Dividing, Connecting, and Complicating the Hinterland: The Lower !Garib/Orange River

The focus of this chapter is on the region of the Lower !Garib/Orange River, which forms the border between Namibia and South Africa. We describe the ways in which this area was constituted as a hinterland within shifting territorial formations during the colonial, apartheid, and post-colonial periods. We develop a concept of hinterland subject to historical and spatial specificity, and beyond the binary of center and periphery. We pay attention to shifting scales and changing perspectives that engendered the conception of the region as a domain of dynamic economic, political, and cultural change in the nineteenth century; a prospecting area for mining and commercial farming in the twentieth century; or a periphery marked by structural impoverishment and environmental degradation in the twenty-first century.