Naming the land: San countermapping in Namibia’s West Caprivi

Both ‘indigenous rights’ and environmental discourses brought a NGO-led natural resource mapping project to the West Caprivi Game Park in northern Namibia in the late 1990s. San countermapping elsewhere in southern Africa demonstrates how mapping has been used as a tool for ‘indigenous’ identity-building and asserting authority over land. At the same time, mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have increasingly been used by conservationists in Namibian Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), demonstrating the potential therein for state and NGO surveillance and intervention regarding both natural resources and their users in conservancies and national parks. Mapping in West Caprivi thus embodied a tension between ‘visibility’ and ‘legibility’. This paper explores how mapping activities reflected, and became part of, institutional and ethnic struggles over identity, authority and natural resources. It argues that members of a San group called Khwe used mapping to construct particular histories, promote a unified, exclusive ethnic identity, and bolster their authority in the area. This in turn presented particular challenges for NGO relationships with the state. The mapping project also showed that, in their bid to counteract their own exclusion, Khwe not only opened up the landscape to new forms of NGO and state legibility, but sought to exclude ethnic others. Like other CBNRM projects, mapping often served socio-political, rather than environmental, functions.