La teoría de la intermediación financiera

Poles and firewood were scarce in Ombalantu district by the early 1970s. By the early 1990s, the same applied to much of the central floodplain in the peri-urban area around Ondangwa and Oshakati. Households in villages close to the border had access to abundant wood resources in Angola’s northern floodplain. In villages further south and closer to Ondangwa and Oshakati, including, for ex- ample, Oshomukwiyu, Omupanda and Eko, however, firewood was in such short supply that people dug out and used old tree stumps and tree roots. In Oshomukwiyu, the only nonfruit trees left in the landscape consisted of sparse, heavily coppiced mopane stumps and some mopane bush.57 _{While a bundle of}

firewood from Angola fetched two rand in border villages in 1993, it fetched five rand in the Namibian border town of Oshikango; a bundle of firewood was sufficient to meet a household’s cooking fuel requirements for two or three days.58 _{By the early 1990s, a variety of woody species, including mopane}

(Colophospermum mopane), red bushwillow (Combretum apiculatum) and wild seringa (Burkea africana) were used as firewood.59 _{Southwest of Oshakati, one}

of Ovamboland’s two largest towns, only fruit trees remained and people used palm fronds and dried dung as fuel. A 2001 study, however, claimed that wood use in Ovamboland as a whole was sustainable, irrespective of the population growth.60 Despite an undeniable shortage of wood resources in parts of Ovam- boland, the dire predictions that Ovamboland would degenerate into a desert had not materialized by the close of the twentieth century. Why not? First, such

57 _{NAN, OVA 57, Dr. H.A. Lueckhoff, report on a visit to South West Africa, Nov. 3-}

15, 1969, appendix Regional Forester to Director-in-Chief Department of Bantu Administration and Development Pretoria, Grootfontein, 3 April 1970 and inter- views by author: Paulus Nandenga, Oshomukwiyu, 28 April 1993; Kulaumoni Hai- feke, Oshomukwiyu, 11 May 1993; Lea Paulus, Onandjaba, 17 June 1993; Johannes Abraham, Odibo, 20 May 1993; Personal observations by the author, Oshomukwiyu, 27 April and Eko, 25 May 1993.

58 _{Johannes Abraham, informal interview by author, Odibo, 20 May 1993.} 59 _{Johannes Abraham, informal interview by author, Odibo, 20 May 1993.}

60 _{Personal communication Joseph Hailwa, District Forester, 24 March 1992, and Na-}

mibian Institute for Social and Economic Research, “Namibian Energy Assessment: Household Energy Consumption, Distribution and Supply Survey of the Owambo Region of Northern Namibia and Katatura, Windhoek” (University of Namibia, 1992). Erkkilä concluded that woody biomass consumption for Ovamboland as a whole was sustainable, see Erkkilä, “Living on the Land”, p. 100, table 12.

predictions often were overstated. For example, a warning by the forester Dr. Lueckhoff that Ovamboland was transforming into an inhospitable desert was based on a tour through Ovamboland in late 1969 – during the height of the dry season! He pointed to ‘treeless plains’ northeast of Oponono Lake as evidence and considered the area’s sparse trees as relic vegetation of a previously more abundant tree cover.61 _{Yet, earlier descriptions of the area depict it as grass}

plains with little woody vegetation. Colonial officials also presumed that ‘Afri- cans’ had a negative attitude towards trees and they explicitly attempted to re- educate African subjects on the value of trees, for example, in 1972, when the administration embraced reforestation under the South African ‘Our Green Heritage’ environmental awareness campaign.62

Second, woody vegetation became less exclusively a source of construction materials (and protection). The fate of the baobab may in fact suggest a trend for other woody species that served ‘protective’ functions. Although the baobab castle represented the starkest example of the critical safety functions of woody vegetation early in the twentieth century, by the end of the century its use as a stronghold was a distant memory. Overall, the importance of woody vegetation as an almost exclusive source for construction materials had been declining since the 1950s, when wood began to be replaced by alternative materials. Of a sample of surveyed households that retained a palisade in 1993, in 13% of the cases (50 out of 313) the materials were of nonwood origin.63 Almost 10% of the households used millet stalks and 7% used palm fronds, wire or bricks.64

Clay bricks and bricks made from a mixture of clay and cement became in- creasingly common in even the most remote rural areas of north-central Nami- bia. In 1966, of the 49 homesteads that were razed to make room for Ogongo Agricultural College, 10% contained brick buildings.65 _{In 1967, 231 households}

received compensation for losses in connection with widening the Ruacana- Ondangwa and Oshivelo-Ondangwa-Oshikango roads. The homesteads of al-

61 _{NAN, OVA 57, Dr. H.A. Lueckhoff, report on a visit to South West Africa, 3-15}

Nov. 1969, appendix Regional Forester to Director-in-Chief Department of Bantu Administration and Development Pretoria, Grootfontein, 3 April 1970.

62 _{NAN, OVA 57, Director of Agriculture Ovamboland to Secretary Bantu Admini-}

stration Pretoria, [Ondangwa], 11 Oct. 1972, and Secretary Bantu Administration to Director of Agriculture Ovamboland Government, Pretoria, 6 Nov. 1972.

63 _{OMITI 4.3.1.} 64 _{OMITI 4.3.1.}

65 _{NAN, AHE (BAC) 1/346, Bantu Affairs Commissioner to Chief Bantu Commis-}

sioner, Ondangwa, 30 Dec. 1965, and Chief Bantu Commissioner SWA to Secretary Bantu Administration and Development, Windhoek, 11 Jan. 1966. On bricks, see also WAT ww17, S. Davis, Tour of Northern Territories – Some Random Com- ments and Thoughts, and Kaulikalelwa Oshitina Muhonghwo, interview by author, Ondaanya, 2 Feb. 1993.

most half (110) of the households contained one or more brick constructions and 24 (10%) used corrugated iron as a construction material, mainly for the roofs.66 _{In 1993, wood was still a critical material, and two out of every three}

Ovamboland Multi-Purpose Investigation for Tree-Use Improvement (OMITI) survey households had at least one hut made with a wall of wooden poles. But two out of every three households also had at least one additional hut made with brick walls. The walls consisted predominantly of mud bricks; only one out of every ten households had one or more cement brick huts. Wood- and mud- walled huts were mentioned by one of every three respondents in the 1993 OMITI survey, and corrugated iron by one of every six.67 _{Indeed, late in the}

1993 rainy season, in the villages of Eko and Omupanda, where construction wood was in very short supply, young boys could be observed making bricks during the school holidays, typically using earth taken from termite mounds, but also using cement.68 _{The shortage of construction material was especially ob-}

vious in the Ondangwa-Oshakati area, which was sparsely forested earlier in the twentieth century. In 1993, millet and sorghum stalks were used as construction material for huts (mentioned by 4% of the OMITI sample) and for palisades.69

Although wood was in short supply in the central areas in the late twentieth century, therefore, environmental change in north-central Namibia cannot be reduced to a unilinear, progressive and irreversible process of deforestation based on the hypothesis of population explosion.

The role of population movements and their impact on the making and unmaking of human-settled areas and uninhabited ‘forest,’ ‘bush’ or ‘wilder- ness’ areas was critical. Colonial violence and the demarcation of colonial boundaries led to massive flight from the Portuguese-occupied northern flood- plain into the South African-occupied middle floodplain, an area that was over- whelmingly wilderness. The subsequent settlement of the middle floodplain wilderness by the refugees from the northern floodplain, and the settlement of the wilderness zones that had separated the precolonial polities from one another by refugees from the northern floodplain and migrants from the old

66 _{NAN, OVA 53, Sec. SWA to Sec. Agriculture Owambo, Windhoek, 24 June 1974,}

appendices A-C.

67 _{OMITI 4.3.11. The 1991 census underrepresented the use of nonwood construction}

materials for huts. The census identifies 598 homesteads in the category “Kraal/Hut” with cement block constructions but it has no category for clay brick constructs. See Republic of Namibia, 1991 Census, Report A, Statistical Tables, vol. 5, table H04.

68 _{Author’s personal observations, Eko, 25 May 1993.}

69 _{On the use of millet stalks, see OMITI 4.3.11. Millet stalks are not included as a}

category of building materials in the 1991 census. See Republic of Namibia, 1991 Census, Report A, Statistical Tables, vol. 5, table H04.

southern floodplain heartlands, dramatically changed Ovamboland’s environ- ment.

The impact of population density on the forest environment therefore is am- biguous and beyond being a quantitative and biological factor. Until the 1940s, the ‘population’ factor in Ovamboland exerted its most important influence through migrations and flight, and not through the mechanics of any ‘population bomb’. Thus, security and insecurity concerns contributed critically to how much woody vegetation was consumed, and why. That population as a qualita- tive factor is as important as population as a quantitative factor also suggests that population may play a critical role in environmental change even under conditions where overall population-to-land ratios appear to be low.

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