Namibia

This article provides an update for 2019.

The indigenous peoples of Namibia include the San, the Ovatue and Ovatjimba, and potentially a number of other peoples including the Ovahimba and Nama. Taken together, the indigenous peoples of Namibia represent some 8% of the total population of the country which was 2,533,244 in 2018. The San (Bushmen) number between 27,000 and 34,000, and represent between 1.06% and 1.3% of the national population. They include the Khwe, the Hai||om, the Ju|’hoansi, the !Kung, the !Xun, the Kao||Aesi, the Naro, and the !Xóõ. Each of the San groups speaks its own language and has distinct customs, traditions and histories. The San were mainly hunter-gatherers in the past but, today, many have diversified livelihoods. Over 80% of the San have been dispossessed of their ancestral lands and resources, and are now some of the poorest and most marginalised peoples in the country.

The Ovatjimba and Ovatue (Ovatwa) are largely pastoral people, formerly also relying on hunting and gathering, residing in the semi-arid and mountainous north-west (Kunene Region) and across the border in southern Angola. The Ovatue are considered to have traditionally inhabited the more remote mountainous areas. The Ovahimba are a larger and locally dominant pastoralist group who reside over a greater area of Kunene. Closely related but separate to the Ovahimba is a smaller group called the Ovazemba. The Ovahimba, Ovatue, Ovatjimba and Ovazemba number some 26,000 in total. The Nama, a Khoe-speaking group, number over 100,000 and live mainly in central and southern Namibia and the northwest of South Africa. Related to the Nama are the Topnaars (≠Aonin) who number approximately 2,600 and who reside in the Kuiseb River Valley, in Dorob National Park, and in the area in and around Walvis Bay in the Erongo Region.

The Namibian government prefers to use the term “marginalised communities” when referring to the San, Otavue and Ovatjimba, support for whom falls under the Office of the President: Division Marginalised Communities. The Constitution of Namibia prohibits discrimination on the grounds of ethnic or tribal affiliation but does not specifically recognise the rights of indigenous peoples, and there is currently no national legislation dealing directly with indigenous peoples, though there is a new draft white paper on the rights of indigenous and marginalised communities that is to be brought before the Cabinet soon. Namibia voted in favour of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) when it was adopted in 2007 but has not ratified ILO Convention No. 169. Namibia is a signatory to several other binding international agreements that affirm the norms represented in UNDRIP, such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The Namibia government office responsible for indigenous peoples and minorities is the Division for Marginalised Communities (DMC), now under the Office of the President. The office considers its main objective to be integrating marginalised communities into the mainstream national economy and improving their livelihoods.

Heroes play a role in every nation's founding narrative, embodying a group's strength and courage, its dedication to protecting all within its fold, and its most important traditions and promises. Yet hero images and tropes have not received the attention they deserve in the social science literature on nations and nationalism. Recent theories of character work-the rhetorical construction of heroes, villains, victims, and minions-reveal the challenges of building an inclusive nationalism in post-colonial states. We engage the debates over some of Namibia's most prominent and contested heroes through the memorials dedicated to them and the commemorations honoring victims of past struggles. We study the victims that these heroes sought to defend and trace the process by which victims become heroes of endurance. The Namibian state has, after its recent independence, constructed a memorial to fallen heroes, Heroes Acre, and an Independence Memorial Museum. Alongside these state-sanctioned memorial sites, a range of citizens have sought to honor and defend their own heroes. By honoring different heroes, they have defined alternative understandings of the nation. We also demonstrate the power of victims in mobilizing present day campaigns for justice and reparations. In Namibia, as elsewhere, greater attention to victims could shift the balance of political power. This article demonstrates how a focus on struggles over the legitimacy of particular heroes and victims can provide unanticipated insights into the study of divided nationalism.

Among (post-)colonial varieties of German, Namibian German is a particularly interesting case. It has a unique status compared to the other extraterritorial varieties as well as to those in the German-speaking area in Europe. First, it is based on a speech community with German ancestry who still live in Namibia today, which distinguishes it from such colonial varieties as Unserdeutsch in the South Pacific and makes it more similar to such German " language island " varieties as, e.g., Texas German in the United States or the German varieties still spoken in Brazil. Second, though, unlike language island varieties as well as other postcolonial varieties and more similar to those in Germany, Namibian German is linguistically vital. It is passed on to younger generations and is also used in public domains, supporting, e.g., register differentiation. Third, unlike most varieties in Germany, however, it is integrated in a setting of societal multilingualism, with speakers who routinely use two or more languages in addition to German in their daily lives, and with a broader context of high linguistic diversity, offering a wealth of language contact opportunities. In this paper, we describe this special status of Namibian German and present first results from a project that capitalises on this to investigate the (socio-)linguistic dynamics that this setting supports, affording us a spotlight on tendencies of language attitudes and language variation in contact situations of German.