4 5 CASE: EPUNGA/ LUNGSICKNESS IN NORTH-WEST NAMIBIA, 1920-PRESENT....6 6 DISCUSSION: THE PLACE OF AMBIGUITY IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS.. 15 7 CONCLUSIONS ........................................................................................... 16 1 INTRODUCTION This presentation concentrates, first of all, on providing a social and political history of Namibia’s northern Kunene Region between the onset of South African colonial rule and now. The entry I take is livestock in general, and the successive epidemics of lungsickness (Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia, CBPP) in this border region in particular. Using this history I, secondly, want to investigate a more theoretical problem, namely the status of ambiguity in anthropological (and historical) analysis. The ethnographic and historical material presented here is part of a larger project that focuses on the social and political meaning and role of animals in north-western Namibia (see van Wolputte, 2004a, 2004b; van Wolputte & Verswijver 2004). Ultimately, this project wants to shed light on the way the inhabitants of the region make and unmake identity and belonging, for instance vis-à-vis the colonial past or vis-à-vis the Namibian state. However, my goal in using historical material (such as oral accounts or archival stuff) is not to recount a linear, orthodox sequence of events. Rather, I concentrate on the uncertainties and ambiguities, on the hopes, suppositions, ambitions and expectations but also on the fears, disappointments and frustrations documented in the colonial archive and by popular lore. This is what Victor Turner (1988: 101-102) referred to as the subjunctive mood (as opposed to the indicative or, in a colonial context, imperative mood) that acts as a reference frame, a metapattern through which ‘the facts of experience can be viewed, reflected upon, and evaluated’ (Turner, 1988: 103; Whyte, 2002: 171-175). In that sense, this account is in line with the history of mentality advocated by for instance Jacques Le Goff (1972) and Aaron Gurevich (1988). In short: by providing a tribology (‘the study of surfaces in relative motion’, see van Wolputte, 2005) I want to sketch the friction between different groups of local actors (civil servants, officers, veterinarians, herders, labourers, headmen, and so on) in the northern Kunene Region. With regard to my use of archival material, this implies that I do not consider these documents, maps or letters as evidence of a chain of events, but rather as social and cultural texts situated within a particular, localised, configurations of political relationships. 2 SITUATING This contribution is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in the northern Kunene Region since 1995, and on archival research in the National Archives of Namibia. This northern Kunene Region, also known as Kaoko or Kaokoland, is a mountainous, arid borderland characterized by (the memory of) indirect rule and apartheid (1915-1990), civil war (1966-1988) and international conflict (1975-2002). Most people in the region belong to the wider group of OtjiHerero-speaking groups (Himba, Herero, Zemba, Ngambwe, Hakahona, …). A majority of them are pastoralists, meaning they raise, breed, and market livestock, in particular cattle. At the fringes: the Kunene borderland • Brief history of the region • Until 1940s: region administered by native affairs commissioner, Ondangwa, Ovamboland (Carl Hahn), two police posts on the border with Angola (Tshimhaka, Swartbooisdrift), the other in the South • In 1941: native affairs office and police post in Opuwo (Ohopoho); starting as an administrative outpost, Opuwo became a garrison town in the 1970s; today: capital of the Kunene region. • Kaokoland in the margins of the state In general, Kaoko was regarded as a remote region, far away from the centre; it was a frontier (see Kopytoff 1977), deliberately maintained by, in this case, both the South African and the Portuguese regime. This implied that • Kaokoland – literally – was made into a bufferzone between ‘Africa’ (Angola) and the white-owned commercial farms in the Police Zone. o to keep the police zone free from cattle diseases, o to protect the white monopoly on the legal trade in cattle and beef. o a labour reserve (as happened in the north-central regions) • Fencing • Veterinary cordon fence: distinguish between northern communal areas and police zone. In colonial discourse: built to contain livestock disease; but also to contain people (labour) o In Kaoko: cattle free zones (north, East, South; desert and ocean in the west. • Borderland: until the end of the 1960s, the colonial presence was hampered by a lack of means and manpower 3 ARGUMENT Main idea: o ambiguity was a central element in the experience of colonialism: o the margins of the colonial state; o continuity (the state effect) experienced after independence o one reason being the uncertainty surrounding livestock and cattle. o Therefore, this uncertainty (subjunctivity) is/was not accidental. o like with every form of governance, there was a big discrepancy between, for instance, colonial discourse and practice. o Moreover, ‘the’ coloniser was itself divided into different factions, interest groups, and so on. To this one can add the divergent responses to colonial rule by different agents among the ‘colonized’, and the divergent reactions their actions provoked among colonial agents. o The point, however, is not to observe that contradictions and ambivalences existed; Observing these paradoxes is relatively easy. o building on the history and memory of lungsickness in the northern Kunene region, I argue that these contradictions (in the margin) were crucial for indirect rule and, later, apartheid, to ‘work.’ Also colonialism, also apartheid, needed to adapt to the logic of the situation. o Nonetheless, one may not forget that this process of adaptation was backed up by a formidable, and violent, government apparatus. In order to go beyond colonising dichotomies such as advanced and primitive, coloniser and colonized, it is adamant to regard the colonial encounter as a social process of adaptation and negotiation. However, this emphasis on process and interaction may not blind us for the (threat of) violence that to an important extent shaped this interaction. o Ambiguity as central element in experience of state o Remarks o ambiguity and contradiction vary with the level of analysis one applies: if one focuses on colonialism as a whole, it is not difficult to find anomalies and discrepancies. This has been one of the reasons to opt here for a ‘micro-physical’ (term is Foucault’s) analysis of colonial rule. o It is also erroneous to regard colonial discourse and practice as fragmented and contradictory only; they were partly integrated and coherent, if only because of the fact that all measures relied on a modernist vision of control and state intervention, and, most importantly perhaps, on the (threat of) violence. o For a good understanding: this does not imply a revisionist or aestheticizing attempt to soften the edges of a brutal, exploitative and abusive reality which – as more than ‘just’ a political system – inscribed itself in both habitus and hexis of ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ (see, for example, Dedering 1993). On the contrary, it constitutes a first attempt, in line with my phenomenological approach, to understand and reconstruct (or re-imagine) colonial and postcolonial realities from a multiperspectival stance. My agenda is to remove the inhabitants of northern Namibia from their one-dimensional and stereotyped role of ‘victim’ and passive subject of colonization to a position that is able to account for their agency, re-imagination and re-appropriation in and of a encompassing, global, political reality (Apartheid) in which they found themselves, this in order to better understand their role and position in the postcolonial landscape (see Fanon 1986). This ‘victimization’ itself is a consequence of a paternalizing, Western power-discourse that denies multiplicity and erases counternarratives from memory. In other words, colonization had many sides and angles that hitherto, and despite recent and outstanding scholarship in the field, have remained underexposed. 4 CATTLE AND COLONISATION 4.1 Cattle and the colony • Cattle is ambiguous: see Comaroff & Comaroff 1991): cattle as ancestral heritage (cattle is history) and cattle as commodity (Hutchinson 1996) • Cattle and the state effect (Mitchell): cattle was the main medium through which the state was experienced; the embodiment of the state effect (taxes, passes, permits, ‘destruction’ of infected herds, vaccination, branding, …) • Also nowadays: Cattle and the (post)colonial state; state is experienced through procedures aimed at, for instance, controlling livestock; current importance of the veterinary cordon fence in political discourse. • Cattle as bodies of power and change: o through cattle:

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