Namibia

The territory of present-day Namibia has been inhabited for many thousands of years, with the San (Bushmen) hunter-gatherers among its earliest documented populations. Rock paintings and engravings at sites such as Twyfelfontein attest to a long pre-colonial human presence. Over subsequent centuries, Khoekhoe pastoralists, Damara communities, and Bantu-speaking peoples migrated into the region. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ovambo kingdoms had consolidated in the north, while Herero cattle-herders occupied the central highlands and Nama groups dominated parts of the south. These societies traded with one another and, by the early nineteenth century, with European missionaries and merchants reaching the coast from the Cape.

European political control arrived comparatively late. In 1884, the German Empire declared a protectorate over much of the territory, naming it German South West Africa, and the colony was extended in 1890 with the addition of the Caprivi Strip following an Anglo-German agreement. German settlement, expropriation of grazing land, and the imposition of colonial administration provoked resistance, culminating in the Herero and Nama wars of 1904 to 1908. The campaigns of General Lothar von Trotha resulted in the deaths of a large majority of the Herero population and a substantial share of the Nama, an episode widely recognised in modern scholarship as a genocide and formally acknowledged by Germany in 2021.

During the First World War, South African forces occupied the colony in 1915, and in 1920 the League of Nations awarded South Africa a Class C mandate over the territory. South Africa progressively extended its own racial legislation, and after 1948 applied apartheid policies to the mandate. The United Nations General Assembly revoked the mandate in 1966, but South Africa refused to withdraw, prompting decades of legal contestation and an armed liberation struggle led by the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) from its bases in Angola and Zambia. The conflict became entangled with the Angolan civil war and the wider regional confrontation between Cuban, Angolan, and South African forces.

A negotiated settlement under United Nations Security Council Resolution 435, linked to the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, paved the way for supervised elections in November 1989. SWAPO won a clear majority, and on 21 March 1990 Namibia became formally independent, with Sam Nujoma as its first president. Walvis Bay and the offshore Penguin Islands, retained by South Africa at independence, were transferred to Namibia in 1994. The new state joined the United Nations, the Commonwealth, the African Union (then the Organisation of African Unity), and the Southern African Development Community, and adopted a constitution widely regarded as one of the more liberal on the continent.

Since independence, Namibia has held regular multiparty elections, with SWAPO retaining the presidency and a parliamentary majority through successive contests under presidents Hifikepunye Pohamba, Hage Geingob, and, following Geingob's death in office in February 2024, Nangolo Mbumba. In the November 2024 elections, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah was elected the country's first woman president, taking office in March 2025. Namibia today is a unitary semi-presidential republic with a bicameral Parliament composed of the National Assembly and the National Council, operating under the 1990 constitution and a generally stable framework of civilian, multiparty governance.