History
Matambo Singwangwa embodies the complexity of conservation and local communities in Namibia’s far northeast. Born in Bwabwata, he spent his childhood in the bush, growing into the hunter-gatherer life of his Baraquena parents. As a teenager, he was forced to join the South African army. With independence, he was employed by Namibia’s fledgeling environmental ministry and could apply his natural knowledge and skills in positive ways. Matambo has worked tirelessly to curb poaching, promote conservation and rebuild wildlife populations. He’s still out in the field for MET today, fighting for conservation.
The Namibian Kalahari is mostly devoid of hills, even rocks. The spectacular rock art and related archaeology found across much of the western half of the country is absent here. As a result, less archaeological work has been done in the Kalahari. Although people and their prehistoric relatives are likely to have utilised the higher-yielding northern Kalahari – and especially its perennial rivers – more than the country’s arid west, their relics are patchy. The little evidence that has been uncovered confirms tens of thousands of years of human presence here, and a growing trade in beads and other goods for at least half a millennium.
The oral history of the area goes back hundreds of years and portrays the immigration from the north of various groups speaking Bantu languages. Perpetual power struggles ensued, dominated by successive kingdoms of the Kololo and Lozi from the 1600s until well into the early twentieth century. By this time, the Tswana Empire was encroaching from the south. The regency of the powerful regimes affected all other groups, including the Kwangali, Mbunza, Shambyu, Gciriku and Mbukushu from the Okavango and the Subiya, Fwe and Yeyi living between the Kwando and Zambezi rivers. SiLozi became the lingua franca of the region during the last Lozi reign, and remains the most widespread language besides English in the Zambezi Region today.
The San, the earliest known inhabitants of the northern Kalahari, were displaced by the immigration of Bantu communities. A San group called the Khwe made the land between the Okavango and Kwando their realm. The area thus became known as the ‘Hukweveld’. Like other San communities, the Khwe are known by various names including Kxoé, Barrakwenge and Baraquena.
The Caprivi Strip became a perpetual frontier the day its peculiar borders were created. Colonial borders generally ignored indigenous land distribution and use, but few are more striking in their disregard for anything that might have existed before than the parallel lines drawn between the Okavango and Kwando rivers to give German South West Africa a wedge into the African interior, a potential thoroughfare to East Africa and access to the mighty Zambezi River.
The strip was defined through two treaties, one between Germany and Portugal (1886) to delineate the border with Angola, and the other between Britain and Germany (1890) to confirm the border with British Bechuanaland. Both borders remained disputed during the German colonial period, due mainly to a lack of on-the-ground knowledge of the area. They were finalised after World War I, when South Africa was given a mandate by the United Nations to administer South West Africa. The area is still widely referred to as the Caprivi, although today it encompasses the Zambezi Region and a part of the Kavango East Region.
During the ‘scramble for Africa’ by European powers, the desert lands between the Kunene and Orange rivers were amongst the last to be claimed, and the swamps of the Okavango, Kwando and Zambezi were amongst the final reaches to be explored. These areas were difficult to traverse, infested with tsetse fly and plagued with malaria. The early explorers who penetrated here struggled through endless swamps and suffered from regular bouts of fever.
David Livingstone, the first European known to have reached what is today the Zambezi Region, explored the area in the early 1850s. Karl Johan Andersson, searching for the source of the Kunene River, was the first European to reach, and name, the Okavango in 1859. Andersson was apparently also the first to use the term South West Africa.
The Caprivi was generally neglected by both the German and South African governments – until apartheid South Africa turned the strip into the main front in its struggle to deny Namibia independence. Over a period of several decades from the mid-1930s, West Caprivi was proclaimed a livestock-free area, then a game park and finally a restricted military zone. From the 1970s, half a dozen military bases were created between the Okavango and Kwando, and further to the east.
The heavy military presence, and the armed conflict that ensued, had a massive impact on people and the environment. The Khwe, as well as several thousand !Xun (also called !Kung) who fled here in the 1970s during Angola’s civil war, were allowed to stay in the strip for strategic reasons. Many men were recruited into the South African army for their skills as trackers and scouts. The dependency that developed left the San disempowered minorities. Since independence, inclusive policies have enabled the Khwe to benefit from the park and its resources; they still make up the majority of residents living in Bwabwata today, while most !Xun have left.
The physical scars of Namibia’s struggle for independence are healing. Wildlife has returned, and remnants of the military occupation slowly crumble into the vegetation. Yet the people of today’s Zambezi Region continue to strive for an own identity. In 1999, an uncoordinated attempt by a group called the Caprivi Liberation Movement to secede the area as an independent republic was quashed by the Namibian government. The region is now receiving significant development attention, but at the furthest extremity from the Namibian capital, some people still feel disenfranchised by history.
.png?width=82&height=85&name=Navigate%20Namibia-03%20(1).png "Navigate Namibia")