Conference Paper for ABORNE 2009. Please do not cite vilify or pillage without at least talking to me. Beyond the Last Frontier: Major Trollope and the Eastern Caprivi Zipfel One night as he lay sleeping on the veranda of his residence in Katima Mulilo Major L.F.W. Trollope, the Native Commissioner and Resident Magistrate for the Eastern Caprivi Zipfel, was attacked by a nineteen year old wielding an axe. Major Trollope survived the attack and the assailant was soon arrested, but in the subsequent trial the “plum posting” that Trollope had created on the furthermost frontier of South African rule came crashing down. The trial brought to the fore that Trollope lived beyond the control of the South African administration to which he was formally subject, and that instead he had become enmeshed in the administrations of Northern Rhodesia and the Bechuanaland Protectorate. Originally appointed to Katima Mulilo to enforce South African rule in the Eastern Caprivi Zipfel, Trollope increasingly established his own fiefdom on the outer fringes of South African rule, and became evermore integrated in the administrations of countries beyond the borders of South Africa. By the time of his demise, Trollope ruled the Eastern Caprivi Zipfel in a manner that had more in keeping with the academically schooled coterie of District Commissioners of Northern Rhodesia and the Bechuanaland Protectorate, than that it bore relation to the apartheid securocrats of the South African Bantu Affairs Department to which he was nominally subject. Beyond the frontier Even amongst the arbitrarily drawn borders of Africa, the borders of the Namibian Caprivi strip are a striking anomaly jutting 500 kilometres into the African continent. Determined in the boardrooms of Europe as part of an exchange between the British and German Empires, the Caprivi strip was designed to enable the German protectorate of South West Africa access to trade and traffic on the Zambesi river; an exchange determined by maps and not necessarily the reality of navigable rivers.1 Beginning with the establishment of the German protectorate through to the establishment of the 1 For a clear and detailed introduction to the Eastern Caprivi and Katima Mulilo in particular see, Wolfgang Zeller, “Danger and Opportunity in Katima Mulilo: A Namibian Border Boomtown at Transnational Crossroads”, Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 35, Number 1, March 2009, pp. 133 – 154. An overview of German and British administration prior to 1956 see, Major L.F.W. Trollope, “The Eastern Caprivi Zipfel”, The Northern Rhodesia Journal, Volume III, Number 2, 1956, pp. 107 – 118. A description of the Caprivi in the heyday of apartheid see, Professor Richard F. Logan, “The People of the Eastern Caprivi”, S.W.A. Jaarboek 1972, pp. 149 - 152. 1 Conference Paper for ABORNE 2009. Please do not cite vilify or pillage without at least talking to me. independent Namibian state, the Caprivi strip has consistently existed beyond the collective imagination of the Namibian state. That the Caprivi strip exists as something of an embarrassment and inconvenient appendage to the country as a whole can be gauged by the manner in which successive Namibian administrations have sought to portray the strip on its maps. The Kriegskarte von Deutsch-Sudwestafrika [war-map of German South West Africa] published by Dietrich Reimer in Berlin in 1904 completely ignores the Caprivi.2 To be fair, between 1904 and 1908, the German administration had more than enough on its hands with the wars in central and southern Namibia to be overly concerned with the cartography of the Caprivi strip. None the less, the Kriegskarte set the standard for a large scale map of the territory as a whole. The famous “farm-map” of Namibia which has been printed in consecutive runs in a scale of 1 : 1 000 000 since 1921, portrays the Caprivi, not as an integral part of Namibia, but as a separate entity in a scale of 1 : 2 000 000.3 The maps published after Namibian independence in 1990 have not been changed and the latest published by the Surveyor General in Windhoek in 2007 continues to represent the marginal nature of Caprivi by representing the territory as a separate entity, in half the scale of the rest of Namibia. The marginality of the Caprivi in relation to the newly independent Republic of Namibia came to a head in August 1999 when armed members of the Caprivi Liberation Front, staged an insurrection and attempted to secede from the Republic.4 Unfortunately for the secessionists they failed to secure the military airport at Mpacha near Katima Mulilo and the Namibian government was able to fly in military forces to suppress the secession. In the subsequent military operations Caprivians were given to understand that whatever their marginal status, they were subject and answerable to the Namibian state. Units of the Namibian Army, Police, and the Special Field Force in particular arrested, 2 Originally published as Kriegskarte von Deutsch-Sudwestafrika 1 : 800 000, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag 1904. Republished in 1994 by the National Archives of Namibia. 3 On the history of the “farm-map” see, Giorgio Miescher, “Visualising Space and Colonial Settlement: The so called “Farm Map” as an Icon of Settler Historiography”, paper presented at the second AEGIS conference held in Leiden, 12 July 2007. 4 CLF refers to Trollope in its propaganda seeking to justify its specific status separate from the nation state of Namibia. 2 Conference Paper for ABORNE 2009. Please do not cite vilify or pillage without at least talking to me. beat and tortured hundreds of people.5 Four years after the event at least 130 people were still being held without trial, at least eleven had died in detention, and at least five were being held incommunicado at a detention centre over fifteen hundred kilometres away in the vicinity of Mariental in southern Namibia.6 Establishing and maintaining an administrative presence Following its establishment on paper in 1890, it was not until 1909 that the German Empire actually established an on the ground presence in the eastern Caprivi Zipfel.7 Essentially an enormous triangle of land defined by the Rio Cuando (under its multiple names of Mashi, Linyanti and Chobe) as it flows south and then north-east to its confluence with the Zambezi, the eastern Caprivi Zipfel is an enormous area of land that consists of forested Kalahari sands and extensive marshes subject to annual flooding. Not surprisingly the area was and is host to extensive stocks of wildlife, and the territory was long contested between various powers anxious to control access to the area’s bountiful hunting products. Also known as the Linyanti, the territory has come to form the basis for innumerable hunting and trading legends.8 Whilst both the Bulozi and Batawana kingdoms contested access to the Linyanti in the second half of the nineteenth century, numerous European hunters made names for themselves in the area.9 Frederick Courtney Selous’s companion French died in a hunting accident in the Linyanti in the 1880’s. In1906 Arnold Hodson (at that stage Assistant Resident Magistrate but later Governor of Sierra Leone) accompanied Resident Commissioner Sir Ralph Williams, on what was essentially a hunting trip to the 5 The Special Field Force falls within the terms of the 1990 Police Act. However, unlike the regular police, no educational requirements are necessary for membership of the SFF. The SFF has come to be staffed primarily by PLAN (people’s liberation army of Namibia) veterans and political appointees. During operations in Caprivi they reported directly to the Head of State and not to the Minister of Home Affairs, whereby any parliamentary supervision was removed. 6 Full details regarding the insurrection are to be found in, Amnesty International, Namibia: Justice Delayed is Justice Denied; The Caprivi Treason Trial, August 2003. 7 As regards the intricacies of the German presence in the Eastern Caprivi, Maria Fisch, Der Caprivizipfel während der deutschen Zeit, 1890 – 1914, Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 1996. 8 Hugh Macmillan notes how the establishment of German and British rule “complicated the Susman brothers’trading relations with people in the two territories where trade had been unregulated”. Hugh Macmillan, An African Trading Empire: The Story fo Susman Brothers & Wulfsohn, 1901 – 2005, London: I.B. Tauris, 2005, p. 102. 9 Thomas Tlou, A History of Ngamiland 1750 to 1906: The Formation of an African State, Gaborone: Macmillan 1985. Barry C. Morton, A Social and Economic History of a Southern African Native Reserve: Ngamiland, 1890 – 1966, PhD Department of History Indiana University 1996. 3 Conference Paper for ABORNE 2009. Please do not cite vilify or pillage without at least talking to me. Linyanti.10 On this trip Hodson’s party came upon a hunting party led by Europeans that had been hunting in the Linyanti, essentially territory subject to Imperial Germany, albeit that there was no official German presence in the area.11 The hunting must have been particularly good, for four years later in 1910 Hodson guided the highest British official in southern Africa, High Commissioner Lord Selbourne to the Linyanti, and once again the British officials crossed over and hunted in what was essentially German territory.12 In 1914 the Eastern Caprivi was occupied by Rhodesian Troops guided by the cattle trader Harry Susman, becoming “the first Allied occupation of enemy territory in the Great War”.13 Administration was undertaken by the British authorities in Bechuanaland Protectorate with the area falling under the District Commissioner Kasane. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s the area remained bereft of any form of colonial administration. As such the territory formed a magnet for poachers and hunters anxious to make a living out of the sale of dried meat, hides and ivory.