Sian Sullivan, Professor of Environment and Culture, has had a book chapter published co-authored with her longstanding Namibian research collaborator Welhemina Ganuses.

“Densities of meaning in west Namibian landscapes: genealogies, ancestral agencies, and healing” is inspired by oral history and cultural landscapes mapping research in west Namibia carried out through the AHRC-funded Future Pasts project. This research has drawn into focus past practices of dwelling, mobility, livelihood and environmental perception amongst Khoekhoegowab-speaking peoples who lived into at least the recent past as hunter-harvesters and small stock pastoralists throughout the wider west Namibian landscape.

Recently Sullivan and Ganuses also contributed to a major national review of post-colonial and post-apartheid circumstances of Namibia’s indigenous and marginalised peoples, to inform the Namibian government’s Ancestral Land Commission: see here.

The new chapter by Sullivan and Ganuses appears in the volume Mapping the Unmappable? Cartographic Explorations with Indigenous Peoples in Africa (Bielefeld, Transcript, 2021), edited by Dr Ute Dieckmann, the German Principal Investigator on Sian’s AHRC-funded research project Etosha-Kunene Histories. We are delighted that for the book’s cover Ute selected a composite image created from our oral history research for the exhibition Future Pasts: Landscape, Memory and Music in West Namibia.

We are even more delighted to learn that the contributions of Welhemina Ganuses to this histories documentation work is being recognised through her formal appointment, on 5^th June, as a Councillor to the Namidaman Traditional Authority in north-west Namibia. This organisation contributes important oversight regarding the management of land, resources and cultural heritage in this area.

For more information about our collaboration see blog articles here and here.