Homecoming. You hear this word again and again when you visit Namibia as a tourist. Traveling to the country is like coming home – even for people who have never been to the state in southwest Africa. “Everyone leaves here with an aching heart,” says an employee of a luxury accommodation, for example. “Namibia is like a magnet that draws you back again and again.”
You quickly understand what he means: Namibia has everything that Europeans imagine when they think of “Africa”: deserts, wild animals, gravel roads. At the same time, the country is almost 20 times the size of Switzerland – and has just 2.5 million inhabitants. So you can also expect endless expanses and empty roads
Tourism is Namibia’s second largest economic sector after mining. According to figures from the Ministry of Tourism, 1.4 million foreign tourists visited the country in 2024 – most of them came from neighbouring South Africa, 300,000 from Europe, 20,000 of them from Switzerland. And, as you quickly notice, tourism is strongly geared towards the European perspective
The journey usually begins in Windhoek. A city made up of a jumble of houses and architectural styles. And a city that doesn’t really want to come to life. It lacks a city center where people linger. The biggest sight is Christ Church – it stands in the middle of a traffic circle
Christ Church in Windhoek. You can see the city in a day
But if you leave the city after a night and a day – that’s all you need here – you will experience it again and again, those moments when you understand what the people here call the “African Dream”
There is the landscape, which you often look at through a car window and which is constantly changing. A different picture every hour: first green trees, then stony areas and mountains, sandy expanses, until trees appear again
There is the expanse that opens up when you hike up the “Big Daddy” dune early in the morning, one of the largest dunes in the world. After an arduous climb, where you keep sinking into the unstable sand, you sit down, shake the sand out of your shoes and look out over the Namib Desert, which simply won’t stop
There is the joy that comes from driving for hours up a riverbed – and then finally finding the elephants that live there
There is the awe you feel when you drive through Etosha National Park, one of Africa’s most important nature reserves, and see them: the zebras standing on the left and right of the roadside as if someone had put them there. The lions lazing under the trees, completely unimpressed by the motorcade that has stalked them
The view in Namibia is often of seemingly endless expanses
Image: blue News / Noemi Hüsser
There is a mixture of adventure and luxury: you drive over gravel roads, over stones, through sand and through rivers. You have to patch at least one flat tire – that’s part of the experience. And in the evening, you arrive at a “lodge”, as the tourist accommodation is called here, sit at bars and in pools, overlook the desert and drink white wine. In the distance, a herd of wildebeest gallops in front of the sun, which is just setting behind the horizon
But Namibia rarely lets you feel just one thing. The more hours you drive, the more kilometers you cover, the more patches you patch, the more the image of the “African Dream” begins to crack. You begin to see the colonial images on which it is built. And how these images are still preserved today – also through travel and the stories that emerge from them at home
Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls this the “danger of a single story”. A story that is told so often until it becomes the only one. “A one-sided portrayal creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are wrong, but that they are incomplete,” says Adichie
For example in Swakopmund, a coastal town on the Atlantic, where the desert meets the sea. Everything here feels like a backdrop – as if someone had put up walls and printed a photo of an average small German town on them: pastel-colored houses, gabled roofs, ornate facades. When you walk through the streets, you are just waiting for a director to jump out from behind the corner of a house, shout “Cut” and relieve you of the unease you carry around with you in this town
But the people here don’t play roles. Swakopmund was developed into Namibia’s most important port city during the German colonial period from 1884 to 1915. And everything in Swakopmund is still a reminder of this today: you can buy gingerbread in the supermarket and drink Hansa beer in a bar on the beach
This is the place where you start to think about Namibia’s colonial past
The dried-up trees in Deadvlei are Namibia’s most famous tourist attraction
blue News / Noemi Hüsser
The story begins with a deception. In 1884, the German merchant Adolf Lüderitz bought land from the indigenous population: five miles of coastline for 200 rifles and 100 English pounds. The contract did not specify whether the miles were English or German. When Lüderitz realized the leeway, he insisted on the four times longer German miles. As a result, the claimed area increased sixteen-fold. It was the beginning of the colony of German South West Africa
What followed were years of tension between the indigenous population and the German colonialists: the Germans claimed more and more land and the indigenous population was pushed further and further back. In 1904, the uprising of the Herero, one of the indigenous peoples, turned violent. They attacked farms and forts, killing more than 100 German men. In response, Germany sent General Lothar von Trotha to German South West Africa. Von Trotha ordered every Herero to be shot. The same order was later given for the indigenous Nama people.
Those who were captured by the Germans but not killed were taken to prison and labor camps. This is the first time the term concentration camp appears in German history. Those who escaped were driven into the desert and died of thirst
According to estimates, the German soldiers murdered around 80 percent of the Herero and 50 percent of the Nama between 1904 and 1908 – between 75,000 and 100,000 people. It was the first German genocide of the 20th century
Nothing in Swakopmund reminds us of it. There is a monument in the town center that commemorates the “Herero Uprising” and the German soldiers who died
Guests at the regulars’ table in Swakopmund drink German beer
blue News / Noemi Hüsser
Just outside the center of Swakopmund, there are places of remembrance for the victims of the Herero and Nama. The Herero activist Laidlaw Peringada has opened a genocide museum. He is also the one who regularly piles up a Herero and Nama mass grave in the cemetery in the south of the town, because the wind keeps blowing away sand and uncovering bones. It is as if Peringada wants to close a wound that is still wide open throughout the country
Germany’s colonial rule over Namibia ended in 1915, after which the South African Union took over the administration of the country. Namibia has been an independent republic since 1990
It was not until 2015 – over a hundred years after the genocide of the Herero and Nama – that the then President of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert, was the first official German representative to describe the crime as genocide. In 2021, Germany recognized the genocide and drew up an agreement known as the “Reconciliation Agreement”, which promised Namibia development aid worth 1.1 billion euros
However, the agreement was criticized by the Namibian population and has still not been signed. Descendants of the Herero and Nama went to court, demanding more than development aid and demanding reparations and the return of land
Around 30,000 people of German descent still live in Namibia today. And according to the Namibian Bureau of Statistics, 70 percent of the agricultural land in Namibia still belongs to the descendants of white settlers
In Swakopmund, a memorial commemorates the “Herero Uprising” and fallen German soldiers, but not the genocide of the Herero and Nama
imago
Namibia is one of the countries with one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. Mining – Namibia’s largest economic sector – also largely benefits foreign corporations that own the country’s gold mines. The country’s wealth continues to flow abroad
In Swakopmund at the latest, a feeling settles in that always returns when people here talk about the “African Dream”. Adichie describes how such stories not only arise, but also have power: They determine how a place is seen – and what remains invisible. The “African Dream” is nothing less than a Eurocentric perspective on a country and continent whose history continues to be told by Europeans. Or by those who are descended from them
The feeling is particularly present when you sit in restaurants where almost all the guests are white and the staff are black. When the individual story of the “African Dream” is turned into an experience: When you drive past so-called “Living Museums” in which the indigenous population demonstrates their culture to tourists*. Or when a group of white tourists in six off-road vehicles stops in a village, distributes a few sacks of food, takes photos – and then drives on again half an hour later.
There are many ways to travel through Namibia. There are many stories to be told, the impressive landscapes, the hospitable people. But also the colonial past, which has not yet been fully dealt with. Neither by the government nor by the guides, who only talk about colonialism if you ask them. Namibia is difficult to describe without thinking about and enduring this simultaneity. Without acknowledging that there are always multiple stories
But as a European traveler, you also have the privilege of being able to choose from them. About a kilometer away from the mass grave of the Herero and Nama in Swakopmund, you can taste excellent gin. That is also true – and that is precisely where the discomfort lies
This article was written as part of a media trip organized by Edelweiss in cooperation with the Namibia Tourism Board and Defender Experience
