Fenced in by Ideas of Modernity: Land Struggles and Civic Activism in Namaqualand, 1980–1993

Abstract

Struggles over access to environmental resources often generate vigorously contested discourses on the meanings of property, land, development, community and tradition. In this chapter I explore how the Namaqualand landscape has, especially since the 1980s, become symbolically and materially contested terrain. The Namaqualand case study reveals the complex ways in which environmental resource struggles can mobilize actions, shape social identities and condition understandings of collective interests. Although meanings may reinforce inequalities, Moore reminds us that Gramsci’s notion of hegemony suggests that ‘dominant meanings are always contested, never totalising, and always unstable’ (Moore, 1993:383). Likewise, the meanings of development, democracy, modernity and tradition are seldom cast in stone, but are instead constantly contested, defended and reinvented.

The research for this chapter was generously funded by the Centre for African Studies’ Oppenheimer Award, University of Cape Town, and the Albert Einstein Institution South African Program at the University of the Witwatersrand, Project for Civil Society. The chapter is drawn in part from intensive interviews conducted in Namaqualand in the first months of 1994. The names of respondents have been changed, except in cases of well-known public personalities, such as Japie Bekeur and Gert Links. I am most grateful for the generosity of Namaqualand residents as well as NGO and civic activists such as Henk Smit, Lala Steyn, Fiona Archer, Martin Bezuidenhout, Louis van Wyk, Llewellyn Links and Harry May. Without their kindness and assistance this project would not have been possible. I am also grateful to the editors and to Professor Tom Lodge for constructive textual interventions.