Still chewing yesteryear’s stones

The re-instatement of ancestral land talks, issues of inheritance of commercial farms without delay, land sold to tourist operators and the abolishment of a resettlement programme were some of the topics that emerged during the consultation on land held at Hoachanas over the weekend.
The land consultations are being undertaken countrywide by the land reform working group of the Namibian Non-Governmental Organisations Forum (Nangof).
The working group is headed pre-independence student stalwarts and now activists, Uhuru Dempers and Sima Luipert.
The residents of Hoachanas at the consultative meeting demanded that the acute landlessness of the settlement be on the agenda of the coming government land conference and that it should be presented as a ‘special case study’. They also demanded that the current resettlement programme be abolished because it is ‘unjust as it favours only the well-connected at the expense of the majority of Hoachanas inhabitants who lost their ancestral land’, the community says.
Chief Petrus Kooper, traditional leader of the Kai//Khau Nama clan of the area was quoted as saying that their demand is made because of the fact that they lost 90% of their ancestral land through forceful colonial dispossession.
The settlement at Hoachanas dates back to at least 1695, and to date, is the main settlement of the Khai?khaun (Red Nation).
After the occupation of the territory of the then South West Africa, Germany in 1902 confirmed Hoachanas as the home area of the Red Nation and created a reserve of 50 000 hectares.
However, the traditional structures of the Nama people were destroyed, and Hoachanas lost its importance as a community centre. All land and livestock was confiscated by the Germans, and the Red Nation only got a new chief in 1922.
However, during the South African regime, attempts were made to have the Nama move to their bantustan in the area of Tses and Aminuis north of Keetmanshoop.
They decreased the size of the Hoachanas reserve to 14 000 hectares and obtained an eviction order that was confirmed by the High Court in Windhoek in 1959.
According to the Nangof, the South African administrator-general told the community that they would be forced to “chew the stones” that remained on the small piece of land.
Chief Kooper says that after 25 years independence the statement made by the then South African colonial chief for the country still remains true for the people of Hoachanas.
He stressed that the situation was worsened by what he described as the ‘unfair resettlement programme of government’.
“What the colonial masters said hitherto is now true; that we will be eating stones if we don’t vacate the farmland where they are now,” Kooper said.
The Hoachanas residents claimed resettlement farms bought since 2012 have been allocated to people from the northern regions including Zambezi, Kavango, Ohangwena, Oshana, Ohangwena, Omusati and Oshikoto.
Kooper made reference to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which Namibia ratified. It calls on members states to recognise the urgent need to respect and promote the inherited rights of indigenous peoples.
Meanwhile Sima Luipert said the civil society is disheartened and disappointed, that most of the crucial resolutions taken at the First National Land Conference held in 1991 were not implemented.
The resolutions among others includes’ expropriation of land owned by absentee landlords and prioritising generational farmworkers for resettlement on farms bought by government.
“The same government that has committed itself to prioritising generational farmworkers is first to evict these farmers,” she charged.