Police Zone

Police Zone, southern two-thirds of South West Africa (now Namibia) in which the German and later South African colonial administrations were able to establish effective European-style police control beginning in the early 20th century. The name of the area and its original boundary were adopted in 1919 by the South Africans from a 1911 German map of the territory on which the area was marked Polizei-Zone.

Spanning the north-central sector of what became the mandated territory of South West Africa, the Police Zone’s boundary (often called the Red Line because it was printed on maps in red ink) extended from the Atlantic Ocean to Botswana in a generalized northward-arcing semicircle. The boundary separated indigenous African groups to the north, including the numerically significant Ambo (Ovambo) as well as other Bantu-speaking peoples, from white settlement areas to the south. Not all indigenous groups of South West Africa, however, lived north of the Police Zone. The numerically less significant Herero, together with groups of Khoekhoe and other groups of mixed origin, lived mostly within the Police Zone.

The Police Zone boundary was long inviolate. Whites were prohibited from entering the north, and the indigenous groups of the north were generally prohibited from entering the Police Zone except when hired as a “labour unit” contracted for a prescribed period. Many successive demarcation changes of the boundary between the 1920s and 1960s usually reflected the increasing white control of better farming areas. The name Police Zone was used less after the South African Odendaal Commission defined the geographic, economic, and political aspects of apartheid in South West Africa. The commission’s directive in 1964 led to the establishment of 10 reserves (homelands) in the 1970s for South West Africa’s African peoples and groups of mixed origin; the eastern, southern, or western boundaries of the 6 reserves for the indigenous African groups to the north of the Police Zone followed the Police Zone boundary with slight alterations.

The 1977 South African agreement to create an interim government in Namibia until independence led to the Rural Areas Proclamation (1977), which revoked the regulations previously used to control the movement of black Africans and permitted all ethnic groups to take employment and residence wherever they chose. By the time of independence in 1990, even the effects of a Police Zone had ceased.