1 Introduction

On Namibian Swakara sheep farms, all newborn lambs are individually examined within the first days of their birth. Farmers or farm workers pick up each lamb, inspect it and stroke it to determine whether to keep it as part of the flock or to use it for pelt or meat production. This practice is referred to as lamb description, though in fact it is as much a practice of selecting and grading as of describing. It is central to Swakara sheep farming and reverberates throughout the relations and institutions of the Swakara industry.

The agricultural knowledge of the Swakara industry is not located primarily in academic institutions. Neither is it a pristine indigenous knowledge practice. This makes it an important case that extends the projects of reconfiguring African studies and un_knowing colonial knowledge practices beyond the realm of universities. It shows that the colonial binaries of nature/culture, subject/object and reason/emotion (see Arndt, chapter 3 this volume) can be destabilized, even by a community of practice that is not committed to projects of decolonization.

Swakara is a breed of sheep unique to Namibia. It is descended from the Karakul sheep brought from 1907 onwards to what was then German South West Africa, as a colonial experiment. In the 1960s and 70s, Swakara pelts became one of the most important export goods from South West Africa, which at that time was under South African rule. Thus, the industry is deeply entangled with histories of German settler colonialism and apartheid. These legacies are evident in the economic inequalities and knowledge practices around Swakara farming.

The practice of lamb description was imported to Namibia along with the Karakul sheep from Germany in 1907 (Declercq 2016). Its origins lie in German colonial rule in Namibia and it was institutionally and methodologically implicated with racializing scientific practices (Schramm forthcoming). The practice of “describing” is a specific way of relating to the world. Initially one might assume that description implies a clear distinction of subject and object, a subject describing an object, an author describing a world. However, unlike the “colonial measuromania” described in chapter 11 of this volume, by Hanke, those who practised lamb description were extremely aware of the fluidity of the subject-object binaries.

I argue that description is a world-making knowledge practice rather than a way of relating to an objective world “out there”. This demonstrates the complexities of how a practice can be simultaneously deeply colonial and yet destabilize the assumptions on which colonial knowledge practices are built. Knowledge is in a co-constitutive relation to the worlds it attempts to describe. The actors in the lamb description encounter do not exist independently – they are embedded within a wider context of relations, which, in turn, become meaningful through the industry’s practices.¹

The agricultural context of southern Namibia is greatly shaped by the legacies of colonial rule and apartheid. Some 70% of Namibia’s commercial² farmland continues to be owned by white farmers (Namibian Statistics Agency [NSA] 2018: 33). Karakul farming in particular was complicit in the processes of colonial land theft and the forced removals of populations from their land. It generated significant wealth for a group of white commercial farmers descended from German- and Afrikaans-speaking settlers, through a combination of subsidies from the apartheid government, the exploitation of African farm labour, the appropriation of farming knowledge and land, and a booming export market for pelts (Moore 2021; Silvester 1993).

Though white commercial farmers profited most, they are not the only ones who have shaped the industry and who claim Karakul farming as their heritage. Black farmers in communal areas, Affirmative Action Loan Scheme farmers, farm workers and their descendants and, to a lesser degree, resettlement farmers are integral to the Swakara industry, present and past. The skills and knowledges in the Swakara industry are the subject of hierarchizations. In relation to lamb description, this means that the “farmer’s”³ skills and knowledge are frequently acknowledged, by themselves and other farmers and actors in the industry institutions, whereas the work of farm workers, wives and children, those who fetch the lambs, wash them, brush them and hold them, those who type up the findings and fill in the description forms, is de-emphasized.

My fieldwork included two extended periods of participant observation on Swakara farms and at the offices of Swakara institutions in Namibia in 2020 and 2021, one shorter period in 2022, and several interviews with actors in the current and historical Swakara industry. My research on the Swakara industry is shaped by my personal positionality as a white woman based in a German academic institution. It is also situated at a specific point in history. The industry is in a situation of crisis following years of drought, low pelt prices, falling numbers of producers and sheep, and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The relations and practices within the industry are in flux and in the process of being rearranged. This is especially true of knowledge practices, where strategic interventions such as training courses are organized by the Swakara Board in an attempt to preserve the knowledge of the industry. At this moment, the undoing of lamb description as a knowledge practice might be imminent, not as the result of any decolonial project but due to the changing economic situation.

How do knowledge practices and relations shift when the underlying principle (in this case the promise of wealth, of generating income from pelts) is no longer applicable, when the very notion of objectivity is put in flux and context threatens to overwhelm any analysis of specific relations? I use the concept of “thinking as moving” to address these questions and to trace the fluid genres of lamb description and the worlds that are mobilized by it.

2 Describing a Lamb – Moving from Subject to Object to Context

The opening quote from the lamb description teaching materials published by the Swakara Board, the institution that represents the industry’s interests through advisory and marketing activities, calls knowledge the “golden requirement” that makes subjective perception, “looking and feeling”, meaningful. The “subjective” nature of the skills and knowledges involved in lamb description are not in opposition to objectivity, or “scientific farming”. Instead, subjectivity is contrasted to measurability. It is the immeasurability of the relevant traits that makes lamb description a “subjective” skill. As a retired Swakara breeder explained to me, “the problem is, you cannot measure these things. The only thing you can measure is the hair length, but you cannot measure the hair [quality], the curl type, you know”.

The farmers’ ability to “look and feel” is intrinsically entwined with the standardized perception, the terminology, categories and description standards of the Swakara industry. Several farmers contrasted this to sheep farming for meat, where the most relevant trait is the animal’s growth rate, which can be easily measured. They concluded that Swakara farming requires more skills and knowledge than meat sheep farming, since anybody can put a sheep on a set of scales but not everybody knows what curl types and patterns are desirable.

Actors in the Swakara industry would frequently talk of being able to “read a lamb” or “reading a photo” at a stud auction when referring to the skills needed for lamb description. The word “description” is derived from the Latin verb describere, which translates as “to write down” (Oxford Dictionary of English 2009). Lamb description does not always involve literally writing something down, but it is an act of defining and fixing information. At the moment of description, the sensory information perceived by the person doing the describing is rendered in the terminology of curl types, pattern-forming characteristics and sheep physiognomy.

There is an immediate encounter between the lamb being described and the person describing it, usually the farmer. The decision of what to do with a lamb is determined not just by the traits of the lamb and the enactment of knowledge practices in the immediate encounter of description, but by wider relational entanglements that I refer to as context. This context includes factors like the current prices of pelts and meat, the rainfall or drought conditions in the area and the local and global economic situations.

The term “context” has been criticized as a way to preempt any analysis of the specific phenomena under examination by explaining it away through reference to a higher order (Latour 2005: 171). Clarke and Star write of the importance of considering conditional elements of a situation as “constitutive of it, not merely surrounding it or framing it or contributing to it” (Clarke and Star 2008: 128). Although I agree with the problematization of context, I believe that “context” is useful in paying attention to scale while situating the knowledge relations and practices under examination within a wider world of temporal and spatial relations. Context is neither a passive substrate on which subjects act, nor a set of factors that determine action. It invokes the imagery of weaving and the co-production of description, of text and world. Context is useful to conceptualize the co-production of worlds and practices on a scale more specific than cosmology but beyond a particular encounter.

In her conceptualization of the term “worlding”, Tsing defines it as “a concept suggested to enable the flip back and forth between claiming and refusing context” (Tsing 2010: 47). By centring the relations that are enfolded in and constitutive of the practice of lamb description, I follow these back-and-forth flips, trace the particular worlds that are being enacted, and study which contexts (material and immaterial) are made relevant in what ways. Thinking as moving, along analytical scales and as modes of relating and knowing allows us to follow these relations through their entanglements across temporal and spatial axes.

Lakoff and Johnson coined the term “thinking is moving” as part of a wider metaphor system with four special cases: 1) thinking is moving, 2) thinking is perceiving, 3) thinking is object manipulation and 4) acquiring ideas is eating (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 235). In my use of the term, I go beyond Lakoff and Johnson’s linguistic analysis and use moving in a more literal, materially and relationally embodied way. In this I take inspiration from Strathern’s thoughts on interpretation as a practice of figure–ground reversal. However much a figure is enlarged by putting it into a “wider context” of understandings, it inevitably falls short of that context itself.

Figure–ground reversal involves an alternation of viewpoints. Now although ground by definition encompasses figure, what is to count as figure and what is to count as ground is not a definitive matter at all […]. Figure and ground promote, we might say, unstable relationships.

STRATHERN 2006: 92–93

In this understanding, “moving” is an “oscillation of view (point)-s” (Strathern 2006: 90). This allows for an analysis of complex relations across multiple temporal and spatial scales without taking the particularities of these relations – the question of what is an object of analysis and what is context – for granted (Strathern 2006: 92).

I use “thinking as moving” to follow the paths of lambs and knowledges across spatial and temporal locations in the Swakara industry. At first glance, the movement of lambs through the different processes of the Swakara industry appears to be a unidirectional production chain, moving and transforming them from living lambs on the farm to pelts sent to the pelt collection centre, to be exported to fur auctions overseas and then marketed as a high-end fashion product. However, this movement is part of a wider network of flows and relations, in which temporal and spatial dimensions are enfolded in more than linear ways. For instance, the decision to keep a lamb for the farm’s flock is both an anticipation of future offspring and an articulation of the lives of previous generations of sheep, of the labour of farm workers and of farmers and their family members.

Lamb description is concerned with the animal’s body, with specific phenotypic traits. The most important is the pelt pattern, followed by hair quality. The different patterns and curl types of Swakara lambs determine the prices their pelts achieve at fur auctions or the price that a stud animal can be sold for. Lamb description takes place on all Swakara farms, irrespective of size and scale; however, only stud breeders are required to document their descriptions. For each lamb they wish to register with the Breeders’ Society they need to fill in a description form and provide a photograph of the newborn lamb.

3 Point of Departure – Lamb Description Courses at Gellap Ost

Within the web of relations of the Swakara industry, the moment of lamb description is a convenient point to analytically “cut the network” (Strathern 1996). At that point, the lamb is the embodiment of a number of resources and relations. It is placed in relation to the person describing it and to the constantly reformed and renegotiated standards agreed upon by the Swakara norms committee. It is placed in relation to all the previous generations of sheep that came before it, in the form of pedigree or the absence thereof. It is placed in relation to the potential future generations of lambs it might be a parent to, or to the potential income to be generated from its pelt. It embodies the resources of labour, love and knowledge that have been invested in raising sheep on a particular piece of land. It is an enactment of a Swakara farmer’s tactile and visual knowledge of Swakara lambs and pelts. To trace these knowledge practices, I begin at the research station Gellap Ost, where I participated in a beginner’s lamb description course and learned my first lessons on how to describe a lamb.

Gellap Ost, the research farm, is a place where several knowledge practices within the Swakara industry are enacted. It is the site of former and potentially future agricultural research on Swakara sheep. It is where future generations of Swakara farmers are instructed in the scientific terminology of lamb description and grading standards, and in the subjective but standardized ways of perceiving and grading Swakara lambs. In the words of the manager at Gellap Ost, “the government stud flock exists to preserve the knowledge of farming with Swakara and the genetic diversity of the Swakara breed”. The research farm is funded by the Namibian government; therefore, the managers’ selection decisions are not informed by economic necessity in the same way that other farmers’ decisions are. This allows the research farm to keep stud animals of less desirable curl types.

Each year, several training courses are taught at Gellap Ost: the beginner’s course followed by the standard lamb description course and, finally, the advanced course, which needs to be passed for official recognition as a breeder. The skills taught in these courses include the slaughtering and pelting of lambs, the framing of pelts and, most importantly, the skill of lamb description. There is a long history of lamb description courses in Namibia. From the 1950s onwards, the Neudamm Agricultural College, farmers’ unions, the Karakul Board and the Karakul Breeders’ Society conducted lamb description courses. The aim was to promote Karakul breeding and improve the overall product quality of the Namibian Karakul industry. (Bravenboer 2007: 152–54). Since Namibian independence in 1990, more focus has been given to training communal farmers in lamb description and selection.

In June 2021, I participated in a beginners’ lamb description course. The teacher was Garrick Husselmann, who runs the research farm. There were three participants: two students who were studying agriculture at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST), doing their practical research projects at Gellap Ost, and myself. The students were already familiar with Swakara to different degrees. Neither intended to be a Swakara farmer but both could imagine having some Swakara sheep on their farm.

Lamb description does not take place in silence. Even during the course, in which we were taught skills individually, we were discussing among ourselves. We were in conversation. These discussions are an important aspect of the practice of lamb description. In a similar way, the discussions among its members are of great importance to the grading committee’s work of evaluating the lamb photos submitted for stud registrations. Completing the courses at Gellap Ost, learning to read a lamb – be it as a living body, a pelt or a photo – is a prerequisite to joining this conversation.

4 Pelt – Subjective Knowledge – Beauty

The newborn lambs’ skin is the product that the Swakara industry revolves around. After the first days of a Swakara lamb’s life the prized pattern disappears. This means that any lamb destined for pelt production must be slaughtered within the first four days of its life. Breeding, mating and other farming activities are all oriented towards producing the best possible quality of pelts. A pelt’s quality is determined through a lamb’s curl type, pattern and hair quality. Therefore, a significant section of the lamb description course was dedicated to teaching us about these characteristics.

In the theoretical part of the course, we received a primer from which we learned the basic lamb description terminology, the different curl types and pattern-forming characteristics, and the weight they have in grading the lamb. The most desirable curl is water silk, which was developed on the Neudamm research farm in the 1930s (Thompson 1938; Viljoen 1981: 154). The flatter curl type distinguishes Swakara from Karakul populations in other countries.⁴ Garments designed from the flatter curl types are lighter than the classical Karakul coats, which are made from pipe curl.

After the theoretical lesson, we went into the courtyard to practise our skills on real lambs. “When you are learning you need lambs, just learning with photos does not work”, a farmer I met in Keetmanshoop told me. In a practice of objectification and standardisation, a lamb was placed on the table in the yard at Gellap, with its mother in the pen across the farm. This appeared to remove it from its social relations to other sheep and its relation to the land as part of a grazing flock of sheep. It was carted there in a metal cage on a trolley along with a handful of other lambs that had been born in the previous days. The trolley with the cage was pulled by two farm workers, one of whom stayed for the practical lesson, to assist with holding the lambs.

It is worth critically examining who or what actors are thought to be entangled in a relational encounter and who or what actors are relegated to context. Farmers’ accounts of lamb description always emphasized the individual encounter and the individual knowledge of the person describing the lamb, which was usually the farmer. Some stated that farm workers on their farms have the relevant skills but that the farmers prefer to make the selections personally. To them, lamb description was a crucial moment, upon which success and failure in the Swakara industry depended. Therefore, farmers were reluctant to delegate it. Nevertheless, the moment of description is only superficially a one-on-one encounter. It is the result of the previous labour of farm workers, helpers and sheep. The people transporting the cage, the hands holding the lamb and the ewes that gave birth to it are all de-emphasized when one centres the individual encounter of farmer and lamb.

In the course, we first learned how to approach the lamb. The first impression was visual – we were told to note down our opinion of the lamb’s hair structure from a distance. Garrick instructed us, “Place yourself so that the sun is behind your left shoulder, so you can see the lustre”. The first step of description is perception. We were each issued a notepad and preprinted description sheet and told to write down what we perceived.

“Then you move closer.” The position of the lamb was standardized: all lambs were arranged facing to the left for the description and for the lamb photograph.⁵ Again, we examined the hair quality and curl type. “Does the hair appear silky or coppery, do you see S-hair or feathery hair? How does it reflect in the sunlight?” Finally, we were allowed to touch the lamb. We stroked the hair with reverence. It was, indeed, silky, velvety, incredibly soft. The lamb was also a warm, breathing, living being. Garrick reminded us to pay attention to the legs as well, not just the back section that would become a pelt. For an accurate lamb description and hair-quality assessment, these parts mattered too.

In this case, examining the lamb was quite literally an activity of thinking while moving. The examiner moved closer from a certain position in relation to the light to perceive the sheen of the lamb’s hair. The lamb itself never stopped moving, and it took several hands, the hands of us students, of Garrick or of one of the farm workers, to keep it still. It is at this dynamic point of movement and cessation of movement that the examiner thinks about how to make sense of the lamb, how to use it, what path the lamb will proceed on: pelt, flock or meat.

Selecting a lamb for pelting narrows the gaze of which characteristics are relevant. Only the pelt, specifically the central section of the lamb’s back, matters at this point. Other characteristics that might be relevant to the lamb’s health, should it grow into an adult sheep, become irrelevant. The moment a Swakara lamb is born, a countdown starts. This results in interesting enactments of temporalities and potentialities. If it is to become a pelt, it must be slaughtered within the first few days of birth. If not, the characteristics relevant to lamb description soon will no longer be visible on its body. The pelt characteristics become invisible on a grown sheep and are only articulated via its offspring. For this reason, all stud animals need to be photographed at birth if they are to be registered with the Breeders’ Society. Only then can they be articulated as the offspring of a grown sheep.

In the teaching material handed out at Gellap Ost, the terms “lamb description”, “lamb selection” and “lamb valuation” were used almost interchangeably. To describe was to recognize the different traits, curl types and pattern-forming characteristics, to award points to the different categories and sections of the lamb, from which we deduced a final score, based on which we made our selection decision. Lamb description became a process of grading and then selection. These practices were deeply entangled; there was no description without judgement, without comparison. What we perceived, the lamb we encountered, was rendered in the terminology we had just learned. It was a practice of comparison, of relating the lamb to the potential ideal incarnation of standards, which could never exist in practice. We compared each lamb to the previous lambs we had seen. “If that one was a 2 then this one cannot possibly be 3.” Whereas the very best lambs would be kept as part of the flock, those with acceptable curl types and pattern-forming characteristics would be pelted immediately. The pelt would then be dried on a frame, and the meat of the lamb’s carcass would be consumed or sold locally.

Apart from the lamb’s characteristics, the decision to use a lamb for pelting depends on conditions beyond the lamb’s body, outside the immediate description encounter. In times of drought, farmers tend to slaughter all lambs to minimize the burden on the scarce grazing and the ewe’s health. This means that the average age of a flock of Swakara sheep rises in drought years. Consequently, in years with good rainfall, farmers tend to keep more lambs in order to restock and reduce the average age of their flock. This means that lamb description in settings outside the training courses is about knowing not only the individual lamb but also the overall flock of Swakara sheep on a farm and the weather and climate conditions on the land. Thinking about lamb description means moving with changes to the land and local and global market conditions. Knowing how to navigate the world of Swakara farming is just as important as having an eye for a pelt’s beauty and quality.

Lamb description is a learned skill of standardized and routinized perception. The visual and tactile senses are the most relevant. Nevertheless, other senses like sound and smell are meaningful to farmers in other farming practices and on an affective level. There was a gendered dimension to the ways that farmers’ skilled touch was described. When I asked about women attending the lamb description courses, I was told that women tended to be very good at lamb description because they had more sensitive hands than men.

“Swakara is about beauty.” This was a common reply to my question on what makes Swakara different from other types of farming. It refers to the high-end fashion products made from the pelts of Swakara lambs, by designers from places like France, Greece, Italy and China. Through their entanglement with the global fur trade, farmers in the south of Namibia, a group not inherently known for their sense of haute couture, are aware of and affected by developments in the fashion industry. Though they do not design clothes themselves, farmers would describe their skills at lamb description with terms like “having an eye for it”, “having good instincts” or “having a good touch”. These refer directly to the sensory organs used to perceive the lambs, pelts and photos. They individualize the perception and emphasize its subjectivity. The right description is not out there on the lamb’s body, it emerges from the farmer’s relation to the lamb. This does not mean that all descriptions are equally valid. There is not one objectively true description, but some are better than others. Or, as one farmer put it, “It is mainly guesswork. But with experience you make better guesses”.

Lamb description builds on visual and tactile perception. However, when what is perceived is rendered into data, visual data travels easier than haptic information. Swakara pelts are collectively marketed through agra, a former farmers’ cooperative and now corporation, with an extensive infrastructure of shops and offices in most towns in Namibia. Producers can hand in their pelts at any agra office, from where they are forwarded to Windhoek, where the pelts are sorted and then transported to the fur auction in Copenhagen. At the auction house, the pelts are sorted into the auction house’s category system. On a scale from purple to platinum, the pelts are sorted into lots of approximately the same price category. When the Covid-19 pandemic prevented the Swakara pelts from travelling to the April 2020 fur auction in Copenhagen, the Swakara Board uploaded photographs and videos of the pelts for sale to allow potential buyers to digitally inspect the pelts. Very few pelts were sold at that auction. While there were various reasons for this, several Swakara employees and farmers stated that they were sure the designers’ inability to touch the pelts was an important factor.

“It is subject to visualization. Feeling it. It is subjective, the whole process: grading, selection”, is how a former Karakul stud breeder remembered lamb description. The immediate moment of description relies on individual perception, yet it is always implicitly or explicitly embedded within the relations and conversations, the different opinions of different actors with a stake in Swakara farming. One farmer described disagreements with his son on lamb description. “The courses are helpful, but in the end, it is a difference of opinion.” Though the criteria themselves are not measurable, their effects can be. In the end, he said, the good prices he received for his pelts at the fur auction proved him right. However, due to the instability of the global fur markets and the context the pelts are sold in, the pelt price is at best a problematic criterion to measure the accuracy of a farmer’s lamb description.

The introduction of this volume quotes Chinua Achebe (1964: 46): “if you want to see it well you do not stand in one place” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Schramm, this volume). This is true of lamb description in a literal way. It is, in part, about position, about being situated in a complex network of relations, and of standing at a certain spot in the courtyard at Gellap Ost with the sun behind your left shoulder. In lamb description, positionality is not a fixed thing but a choreography of standardized approaches. You position yourself (or your camera) in a certain relation to the lamb and the light. And then you move.

5 Flock/ Stud – Breeding Knowledge – Genetics

“This one I’ll keep”, said a commercial farmer as I accompanied him during lambing season while he examined the lambs on his farm. The lamb was one of the first to be born that season. It was a water-silk lamb with acceptable hair quality, characteristics that would no longer be visible after its first days of life. Its mother was strong and healthy, and the farmer was keen to restock his flock in this first year of rain after eight years of drought, so this lamb was going to be kept as part of the commercial flock. Unlike other lambs selected for pelt or meat production, this lamb would grow into an adult sheep and have lambs of its own in the coming years. But this lamb was not a stud animal, which means its pedigree and its characteristics were not documented. Instead, it would become part of the commercial Swakara flock producing lambs for pelt and meat.

Describing this lamb took place informally in the field. The farmer lifted it, looked at it and touched it. After the decision to keep it was made, the lamb received a coloured ear tag to mark it for the flock. When a stud lamb is registered, lamb description becomes more formalized. The information about the lamb is translated into a system of standardized categories. Breeders need to fill in a lamb description form and add a photograph of the lamb within the first days of its life.

The breeding criteria and description standards date back to the 1920s, when the Karakul Breeders’ Society was founded and the first manual for lamb description in Namibia was published (Bravenboer 2007: 68) together with the Karakul studbook, which initially only allowed the registration of lambs that were traceable to imported Karakul sheep. From 1929 onwards, sheep had to be inspected by the studbook commission before they could be registered (Bravenboer 2007: 78). This codification and formalization of breeding standards took place in the context of an intensification of colonial land theft under South African rule in Namibia. Poor, white Afrikaans-speakers from South Africa settled in the south of Namibia within a regime of biopolitical and territorial violence against Black populations (Hayes, Wallace and Silvester 1998: 8, 18).⁶ By 2021, the Swakara Breeders’ Society had shrunk to 16 members, of whom only eight were active breeders (Swakara Breeders Society and Swakara Board of Namibia 2020: 21).⁷

The breeding standards are constantly renegotiated. Once a year, the Swakara norms committee and the breeders come together to discuss and adjust the standards and make decisions on future breeding directions. This event, the Norms Day, takes place at Gellap Ost. It is an occasion for strategic discussions of the overall direction of the industry and a social occasion for the Swakara farmers.

Although all animal breeding is ultimately about promoting certain traits to optimize the overall population of the breed and increase productivity, Swakara farmers claim that their breed takes this to a different level. “I love Karakul,” said a farmer I met in Keetmanshoop,“It is scientific farming, not like with meat sheep. Especially the breeding aspect. You need to look exactly at what ram goes with which ewe, it is a science.” Several farmers characterized Swakara breeding as more “scientific” than other kinds of farming. When I asked what made Swakara scientific, the answers would revolve around knowledge and, most commonly, standards. Though the perception and description of a lamb is subjective, it is in relation to the wider context of the industry, the opinions of others and the industry standards.

In 2020, the entire judging system for stud lamb photographs was overhauled to align it more closely with pelt production and make it more intuitive to producers who are not breeders. In the previous system, each lamb received a percentage score, the higher the better. This was replaced by the categories Type 1, 2, 3 and Elite in the new system (Swakara Breeders’ Society and Swakara Board of Namibia 2020: 9). This system was implemented by the Swakara grading committee,⁸ which reviews the descriptions and photographs submitted by breeders. This is not a rubberstamping procedure. Instead, each photo and description are carefully examined, and the score given to a lamb is adjusted if the committee disagrees with the breeder’s assessment.

The members of the grading committee are the manager of the research farm Gellap Ost, a retired breeder and former manager of the research farm, and two active commercial breeders. The committee is elected and appointed at the annual Swakara industry forum. Normally the committee meets every other month, but in October 2021 there had only been one meeting that year. The committee’s decisions are made by consensus.

At the judging meeting I attended in spring 2021, the committee members gathered around a table at the Swakara office in Keetmanshoop. Each person took a pile of photos, which they sorted into the different categories, as marked on a table. After this, they collectively discussed and adjusted each other’s assessments. Each committee member was a veteran at lamb description, but by judging the photos collectively the decisions were made more objective, though not in the sense of moving closer to an objective truth “out there” but by making individual subjective description intersubjective. As a member of the grading committee stated, “Four eyes see better than two and six see better than four”.

The different positions of people describing and grading lambs are not equal. The grading committee’s decision is final, though breeders do have the opportunity to contest a decision and the committee’s decisions are in relation to the breeder’s original assessment. Although the quality standards are not negotiable, context also matters in the grading decisions of the grading committee. At a time when there is little demand for Swakara stud animals, several breeders are reluctant to pay the fees for registering lambs.⁹ In this context, it seemed unlikely that the grading committee would be overly rigorous in their grading decisions.

Following the review by the grading committee, the photos and descriptions of the lambs are sent to the Namibian Stud Breeders Association (NSBA) in Windhoek, which issues the registration certificates and manages the stud animal database. The NSBA is the umbrella institution for all stud-breeding societies in Namibia, including Swakara, and manages the record-keeping and registration for all stud breeds in Namibia.¹⁰

When I visited the NSBA office in Windhoek, an employee described his vision of scientific livestock breeding and what it could mean for Swakara. His view of scientific farming deviated from that of the Swakara farmers. In his eyes, the basic skills of lamb description were not enough to ensure a future for Swakara. “[Breeders] are too concerned with what an animal looks like.” He added that breeders do not make use of the advances in technology that would make it possible to make breeding decisions based on genetic information instead of phenotype. According to this vision, the selection decisions of which animals to keep for breeding could be made on a more “objective” basis – genetics instead of aesthetics. “The science tells us it doesn’t help to have just a nice-looking animal, it must be an efficient producer.” However, the problem of measurability remains. Although it is possible to predict an animal’s performance in terms of number of births or growth rate, the pelt quality characteristics that form the basis of lamb description remain unmeasurable, even with genetic analysis. Nevertheless, many farmers envisioned scientific innovations as something that could improve Swakara farming.

Gellap Ost was formerly the site of scientific research for the Karakul industry. In recent years, the activities at the research station have focused on teaching training courses and preserving the genetic diversity of the Swakara breed. With falling pelt prices and producer numbers, the Swakara Board has been intent on cutting costs. “We could train ten farmers or analyze one gene.” Since funds have been scarce in recent years, the research conducted at the research farm is now mostly limited to small-scale student projects.

The vision of scientific innovation is entangled with the notion of progress as a linear development, the idea that better technologies will produce better sheep with better-quality pelts and better health. However, in the current situation, this is a promise without traction. Although farmers saw scientific research as a potential hope for a struggling industry, they were quick to admit that it was far more likely that such innovations would happen in other, more profitable farming sectors.

6 Meat – Generating Income – Knowledge in Suspension

“What would you do with this one? Pelt, flock or meat?” In the current market situation, this is a theoretical decision. With pelt prices at an all-time low, all the lambs are being raised for meat. In November 2020, the auction house Kopenhagen Fur announced its controlled liquidation by 2023, following the Danish government’s decision to order a cull of the country’s entire mink population in an attempt to limit the spread of new mutations of the Covid-19 virus, which had been identified at several Danish mink farms (Buttler and Wienberg 2020). The news caused great ripples in the Swakara industry. A commercial farmer I was visiting at the time stated, “Of all things, I would never have thought that it would be Kopenhagen Fur, that goes. […] It is strange that something that has been there for 100 years can be gone just like that”. Apart from exacerbating the general mood of uncertainty among Swakara farmers, this meant that the Swakara industry needed to move to the Saga Fur auction house in Helsinki in 2023.

Swakara sheep can be used for mutton production. However, their growth rate is lower than that of meat sheep breeds like the dorper or meatmaster. Most farmers I met in 2021 were mating their Swakara ewes with meat sheep breeds to generate income, regardless of what this would mean for curl type or hair quality of the lambs. “No one in their right mind is producing pelts right now.” A stud breeder described it as painful to see the resulting lambs born from his prized stud animals.

After our lamb description course at Gellap Ost, the lambs were carted off in the cage they had been brought in, to be released back into the pen, amid some excitement from the ewes, and returned to their mothers. Though we had judged several of them to be best suited for pelt production, none of these lambs were made into pelts. While this was good news for the lambs, who got to live for at least another five months, it meant that in our case the practice of lamb description was a practice without material consequence. It remained a relational knowledge practice. However, the wider context had changed so that Swakara pelts were no longer generating meaningful wealth. In this context, lamb description was a rehearsal, a way of maintaining the relations that are engendered through lamb description, through attending the courses. We learned the ways of engaging with the lambs, of approaching, seeing, feeling and describing them. This re-enactment of lamb description served the purpose of preserving the knowledge of how this is to be done until a future time when it will once again be useful.

7 Conclusion

The knowledge practice of lamb description is both contingent on and constitutive of relations among humans as well as non-humans in the Swakara industry. It is the knowledge of an individual lamb, its pedigree and its potential as a pelt or as part of the farm’s flock. Lamb description is about perception, the ability to appreciate the aesthetics of Swakara pelts, being able to imagine a living lamb as a potential product at fur auctions, knowing the terminology and desirability of the different categories of curl type and other traits, and, finally, the knowledge of how to make economically viable decisions to secure the future operation of the farm.

Lamb description is rendered “scientific” through a rigid terminology taught in the courses at the research station and through the strict standardization of perception and reporting procedures. Subjectivity is cast as both a requirement and a challenge to lamb description. In an immediate encounter with the lamb, the person describing it needs to have “an eye for it” or “the right touch”. The criteria of lamb description are rigorously defined and immeasurable, at the same time. Within the Swakara industry, knowledge, as enacted in the encounter of farmer and lamb or in the discussions of the grading committee, is positioned as the resolution to this contradiction. This knowledge is gained through experience, through the practice of being a Swakara farmer, through family legacies and in conversation with other farmers. The courses at Gellap Ost are but a point of departure in this dynamic.

The practice of lamb description moves beyond dichotomies of theory and practice, academic and practical knowledge. “You need to feel it see it. […] you just know.” This subjectivity, the fact that it is always a person doing the describing and the judging, is not in opposition to the notion of Swakara as scientific; instead, it shows that there is not always a clear dichotomy between scientific and practical knowledge.

Lamb description pervades the Swakara industry in ways that go far beyond the immediate encounter of farmer and lamb, where position and movement are standardized. It links the individual farms to the studbook registry, norms committee and grading committee. Furthermore, it is positioned within a constantly shifting context. Position matters in ways that go beyond mere positionality. It shows what happens when the standpoint, the position and the worlds enacted are in dynamic flux. These movements offer us ways to destabilize the binaries of academic and practical, aesthetic and economical, scientific and intuitive knowledge, objectivity and subjectivity.

What will happen to the knowledge relations within the Swakara industry when its promise of generating wealth has become obsolete? Swakara is no longer up and coming. It no longer holds the promise of quick wealth, and it seems that the promise of capital-intensive, modern, export-oriented farming has moved on to other products. Swakara has become an endeavour of enthusiasts and nostalgic farmers. If thinking is moving, then the objects and subjects of lamb description have shifted along with their context. The aesthetic, “subjective” knowledge of those describing a Swakara lamb is, at this moment in time, mostly located in the individual description encounter. Few lambs are slaughtered for pelts, and therefore the knowledge of curl types and hair quality does not lead to the fur auction. Instead, it serves the purpose of preserving the knowledge, and the genetic characteristics of Swakara lambs, for a time when pelt prices might rise again. Consequently, the ongoing conversations among farmers, the mutual recognition of quality, have become more important, as the outside recognition through auction results has fallen away. Being able to describe a lamb, knowing how to read a lamb, being part of the conversation among farmers lies at the core of what it means to be a Swakara farmer in the current situation.