Abstract provided by author:
The study indicates that ideological and material factors have indeed both variously been responsible for significant social adaptations that have occurred in Herero society in recent times. The findings suggest that material impulses have far outweighed ideological stimuli in importance for the greater part of recorded Herero history. It is only since the end of World War II that ideological variables seem to have predominated as causal agents of social change
In an attempt to test these two theorists' postulates in a substantive setting, the chief ideological and material influences which have affected the socio-cultural development of the Herero of central Namibia are surveyed and related to some modern social structures peculiar to them