Suchergebnisse

Livestock owners, elites and non-elites alike, from different parts of Namibia fence in land that belongs to the indigenous San people who collectively manage their land as a conservancy. Fencing violates the Communal Land Reform Act of 2002. The conservancy started a lawsuit in August 2013 with reference to this Act to remove the fences and end the illegal occupation of land. The High Court ruled in 2016 in favour of the conservancy, but the fences have not been removed and more illegal settlers have settled in the conservancy. We conceptualize and analyse the act of fencing as land grabbing but argue simultaneously that the legal battle of the conservancy is more than a struggle for justice. The case unfolds as an ontological struggle between actors, their institutions and respective policies and discourses, pivoting on conflicting visions of modernities of (rural) development in Tsumkwe West. The wider significance beyond N≠a Jaqna is that the core of struggles about land and rights in situations of land grabbing is whose modernity counts. The court case has also paved the way for conservancies and other resource communities to become involved in dealing with land issues and contesting the multiple meanings of land.

The notion that Africans lack a sense of future was extensively debated following John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy (1969) and has since entered the scholarly and popular discourse as a fixed topos which we label #African time ('Europeans have watches, Africans have time'). The most recent references to the topos are found in future vision reports of many African states and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that assert and demand a sense of future for Africa and from members of African societies. While the notion of a homogenised past-oriented 'African time' has been largely abandoned in academia, #African time appears to be an accepted and enactable popular discourse among policy makers, state planners and NGO workers. This article provides examples of this phenomenon and it extends James Scott's (1998) idea, that state authorities tend to make its citizens 'legible' in order to govern them, to explain the tenaciousness of the #African time topos. While Scott's examples are almost exclusively about shaping space for legibility, we show that there is a similar process taking place with regards to time, and that citizens, communities and societies are expected to formulate visions for the future if they want their interests to be 'read' by the state, by NGOs, donor agencies and other powerful agents they interact with. In this process of making the future visions of citizens legible, the topos of #African time plays a major role.