Re-creating Eden: land use, environment and society in southern Angola and northern Namibia (review)

Emmanuel Kreike has written a thoroughly researched book that will be of great interest to scholars of the colonial partitioning of Africa, the interaction of human agency and environmental change, and all those working on northern Namibia and southern Angola. He argues that the social, cultural, and environmental impact of colonial conquest and pacification between 1890 and the early 1930s in the Ovambo floodplain, and Africa in general, require greater analysis, since their dramatic social and environmental effects are comparable to later projects which followed the consolidation of colonial rule.

Kreike taps into the insights, but also seeks to avoid the shortcomings, of approaches which deal with political and moral ecology and biological imperialism. His own approach is not primarily landscape-centred, but instead is grounded in the experiences of the Kwanyama people living in the floodplain environment. Accordingly, the spatial focus of the study shifts together with the actors as they move back and forth across the emerging Portuguese–German/British colonial boundary. The impact of both locals and intruding colonizers is described as an oscillating process of creation, destruction and recreation of two opposing environments around which the memories of Kreike’s Kwanyama sources revolve: oshilongo – a cultivated landscape with infrastructure created by investing human labour in a previous wilderness; and ofuka – a barren and hostile wilderness lacking infrastructure, food and security.

The empirical section of the book covers the period from 1879 to 1960 and divides it into seven chapters organized according to partly overlapping time periods marked by key events in Ovambo floodplain history (1897 rinderpest epizootic, 1915 famine, 1961 border fence construction) and around key topics (early colonial trade, Portugal’s violent intrusion, Kwanyama exodus, the role of male migrant labour and missionary work in socio-environmental reconstruction, women’s access to resources, and cross-border cattle rearing). Material from Kreike’s own interviews with over 61 Kwanyama elderly people increasingly appears in the text as this Kwanyama narrative evolves. The interview material complements a large assemblage of published sources and extensive, multilingual archival material from Namibia, Angola, France, Germany and Portugal, an impressive achievement in itself.

The book is meticulously researched, well-structured, and lucidly argued. At times, however, the reader is buried with excessive details, such as population statistics and other numerical data that would have been more accessible in charts. While the effort to illustrate the spatial shift of people and narrative focus with eight separate maps is commendable, places mentioned in the text are often difficult or impossible to locate on the maps, some of which are graphically overloaded. Fortunately, the text is interspersed with the fascinating personal accounts from the author’s interviewees going back to the 1910s, which enliven the reading experience. But these, unfortunately, provide little continuity and remain mostly isolated and anecdotal, so that we rarely learn about the trajectories of individuals, families or places over longer periods.

Kreike cautions that memories and narratives of struggle, survival and victory over adverse conditions may have coloured the oral histories he has collected, but he only engages with this issue rather half-heartedly in two sentences at the end of the book. At the time of his fieldwork, Namibia had only been independent for two years, and the Angola–Namibia borderland was a theatre of war right up until independence. ‘Struggle’, ‘hard work’ and the ‘freedom fight we have won’ were dominant slogans around which private and public memories were and are still formulated in the Kwanyama areas, the hard core of SWAPO’s political support until the present. A more thorough engagement with this problem, perhaps supported by a brief account of the borderland history from 1960 to Namibian independence, would therefore have been welcome.

Overall, Emmanuel Kreike has produced a solid and highly recommendable piece of work at a time when issues he touches upon (such as grazing pasture rights...