The Kgalagadi desert (aka the Kalahari) was a site of struggle of the indigenous people against the genocidal German colonial occupation and the South African apartheid administration of South West Africa. In this text, Asher Gamedze writes about some autonomous community projects associated with the Namibian Nationhood Project Coordinating Committee in the context of the intensifying liberation struggle in Namibia in the 1980s.
Although individually authored, this piece is part of collective research and writing work done by Asher Gamedze, Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja and Koni Benson, the latter two who made useful contributions to thinking through this piece. Asher and The Funambulist also thank Ayesha Rajah, who kindly provided the images and stories from her personal collection and recollections.
The majority of land within Namibia’s contemporary borders falls into the semi-arid Kalahari Basin, a great deal of which is the arid Kalahari Desert. The indigenous Tswana name for the desert, which cuts across present day Botswana, South Africa, and Namibia, is Kgalagadi (“the waterless place”) taken from the root kgala, “the great thirst.” It is one of the longest human-inhabited regions in the world with records of artistic activity dating back more than 20,000 years, and strategies developed for surviving in arid conditions adapted over that time and longer by the Indigenous people. The German colonizers, under military leader Lothar van Trotha, exploited the conditions of the desert in the genocide against Nama and Herero people, driving whole communities into it to die either by their guns or out of thirst. This was part of the process of dispossession, alienating Indigenous people and knowledge from the desert to make way for white commercial exploits.
In the 1970-80s, much of the Sahel experienced a prolonged drought. Further South, in Namibia, and particularly in the South of the country, already semi-arid to arid, the great thirst was severe. Drought-relief, which was absolutely essential to the survival of life (human, plant, and animal), was brought in by international organizations such as the International Red Cross and many foreign governments. Within that moment too, politically, South West Africa was in the throes of becoming Namibia. The independence process and the national liberation struggle were advancing along many different lines and in a multitude of directions. One of the directions was centered around the political processes and negotiations that would lead to “independence.” The UN was a key player in that. There was another direction, largely centered around an exile-led South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), which persisted with the policy of armed struggle, mostly in the North of the country. At the same time, NGOs were proliferating in the country and community development was becoming an important sphere of activity.
In response to the harsh living conditions brought on by the severe drought, and various relations of dependence (political, economic, and psychological), an autonomous trajectory of the national liberation struggle turned its attention to the desert in the South. Two of the principal proponents of this tendency were Ottilie and Kenneth Abrahams.
A small snapshot of the political work of Tilly, and her husband Kenny would include independent student organizing in the late 1950s (the Cape Peninsula Students’ Union), a study group about guerilla warfare (the Yu Chi Chan Club) and an underground guerilla network (National Liberation Front) in the early 1960s. It would also include a brief involvement in the SWAPO executive in Dar es Salaam in the mid-1960s, before getting suspended for life as a result of critiquing the leadership’s spending practices. They were also the core of a radical publishing group, “The Namibian Review,” since the mid-1970s, which started in exile in Sweden and later moved to Windhoek. In the late 1970s, frustrated with the lack of a democratic culture in SWAPO, they were part of launching the SWAPO-Democrats (SWAPO-D), conceived as a faction of the main party that was “campaigning for an inner-party democracy.” After they felt that SWAPO-D was going “precisely nowhere,” feelings that they had also about SWAPO’s armed struggle, these radicals reviewed their strategy. They realized that they had focused so much on the purely political aspect of the struggle and that perhaps it was a moment to rethink the orientation and expanse of their political work.
Tilly further explains this:
“By the middle of 1983 we reviewed our position and came to several important conclusions. The first was that our country and our people were being seriously affected by numerous crises in health, education, housing and employment, and these were aggravated by the most severe drought we have suffered in the past thirty years. The second was that it was no longer sensible to wait for UN-supervised elections, [Resolution] 435 and internationally recognised independence before tackling these crises and alleviating the misery of our people. We decided, therefore, to deal with these problems directly, without neglecting the broader struggle for national liberation and independence. As the UN had several years previously launched a comprehensive programme in support of the nationhood of Namibia, covering the struggle for independence and the initial years of independence, and involving assistance by specialised agencies within the UN system, we decided to adopt this Nationhood Programme and make one important alteration. We would launch it and carry it through inside Namibia itself and not try to build a nation-in-exile, as the UN had been doing for the past ten or twenty years.”
Under the auspices of the Namibian Nationhood Project Coordinating Committee (NNPCC), Tilly, along with her husband Kenny and a group of activists within their broader network, connected with, and established a number of community development initiatives. All of the projects were founded on the basis of participatory democracy, and were oriented toward self-reliance: “the people would say what they wanted to do, how they wanted to do it and they would accept responsibility for it.” A key impulse was to psychologically and materially disrupt and ultimately rupture the relations of dependence that existed and were being built not only by the colonial administration, but also by the NGO mentality, the UN-led political process, and the exile-led liberation organizations; all of which seemed to wrest control of people’s destinies from them.
The NNPCC’s work was underlain by the principle that “we are our own liberators.” They were interested in and committed to national liberation and they understood independence as one moment within that much broader process. While they understood certain aspects of it as useful, they felt that the significant political focus on the UN undermined the population of South West Africa’s capacity for self-activity and deriving their own solutions to their situation. Since at least the early 1960s, Tilly and Kenny had been involved in the struggle based on a commitment, a program, for liberating the country from South African military occupation and colonial custodianship that was based on the aspirations and actions of the people of Namibia. This autonomous, popular approach ran counter to the view that depended primarily on the good wishes and intervention of external international actors. Central to their imagination of national liberation was that the country’s population should own and control the means through which they would sustain their lives. Part of the struggle was then, not only to resist and fight for an end to colonialism and occupation, but to develop and build the skills, confidence, as well as the intellectual and material means that would enable people to collectively rely on themselves.
The organizations and groups that were part of the NNPCC included independent schools, education and training initiatives, community centers, as well as housing and agricultural projects.
Some of these were based in Windhoek, in the townships of Khomasdal and Katutura, where the Black population was, and still is concentrated. Many of them were in ||Karas, the southernmost region of Namibia, in the towns of Keetmanshoop, Vaalgras, Luderitz, Berseba, and Snyfontein. ||Karas has a very low population density, the lowest in Namibia, and with an average annual rainfall of 18 millimeters, it is classified as a subtropical desert climate. The conditions in the desert during this drought were harsh.
Tilly, as Director of the NNPCC, along with Kenny and some of their close comrades would travel regularly from Windhoek, where they were based, to the desert, where they would meet with the groups of people who were running the projects within the Committee’s ambit. They would sit together in a circle, often outside under a tree, and collectively discuss where the project was at: particular challenges, successes, arising concerns, and future plans. The agricultural projects, which were mostly quite modest communal gardens growing vegetables, were a central focus of the Committee. Difficult dynamics emerged internal to projects around how the fruits and vegetables of the labor of a group get distributed when only a handful of people work but everyone wants, and needs to eat. Other tensions emerged between the Windhoek-based comrades, who received and administered grants, and project leaders, who wanted to spend project money on personal costs.
The harsh conditions of the drought on top of the general desert environment intensified the struggle for basic survival and highlighted a number of issues within the colonial South West Africa economy. So much land was being used for karakul sheep farming, and most of the produce of the land was for the market, not local sustenance and consumption, and the use of water was highly inappropriate for the conditions. Tilly expands:
“We have hitherto, especially in our agricultural projects, taken over farming methods lock, stock and barrel from White commercial farmers. We have not had time to consider the uses of Appropriate Technology. Much emphasis has been placed on obtaining and storing water, through digging wells, drilling boreholes, the construction of dams etc. Too little thought has been given to the way water is actually used. Obviously if we can reduce actual water consumption, we can reduce expenditure on dams, windmills, diesel pumps etc, items which usually require a relatively heavy capital investment. We thus intend to investigate such water-saving methods as drip-irrigation, more intensely in the future.”
Politics of water usage was tied up with the history of dispossession and white commercial farming, with methods not well-adapted to the conditions of the desert or the needs of the people. Through participatory democratic processes, people involved in the projects were able to critically engage with the question of what vision of agriculture was suitable to their conditions, drawing on their own collective knowledge and critiques of the prevalent models of commercial farming.
Water is always an issue in the desert, because it is so scarce. In the present moment, access to it is under the threat of private capital and the relentless march of commodification.
In the 1980s, the politics of drought aid in the forms of water, livestock, food, and other necessary items for survival added to the forms of dependency that the Namibian people were already entangled in. The form of provision of this aid, as handouts, undermined some of the work of the NNPCC: nothing was expected of people who received aid, and nothing was done to reduce the future need to receive aid. The attempt to build self-reliance was under attack from all quarters.
Despite the challenges of the context that attempted to produce and maintain relations of dependence and undermine collectivity among the Namibian people, there were many positives of this self-activity. After the first few years of the project, recognizing the need to locally provide practical skills development for workers in the community projects, the Nationhood project started the Namibian People’s Development Institute (NAPDI) as an alternative to the expensive and inaccessible training opportunities outside the country. As part of skills development, they brought in people from organizations outside Namibia to share knowledge and practices of growing food in drought and desert conditions. Relationships established through the Committee were drawn on in later phases of the liberation movement and many of the projects and networks persist today.
In 1987, Tilly reflected on the first few years of the NNPCC work:
“In the early days of the NNPCC we proclaimed that, “Once we understand that we are our own liberators, no force on earth will be able to stop us.” After two-and-a-half years we are convinced that this is no idle, utopian dream, but a very real and practical possibility. We said that we shall make the desert bloom, and this is exactly what we are starting to do. In short, we have seen the future, and it works!”
It is difficult to assess the impact, successes, or failures of minoritarian tendencies, such as the projects under the NNPCC. And perhaps that is neither the point nor their greater contribution to histories of emancipatory thought and practice. The South is still a desert and it is still hard to live there. It always will be, and that will not change anytime soon. In the desert of the present, the idea that we are our own liberators undoubtedly requires complex techniques of cultivation. Liberation, however we conceive of it, will not be a handout, it cannot come fully grown from an external actor. It has to be watered and pursued in the ground-laying process of collective work. ■