I wrote this important paper together with Robert Hitchcock, about the very timely issue of perpetuating land pressures on Hai//om people in Northern Namibia. In addition to an attempt for a collective action lawsuit by the Hai//om for Etosha National Park and Mangetti West, the Hai//om experience many other pressures on their land that need serious attention since these often lead to an ever-increasing marginalisation and further disempowement. You can read the paper here on my personal, free, open access site and this is the abstract:

Abstract:

As former mobile foraging peoples, the indigenous Hai//om San of Namibia lost most of their land – including Etosha National Park and Mangetti West – to other groups and the state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After independence (1990), the government redistributed some of this land to various expropriated groups. In the following overview, we delve into this complex history to argue that the recent decision by the Hai//om (2015) to file a collective action lawsuit against the government of Namibia over Etosha and Mangetti West must be seen in a context of ongoing, often subtle, processes of land dispossession simultaneously taking place as a result of marginalisation and structural disempowerment.