Namibia

The last African colony to become independent, and the site of the first genocide of the twentieth century. Germany claimed South West Africa in 1884, and when the Herero and Nama rose in 1904 General von Trotha issued an extermination order, driving survivors into the Omaheke desert and poisoning the waterholes; around eighty per cent of Herero and half of Nama died, and the survivors were held in camps. Germany formally acknowledged the genocide only in 2021. South Africa took the territory in 1915 and governed it under a League mandate it refused to surrender, extending apartheid law and contract labour to it. SWAPO began an armed struggle in 1966, the same year the United Nations revoked the mandate, and the war ran for twenty-three years, entangled with the Angolan conflict and Cuban intervention. The International Court of Justice ruled South Africa's occupation illegal in 1971. Independence came on 21 March 1990. The country is the second least densely populated on earth, with the Namib on one side and the Kalahari on the other. Diamonds and uranium dominate exports. Windhoek is the capital. German is still spoken in places and the Herero dress of the period is still worn. The country has about three million people in eight hundred and twenty-five thousand square kilometres. English is the sole official language, though Afrikaans and German are widely spoken. The Namib is among the oldest deserts on earth and its Sossusvlei dunes among the tallest. The Skeleton Coast is named for the shipwrecks along it. Walvis Bay remained South African until 1994.

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