Namibia

Namibia is named after the Namib, a coastal desert where the cold Benguela Current brings fog but almost no rain. Red dunes tower over the clay pans of Sossusvlei, shipwrecks rust along the Skeleton Coast, and the welwitschia, a plant that may live a thousand years or more, grows on the gravel plains. Inland a high plateau gives way to the Kalahari. Fish River Canyon cuts into the south, and the white salt pan of Etosha shimmers in the north.

San hunters engraved giraffes, rhinos and footprints into the sandstone at Twyfelfontein thousands of years ago. Germany claimed the territory as South West Africa in 1884, and its troops crushed the Herero and Nama risings of 1904–08; most of the Herero and about half of the Nama died in battle, in the desert or in prison camps, killings Germany acknowledged as genocide in 2021. After the First World War South Africa took over and extended apartheid here, until a long struggle led by SWAPO won independence in March 1990.

Herero women wear long Victorian-style dresses with hats folded like cattle horns, and German colonial buildings line the seafront at Swakopmund. Grilled meat, kapana, sizzles at street stalls. Diamonds come from the beaches near Oranjemund and from the seabed offshore, lifted by specialised ships. Uranium comes from the Rössing and Husab mines in the Namib, trawlers out of Walvis Bay land hake, cattle ranches export beef, and visitors come for Etosha’s waterholes and the desert elephants of the north-west.