Racial landscaping and the legal (mis)recognition of communities: the case of Namibia’s Rehoboth Basters

This article draws on the “substantive landscape” to illustrate the non-innocence of the term “community” used in international law to denote groups with collective and place-based rights in land. It examines the transnational and racialised dimensions of the legal concept of “community” in post-apartheid Namibia, with emphasis on the Rehoboth Basters – whose multiracial origins defied Eurocentric and apartheid typologies seeking to make a clear boundary between “nation” and “native”. Drawing on historical scholarship, doctrinal analysis of historical laws, and archival research and original interviews, this article argues that there is a durable and ongoing collusion between international and national scales of law-making manifested by the strategic (mis)recognition of communities. This reifies colonial and apartheid ontologies of African collective personhood and obstructs international law’s ability to act as a catalyst for place-based justice and decolonisation.