The 1896 Redline – A Brief History

• JOB SHIPULULO AMUPANDA

AFTER THE 1884 Berlin Conference that awarded the territory of present-day Namibia to Germany, chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s approach was that German companies with private capital must take up the bountiful opportunities in the colonies.

The German government only moved in when conflict arose between German settlers and the natives.

In 1890, Germany built its first military fort in Windhoek. In the same year, the German and British signed the Zanzibar Treaty in which a tract of land measuring more than 400 kilometres in length became part of German South West Africa. Once acquired, the Germans named this land after chancellor Graf Leo von Caprivi, calling it the Caprivi Strip – the present-day Zambezi region. The nucleus of the colonial state started morphing from 1890 onwards.  

Capitalism underpinned the German colonial strategy. They sought to extract and protect gains made. In the 1880s, the rinderpest disease was discovered in east Africa. It was recorded south of the Zambezi River in early 1896, causing panic amongst settlers who had acquired cattle from the natives through violence and other trickeries. 

In August 1896, the Germans and British held a two-day conference in Vryburg, part of British Bechuanaland, to strategise on the rinderpest threat. This conference took five key resolutions. First, to prohibit the movement of all animals across the borders of the colonies. Second, to institute strict control measures on the movements of the Africans.Third, that two barbed wire fences be erected along the borders of the colonies. Fourth, that the fence be constantly guarded and all animals seen near the fence be killed. Fifth, that all Africans crossing the fence be thoroughly disinfected.

The Germans didn’t have the resources and capacity to implement the Vryburg resolutions – particularly fencing and monitoring the entire expanse of South West Africa. Instead, they erected a cordon to the north and east of areas inhabited by the settlers.

Theodor Leutwein, then governor of German South West Africa, saw the rinderpest and Vryburg resolutions as an opportunity to bring the north-central part of the territory under his control. He sent his deputy, Friedrich von Lindequist, to ensure that a cordon fence was erected at the chosen area. Work on the cordon, consisting of 16 military outposts, started in November 1896 and was overseen by Lindequist himself.  

However, it failed to achieve its objective of keeping rinderpest in the north as it was later discovered at Epukiro, Grootfontein and in Windhoek. Giorgio Miescher, an historian at the University of Basel who wrote insightfully on the redline, said it seemed that rinderpest entered the territory through present-day Botswana. The disease decimated cattle north of the cordon. It was recorded in Uukwambi between July and August 1897. Miescher again found that it might have come from the south, through the cordon, into Uukwambi.

DECREES AND DISEASE

In 1904, war broke out between the Germans and various native communities. In December 1905, the German Reichstag (parliament) passed a resolution confining police protection in this colony to the smallest area. Two years later, on 15 March 1907, a decree arrived from Berlin with a map depicting this area, marked in blue, which would enjoy police protection. This blue line subsequently became known as the police zone border. In the north, this border followed the cordon erected in 1896 that failed to control rinderpest.

On 22 March 1907, Lindequist issued a decree creating three restricted areas named game reserves. Game reserve number 2, measuring more than 90 000 square kilometres, included the area of Etosha pan, and northern Kaoko to the ocean. The police zone also served as the veterinary border for the duration of German control of South West Africa. In 1915, Germany lost control of the territory, to South Africa, during the First World War.

In 1916, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia broke out. South Africa imposed an embargo on South West Africa to the dismay of the settlers who depended on the South African market for cattle exports. The settlers protested and petitioned the government, resulting in the deployment of Alexander Goodall, head of the veterinary service, to hear them. 

To lift the embargo, the settlers presented a proposal to Goodall in which they drew a redline on the map, on the very borders of the police zone which separated what they called the ‘dark areas’– native territories and South West Africa proper. As with the rinderpest in 1896, northerners and their cattle were left to suffer. The South African government eventually adopted this redline. After independence, the black government kept the redline. 

I provide this history recalling the words of Benjamin Cardozo that “history, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future”. 

* Job Shipululo Amupanda is activist-in-chief of the Affirmative Repositioning movement and former mayor of Windhoek. He holds a PhD in Political Studies from the University of Namibia.

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