Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

Vigne, Randolph.
The Hard Road to Colonization: The Topnaar (Aonin) of Namibia, 1670-1878
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History - Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 2000

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Randolph Vigne | The Hard Road to Colonization: The Topnaar [[]Aonin] of Namibia, 1670-1878 | Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 1:2 The Hard Road to Colonization: The Topnaar [[]Aonin] of Namibia, 1670-1878 Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 1:2 | © 2000 Randolph Vigne The Hard Road to Colonization: The Topnaar [[]Aonin] of Namibia, 1670-1878 Randolph Vigne The Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland 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." 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...