Danger and Opportunity in Katima Mulilo: A Namibian Border Boomtown at Transnational Crossroads

Rapid construction of new 'transport corridors' across the SADC region is supposed to facilitate the free flow of commodities, tourism and investment between 'valuable places' in Southern Africa and global markets. Since the opening of a road bridge across the Zambezi in 2004, Katima Mulilo has become a busy stopover point along the Trans Caprivi Corridor (TCC), which links the Copperbelt of Zambia with Namibia's sea port of Walvis Bay. The new transport route has at last fulfilled the colonial dream that motivated the Anglo-German exchange of territory, which originally established the 'access corridor to the Zambezi' in 1890. Katima's current investment boom seems to give substance to the SWAPO government's official agenda of 'bringing development' to Caprivi, nearly a decade after an armed insurgency attempted its secession. But beyond the apparent success story, Katima Mulilo's boom is illustrative of a broader reconfiguration of the nature of state sovereignty, engendered by two distinct but interrelated processes. One of these processes changes the nature of state sovereignty from 'above'. The TCC is a space for global business and transnational governance over which the Namibian state authorities have de facto limited sovereignty. The other process changes state sovereignty from 'below'. It is manifest in the flourishing of illegal business activities in the Namibia-Zambia borderland, sprawling shanty towns and other societal phenomena that challenge SWAPO's idealised development agenda. The combined dynamics of opportunity for more-or-less legal private gain, on the one hand, and looming societal instability that accompany Katima Mulilo's current boom, on the other, continue the historical pattern of Caprivi as a site that threatens to colonise the centre of the state from its territorial and social margins.