African Studies and African Country Resources @ Pitt: Namibia

This work examines the development of regional policy-making and organizational behavior of Namibia's regional institutions in their founding year, as they were established after independence from South Africa in 1990. The study emphasizes the importance of focusing on the microlevel dynamics and communications of public organizations in order to understand the intricacies of decentralization, in Namibia as in other parts of the world. The author shows clearly that a focus on the capacity-building activities of elected regional councils and parliaments can reveal important aspects of the strengthening of new democracies.

Namibia's Red Line opens a fascinating window into a nation's history by tracing the establishment of an internal border within it. Based on archival sources and oral histories, it recounts the process of border constitution in Namibia from the German military's construction of a temporary veterinary defense line against Rinderpest in the late nineteenth century to the erection of a two-meter-high fence by the South African colonial government sixty years later. The nearly 800-mile-long fence has divided northern and central Namibia up to today. Giorgio Miescher reveals the Red Line's history to be a gradual process aimed at segregating stock and people and constructing dichotomies between modern and traditional, healthy and sick, European and African.