Ovamboland, located in the northernmost part of present-day Namibia and southern Angola, was drawn into the orbit of the slave trade during the nineteenth century. Although the Atlantic slave trade dwindled in west-central Africa by the midnineteenth century, slave raiding within the region did not cease. Slave labor was redirected within Africa to produce 'legitimate' exports, and thus, the African social order was more firmly rooted in slavery than ever before by the last decades of the nineteenth century.'