City as a Creature of Law – Revisiting Windhoek’s Legal Architecture

Incontrovertibly, an understanding of city life in the absence of the legal architecture will be incomplete a picture of the shaping forces at play. Issues of residential zoning, policing and trading are invariably done within parameters of legal provisions. As Saho (2013) observes, ‘colonial officials brought with them not only ideas about how Africans could be ruled, but also practices of how African spaces were to be planned and managed’. Although a raft of legal provisions have been repealed or amended, some of them anachronistically remained intact. This paper shall trace regimes of the legal behind the making of Windhoek as a city, from the contested city status to the disparate legal provisions governing city life.