ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION The economic history of Namibia has been marked by land alienation, resource extraction and labour exploitation. For over a century from die time of colonisation in 1884 to the present impasse in independence negotiations the attention of the colonial rulers has been directed toward the mercantile value of the human and natural resources in the Territoiy. The territoiy was visited by Portuguese, Dutch, British and German interests in turn. Commercial operations based in Europe, the Americas and South Africa searched the seas off Namibia for whales, seals and guano deposits before exploring the interior. British and other maritime interests used offshore islands and the rare coastal harbour as whaling stations where their ships could wait out storms or make repairs while explorers from the Cape Colony to the south searched out the Territory to determine its potential mineral wealth. Traders and missionaries followed explorers and prospectors to Namibia. German interests pursued a policy of immigration and settler ranching that required ever increasing amounts of land. The scramble for mining and trade concessions from the traditional leadership in return for ephemeral ‘protection’ resulted in the loss of economic and political control over internal affairs (27, pp.158-73). The Union of South Africa, which captured die Territoiy in 1915, distributed land to transnational corporations involved in resource extraction and to South African settlers. The indigenous population was shuffled onto unproductive reserves in the periphery o f the Territory that still form pools of labour serving colonial interests. Africans were stripped of their means of production (access to land and resources), reduced to dependency upon a wage economy sustained by foreign capital and forced into a class of migrant labourers employed by international interests.
