Reinventing the Family: Kinship, Marriage and Famine in Northern Namibia, 1948-54

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Reinventing the Family: Kinship, Marriage, and Famine in Northern Namibia, 1948-1954 Author(s): Meredith McKittrick Source: Social Science History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 265-295Published by: Social Science History AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1171616Accessed: 30-05-2015 15:06 UTC

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Meredith McKittrick

Reinventing the Family Kinship, Marriage, and Famine in Northern Namibia, 1948-1954

In October 1952, during a famine in northern Namibia, an Ovambo woman named Helvi Kondombolo filed a complaint with colonial officials, stating that her son, a contract laborer, had been living in the southern part of the colony for eight years and that she wanted him either sent back to the Ovam- boland reserve or persuaded to send her money to buy food. Her complaint is unique in that the laborer in question was Sam Nujoma, now president of Namibia. And yet she was only one of dozens of women who filed similar

Social Science History 21:3 (fall 1997). Copyright C 1997 by the Social Science History Association.



266 Social Science History

complaints against men between 1948 and 1954 (National Archives of Na- mibia [NAN], Native Affairs Ovamboland [NAO] 93 and 94, file 42/2). In colonial southern Africa, European officials and African men often collaborated in efforts to control African women. These complaints represent a rare case in which European officials and African women collaborated to control African men.

There are two contexts for Helvi Kondombolo's complaint. The first is

political activity among Africans in the southern part of Namibia, which was until 1989 a South African colony known as South West Africa. In 1952 the deadbeat son was working for cash wages that his mother wanted to share, but he was also organizing political protests among migrant laborers. Four

years later he would assist in forming the Ovambo People's Organization, the forerunner of the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO); 38 years later he would be elected the first president of an independent Namibia.

This is not the context in which Helvi Kondombolo viewed his behavior. In a 1993 interview, she admitted quite frankly that she did not at first

support the movement for Namibian independence, explaining that people in the North and laborers in the South had different concerns dictated by geography (Kondombolo, 23 August 1993). Like most Ovambo women, she had never been to the labor centers in the South where by the 1940s most Ovambo men spent a significant portion of their adult lives. As a result, she had no independent access to cash, for in Ovamboland, migrant labor was the only way to earn money and it was an exclusively male institution. On a daily basis, then, Helvi Kondombolo and other Ovambo women were tied to the subsistence economy of the reserve, and in 1952 that economy was failing. The harvests had been below average for the past four years, and official reports indicate that by 1952 famine conditions had set in (NAN, NAO 61, file 12/2). They remained until an ample harvest was reaped in mid-1954.

This first mention of Sam Nujoma in the archives, not as a liberation hero and the nemesis of the colonial government but as a faraway, seldom- seen son, speaks volumes about the realities of daily life in 1950s colonial

Namibia--about the migrant labor economy that drew African men away from home for long periods, about the women they left behind, and about what the system of male migrancy did to family relationships and household economies. In one sense, then, this article examines changing relations



Kinship, Marriage, and Famine in Northern Namibia 267

between men and women in the context of a society deeply affected by a migrant labor system. But it does so within the context of a famine that struck northern Namibia from 1952 to 1954. People's survival strategies during this famine are inseparable from changing ideas of what constituted families and familial obligations.

Within African historiography, famine has been studied as "both a prod- uct of and a window onto the social and economic history" of the continent (Vaughan 1992 [1987]: 3; also Watts 1991, 1983). Famine is the ultimate crisis for any society, threatening its existence at the most fundamental level, and as a result it lays bare social tensions and inequalities. Such inequalities are then a matter of life and death, and in the process of stripping aside polite ideologies, famine conditions make hierarchies of power more accessible to outside observers, whether they be colonial officials or academic researchers.

The study of famine has linkages to four concerns of recent historical research. Famines force people to react in ways we can see; this allows us to construct them as active rather than passive. Second, by examining who starves, at what point, and why, we get a glimpse of how social relations and entitlements are woven together (Vaughan 1992 [1987]; Watts 1983; Sen 1981). Third, famines were an opportunity for increased colonial intervention, because they left Africans at their most vulnerable (NAN, Resident Commissioner Ovamboland [RCO] 8, file 9; Peires 1989: 241-72; Iliffe 1979: 193-202). And finally, famines are a way to look at how wider external processes influence a society because, as Amartya Sen (1981) has argued, famines rarely occur for ecological reasons only (see also Hayes 1992; Vaughan 1992 [1987]; Watts 1983).

What has been ignored, however, is the extent to which famine is also a creator of social and economic history, for the actions people take out of desperation often reshape a society. The famine that struck northern Namibia in 1952-54 is a window onto some of the most fundamental changes taking place in the region. Women were left most vulnerable by this period of shortage due to a coalescence of colonial and ecological forces. But to cope with their increased vulnerability, they engaged in actions with long-term consequences. Many women attempted to redefine kinship and marital relations to their advantage, arguing that male relatives who were contract laborers in the southern part of the country had an obligation to forward a portion of their cash wages to their mothers or wives. Making such arguments required




a significant redefinition of mother-son and, particularly, wife-husband re-

lationships. The women drew on new ideas prevalent in Ovambo society, such as those surrounding Christian notions of nuclear families and life-

long marriage and European-colonial discourses of female vulnerability and

dependence, and blended them with older ideologies. African historians and scholars of other colonized societies have empha-

sized the extent to which colonialism provided Africans with opportunities to reshape social relations that were contested in the precolonial era. In seek-

ing out specific ways in which this reshaping occurs, research has targeted institutions such as colonial and "customary" law and changing economic

systems (in particular, migrant labor and cash cropping) as sites where kin-

ship and marriage are contested and given new meanings. While women are often seen to have suffered long-term disadvantages in these debates around the continent, their position seems to have been particularly precarious in the settler societies of southern Africa, which were centered around male mi-

grant labor economies (McClendon 1995; Moore and Vaughan 1994; Jeater 1993; Schmidt 1992; Walker 1990; Chanock 1985; for West Africa see Mann 1985; Roberts 1984; for East Africa see Lovett 1996 and 1994).

In the realm of law, women were often disadvantaged because colonial officials were the ones controlling the production of legal "fact" and consulted older African men (McClendon 1995; Parpart 1994; Jeater 1993; Schmidt 1992; Vaughan 1992 [1987]; Chanock 1985).1 However, these laws were often hardened due to a colonial sense of a "crisis of control" in the 1920s and 1930s, which focused on a perceived increase in women's mobility (McClendon 1995; Parpart 1994; Jeater 1993; Marks 1989). Thus it can be concluded that African women, as well as male elders and the colonial state, played a role in transforming the discourses of gender, marriage, and patriarchy through their actions (McClendon 1995; Parpart 1994; Lovett 1994). This allows women a certain agency, certainly, but it must be emphasized that the institutions that many scholars have targeted as key to creating these discourses were not present in all societies, nor did they always allow women to participate. In Ovamboland, there were no colonially constituted "native courts" in which women could publicly exploit the contradictions present in "customary" law and European mores. Female informants re- peatedly said that they were unable to present their cases in chiefs' courts but had to appoint a male proxy to do so; women also said that even this




happened very rarely. As elsewhere, certainly, women's actions in fleeing to urban areas, refusing initiation, joining churches, or flouting colonial definitions of morality forced African and European men to respond. But in most circumstances, the deliberate creation of new discourses surrounding women mirrored colonial hierarchies: it was directed by European officials, in consultation with (subordinate) older African men, while ignoring the interpretations of African women.2

Relative to other ways in which gender hierarchies were shaped, then, the famine under study stands out because women held a relatively privi- leged position, even if only briefly, in the production of discourses about kinship and marriage, appropriating colonial discourses about control and tradition to shape their own circumstances. They briefly had access to the primary arenas in which such discourses were produced--colonial officials and the written word. This was so only because listening to the women served the interests of colonial officials. But in the process, African men had to de- fend themselves against the charges their womenfolk laid and had to work within the framework these women provided. Women were still extremely constrained, and their insistence on participating in this discourse was born out of a desperation created by the intersection of patriarchy and colonialism. But due to the circumstances in which colonial officials found themselves in the 1950s, where men were viewed as the creators of rural disorder and women as the only potential antidote to the growing chaos, Ovambo women were briefly given a public voice -although one heavily mediated by colonial

officials--and a chance to argue their view of what "customary" relations

ought to be. It is the specific circumstances of this famine, combined with a wider

context of political, economic, and social change, which gave women this

momentary "voice." Studies of food scarcity in colonial Africa, particularly those by Megan Vaughan (1992 [1987]; 1983), have recognized that relations of kinship change over time and that historically specific types of social rela-

tionships intersect with historically specific crises to play a deciding role in

determining who suffers, when, and why. Vaughan attributes the specificity of the 1949 Malawi famine to changes in kinship and marriage structures and practices. As land shortages became more severe, she argues, households came to rely more on wage labor procured mainly by men. This eroded the

sufficiency of sorority groups in this matrilineal, matrilocal society and left




women increasingly dependent on men. As the famine progressed, individuals began to show less generosity toward others, and the true relations of

power and access to resources were revealed. The instability of marriage and dependence of women on men combined to leave at least some women far more vulnerable than their male counterparts (Vaughan 1992 [1987]; also see Moore and Vaughan 1994).

Thus Vaughan situates transformations in social relations primarily within the realm of economics - a competing cash economy and land short-

ages--although she also allocates a role for colonial ideas of gender. But while she recognizes that kinship and marriage change and affect the process of famine, Vaughan does not examine a related possibility - that the extreme circumstances of famine might accelerate the transformation of kinship and marital institutions and practices. When the Malawi famine ended, social relations again moved into the realm of the invisible, but the assumption is that they continued on much as they had before, waiting for the next big crisis to bring the contradictions and tensions back to the forefront.

The 1952-54 famine in Namibia, however, had a long-term impact on people's ideas of what kinship relations comprised. It came at a time when those relationships were under strain and when people were already engaging in processes of negotiation and redefinition. Such debates gained new

intensity during the famine itself, when people were hungry and the stakes were higher. Thus the battles over rights and obligations that took place dur-

ing this famine were part of a preexisting debate. But the urgency implicit in a crisis that provides us with a window onto these debates also prompted people to engage in them with greater vigor than during kinder times.

Such debates do not generally surface in oral histories because they are no longer taking place, or, rather, they are taking place in a very different context over other issues and thus no longer seem relevant in their old form. In addition, as Vaughan discovered in her research, people seldom remem- ber the mundane details of finding food, allocating food, consuming food-- that is, the stuff of daily life-until food resources are strained. But unlike the 1949 Malawi famine, these debates do not appear in oral histories of the 1952-54 famine, for it is remembered by very few oral informants today.3 The problem is not its lack of severity, for official reports indicate malnour- ished young men seeking contracts to go south, livestock deaths, depletion of government grain reserves available for sale, and a severe shortage of




water.4 Earlier nonlethal famines--in 1930-33 and during World War II- are remembered, and memories of a deadly famine in 1915-16 are particularly vivid.' Rather, the 1952-54 famine appears to be unmemorable today partly because, when placed against the landscape of crisis, civil war, and change that patterned life from the 1950s to the 1980s, it was mundane. In this sense, it is very different from the famine Vaughan researched, which has not been eclipsed by a worse subsistence crisis.

Yet at the time of the Namibian famine, things did not look quite so quo- tidian. Many women in Ovamboland, motivated by what they then saw as unusual circumstances, took an unusual step: they went to colonial officials and asked them to write letters requesting support from male relatives-- usually sons and husbands--working in the South.6 If we doubt that circumstances were dire, we need only reflect on the possible consequences of their letters-consequences of which most women could not have been ignorant. Overstaying one's contract in the South was an offense punishable by whipping, jail, and/or hard labor. The native commissioner who preceded the one to whom these women made their requests was nicknamed Shon- gola-"Whip"-by his Ovambo subjects. Men of working age, who were most visible to the colonial state, had every reason to fear the representatives of that state. Their mothers and wives knew this. Yet they went to the commissioner's office anyway and told him their male relatives were breaking a law designed to exploit their labor power.

The focus of their complaints were the men who kept the diamonds, copper, and tin flowing out of the mines, who kept the roads paved, the trains running, and the white ranching industry profitable. All worked on one- to two-year contracts which could not be broken without penalty; all worked for wages too low to support a family--wages that subsidized a colonial, white-dominated economy that thrived on their cheap labor. To ensure that Ovambo laborers did not have to support a family, the colonial government kept mine laborers isolated in compounds and maintained strict controls on the mobility of women, so that they would stay in Ovamboland and grow enough food for their subsistence. The economy of the reserve was therefore crucial to upholding the entire colonial economy.7

When a wife or a mother wrote to a laborer making a claim on his limited wages, she had to be aware that she was asking to be prioritized over other female relatives who were also in need of support. Thus these letters un-




doubtedly represent a process of generational conflict between women which is obscured in the archives and in oral history alike and which needs further investigation.8 What is much more apparent in the letters is the way in which relations between men and women were negotiated, for many of these women told colonial officials that the men were in the South illegally, having overstayed their labor contracts. The frequency of this assertion indicates that women were using this information intentionally, as a way of getting colonial officials' attention. This famine thus represents a rather unholy alliance between African women and colonial officials, who found themselves with common interests, although coming from radically different places.

In an unusual turn of events, colonial officials spent vast amounts of time and money tracking down men who only rarely responded to requests to send home money or to visit. Normally, colonial officials ignored domestic issues generally and the grievances of women specifically. In this case, however, they saw the women's complaints as a potentially useful means of

policing African men. The 1950s were a period in which colonial officials felt that they were losing control of the system they had constructed, as the

imperfections of "indirect rule" became apparent. So many men were going on contract that some inevitably slipped through colonial controls and remained in the urban areas, where wages and living conditions were better.

Many others played by the rules but stayed away on contract for years, in effect deserting their families in Ovamboland.9 Officials were deeply concerned about upholding a system that was rife with contradictions and yet was extremely profitable for the colonial state and the white settlers of Na- mibia. By the early 1950s, their concerns took on an added urgency: strikes and protests led by migrant workers were taking place in the South, colo- nies around Africa were achieving independence, and in South Africa, the African National Congress and other political organizations were launch-

ing direct mass-action campaigns. Namibian officials were concerned that their subjects would follow South Africa's lead (NAN, NAO 58, file 7/3/1, 13 September 1949 and 17 December 1949).

The women had their own purposes in turning to colonial officials. Faced with a contracting subsistence economy, a temporary crisis in food supply, and a growing migrant labor system that took men away for years at a time, the women were seeking ways to shore up their economic status and their social relations with men, many of whom were not supporting their




female relatives in Ovamboland but were instead turning their energies to

establishing new family ties and social networks near labor centers. Given the lack of specific and comprehensive information, it is impossible to state how frequently Ovambo laborers formed new families in the South or the nature of these families. But colonial officials often complained of "immoral" women who cohabited with men in the native locations (NAN, RCO 2, file

2/1916/I; NAO 13, file 6/2/5); in addition, there are occasional references in the complaints to men divorcing wives in Ovamboland and marrying under

European law in southern towns, and to men's obligations to friends or relatives in the South (NAN, NAO 93 and 94, file 42/2). Sam Nujoma married a Herero woman in Windhoek the same year his mother complained that he had not been to visit her in Ovamboland.

The main channels through which women and colonial officials pursued their agendas were letters written by colonial officials on behalf of women to absentee male migrant laborers, and the replies by those laborers, engaging in the debate. The letters are unusual in that women are so rarely visible in the colonial record; they illustrate colonial ideologies, gender relations, and the strain that the migrant labor system put on both household economies and relationships between men and women. Aside from simply looking at the

parties involved and what their respective interests were, however, it is vital to interrogate the language of these letters. The wording in which women's demands and men's responses were couched indicates profound attempts to redefine notions of kinship and marriage, and ideas of what people involved in these relationships owed to each other. It is perhaps this aspect that is most revealing of the changes taking place in 1950s Ovambo society. Without the letters, this process of redefinition would be lost to us.

Migrancy and Family in Colonial Namibia

Labor was the sole reason for the South African presence in Ovamboland, an area in north central Namibia composed of several societies--all labeled Ovambo by early explorers and colonial officials ?--that practiced mixed

agriculture and pastoralism and were matrilineal and patrilocal. The rest of Namibia had been colonized by Germany in the 1880s, but the north central region had been left alone, subjected only to European labor recruiters, missionaries, and traders visiting with the permission of Ovambo kings. Its




people were too well armed, its population too dense, its land too malarial to be of great interest to the Germans, who in any case were barely holding on to their colony in the face of massive revolts by their unwilling African

subjects. It was only after South Africa conquered the territory on behalf of the British during World War I, and was eventually awarded the colony as a

League of Nations mandate, that European colonialists began to look with interest toward Ovamboland, with its relatively dense population. Namibia is an arid country, and Ovamboland and the neighboring region along the

Kavango River, which is much smaller, are the only places with sufficient rainfall for highly productive agriculture. In addition, German troops had killed an estimated 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama peoples- previously their labor force and the largest populations in the southern part of the territory--during a 1904-7 war (Bridgman 1981; Dreschler 1980). Therefore, by 1915 about half the population lived (and still lives) in this

relatively compact area. Germans in Namibia and Portuguese in Angola tapped this labor force

to a limited extent in the early twentieth century. South Africa, having estab- lished a skeleton administration in Ovamboland to regularize the supply, nonetheless found itself faced with constant labor shortages. The colonial

government at first held the area rather weakly and was not in a position to

impose cash taxes or forced recruiting on the population. Rather, oral history confirms that migrancy was initially prompted not by a need to buy food, or even to pay taxes, but instead to fulfill new "needs" that had not existed prior to contact with European traders and missionaries. These expanded "needs" included prestige and practical goods that both marked new Chris- tian identities and new definitions of status and made life easier: European clothing; manufactured hoes, pots, and axes; blankets; soap; and bicycles.

Clothing, in particular, was indispensable to the growing Christian community, which closely associated European dress with conversion. By the 1940s, about half of Ovamboland's population was Christian. Further, clothing and other manufactured goods were status symbols in the non-Christian community, which first began to associate them with power and prestige in the late precolonial era, when kings who monopolized access to long- distance traders also controlled the distribution of such goods. By the 1940s Ovambo fathers, including many who were not Christian, began demanding




that sons bring European goods from the South before they could receive

permission to marry. A series of changes in local ideas of status and identity therefore worked together to cause many to perceive European goods not as luxuries but as necessities (McKittrick 1995, 1996). Thus when men went to the South, they saw themselves as contributing to the fulfillment of these new needs, not as contributing to household subsistence economies.

But access to cash to buy such goods was a highly gendered inequality. There were only two stores in Ovamboland in the 1940s and 1950s, and such

goods were rarely available by barter. Most laborers purchased their products in the South and carried them home. But women did not have this option, for colonial officials and Ovambo leaders proclaimed a "traditional" law bar-

ring women from leaving Ovamboland. Given that "Ovamboland" itself was a colonially created entity, and there are many stories of women leaving the

region during the famine of 1915-16, the law was not a precolonial relic. Rather, it was part of the migrant labor economy, which was supported by a female-headed rural economy. The law limiting Ovambo women's mobility was an attempt on the part of male elders and colonial officials to ensure that African women subsidized men's wages with their agricultural work and to induce men to return home once they had finished their contracts. It was defined as "traditional" to give it a legitimacy supposedly beyond chal-

lenge, since "tradition" was understood to have remained unchanged from the distant past.

Although some women managed to escape colonial controls and moved to labor centers and cities in the South, they represented a tiny minority. Thus men earned cash on contract, while women were left dependent on male relatives. Colonial officials did not see this as a problem but, rather, as the natural relationship between men and women. It was not natural, however, within the parameters of early-twentieth-century Ovambo society, in which husbands and wives maintained separate property and women supported themselves. Ovamboland was a matrilineal society, and a wife and her children formally belonged to her lineage, not her husband's. Upon her husband's death, a widow had to leave his house and return all the property he had given her. Women inherited the grain in their granaries, which they had

grown, and nothing else; sometimes they were even cheated out of this. The husband's relatives would occasionally give the children a couple of goats




or a cow as a goodwill gift, but this was strictly voluntary (Shombwaku and Kafe, 10 August 1993). Normally a widow would return to her family home to stay with a brother or grown son.

To buy European goods, a woman could sometimes sell surplus livestock or grain (grown on her husband's land, to which she had usage rights) to returning laborers. But this option became less feasible as colonial rule

progressed. Colonial policies of the 1920s and 1930s had resulted in growing land pressure in Ovamboland. In addition, the entrenchment of Christianity and new material desires meant that men spent more of their adult lives in the South as the colonial era wore on. The increasing burden of work women had assumed began to take its toll. Women devised strategies to cope with the loss of labor, sometimes relying on male neighbors appointed by their husbands for the heaviest tasks and forming work parties during labor- intensive times. But over the long term, they were responsible for men's tasks as well as their own, and the absence of men affected their ability to

grow a surplus to sell for manufactured goods. The resulting dependency on men was frequently commented upon in oral interviews as something rela-

tively recent and troubling (Iitembu, 27 August 1993; Ngoloimwe, 4 August 1993; Shihepo, 22 July 1993).

But the economic changes, combined with increasing land pressures and a declining water table, also sometimes affected women's ability to meet subsistence requirements. Ovamboland had often suffered from crop failure in the precolonial period, because rainfall in this area tends more toward extremes than toward averages. But famines were rarely universal, because rainfall was uneven between rather small areas. A system of exchange based on kinship and client networks over a large area allowed households that had suffered crop failure to survive with the help of those that had not. When universal famine occurred, as it did in 1914-16, it was due to circumstances

beyond the failure of the environment, such as warfare (McKittrick 1995: 74-79; Hayes 1992: 178-236).

This changed in the colonial era. By the 1930s, households were failing to meet subsistence and regularly suffered from a period of severe hunger before the new crop was reaped, even when a good crop had been harvested the year before. Government reports from this time onward paint a picture of an area increasingly unable to support itself (NAN, NAO 61, file 12/2; NAO 19 and 20, file 11/1). They also describe an area where food shortages




were increasingly being managed through commercial transactions involving money. Old structures of borrowing and exchange were giving way to the cash-based sale of grain from government-controlled depots. Here women were doubly disadvantaged. Not only did they not have the cash to buy the grain; they were also the ones providing the grain for sale. In the late 1920s, having coopted or deposed the most uncooperative Ovambo leaders, the colonial government felt secure enough to begin levying an annual grain tax on the head of each household - defined as male. But the men were increasingly gone, so the burden of producing this tax fell on the women, who then had to turn around and buy back the grain they had paid when they ran out of food. This forced them into making a monetary transaction to feed their families -but they had no independent access to money.

From 1948 to 1954, harvests fell below normal, and this made a bad situation still worse. Like most famines in the colonial era, this was apparently one in which no one died directly from starvation. The unremarkableness of this famine in the minds of those who lived through it makes all the more compelling the flood of unprecedented complaints that came to the native commissioner's office. Women were trying out a new strategy to deal with a crisis, but they were doing so in the context of new circumstances that were beginning to recur at some level every year.

Deadbeat Sons and Husbands, Desperate Mothers and Wives

Because this famine is unremembered by those living in Ovamboland, it is an event that could easily have remained hidden from the researcher's purview. But between 1948 and 1954, numerous Ovambo women filed complaints against their male relatives in the South, and these letters survive in the archives today. The complaints were delivered by women or their

proxies, sometimes from as far as 100 miles away, but usually from homes near colonial offices.

The most striking thing about these complaints is that they were taken seriously by colonial officials, who spent a lot of time and money on them for very little reward. Increasing male migration had led to a fear of a breakdown in the labor system. In the 1920s and 1930s, these fears had centered around women who escaped Ovamboland and moved to urban areas or to labor




centers, or women who became pregnant outside marriage or defied their

parents. Such women were portrayed as inherently immoral once uprooted from their "traditional" environment. Other scholars have found parallel crises of confidence in southern Africa for these decades, and in each case, increasing control over women's mobility and sexual activity was touted as the solution (McClendon 1995; Parpart 1994; Jeater 1993; Marks 1989).

In 1950s Ovamboland, the situation looked different. It was men, not

women, who were considered the primary problem, because it was men who were rejecting their links to the reserve and who were engaging in illegal political behavior in the South. Thus colonialism again experienced a crisis of confidence, but this time male laborers, rather than women, were targeted (cf. Moore and Vaughan 1994: 140). Male migration was virtually universal

by the 1940s; formerly only young, unmarried men had gone south, but now

many men spent much of their adult lives away on labor contracts. This had been what colonial officials had striven for in the 1920s, when they fretted over the refusal of married men to leave their homes. But by the time these officials had gotten their wish, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the idea of a tribal reserve existing alongside European society but unaffected by it looked increasingly unworkable. The women's claims of nonsupport and de- sertion by male relatives merely confirmed colonial fears. Yet the migrant labor economy was fundamental to the system of colonial rule and to Euro-

pean prosperity, and officials could not afford to see it break down. Officials thus listened to Ovambo women for perhaps the first time, drawn to their

complaints as a new means of exercising control over laborers. It is likely that as women realized officials were receptive, word spread

and more lodged complaints. But this does not entirely explain the timing of these letters, for there were very few for 1948-51, when they first started to trickle in, and they increased dramatically during the famine's peak, from 1952 to 1954. This reflects the reliance of these women on the male laborers who were largely absent from their lives, and the ways in which even a

partial crop failure dramatically increased that reliance." It also shows the

attempts of those left behind to try to maintain social ties, and their attempts to manipulate administrative fears as a way of gaining a hearing.

The context in which these complaints were filed is not just one of

increasing land and labor pressures and a growing money economy that excluded women. It was also a time of increasing church membership. Divorce




was forbidden to the Christian community, and a woman who left her husband was expelled from the church. But a man who failed to support his wife did not face the same punishment. Therefore, women who were not

supported had to work within the framework of a perceived marriage bond, in which the husband and wife should serve as an economic unit. They no

longer had the option of marrying someone else or returning to their families. But while marriage changed significantly, matrilineal inheritance prac-

tices remained quite consistent; indeed, they are still being negotiated today. Ovambo women continued to be "chased" from their husband's house and, at most, received only their own property upon his death, or married their husband's brother. But increasingly, these widows had nowhere to go, for often their husband's brothers were Christian and hence monogamous. If

they were already married, they could not take on their dead brother's wife. And quite often, a widow's sons were away on labor contracts. A woman

might have a physical house she could reside in, although this was not guaranteed, because young men waited to establish households until after they were married, and the age of marriage was increasing as migrant labor became more entrenched. In the case of an elderly woman, running a farm without the assistance of male labor might prove impossible. Most of the

complaints that came from mothers against sons noted that the women were

elderly and widowed, indicating that the lack of labor assistance was a major problem.

The fact that the complaints came from both mothers and wives threw those men who were married and whose mothers were elderly - factors likely to go hand in hand -into a double bind. Many men were coming to agree with the Christian idea that they should support their wives. But as their mothers inherited nothing from their fathers, the old obligation to support one's mother remained in place as well. They had the options of spreading already scarce resources twice as far or of deciding whom not to support. This period was a time of tremendous flux and ambiguity in social relations, and people fell between the cracks. It is those people who often turned up at the native commissioner's office.

In order to lay claims to support, women had to argue that they were in fact "family" to the man in question. Relationships became not an issue of

proximity and daily contact and interaction but, rather, a matter of biological or marital ties that were supposed to remain static and endure any circum-




stance. Men's earnings were extremely small, and many had dependents in the South. Remittances, as Moore and Vaughan (1994: 164) have suggested, were a way for male laborers to maintain social networks in their rural homes. But men's wages were finite, supposedly meant to support themselves only. There inevitably came a point at which they could be stretched no further. For those laborers who found themselves with competing family obligations in the North and the South, the question became which should be supported and which excluded at the risk of severing ties. In many cases, given these

competing demands, wives' and mothers' claims on men's cash wages were

by no means a given. Each had to make a strong case that the laborer had an

obligation to her that overrode others. The letters are not the women's words but, rather, are heavily struc-

tured accounts written by officials and designed to obscure local details. The

process by which oral testimony becomes text has been examined by several scholars, who have argued that in different contexts the original "voice" of the speaker comes through in varying degrees (Roberts 1990; Davis 1987). We do not know much about these women as individuals, only about their

position in a system of larger structures. But the variations in the letters

provide hints at how we can separate the colonial formulas from the actual

arguments of the women themselves. The letters fall primarily into two categories: older women against sons

or wives against husbands. Far less frequently, women asked maternal uncles or brothers for support, illustrating that women called upon a variety of social relations but prioritized some over others. There are no recorded complaints of women against their fathers, probably in part because most men with daughters grown and out of the house would no longer be going south and earning cash, and partly because fathers in Ovamboland's patrilocal, matrilineal society were seen as having completed their financial duties once

daughters married. In one case, an older man asked a nephew for support; this is the only case of that nature and we must assume it was exceptional, although surely some older men also suffered from poverty and an inability to obtain cash earnings.12 In another unusual case, a woman asked her daughters, legally classified as "detribalized" and thus permitted to live in the South, for support.13

Older women asking sons for financial support or visits comprise the most common type of complaint, reflecting the triple vulnerability of gen-




der, old age, and widowhood in Ovambo society. For example, an official wrote on behalf of one woman: "Ndeikeva Mwetupaka complains that her son, Jonas Namadi, c/o Orange Hotel, Upington [South Africa], does not

support her. She is a widow, poor and sickly, and living on charity. She de- clares that Jonas has been away from Ovamboland for about 14 years and desires him to visit her soon" (NAN, NAO 94, file 42/2, Assistant Native Commissioner [ANC]-Ovamboland to Native Commissioner Ovamboland [NCO], 8 December 1952). This complaint is of nonsupport, but the re-

quest, and the woman's perceived solution to her poverty, is a "visit." This reflects two features of Ovambo society: first, that "visits" carried with them certain expectations, such as gifts, and were of course of an unspecified length. Second, her request reflects prevailing realities for elderly women in Ovamboland. Less secure without the physical presence of a male relative, this woman probably did not see a mere cash remittance as a solution to her difficulties. In this case, the native commissioner forwarded her request to an official in South Africa with a recommendation that Ndeikeva's son be "repatriated" to Ovamboland, but there are no future records indicating whether this happened.

Many older women did not insist on a visit but requested that the men either visit or send cash payments. Helvi Kondombolo's letter asked that Sam Nujoma be sent home, having been in the South for eight years, "or be persuaded to send her funds with which to purchase food" (NAN, NAO 94, file 42/2, NCO to ANC-Windhoek, 21 October 1952). It is doubtful that this presentation of options echoes colonial thinking, since someone who had been in the South for eight years would as a matter of course be sent home unless he could prove legal exemption.14 But in the mind of Helvi Kondom- bolo, getting cash for food or having a son at home to rely on for support were about equal as strategies. Two months later, her son sent cash and a promise to visit when he was able (NAN, NAO 94, file 42/2, ANC-Windhoek to

NCO, 17 November 1952). Moore and Vaughan (1994: 164) have argued that when cash was sub-

stituted for other types of wealth in such redistributive practices as bride service, social relations were not dramatically changed. Yet substituting cash remittances for agricultural labor or a man's physical presence required some

redefinition, for cash represented a radically different form of social security. The substance of a relationship based on cash remittances over hundreds of




miles was not physical proximity, daily contact, and reciprocity, but rather an abstract "familial" bond that was supposed to transcend others, existing over hundreds of miles and potentially years of noncontact. Such a bond is also based to some degree on Western notions of marriage and kinship, where men were supposed to support their wives and other female relations.

Wives especially sought cash when requesting support from their husbands. They also drew on the idea of the nuclear family by mentioning children: "I have the honor to inform you that Claudia Shimboleni has re-

quested that her husband Stephanus Shikongo be induced to send her money for the support of herself and her two children. She states that there is very little food left in her kraal. She has written to her husband but he has not

replied" (NAN, NAO 94, file 42/2, ANC-Ovamboland to NCO, 6 August 1952). The fact that this couple had European first names indicates that they were church members.'5 This means that the woman could not leave her husband, although it appears that he had deserted her or was ignoring her. Under non-Christian marriage practices, she could have left him and re- married. Instead, as a church member, she tried to make a case for support by arguing that they were a single economic unit and that she should share in the fruits of his labors, and she enlisted the support of the colonial state in making her case.

Despite their differences, these cases share one theme: an attempt to manipulate definitions of familial obligations and to forge new ones. Sometimes these obligations were based on new ideas; sometimes they were variations of old responsibilities, tailored to fit a cash economy and long periods of separation. Always they were represented in terms of traditional, accepted duties. But these were not traditional duties, because labor migrancy and partial immersion into a cash economy were relatively new circumstances for Ovambo societies. In the case of older women, the difference was not so radical. Sons were expected to support their elderly mothers. Altering the manner in which that support was given did have some repercussions for the relationship, but these were far less dramatic than what wives were requesting.16

The practice of men channeling the cash wages and the goods they purchased into the nuclear family rather than into their matrilineage meant that the wealth produced by a man's labor power was being diverted from his lineage to another. If a woman was given clothing or goods, these at least




could be claimed by her husband's relatives after his death, though it was

generally seen as rather greedy to demand the return of every article. But if a wife was given cash to buy food, then the man's earnings were consumed

immediately and did not benefit his lineage at all; indeed, he was performing the wife's role, which was to feed the family. Further, cash is an abstract form of wealth, convertible into a variety of other types of wealth. A man who sent cash home to his wife could not guarantee that she would not use it on something other than food, something which she then could keep for herself.

Defining Family

But women did not just ask for money, for the migrant labor system dam-

aged more than subsistence economies. It also strained social relations, and the letters were partly attempts to repair these, because women often asked men to visit them as well. Such requests were not simply a ploy to get men home so they could be milked for money and presents; often, they were

probably an attempt to reinforce the sense that a relationship existed at all. A system of smoothly functioning kinship had of course never existed, ex-

cept in the minds of colonial officials. But it was under particular strain at this time, as the number of contracts a man undertook in his lifetime increased. Older men in the North today often cannot relate important local events of the 1940s and 1950s; the answer is almost invariably, "I was in the South at that time." Famines, the death of kings, epidemics, religious move-

ments, births, marriages, festivals: all took place outside their purview. One can only imagine what the effect on social ties must have been under these circumstances.

So there was a catch to women's attempts to enforce these social ties, because they were not only reinventing the meaning of those ties; they were

trying to prove that those ties should still exist. Like colonial officials, they were shoring up a system. The labor system was predicated on the idea that men didn't have to support people in the reserve, that they didn't have to be paid a living wage. But that labor system was changing more slowly than local economies. The 1950s were therefore a time of severe economic

stresses, as subsistence economies began to falter but the idea of using money to subsidize them was not yet widely accepted.




Men's responses to these requests therefore varied, from acquiescence to

outright refusal, depending on the circumstances. If they were in the South

illegally, they were sent home or sometimes imprisoned first. Others sent

money, or promised to do so but never did. But one indication of the state of social relations between migrants and their relatives at home is that the men almost never agreed to visit, even if they sent money. One inevitably gets the sense from these letters that some of the complainants' targets would have

preferred to forget their ties in the North and that the complainants were seen as nuisances.

This reluctance to lend support reflects the fact that the networks of interaction and reciprocity that sustained a relationship no longer existed for

many people. Colonial officials and missionaries, armed with anthropological charts they had made and confident in the eternal stability of Ovambo com-

munities, misinterpreted the social fabric of those communities. Officials felt that they could stop change merely by better policing of the contract labor

system and thought that laborers should naturally want to return to their

"proper" families in the North. Unfortunately, the laborers did not fall into

step with the models. Men often had families in the South as well--dependents and dependencies that completely excluded those they had left behind in the North. Even when they did not, in their minds they had gone south to fulfill demands for manufactured goods. They were not happy to find that they were instead leaving their homes for years at a time merely to buy food for their families, who were supposed to be supporting themselves. It is for these reasons that obligations were met so unenthusiastically on most occasions.

Women were aware of this separation, and how could they not have been? One man who had not seen his wife in three years refused her requests for him to visit during the summer months. His reasons might have focused on the climate or on the heavy agricultural workload that summer entailed (he did offer to visit after the harvest, in the winter), but in either case his priorities were abundantly clear (NAN, NAO 93, file 42/2, Swakop- mund Magistrate to NCO, 14 December 1949). Another refused to come home or send money to his mother; he had been sent south with an uncle as a boy to escape an earlier famine, and now he resided there legally. His mother said that "she did not realize at that time that he would eventually lose all interest in his family"--defining "family" as herself, not the




uncle who had raised him (NAN, NAO 94, file 42/2, NCO to Chief Native

Commissioner-Windhoek, 5 February 1955). In the instances where the administration tracked cases over a long

period, results show that officials had remarkably little success in forcing men to do anything. The administration issued threats, but it had no legal ground to stand on unless the laborer had overstayed his contract and was in the South illegally. Any attempts to resort to extralegal measures to

drag unwilling men back home would have been resisted strongly by the business community, whose immediate interests rested in maximizing the labor supply.17 It was for this reason that colonial officials had not succeeded in their attempts to mandate a stay in Ovamboland between contracts for laborers in the 1940s. In at least one instance, officials tracked a deadbeat husband intermittently from 1948 to 1954, the full range of time for which these letters exist. The man paid irregularly and finally instituted divorce

proceedings against his wife (NAN, NAO 93, file 42/2, Thomas Iiyambo vs. Helena Ichuchua).

An example of the limits placed on women's attempts to gain support is the case of Hilima Kristof, an elderly woman who was blind. She had a husband, two daughters, and a son living legally in the South. At first she tried to persuade them to return to Ovamboland to help her rebuild her

compound, without success. She also tried to obtain support from her husband, whom she had married under customary law, but found that he now had a wife recognized under European law in the South, which overrode her own marriage." She therefore had no claim to support from him. One of the

daughters agreed to send home one-third of her meager salary. The son said he was supporting an aunt in the South but agreed to send home one-fifth of his salary, which he never did (NAN, NAO 93, file 42/2, correspondence re: Hilima Kristof, 1949). This case demonstrates that even when women tried all of their options, it was no guarantee of results. The relegation of local Ovambo practices to the realm of "customary" law meant that colonial officials could do little when one party legally no longer fell under the control of such customs.

Because men so often refused to accede to the women's requests, their letters justifying their actions provide another side to the story, in that they began to serve as a forum on men's views as well as women's. The re-

sponses to women's complaints indicate that there were frustrations on both




sides. Men argued that female relatives did nothing to uphold the relation-

ship but merely exploited male relatives' earning power. One letter reads, "Moses complained that he never hears from his mother except when she is in need of money" (NAN, NAO 94, file 42/2, Luderitz Magistrate to ANC-Ovamboland, 18 February 1953). Another laborer wanted his money delivered in installments, because "he is afraid that, should his mother receive the whole sum, she might spend it on other things and not only on food" (NAN, NAO 94, file 42/2, ANC-Luderitz to NCO, 8 April 1953). These responses reflect an understandable reluctance to support people to whom these and other laborers had no real relationship, only obligations.

Men's attempts to critique the terms of the new obligations were especially obvious when wives demanded support. Within the matrilineal inheritance system, there was a degree of tension between a man's married family and his matrilineage over the distribution of his resources, although this is obscured in the letters, perhaps because officials did not consider it central to the matter at hand. Yet one would imagine that at least in some cases, men were under pressure from maternal relatives not to give in to the demands of their wives. These relatives were undoubtedly female as well as male, and this fact indicates that these public debates over resources probably mask conflict between women of different generations - wives and their mothers-in-law, for example--which register only faintly in archives and oral histories.

In the source materials, such conflicts are often portrayed as struc- tural- competition and even fights between co-wives, or overbearing and

demanding mothers-in-law making clear to new wives their subordinate position. But undoubtedly such conflicts were dynamic and were affected

by the contradictions that arose while marriage and economies changed but inheritance practices did not. In the case of men who did not want to support a wife, it was all too easy for them to argue simply that they had no obligation to provide women with cash, since there was no "customary" law on such things, or that they had to support their mothers instead.

But more immediately, the mission ban on divorce threw the nature of marital obligations into limbo. Women might demand money from their husbands, but increasingly their husbands demanded wifely obedience in return, for Christian rhetoric could be used multiple ways. Tolerance and obedience were marital values taught to non-Christian women as well, but




there was a recognition that these had limits and that refusal was possible in the form of divorce. Laborers using Christian rhetoric tried to expand the scope of their authority over their wives, and in this they were supported by European officials, who held the prevailing definition of a marital unit as one in which a husband supported his wife in return for her obedience. But the men put a local twist on their demands, for these often centered around the issue of locality and residence, already contested in "traditional" Ovambo marriages. One example of a complaint that became a forum for airing marital grievances reads as follows:

Woman Emelia Kandi enquires why her husband, Leonard Juuso em- ployed on Abenab mine, does not write her or send her money for support. It is understood he returned recently, but went back to labor almost immediately.

The response:

I interviewed Leonard Juuso at Abenab. He stated that on his last visit to Ovamboland he proceeded to the kraal of Festus where he had left his wife. His wife was absent, and Festus told him that she had returned to the kraal of her father. He has since written her twice without receiving any reply. Leonard is prepared to support his wife provided she returns to the kraal of Festus. Kindly inform me when she has done so in order that money may be collected for transmission to her. (NAN, NAO 94, file 42/2, correspondence on Emelia Kandi vs. Leonard Juuso)

In this case and many others, men who did or did not have their own households dictated where their wives should stay in their absence. Many women preferred to return to their family homes. The system of patrilocality was already fraught with conflict because a new wife was often treated un- kindly by her in-laws or senior wives, even when her husband was around. There was consequently a degree of flexibility in some marriages, where a wife might live alone or with her parents even if her husband was in Ovam- boland. Men used the demands of their wives for support to gain the upper hand in this debate, and the issue of controlling a wife in the husband's absence came to be at the forefront of many of the battles over material support.19




Conclusion

The public forum in which these complaints and countercomplaints were

lodged serves as something of a window onto the strains that social relations were enduring at this time. These strains arose both out of preexisting in-

equalities based on gender divisions and marriage and inheritance practices and out of new inequalities stemming from new needs, new economies, and colonial policies. The manner in which they were filed shows attempts to uti- lize new ideas which grew in a climate of missions and a cash economy. Given that archival records are heavily weighted toward elites, and especially men, this is no small thing. The grievances also show the unusual alliance that arose between African women and colonial officials, each bent on enforcing time limits on men's contracts and their relationship with communities in the North. Both sides doubtless used methods other than letter writing, but the complaints do illustrate the intersecting concerns of each side.

Finally, this famine is a window onto a time in Ovambo society when intense changes were beginning to crystallize. Christianity began to redefine the family unit, and male migrancy had narrowed all women's options. In the case of wives and mothers, the reinvention of familial obligations hinged on a redefinition of what comprised social relations--the idea that this new form of wealth was to be provided to people that a laborer almost never saw. Such redefinitions may have increased generational competition between women to some degree, although this is not clear from the letters.

It was especially in the context of this famine that women had the ability to enter into this debate directly, however constrained their participation may have been. They had to engage with colonial ideologies--including the

argument that men, not colonial policies, were responsible for the decline in their fortunes--but in the process, they played a role in reshaping those ideologies. The result was that this famine not only exposed conflicts but provided a forum in which people engaged in negotiations and struggles that were to have lasting implications for the shape that future social relations would assume.

Notes

Meredith McKittrick teaches in the Department of History and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research centers on Ovambo communities in




nineteenth- and twentieth-century Namibia. In particular, she focuses on shifts in gender and generational relationships in the context of the raiding economy of the late nineteenth century, and conversion to Christianity, the creation of "customary" law, and the institutionalization of migrant labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is interested in the appropriation of European goods, ideas, and knowledge in the context of these broader changes, and how such goods/knowledge were reinscribed with meaning and used in debates over status and resources. Forthcoming publications include "Generational Struggles and Social Mobility in Ovambo Communities, 1915-1954," in Trees Never Meet: Mobility and Containment in Namibia, 1915-1945, ed. Patricia Hayes and Jeremy Silvester, and "The 'Burden' of Young Men: Property and Generational Conflict in Namibia, 1880-1945," in African Economic History. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Symposium on Law, Colonialism, and Contracts in Africa in May 1994. I wish to thank Richard Roberts for his comments on an earlier version of this piece and Thom McClendon for his insights and suggestions. The research on which this article is based was made possible by a Fulbright-IIE Doctoral Research Grant in 1993. See the resulting dissertation, "Conflict and Social Change in Northern Namibia, 1850-1954" (Stanford University, 1995). 1 Since the early 1980s, Africanists have recognized that "customary" law and "tradi-

tion" did not reflect precolonial reality but were instead invented systems of fixed rules that replaced an intentionally fluid process of settling disputes. Customary law was a primary tool used by colonial governments to rule African societies on the cheap, allegedly through their own institutions (mistermed "indirect rule") (Mann and Roberts 1991; Moore 1986; Chanock 1985; Ranger 1983). The body of customary law was generally shaped by colonial officials in consultation with African male elders, to the detriment of women and junior men. Preexisting conflicts over how societies worked were papered over, supposedly to return African societies to their

golden age of stability and harmony. However, as Sara Berry (1993: 33) notes, this

simply meant that colonial officials built their system on conflict, since contestations over rights and resources did not end.

2 The process of creating customary law also excluded junior African men, who, like women, were seen to be rightfully under the control of elder men (Chanock 1985). But unlike women, junior men were not defined as perpetual minors; they one day had the possibility of enjoying the rights and privileges exercised by male elders (Meillassoux 1981, 1972).

3 Even when reflecting on the most severe famines, Ovambo informants tended to assert merely that "all people suffered equally" during times of hunger, an assertion contradicted by colonial and mission records from the time (Amwaama, 11 August 1993; Angombe, 29 July 1993; Angala, 27 August 1993).

4 There were apparently no casualties from starvation per se, but the Ovambo dis-

tinguish between famines which kill and those which do not, so it is not that this famine falls outside their definition of a genuine crisis.

5 One informant went so far as to say, "The big famine is the only famine that took




people's lives. Other famines were not of significance. People managed to help each other until the rain started to pour down" (Iitula, 7 September 1993).

6 There are some indications that women had tried to lodge complaints against male laborers in the mid-1940s, under the native commissioner nicknamed Shongola, but there is no documentation showing that he pursued them. This earlier native commissioner was far more sanguine about the prospects of the system he had helped construct than was his successor, the official who acted on behalf of the women in 1948-54, the full length of his tenure.

7 The South West African migrant labor system was modeled on and linked to the South African system, whereby a government agency did the recruiting and set the wages for all private and government employers of African labor.

8 There is an abysmal dearth of literature on generational conflict between women or, indeed, even a recognition that "generation" is a meaningful category for Afri- can women, as it is for African men. The best literature on generational divisions and conflicts in Africa treats generation as an exclusively male phenomenon (Atkins 1993; Moore and Vaughan 1994; Murray 1992; Chanock 1991; Meillassoux 1981; Berry 1984). One rare recognition that generation is meaningful for women is Belinda Bozzoli's Women of Phokeng (1991).

9 Ovamboland officials were concerned that men could legally remain away from Ovamboland for so long by simply reengaging on one contract after another, so they tried to enforce a mandatory three-month minimum stay at home between contracts. But employers in the South were constantly clamoring for more labor, and their views prevailed.

10 "Ovambo" designates an ethnic grouping based on similar language and culture, but submerged within this category are other identities that are based on precolonial political units and differences in culture and dialect. The existence of an "Ovambo" identity rooted in the precolonial period has been debated among historians, anthropologists, and even the Ovambo themselves, as have the origins of the term.

11 Only a small minority of women actually filed complaints, reflecting the fact that most resolved the issue of support from male laborers in other ways, or were too far from colonial offices or unaware that the option to file a complaint existed. Of course "woman" was not a universal category, and the term can obscure other factors that shaped people's experiences. Ovambo women were located in different positions on the grid of privilege and disadvantage; women who were married to chiefs, for instance, probably did not have to worry about access to European goods like their commoner sisters did, since returning laborers paid tribute in those goods. Also, polygamous and monogamous households and Christian and non-Christian families experienced the famine, and colonialism generally, in different ways. There was also variation over space, since the various Ovambo communities had different marriage practices, and in the extent of colonial intervention. Colonial offices were located in the two largest eastern districts; this is also where most of the women's complaints




originated. The five western districts were visited by officials only two or three times a year. In addition, the main route to the South left from the East, and most of the traffic southward congregated there; thus, women's chances of leaving Ovamboland in violation of colonial rules were greater in the East. Yet despite differences in women's experiences, they were disadvantaged as a group by the laws and ideologies created by African and European men. Thus, when women discussed male/female relations, blanketing over distinctions between women, they were doing so in a way relevant to their experiences as women as defined within colonial discourse.

12 In general, men who were too old to go labor in the South had two choices: they could demand a portion of their son's earnings in exchange for the beast the young man needed to be considered an adult ready to marry. This process was known as omutenge, or "burden," and was a means by which wealth was redistributed and exchanged between matrilineages (see McKittrick 1996). Also, most men as they grew older benefited from inheritances of livestock and other property as elders died, and these inheritances could be exchanged with returning laborers for European goods or sold for cash in Angola. Women benefited too, but to a lesser degree. Also, some older men indicated that they saved a portion of their earnings throughout their labor career, often in postal savings accounts. This was probably a strategy used by many who had no expectation of obtaining inheritances.

13 In the 1940s the administration, in an attempt to realize a pure, "tribal" Ovambo identity, classified certain Ovambo residing in the South as "detribalized." The cri- teria generally revolved around having lived in the South a given number of years and, presumably, having thus lost one's "true" Ovambo identity. This classification was an administrative attempt to create a blank slate so that they could reinforce a distinction between "proper" (read: traditional) Ovambo and everyone else. It was seen as a way to fossilize an Ovambo identity; troublesome Ovambo who challenged notions of an unambiguous, unadulterated rural Ovambo identity by having accul- turated to urban areas and/or married non-Ovambo could thus be written off as not truly Ovambo and excluded from the category of those who belonged on the reserve.

14 In this case, as in many others where women charged that men had been away for a long period of time, officials pursued the claims for support and also launched an investigation into whether the laborer was "legally" residing in the South. In the case of Sam Nujoma, who had been sent there with relatives as a young adolescent, they concluded that he had the right to remain there.

15 Taking a European name was a requirement for baptism in the church. Euro-

pean names became somewhat fashionable among migrant laborers, and many non- Christian men adopted them, but this rarely occurred among women unless they were baptized.

16 Without the physical presence of a son, an older woman without a surviving brother lost companionship, labor power, and someone to intervene for her in judicial disputes. Most older women were not left so vulnerable, for certainly many had living




brothers. Furthermore, there seems to have been a system of alternating who went to labor in an Ovambo village (which often contained related men) so that a male neighbor was always available. It is probable that a woman with more than one grown son also benefited from such patterns. The complaints reflect the extraor- dinary circumstances that were possible but not inevitable under Ovambo kinship systems. By calling on sons for support, older women were working very much within a framework which both parties understood and which did not dramatically affect others within the lineage, although it might affect dependents the man had in the South.

17 See Parpart 1994 for a similar conflict of interests between colonial officials and employers on the Zambian copperbelt.

18 The details of the case strongly indicate that she and her husband must have lived in the South together at some point, since both he and her children appear to have been there legally. Despite colonial attempts to control women's mobility, some women did leave Ovamboland, sometimes alone and sometimes to join husbands in the South. There are other cases in the archives where such women returned to Ovamboland, perhaps to farm so that they and their husbands were guaranteed a place to live when the men were too old to work. In some cases, such as that of Tomas Iiyambo and Helena Ichuchua, these marriages based on separate residences disintegrated.

19 The context of these battles was the apparently high prevalence of adultery not only among laborers in the South but also among their wives, left husbandless in the reserve. Colonial files are filled with complaints by men that their wives deserted them while they were away on contract. The issue of residence was probably partly an attempt by men to have a proxy police their wives while they were gone.

References

Archival Sources National Archives of Namibia, Resident Commissioner Ovamboland 2, file 2/1916/I,

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Reinventing the Family: Kinship, Marriage and Famine in Northern Namibia, 1948-54

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