Many countries in the world have odd bits sticking out here and there, but perhaps one of the strangest is Namibia's Caprivi Strip, jutting out from the country's far northeast like an arm trying to dribble Botswana like a basketball.
Africa became one big European land grab in the late 19th century, and Namibia was no exception. While Britain claimed Walvis Bay - an excellent deep-water port, one of the few on southern Africa's Atlantic coast - in 1878, Germany proclaimed a protectorate over the whole area in the mid-1880s, building on missionary settlements begun in the 1840s and a piece of land ceded to a German trading firm in 1883.
German South-West Africa must have been a foreboding place for the colonists. Even by the standards of a continent that includes the world's largest desert, Namibia is exceptionally dry. It contains parts of two of the world's most foreboding desert landscapes, the Namib and the Kalahari. The country has around 300 sunny days every year, which is not necessarily a boon for agriculture. The only two major rivers that would have run through the colony were the Orange and the Okavango - and those were just along the edges, to say nothing of the fact that the Okavango doesn't actually flow into the ocean.
Map of Namibia, with the Caprivi Strip at the top right.
With all this in mind, it's not surprising that the Germans wanted better access to water resources, and the northeast of the protectorate was the place to go looking for them. The best bet - so they thought, anyway - was the Zambezi River, which rises in northwest Zambia, flows down through Angola, back into Zambia, and then forms much of the Zambia-Zimbabwe border before passing through Mozambique and into the Indian Ocean. In the 1880s, the Zambezi also touched on the British protectorate of Bechuanaland (modern Botswana) before reaching Zimbabwe. The Germans aimed to change that.
The British had been involved with the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of modern-day Tanzania, since the 1850s. But in 1885, the Germans showed up with a number of gunships and threatened the sultan of Zanzibar to give them his inland territory or else. The British and Germans subsequently worked out an arrangement in which each would get a sphere of influence on the mainland. Still, the Germans had their dry territory on the other side of the continent. So at a conference in Berlin in 1890, they agreed to drop their claim to Zanzibar in exchange for Heligoland, a group of small islands in the North Sea then controlled by Britain, and access to the Zambezi River from the west, which came in the form of the Caprivi Strip.
The course of the Zambezi, from NW Zambia near the middle top of the image, around past the Caprivi Strip and Zimbabwe and out through Mozambique.
The Germans were hopeful that the Zambezi would provide a way to connect their west coast territories with those on the east coast - despite dropping pretensions to Zanzibar, they still controlled much of mainland Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Unfortunately for Germany, the Caprivi Strip only reaches as far as the upper course of the Zambezi, and in its lower reaches at that. The Caprivi Strip extends more than 250 miles from the main portion of Namibia to reach its objective, but only about 40 miles from the Caprivi Strip's termination point comes one major obstacle that rendered navigation of the Zambezi from the Caprivi Strip to the Indian Ocean completely impossible: Mosi-oa-Tunya, better known to most of the world as Victoria Falls.
In truth, the Zambezi as a whole is ill-suited for long navigation due to rapids and sandbars, even with Victoria Falls removed from the equation. But with the Smoke that Thunders standing almost directly in their way, the Germans had no hope of linking up with the east coast; only some local navigation north into Zambia and Angola was possible. Nevertheless, the Caprivi Strip remained part of German South-West Africa, and it stayed with the territory as it became South-West Africa (under South African administration after World War I) and finally Namibia upon its 1990 independence from South Africa.
Victoria Falls. Oh, it's pretty, but just you try getting a steamship over it.
In its own way, the Caprivi Strip stands as one of the strangest-looking monuments to the European powers' cavalier attitude towards Africa - existing geography and tribal boundaries were no match for lines drawn on a map to satisfy sometimes shortsighted territorial aspirations.
Non-linked references:
Caprivi Strip history and general information from:
General Namibian history from:
Namibian rainfall data from:
Information on the Zambezi River from:
Information on Anglo-German relations in East Africa from:
Images from:
