Abstract: The belated colonization and taxation of northern Namibia after World War I offered South African administrators a fertile field to develop their own brand of "indirect rule." But while indirect rule purported to keep native subjects locked in a fictitious time of tradition and local authority, increased labor migration to the metropolitan Cape quickly produced new forms of association and subjectivity across racial lines and dispersed among various political tendencies. Social mixing, political romance, and socialist education all contributed to heady new sensibilities that fed into an emerging liberation movement, giving the initial nationalist impetus a pluralist flavor.

Patricia Hayes studies colonial Namibian history and has published widely on the relationship between colonial photography and administration. She is co-author of Namibia under South African Rule: Mobility and Containment (1998), as well as The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (1998), which was nominated for the Sunday Times non-fiction award in South Africa. She runs a visual history research project at the University of the Western Cape, which focuses on Southern African documentary photography.

Free and open to the public.

This lecture is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.