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Himba Epochs*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Gordon D. Gibson
Gordon D. Gibson*
Affiliation:
Smithsonian Institution
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Extract

In contrast to most other nonliterate African peoples, the Himba and Herero -- pastoral Bantu peoples of southwestern Africa -- have developed quasiannual chronologies based upon important episodes and occasional conditions of the region in which they live. For example, to establish the time of a personal or family event, a Himba may refer to the epoch of the disarming or the epoch of the locust invasion as readily as we refer to 1917 or 1923. Such a chronological system is naturally of interest to the student of African history, for it is a key to the events that are considered important by the Himba themselves. But beyond this, a system of ordered epochs is also of value for demographic and other sociological studies in which the ages of individuals are important for, while the Himba, like most non-literate peoples, do not enumerate the years of their lives or the years that have passed since crucial events, many are able to provide the names of the epochs of their birth, marriage, childrens' births, and so forth. It remains, then, for the investigator merely to correlate the epochal names with our numbered years in order to determine, with a fair degree of approximation, individuals' current ages and their ages at their life crises -- data which are important for certain kinds of detailed sociological research. In essence this procedure is simple enough, but establishing a sufficiently accurate correlation between the Himba epochs and the numbered years has proved to be a difficult task and one requiring a variety of approaches. The nature of the Himba epochal chronology and the method employed for correlating it with the years of the Christian calendar are the subjects of this paper.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 4 , 1977 , pp. 67 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1977

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Footnotes

*

The author is grateful to the Instituto de Investigação Científica de Angola for sponsorship and for material aid of his fieldwork in Angola. Other support for fieldwork in both Angola and South West Africa was provided by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Institutes of Health of Washington D.C. The writer also appreciates the hospitality and assistance offered by many friends of all colors in both countries, and especially the privilege of making his bases at the Missão Católica do Chlulo. While accepting full responsibility for any shortcomings of this paper, the author wishes to thank William C. Sturtevant and Joseph C. Miller for their critical reading of an earlier draft.

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