Namibia country report

a shop from corrugated iron or bricks. He sold his goats, and with the proceeds of N$1 000bought 18 corrugated-iron sheets and built his shop. In 1996 he replaced the corrugatediron with bricks, constructing the brick building himself.Progress was slow as he had to feed his children from the income generated from the shop.A six-month stint in the police cells awaiting formal charges of alleged rape set him backeven further. The charges were never formally laid as it turned out that there was no caseagainst him. When he returned to Drimiopsis he concentrated on his shop again.On settling at Drimiopsis in 1991, he had no livestock but only his trading business andabout N$2 000 in a savings account. With this he bought some chickens. They bred well,and when they were big enough he sold them. With the proceeds he bought two lambswhich he gave to his oldest child’s mother’s grandfather in Skoonheid to look after.Apart from the lambs he bought, some people paid him with goats for goods they boughtin his shop. At the time there were many more people at Drimiopsis, i.e. 500-600. Most ofthem had been evicted from commercial farms and were staying temporarily at Drimiopsis.When people ran out of money for buying food, he accepted goats as payment. By 1994 hehad accumulated 36-38 goats, which he sold to build his shop. Thereafter he invested inmore goats whenever he had money, and accumulated about 15 goats.In 2004 his wife contracted TB. By this time they had separated but she was still livingat Drimiopsis. In the same year she received a few of the cattle donated to the scheme bythe Roman Catholic Church, which would earn her a small income. Their daughter was atschool and their young son was at home with Rudolf. Looking after his estranged wife inhospital as well as the children and shop became too much of a burden, particularly as hehad nobody to look after his goats. He was unwilling to ask community members to lookafter the goats as he felt that they could not be trusted; they would take the goats out todrink at the water point and forget about them. He therefore decided to sell the goats andbuy stock for the shop with the proceeds. Since 2004 he had not bought livestock again.Once his children had completed their schooling he would consider livestock ownershipagain. Should his son drop out of school, he would be available to look after livestock.Rudolf’s livelihood strategy was to buy and sell assets, e.g. buy goats, let them multiply andthen sell them. He ascribed his present “verwaarloos” (poor state) to both his own negligenceand his former wife’s TB. He no longer had any savings. His shop generated a turnover ofabout N$1 000 per month, of which he used N$600 to buy new stock and kept N$400 tofeed himself and the children, leaving nothing for further investment. He was consideringcultivating crops in the garden plot given to him in 2008 to generate more cash.One of his competitors, the Oshiwambo-speaking woman employed by the Departmentof Forestry who opened a shop at Drimiopsis, focused on selling trees to the communityrather than foodstuffs, but she had opened a cuca shop in her house where she sold somefoodstuffs. His other competitor was the Oshiwambo-speaking official beneficiary whoowned the shop across the road from Rudolf’s shop and stocked a small range of foodstuffs.156 ● Livelihoods after land reform: Namibia country report (2010)