Namibia's history: a century governed under other names

Who lived on the land before the German protectorate

People were living in the Huns Mountains of the south by about 25,000 BCE, and painted stone plates from that period survive, by the Wikipedia account of the country's history. The Brandberg holds numerous rock paintings, most of them from around 2000 BCE, and no reliable evidence settles which people made them. Twyfelfontein, or /Ui-//aes, in the north-west, carries rock engravings of rhinoceros, elephant, ostrich and giraffe, human and animal footprints and six painted rock shelters; UNESCO, which inscribed it as Namibia's first World Heritage property in 2007, reads the site as a record of hunter-gatherer ritual over at least 2,000 years.

Britannica's history, by Reginald Herbold Green, opens with a warning about its own material: the past of Namibia is not well chronicled, the explorer, missionary and settler sources are neither comprehensive nor unbiased, and professional historiography only began after 1960. With that caveat, it names the San as the earliest Namibians, hunter-gatherers pushed to the desert margins before Europeans arrived. The Nama, pastoralists with a larger clan system, settled the south; the Wikipedia history dates their arrival to the first century BCE. The Damara combined herding, hunting and copper smelting. In the north the Ovambo built several kingdoms on both sides of the Kunene River, farming and working copper, and the related Kavango peoples to the east had a weaker state system.

The Herero, a cattle-keeping people, came in from the north-west in the seventeenth century and settled first in Kaokoland. Some groups moved south into Damaraland in the middle of the nineteenth century; those who stayed in Kaokoland are the Himba.

How guns and horses changed the balance

After the first quarter of the nineteenth century the Oorlam, Khoisan groups who had adopted Boer customs and arms at the Cape, crossed the Orange River with horses and guns. In the 1830s the Oorlam leader Jonker Afrikaner agreed with the Nama chief Oaseb to hold the central grasslands against the Herero pushing south, took tribute in return and settled at the site of present-day Windhoek. The result was decades of warfare between Herero and Oorlam over the Damaraland grazing, in which the Damara were displaced and many killed.

The last group now counted as indigenous arrived in 1868, when about 90 families of Basters, Afrikaans-speaking descendants of Boer men and Khoisan women, crossed the Orange River. They founded Rehoboth and in 1872 proclaimed the Free Republic of Rehoboth, with an elected Kaptein and a three-member Volkraad.

How Germany assembled a colony from purchases and treaties

European contact was brief and coastal for three centuries. The Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão raised a stone cross on the Skeleton Coast, in 1485 according to the Wikipedia history and in 1486 according to Britannica, and Bartolomeu Dias stopped at the bays now called Walvis Bay and Lüderitz in 1488. The Namib kept both of them on the shore. The Dutch at the Cape took control of Walvis Bay in 1793 as the only good deep-water harbour on that coast, and Britain inherited it with the Cape in 1805. The London Missionary Society began work in 1805 and founded Bethanie in 1811; the German Rhenish Mission Society followed in the 1840s.

Britain moved first on territory. It began the annexation of Walvis Bay in 1878 and let the Cape Colony complete it, with the Penguin Islands, in 1884, but London declined the costs of the interior. In 1883 the German trader Adolf Lüderitz bought Angra Pequena from the Nama chief Josef Frederiks II for 10,000 marks and 260 guns. On 24 April 1884 the area was placed under the protection of Imperial Germany, and the German flag went up on 7 August 1884. The Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1 July 1890 added the Caprivi Strip, a corridor that gave Germany access to the Zambezi.

Britannica calls the acquisitions a matter of "exceedingly dubious" treaties and open theft. The Nama under Hendrik Witbooi fought the occupation until 1894, when Witbooi signed a protection treaty that let the Nama keep their arms. Theodor Leutwein, governor from 1894, tried with little success to practise what he called colonialism without bloodshed. A veterinary cordon called the Red Line divided the colony: south of it, in the Police Zone, Germany ruled directly; north of it, in the Ovambo and Kavango areas, it never did. From the north, men went south on contracts to the mines and farms, the start of the contract labour system that would later carry the liberation movements across the whole territory.

Settlement grew fast. There were 3,700 Germans in the colony in 1903 and 13,000 by 1910. The Tsumeb copper and zinc mines opened in 1906, diamonds were found near Lüderitz in 1908, and railways linked Lüderitz, Keetmanshoop and Windhoek and ran from Swakopmund to Windhoek and Tsumeb.

What Germany did to the Herero and Nama

The war began on 12 January 1904, when Herero fighters under Samuel Maharero attacked farms and killed about 150 Germans; the Wikipedia history gives the Schutztruppe's initial strength as 766. Germany sent 14,000 more troops and replaced Leutwein with General Lothar von Trotha. After the Battle of Waterberg on 11 August 1904, the Herero retreated into the Omaheke, the waterless western arm of the Kalahari, where German forces held the waterholes. On 2 October 1904 von Trotha issued the order that every Herero within the German boundaries, armed or not, would be shot. On 22 April 1905 he issued a similar demand to the Nama to surrender unconditionally. Witbooi died in battle on 29 October 1905, and the Nama war continued into 1907.

Survivors were held in concentration camps and used as forced labour. Around half of the prisoners died, by the Wikipedia account of the genocide, and skulls and other remains were shipped to Germany for research meant to prove African racial inferiority. Laws passed in 1907 confiscated all Herero land, barred Herero from owning cattle or land and made them carry a numbered metal disc.

How the sources count the dead

The death toll is an estimate, and the sources on disk give different ones.

How Germany and Namibia came to name it

Germany acknowledged a genocide in 2015, according to the Wikipedia article on it, and opened negotiations with the Namibian government. On 28 May 2021 the German foreign minister Heiko Maas announced their conclusion: Germany would "officially call these events what they are from today's perspective: a genocide", ask Namibia and the descendants for forgiveness, and fund a programme of €1.1 billion for reconstruction and development. The same statement said that "legal claims for compensation cannot be derived from it". The BBC reported that the money would be spent over 30 years, and that a Namibian government spokesman called the recognition "a first step in the right direction".

Herero and Nama organisations objected from the day it was announced. Laidlaw Peringanda, chairman of the Namibian Genocide Association, told the BBC that his people were not accepting the offer and that Germany should buy back ancestral land. Most of the organisations representing the two peoples rejected the deal and demanded the right to negotiate with Germany directly, and in 2023 the Landless People's Movement and Herero and Nama traditional leaders went to court in Namibia to annul the National Assembly's resolution approving it. Germany describes the money as a gesture of reconciliation and not as compensation or reparations; descendants of the victims quoted by the ICTJ in 2025 said it was not enough and asked Germany to negotiate with them directly.

Namibia proclaimed 28 May a public holiday, Genocide Remembrance Day, on 28 May 2024, and kept it for the first time in 2025. The date had been argued over for years: many OvaHerero favoured 2 October, the day of the extermination order, and many Nama 22 April, the day of the order to the Nama. OvaHerero and Nama groups announced a boycott of the first official ceremony in the Parliament Gardens in Windhoek.

How South Africa governed the territory as a mandate

South African forces invaded in 1914 and 1915, and the last Schutztruppe commander, Victor Franke, surrendered near Khorab on 9 July 1915. In the north, Mandume ya Ndemufayo, the last king of the Kwanyama, was killed in February 1917 in a joint attack for resisting South African authority over his people. On 17 December 1920 South Africa took over administration under a Class C mandate of the League of Nations, the form intended for territories judged least developed, which gave it full powers of legislation.

Britannica reads the mandate as a licence for settlement and creeping annexation. Afrikaner farmers were encouraged to settle, De Beers bought the diamond fields at the mouth of the Orange River, and the railway was extended to Walvis Bay and to the Cape so that the territory traded through South Africa in both directions. When the League gave way to the United Nations in 1946, South Africa refused to place the territory under trusteeship. It never formally annexed it, but ran it as a de facto fifth province, with its white minority represented in the whites-only parliament of South Africa.

The economy grew fast after 1945. Britannica puts income in the late 1970s at more than $1,000 a head on average, about $20,000 for Europeans and $150 for Black Namibians. In 1962 South Africa appointed the Odendaal Commission, which divided the territory into ethnic homelands on the South African model.

How the United Nations contested the mandate

Namibians began petitioning the United Nations in 1947, at first through intermediaries. In December 1959 residents of the Old Location in Windhoek protested against their forced removal to Katutura, and the Wikipedia history counts eleven protesters killed. The parties formed around that time: the Ovamboland People's Organisation in 1958, which became SWAPO in 1960, and SWANU, founded in 1959 largely by Herero intellectuals.

The legal case ran through the International Court of Justice. In 1966 the court dismissed a complaint brought by Ethiopia and Liberia, and on 27 October 1966 the General Assembly, by Resolution 2145, ended the mandate and placed the territory under the direct responsibility of the United Nations, which renamed it Namibia in 1968. South Africa did not leave. The Security Council then asked the court for an advisory opinion, which it delivered on 21 June 1971: South Africa's continued presence was illegal, it was obliged to withdraw, and member states were to refrain from any act implying recognition of it.

Inside the territory, the strike of 1971 and 1972 brought out 13,000 contract workers, by the Wikipedia count about 25% of the working population, against the contract labour system. Britannica treats it as the point at which the struggle became national.

How the war for independence was fought

The People's Liberation Army of Namibia, SWAPO's armed wing, fought its first engagement at Omugulugwombashe on 26 August 1966, a South African raid on a guerrilla camp in the Wikipedia account of the war. 26 August is now a public holiday, Heroes' Day. Andimba Toivo ya Toivo and other SWAPO leaders were tried for terrorism in 1968 and imprisoned on Robben Island. After Angola became independent in 1975, SWAPO moved its bases there, and the war became one front of the larger conflict in Angola.

South Africa tried an internal settlement. The Turnhalle Constitutional Conference of 1975 excluded SWAPO, elections held in December 1978 were boycotted by it, and a Transitional Government of National Unity from 1985 to 1989 failed to win United Nations recognition. Meanwhile the Western Contact Group of Canada, France, West Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States produced the settlement plan adopted by the Security Council as Resolution 435 in 1978.

On 4 May 1978 South African paratroops attacked Cassinga in Angola, and the two accounts of it have never met. SWAPO and Cuba described the site as a refugee camp; the South African government described it as a guerrilla base. Namibia keeps 4 May as Cassinga Day.

How the war was ended at the negotiating table

The settlement came through Angola. Talks mediated by the United States from May 1988 linked a Cuban withdrawal from Angola to a South African withdrawal from Namibia, and the agreements were signed in New York on 22 December 1988. The United Nations Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson, was not at the signing; he had been killed the day before on Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie.

How the United Nations supervised the transition

Resolution 435 came into force on 1 April 1989 and began badly. It was alleged that about 2,000 armed PLAN fighters crossed from Angola; the United Nations special representative, Martti Ahtisaari, authorised a limited contingent of South African troops to support the police, and in the fighting that followed 375 PLAN fighters were killed. The parties agreed at Mount Etjo to return the PLAN fighters to Angola and confine South African forces to base. The police counter-insurgency unit Koevoet, which the UN regarded as a paramilitary force, was disbanded under Security Council pressure, with 1,200 members demobilised from 29 September 1989 and a further 400 on 30 October.

The UN Transition Assistance Group was almost 8,000 strong at its peak during the elections of 7 to 11 November 1989, by the United Nations' own figures: just under 2,000 civilians, 1,500 police and about 4,500 soldiers, at almost 200 locations. About 42,000 refugees came home. More than 97% of registered voters voted.

SWAPO's 41 seats fell short of a two-thirds majority, so the constitution had to be written by agreement. The Constituent Assembly adopted it unanimously on 9 February 1990, using the Constitutional Principles agreed in 1982, and Namibia became independent shortly after midnight on 21 March 1990. It was admitted to the United Nations on 23 April 1990.

Why Walvis Bay stayed South African after independence

Walvis Bay had been annexed to the Cape before Germany arrived and passed to the Union of South Africa in 1910, and for 55 years it was administered as if it were part of South West Africa. In 1977 a South African proclamation transferred it back to the Cape Province. The General Assembly declared it an integral part of Namibia in November 1977, and Security Council Resolution 432 of 1978 called for its reintegration, but the settlement plan left the question aside, and at independence the port stayed under South African sovereignty.

After talks between the two governments, a Joint Administrative Authority took over in November 1992. South Africa's parliament passed the Transfer of Walvis Bay to Namibia Act, and on 1 March 1994 Walvis Bay and twelve offshore islands passed to Namibia.

What the first decade after independence brought

The constitution allowed a president two terms, and in 1998 the SWAPO majority, holding two thirds of both houses, amended it to allow the first president a third. Namibian troops went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1998 as part of a Southern African Development Community contingent. On 2 August 1999 the Caprivi Liberation Army, which sought the secession of the Caprivi Strip, attacked Katima Mulilo; government forces put the attack down and the arrests led to the Caprivi treason trial. Angolan refugees in Namibia peaked at more than 30,000 in 2001.

Land stayed where the colonial period had left it. The constitution allows land to be bought only from willing sellers, and the Wikipedia history records that reform has been slow. The current shape of those questions belongs to Namibia: politics and Namibia: economy.