Namibia

The San and the Khoekhoe — hunter-gatherers and herders — were the first inhabitants, followed over centuries by Bantu-speaking farmers and herders such as the Ovambo and Herero, while the Namib Desert kept the coast almost empty. Germany claimed the territory in 1884 as German South West Africa. When the Herero and Nama rose against colonial land seizures in 1904, German forces responded with extermination orders, desert drives, and concentration camps that killed about 80 per cent of the Herero and half the Nama — widely called the first genocide of the twentieth century, and acknowledged as genocide by Germany in 2015.

South Africa occupied the territory during the First World War and governed it first under a League of Nations mandate and then, after the United Nations revoked that mandate, in open defiance of international law, extending apartheid across it. The liberation movement SWAPO began an armed struggle in 1966.

A UN-supervised transition led to independence in 1990 under Sam Nujoma. Namibia has been a stable multiparty democracy since, though SWAPO has won every election. SWAPO was cut to a bare three-seat majority in the National Assembly at the November 2024 election, its weakest showing since independence, and its candidate Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah was declared the winner of the presidential vote and sworn in on 21 March 2025 as the country's first woman president. Germany and Namibia continue to negotiate over reparations for the genocide.

Namibia's peoples remain fairly distinct, partly through geography and partly through apartheid-era divisions. The Ovambo of the north are the largest group; the Herero are known for the Victorian-style long dresses and horn-shaped headdresses their women adopted from missionaries and now wear with pride; the Nama and Damara speak Khoekhoe with its click consonants; and the Himba of the remote Kunene keep a semi-nomadic life, the women coating their skin and hair in red ochre and butterfat.

There are also long-settled Afrikaner, German, and mixed communities — Lutheran churches, German bakeries, and an Oktoberfest in Windhoek are part of the national fabric. Christianity, mostly Lutheran, is dominant.

A strong conservation ethic runs through public life. Community conservancies, in which residents manage wildlife and tourism on communal land and share the income, have helped desert-adapted elephant and black rhino recover from very low numbers.

Around three million people live in a country more than twice the size of Germany, making Namibia one of the emptiest places on Earth. Windhoek, in the central highlands, is the one real city; Swakopmund and Walvis Bay sit on the coast; and the densely settled Ovambo areas of the far north hold much of the rural population on small millet farms.

The economy runs on mining — diamonds dredged from the seabed, uranium from the desert, and newer prospects in green hydrogen and offshore oil — together with fishing on the cold, productive Benguela current, cattle ranching, and tourism. By average income Namibia is upper-middle-income, but it is among the most unequal countries in the world, and recurring drought hits farmers and herders hard.

Life in the towns is comfortable and car-dependent; life in the communal north and the Kunene is close to the land, organised around cattle, millet, and the rains.

Namibian eating is built on meat: beef and game such as kudu, oryx, and springbok, grilled over a braai or dried into biltong, and slow stews cooked in a three-legged potjie pot. The barbecue is a social institution shared with South Africa.

The German legacy shows in bread, cakes, schnitzel, sausages, and lager brewed to the old purity law — Windhoek Lager and Tafel are the national beers. In the north, the staple is oshifima, a stiff porridge of pearl millet (mahangu), eaten with meat or a spinach relish, and mopane caterpillars are a seasonal protein. On the coast there is fresh line fish.

Sossusvlei, in the Namib-Naukluft Park, has some of the world's highest dunes — Big Daddy stands about 325 metres — and the white clay pan of Deadvlei, studded with black skeletons of camelthorn trees. The Skeleton Coast to the north is a fog-bound shore of shipwrecks, a huge Cape fur seal colony at Cape Cross, and desert-adapted wildlife. Between them, Swakopmund is a German-flavoured seaside town ringed by dunes and adventure sports, and the Walvis Bay lagoon is rich in birdlife.

Etosha National Park, built around a vast salt pan, offers some of Africa's easiest self-drive game viewing, with elephant, lion, rhino, and giraffe gathering at its waterholes. Damaraland and Kaokoland hold the rock engravings of Twyfelfontein, a World Heritage Site, the granite dome of Spitzkoppe, the Brandberg with its ancient paintings, and free-ranging desert elephant and rhino.

In the south, Fish River Canyon is the largest canyon in Africa, about 160 kilometres long and almost 550 metres deep in places, with a famous multi-day hike, and the Quiver Tree Forest stands near Keetmanshoop. The lush Zambezi Region in the far northeast, a strip of rivers and floodplains, offers a completely different, water-rich Namibia of hippos and birdlife.