The history of Namibia

Namibia, a land of desert coast, dry highlands and northern floodplains in south-western Africa, has one of the oldest human records on earth, preserved in the rock art of the San and other early peoples. Khoekhoe herders, Bantu-speaking farmers and cattle-keepers, and nineteenth-century migrants from the Cape shaped its population before Germany seized it in 1884. Between 1904 and 1908 German forces carried out the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples, often called the first genocide of the twentieth century. South Africa then ruled the territory for seven decades, extending apartheid to it and fighting a long war against the liberation movement SWAPO, until Namibia won independence in 1990, one of the last African colonies to do so.

Namibia's dry climate has preserved a remarkable record of the distant past. Stone tools show that early humans hunted here for hundreds of thousands of years. In the Apollo 11 Cave in the Huns Mountains of the far south, archaeologists found painted stone slabs showing animals, dated to around 25,000 BCE and among the oldest figurative art in Africa. Later artists left thousands of paintings in the granite of the Brandberg, the country's highest mountain, and more than two thousand engravings of animals, footprints and figures at Twyfelfontein, which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007.

For most of this long history the people of the region lived by hunting and gathering. The San, whose many languages use click consonants, are the descendants of these ancient hunter-gatherers, with a deep knowledge of desert plants, water sources and animal behaviour, and many scholars link them to much of the rock art. Around two thousand years ago, Khoekhoe-speaking herders, the ancestors of the Nama, brought sheep and later cattle into the south, moving with their herds between seasonal pastures and living in portable domed huts. The Damara, another long-established people who speak a Khoekhoe language, lived as hunters, herders and smiths in the centre and north-west.

From around the fourteenth century, Bantu-speaking peoples, part of the long Bantu expansion, settled in the north. The Ovambo, today the largest group in Namibia, lived on the fertile floodplains along the modern border with Angola, where they farmed millet and sorghum, raised cattle, fished and worked iron and copper. They were organised in a series of kingdoms, among them Ondonga and Uukwanyama, ruled by kings who controlled land, trade and rain-making rituals. Along the Kavango River to the east lived related farming peoples, and in the far north-east, in what is now the Zambezi Region, peoples linked to the Lozi kingdom of western Zambia.

The Herero, cattle-herding people who speak a Bantu language, entered the north-west from about the seventeenth century, settling first in Kaokoland, where their kin the Himba still live. In the nineteenth century many Herero moved south onto the central highlands, where their great herds and powerful chiefs made them the leading power in the centre. There they collided with newcomers from the south. Groups of Khoekhoe, mixed and Afrikaans-speaking people from the Cape Colony, known as Oorlam, crossed the Orange River with horses and guns from the late eighteenth century. Their most famous leader, Jonker Afrikaner, settled at what became Windhoek around 1840, took tribute from the Herero and dominated the centre for two decades. Another Oorlam leader, Hendrik Witbooi, later built a strong state around Gibeon in the south. In 1870 the Basters, a community of mixed descent who were Calvinist and spoke Afrikaans, founded Rehoboth with its own elected council. The mid-nineteenth century was marked by repeated wars between Herero and Nama-Oorlam groups over cattle and grazing land.

The first Europeans to touch the coast were the Portuguese, who were seeking a sea route around Africa for the Portuguese Empire. Diogo Cão raised a stone cross at Cape Cross in 1485, and Bartolomeu Dias anchored at Walvis Bay and Lüderitz in 1487 and 1488, but the Namib Desert, one of the oldest deserts in the world, kept outsiders from the interior for centuries. Missionaries were the first Europeans to settle. The London Missionary Society arrived in 1805, the German Rhenish Mission from the 1840s and Finnish Lutherans among the Ovambo from 1870, spreading Christianity, literacy and new crops and trade goods. Traders exchanged guns, brandy and cloth for cattle and ivory, and hunters from the Cape slaughtered much of the region's wildlife. In 1878 Britain annexed the deep-water harbour of Walvis Bay, the only good port on the coast, and attached it to the Cape.

In 1883 the Bremen merchant Adolf Lüderitz bought the bay of Angra Pequena and a strip of coast from a Nama chief, in a deal that later caused bitter disputes about how much land had actually been sold. In 1884, during the Scramble for Africa, the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck placed the area under the protection of the German Empire, creating German South West Africa. The Caprivi Strip in the north-east was added in 1890 under the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty with Britain, which also settled the fate of Zanzibar.

German control was at first slight, and officials relied on "protection treaties" with local leaders who often signed them to gain allies against their rivals. Hendrik Witbooi refused. In April 1893 German troops attacked his settlement at Hornkranz, killing many women and children, and he resisted until 1894, when he accepted a treaty under governor Theodor Leutwein. German settlers arrived in growing numbers, taking land and cattle through purchases, debts and seizures. In 1897 a rinderpest epidemic killed most of the cattle in central and southern Namibia and in neighbouring Botswana, devastating the Herero and Nama economies and pushing many into debt and labour for settlers. A veterinary cordon, the Red Line, separated the settler south from the Ovambo north, which was left largely under its kings.

In January 1904 the Herero under their paramount chief Samuel Maharero rose against German rule, attacking farms and killing about 150 German settlers and soldiers, while largely sparing women, missionaries and other Europeans. Berlin sent thousands of reinforcements and appointed General Lothar von Trotha, a veteran of brutal colonial campaigns, as commander. On 11 August 1904 his forces attacked the Herero, who had gathered with their families and herds at the Waterberg plateau. Most of the Herero escaped, but they fled east into the Omaheke, a waterless arm of the Kalahari Desert. German troops pursued them, guarded and in places poisoned waterholes, and set up a cordon along the desert edge. Tens of thousands died of thirst and hunger.

On 2 October 1904 Trotha issued his extermination order, declaring that every Herero found within the German borders, with or without a gun or cattle, would be shot, and that women and children would be driven back into the desert. Under pressure from Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II had the order withdrawn in December, but the surviving Herero were then rounded up into concentration camps. In October 1904 the Nama under Hendrik Witbooi also rose, beginning a guerrilla war that lasted until 1908; Witbooi was killed in 1905, and Trotha issued a similar threat against the Nama in April of that year.

In the camps, at Windhoek, Okahandja, Swakopmund, Lüderitz and elsewhere, prisoners, most of them women and children, were forced to build railways and harbours on starvation rations, with little shelter, and were beaten and raped. Around half of all prisoners died; the camp on Shark Island at Lüderitz was especially lethal. Skulls of the dead were sent to Germany for racial research. When the camps closed in 1908, the Herero had lost most of their people, all their land and their cattle; estimates vary, but usually put Herero deaths at between about 40,000 and 80,000, perhaps 80 percent of the people, and Nama deaths at about 10,000, half their number. Survivors were forbidden to own land or cattle and were forced into labour for settlers. Some historians see the genocide, with its racial ideology, camps and scientific racism, as a forerunner of the crimes of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, while others stress the differences.

With African resistance broken, the colony drew more settlers, whose number rose from about 3,700 in 1903 to some 13,000 by 1910. Diamonds were found near Lüderitz in 1908, and the government reserved a vast coastal zone for diamond mining that still exists.

During World War I, forces of the Union of South Africa under Louis Botha invaded the colony, and the German troops surrendered in July 1915. In 1917 South African forces killed Mandume ya Ndemufayo, the last independent king of the Kwanyama, who had resisted both powers. In 1920 the League of Nations gave South Africa a mandate to govern South West Africa, as it was now called. South Africa treated the territory as a fifth province. It brought in Afrikaner settlers, confined Africans to reserves and imposed a contract labour system that sent Ovambo men to work in mines and farms in the south. In 1922 it bombed the Bondelswarts, a Nama community that resisted a dog tax, from the air.

After World War II, South Africa refused to place the territory under the trusteeship of the United Nations and tried to annex it. It extended apartheid to South West Africa, with pass laws, segregated towns and, after the Odendaal Commission of 1962 to 1964, plans for separate ethnic homelands. On 10 December 1959 police fired on residents of the Old Location in Windhoek who were resisting removal to a new township, Katutura, killing eleven people. In 1960 Sam Nujoma and others founded the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO), which grew from an earlier Ovamboland movement into the main voice of Namibian nationalism.

In July 1966 the International Court of Justice dismissed a case against South Africa brought by Ethiopia and Liberia on procedural grounds. A month later, on 26 August 1966, SWAPO's guerrillas fought their first battle with South African police at Omugulugwombashe, and in October the UN General Assembly ended South Africa's mandate. In 1968 the UN renamed the territory Namibia, after the Namib Desert, and in 1971 the International Court of Justice ruled that South Africa's presence was illegal. That year a general strike by contract workers spread from Windhoek and Walvis Bay to the mines.

When Angola became independent in 1975, SWAPO moved its bases there, and the war in northern Namibia became tied up with the Angolan civil war and the Cold War. The Soviet Union and Cuba supported SWAPO and the Angolan government, while South Africa invaded southern Angola, backed the rebel movement UNITA and used counter-insurgency units such as Koevoet, which became notorious for abuses in Ovamboland. SWAPO's security service also detained and tortured hundreds of its own members in Angola on suspicion of spying. In 1978 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 435, a plan for UN-supervised elections, but South Africa delayed it for a decade, and the United States linked Namibian independence to the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola.

After heavy fighting in southern Angola in 1987 and 1988, South Africa, Angola and Cuba signed the New York Accords in December 1988. The UN Transition Assistance Group began work on 1 April 1989, a day marred by fighting when SWAPO fighters crossed from Angola. In November 1989 SWAPO won 57 percent of the vote for a Constituent Assembly, which adopted a liberal democratic constitution.

Namibia became independent on 21 March 1990, with Sam Nujoma as its first president, in a ceremony attended by Nelson Mandela, who had been released from prison weeks before. South Africa handed over Walvis Bay and the offshore islands in 1994. The new government pursued national reconciliation, kept white farmers' property rights protected in the constitution and built a stable, multiparty democracy, though SWAPO has won every national election. Land remains deeply unequal, and reform through voluntary purchase has been slow. Nujoma served three terms, after a constitutional change, and sent troops to support the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1998; in 1999 a secessionist attack in the Caprivi Strip was put down, followed by a long treason trial. He was succeeded by Hifikepunye Pohamba in 2005 and Hage Geingob in 2015.

The genocide has shaped relations with Germany. A German minister apologised at a centenary ceremony in 2004, and in 2015 the German government acknowledged that a genocide had taken place. In 2021 the two governments agreed a joint declaration under which Germany would provide 1.1 billion euros in development aid over thirty years, while avoiding the word reparations and denying any legal liability. Most Herero and Nama organisations rejected the deal, arguing that they had been excluded from the negotiations, and in 2023 opponents challenged it in the Namibian courts.

Geingob died in office on 4 February 2024 and was succeeded by his vice-president, Nangolo Mbumba. In the election of November 2024, SWAPO's candidate Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah won about 57 percent of the vote, and on 21 March 2025, the thirty-fifth anniversary of independence, she was sworn in as Namibia's first woman president. Sam Nujoma, honoured as the founding father of the nation, died on 8 February 2025 and was buried at Heroes' Acre outside Windhoek.