The Hard Road to Colonization: The Topnaar (Aonin) of Namibia, 1670-1878

The Topnaar of Walvis Bay and the Lower !Khuiseb watercourse on the Atlantic fringe of the Namib desert exhibit the capacity of a community to survive untold centuries of physical hardship, human exploitation, and dispossession–even the loss of a shared genetic identity. They were seen, seventy-five years ago, by a sympathetic social anthropologist as “probably the most miserable of all the remnants of the Nama.” ¹ Yet they have survived and found a respected place for themselves in what was for so long a desert battleground and a haven for sailors’ lust and hell-raising. The Topnaar were under further attack as their homeland became a European trading base and as the shock waves of European colonization south of the Orange River led to internecine turmoil in mid-nineteenth-century Namibia.

The name Topnaar, like the people who bear it, is a hybrid. Meaning the “people of the point” (i.e., of the furthest margin), it has Dutch and Nama roots, with an echo also of !Nara, the wild cucumber (Acanthosicyos horrida), the harvesting of which is central to Topnaar culture. The singular character of these []Aonin, as the Nama know them, has interested anthropologists, who once termed them hunter-harvesters, though they have also herded cattle since ancient times. Ethnologists and historians have disputed the antiquity of their settlement of this inhospitable region. Did they come from a stretch of coast near Cape Frio in the far north at the end of the eighteenth century, ² or were “some places on the central coast ... already inhabited by Khoekhoen at least 300 years ago?” ³ More recent archaeological evidence, at more than two hundred sites in the !Khuiseb delta, has identified coast people with a “subsistence economy largely based on marine resources” two thousand years ago, who moved inland, acquiring domestic stock a millennium later. Further back still, their ancient forebears harvested the !nara in the Namib desert perhaps eight thousand years ago. ⁴ Those who lost their stock for natural reasons and became beach dwellers again became the HurIìnin of the coast, as the Topnaars themselves distinguish them, while the !Khuisinin remained along the !Khuiseb River, the division being a “recent social phenomenon rather than a fixed ethnic entity ... categories to distinguish rich from poor before the arrival of the Europeans.” ⁵ More recent work supports this theory of early settlement and takes up the story through archaeological evidence of the period of external trade and the inland circulation of goods until the confluence of such evidence with the documentary record in the nineteenth century. Thus is displayed the collapse of Topnaar pastoralism and their extreme impoverishment under the influence of European trade and colonialism. ⁶

In this paper I contend that the Topnaar are indeed the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of the area, infused with indigenous and exotic strains acquired in their troubled history. Twentieth-century anthropologists have differed on this but have taken little account of the Topnaar’s own version of their history, one narration of which has escaped close attention and is dealt with below. It was produced shortly after 1878, the year most Topnaar territory came under British rule, when their decline already seemed irreversible. Here, with the onset of colonization, this paper ends. It was the trading preliminaries to that colonization and the domination by more powerful Nama and Orlam groups in the interior that reduced the Topnaar to the status ascribed by many observers: half-starved, mendicant beachcombers tenuously preserving a culture dependent on the harvesting of fish and molluscs on the bleak Atlantic coast and !nara melons on the otherwise barren Namib dunes.

Fifteenth-century Portuguese navigators left West African women at Cape Cross and Luderitz but met no indigenous people and did not make landfall at Walvis Bay. Only in 1670 did three Dutch sailors from the hooker Grundel meet, in Sandwich Bay, just north of Walvis Bay, five local inhabitants and a dog. The locals would not approach when beckoned. They were seen to carry a stick with an animal’s tail attached – the characteristic Nama fly-whisk. A few huts...