TrackingSkelm(Sly/Surreptitious/Covert) Signs in the ‘Bush’ War Landscape in Namibia

This paper attends to the phenomenology of particular military landscapes as experienced through the bodies of San spoorsnyers (trackers) as they trailed insurgents during a specific historical moment, the ‘Bush’ War (Namibian War of Independence or South African Border War) on the border between Namibia (formerly South West Africa) and Angola. As an ethically defined group, the San (Also referred to as Bushmen) were enlisted on the basis of stereotypical representations of them as hunters and trackers who could, when trained in the Army, trail insurgents through landscapes. The paper elaborates the ways in which these trackers experienced landscapes in and through bodies in motion and practice: as visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile and atmospheric. It emphasizes the particularity of the San trackers’ lived experiences of military landscapes, as the latter drew on a combination of historical, culturally informed and soldierly habitus, somatic modes of attention and bodily dispositions.