Understanding Hinterlands from a Hinterland

The Lower Orange River (or Lower !Garib) marks today the border between Namibia and South Africa.Footnote 1 The river is an exceptional oasis in an otherwise mountainous and arid landscape. Besides a few mining and irrigation settlements, the area is sparsely populated. Given its exceptional ecology and the abundance of water, the Lower !Garib has sustained highly mobile communities and their livelihoods for centuries. Since the late eighteenth century, the colonial presence at the Cape unleashed profound processes of socio-cultural and economic transformation (Penn 2005). Long-term violent displacement and marginalization shaped the region and its societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; both sides of the Lower Orange River were subject to extractive capitalist economies established by both colonial and post-colonial central governments in Europe and Southern Africa, that is, in London, Berlin, Cape Town, Pretoria, and Windhoek (Silvester 1993, 1998; Dedering 1997; Rohde and Hoffman 2008; Legassick 2010).

Our focus on the region of the Lower !Garib sheds light on diverse practices of control, exploitation, and integration of peripheral (border) regions, or hinterlands, into colonial, apartheid, and post-colonial territorial and political formations. We study “material, symbolic, personal and discursive flows” (Lester 2003, 609) over the borders of Southern Africa and thereby wish to provide nuanced historical geographies of the subcontinent. Herein the concept of hinterland provides an idiosyncratic lens through which we might begin such an inquiry.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines hinterland as “the remote areas of a country away from the coast or the banks of major rivers.”Footnote 2 The region we are concerned with contradicts this framing, given that it is precisely situated along a major river and close to the Atlantic coast. It hence provides an opportunity to complicate notions of hinterland and specify why they remain productive for thinking about the Lower Orange River region, even if, or perhaps because, this area was recurrently relegated to peripheral geographies, while at the same time it engendered movement, circulation, and exchange along and across the river. In short, the river and its associated landscapes allow us to develop a notion of hinterland that is located in the specificity and ambiguity of time and space, and moves beyond the binary of center and periphery, or an imagined, othered hinterland.

How to study a hinterland without re-enforcing an urban perspective, a perspective that has always imagined the periphery from the center, asked the architect Milica Topalovic in her inaugural lecture at the ETH Zurich. She stated that “only when the centre of gravity and its blinding sources of light become temporarily obscured can the phenomena unfolding its shadow be adequately perceived and analysed” (Topalovic 2016, 17). We suggest to go even further and—to stay with Topalovic’s metaphor—not only to obscure the center but to turn up the lights in the hinterland and let it shine. In other words, our research actively tries to understand a hinterland from the perspective of a hinterland. We turn around Topalovic’s question and ask what is the hinterland’s relation to its city, if there is one at all? And—if thought from the hinterland—does it matter where and what this city or the center is? If hinterlands “can no longer be seen as remote, residual or anachronistic” (Topalovic 2016, 27), what does that mean for people who never saw themselves as anachronistic and remote, but, like in our case, have on different scales and at certain times formed a center of a cultural, economic, and political network, with diverse relations to changing, far-away centers?

To understand hinterlands from the specific area we researched, the Lower !Garib, it might be helpful to think along Phil A. Neel’s conceptualization of US hinterlands, as near and far hinterlands (2018a, 17). The term “near hinterland” seems hardly appropriate for describing the Lower !Garib region, as the relevant centers of powers, such as Cape Town or Windhoek, have never been close enough to allow for the region to become a suburban “foothill of the megacity” (Neel 2018a, 17). The region, as we will elaborate later in some detail, rather fits into the category of the far hinterland, described by Neel as an impoverished area somewhere between “traditionally rural” and a place of violent resource extraction, where “supply chains narrow along thin strips of interstate, river, or railroad” (2018b, 33). To be precise, the Lower !Garib region was often all of this at the same time: a traditional rural area with few direct links to any centers, a hinterland defined by massive resource extraction and often poverty, and, in addition, a space of transit, in-between the centers of Cape Town, Windhoek, and even the global markets.

Shifting Hinterlands and Colonial Borders

Before flowing into the Atlantic Ocean, the Orange River crosses about 500 kilometers of land that is extremely dry and features an average rainfall below 100 mm per annum. In this aridity, the river and its rich vegetation along the banks constitute an elongated oasis and a source of human and animal life (Blanchon 2017). To farmers in the region, the river’s permanent water has been of central importance for many centuries. Here, they can water their livestock, find grazing, and even plant additional fodder. People living along and in the vicinity of the Lower !Garib developed complex and innovative economic and social systems that enabled them to sustain themselves. Archeological sites on the river banks and early travel reports of the eighteenth century confirm the Lower !Garib’s historical role as a central artery of life in this (semi-)desert area.Footnote 3 Local population would have hardly called the Lower Orange River a hinterland. The notion of the Lower Orange River as the Cape’s hinterland gained prominence and eventually consolidated into a dominant trope within a particular conceptualization of the region. In this narrative, the region was an unchanged, “anachronical” empty land—or hinterland—where all developments and changes came through the expansion of the Cape and the people that were pushed northward.

Andrea Rosengarten and others are challenging stereotypes of Southern African historiography which are built on narrative conventions of colonial determinism and teleology (Rosengarten 2023). Rather, Rosengarten is arguing for more flexible, spatial dimensions of group-making among nomadic pastoralists, mixed subsistence specialists, and newcomers in this region. Or, in other words, the region became an imagined hinterland from the perspective of the Cape Colony, which is still in many ways reflected in today’s historiographic description of the region. From the perspective of the region itself, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were marked by diverse newcomers leading to new networks, conflict, and exchanges—however, none of them directly linked to any particular center.

For eighteenth-century explorers from the Cape, the Orange River constituted remoteness, a threshold to unknown lands, which also remained inaccessible by sea.Footnote 4 To them, crossing the river held the promise of discovery of gold and other treasures of the African interior. Their hopes were disappointed, but the areas known as “Little Namaqualand” (south of the river) and “Great Namaqualand” (north of the river) were nonetheless subjected to the advancement and violence of the northern frontier. A complex dynamic of conflict, alliance, confrontation, and collaboration ensued, in the course of which advancing settlers, run-away slaves, violently displaced Khoi, San, and other groups, local communities and newcomers, traders, and Christian missionaries disputed the control of resources, power, as well as physical and social reproduction (Penn 2005; Dedering 1997). Pressure on livestock and game spiraled, and led to the emergence of a characteristic raiding and hunting economy, in which mounted and armed commandos took center stage and intensified the northern frontier’s expansion north of the Orange River into Great Namaqualand. It was around this time when parts of the region became an economic hinterland, a space of resource extraction for a global market: livestock was raided and sold to the economic centers. Cape Town was at this time in constant need of fresh meat to cater for international shipping, whereas the region’s local hunting products such as ostrich feathers were in demand in salons all over the world (Stein 2007, 778).

In 1848, the Cape Colony claimed the whole territory up to the Orange River, and for the first time the river became an official colonial border. The formal integration of Little Namaqualand into the Cape Colony enabled the establishment of loan farms, where settlers could now count on state protection. These farms were based on rather loosely specified property rights that did not involve tradable land titles; they were mostly given to rich farmers from the Cape, who did not live on the loan farms (Dye and La Croix 2020).Footnote 5 This policy further dispossessed African farmers and forced many to either live under the protection of the mission stations established in the far north of the colony or cross the river and settle in Great Namaqualand. In the following decades, large parts of Little Namaqualand were divided up into settler farms (Surplus People Project 1995; Penn 2005). Due to the harsh, arid conditions, though, the region usually attracted settlers with very limited means. Therefore, it never became prime farmland but remained closely linked to the local rural economy with only limited contribution to South Africa’s growing commercial farming industry. White farmers in Little Namaqualand could not invest in their land, for example, to fence it, and they were highly dependent on the presence of an African labor force. Hence, until far into the twentieth century, Africans recruited into farm labor maintained a certain degree of economic independence based on livestock ownership and grazing rights on settler-owned farmland (Rohde and Hoffman 2008; Gordon 2023). From a local perspective, the reliance of white farming on local workforce, knowledge, and trade—at least in the farming sector—contradicts constructions of the region as a fully dependent hinterland of the colonial centers at the Cape and in Europe. At the same time, commercial copper mining started in Okiep, South Africa’s oldest mining town, situated around a hundred kilometers away from the river. This marked the beginning of a new economic sector, which had a lasting impact on the region and its relation to global centers.

The colonial border established along the Lower Orange River and proclaimed in 1848 did not mark a boundary between two colonial powers, but the formal limit of colonial expansion. For a few decades, the Lower !Garib divided an area of direct colonial rule in the south and a highly militarized territory north of the river under African control. Similar to the earlier developments south of the river, in Great Namaqualand, today’s Southern Namibia, competing interest groups—Khoekhoegowab-speaking pastoralists, European traders, northward-trekking African farmers from the Cape, and missionaries—formed changing alliances (Lau 1987). Only in 1884, when imperial Germany successfully claimed Great Namaqualand as part of the German Protectorate, did the Lower Orange River turn into a formal border between two distinct colonial territories (Barnard 2000).

Germany’s colonization of Namibia proceeded along two main axes from the seashore, starting at the ports of Lüderitz in the south and Swakopmund in the north, and continuing through the desert into the highlands. Whereas Windhoek, once founded by the powerful local leader Jonker Afrikaner, became the political center in the north, Warmbad—and later Keetmanshoop—became equivalents in the south. Given these southern colonial centers’ relative vicinity to the river, German colonialism had a direct impact on the Lower !Garib area: settler farms were established, as well as police stations and a system of regular patrols. However, it was not until the early years of the twentieth century that colonial power fully unfolded in the southernmost parts of the territory (Silvester 1993; Botha 2000). Before that, for most African farmers and herders in the region, German colonialists were maybe just another group of powerful newcomers that still allowed for negotiations and even profitable arrangements, because the German settlers needed local labor and political support.

Under the leadership of Hendrik Witbooi, whose family had crossed the Orange River in the first half of the nineteenth century, many of the Nama groups took up arms against German rule. Four years of substantial human and financial investment and military force were required to defeat decentralized and highly mobile African commandos. During the anti-colonial war between 1904 and 1908, African forces would regularly seek refuge in the Cape colony, where they could regroup and prepare new attacks (Dedering 2006). Thus, the !Garib gained strategic importance and the river was increasingly militarized. Imperial Germany fought this war with utmost brutality. Civilians died in their thousands on the battlefield, in concentration camps or were deported, making the war a genocide (Erichsen 2005; Zimmerer and Zeller 2008; Biwa 2012). The colonial strategy aimed to destroy independent local African societies to make space for an emerging settler economy and to turn Southern Namibia into a colonial hinterland of resource extraction with a self-sufficient white-owned agricultural sector. Consequently, from 1905 all African communities who had fought against the Germans were made subject to a total expropriation of land and livestock (Werner 1998).

After 1908, the German Empire heavily invested in the transformation of Southern Namibia into a commercial farming area. Huge farms were delimited, boreholes drilled, and the general infrastructure improved. In 1910–1912, the construction of a new railway line laid the grounds for a territorial, political, and economic integration of Keetmanshoop and Windhoek. Warmbad, the former center in the South, at the same time lost its importance because it was not linked to the railway. The discovery of rich diamond deposits close to Lüderitz in 1908 gave a further boost to the colonial economy, but the outbreak of World War I and Namibia’s occupation by South African troops abruptly stopped imperial Germany’s settler ambitions in Southern Namibia. The diamond deposits and farming potential had been a crucial incentive to South African occupation, and once again political turmoil and economic interest changed the status of the Lower Orange River, this time from an international to an internal border (Miescher 2012b; Rutishauser 2023).

This status persisted for 75 years, that is, from 1915 to 1990, though the League of Nations and its successor the United Nations never formally recognized South Africa’s de facto annexation of today’s Namibia. From a South African perspective, things had changed significantly in 1915 and the Lower Orange River region was no longer considered a hinterland but was placed at and promoted as the heart of a predominantly Afrikaner dryland farming community (Silvester 1998; Botha 2000; Swanepoel 2016). White famers benefitted from massive support by the central government, while the space for maneuver for local African people was shrinking even more. However, with the discovery of huge diamond deposits at the mouth of the Orange River in the late 1920s, the region also became a backbone of the diamond mining industry and thus a specific type of global hinterland. These two economic sectors stood for two opposing hinterland dynamics, as we will discuss later.

During the period of South African rule, Namibia’s most relevant colonial border shifted northward up to the Etosha Pan. Henceforth, the so-called Red Line, a combined veterinary and settlement border, drew the line between two essentially different domains: the heartland of settler colonialism in Central and Southern Namibia—closely linked also to the South African mainland—and the African interior in the northern part of the colony, where most Africans lived (Miescher 2012a). Whereas all traffic of humans, animals, and goods over the Red Line was heavily regulated and controlled, white people could cross the !Garib border without any restriction. Movement of African people over the river was controlled in the framework of the general pass laws; local border crossings were possible at some places, for example, for workers in the irrigations schemes on both sides of the river. Movements of animals and goods remained controlled here as well, albeit—at least in the memory of people living at the border—more relaxed than in the north (Moore 2020).

In 1990, after a long struggle for liberation, Namibia gained independence, and political priorities shifted toward the development areas in the far north beyond the Red Line. The South, once pampered and highly subsidized as settler heartland, lost political influence and access to state resources. It became a marginalized region, far away from the centers of power, and due to its small population, it was left with no decisive voting power within the political landscape of the emerging democratic country. Likewise, the end of apartheid in South Africa put an end to significant subsidies for white farmers, who had formed the ideological backbone of the old regime (Bernstein 2013). The redirection of state subsidies toward formerly disadvantaged constituencies was a heavy blow for settlers who farmed along the Lower Orange River, and many of the white-owned farms, especially the ones with low carrying capacity and without irrigation potential, were gradually deserted or sold to larger mining or farming companies. As a result, the Lower !Garib became a hinterland in ways not known for more than 100 years. Today, the region resembles a far hinterland, as described by Neel (2018a), an area that is marked by poverty and remoteness, and only sustains violent and “messy industries.” Though, depending on which economic sector is highlighted, agriculture or mining, the hinterland has been experienced differently.

Farming and Agriculture: A Rural Economy or a Colonial Hinterland?

Given the uniquely favorable ecological conditions along the Lower Orange River, one might assume the emergence of a thriving irrigated agricultural sector during the colonial period. In fact, irrigation farming was important even before colonial farmers began with commercial farming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Africans used the permanent water of the river for the production of fresh vegetables and fruits for local consumption and small-scale trade, as well as the production of additional food for livestock (Legassick 2010). Taking these African initiatives as role models, the South African administration and the missions also promoted irrigation farming along the Lower !Garib by building canals and small irrigation schemes in order to settle impoverished white South African families—and later also rural “Coloureds” (Visser and Du Pisani 2012; Moore 2023). Additionally, the South African government surveyed and sold many farms along the Lower !Garib to private investors. One of the buyers was a syndicate around the farmer and speculator Carl Weidner, which purchased farms along the river with the aim to turn them into large irrigated farms, mostly for the production of lucerne for sale in Namibia and South Africa (McKittrick 2015; Moore 2023).

However, neither the small-scale schemes nor the large private farms proved economically sustainable in the long run given the remoteness of the area and the challenges of transport and infrastructure. In fact, all local efforts to convince South African Railways to connect the Lower Orange River to the existing railway network, then the only feasible means of long-distance transport, failed (Boonzaaier 2008). On the Namibian side of the river, however, Karakul farming became a more lucrative business for white farmers, and the immense global demand for Karakul pelt and the shortage in Karakul rims led to an economic boom in the region (Swanepoel 2016; Moore 2020). This had two partly contradicting impacts on the Lower !Garib area. Firstly, up to the 1950s, it was prohibited to export Karakul from the occupied territory southward across the river into South Africa, and the internal boundary became a de facto veterinary border. Secondly, particularly after the lifting of the export ban to South Africa, and with growing numbers of Karakul sheep, irrigated lucerne production regained importance in order to feed the sheep and strengthened local production networks in which small-scale irrigation farmers benefitted from the Karakul industry as local suppliers of fresh vegetables to the farms and their many workers.

But again, decline loomed on the horizon, and both forms of irrigation lost importance once the Karakul industry declined and transport costs for fresh products from outside the region dropped in the 1970s. In this case the better infrastructural connection of the region to the centers of power negatively impacted on the local economy of the hinterlands. As a result, many of the smaller irrigation farms were bought by fruit companies, which could operate cash crop production on a different scale. For a few decades only, then, the high demand for Karakul pelts had put the Lower Orange River at the center of a booming global industry. However, even during these gratifying economic cycles Africans could hardly benefit. They had no access to private land ownership and were excluded from loans and investments required for Karakul breeding and irrigation farming.

Spaces of Inclusion and Exclusion: A Mining Hinterland?

Far more important than farming in terms of scale, profit, and duration was diamond mining in the Lower Orange River area, which turned into a global mining center for more than a century. The “discovery” of the first diamonds in 1908 at Kolmanskop close to Lüderitz, 200 kilometers north of the river’s mouth, marked the beginning of a process of territorial enclosure and exclusion that shaped the region’s geography and population for a long time. A closer look at this history will enable us to explain what we mean by territorial closure and exclusion, and how this impacts this hinterland’s relations to the centers of power.

Shortly after the discovery of diamonds, notably in an area with no exclusive mining rights, a diamond rush began, and individuals and small companies started to claim diamond fields for exclusive exploitation. Kolmanskop was the center of diamond mining and a thriving small town in the middle of the desert. The German administration did everything to prevent an uncontrolled diamond rush, and already in 1909 it proclaimed a huge territory along the Atlantic Ocean, a closed area, called “Sperrgebiet.” Soon afterward, the state-owned Deutsche Diamanten-Gesellschaft (German Diamond Company) was awarded exclusive mining rights. The declaration of the Sperrgebiet meant that lands between the 26° south (i.e., circa 100 kilometers north of Lüderitz) southward to the Orange River and 100 kilometers inland were declared prohibited, with access strictly controlled. For local communities, the closure constituted an enormous physical barrier to the lands closer to the coast that they used for grazing and hunting.Footnote 6 After the defeat of the German troops in 1915, the mining rights went to the South African-owned Consolidated Diamond Mines of South West Africa (CDM),Footnote 7 and the Sperrgebiet remained a closed area for the entire period of South African rule.

Once the diamond deposits around Lüderitzbucht were exhausted, the mining activities moved southward. The discovery of diamond deposits at the mouth of the Orange River in the 1920s led to the establishment of the twin towns Alexander Bay, just south of the river, and Oranjemund, just north of it, in 1926 and 1936, respectively. The eventual relocation of the diamond mining company’s headquarters, including some of the buildings and infrastructure, from Lüderitz to Oranjemund was a symbol for how the Lower !Garib had turned into an extractive center for the global diamond trade. In the following decades, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers reached the twin towns, whereby recruitment practices differed depending on the side of the river people worked on. On the Namibian side, most workers came from Northern Namibia or even Angola, Zambia, or Zimbabwe, all of them grouped together under the term “Northern and exterritorial native laborers,” meaning that they all were recruited north of the Red Line (Amupanda 2020). On the South African side of the river, workers were predominately recruited from South African reserves and homelands, and other specific South African recruitment areas. The white workforce, on the other hand, usually came from various South African cities (Bertoni 2008).

Oranjemund and Alexander Bay were thriving company towns with hospitals, schools, shops, and recreational facilities. The mining towns at the mouth of the !Garib were completely sealed off from the area upstream. Heavy policing of the borders of the mining areas allowed for no interaction and exchange with local residents in the interiors. In other words, these towns became sealed off from their own hinterlands, with no profits flowing into the broader region. All workers, black and white, could only reside in Alexander Bay and Oranjemund for the duration of their contracts, and single workers, again black and white, often stayed in segregated hostels deep inside the mining areas (Bertoni 2008). Strict racial segregation was imposed until the late 1970s. As a result, migrant workers hardly made a home for themselves here, even if they spent long years in the two coastal towns.

By looking at the period of South African occupation and later apartheid rule in the Lower Orange River area, it becomes clear that a particular region can be understood as a hinterland for some of its inhabitants, while for others it was a center. The massive economic investment in agriculture and the promotion of the Lower !Garib region as a heartland of Afrikaner farming created a strong sense of belonging, superiority, and power for white farmers that is untypical for hinterlands as sites of pronounced political abandonment, as, for example, described by Neel (2018b). The same system, however, forced Africans in the region into wage labor and made them dependent on “violent business” (Neel 2018a), creating a “space of resource extraction” for the colonial, global economy. Hence, living in a hinterland was experienced differently by different people, and as we have shown, hinterlands can also be fragmented within themselves, creating spaces of inclusion and exclusion that complicate concepts of a homogeneous hinterland closely tight to an urban center of power.

New Dynamics Along the Lower !Garib

Years of extensive mining have depleted the diamond deposits in the desert and along the Lower Orange River, and the mining companies have moved much of their extractive activities offshore. As part of this shift, corporate capital has lost interest in municipal administration and investment. Alexander Bay is in decline, whereas Oranjemund so far successfully fights against the same fate.Footnote 8 Both towns have recently been opened to the public and permanent residence is welcome. Notwithstanding these openings, Alexander Bay has turned into a semi-deserted ghost town. Residents of Oranjemund, on the other hand, have embraced the possibility of a prosperous future by turning their town into a travel and tourism gateway to both the Namib Desert and the Lower Orange River valley. At this stage, success remains a matter of conjecture, but there are signs of change—in Oranjemund and beyond. Aussenkehr, situated 180 kilometers upstream on the Namibian side of the river, has become the largest settlement on the Lower !Garib. Here, private investors run large irrigation farms that produce grapes for the international market. Since independence, Aussenkehr has attracted tens of thousands of seasonal workers, mostly from northern Namibia. In the beginning, the workers stayed on the farm and returned home once the work was done. Thus, after the private grape companies withdrew from their obligation to look after the workers staying on their farms, the Namibian government became preoccupied with developing Aussenkehr into a regular town where permanent settlement for farm workers and their families is a real option. Like Oranjemund almost a century ago, though on a different scale, Aussenkehr functions as an insular world on its own, with minimal connections to the broader region, but with strong ties to the global markets and its centers worldwide. Workers and consumer products all come from outside the region, the former from northern Namibia and the latter from the economic centers of South Africa.

An outlook on the Lower Orange River region’s future shows contradictory signs of both opening up and further closure. An indication of a more permeable border, at least for wildlife and tourists, is perhaps the establishment of the /Ai-/Ais Richtersveld Transfrontier Park in 2003, situated between Aussenkehr and the river delta. Other developments seem to perpetuate and reinforce exclusion and territorial enclosures, such as the establishment of strictly controlled private conservation areas, the growing capture of irrigation farming by global capital, and, most recently, the closing of the border due to COVID-19. Surely, these contradictory developments will invite, once again, a reassessment of the Lower !Garib as a hinterland, or many hinterlands, for those who live there.