School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Centre of African Studies (CAS) is delighted to welcome you to the following seminar:

"South Africa's empire on the rivers and the militarization of Caprivi Zipfel,c.1948-75"

Speaker: Professor David M Anderson, Professor in African History, University of Warwick

Chair: Professor James Smith, Vice Principal International, Professor of African and International Development, University of Edinburgh

The north-western portion of South-West Africa, known since the early twentieth century as Caprivi Zipfel, was a contested region from its first definition in the Heligoland Treaty of 1890.  Up until the 1970s, its borders remained disputed between the colonial powers and post-colonial states of the region, and even the status of the South African administration of Caprivi was challenged within the United Nations under the terms of the Mandate. By the mid-1950s, as the process of decolonization began in one African colony after another, Caprivi’s future was hotly debated between the colonial administrations of Bechuanaland, Angola, and Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and with the governments of South Africa, Britain and Portugal.   African nationalist parties joined in these debates, often objecting to colonial plans for Caprivi, but sometimes also asserting claims over Caprivi’s sovereignty, while South Africa embarked upon its own programme of militarization in the volatile riparian landscape between the Zambezi, Kwando and Okavango rivers. History, and pragmatic politics, were deployed in equal measure to justify the claims for Caprivi, as each player sought to legitimize and authenticate their vision of Caprivi’s future place in the political ecology of the region.  For some, especially the South Africans, decolonization presented an imperative to recolonize Caprivi, and in these discussions the voices of Caprivi’s own population struggled to be heard.  This paper examines these debates, charting the development of South Africa’s imperial and military strategies in Caprivi up to the invasion of Angola in 1975, to reveal the contested, often contradictory, and sometimes sinister motives that lay behind this story of claim-making in Caprivi Zipfel in the age of decolonization.  As other empires in Africa were ending, it was in Caprivi that South Africa’s own empire was made. 

When: Wednesday 21st February 2024 (3.30-5pm GMT)

Where: Hugh Robson Building, Lecture  Theatre G.04

Format: In person. To attend this event, please register on Eventbrite

Speaker Biography:

David M. Anderson is Professor of African History, in the Global History & Culture Centre at the University of Warwick. He has published widely on the history and politics of eastern Africa, including Histories of the Hanged (2005), The Khat Controversy (2007), The Routledge Handbook of African Politics (2013, ed), and Politics and Violence in Eastern Africa: The Struggles of Emerging States (2015, ed). Three projects will come to publication in the coming year: Allies at the End of Empire (ed), From Resistance to Rebellion, and Africa’s New Authoritarians.  He is now working on a volume of essays on the Mau Mau counter-insurgency in 1950s Kenya, drawing upon colonial documents released since 2012, and (with Michael Bollig) an edited volume of essays on Conservation in Africa. Anderson is editor of the African Studies Series at Cambridge University Press, would founding editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and regularly contributes to the print and broadcast media on African politics.