National Culture in Post-Apartheid Namibia addresses the challenges of creating a national culture in the context of a historical legacy that has emphasised ethnic diversity. The state-sponsored Annual National Culture Festival (ANCF) focuses on the Kavango region in north-eastern Namibia. Akuupa critically examines the notion of Kavango-ness as a colonial construct and its subsequent reconstitution and appropriation. He analyses the way in which cultural representations are produced by local people in the postcolonial African context of nation building and national reconciliation by bringing visions of cosmopolitanism and modernity into critical dialogue with the colonial past. Competing cultural festivals are used as celebratory social spaces in which performers and local people participate whilst negotiating a sense of national belonging in an ongoing tension between the need to celebrate diversity, yet strive for unity. This is the first study to discuss the comprehensive role played by those cultural festivals, which were organised in the ethnic homelands during the time Namibia fell under South African control.

‘National Culture in Post-Apartheid Namibia‘ addresses the challenges of creating a ‘national’ culture in the context of a historical legacy that has emphasised ethnic diversity. The state sponsored Annual National Culture Festival (ANCF) focuses on the Kavango region in north-eastern Namibia. Akuupa critically examines the notion of Kavango-ness as a colonial construct and its subequent reconsitution and appropriation. He analyses the way in which cultural representations are produced by local people in the postcolonial African context of nation building and national reconciliation by bringing visions of cosmopolitanism and modernity into critical dialogue with the colonial past.

The search for justice, beyond the basic political understanding, is profoundly theological and ethical. In this work, Dr. Basilius M. Kasera analyses the meaning of justice in post-apartheid Namibia from a biblical perspective. He argues that notions of justice carry no meaning unless they emanate from the community of the affected. Every group of people, by virtue of being God’s image-bearers, are able to assess their own context and provide befitting solutions. However this kind of agency has not been afforded to the post-apartheid Namibian society, which continues to operate on borrowed models of justice. While extrapolating on Allan Boesak’s beneficial theological concepts of justice, Dr. Kasera encourages theologians and Christians at large to participate in the creation of meaningful, effective, and transformative policies, programmes, practices, systems, and justice institutions.

In northwest Namibia, people’s political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State. By elucidating the State through a focus on the social, historical and cultural processes that help constitute it, this study helps chart new territory for anthropology, and it contributes an ethnographic perspective to a wider set of interdisciplinary debates on the State and state processes.

Transfrontier conservation challenges African borders, the "colonial scars of history". The global tourism industry has discovered the potential of African borderlands for adventure travel. Iconic animals and indigenous cultures are marketed in the same breath, often evoking stereotypical images of "Wild Africa". Can ecotourism and ethno-tourism be commended as viable panaceas for environmental protection and development? The marketing of nature and culture raises important questions on the meaningful inclusion of local communities as tourism entrepreneurs. Living museums and cultural villages are emerging as start-ups of local communities. They commodify ethnicity albeit on their own terms. This volume debates the economy of conservation, providing diverse perspectives on an issue of great contemporary relevance.

This volume examines democracy and elections in Africa, taking stock of the state of constitutional democracy on the continent after the democratic gains of the 1990s and 2000s, focusing on how competitive politics or multiparty democracy can be realized and how, through competition, such politics could lead to better policy and practice outcomes.

New oral histories from Black Namibian and Angolan troops who fought in apartheid South Africa’s security forces reveal their involvement, and its impact on their lives, to be far more complicated than most historical scholarship has acknowledged. In anticolonial struggles across the African continent, tens of thousands of African soldiers served in the militaries of colonial and settler states. In southern Africa, they often made up the bulk of these militaries and, in some contexts, far outnumbered those who fought in the liberation movements’ armed wings. Despite these soldiers' significant impact on the region’s military and political history, this dimension of southern Africa’s anticolonial struggles has been almost entirely ignored in previous scholarship. Black troops from Namibia and Angola spearheaded apartheid South Africa’s military intervention in their countries’ respective anticolonial war and postindependence civil war. Drawing from oral history interviews and archival sources, Lennart Bolliger challenges the common framing of these wars as struggles of national liberation fought by and for Africans against White colonial and settler-state armies. Focusing on three case studies of predominantly Black units commanded by White officers, Bolliger investigates how and why these soldiers participated in South Africa’s security forces and considers the legacies of that involvement. In tackling these questions, he rejects the common tendency to categorize the soldiers as “collaborators” and “traitors” and reveals the un-national facets of anticolonial struggles. Finally, the book’s unique analysis of apartheid military culture shows how South Africa’s military units were far from monolithic and instead developed distinctive institutional practices, mythologies, and concepts of militarized masculinity.