Drawing largely from the experiences of a land mapping exercise in the ancestral lands of the residents of Gudigwa in northern Ngamiland, this paper explores the changing ways in which land ownership have been structured. It follows the decline of tenure over land and natural resources by Basarwa, a process that began after the first Bantu-speaking immigrants became established in the area. This analysis challenges the fallacy that Basarwa only had a loose sense of territoriality, and examines in detail the nature of local conceptions of land ownership, and the salience of these conceptions to present struggles over land.
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