Setting the Stage
All right, I’m going to do a broad-spectrum Namibian history to set the stage for what’s to come; thus far we’ve been warming up. There will be things I miss; things I breeze over, likely even things I get flat-out wrong. This historical rendering is a combination of what I’ve read in archives, secondary literature, and a whole lot of what I’ve heard from people who lived this history or heard it passed down.
What is Namibia? First off, it’s not “Nambia!” *wink* It’s Na-mi-bi-a. Don’t worry; it took me awhile too. It’s a country that finally gained independence in 1990 after a long fight against South African apartheid rule. Before that, it was known as Southwest Africa under South African occupation, and earlier it was the colony of German Southwest Africa. And before that? Well, that’s where we’re headed, into the layers of colonial contact, resistance, genocide, and oral memory that make up Namibia’s story. I warn you now; this won’t be a perfectly chronological textbook chapter. Namibia’s past is messy, layered, and sometimes profane, much like the way I first heard it.
First Contacts and the “Skeleton Coast”
Europeans first showed up sparingly on Namibia’s shores in the 15th century, but it was not exactly a welcoming coastline. In 1485, a Portuguese navigator planted a cross and then promptly left. The seas were rough, the desert coast unforgiving. For centuries after, European traders mostly avoided what they called the “Skeleton Coast,” littered with shipwrecks. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that the British finally set up a foothold at Walvis Bay, a natural harbor on the Atlantic. Even then, Walvis Bay was a lone imperial outpost, a tiny British-run port surrounded by vast African communities beyond colonial control.
By the late 1800s, Germany showed up for the scramble. Seeing the Brits in Walvis, the Germans decided to set up their own coastal base at Swakopmund. Two colonial powers were suddenly jostling for control of adjacent bits of desert coastline. In 1884, at the infamous Berlin Conference, European polities chopped up Africa, and Germany was formally granted German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) as its colony. The Brits held onto Walvis Bay (and would weirdly keep it even beyond Namibia’s independence, more later), but Germany got the rest.
For German colonizers, Namibia was imagined as a wild, yet open frontier beyond the Cape Colony (British South Africa), a space to deploy their vision of Herrschaftsutopie, a utopia of domination/hierarchy/racialization (if I may, more on that in another post). South of the Orange River (the modern Namibia, South Africa border) was the Cape; north of it was “where the wild things are.” This frontier was home to people that the Cape colonists saw as “others,” folks who wore animal skins and didn’t fit into the polite colonial order. But Europeans weren’t the only ones on the move here.
“Swakopmund” was already a meeting point for local peoples, a trading spot at the mouth of the Swakop River where Namaqua, OvaHerero, and others bartered and grazed cattle for hundreds of years, some say.
Outlaws and Missionaries in the 1800s
Long before Germany claimed the land, other travelers had crossed the Orange River going north. One crew was a band of mixed-race “renegades” from the Cape known as Oorlams. Following leaders such as Jan Afrikaner, these were the sons and daughters of Dutch settlers and local African women who didn’t fit into strict colonial societal and racial structures. Many were, to put it bluntly, deemed outlaws by the colonial entity and European settlers.
Rather than accept second-class status in the Cape, they packed their wagons and weapons, heading into Namibia’s interior to live on their own terms. By the early 19th century, this groups had settled near present-day Windhoek, raiding cattle and upsetting the established trade networks as they went. I’m not a historian of the this movement and group of people (and I probably shouldn’t be doing all this background), but the point is: a whole mixed community moved in and shook things up before formal colonialism even took root.
Around the same time, Christian missionaries began trekking north from the Cape. The London Missionary Society sent the first missionaries into Namibia around the mid-1800s, the Albrecht brothers and their families. They were followed by Germans (Rhenish Mission) and Finns by the late-1800s. These missionaries set up stations among the Namaqua and OvaHerero people, bringing the Bible, and often a whole new cultural order, into local communities. So, even before the German flag officially flew, European influence was seeping inland via mission schools and churches.
Cattle, Colonization, and the “Shithole” River
That broad schematic is a version of history capital “H,”names, dates, dependent upon the archive. However, there is another way to tell this history. There are other perspectives, lens, and relationships to the past that can be gleaned through conversations, through relationships, through listening to how people understand and more importantly feel about their past. Let’s call it affective history…
So, let’s talk about the OvaHerero and OvaHimba, because they’re central to this story and to my research. The OvaHerero are a cattle-herding people who speak OtjiHerero, a Bantu language. Their own oral traditions say they migrated into what is now Namibia centuries ago from a great lake region in the north. Whether it was 300 years ago or 700 years ago (I’ve heard and read all sorts of estimations) at some point large groups of OvaHerero ancestors crossed the Kunene River with their herds, moving southward in search of new pastures. Some groups settled down along the way; others kept moving, spreading through central Namibia wherever the grazing was good. This slow migration meant that by the late 19th century, OvaHerero clans were present even in coastal areas like Swakopmund, right when the Germans were arriving and setting up shop.
This leads to one of my favorite little anecdotes: the story of Swakopmund’s name. German colonists set up a foothold on the Atlantic shore and give it a proper German name, combining Swakop (for the Swakop River) and Mund (meaning “mouth”). Literally, “Mouth of the Swakop.” Sounds straightforward.
But if you ask local Khoekhoe speaking people, the Swakop River had a more…um…pungent reputation. The river was called something like “Tsoakhaub,” which basically means “the mouth of the shithole (butthole) river.” Why such an unflattering name? Well, apparently when the river flooded and then receded, it left behind rotting organic matter that stank to high heaven. The air would get foul with the smell of decay, hence the locals, with characteristic bluntness, dubbed it the “anus river.” So, when the Germans came and named their town Swakop-mund, they were inadvertently preserving this crude joke of a name: Mouth of the Shithole River.
Of course, the OvaHerero people had their own name for that spot too. They called the coast here Otjozondii, “the place of the seashells,” because coastal shells were used for jewelry and commerce. The river itself was called Ondondu Jomarunga, River of Thieves, signifying the dangers of lingering too far upriver where competing communities sought grazing lands. To OvaHerero, it was a market site, a meeting ground long before Europeans arrived.
I love this collision of perspectives: a single river mouth known by one culture for its smell, by another for its shells, while colonizers innocently immortalize the former in German. These layers of meaning were my first hint that every place in Namibia holds multiple stories, you just have to listen for them.
Listen to Johanna Kahatjipara, OvaHerero Oral Historian, and her daughter, Barbara, discuss this history and humorously debate the translations of Tsoakhaub:
Genocide in German South West Africa
By the turn of the 20th century, German rule in Namibia had gone from tentative to brutally assertive. Settlers wanted land, the best grazing land, which happened to be exactly where OvaHerero and Namaqua communities lived. Tensions erupted into open war in 1904 when the OvaHerero rose up to resist German encroachment. The Germans responded with an extermination order. What followed was the 1904-1908 OvaHerero and Namaqua Genocide, often called the first genocide of the 20th century.
German troops drove tens of thousands of OvaHerero men, women, and children into the desert, sealing off waterholes, and effectively killing most of them by thirst and starvation. Those who survived were rounded up into labor and concentration camps; Namaqua communities who rebelled met a similar fate. It’s estimated that 60-80% of the OvaHerero and about half the Namaqua were wiped out in those years. It was an atrocity of shocking scale, and one the world mostly ignored at the time and even today. (Let’s be honest, how many of you already knew this history? I certainly didn’t in 2017 when I first arrived as an eager volunteer.) Germany only formally acknowledged it as “genocide” in 2015 and offered an apology in 2021, over a century later. These debates over recognition and restitution are ongoing, and we will return to these topics in closer detail in future posts.
For the OvaHerero, 1904-08 shattered their society, requiring a critical (re)crafting of social ties. Those who could, fled, many back northwest to Angola where some had kin. These refugee bands were destitute, their cattle gone and their leaders dead. Other Namibian groups in the north looked upon the ragged survivors with pity and a bit of scorn, calling them OvaHimba, often translated as “beggars” or “begging people.” According to the historical understanding of many, OvaHimba meant beggars because these were broken remnants of the OvaHerero, reduced to pleading for refuge. Even some OvaHimba elders I met took no offense at this degradation; they’d say yes, that’s our history, we became beggars, and we’re still proud to be OvaHimba regardless (I’m editorializing a bit here, but you get the point).
But hang on, because this is where the story takes a turn, and where oral history asserts itself against the colonial version. I spoke with Johanna in 2023, and she, along with others I spoke with subsequently, completely reframed this narrative for me. According to Johanna, we, outsiders, are misunderstanding the language. OvaHimba, in her telling, does not mean “beggars” at all. It means “the rooted ones”, those who stayed. Likewise, OvaHerero doesn’t simply mean “OvaHerero people” as an ethnic label; in their language it literally connotes “those with a plan, those on the move,” the people who are following the cattle.
In this reframed history, when the great migration from the north happened ages ago, some people chose to settle permanently, to put down roots in the Kaokoland region (today’s northwest Namibia). Those became the OvaHimba (rooted people). The rest kept migrating southward with their herds, those became the OvaHerero (the people on the move). A third group, our oral historian says, were once part of the same OtjiHerero-speaking family but broke off eastward into agriculture north of the Etosha pan, these became the Ovambo farmers, whom the OvaHerero jokingly dubbed “the delayed ones” because they stayed behind planting while the OvaHerero kept moving.
Think about what that oral tradition does: It takes a story of defeat and turns it into a story of strategy and identity. In the OvaHerero telling, OvaHimba aren’t beggars at all, they’re the brave souls who decided to stay put in the north, to be custodians of that land. The OvaHerero proper are the adventurers who went on the great journey south. The Ovambo are those who tarried to farm, “they might catch up later,” as one elder said with a grin.
This is historical memory as a political act: a layered narrative that counters the colonizer’s version (and even the earlier OvaHerero version that had internalized the label “beggar”). It’s a prime example of how oral history can preserve meanings and perspectives that the colonial archives completely missed or distorted.
Apartheid, Resistance, and Independence
After the genocide, German rule in Namibia limped along a few more years. In 1915, during World War I, South African troops (fighting for the British Empire) invaded and defeated the German colonial forces. Germany lost its African colonies, and Namibia fell under South African administration, first as a League of Nations mandate, later essentially as a province of apartheid South Africa.
Thus began 70 years of apartheid in Namibia. The South Africans imposed harsh pass laws and segregation, much like inside South Africa. Black Namibians were pushed into “homelands” and reserves; the OvaHerero, for instance, were largely confined to a fragment of their former territory (the remnants of “Hereroland”). The white population (including Afrikaner settlers and German Namibians who stayed on) dominated politics and landownership. Namibia was treated as just another part of greater, white-ruled South Africa.
Of course, Namibians resisted. Nationalist movements sprang up after World War II, demanding freedom. The earliest was SWANU (South West Africa National Union). But within a few years, a rival movement dominated by Ovambo leadership eclipsed it: SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organization) was born in 1960 under Sam Nujoma and became the spearhead of the liberation struggle.
SWAPO launched a guerrilla war against South African forces in 1966 that ground on for decades. Meanwhile, the UN pressured South Africa, eventually revoking its mandate. By the 1980s, the conflict in Namibia was tied up with the Cold War and regional battles. Finally, a settlement was reached: in 1989-90, Namibia held UN-supervised elections, SWAPO won, and Namibia officially became independent on March 21, 1990. The Ovambo people, who made up about half of Namibia’s population, had been the core of SWAPO’s support and fighters. Unsurprisingly, SWAPO has dominated national politics ever since independence.
Archives, Oral Histories, and Decolonial Memory
Let me step back from the timeline and reflect on what I, as a researcher (and obvious outsider), have learned from all this. I’ve spent long hours in dusty archives, reading colonial reports that “set the stage” of Namibian history in a very Eurocentric way.
Those archives record dates of treaties, battles, names of governors, and they largely ignore the rich local context. For example, a German administrator might note “Hereros defeated at Waterberg, survivors fled,” but nowhere in the official file would it mention what those OvaHerero survivors called themselves or how they made sense of their plight. The archive gives us one kind of truth, often a cold bureaucratic one.
It took sitting in a café in Windhoek with an old OvaHerero woman for me to start grasping the other side of that truth. She told me plainly to understand their perspective a little more. Listen to what our language is telling you. Listen to what we’ve told each other. It was both an invitation and a gentle scolding.
In that moment, in a café connected to a Spar grocery store, I realized how skewed my perspective had been. I knew dates like 1884 or 1904, I knew casualty counts and treaties, but I didn’t know the stories. I hadn’t really appreciated that OvaHerero and OvaHimba elders had already chronicled these events in their own oral literature, in praise songs, in place names (even crude ones like “Shithole River”), in the very identities of their clans. Johanna reminded me that if I took the time to learn a few words of OtjiHerero, I’d see history differently. Words like OvaHimba and OvaHerero carry meanings and memories within them; they encode a narrative of movement, loss, and resilience that no colonial ledger could truly capture.
This is why I call oral history a “decolonial archive” rooted in an affective historical orientation. It runs parallel to, and often at odds with, the official archives. The German records say: We fought a war, the natives were defeated, our imperial project could continue.
The oral narratives say: Our people moved like this; some stayed, some went; then foreigners came and pushed us back, but we’re still here. Neither version is completely right or wrong, but one has been privileged as “History” for far too long. It’s time to let the other ways of telling stories of the past to speak just as loudly.
By engaging with oral testimony, we gain a second entry point into the past, one that recenters African voices. As a historian and anthropologist-in-training, I can plot events chronologically and map out causes and effects in contemporary cultures. But thanks to storytellers like Johanna, I’ve learned there’s another way to make sense of it all: one that is less about what happened to Africans and more about what Africans did, remembered, and believed about what happened.
In OvaHerero oral history, the OvaHimba are not beggars, they are the rooted guardians of the north. The OvaHerero are not just victims, they are the people with a plan, even if fate derailed it for a time. Reclaiming these meanings is a powerful act of decolonizing the narrative. It doesn’t erase the atrocities of German rule, those remain a grim backdrop, but it enriches our understanding of how communities survived and understood their survival. It also challenges us, in the present, to rethink our relationships.
If we take the time to listen, we might see the OvaHimba women who approach tourists in town not as “beggars” but as a proud people deeply rooted in their land and culture. To me, that’s a profound shift in mindset, one that academics and visitors alike need to embrace.
Closing Thoughts
This has been a sweeping journey: from first colonial contacts on a treacherous coast, through the violent birth of a colony, to genocide, apartheid, and finally freedom, all threaded with the personal and communal memories of Namibian people. It’s the longest and most winding post I’ve written so far, and if you’ve made it this far, thank you.
The central lesson I take from Namibia’s layered history is that the past isn’t just in textbooks or official records; it lives in language, in landscape, and in the stories people tell to make sense of their lives.
The “mouth of the Shithole River” and the redefined “rooted” OvaHimba are more than quirky tales, they’re reminders that history can look very different depending on whose lens you use. Going forward, I plan to zoom in on some of the specific facets we touched on only briefly here. In upcoming posts I’ll dig deeper into the bizarre colonial legacy of Swakopmund (that charming resort town with a dark history lurking under its German gingerbread architecture), and into the role of missionaries in transforming Namibian societies. We’ll explore how memory is preserved in monuments (and in humble stone piles in the desert), and how modern Namibia grapples with its past. Consider this post the broad canvas, the backdrop against which those more focused stories will unfold.
For now, I’ll leave you with a short list of books and resources if you’re itching to dig deeper into Namibian history, colonial memory, and African oral traditions. As always, the story continues, and the best way to honor it is to keep listening:
Extra Readings
A History of Namibia: from the Beginning to 1990 (2011) Marion Wallace
Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia 1890-1923 (1999) Jan-Bart Gewald
The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (2010) David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen
God’s Feet or the Mission’s Pack Donkey: Evangelists of Namibia (2022) Hans-Martin Milk
Really excellent, Tony. Thanks for such a concise and compassionate overview.