Re-creating Eden: Land Use, Environment, and Society in Southern Angola and Northern Namibia (review)

Re-creating Eden is a masterful work. Simply stated, the book maps the migrations of Ovambo speakers though different environments and territories, surveying the causes for the movements, the adaptations to and interventions in different environments, and the resulting social transformations. But nothing about this project is simple. It encompasses two territories, a buffer zone, three colonial administrations, three sections of the floodplain, and at least a half dozen separate polities, all over the better part of a century. Kreike adds another layer, a web of references to analogous developments elsewhere in colonial Africa, to place his own work in a comparative context.

The book draws upon religious language, the story-line moving from Eden's creation to apocalypse to re-creation. The emphasis, however, is on the ways that Ovambo speakers created domesticated spaces out of wilderness after a period of environmental trauma in the early twentieth century. To do this, Krieke builds on other historians' understandings of colonial annexation as environmental cataclysm and of African environmental initiative, but in his study the creation of environments is specifically historicized to a degree seldom before seen.

The introduction makes the point that the subject merits detailed consideration by discussing the historiography of colonial conquest and reconstruction in its aftermath. The endnotes are half again as long as the chapter itself, and authoritatively connect this history to many, many others. It also introduces the two key terms in the book, oshilongo (domesticated landscapes) and ofuka (wilderness). Yet the etymological review (4) meant to explicate the meaning of these words to Ovambo speakers is perhaps too brief to support the use of these foreign terms, rather than their English equivalents, throughout the book.

The precolonial baseline to this history is that the earliest known Ovambo landscapes were creations of humans who domesticated the territories by digging wells, planting trees, hunting wild animals, and importing cattle. "Eden," however, only fits the landscape, not the human society inhabiting it. Even before colonial annexation, inhabitants suffered violence and extractions, and they abandoned some settlements. Colonial annexation, with rinderpest, World War I, and famine in its wake, further depleted the oshilongo on the northern floodplain of inhabitants. Disruptions in Portuguese territory lasted through 1930, shaking loose refugees who fled south across the border. They settled on ofuka on the middle and southern floodplains in Namibia, and four chapters of the book discuss different aspects of its domestication and the social ramifications of establishing settlements. Regrettably, the book does not include Krieke's research on immigrants planting fruit trees in their new homes, a most evocative instance of refugees recreating Eden (see his "Hidden Fruits: A Social Ecology of Fruit Trees in Namibia & Angola 1880s–1990s" in William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor, eds., Social History and African Environments [Athens: Ohio University, 2003]).

Krieke shows that as refugees recreated hospitable landscapes under South African rule in the twentieth century, they also revolutionized society. In short, women did the work, but men benefited most, in part through the spread of Christianity. The examination of migrant labor shows that it detracted from food production by claiming male energies, but it also provided resources to invest in farming. Christian conceptions of marriage, land shortage, and the adoption of the plow combined to erode female power and resources. In the harshest, driest landscapes, immigrants used both old Ovambo and new colonial technologies to develop water sources. Refugees, many of them Christian, created ranching territory in what had been desert, although desert settlement was dependent on transhumance to Angola. The last chapter describes the challenge that continuing encroachment of olishongo on ofuka and the colonial boundary created for herders, and the ways they responded. In the end, cross-border migration and household control over cattle became unsustainable.

Krieke weaves together archival and oral sources, the latter often quoted at length to humanize the colonial record. In...