Neither arbitrary nor artificial: Chiefs and the making of the Namibia‐Zambia borderland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the late 1990s a separatist movement emerged in Namibia's northeastern Caprivi Region. In the aftermath of an armed uprising in 1999 speculation emerged regarding a possible link between the Caprivi secessionists and Lozi separatists across the border in Zambia's Western Province. The Lozi heritage certainly has continuing relevance for Caprivi's population. Through language, kinship relations and economic exchange it serves as an integrative factor of everyday life in the Namibia/Zambia borderland. But the Caprivi secessionists had no intentions of re‐creating a united Lozi kingdom. The present‐day positions of authority by the “traditional” leaders of the Fwe (the support base of the secessionists) and other groups in Caprivi were, in fact, created by the territorial separation and system of indirect rule imposed by the German colonial authorities. Thus, the colonial border served vested interests in Caprivi from the outset. Rather than reverting to an imagined pre‐colonial past, the secessionists’ territorial claim emerged from a more recent legacy of pre‐independence state formation: The apartheid regime's attempt to create a Caprivi Bantustan. As in the case of the colonial boundary, this legacy caused new political realities and vested interests to emerge on the ground in Caprivi. Today, informal cross‐border business ventures in the Namibia/Zambia borderland are flourishing. The border is once again at the center of vested interests of those who live in its proximity. To call this border “arbitrary” or “artificial” therefore ignores the fact that in nearly 12 decades it has very much become part of the socioeconomic and political landscape of Caprivi.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".