Bollig, Michael. Shaping the African Savannah : From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an 'Arid Eden' in recent literature, as one of Africa's most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a 'last frontier' by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia's Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this 'Arid Eden' came into being, how this 'last frontier' was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.

Source: Book description

Bolliger, L.  “Apartheid’s African Soldiers: A History of Black Namibian and Angolan Members of South Africa’s Former Security Forces, 1975 to the Present.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2020.

In this study, I examine the history of black Namibian and Angolan soldiers who fought in apartheid South Africa’s security forces during the Namibian war of independence and the Angolan post-independence civil war from 1975 until 1989. I ask how and why these soldiers got involved in South Africa’s security forces, and what the legacies of that involvement have been, in particular for the individual soldiers and their families. Based primarily on black former soldiers’ own accounts, I argue that their experiences deeply disrupt dominant narratives of heroic struggles of ‘national liberation’ against colonial occupation. While scholars have remained almost entirely silent on the histories of African soldiers of colonial and settler armies during the period of decolonization, nationalist narratives have either ignored or denounced them as ‘mercenaries’ and ‘collaborators’. I complicate such portrayals by highlighting the limits and divisions of the wars of ‘national liberation’ in Namibia and Angola. More specifically, I trace the long history of different forms of ‘collaboration’ during colonial conquest and occupation and examine black soldiers’ complex motivations for joining and remaining in South Africa’s security forces.

Source: excerpt from thesis abstract as culled from https://ora.ox.ac.uk

Bombshell Grenade

Rapper

Zambia

instagram.com/bombshellgrenade/?hl=en

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Bond, George Clement. "New Coalitions and traditional chieftainship in Northern Zambia: The Politics of Local government in Uyombe1." Africa, 45,no. 4 (1975): 348-362.

This paper looks at the persistence of traditional leadership as a basis of local government through the process of political change and of maintaining political boundaries between central government and other political units. The study sought to find out how the new form of traditional authority came about as a result of political change that produced a new party-based rural elite in Uyombe, a small chiefdom in the northern province of Zambia. The author argues that Zambia, just like other African countries lacked the financial strength to train personnel for civil service and rural institutions. Rural elites were recruited into the civil service along with educated urban elite. These rural elites, usually from smaller ethnic populations, were strategically given civil service posts which counteracted the regional and ethnic interests of the larger political units. Thus, these rural elites were able to leverage their bargaining power and gain temporary control of local government and transformed it into a more representative and effective unit of administration which was oriented toward rural economic development.

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Elias Bongmba

Professor of Religion/Chair, Religion, Faculty Associate, Wiess College, Rice University

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Book Publishers Association of Zambia

Publishing

Lusaka, Zambia

https://www.commonwealthofnations.org/organisations/book_publishers_association_of_zambia/

Maria Borges

Model, Supreme Agency

Angola

Level of Influence: International

instagram.com/iammariaborges/?hl=en

Botha Martin

Professor, African Cinema, University of Cape Town, South Africa

martin.botha@uct.ac.za

(021) 650 2841

cfms.uct.ac.za/fam/staff/botha