The politics of love: urban development, intimacy and the future in the northern Kunene Region, Namibia

The most recent UN Habitat report (2010) has drawn attention to the fact that Africa is urbanizing at an incredible speed, and to the fact that the process of urbanization is exacerbating the already high levels of inequality on the continent. At the same time, Africa has caught the attention of global investors and speculators: one speaks of a “new scramble for Africa” (Carmody 2011) that involves both the old and emerging world powers. Made possible by new technologies of prospecting and extracting, and propelled by the surging prices of resources such as oil, iron ore, copper, and other metals on the world market, a neo-liberal policy model is rapidly replacing existing “dependency” models. Namibia is no exception, and recent discoveries of offshore oil and large deposits of iron ore are already having their impact on urban-rural dynamics, and on the lay out and "character" of the town of Opuwo, a small but booming town in the north of the country. But these discoveries also affect urbanites in the expectations they have of the (immediate) future and in the ways they strategize, manage, engage in and “live” their closest relationships, ranging from friendship bonds to kinship and sexual relations. This is the question underlying this research proposal: how do global flows of capital, and neoliberal economics and policies affect the “micro-physics” of life in a small African city?