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Namibia's Red Line: The History of a Veterinary and Settlement Border. By Giorgio Miescher. African Borderland Studies. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Pp. xii, 327; maps, bibliography, index. $95.00.
Anyone traveling today from central Namibia to its densely populated north has to pass through a checkpoint at "Oshivelo"-"the gate"-where license plate numbers are recorded and vehicles are searched before being allowed to proceed. This gate is part of a massive fence that continues to divide the country in two thirteen years after independence-a border that is colloquially known as "the Red Line." Giorgio Miescher's exhaustively researched monograph explores the history of this internal colonial boundary from the 1890s to the 1960s. A translation of his dissertation, first published in German, Namibia's Red Line explores the border "where 'white' settler Africa encountered the 'black' African interior" (p. 201). The book's six substantive chapters move chronologically through a shifting colonial spatial regime centered on what became known as the Red Line.
It began as a veterinary cordon in a futile attempt to arrest the 1896-1897 Rinderpest epizootic, and then became a...