Conflict and Power in Nineteenth-Century Namibia
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8976889 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brigitte Lau (Historical Archives, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1986 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 29-39 |
| Publication date | 1986-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of African History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8537 • E-ISSN: 1469-5138 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0021853700029182 |
| OpenAlex | W2132096847 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 14 |
| References cited | 6 |
In explaining how one Oorlam group, the Afrikaners, lost their hegemony in Namaland in the 1860s, this article examines the impact on this region of Oorlam migrations, trade with the Cape and the advent of Christian missionaries. The kinship-based social organization of Nama pastoralists was largely replaced by the ‘commando’ organization, introduced by the Oorlams. By the 1850s, production throughout Namaland was geared less to subsistence than to the demands of Cape traders for cattle, skins and ivory. Raiding and hunting, with imported guns and horses, supplanted local traditions of good husbandry. While foreign traders made large profits, commando groups were locked into a cycle of predatory and competitive expansion. By the early 1860s, such conflict had polarised; the Afrikaners and their allies (including Herero client-chiefs) confronted several Nama/Oorlam chiefs and an army raised by a Cape trader, Andersson. The ensuing battles were not, as has been claimed, a Herero ‘war of liberation’; instead, they marked the replacement of Afrikaner by European hegemony; the country was freer than ever before to be controlled by agents of merchant capital and colonialism
Ancient history · Archaeology · Cape · Capital (architecture · Capitalism · Colonialism · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Ethnology · Geography · Hegemony · Kinship · Livestock · Pastoralism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Subsistence agriculture · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · South African History and Culture
Remov[e] Us From the Bondage of South Africa
Fortuitous circumstances?” John Owen Smith and the art of nineteenth-century colonial wealth accumulation
The Uncanny Capital
Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa
The Decline of Marriage in Namibia
Historical legacies
The archaeology of social rank among eighteenth-century Nomadic pastoralists in southern Namibia
Problems of Pre-Colonial Namibian Historiography
I Rode through the Desert
Honourable Soldier-Bureaucrats
Khoikhoi and missionaries in early nineteenth-century southern Namibia
The archaeology of social rank among eighteenth-century nomadic pastoralists in Southern Namibia
(Re)classificando espaços e identidades
A New Archaeological Perspective on Nomadic Pastoralist Expansion in South-western Africa
| Unique citing works | 14 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,37 |
| Citation span | 1988 - 2024 (37) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 13 |