Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The dispossession and disempowerment of indigenous people in South West Africa/Namibia spans a century of colonial rule, extending from the heyday of the imperialist scramble for Africa in the 1880s to the period of superpower proxy wars in southern Africa in the late twentieth century. Namibia was the last colony on the continent to gain national independence in 1990. The colonial history of Namibia is marked by some of the worst excesses which European colonialism and racism inflicted on Africans, ranging from genocide to systematic discrimination under apartheid. The final collapse of colonial rule was not only the result of the global power shifts which impacted on the region in the last decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the different phases of colonial rule, from the German period (1884–1915) to the South African occupation (1915–90), indigenous resistance to colonial domination covered a wide range of options, ranging from local rebellions and various acts of non-compliance and protest to the organized diplomatic and military struggle for national self-determination. For most of the nineteenth century the arid and agriculturally unsuitable regions of southern and central Namibia were the untamed hinterland of colonial South Africa. The territory north of the lower Orange River, which was thinly populated mainly by transhumant Nama (Khoekhoe) hunterpastoralists (“Hottentots” ... log in or subscribe to read full text