Namibia's culture: one official language and a dozen spoken at home

Why English became the only official language

Until 1990 three languages were official: English, German and Afrikaans. SWAPO had decided long before independence that the country should have one official language, and the Wikipedia account records its reason: it saw South Africa's recognition of many languages as "a deliberate policy of ethnolinguistic fragmentation". Article 3 of the constitution makes English the official language and adds two qualifications. Other languages may be used as the medium of instruction in schools, and Parliament may allow another language in official and court business in areas where a substantial part of the population speaks it.

English is the working language of the civil service and of the schools, and the state broadcaster uses it too. Most Namibians understand it, but few grew up with it, and a report cited in the Wikipedia article on the country's culture found that 98% of teachers lacked sufficient training in the language they were meant to teach in.

Which languages Namibians speak at home

The main Wikipedia article gives the main household language from a survey of 2016.

Each heading covers several languages. The Herero languages include Otjiherero, Otjimbanderu and five others, and the Kavango group includes Rukwangali, Rushambyu, Rugciriku, Thimbukushu and Rumanyo. SADC's own page on Namibia adds Tswana, Gciriku, Fwe, Kuhane, Mbukushu and Yeyi among the Bantu languages, and the San languages Naro, ǃXóõ, Kung-Ekoka, ǂKxʼauǁʼein and Kxoe. Among white Namibians, by the Wikipedia figures, 60% speak Afrikaans at home, 32% German and 7% English.

Who makes up the population

The Wikipedia article on the country divides the majority into Bantu-speaking peoples, the Owambo, Herero, Kavango, Lozi, Tswana and Himba, and Khoisan peoples, the Damara, Nama and San. People of mixed ancestry make up a further share, Coloured Namibians at 2.1% and Basters at 1.5%, and white Namibians, mainly of Afrikaner, German, British and Portuguese origin, 1.8%. About 30,000 white Namibians trace their families to German settlers of the colonial period and keep German schools and cultural institutions. A Chinese community numbered 40,000 in 2006.

Britannica's account of the cultures, by Reginald Herbold Green, insists on the differences inside each category. The Rehoboth Basters resemble the rural Afrikaner culture of the mid-twentieth century; the Nama have more in common with the other pastoral Black communities; the Cape Coloured have a distinct urban culture. The northern cultures, distinctive in language and in their music and dance, grew out of mixed farming, unlike the herding cultures of the Damara and Herero. Of the San, Britannica writes that their culture was ruined by serfdom on the ranches and by exploitation as trackers in the war, and that efforts to rebuild it have been held back by a shortage of knowledge and means, by a lack of space and by the paternalism of outsiders who appointed themselves its guardians.

How families and herds are organised

Most households, the Wikipedia article on culture records, are not nuclear families and include other kin. Children often live with relatives when their parents work elsewhere or a school is nearer. Some peoples trace kin through women and others through men, and some count both lines; the kin group holds joint property, livestock above all. The shift has been from the matrilineal to the patrilineal: wives and children in matrilineal communities can now claim the property of a dead husband or father, which traditionally passed to his sister's children. In the communal areas a family's wealth is counted in cattle.

The homestead takes a different form in each region. The traditional Owambo home, in the Wikipedia article on the Ovambo, is a complex of huts inside a fence of large vertical poles joined by two horizontal poles on each side, a maze with two gates in which each hut has its purpose: the ondjugo is the hut of the woman of the homestead and the epata the kitchen. A Himba extended family lives in an onganda, a circular hamlet of huts and work shelters around the okuruwo, the sacred ancestral fire, and a kraal for the sacred livestock.

How the churches shaped belief

In 2007 the US State Department's human rights bureau counted up to 75% of Namibians as Protestant and as much as 50% as Lutheran, and the main Wikipedia article puts Christians of all churches at 80 to 90%. Lutherans are the most numerous, a legacy of the German and Finnish missions of the colonial period. The figures for them differ by source: the Wikipedia article on culture gives 43.7% of the population as Lutheran, citing a breakdown in which Protestants total 65.1%, while Britannica writes that about half the population is Protestant and most Protestants are Lutheran. Roman Catholic, Methodist, Anglican, African Methodist Episcopal and Dutch Reformed churches are also present.

The Rhenish Mission Society began working in the 1840s, missionary activity in the second half of the nineteenth century led many Namibians to convert, and the Wikipedia article on culture traces the Victorian-styled clothing some women wear to the missionaries' influence. Between 10 and 20% of the population hold indigenous beliefs. About 9,000 people are Muslim, many of them Nama, and the Jewish community numbers about 100. The constitution protects freedom of religion.

What people wear and how they greet

Dress differs from one region to the next. Herero women wear dresses in a Victorian style with traditional jewellery, and their hairstyle marks rank and social status. Lozi women wear the musisi or wrap themselves in a sarong called the sitenge. Himba people wear traditional attire and cover their skin and hair plaits in otjize, a mixture of butterfat and ochre, often perfumed with aromatic resin, which gives them an orange or red tinge.

Greetings carry weight. The Wikipedia article on culture describes conversations that open with a hello and an enquiry after the other person's health before any business, handshakes that continue while two friends talk, and in the north a curtsy combined with a handshake in which the left hand touches the right elbow. Men nod and women bend the knee slightly when greeting an elder.

Formal marriage covers a minority. An analysis of marital status published in July 2003, the Basic Analysis with Highlights, found about 56% of the population never married, about 19% married under common law, about 9% married traditionally and about 7% living in consensual unions. Weddings combine church and older forms. Many Owambo couples marry in church with identically dressed attendants and then come out to guests who dance and wave horsetail whisks. Until 1985 South African law, in force in the territory, barred marriage between people it classed as white and those it classed as not.

What Namibians eat and drink

Before colonial rule, the Wikipedia article on culture writes, food came from a wide range of wild fruits, nuts, bulbs and leaves and from hunting, and Khoisan herders domesticated cattle in the region about two thousand years ago. For farmers today the staples are maize, millet and sorghum; for herders, dairy products. Beans and greens are eaten with millet in the north, but otherwise few vegetables are grown. Meat is prized, and important occasions are marked by slaughtering cattle or goats and serving meat with home-brewed beer; in some cultures guests take leftover meat home. German settlement left its own mark on the cooking.

The marula fruit has a festival of its own. UNESCO lists Oshituthi shomagongo, the marula fruit festival, as intangible cultural heritage, inscribed in 2015. Namibia ratified the UNESCO convention on intangible heritage on 19 September 2007.

How Namibians keep their music and rock art

The musical traditions vary with the languages. Much of the music is sung in groups, with dance and sometimes drums, and most solo songs are sung to a musical bow or a lamellophone, some with no accompaniment at all. The Nama play strings, flutes and drums, and the Bantu-speaking peoples xylophones, gourds and horn trumpets. In 2020 UNESCO placed Aixan, ancestral musical sound knowledge and skills, which it lists as Aboxan Musik ǀŌb ǂÂns tsî ǁKhasigu, on its list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. A UNESCO-supported project to document and safeguard Okuruuo ran from September 2020 to September 2024.

Popular music runs through hip hop, R&B, reggae, afro-pop, house and kwaito. The Namibian Music Awards replaced the Sanlam-NBC awards. The National Theatre of Namibia hosts local and visiting performers, and dance troupes from each group perform at festivals such as the Caprivi Arts Festival.

The oldest art is on rock. The Brandberg holds painting sites across about 750 square kilometres, mostly the work of San hunter-gatherers and in some cases 2,000 years old or more, among them the panel known as the White Lady. Twyfelfontein, a World Heritage site since 2007, is an engraving site. Craftspeople sell to local buyers and tourists, and the Wikipedia account names Kavango woodcarving and Owambo basketry as the best-known crafts.

What Namibians read and watch

At independence the best-known performers were Jackson Kaujeua, who had been mixing traditional forms with afro-pop and gospel since the 1970s, and Ras Sheehama. A generation of kwaito and hip hop acts followed, and the Namibia Society of Composers and Authors of Music collects for and promotes Namibian music at home and abroad.

Film began from outside. The American anthropologist John Marshall filmed the Ju/'hoansi for four decades from 1950, producing The Hunters in 1957 and Nǃai, the Story of a ǃKung Woman in 1980. After independence Namibian directors, among them Bridget Pickering, Richard Pakleppa and later Joel Haikali and Oshosheni Hiveluah, began to make their own, and Parliament passed the Namibian Film Commission Act in 2000.

Before independence Namibian literature was largely an extension of South African or German writing. Afterwards a movement grew to publish Namibian books, and the Wikipedia account names Neshani Andreas, Mvula ya Nangolo and Peya Mushelenga among the writers of that period. Fiction and poetry are published in English and Afrikaans, as is memoir; writing in the indigenous languages is mostly traditional tales and fiction for schoolchildren.

Britannica describes the press as free of censorship. The government owns one newspaper, New Era, beside a range of independent titles and religious and trade union papers, and broadcasting is split between the state and private stations.

How schooling and sport fill the week

School is compulsory for the seven years of primary education, between the ages of six and sixteen, and the Education Act of 2001 bars fees in primary schools, though parents pay for uniforms and books. Namibia had 1,947 primary and secondary schools in 2022, up from 1,723 in 2013, teaching 822,574 pupils, against 400,325 primary and 115,237 secondary pupils in 1998. Schools, hostels and classrooms are still short in most of the country, and many school buildings follow a standard design proposed in the 1990s by the architect Gabriel Castro. The curriculum was revised in 2014 and introduced grade by grade from 2015 to 2020. Literacy among people aged 15 and over was 91.5% in 2018, by the CIA figure cited in the Wikipedia article. The universities are the University of Namibia, the Namibia University of Science and Technology and the International University of Management.

Football is the game most children grow up playing. Rugby and cricket have followings, as do boxing and athletics, and national teams play at the Independence Stadium in Windhoek. Britannica records that the white communities follow a wide range of sports while Black communities concentrate on football. The regions and the parks where visitors meet these cultures are covered in Namibia: travel.