Beyond the last frontier: Major trollope and the eastern caprivi zipfel

Abstract

Even among the arbitrarily drawn borders of Africa, those of the Namibian Caprivi Strip are a striking anomaly, jutting 500 km 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 give the German Protectorate of South West Africa access to trade and traffic on the Zambezi River in an exchange drawn up according to maps and not necessarily the navigability of the rivers.1 From the establishment of the German Protectorate through to the setting up of the independent Namibian state, the Caprivi Strip existed beyond the collective imagination of the Namibian state.