Namibia
Capital: Windhoek · Southern Africa
Desert land of the Himba's ochre aesthetics, Herero cattle culture and resilient memory, Nama-Damara click languages and Twyfelfontein's ancient engravings.
Ethnic communities
- Ovambo (Aawambo)Northern kingdoms; largest population group
- Himba & HereroPastoralists; otjize ochre body art and Victorian-influenced Herero dress
- Nama & DamaraKhoekhoe-speaking peoples with click phonology
- San (Ju|'hoansi)Kalahari first peoples
More communities of Namibia
- Ovambo (Aandonga, Kwanyama) · Northern kingdoms — half the nation
- Herero · Cattle nation of genocide memory and red dress
- Himba · Kunene's ochre pastoralists (full profile)
- Nama · Khoekhoe clans of !nabas and step-dance
- Damara · Ancient click-speaking miners and herders
- San (Ju|'hoansi, Hai||om) · First peoples of the east and Etosha (full profile)
- Kavango peoples · River kingdoms of woodcraft and fish
- Mbukushu · Rainmaker-farmers of the Okavango
- Subiya & Mafwe · Zambezi-region floodplain communities
- Batswana ba Namibia · Eastern Tswana border communities
- Rehoboth Basters · Afrikaans-speaking free community of 1870 trek
- Coloured communities · Cape-descended urban heritage
- Topnaar (ǂAonin) · !Nara-melon harvesters of the Kuiseb
- Zemba & Twa · Kunene's smaller herding communities
- Mbanderu · Eastern Herero kin of the omuramba plains
Languages
Major languages: Oshiwambo, Nama/Damara (Khoekhoegowab), Otjiherero, Afrikaans, English
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu); Khoe-Kwadi (Nama)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Ovambo kingdoms (Ondonga, Uukwanyama)
- • Oorlam-Nama polities
Heritage sites
- • Twyfelfontein engravings
- • Namib Sand Sea
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Namibia
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Sportb. 2003
Christine Mboma
Sprinting
Took 200m silver in Tokyo at 18 with a world under-20 record, after being reassigned from her preferred 400m under eligibility rules.
- Sportb. 1967
Frankie Fredericks
Sprinting
Won four Olympic silver medals in the 100m and 200m, Namibia's first Olympic medals of any colour.
- Politics & liberationc. 1830–1905
Hendrik Witbooi
Anticolonial resistance
Nama kaptein who fought German colonial forces during the genocide of the Herero and Nama. His portrait appears on Namibian banknotes.
- Music & the arts1953–2010
Jackson Kaujeua
Music
Sang for SWAPO in exile and became the country's best loved gospel and liberation voice after independence.
- Politics & liberation1929–2025
Sam Nujoma
Independence
Founding president of Namibia and SWAPO leader through three decades of exile and armed struggle against South African rule. Titled Founding Father of the Namibian Nation in 2005.
Deep-dive community profiles
Bakgalagadi
The first Sotho-Tswana speakers in the Kalahari — pushed into the desert by later arrivals, made clients of the Tswana states, and now caught between their own land claims and the eviction of the San from the Central Kalahari reserve they share.
Open deep profile →Basubiya
River people of the Chobe and Zambezi floodplain whose kingdom once held the whole four-country corner, who were pushed aside by the Lozi and then the Kololo, and whose land was fenced off for a national park in 1960.
Open deep profile →Bayei
The people who brought the mokoro — Okavango Delta fishers and hippo hunters who arrived from the Zambezi in the eighteenth century with the dugout canoe and the fish trap, and who now pole tourists through the channels they mapped.
Open deep profile →Damara (ǂNūkhoen)
Namibia's oldest unresolved question — a Bantu-featured people speaking a Khoekhoe click language, whose origins remain genuinely unexplained, who were enslaved by their neighbours and then confined to a homeland of stone by the apartheid administration.
Open deep profile →Griqua
The people who made states out of the frontier — Khoekhoe, San, enslaved and settler descendants who took a name for themselves, founded republics with constitutions and coinage at Griquatown and Kokstad, lost them to diamonds and annexation, and are still seeking recognition as an indigenous people.
Open deep profile →Hambukushu
The rainmakers of the Okavango panhandle — farmers and fishers whose chiefs were sought across the region for their control of rain, and whose baskets, coiled from palm and dyed with bark, are among southern Africa's most collected craft.
Open deep profile →Herero (Ovaherero)
The cattle-herders of central Namibia — whose women's Victorian-derived otjikaiva dresses and horn-shaped headdresses are worn in proud defiance, whose sacred ancestral fire (okuruwo) never dies, and who survived the 20th century's first genocide.
Open deep profile →Himba
Pastoralists of the Kunene — famed for the otjize ochre-and-butter that colors skin and braids red, a dual-descent kinship system counted through both mother and father, and the sacred ancestral fire that must never die.
Open deep profile →Kavango peoples
The five river nations of Namibia's north-east — Kwangali, Mbunza, Shambyu, Gciriku and Mbukushu — farmers and fishers of a green strip along the Okavango, and the country's woodcarvers.
Open deep profile →Nama (Khoekhoe)
The southernmost Khoekhoe herders — heirs of the ancient Cape pastoralists, keepers of the click-rich Khoekhoegowab tongue, the Nama stap dance and the /gais praise-poetry, who fought and endured the same colonial wars that struck their Herero neighbours.
Open deep profile →Ovambo (Aawambo)
The nation of the oshana floodlands — Namibia's largest people, whose millet-and-marula kingdoms between seasonal channels bred the efundula bride-festivals, the sacred fire of kingship, and the backbone of the liberation struggle.
Open deep profile →Rehoboth Basters
A community that named itself with a slur — descendants of Cape Dutch settlers and Khoikhoi women who trekked north in 1868, wrote their own constitution, governed themselves for a century, and lost the case for their land in Namibia's Supreme Court.
Open deep profile →San (Bushmen)
The first peoples of southern Africa — carriers of some of humanity's oldest lineages and its oldest continuous art tradition, whose click languages, trance-dance healing and encyclopedic desert knowledge stretch back tens of thousands of years.
Open deep profile →Topnaar (ǂAonin)
The people of the !nara melon — a Nama community living in the Namib desert along the dry Kuiseb river, whose entire economy once rested on a spiny endemic plant, and whose water is now taken by a city upstream.
Open deep profile →