Guests in their Homeland - The situation of the Topnaar community, the traditional but not legal residents in the Namib Naukluft Park

Guests in their Homeland - The situation of the Topnaar community, the traditional but not legal residents in the Namib Naukluft Park

M.A. Dissertation - National parks have been established in the Third World throughout the last century without consulting local people. Usually management plans of these areas fail to include the local residents. International agreements have been made in the past decades to make local people gain rights in these areas. The parks make a clear separation between human beings and non-human nature. To explain this, the nature vs. culture dichotomy will be used. The focus in the project is on the Topnaar people, the local residents of theh Namib Naukluft Park in the Central Namib Desert. The aim is to answer whether, and how, they feel affected by the fact that they live within a proclaimed national. Since the proclamation of the park in 1907 their presence has been ignored in all park law. The fieldwork was carried out in Namibia in the spring 2009. Qualitative ethnographic research methods were used for data gathering. People within the Topnaar community were interviewed as well as ministry officials, NGO employees and consultants. The research showed that the existence of the community is generally acknowledged and the government has been trying to facilitate their livelihoods within the park since the independence of Namibia in 1990. Factors that could be linked to the park did not seem to affect their livelihoods. Factors of a more general nature seemed to affect them more, such as lack of water and leadership problems.

Katrín Magnúsdóttir

http://skemman.is/en/item/view/1946/14991

University of Iceland

2013

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English