Why did stores (and not, say, manufacturing or industry) become so important in northern Namibia? This deceivably simple but pertinent question is the starting point of Gregor Dobler's analysis in Traders and Trade. Based on a combination of archival research and ethnography, Dobler's answer is to investigate the rise and fall of a new elite – traders – in northern Namibia. The result is a thorough and accessible analysis based on a combination of archival research and ethnography.
The main thesis in Traders and Trade is that the particularities of indirect rule and later apartheid in this part of southern Africa made possible the rise of a merchant class. The latter made good use of the tensions and structural contradictions of an exploitative regime to advance their reformist and professional agenda, but ultimately also depended on apartheid policies to shield them from outside competition. Trade was the ‘flip side of labour migration’ (p. 208), and this became painstakingly clear after independence, when most locally owned stores had to close their business due to the relentless competition from large South African supermarket chains and Chinese retail stores.
This argument is substantiated in seven chapters. In the first, the author sketches the contours of the precolonial competition for the monopoly on trade between the various polities, and their ruling political elites, in north-central Namibia. This struggle resulted in making migrant labour an interesting venue for those who saw their upward social mobility blocked by their rulers.
Next, the second chapter investigates the history of the first European-owned stores under indirect rule. By the end of the 1930s, however, the first African trading licence was granted, marking the beginning of a new, parallel system of elite formation based on cash ‘and access to the new knowledge systems missions and colonial administration had brought’ (p. 65).
An emerging African elite found a material base in the many stores that mushroomed after the 1950s, an evolution analysed in Chapter 3. On the one hand, this boom of local store owners was made possible by a new bureaucratic regime that increasingly depended on migrant contract labour. On the other hand, despite being part of the structural underdevelopment of the so-called homelands, stores also became an indicator, factor and medium for social change.
These changes are discussed in Chapter 4. For one thing, the more successful shop owners were not content with economic success, ‘but also strived for political freedom and equality’ (p. 99). So did their more educated counterparts – the nurses, teachers and pastors. Together they constituted the modern elite that gathered at the stores.
The fifth chapter in Traders and Trade then pauses at the ambivalences and contradictions with which shop owners were confronted. It also demonstrates how their stores became public spaces associated with particular social circles and political patronage fuelled by the economic success of a few businessmen.
The economic success of a happy few, however, was not the main change that took place in north-central Namibia. As Dobler demonstrates, even small stores represented an imaginary space that linked the rural to more urban social forms. They became a new centre for social life – also literally, as some of these proto-urban centres evolved into the larger towns and cities the region knows today.
Yet the origins of the split between the professional traders and the educated elite also lay here. Mainly because of pragmatic considerations, the former adopted a more reformist political ethos. The educated elite, in contrast, was pulled and pushed into a more revolutionary paradigm and many of them became ‘professional politicians’, often in exile. Many of the lines the author set out from the beginning meet in this seventh chapter. Yet I could not help but wonder about the many shop owners who did not make it. Theirs too is a story that needs to be told, but it somewhat falls between the folds of Dobler's emphasis on the structural determinants of trade and on the (nevertheless important) role of a happy few.
In Traders and Trade, Dobler delivers factual detail on a formative period that was hitherto under-researched in Namibian historiography. Obviously, the book is of special interest to Namibianist scholars. Yet, even if only because Dobler's analysis sheds light on the way in which the colonial past continues to shape postcolonial society, Traders and Trade is also relevant to everyone interested in the particularities of colonial rule and the specific form that apartheid rule took in different corners of southern Africa and, mutatis mutandis, throughout the entire continent. It is definitely worth the read.
