This article seeks to place Namibia’s contract labour system, and those whose lives it shaped, in histories of labour migration and South African empire-building in southern Africa. In order to do so, it traces South African and South West African (SWA) officials’ attempts to re-scale a trans-colonial migrant labour system to fit nominally decolonised, national scales. Secondly, it examines how African contestations of state power on a municipal scale undermined officials’ scalar projects. In asserting a transnational zone of migrant labour recruitment that straddled the SWA–Angola boundary and articulated with the sprawling recruitment networks of the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), the SWA Native Labour Association (SWANLA) laid claim to the same scale of practice as recruiters for the Rand mines. Labour shortages in SWA and South Africa in the 1950s led then Minister of Native Affairs Hendrik Verwoerd to place the ‘controlled bringing in and sending away’ of foreign Africans at the centre of South Africa’s labour empire. In the 1960s, in response to African migration and international pressures, South African and SWA officials sought to replace SWANLA with a territory-wide labour bureau system, run partly out of bantustan governments, that would support claims of decolonisation through ‘separate development’. The article then examines African engagements with urban influx control infrastructures and practices on a small scale, in the port and fishing town of Walvis Bay. Whether leveraging house rental payments as a promise of secure urban tenure or using beer to escape infrastructural ties to the state, African Walvis Bay residents emphasised the importance of the urban scale in the colonial exercise of power. Since these contestations had African urbanisation at their core, they proved the lie of bantustans as the physical and political homes of essentially rural Africans.

本文旨在将纳米比亚的契约劳动制度及其所塑造的生活置于劳动力迁移和南非南部非洲帝国建立的历史中。为此，它追溯了南非和西南非洲（SWA）官员试图重新建立跨殖民地移民劳工体系以适应名义上非殖民化的国家规模的尝试。其次，它考察了非洲在市政规模上的国家权力竞赛如何破坏了官员的标量项目。在宣称跨越SWA-安哥拉边界并与威特沃特斯兰德土著劳工协会（WNLA）庞大的招聘网络相衔接的跨国移民劳工跨国区时，SWA土著劳工协会（SWANLA）声称与兰德矿山的招募人员。1950年代，南非西南部和南非的劳动力短缺导致当时的内政部部长亨德里克·维尔沃德（Hendrik Verwoerd）将外国非洲人的“有控制地入境和遣送”置于南非劳动帝国的中心。1960年代，为了应对非洲移民和国际压力，南非和西南地区官员试图用全州范围的劳工局系统取代SWANLA，该系统部分脱离了班图斯坦政府的支持，这将通过``独立发展''来支持非殖民化的主张。然后，本文研究了非洲在港口和渔镇沃尔维斯湾（Walvis Bay）的小规模城市入侵控制基础设施和实践的参与。无论是利用房屋租金作为保证城市保有权的承诺，还是利用啤酒来逃避与该州的基础设施联系，非洲华维斯湾居民强调了在殖民地行使权力中城市规模的重要性。由于这些竞赛以非洲城市化为核心，因此证明了班图斯坦是实质上非洲农村人的物质和政治家园的谎言。