Pastoral nomadism in north-western Namibia has been depicted as well-adapted to the hazards of an arid environment (Malan 1972, 1995; Steyn 1977). Society and culture have been often interpreted as being determined by the vicissitudes of seasonal and inter-annual resource scarcity. 1 Drought is generally conceptualisedrnas the major risk within this semi-arid environment (Malan 1995). However, accounts which argue this glance over the fact that human–environment relations in north-west Namibia have changed rapidly throughout the past one hundred years due to governmental measures. Herding in north-western Namibia was formed by and impacted on by the political formation constituting the segregationist South African state until the 1990s. The colonial encapsulation of the pastoral community in the 1920s and 1930s starkly diminished the role of trade and exchange with neighbouring communities but apparently led to a thorough pastoralisation of north-western Namibia's population (Bollig 1998a, 1998b). The heavy-handed control of pastoral mobility conditioned early colonial land-use patterns significantly (Bollig 1998b; van Wolputte 2004). The pastoral land-use pattern which is nowadays seen as the traditional way of Himba pastoralism came into being only in the 1960s when a great number of newly drilled boreholes enabled the expansion of pastoralism and gardening.