Imagining the Post-Apartheid State: An Ethnographic Account of Namibia

By John T. Friedman

In northwest Namibia, people’s political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State. By elucidating the State through a focus on the social, historical and cultural processes that help constitute it, this study helps chart new territory for anthropology, and it contributes an ethnographic perspective to a wider set of interdisciplinary debates on the State and state processes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857450913

John T. Friedman

John T. Friedman is Associate Professor of Socio-cultural Anthropology at the University College Roosevelt of Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Before training as an anthropologist at Cambridge University, he worked in the field of international development. He has been researching and working in Namibia since 1993.

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Imagining the Post-Apartheid State

IMAGINING THE

POST-APARTHEID STATE

An Ethnographic Account of Namibia

John T. Friedman

Published in 2011 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

©2011, 2014 John T. Friedman

First paperback edition published in 2014

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages

for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book

may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information

storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,

without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Friedman, John T.

    Imagining the post-apartheid state : an ethnographic account of Namibia / John T. Friedman.

        p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-85745-090-6 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-85745-091-3 (institutional ebook) – ISBN 978-1-78238-323-9 (paperback) –

  ISBN 978-1-78238-324-6 (retail ebook)

  1. Ethnology–Namibia. 2. Political anthropology–Namibia. 3. Kaokoland (Namibia)–Politics and government. I. Title.

  GN657.N35F75 2011

  305.80096881–dc22

2011006254

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78238-323-9 paperback

ISBN: 978-1-78238-324-6 retail ebook

For my parents,

Gail and William Friedman

CONTENTS

List of Figures

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1   Imagining States

Chapter 2   State Imaginings

PART I   GOVERN-MENTALITY IN KAOKOLAND

Chapter 3   ‘How Do You Feeling about Freedom’

Chapter 4   The Art of Being Governed

PART II   COURTS, LAWS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE

Chapter 5   In the Matter of The State v. Custom

Chapter 6   Judicial Statements

Chapter 7   Legal States of Imagination and their Effect

PART III   CHIEFSHIP AND THE POST-APARTHEID STATE

Chapter 8   Making Politics, Making History

Chapter 9   ‘Tradition’, Authority and the State in Northern Kaokoland

CONCLUSION

Chapter 10   Towards an Ethnography of the (Namibian) State

Notes

References

Index

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 Map: Namibia, Kunene Region, Kaokoland and Opuwo

1.2 ‘The people are living very hard here in Opuwo’

3.1 ‘All windows broken’

3.2 ‘We were left behind’

3.3 ‘My brother eating white bread’

4.1 ‘You can do what you want’

4.2 ‘All nations standing together’

4.3 ‘Family means more than that’

5.1 ‘Only the government and police can do that’

5.2 ‘It is where the man is having the power’

6.1 ‘He is looking for the stolen things’

7.1 ‘This is the High Court of Namibia’

7.2 ‘As Mukuene imagined’

8.1 ‘Herero history is not recognised’

8.2 Genealogy of factions in the Kaokoland chieftaincy dispute

8.3 ‘The heroes that fought for their country’

8.4 ‘A family of the Namibian people’

9.1 ‘He is the ruler of that village’

9.2 ‘If you have power you can do anything you want’

9.3 ‘It has remained covered for many years’

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

They say that one never really finishes writing a book; instead, one just stops. After many years, perhaps too many, I have finally decided to stop writing this book.

My affair with the Namibian State began in the early 1990s. Since then, I have come to know so many lovely people, many of whom gave of themselves in ways that can in no way be matched by a mere acknowledgement such as this. Although they have given me knowledge and support, and ultimately made it possible for me to start and then stop writing this book, it is actually their gift of friendship that I value most of all.

I owe my gratitude to the many Kaokoland-connected people who shared their ideas, time, knowledge and space, and who assisted me during my stays in Opuwo and Windhoek. In particular, I would like to thank Jennifer Chin, Maja and Ted Essebaggers, Ingenecia Humu, Kenneth Humu, Kahorere Hungi, Kapandu Kashango, Jekura Kavari, Tjiuree Kazavanga, Uripoye Mburura, Nici Muhenje, Inimgirua Musaso, Karumia Musaso, Kiana Nelson, Uvatera Venane Ngombe, Eberhard Rothfuss, Lucresia Ruiter, Johannes Ruiter, Jacob Schoeman, Sophie Shipepe, Tjikajona Siraha, Kapuka Thom, Uziruapi Tjavara, Ursula and Pieter de Villiers, and the staff at the Opuwo Magistrate’s Court. Three Kaokoland-connected individuals deserve a special acknowledgement: Uhangatenua Kapi was the most ideal research assistant imaginable, and his contribution to this study, though unfairly hidden, was highly significant; as for Mike Kavekotora, he was the most ideal informant imaginable, and his tireless willingness to convey his knowledge was only limited by my ability to comprehend; and, finally, Aparicio ‘Chinho’ Lopes was the most ideal spirit imaginable, and like such special and rare people, he has never quite realised his own contribution in making Opuwo so memorable and meaningful.

During the past eighteen years, my relationship with Nick Mkabelana, Raya Tjieva, and the rest of the family and neighbours in Gemengde Een (Windhoek) has anchored me in Namibia like no other. They have always made the country feel like a home to me. A number of other Namibia-connected people have also gone to great lengths to assist me. I am grateful to the staff at the National Library and the National Archives, particularly Kenny Husselmann and Teresa de Klerk. Ben Kasetura was a fantastic language teacher; Jon Barnes and Beth Terry opened their home first as strangers, and then continually throughout the many stays thereafter as friends; and Evelyn Shilamba has given me the gift of her friendship since those early days at the ministry. In addition, I would also like to extend my appreciation to Michael Bollig, Joshua Forrest, Robert Gordon, Franz Irlich, Mary Isaacs, Nixon Marcus, Naff Mieze, Abe Naude, Svein Ørsnes, Elrich Pretorius, Paulina Shivute, David Simon, Jacqueline Solway (who is almost connected to Namibia), Ciefriedine Tjeriko, Alet Witbeen and Steven van Wolputte.

My years affiliated with the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge left an indelible mark on both me and this book. I feel most fortunate for having had the privilege of working closely with the late Sue Benson. Despite her most untimely death, she continues to shape me as a teacher, researcher and writer. In addition, a number of other Cambridge-connected individuals have inspired, encouraged and/or supported me throughout the course of this project. Many of them have read and commented on draft chapters or earlier incarnations of the book. I would thus also like to extend a sincere thank you to Anthony Baylis, Robert Edgar, Mariane Ferme, Wenzel Geissler, Thomas Blom Hansen, Keith Hart, Leo Howe, John Iliffe, John Lonsdale, Alan Macfarlane, Hayley Macgregor, Nolwazi Mkhwanazi, Ruth Prince, Todd Sanders, Fiona Scorgie, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, Julie Taylor, Marilyn Strathern and Lucy Ward.

A group of Netherlands-connected people have also assisted me during the course of this project. Peter Geschiere has been both an inspiration and a constructive critic; I have appreciated his willingness to engage my work, and I have benefited greatly from his feedback. Mart-Jan de Jong insisted that I persevere, and he enabled that by winning valuable (and very hard to come by) writing and research time for me. Pieter Ippel has supported me in ways that extend well beyond the confines of this project, and for that I am most grateful. I also wish to thank Arno Coppens, Isperih Karaivanov, Liesbet Mallekoote and Peter Slager, as well as the many Roosevelt Academy (Utrecht University) students who have sparked my thinking while participating so enthusiastically in my ‘Faces of the State’ seminar.

At Berghahn Books, Ann Przyzycki, Mark Stanton and Marion Berghahn have been a pleasure to work with. I thank them for having made the production of this book not only possible, but also pleasurable.

In addition to all of the individuals mentioned above, a number of institutional bodies helped finance this project. In the United States, I am indebted to the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. In the United Kingdom, generous financial support came from the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom, the Smuts Memorial Fund, the Cambridge Political Economy Society Trust, the Cambridge Overseas Trust, the H.M. Chadwick Fund, the Kurt Hahn Trust, the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Cambridge African Studies Centre and Darwin College, as well as the University of Cambridge, its Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology, and its Department of Social Anthropology. In The Netherlands, further funding was provided by the Contested Democracy research programme of The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), as well as the Department of Social Science, Roosevelt Academy (Utrecht University). Air Namibia also contributed to the realisation of the research. If it had not been for such wide financial backing, this book would never have come to pass, nor would have a series of previous publications. With respect to the latter, I should thus acknowledge that Chapters 8 and 9 appear as a much-expanded and updated version of ‘Making Politics, Making History: Chiefship and the Post-Apartheid State in Namibia’, Journal of Southern African Studies (Vol. 31, No. 1). Less significant portions of those two chapters have also featured in Dialectical Anthropology (Vol. 30, No. 3/4) and the European Journal of Development Research (Vol. 21, No. 3).

Although kinship is a most interesting and enjoyable anthropological pursuit, it is much more satisfying and enriching when practised. My sweet, sweet daughters, Estella and Morena, are as much a product of Namibia as this book. Throughout the years, they have always been able to give much more energy than they consume. They have offered me the strength and sense of purpose that has propelled me through the completion of this ‘story’ (as they call it). Lastly, but only because she has contributed everything already mentioned above and much, much more, Fatima Müller-Friedman has been my partner in every sense of the word. Throughout the past fifteen years, we have journeyed each step of the way hand-in-hand, and, for this reason, she is a part of each and every page.

J.T.F.

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1

IMAGINING STATES

At first reading, the title of this book is likely to arouse some scepticism. How is it possible for an anthropologist to present an ethnographic account of Namibia, of an entire country? As anthropologists we are accustomed to investigate the localised, the small-scale, the village community. We are specifists, not generalists. The critic will thus be quick to suggest that any such attempt can yield only two possible outcomes: either a generalised account of ‘the Namibian people’, or a superficial survey of Namibia’s ethnic groups. Of course, both approaches would result in essentialised and incomplete ethnographies. However, in proposing this ethnographic account of Namibia I am focused on neither the Namibian people, nor the Namibian peoples. Instead, in this book I aim to constitute the Namibian State¹ itself as an ethnographic object of study. Here, I am nudging my way towards what Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997a) have called an ethnography without the ethnos, or an ethnography beyond culture. As such, this account takes ethnographic shape through its analytical positioning, its interpretive viewpoint and its holism; it is also ethnographic in its methodology, and in the sense that it aims to offer a ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) of its subject matter. In attempting to ethnographise the State, this work contributes to anthropology’s ongoing moves beyond the local in favour of those social formations and institutions altogether more complex, varied, global and dispersed. For this reason, it hopes to further de-centre the traditional anthropological gaze. Through such ‘location work’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997b), then, this book aspires to help rethink ‘the field’ by exploring a methodological problem relating to the limits of ethnographic description. What might constitute an ethnography of the Namibian State, and how might an anthropologist study such an amorphous and problematic object?

At one and the same time, this book offers an empirical illustration of the Namibian State through the eyes and experiences of those that inhabit it. The case of post-apartheid Namibia offers a rich opportunity to explore such a bottom-up contribution to the study of state process. As Africa’s second youngest independent State, Namibia liberated itself from South Africa’s former apartheid regime in 1990. Today, the Namibian State and its inhabitants continue to negotiate their newfound democracy. This ongoing process of state-making is contested at numerous levels. At the national level, political parties and their leading actors guide the State through a programme of post-apartheid reform. Among other issues, the crafting of Namibian unity and the transcending of the rural–urban divide remain high on the list of national priorities; all the while, we see neoliberal versions of the democratic state model intersecting with the SWAPO² party’s attempts to retain control over what has become a dominant-party democracy. At the local level, however, we see quite a different set of parameters in the contestations surrounding the institutionalisation of the newly democratic State. In Kaokoland, a distant locale in the northwest part of the country, individuals and communities engage the new State in their everyday lives. Here, the Namibian State is encountered as an educational system, a development project, a bureaucrat, a memory, a war wound and/or a patrilineal ancestor. It may be invoked, or avoided. Among Kaokolanders, the State is perceived as legitimate, corrupt, liberating, constraining, repressive and/or a new form of apartheid.

Conceptual Bearings

In studying Namibia as an ethnographic object in its own right, it is necessary to begin by locating ‘the State’ in a double sense, that is, both theoretically and empirically. With respect to the former, the State has obviously been a central and long-standing preoccupation of political philosophers and theoreticians. Beginning most concertedly in the seventeenth century, our list of early state theorists would include Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Engels and Weber, to name but a few. In the present era, the discussion has also produced a voluminous amount of theorising. Many of these more recent scholars have focused on the origins of the State (Service 1975; Cohen and Service 1978), or on its functioning (Robertson 1984); some have problematised the State (Vincent 1987), or have suggested that the concept defies definition altogether (Hoffman 1995); and still others have denied the State’s very existence (Miliband 1969). As Philip Abrams points out, ‘[w]e have come to take the state for granted as an object of political practice and political analysis while remaining quite spectacularly unclear as to what the state is’ (1988: 59).

Although this work does not aspire to theorise a generalised notion of ‘the State’, in proposing an ethnographic account of Namibia it is necessary to make evident some of my own theoretical positionings. What existing claims have guided me towards the State in its theoretical sense? First, I am guided by the assertion that the State cannot be treated as an entity that exists over and above those living within it. The State is not a reified ‘thing’ in and of itself, but rather a complex system of social relations (Radcliffe-Brown 1940). Second, the State is often reduced to a certain set of specific functions. However, the State does not possess such strict intentionality, unity, and functionality (Foucault 1991a). Third, history teaches us to view the State as a dynamic social process (Lonsdale 1981; Bayart 1993). The State is thus always in the making, never complete.³ Finally, in order to avoid the tendency to objectify the State, it is important to take the ‘idea’ of the State just as seriously as its materiality (Abrams 1988). Taken together, these four observations offer a point of departure by opening up ‘the Namibian State’ as a space containing many possible and competing objectifications, personifications and reifications. These theoretical guideposts allow us to explore what kind(s) of object(s) Namibians make out of their State. Here, the Namibian State is granted enough disunity so as to possess internal contradictions, competing interests and multiple meanings.

But in proposing an ethnographic account of the Namibian State, how might we locate ‘the State’ in its empirical sense? What constitutes ‘the field’ when we want to study the State ethnographically? There are, of course, many possible creative points of entry. An anthropologist could, for example, choose to study bureaucratic spaces (Herzfeld 1992), or networks of power (Riles 2000), or state effects (Trouillot 2001; Mitchell 1991, 1999). The State could be situated at the site of its performances (Geertz 1980), and through ritual acts, symbolic self-representations and spectacle (Kertzer 1988; Mbembe 2001). One might also focus on technologies of State, for example, census-taking, mapping and statistics (Scott 1998; Kertzer and Arel 2002), or even neo-liberalism more generally (Ong 2006). Finally, we might wish to construct a bureaugraphic record of the Namibian State by analysing archival materials as ethnographic objects (Stoler 2009); or we could locate the State through an anthropology of legislation, or through a historical analysis of legal thinking in the territory (Chanock 2001). All of these ‘locations’, and still many others, could serve as potentially fruitful ethnographic field sites for our study of the Namibian State.

However, in heeding Philip Abrams’s plea to recognise the ‘cogency of the idea of the state as an ideological power and treat that as a compelling object of analysis’ (1988: 79), I have chosen to locate the Namibian State, first and foremost, in the political imagination of those who inhabit it. But like the State itself, this notion too is conceptualised in many different ways within the social sciences and humanities disciplines (Stevenson 2003)? Given the flexible nature of this pivotal concept, we have good reason to pause for a moment so as to unpack ‘imagination’, and to consider its relevance for the field of anthropology in general, and the study of state process more specifically.

As detailed in her review article, Claudia Strauss (2006) traces anthropology’s recent interest in imagination to the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis.⁴ Most influentially, Cornelius Castoriadis (1994) has utilised ‘the social imaginary’ in reference to a group’s ethos, that is, to a society’s shared and unifying conceptions; while Jacques Lacan chose to situate imagination in the Freudian realm of illusion, and thus fantasy. More recently, the philosopher Charles Taylor defines the social imaginary as ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (2004: 23). Taylor’s conception lays emphasis not on what a given society imagines, as Castoriadis would have it, but on the ways people imagine society (Strauss 2006: 329).

In the mid-1980s, anthropologists began experimenting with the concept of imagination in an attempt to transcend some of the problems associated with the more reified notion of culture. The social imaginary helped emphasise the polyvalence, dynamism and creativity inherent in social life. For example, Arjun Appadurai’s (1991) research on transnationalism highlights imagination as a new social force in the contemporary age. He points to the role of the global mass media for its ability to offer people consideration into a wider set of potential life possibilities. For him, the deterritorialisation of persons, images and ideas has taken on new force by shaping people’s fantasy into new social practice. Appadurai’s call for ethnographers to explore the connections between imagination and social life has been supported by other anthropologists who study the historical (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992), religious (Fernandez 1982), and techno-scientific (Marcus 1995) imagination.

In pursuing the Namibian State through the prism of imagination, I will be drawing on the concept in relation to the realm of politics and power. In this sense, anthropology’s interest in political imagination can be traced to the work of Benedict Anderson (1983) and his notion of the ‘imagined community’.⁵ In detailing the origins of nationalism, Anderson argues that all nations are imagined political communities in the sense that ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (1983: 6). In helping to link imagination to the State, Anderson’s seminal work sparked a wide range of anthropological scholarship relating to identity and belonging in the contemporary nation-State, and to the constructed nature of national identity.

Liisa Malkki (1995), for example, moves beyond Anderson’s unifying account by identifying competing national imaginations among two groups of Hutu refugees living in Tanzania. In her study, camp- and town-based refugees construct a sense of ‘nationness’ through their respective narratives of exile, and by reflecting on one another in the construction of identity. Michael Taussig’s analysis of colonial domination in the Putumayo relies on imagination as well, but this time in creating and sustaining a culture of terror. There, the colonialists constructed the region’s inhabitants as wild savages: ‘Far from being trivial daydreams indulged in after work was over, these stories and the imagination they sustained were a potent political force without which the work of conquest and of supervising rubber gathering could not have been accomplished’ (1984: 492). Similarly, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (1993) employs imagination as a technology. In her ethnography, the Indonesian State and the Meratu people imagine one another in specific ways, and the confluence of these counter imaginings helps structure the dynamics of their relationship. From these latter two accounts, imagination emerges as both a collective form of constructing and interfacing with ‘the other’, and a mechanism or tool by which individuals offer commentary about such relationships.

Although many anthropologists have embraced the concept of political imagination in their work, most fail to offer an explicit definition of it. Jonathan Spencer is clearest in his rendition when he refers to political imagination as ‘the different ways in which people have identified, created or reacted to an area of life and a set of practices they themselves refer to as the political – sometimes including parties, usually including politicians, almost always including the post-colonial state’ (1997: 3–4). In this sense, then, political imagination becomes shorthand for a set of emic interpretations of politics. It serves to remind the ethnographer that Western conceptions of politics may not apply in other settings, and it creates the possibility for a diversity of political experiences and understandings.

But anthropology certainly does not hold a monopoly over the notion of political imagination, especially in the African context. The historian Terence Ranger, for example, concludes that the so-called invented traditions that have been associated with the history of colonial rule on the continent are more accurately conceived of as imagined:

[T]he word ‘invention’ gets in the way of a fully historical treatment of colonial hegemony and of a fully historical treatment of African participation and initiative in innovating custom. . . . Some traditions in colonial Africa really were invented, by a single colonial officer for a single occasion. But customary law and ethnicity and religion and language were imagined, by many different people and over a long time. These multiple imaginations were in tension with each other and in constant contestation to define the meaning of what had been imagined – to imagine it further (1993: 81).

While among political scientists, Jean-François Bayart (2005) argues for an examination of the political imaginaire as a means to better understand the relationship between culture and politics. In attempting to undermine the tendency of political analysts to essentialise culture as a natural given, he proposes that:

we have to understand the imaginaire as the dimension from which issues a continuous dialogue between heritage and innovation that characterises political action in its cultural aspect. Understood in this way, the imaginaire is first of all an interaction . . . that is, an interaction between the past, the present, and a projected future, but also an interaction between social actors or between societies, whose relations are filtered by their respective ‘imaging consciousnesses’ (2005: 137).

As a historical phenomenon, then, political imagination does not hold still; it does not necessarily constitute a totality, or a coherent range of restricted meanings. What it does do, though differently across time and space, is play a formative role in the production of both politics and the State (Bayart 2005: 227–33).

The above approaches from within and outside the field of anthropology help to refine the notion of political imagination as used in this ethnography. Here, state-related political imagination refers to the different ways Namibians perceive and talk about, represent and construct, and experience the Namibian State. As such, I am choosing to value political imagination for two of its simultaneous connotations. On the one hand, my use of the notion connects the Namibian State with images in the more general sense; while, on the other, it references the inventiveness and creativeness of subjects, both individual and collective. Political imagination is herein treated as historically configured and reconfigured; it is susceptible to falsehood, illusion and fantasy, but nonetheless contributes to the making of social and political reality. Political imagination is seen as a technology used in both the production and reproduction of politics; it is both structured and structuring.

By conceiving political imagination in just this manner, we create the space within which the Namibian State becomes ethnographically pursuable, and we do so in such a way that helps us walk a fine line between structure and agency in state process. Political imagination as herein conceived allows us to locate the State not only at the level of national government, but also in the everyday, localised experiences of ordinary people.

In this case, however, ‘local’ will be used in a rather diffuse manner. This book focuses on the imaginings of a dispersed and diverse set of Namibians, those whom I label ‘Kaokoland-connected’. They are primarily people who reside in Kaokoland itself, an approximately fifty thousand square kilometre portion of northern Kunene Region in north-western Namibia (see Figure 1.1).⁶ But they are also former residents of Kaokoland, people who have since relocated to Namibia’s capital city, Windhoek; and they are relatives of Kaokolanders, individuals who themselves may have never set foot in the region.

In ethnographising the State through this particular methodological positioning, the book relies on two state-related theoretical propositions of its own, two underlying premises that will carry through the text. First, political imagination can serve as a prism through which to refract the State. The book will detail certain aspects of state-related political imagination in Namibia, and, in doing so, it will explore such imagination as a location of State. This methodological approach leads to a second important premise: state-related political imaginings are not without effect. They are not only products of the State, but they are also productive of the State. Political imagination is therefore both constituted by, and constitutive of, the State. The extent to which this assumption holds true in the post-apartheid Namibian State will feature as another central focus of this book. In what ways are subject-citizen and State in Namibia mutually constituting?

Anthropology and the Current State of Affairs

Having established a conceptual framework that will carry through this book, I now turn briefly towards anthropology and its study of the State, paying particular attention to its most recent focus. With a clear recognition that the State represented a radical break from earlier forms of political organisation, one of the first anthropological projects relating to the State formed around understanding the nature of those differences. This was an attempt by nineteenth-century evolutionists (Morgan 1877; Engels 1975 [1884]) to define and categorise the State, a project again picked up in the 1940s by structural-functionalists working in Africa (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940; Nadel 1942).

Understanding the nature of these differences in political systems – whether between chiefdoms and States, or centralised and acephalous societies – was also central to a second main anthropological preoccupation with the State, the quest for state origins.⁷ Three main theses dominated this discussion, all of which fell within a neo-evolutionist paradigm. Some scholars argued that the State had its basis in conflict. In this regard, neo-Marxists were particularly influential in analysing economic inequality and class divisions as the essential components of state formation (Fried 1967), though others developed theories focusing on war and conquest (Carneiro 1970; Lewis 1981). Second, some anthropologists viewed the State as a social contract, emerging as a product of co-operation, as the most pragmatic form of political association (Lowie 1927; Service 1975; Cohen and Service 1978). Lastly, other scholars from this era placed emphasis on the role of technology and/or ecology in the development of the State (Childe 1936; Steward 1955; Goody 1971).

Beginning in the 1980s the anthropological debate surrounding state origins and formation waned significantly. In its place, anthropologists began paying closer attention to the workings of the State, and to practices associated with it. For example, Peter Geschiere (1982) analyses the colonial and post-colonial State in Cameroon as a way to understand its impact on local-level power relations and systems of authority among the Maka. Also of interest, Bruce Grant (1995) traces the twentieth-century historical trajectory of the Nivkhi in eastern Siberia by detailing the Soviet State’s ever-shifting construction of Nivkhi identity and its effects on the communities it aimed to define. In Sierra Leone, Paul Richards (1996) argues that young soldiers wage civil war in the rain forest as a rational attempt to re-attach themselves to a functioning State. For her part, Sharon Hutchinson (1996) analyses the Nuer in relation to the expansion and contraction of state structures in Sudan. She reveals how local meaning and sociality are firmly rooted in Nuer experiences of the State.

The group of ethnographies highlighted above share a common attribute in that they all take a group of people, rather than the State itself, as their formal object of study. The State emerges on the fringes of each account, and most often as a catalyst of change. All of them thus seek to elucidate the impact of state policies and practices at the local level. In other words, they seek to answer the question ‘what can we learn about a specific group of people by investigating their relationship with the State?’ In this book, I flip the question on its head: ‘what can we learn about the Namibian State by investigating the state-related imaginings of a group of Kaokoland-connected people?’ In doing so, the object of ethnographic study shifts away from a collectivity of people in favour of the Namibian State itself.

In focusing my inquiry so directly on the Namibian State, the present work aims to contribute to, and expand upon, the most recent anthropological conversation on the State. Since the mid-1990s, some anthropologists have turned their attention towards that which is sometimes referred to as ‘ethnography of the State’. This new research agenda represents a qualitative shift from a focus on state practice to one of state process.

Two main characteristics distinguish this latest anthropological engagement with the State from its predecessors. First, anthropologists are now taking distance from earlier, more restrictive definitions of ‘the State’. Whereas ‘the State’ was once commonly understood as a set of clearly defined institutional and bureaucratic governmental structures, as separate and distinct from society, and/or as possessing a monopoly over the legitimate use of force, ‘the State’ is now being theorized as diffuse, porous, dynamic and contradictory in nature. In this way, these anthropologists of the State are contributing to a rethinking of ‘the State’ as an object of study. In addition to theorising the State afresh, this most recent approach has led to a concomitant repositioning of ‘the State’ in anthropological accounts. Anthropologists are now beginning to move the State to the very centre of their ethnographies. An ethnography of the State thus attempts to elucidate its object of study through a focus on the various social and cultural processes that help to constitute it. Although this shift in emphasis may sound subtle, it has significant and exciting methodological repercussions.

These challenges have inspired innovative approaches, leading anthropologists to pursue ‘the State’ well beyond the confines of its institutional apparatuses. Today, anthropologists may research the State through a focus on the family, human subjectivity and affect, bodily practice, and/or discourse – to name but a few. By taking on such an unorthodox object of ethnographic study, this most recent anthropological engagement with the State has yielded some remarkably rich and creative scholarship.⁸ In the process, this body of new work has revealed anthropology as being better suited to the study of the State and state process than is usually thought (especially by those outside the discipline).

In relation to the present work, three particular accounts have most influenced my ethnographic approach to the Namibian State. Tsing’s (1993) study of the Meratus, a group of people living in an ‘out-of-the-way place’ in South Kalimantan (Indonesia), reveals how ‘[v]illage politics contribute to making the state; the categories of state rule are actualized in local politics’ (1993: 26). Here, Tsing seeks to develop a new set of conceptual tools in trying to address the problems of marginality. For her, marginality is not a form of isolation, or a mode of describing the position of a society in geographical or political space, but rather a dynamic and creative process which occurs in and through time, and which implicates both the Meratus and the Indonesian State. The individuals or groups involved in this encounter produce, interpret and reshape themselves in relation to one another, and, as a result, produce, interpret and reshape marginality itself. In this case, then, we see how the Indonesian State helps construct Meratu marginality, but in turn, we also come to understand how the Meratus contribute to the construction of the Indonesian State.

In exploring the interconnections between State and selfhood in Berlin, John Borneman (1992, 1997) proposes that we approach States like we approach the study of culture, and with the same set of analytical tools. He argues that States are part of a historically formed cultural order, and therefore not independent or diametrically opposed to culture. States ‘get their meaning from contemporary culture and give meaning back to it; they are legitimated in a myriad of ways in everyday life much as they also shape life, in the extreme case by formally legalizing or criminalizing sets of practices’ (1992: 4). Borneman’s account also helps to close the gap between State and individual: ‘Like the factitious dichotomy between nature and nurture, the individual and state allegorize themselves in a symbiotic process in which it is illusory to think we can isolate the point where one begins and the other ends’ (1992: 285).

Finally, James Ferguson’s (1990) well-known account of ‘development’ in Lesotho helps reveal the methodological possibilities inherent in an ethnography of the State. His deconstructive analysis is usually read as a post-structuralist critique of development. However, it is Ferguson’s methodology that is of most relevance here. In particular, the primary object of his ethnographic study is not the people to be ‘developed’, but the apparatus that is to do the developing – in this case, both international development agencies and the Lesotho State. In approaching this non-traditional object of anthropological inquiry, Ferguson undertook fieldwork among people who engage the development apparatus in their everyday life. He thus employs orthodox anthropological field methods at the grassroots level as a means to research the State’s development apparatus.

In drawing some of its inspiration from these recent anthropological approaches, this work will remain focused on the Namibian State as its primary object of study. As mentioned above, this ethnography of the State is made possible through an investigation into the ways political imagination manifests itself in everyday life. As a methodological exploration, the book proposes that the State does not lie beyond the reach of anthropology’s ability to know. Despite problems of scale, the post-apartheid Namibian State is a legitimate and methodologically tenable object for ethnographic inquiry.

Fieldwork in the Namibian State

Might it turn out, then, that not the basic truths, not the Being nor the ideologies of the centre, but the fantasies of the marginated concerning the secret of the centre are what is most politically important to the State idea and hence State fetishism?

— Michael Taussig (1992: 132)

This book is based on eighteen months of anthropological fieldwork in the Namibian State.⁹ During that time I came to know ‘Namibia’ in multiple ways, and through various means. I tried to constitute ‘the field’ in as many places, and in as wide a mode, as I could imagine. Most central to my research, though, were those individuals whom I have termed ‘Kaokoland-connected’, and in particular, those who circulated in and through the town of Opuwo during my residency there. My new Namibian friends and acquaintances spoke a host of first languages: Otjiherero, Oshivambo, Dhimba, Otjihakaona, Oshinkumbi, Oshimbundu, Portuguese, Afrikaans and English. They identified themselves as Herero, Himba, Himba-Herero, Ovambo, Zemba, Afrikaner, Nkumbi, Mbundu and Hakaona; as Namibians and as Angolans; as citizens and refugees; as Whites, Blacks and Coloureds.¹⁰ They were scantily attired, semi-nomadic pastoralists who painted their bodies with red ochre; they were smartly dressed civil servants who lived in the new suburban-style houses of Okatuuo; they were young children in the early years of their primary school education, teenagers, school-leavers and the unemployed. The men and women whom I came to know in Opuwo were entrepreneurs and gardeners, workers and professionals, chiefs and headmen and oral historians; they were illegal immigrants, pensioners and housewives; and they were former South African soldiers and PLAN¹¹ freedom fighters. Many of them attended one or another of the Christian churches in town; others attended to their ancestors; most accommodated both aspects of belief. A few of my acquaintances owned four-wheel-drive vehicles, televisions, and living room sets; but the majority lived in self-built and sparsely decorated mud or concrete brick homes and had to manage without plumbing and electricity. The eclectic mix of people circulating in and through Opuwo while I was living there also included missionaries and international development volunteers, European tourists on ‘Himba safaris’, road works gangs in bright orange overalls, and international consultants in khaki-coloured trousers.

I deliberately chose to initiate my study of the Namibian State ‘from the margins’ (Tsing 1994). Such an initial positioning afforded me a number of conceptual advantages. First, it allowed me the opportunity to counter the tendency of both policy makers and scholars to account for the State at its so-called centre. This common vantage point suggests that state power and authority are founded in, and emanate from, the capital city. By situating my study of the Namibian State in its margins, I was afforded the chance to challenge these oft-held assumptions. My vantage point in Kaokoland thus helped me to consider the ways marginality also contributes to the making of the State (Tsing 1993; Das and Poole 2004a).

As geographically distant and isolated locations, margins are often economically insignificant, and the population residing there tend to lack political efficacy. These circumstances contribute to the fact that those in the centre know little about the margins, and those in the margins know little about the centre. Marginality thus provokes imagination; and when acted upon by agents of the State and subject-citizens alike, these imaginings (of the centre about the margins, and of the margins about the centre) become an important element in the governing process. From this vantage point, then, we are also able to consider how, and to what extent, people’s everyday state-related political imaginings help construct ‘Namibia’ from the outer edges in.

Finally, the perceived irrelevance of the margins also means that States tend to deploy few material resources there. The lack of penetration fragments hegemony, limits control, and reveals discrepancies between the rhetoric of state power and everyday reality. The margins allow us to see the State more clearly because from here it is easier to assess the limits of its capacity, authority and legitimation. Simultaneously, and for the very same reasons, the margins reveal the State’s susceptibility to colonisation