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The history of Namibia is not well chronicled. Its isolated geographic position limited contact with the outside world until the 19th century. Explorer, missionary, trader, conqueror, and settler sources are neither comprehensive, notable for accuracy, nor unbiased. Professional historiography is a post-1960 development in the country, and the political events of the years since then have colored most of the written history.
Independence before the conquest
The earliest Namibians were San, nomadic peoples with a survival-oriented culture based on hunting and gathering. Their clans were small and rarely federated, and their military technology was so weak that, even before the arrival of the Europeans, they had been pushed back to the desert margins. Rock paintings and engravings at Twyfelfontein, in northwest Namibia, have shed light on the early San hunter-gatherers who once inhabited the area. Stone artifacts, human figures, and animals such as giraffes, rhinoceroses, and zebras are depicted. Twyfelfontein was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007.
The first conquerors in southern Namibia were the Nama. They had a larger clan system, with interclan alliances, and a pastoral economy. Closely linked (usually in a dependent role) were the Damara, a people from central Africa whose culture combined pastoralism, hunting, and copper smelting. In northeastern and central Namibia the Herero (a pastoral people from central Africa) built up interlocked clan systems eventually headed by a paramount chief. The unity of the Herero nation, however, was always subject to splintering. In the north the Ovambo people developed several kingdoms on both sides of the Kunene River. They were mixed farmers (largely because of a more hospitable environment for crops) and also smelted and worked copper. To the east the related Kavango peoples had a somewhat similar but weaker state system. On the margins of Namibia—i.e., the Caprivi Strip in the far east and on the margins of the Kalahari—the local peoples and groupings were spillovers from southern Zambia (Barotse) and Botswana (Tswana).
Until the 1860s, European contact and penetration were slight. Diogo Cão and Bartolomeu Dias touched on the Namibian coast in 1486 and 1488 respectively, en route to and returning from the Cape of Good Hope, but there was virtually no contact until the 1670s. Afrikaner explorers after 1670 and Afrikaner traders and settlers about 1790 came to Namibia and eventually reached the southern boundaries of the Ovambo kingdoms, notably at the Etosha Pan. They—together with German missionaries, explorers of varied nationality, British traders, and Norwegian whalers—did not play a dominant role before 1860. Instead, they created the first avenues for trade (ivory and later cattle) and introduced firearms.
The latter heightened the destructiveness of conflicts among the various clans and peoples. So did the arrival, after the first quarter of the 19th century, of the Oorlam-Nama from the Cape. Their military technology (which included horses, guns, and a small mobile commando organizational pattern) was modeled on that of the Afrikaners. They came to dominate the resident Nama (Red Nation) and Damara. In the middle of the 19th century, a kingdom ruled by the Oorlam but partly Herero and supported by the Red Nation and Damara was established near Windhoek by the Oorlam chief Jonker Afrikaner.
Central Namibia was then an area of conflict between the southward-moving Herero and the northward-migrating Nama. In 1870 a peace treaty was signed with the Germans on the border of Herero country. Meanwhile, largely as a result of war pressures, Maherero had emerged as the Herero paramount chief. At this time a South African Creole (“Coloured”) community, the Rehoboth Basters, had immigrated to a territory south of Windhoek, where they served as a buffer between the Herero and the Germans. Like the Oorlam, they were Europeanized in military technology as well as civil society and state organization, which were copied from the Afrikaners.
The German conquest
In the 1870s, British annexation of Namibia appeared imminent. A treaty with the Herero and the raising of the British flag over Walvis Bay were seen as forerunners of the northward expansion of the Cape Colony. However, London proved reluctant to take on added costs in an apparently valueless area, and the way was left open to German colonial annexation as South West Africa in the 1880s. The acquisitions, by exceedingly dubious “treaties” and more naked theft, did not go smoothly, despite the employment of so-called “divide and rule” tactics within and between peoples. The first major resistance—by the Herero in 1885—forced the Germans back to Walvis Bay until British troops were sent out.
By the turn of the century, German settlers had arrived, copper was minable, railway building from Swakopmund and Lüderitz was under way, and diamonds were soon discovered near Lüderitz. But from 1904 to 1907 a great war of resistance broke out, nearly expelling the Germans before it was quelled with extreme savagery by tactics including extermination, hangings, and forced detention in concentration camps. See German-Herero conflict of 1904–07.
The first phase of the war was fought between the Germans and the Herero (with a single Ovambo battle at Fort Namutoni near the Etosha Pan). It reached a climax when General Lothar von Trotha defeated the main Herero army at the Battle of Waterburg and, taking no prisoners, drove them into the Kalahari, where most died. By 1910 the loss of life by hanging, battle, or starvation and thirst—plus the escape of a few to the Bechuanaland protectorate—had reduced the Herero people by about 90 percent (80–85 percent dead, 5–10 percent in exile). The Nama resistance war came late because a key letter from Maherero’s son and successor, Samuel Maherero, to the Oorlam chief Hendrik Witbooi that proposed joint action had been intercepted. The resistance was finally crushed in 1907, and Nama survivors were herded into concentration camps. War, starvation, and conditions in the camps claimed the lives of two-thirds of the Nama.
The Germans allocated about half of the usable—and apparently all of the best—ranchland (except that of the Rehoboth Basters) to settlers and restricted Africans to reserves. The Tsumeb copper and zinc mines opened in 1906, and diamond mining (more accurately, sand sifting) began near Lüderitz in 1908 and at the main fields at the mouth of the Orange River (Oranjemund) a few years later. Railways linked Lüderitz, Keetmanshoop, and Windhoek as well as Swakopmund, Windhoek, and Tsumeb.
German direct rule never extended to the north. The “red line”—now a quarantine boundary—delimited the Police Zone from the Ovambo and Kavango areas. In the latter, the near extinction of elephants, a rinderpest epidemic, and the rising consumption habits of the kings led to a migration of single male contract laborers to work in the mines and ranches and in construction. The “contract labor system”—which was to provide the cheap labor for the colonial economy and later provided the national communication and solidarity links to build the liberation movements of 1960–90—had begun.
The South African conquest
In 1914–15 South African troops invaded and captured South West Africa as part of the World War I (1914–18) conquest of the German colonies in Africa. Except for diamond mines, most property—including Tsumeb—found its way back into German hands. The rising De Beers colossus bought Oranjemund and the balance of the diamond-producing area to bolster its world domination; it was used as a market-balancing mine (that is, its production was varied to control the price of diamonds, and it was totally closed for more than two years in the 1930s), a role it played into the 1980s. Afrikaner settlers were encouraged to come to South West Africa for security reasons—to hold the inhabitants in check—at least as much as for economic reasons.
The League of Nations awarded a Class C mandate (meaning no real targets for development of the people toward independence were intended) to the crown of Great Britain to be exercised by the Union of South Africa authorities. That “sacred trust” was read as justifying settlement, greater exploitation, and no rights for Black (and precious few for Coloured) Africans, plus a creeping annexation into South Africa as a “fifth province.” The rail system was extended to Walvis Bay (the one good natural port) and south to the South African border and to Cape Town to tie South West Africa’s economy to South Africa’s on both the import and export sides.
South Africa extended direct rule to the Kunene and Okavango rivers—parallel to a Portuguese push south to the Angola-Namibia border. Resistance there and elsewhere in South West Africa flared into violence repeatedly until the 1930s, while trade union organizing and political as well as economic resistance began in the 1920s. Until 1945 South West Africa was not a productive colony—cattle and karakul were in oversupply, diamond output was held low, and export prices for base metals were not attractive. Governance, security, and settler survival all had to be financed in large part from Pretoria.
The political economy of a colonial boom
From 1945 the economy of South West Africa grew rapidly, reaching a peak of more than $1,000 per capita ($20,000 for Europeans and $150 for Black Namibians) in the late 1970s. The pillars were base metal expansion at better prices and sharply increased output and prices for cattle (largely in South Africa), karakul (via South Africa to the European–North American fur market), and diamonds. Fourfold growth in world demand after World War II led to increases in output at De Beers’ diamond mines. In addition, the fish catch (largely for fish meal and canned pilchards) exploded to 1,102,000 short (U.S.) tons (1,000,000 metric tons)—a level that laid the groundwork for the present stock depletion and conservation problems.
The European enclave boomed. The situation was quite different for the other 90 percent of the people. Rising population was eroding productive capacity—per capita and absolutely by ecological damage—in African areas. Until the late 1970s, contract labor paid only enough to support a single person at subsistence level. Black nurses, teachers, and secretaries, as well as semiskilled workers, began to be trained and employed on a significant scale only in the mid-1970s. Land reallocations increased contract labor. A body called the Odendaal Commission organized separate development, which led to the creation of “homeland” authorities that benefited a new Black elite (as in the 1980s did government wages and salaries for teachers, nurses, and Black-area administrators and troops and a wage increase by large employers in mining and finance). A rising proportion of Black Namibians—two-thirds by the late 1980s—was left in abject poverty. Further, contract labor eroded the social and civil structures, giving rise to numerous and usually very poor female-headed households in the “homelands” and the urban peripheries.
From resistance to liberation struggle
From 1947, Namibians (initially via intermediaries) had begun to petition the United Nations (UN) against South African rule. A series of cases before the International Court of Justice (World Court)—the last, in 1971, declaring the mandate forfeiture by the United Nations in 1966 to be valid—led to a de jure UN assumption of sovereignty and de facto support via publicity, negotiation, and training for Namibian liberation.
In South West Africa the churches (numbering at least 80 percent of Black Namibians in their membership) took an early lead in petitioning the UN and South Africa and created a climate of Black social and civil opinion favourable to the liberation struggle; they were slow, however, to endorse its armed phase. From the 1950s to the ’70s the churches had become increasingly national in staff and outlook, in some cases after severe conflicts with the overseas “parent” bodies and local missionaries.
Black trade union activity (illegal until the mid-1980s) began to revive as well and focused rather more on political than on economic mobilization. The major strike of 1971–72 was against contract labor, the implementation of apartheid, and the 1966 failure of the initial World Court case as much as it was for wage increases per se.
From 1958 to 1960 the political focus turned from resistance to liberation, and leadership passed from traditional chiefs to party leaders. SWAPO (nominally South West Africa People’s Organization, although only the acronym has been used since 1980) was founded as the Ovamboland People’s Organization in 1958; it achieved a national following as SWAPO in 1960. In 1959 SWANU (South West Africa National Union) was formed, largely by Herero intellectuals. Within a decade, SWAPO had become the dominant party and had grown beyond its Ovambo roots. The presence of Ovambo throughout the nation due to contract labor was used to forge a national communication system and mobilizing capacity.
The parties had been formed because petitioning seemed ineffective. The forced removal (with violence and deaths) of Black Namibians from the Old Location in Windhoek to the outlying township of Katatura (sometimes translated as “The Place We Do Want to Be”) was perhaps the key catalytic event. Until 1966 the parties sought—in the face of increasing repression—to press for redress of grievances from South Africa and via the United Nations. Indeed, until the 1970s the armed struggle, then largely across the border from Zambia, was only a minor nuisance to South Africa.
The 1971–72 strike marked a turning point in terms of national solidarity and nationwide participation in the struggle. It greatly alarmed South Africa; a rising crescendo of trials and summary imprisonment and torture was pursued, though this process had already begun when Herman Toivo ja Toivo and most other SWAPO leaders not already in exile were tried for terrorism and imprisoned on Robben Island in 1968. From 1969 SWAPO had operated along almost all of the northern border—an operation that was easier after Angolan independence in 1975—and in the north-central farming areas around Grootfontein. Although set back by an internal leadership crisis and division among fighting cadres in 1976, the armed struggle had become militarily damaging and economically costly to South Africa by the end of the 1970s.
