New Notes on Kaoko: The Northern Kunene Region in Texts and Photographs
Giorgio Miescher & Dag Henrichsen (eds).
Basler Afrika Bibliographien
2000
© Basler Afrika Bibliographien
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The Elephant Shooting: Inconsistencies of Colonial Law and Indirect Rule in Kaoko (North-Western Namibia) in the 1920s and 1930s.
This paper is concerned with the emergence and making of a criminal case in Kaoko between 1929 and 19357 and its bearing on the development of colonial native administration in the territory. I first heard of the ‘elephant case’ in interviews I did with residents of Kaoko Otavi and nearby villages in 2001/2002. The elephant shooting and the alleged murder of Petrus Kakuyu had not been an issue in my research in the beginning, but had been actively raised by some of the men I interviewed, as an instance of significant political conflict. Only after recording their accounts, I went to the National Archives in Windhoek to look for archival information on the case and was immediately captured by the amount of documentation the South African administration had produced in the course of their inquiry. What was particular, both with contemporary oral information and with the archival sources, was a strong ambivalence and contradiction, the fragmented and inconsistent nature of knowledge about what had happened and who had been involved in the case. As a matter of fact, the administration’s search for evidence remained unsuccessful and neither the remains of the elephant nor Petrus Kakuyu were ever found. Nevertheless, there was a case, a huge number of witnesses were interrogated and people were prosecuted, charged and sent to prison. Beyond this, the ‘elephant case’ and its aftermath remained an issue of vivid debate among residents of Kaoko Otavi and one of the central tropes in male oral accounts of the region’s past. BAB Working Paper 2006:03 Presented at the History Department Zurich 7 February 2006, and at the National Archives of Namibia, Windhoek 27 Febraury 2006. ISSN 1422-8769
Lorena Rizzo
http://baslerafrika.ch/wp-content/uploads/WP_2006_3_Rizzo.pdf
Basler Afrika Bibliographien
2005
© The author © Basler Afrika Bibliographien
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Notes on the Kaokoveld (South West Africa) and its People
No. 26 in a series of government publications titled "Ethnological Publications." This issue discusses Kaoko: history, ecology, rinderpest, Oorlog, settlement, rainfall, livestock, demographics, urban areas, ethnicity, and "histories" of the Himba, Herero, and Tjimba
N.J. van Warmelo
Union of South Africa: Department of Native Affairs
1951
English
White Power in Angola and Namibia: The Kunene Hydro-Electric Schemes - A Study in the Political Economy of Infrastructural Development
B.A. (Hons) Thesis - "This paper will examine the Kunene river Hydro-electric schemes, in their historical, legal, military, strategic, technological, economic and political contexts, in order to bring greater understanding of the society and its conflicts. The schemes will be seen in a relatively loose theoretical framework, involving concepts of modernisation, development and underdevelopment, colonialism, imperialism, together with capital accumulation and violence in the struggle between social groupings."
Renfrew Christie
University of Cape Town
1974
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