Namibia

My version of Namibia is vastly over-simplified, and that necessarily makes it inaccurate.  Anywhere there’s room for subjectivity, of course there will be disagreement.  In the understanding that I’m going to get it both wrong and incomplete, here’s what I find most interesting and useful in developing a fundamental understanding of this nation.

My Lonely Planet guidebook says some evidence suggests human-like creatures were killing elephant-like creatures here 750,000 years ago.  There is definite evidence, though, in the form of rock paintings, of human habitation of Namibia for at least 30,000 years.  Those early, artistic inhabitants were ancestors of what we now call the San people.  No one seems to know whence these people came, though their skin color, relatively small stature and eye shape are all similar to that of the people of eastern Asia.  Hmmm.  They call themselves a name that translates to ‘the harmless people,’ and speak languages that include clicking and popping sounds.  They were traditionally, and well into the twentieth century, nomadic hunters and gatherers, moving camps at frequent intervals and living off the land, which in a dry country can get a bit tricky.  Today there are about 20,000 San in Namibia.  Some people say they are trying to move away from their traditional way of life and into something warmer and better  fed, with less risk of dying of thirst or ticked-off lion; others say they want to keep their lives nomadic and simple.  I haven’t met any San yet.

A few thousand years ago, Bantu and Khoikhoi (pronounced ‘kway-kway’) people began migrating into the area from the north and east.  The histories I’ve read suggest that both the Bantu and Khoikhoi put pressure on the San, sometimes enslaving them and always at least requiring them to move into more arid, less fertile areas.  The Khoikhoi and some Bantu tribes, like the Herero, were largely herders (preferably of cattle, but also of ‘smallstock,’ i.e. sheep and goats), and they wanted the grassland savannahs for their livestock.  Most of the Bantu tribes stuck to the northern reaches, which are riverine and allow for settled farming of both crops and livestock.

The Nama people, who are Khoikhoi, and the Damara, who are Bantu, also speak click languages, which apparently baffles anthropologists.  Both tribes are much darker-skinned than the San, and tend to be taller and bigger overall.

So the Bantu and Khoikhoi, both of which divide into multiple sub-tribes, farmed and herded and occasionally battled each other for land or cows for a few thousand years, while the San sought antelopes and melon in the Namib Desert, and tried to avoid being captured by someone bigger and set to ranch or housework.  Europeans arrived on the coast in the late 15^th century, about the same time the Herero (a Bantu tribe) were moving into what is now the Namibian interior.  Remember the Herero.

The Europeans didn’t take much interest in the area, bar some enthusiastic, mostly Lutheran, missionaries doing successful conversion work, some big-game hunting, and a few guano enterprises on the coast (which Africans don’t seem to have been using much), until the mid-19^th century.  At that point a German guano merchant asked his native land to send soldiers to protect his coastal trading village.  Bismarck had not been ambitious to colonize Africa, but he agreed to send troops, and that small garrison eventually became the German Imperial Army.

In 1884, Germany sponsored a conference of European nations to determine who got what in at least some parts of Africa.  The Germans laid claim to what is now Namibia (unlikely anyone else much wanted it, really), and poetically named the area “German South West Africa.”  German farmers began moving to the inland savannahs and negotiating to take over grazing land, mostly from the Herero and Nama people.

The negotiations were largely peaceful for over a decade, but eventually many on the German side decided that what they perceived as their inherent superiority to the indigenous people ought to permit them to take what they wanted by force, and the Herero especially began to resent the bullying.  The Herero showed their displeasure with returns of force, winning a few battles, and the Germans began a propaganda campaign back home that quickly resulted in larger numbers of soldiers and more powerful weapons arriving in Namibia.

In 1904, the enhanced German forces in the area began a series of slaughters of the Herero, with the expressed intent of eliminating the people entirely.  It was the first genocide of the 20^th century.  After brutal battles and a series of tactics that trapped the remaining Herero in some of the driest parts of the Namib, so they would die of thirst and hunger, the soldiers rounded up the few thousand Herero left and installed them in what were probably the first institutionalized concentration camps in human history.  At some point, the Nama people attempted to come to the Herero’s aid, and got much the same treatment from the Germans.  Both Herero and Nama were treated as significantly sub-human, assigned numbers that they wore on dogtags (30 years later, and much farther north, numbers would be tattooed on people’s arms), and were rented or sold to farmers and manufacturers who often worked them to death.  Germany has acknowledged the genocide but declined to make financial reparation.  Current Herero leaders are attempting to engage the German government, and some businesses, in negotiations on the issue.

At the outbreak of World War I, England persuaded South Africa to invade Namibia, to put additional pressure on the German Army.  Perhaps because diamonds had been discovered in the south of Namibia a few years earlier, the South Africans agreed to do so, and their military was largely successful against the reduced and distracted German troops.  The Treaty of Versailles required Germany to surrender its colonies, and the League of Nations allowed South Africa to serve as administrator of the former German South West Africa.  South Africa, however, apparently preferred the idea of a new province, and set to work on that basis, giving most of the central savannah land to white farmers, creating ‘homelands’ for specific tribal peoples, and eventually implementing apartheid when that system came to South Africa.  Even before apartheid, mixed-race people had few rights and blacks even fewer, and forced labor was common for both.

As Namibians made their complaints known at the U.N. and the International Court of Justice, those bodies ruled that South Africa needed to reduce or relinquish its control of Namibia, which edicts South Africa apparently ignored.  In 1966, the U.N. declared that it would administer the region, but that did not happen; South Africa continued to treat the area as a province.  That year, a group of natives who eventually took the name SWAPO (South Western African Peoples' Organization) began a military fight against South Africa, while continuing their attempts to negotiate independence.  Angola (which borders Namibia to the north) got involved as a handy base of operations, which meant Cuba got involved, which just complicated everything.  Eventually the war got too expensive for South Africa (they were spending at least several hundred million dollars annually toward the end of twenty years of fighting, to hold onto 7,000 farms and some diamond mines they could probably retain just by force of habit and expertise), and in 1988 South Africa agreed to withdraw its troops and allow elections in which all Namibians would be able to vote.  That was two years before Nelson Mandela was released from prison in South Africa.  About 20,000 to 25,000 Namibians died in the war for independence according to the only website I could find that quoted a number.  That’s rather a lot for a total population of two million.  In 1990, the country elected Sam Nujoma, a SWAPO leader and prominent voice in all the independence negotiations, as its first president under a newly-drafted, model constitution.

Namibia today is one of the least-densely-populated countries in the world, with one of the highest income disparities.  It is also, to me, one of the most exciting of developing nations, with a solid political infrastructure, a commitment to economic growth for all and a social safety net, and a constitutionally-enshrined mandate for conservation of its rich natural resources.

Namibia is about the size of Texas plus Louisiana, with less than one-tenth the population.  Most of the just over two million people are concentrated in the north, which has the rivers that form the border with Angola and creates a much more fertile zone than the desert and desert-like environment of the rest of the country.  There are diamonds in the southwest and uranium and other minerals, also largely in the south.  There’s a decent and improving educational system, with a goal of ensuring education for all children through the secondary level, and a fine university in Windhoek, the capital city.

Namibia has amazing wildlife:  lions, elephants, giraffes, leopards, cheetah, rhinoceros, hippopotami, many kinds of antelope with fantastic horns and jumping abilities, warthogs, hyenas, jackals, baboons, mongeese, blue wildebeests, ostrich, eagles, secretary birds and buzzards and this gigantic waddly ground bird whose name starts with kh, I think.  I saw almost all of these critters in about two days in Etosha National Park, and recommend a visit enthusiastically and without reservation.

While I’m here I also hope to get to the astounding dunes of the coast, and the Fish River Canyon and maybe the Okavango Delta.  Namibia is also a great launching site for a visit to Victoria Falls, just a few kilometers into Zambia and Zimbabwe from the northeast border.  We shall see.