Labor movements in Namibia have been rather fragile over the past few decades, ever since the country gained independence from South Africa in 1990. This was not always the case. Collective labor action, both spontaneous and organized, has had a long history in the country as a notable segment of anti-colonial resistance.
With their trajectories embedded in a political economy of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivism, Namibia’s emerging nationalist organizations of the mid-twentieth century grew out of a long history of collective protest and resistance. Mobilization by Namibian workers became an important factor in the struggle that culminated in the country’s liberation from South African rule shortly before the demise of apartheid in South Africa itself.
Namibia became a colony of the German empire from 1884. By December 1893, the earliest strike had been recorded at a mine at Gross Otavi. When the Allied powers stripped Germany of its colonies after World War I, the League of Nations entrusted Namibia’s administration to the Union of South Africa.
South Africa systematically extended its established policies of racial segregation to Namibia, seeking to extract as much wealth as possible from the colony as Germany had done before. With labor supply a foremost concern, the South African administration installed political structures in the north and a distinctive contract labor system that marked Namibia’s colonial economy and social relations until independence and beyond.
South Africa systematically extended its established policies of racial segregation to Namibia, seeking to extract as much wealth as possible.
Despite persistently very low wages, traveling to provide migrant labor for the mines, fishing industries, and farms of central and southern Namibia became a defining life experience for the people in the northern regions. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, Owambo men generally spent much of their adult lives as contract…
Auteur: Heike Becker
