Windhoek

Long before there was a town, the hot springs in this bowl of hills were known to Nama and Herero herders, who called the place /Ae//Gams, 'hot spring' in Khoekhoegowab. In the 1840s the Oorlam leader Jonker Afrikaner settled his followers at the springs, built a stone church and made the place a centre of trade and raiding; after his death the settlement faded, and by the 1880s little was left.

The modern city dates from 1890, when the German officer Curt von François moved the headquarters of the colonial force here and began the fort now called the Alte Feste. A small colonial town grew below it, with a Lutheran church, a railway to the coast, and administration buildings on the ridge — the Tintenpalast of 1913 among them. South African forces took the town in 1915, and Windhoek became the capital of a territory governed from Pretoria.

Apartheid legislation reshaped it. Black residents of the Old Location were forced to move to Katutura, eight kilometres north of the centre, where the new township was created in 1961; police fired on protesters against the move on 10 December 1959, killing eleven. Khomasdal was laid out for people classified as coloured. Windhoek became the capital of independent Namibia in 1990 and has grown quickly since, spreading north and west into new suburbs and informal settlements while the old colonial core, now sharing its skyline with the Independence Memorial Museum, remains recognisable.

Windhoek is the one place where all of Namibia meets. Ovambo families who moved south for work, Herero and Damara and Nama households, Afrikaans-speaking Namibians, a German-speaking community with its own schools, newspaper and churches, and a growing professional middle class of every background share a city of fewer than half a million people. Conversations switch between English, Afrikaans, Oshiwambo and Otjiherero within a sentence, and many residents still describe themselves by the region their family comes from.

The German inheritance is visible and audible — Lutheran churches, bakeries, street names, a carnival in April and an Oktoberfest in October — and it sits beside a strong national culture built since independence, expressed in the Independence Memorial Museum, Heroes' Acre and the public holidays that mark the liberation struggle. Herero women in long Victorian-style dresses and horn-shaped headdresses are a familiar sight in the streets, and the annual August commemoration at Okahandja draws people from the city.

The arts scene is small and concentrated: the National Theatre, the National Art Gallery, the craft centre, and a lively local music scene that mixes kwaito, hip hop, gospel and Damara punch. Rugby and football are both followed. Manners are courteous and unhurried, greetings are taken seriously, and the weekend braai is the fixed point of social life.

About 490,000 people lived in Windhoek at the 2023 census, roughly a sixth of all Namibians, and the city continues to draw people from the north faster than it can house them. The result is one urban area with two very different halves: the centre, the eastern valleys and the leafy hillside suburbs on one side, and on the other Katutura, Khomasdal and the informal settlements spreading north-west, where many households live in corrugated-iron housing without piped water or sanitation. The contrast is the country's inequality made visible.

Government is the city's largest employer, alongside banking, insurance, retail, the university and the hospitals; the airport, the railway and the road to Walvis Bay make it the country's distribution centre; and tourism supports the car-hire firms, lodges and tour operators clustered here. Unemployment, especially among the young, is the dominant political issue, along with the wait for serviced housing plots.

The day starts early and offices empty by mid-afternoon; the centre is busy at lunchtime and quiet by evening, when life moves to the suburbs and the township. Water is a permanent worry in a city with no river, supplied by reservoirs to the north and by a plant that reclaims waste water as drinking water — the first such supply in the world when it began in 1958. In December much of Windhoek closes and heads for the coast at Swakopmund or for family homesteads in the north.

Windhoek eats as a German-Namibian country town and a southern African city at once. The street version is kapana: thin strips of beef cut and grilled over open fires at the Single Quarters market in Katutura and at stands across the city, dipped in a dry mix of chilli and spice and eaten standing, with vetkoek — fried dough balls also called fat cakes — and a cold drink. Alongside it are boerewors sausage, grilled chicken, and pap or oshifima, the stiff maize or pearl-millet porridge eaten with a relish of meat or wild spinach.

Game meat is the city's restaurant speciality, and oryx, kudu, springbok and zebra steaks appear on menus everywhere, along with beef from the central farms, which is among the best in southern Africa. Dried meat matters as much as fresh: biltong and the thin droëwors sausage are sold by the bag in every supermarket. Farm cooking contributes potjie, a stew of meat and vegetables cooked slowly in a three-legged iron pot over coals.

The German side supplies bakeries with rye bread and rolls, cafés with apple strudel and cream cakes, and butchers with smoked sausage. Lager brewed in Windhoek under the old German purity law is the national drink and the reason for the Oktoberfest; oshikundu, a lightly fermented millet drink from the north, and rooibos tea are the everyday alternatives.