Namibia

• 1. Introduction

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  The name Namibia comes from a desert, and the word at its root means vast place. The Namib is the oldest desert in the world, and its name has Khoi origins. A man named Mburumba Kerina chose it for the country, after first proposing the blunter Republic of Namib. The Republic of Namibia lies in Southern Africa, borders the Atlantic Ocean, and has its capital and largest city in Windhoek. It holds only about 3.1 million people, which makes it one of the most thinly settled nations on Earth. Behind that emptiness sits a set of puzzles. How does a land with so little rain keep its people alive? Who lived there long before any colonial flag went up? And how did a territory handed from one foreign power to another become a country in 1990?

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• 2. Dunes And Fog

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  Along the whole Namibian coast runs the Namib, a belt of hyper-arid gravel plains and dunes between 100 and 200 kilometres wide. Its sand dunes are the highest in the world, piled up by strong winds blowing in off the ocean. Thick fog often gathers along the shore, because this is where the Atlantic's cold water meets Africa's hot climate. The cold, north-flowing Benguela Current drives the pattern and holds coastal rainfall to 50 millimetres a year or less. Within the Namib lie the Skeleton Coast and the Kaokoveld in the north, and the Namib Sand Sea along the central coast.

  In winter, a hot dry wind called Bergwind, German for mountain wind, sometimes blows from the inland desert to the coast. Afrikaans speakers call it Oosweer, meaning east weather. It can grow into sand storms, and the sand it dumps in the Atlantic shows up on satellite images.

  Namibia covers 825615 square kilometres, which makes it the 34th largest country in the world. Geographers divide it into five areas: the Central Plateau, the Namib Desert, the Great Escarpment, the Bushveld and the Kalahari Desert. Königstein, at 2573 metres, is the country's highest point and stands on the Central Plateau. The Great Escarpment climbs swiftly past 2000 metres. Its soils are rocky and poorly developed, yet it is far more productive than the Namib, because summer winds forced up its slopes release moisture as rain.

  The Bushveld lies in the northeast, along the Angolan border and through the Caprivi Strip, and it receives around 400 millimetres of rain a year. Its flat, sandy soils hold water poorly, which limits farming. The Kalahari reaches into South Africa and Botswana. People call it a desert, but it contains varied environments, including green areas that are technically not desert at all.

  The Succulent Karoo shelters more than 5,000 plant species, and nearly half of them grow nowhere else. About 10 percent of the world's succulents are found there. The likely reason is the unusually steady pattern of its rainfall. Across the country the sun shines on more than 300 days a year, and the Tropic of Capricorn cuts Namibia roughly in half. Only in the far south, at places such as Warmbad, do maximum temperatures pass 40 degrees Celsius.

  The animal count reaches 200 land mammal species, 645 bird species and 115 fish species. Among them are the wild dog, the dik dik and the critically endangered black rhino. Article 95 of the constitution commits the state to protecting ecosystems and biological diversity, and to using living natural resources sustainably for present and future Namibians. In 1993 the new government received funding from a United States Agency for International Development program called Living in a Finite Environment. Its main aim was to give local communities rights to manage wildlife and run tourism.

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• 3. Water Below Ground

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  Rainfall in Namibia averages about 350 millimetres a year, but the figure hides a steep gradient. The Caprivi Strip in the northeast receives about 600 millimetres, and the amount falls toward the southwest until it reaches 50 millimetres or less at the coast. The only perennial rivers run along the national borders, with South Africa, Angola, Zambia and, for a short stretch in the Caprivi Strip, Botswana. In the interior, rivers flow only in summer, after exceptional rains, and a few large dams store the seasonal floods.

  Most Namibians therefore depend on groundwater, which can supply nearly 80 percent of the country. That includes isolated communities and the mining, farming and tourism operations far from any reliable surface water. More than 100,000 boreholes have been drilled over the past century, and one third of them came up dry. Experts estimate that 7720 cubic kilometres of water lie underground.

  In 2012 drillers found an aquifer called Ohangwena II, which sits on both sides of the Angola-Namibia border. By a 2018 estimate, it could supply 800,000 people in the north for 400 years at the rate of use then.

  The north also faces the opposite problem. Every year the Efundja brings seasonal flooding to the Cuvelai-Etosha Basin, where rains that fall in Angola run down and fill the flat oshanas, as the Oshiwambo call the flood plains. The floods damage infrastructure and sometimes cost lives. The worst, in March 2011, displaced 21,000 people.

  Drought is just as familiar. Rain in the summer of 2006-07 fell far below the annual average. In May 2019 the government declared a state of emergency over drought, then extended it by six months in October of that year.

  Delivering water is its own struggle. NamWater is the only bulk supplier, selling to municipalities, while a rural directorate handles the countryside. A United Nations assessment in 2011 found that access had improved a great deal since 1990. Yet high costs and long distances to water points lead many rural Namibians to prefer their traditional wells. Sanitation lags further behind, with 298 schools lacking toilets, and the United Nations has called it a crisis. On the 8th of June 2023, Namibia became the first Southern African country, and the eighth in Africa, to accede to the UN Water Convention on shared rivers and lakes.

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• 4. Peoples And Voices

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  For thousands of years before the 14th century, the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa lived a nomadic life in the dry lands that became Namibia. The Khoikhoi were pastoralists, while the San were hunter-gatherers. The Damara and Nama were also among the earliest inhabitants. Around the 14th century, Bantu peoples arrived from central Africa as part of the Bantu expansion. From 1600 the Owambo formed kingdoms, among them Ondonga and Oukwanyama.

  Twyfelfontein, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007, preserves one of the largest concentrations of rock engravings on the African continent. It is a prehistoric site, and it is a reminder of how long people have lived in this country.

  The 2011 census counted 2,113,077 inhabitants, and the 2023 census counted 3,022,401. In 2017 the country averaged just 3.08 people per square kilometre. Only Mongolia has a lower population density among sovereign states. The Bantu groups include the Owambo, Herero, Kavango, Lozi, Tswana and Himba. The Khoisan groups include the Damara, Nama and San. People of mixed ancestry are also counted, with Coloureds at 2.1 percent and Basters at 1.5 percent.

  Whites make up 1.8 percent of the population, and they are mainly of Afrikaner, German, British and Portuguese origin. Around 30,000 of them trace their roots to German settlers, and they maintain German cultural and educational institutions. Nearly all the Portuguese settlers came from neighbouring Angola.

  Language became a political choice. Before 1990 English, German and Afrikaans were all official. SWAPO, the liberation movement, wanted one official language and rejected South Africa's approach of recognising many, which it called "a deliberate policy of ethnolinguistic fragmentation." English became the sole official language even though only 2.3 percent of people speak it at home. Critics argue that the policy contributes to school drop-outs. In a 2016 survey, Oshiwambo was the most spoken language, used in 49.7 percent of households, followed by KhoeKhoegowab at 11.0 percent.

  Christians make up between 80 and 90 percent of the population, and Lutherans are the largest group among them. Between 10 and 20 percent hold indigenous beliefs.

  The German-language Windhoeker Anzeiger, founded in 1898, was the first newspaper in the country. Under German and later South African rule, the press mostly reflected the white minority's view. Today the picture has changed. In 2019 Namibia ranked 23rd on the Press Freedom Index, the highest position of any African country.

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• 5. German Colonial Rule

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  The Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão landed on the Namibian coast in 1485, and Bartolomeu Dias followed in 1486. Portugal made no attempt to claim the land. Like most of the interior of sub-Saharan Africa, the region stayed largely unexplored by Europeans until the 19th century, when traders and settlers came mainly from Germany and Sweden. In 1870 Finnish missionaries reached the north to spread the Lutheran faith among the Owambo and Kavango peoples. The Dorsland Trekkers, travelling from the Transvaal toward Angola, crossed the area, and some of them chose to stay.

  From the late 18th century, Oorlam people from the Cape Colony crossed the Orange River and moved into what is now southern Namibia. Their meetings with the nomadic Nama were largely peaceful, and the Nama welcomed the missionaries who travelled with them. They allowed the use of waterholes and grazing in return for an annual payment. Farther north, however, the Oorlam met OvaHerero clans at Windhoek, Gobabis and Okahandja who resisted their advance. The Nama-Herero War broke out in 1880. It faded only after German troops moved into the contested places and froze the existing balance of power.

  In 1878 the Cape of Good Hope, then a British colony, annexed the port of Walvis Bay and the offshore Penguin Islands. In 1884 Otto von Bismarck made the rest a German colony, known as German South West Africa, partly to head off perceived British encroachment. A British commission under the governor in Cape Town judged that only the deep-water harbour of Walvis Bay was worth occupying.

  In 1897 a rinderpest epidemic killed an estimated 95 percent of the cattle in southern and central Namibia. The German colonisers answered by building a veterinary cordon fence known as the Red Line. In 1907 that fence broadly defined the boundaries of the first Police Zone.

  From 1904 the Herero and the Nama took up arms against German settlers. German officials ordered the extinction of the OvaHerero and Nama in a campaign that has been called the first genocide of the 20th century. The Germans killed 10,000 Nama, half of that population, and approximately 65,000 Herero, about 80 percent of theirs. Survivors released from detention faced forced labour, deportation and segregation that resembled apartheid, years before South Africa adopted it. Most Africans were confined to so-called native territories. Some historians have speculated that the destruction of the Herero became a model for the Nazis in the Holocaust.

  The memory of these events still shapes ethnic identity in independent Namibia and its relations with Germany. A German development minister apologised in 2004, but her government distanced itself from the apology. Only in 2021 did Germany acknowledge the genocide, agreeing to pay €1.1 billion over 30 years in community aid.

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• 6. South African Control

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  South African troops under General Louis Botha deposed the German colonial administration during the First World War, and German rule ended with a defeat in 1915. In 1920 the League of Nations handed administration of the territory to South Africa as a mandate. The system was a compromise between those who wanted the Allies to annex former German and Ottoman lands and those who wanted international trusteeship until the peoples could govern themselves. South Africa treated the mandate as a veiled annexation and made no effort to prepare the territory for self-rule.

  After the Second World War, the United Nations replaced the League. Article 77 of its Charter said that trusteeship "shall apply...to territories now held under mandate." The UN asked all former mandates to be surrendered to its Trusteeship Council, but South Africa refused. It asked for permission to annex South West Africa instead, and drew considerable criticism. When the General Assembly rejected the request, South Africa dismissed the opinion and began tightening its grip. The matter went to the International Court of Justice, which held discussions on the legality of South African rule between 1949 and 1966.

  In 1948 the National Party won power in South Africa and applied apartheid to the territory. Black residents faced pass laws, curfews and residential rules that limited their movement. Development was concentrated in the south, next to South Africa, in the area known as the Police Zone. Beyond it, indigenous peoples were restricted to theoretically self-governing tribal homelands.

  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, decolonisation swept across Africa and nationalist parties appeared in the territory. Two of them were the South West African National Union and the South West African People's Organisation, known as SWAPO. Both demanded that the mandate end and the territory become independent. In 1966 the International Court of Justice ruled that it had no legal standing to consider the question. SWAPO responded by launching an armed insurgency, which grew into part of the South African Border War.

  In 1971 contract workers staged a general strike against the contract labour system and in support of independence. Some of the strikers would later join SWAPO's armed wing in the war.

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• 7. Road To Independence

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  On the 12th of June 1968, the UN General Assembly proclaimed that South West Africa would be renamed Namibia, in line with the wishes of its people. Security Council Resolution 269, adopted in August 1969, declared South Africa's continued occupation illegal. SWAPO then renamed its armed wing the People's Liberation Army of Namibia, or PLAN. The struggle became a flashpoint in Cold War proxy conflicts in southern Africa. PLAN sought weapons and sent recruits to the Soviet Union for training, and the Soviet Union and Cuba deployed advisers and increased supplies. By 1975, SWAPO's leadership, reliant on Soviet, Angolan and Cuban aid, had placed the movement firmly in the socialist bloc.

  War weariness and easing tension between the superpowers pushed South Africa, Angola and Cuba toward the Tripartite Accord. South Africa accepted Namibian independence in exchange for Cuban military withdrawal and an Angolan promise to stop aiding PLAN. An informal ceasefire began in August 1988, and a United Nations Transition Assistance Group, UNTAG, was formed to monitor the peace and supervise returning refugees. In March 1989, PLAN made one last incursion, possibly through a misunderstanding of UNTAG's directives. A new ceasefire confined the insurgents to bases in Angola until UNTAG could disarm them.

  The 11-month transition ended with the last South African troops withdrawn and all political prisoners granted amnesty. Discriminatory laws were repealed, and 42,000 refugees returned home. Just over 97 percent of eligible voters took part in the first election held under universal suffrage, watched by foreign observers. SWAPO took 57 percent of the vote and 41 seats in the Constituent Assembly, short of the two-thirds needed to write the constitution alone. The constitution was adopted in February 1990, protecting human rights and creating an independent judiciary.

  Namibia became independent on the 21st of March 1990. Sam Nujoma was sworn in as the first president before representatives of 147 countries, including 20 heads of state. Nelson Mandela, released from prison the month before, attended. In 1994, shortly before South Africa's first multiracial elections, that country handed Walvis Bay to Namibia.

  SWAPO has won every election since. Nujoma ruled for 15 years before a smooth handover to Hifikepunye Pohamba in 2005. The government promoted reconciliation and offered amnesty to those who fought on either side. In 1999 it quashed a secessionist attempt in the Caprivi Strip led by Mishake Muyongo of the Caprivi Liberation Army. Hage Geingob won the presidency in December 2014 with 87 percent of the vote, and was re-elected in 2019 with 56.3 percent. He died on the 4th of February 2024, and Vice-President Nangolo Mbumba finished his term. Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, SWAPO's first female presidential candidate, won the 2024 election with 57 percent and was sworn in on the 21st of March 2025.

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• 8. Diamonds And Inequality

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  A 1978 book, The Diamond Investigation, reported that De Beers bought most of Namibia's diamonds and would keep doing so, because "whatever government eventually comes to power they will need this revenue to survive." Mining indeed became the single most important contributor to the economy, providing 25 percent of national revenue. Rich alluvial deposits make Namibia a primary source of gem-quality diamonds. Unlike many African producers, it built a diamond industry largely free of conflict and extortion. The source credits a joint agreement between the government and De Beers that created a taxable base and strengthened state institutions.

  Uranium is the other famous export. Namibia was once the world's fourth largest producer, though by 2019 it was producing 750 tons annually. The country also extracts lead, tungsten, gold, tin, fluorspar, manganese, marble, copper and zinc.

  Tourism contributes 14.5 percent of GDP and 18.2 percent of all employment, and serves over a million visitors a year. The draws include Fish River Canyon, Sossusvlei, the Skeleton Coast Park, Etosha Pan and the coastal towns of Swakopmund, Walvis Bay and Lüderitz. Visitors also try sandboarding, skydiving and 4x4ing.

  The benefits are unevenly shared. About half the population depends largely on subsistence farming, and about 4,000 commercial farmers own almost half the arable land. The Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, stood at 59.1 in 2015, one of the highest in the world. In 2023 youth unemployment reached 38.4 percent, and 40.9 percent of people lived in multidimensional poverty. Even so, Bloomberg Markets named Namibia the top emerging market in Africa in 2013, and 13th in the world.

  The next bet lies offshore. Estimates updated in 2022 suggest that two exploration wells in the Orange Basin could hold 2 and 3 billion barrels of oil, respectively. If confirmed, the revenue could transform the domestic economy.

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