13. Historicising the Palmwag Tourism Concession, north-west Namibia

Abstract

The Palmwag Tourism Concession comprises more than 550,000 hectares of the Damaraland Communal Land Area in Kunene Region. To the west lies the Skeleton Coast National Park. Otherwise, the Concession is situated within a mosaic of differently designated communal lands to which diverse qualifying Namibians have access, habitation and use rights: namely, Sesfontein, Anabeb and Torra communal area conservancies on the Concession’s north, north-east and southern boundaries, with Etendeka Tourism Concession to the east. Established under the pre-Independence Damaraland Regional Authority led by Justus ǁGaroëb, Palmwag Concession lies fully north of the vet fence/“Red Line” that marches east to west across Namibia. In the 1950s, however, the Red Line was positioned further north with part of the current concession comprised of a former commercial farming area for white settler farmers, the expansion of which was associated with evictions of peoples Indigenous to this area. The iterative clearance of people from this area also helped make possible the 1962 western expansion of Etosha Game Park, and followed by the establishment of a large trophy hunting concession between the Hoanib and Ugab rivers in the 1970s. Drawing on archive research, interviews with key actors linked with the Concession’s history, and on-site oral history with local elders through much of the Concession’s terrain, this chapter places the Concession more fully within the historical circumstances and effects of its making. In doing so, competing and overlapping colonial, Indigenous and conservation visions of the landscape are explored for their roles in empowering different types of access and exclusion.