You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘genocide’ tag.
Map of Namibia
Our imaginary fantasy trip across Africa has taken us to some amazing places as we proceeded west along the map starting out from the micro-continent of Madagascar. Exploring the continent on the internet has really made me want to visit someday! Through photos and descriptive writing we have seen the great lakes of Malawi and Tanzania. We have lingered in the terrifying yet astonishing rainforests of the Congo. We have marveled at the unprecedented ugliness of the flags of Mozambique and Angola (sorry, flagmakers). At last we come to the ancient Namib Desert. Beyond it lie the cold waves of the Atlantic Ocean filled with nutrients thrown off from the mighty Antarctic circumpolar current. It is one of the most jarring juxtapositions on Earth—the rich freezing waters of the sea pound against the burning arid dunes.
As you can tell, I have a fascination with the Namib. If I ever win the lottery or suddenly find a bag of gold or gain a million internet followers [crickets chirping], I will make it my business to go there at once. The Namib is the world’s oldest desert. As the continents dance all around the globe and their landscapes change from forest to ocean to plains to mountains to glaciers, the Namib has somehow stayed a wallflower and kept its dry desert climate. Its climate has been largely unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs, which is why it is home to oddities like the welwitschia and the sandswimming golden mole.
A San Hunter Gatherer in Namibia
Namibia’s human history recedes into the remote mists of prehistory (humankind is after all from Africa). Various groups of people arrived in the desert in waves. The San, Damara, and Namaqua—hunter-gatherers, then herdsmen—arrived. Then the farmers of the great Bantu expansion showed up in the 14th century. Contemporary Namibian history is more tragic—since the desert land was caught between mighty colonial powers of Germany and Great Britain. Great Britain took the most useful natural harbor and Germany took the rest of Namibia—although the native Namaqua and Herero tribes rose against the nascent colonialists. From 1904 to 1907 the Germans wiped out approximately 10,000 Nama 65,000 Hereros in one of the twentieth century’s first genocides. The surviving tribespeople were relegated to concentration camps and unlivable ghettos.
German Colonial Powers of the Second Reich in Namibia
When the Germans lost World War I, Namibia passed to de-facto South African control. South Africa administered the territory somewhat informally (and brutally and badly) until a variety of incomprehensible UN mandates, international pressure, and a scrappy (though morally gray) guerilla independence movement forced the apartheid government of South Africa to grant the nation independence in 1990. Contemporary Namibia has abundant natural resources (which are managed with greater fairness than in neighboring states), but it has suffered greatly from the scourge of HIV. Additionally the single political party SWAPO (which evolved from the aforementioned scrappy independence fighters) is run by a somewhat opaque politburo.
Flag of Namibia
The flag of Namibia is based on the flag of the national liberation movement. It was chosen by the chairman of the subcommittee for flag creation who reviewed over 800 designs before choosing the current flag. The colors have symbolism not dissimilar to other African national liberation flags. Red represents the people of Namibia and the blood they have shed to make a nation together. White is the color of unification and peace. Green represents farms, agriculture, and ecology. Blue represents the ocean and the life-giving freshwater which is so rare in the desert. The sun represents…well, the sun…the source of all energy and life (although political junkies might speculate that it also is a homage to the sun of the Kuomintang).
Tanzania…oh my goodness is that pretty…
In past weeks this blog has been slowly traveling on a meandering path through sub-Saharan Africa, concentrating especially on the flags of these lands. We started in Madagascar, moved across the channel to Mozambique, visited Malawi (on the edge of its great lake) and today we travel further north to Tanzania. Tanzania is a beautiful land of mountains, rain forests, lakes, vast arable fields, and beaches. Africa’s tallest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, can be found in the north of Tanzania. The country is bounded by three of the great rift lakes of Africa (Lake Malawi, Lake Tanganyika, and Lake Victoria). To the east lies the Indian Ocean and the Zanzibar archipelago stretches out into the sea.
The mainland portion of Tanzania was originally known as Tanganyika. It was a German colony until after World War I when control shifted to the British. Tanganyika had an easy transition away from British colonial control to independence in 1961. The islands of Zanzibar however had a much darker and sadder history—they were the center of the great Swahili-Arab slave trade until the British navy shut the wicked industry down. Even then the Sultanate of Zanzibar continued slave trading on the sly until Britain finally annexed it after a 38 minute long war! Zanzibar obtained independence from the British in 1964, after which the newly liberated citizens committed genocide against the Arabs and Indian Moslems who had so long dominated the islands. After this murderous rampage, the islands of Zanzibar turned away from the Arab world and joined together with Tanganyika to form Tanzania in 1964 (although Zanzibar remains semi-autonomous).
The Flag of Tanzania
The flag of Tanzania is likewise a combination of the earlier (and oddly similar) flags of Zanzibar and Tanganyika. When the two standards merged into one Zanzibar’s blue field joined Tanganyika’s green one. The main difference was the central black stripe which moved from horizontal to diagonal (although it kept Tanganyika’s narrow yellow stripes around it. The colors are symbolic—although the symbolic meanings are not hard to guess. The green stands for the fields and forests. The blue represents lakes, rivers, and the ocean. The gold bands represent wealth and, most importantly, the black band represents the Tanzanian people. It’s a pretty flag for a pretty land…but I can never remember it at all. Whenever I look at the flags of the world, it is one of the few I always get wrong. Maybe now that I have written a miniature essay about it, the flag of Tanzania will henceforth stick in my head.
The Flag of Tanganyika
The Flag of Zanzibar
The Skeleton Coast of Namibia (photo from grandpoohbah.net)
Try to imagine the Namib Desert, where a stormy foggy shoreline gives way quickly to endless bone-dry dunes of shifting golden sand. It is one of the starkest contrasts in the world’s geography: the fury of the cold waves is juxtaposed with the opposing starkness of the sun-pounded dunes.
The coastline where the Namib Desert runs up against the Atlantic is known as the skeleton coast both because it is a place where whalers and sealers once discarded the stripped carcasses of the marine mammals they killed in droves and because it is one of the world’s most treacherous coastlines. More than a thousand major modern wrecks dot the coast (where they mingle with countless older shipwrecks). Portuguese sailors trying to get around the horn of Africa to reach the riches of Asia called the area “the gates of hell.” A human powered craft can make its way through the pounding surf to the desolate coastline but it then becomes impossible to re-launch. Sailors shipwrecked on the Namib coast thus faced the daunting prospect of walking through a vast expanse of waterless desert. Before the modern era, most ship-wrecked souls did not escape and their skeletons soon became part of the landscape.
The shipwreck of the Eduard Bohlen (photo by Michael Poliza)
The desert is ancient. For more than 55 million years it has existed as a wasteland with almost no surface water. Since the end of the age of dinosaurs, the warm tropical air of the Hadley cell has intersected a cold oceanic current welling northward from Antarctica. But the region was arid long before that. West Gondwanaland shifted to its present position along the Tropic of Capricorn nearly 130 million years ago and has remained there since—a wallflower in the great dance of continents.
The Namib Desert photographed from The Space Shuttle Columbia
Namibia was a German colony during the colonial era. Unsurprisingly, the Germans made their Namibian colony the sight of the twentieth century’s first genocide when they tried to extinguish the unruly Herero and Nama peoples in 1904. The nation was seized by South Africa after the end of World War I but after many decades of gradual power shifting Namibia gained complete independence in 1990.
The Republic of Namibia is the second sparsest nation on earth with only 2.1 million people spread across a landscape roughly the size of Germany, Poland, the Czech republic, Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands combined (not that those nations should ever be combined!). It is one of the few stable multi-party democracies in Africa (maybe I should say the world). Namibia makes most of its money from mining uranium, gemstones, lead, tungsten, gold, tin, fluorspar, manganese, marble, copper and zinc. Natural gas can be found just off the coast (though it may prove challenging to drill there).
The Navachab Open Pit Gold Mine, Erongo Region, Namibia
Why am I writing about this beautiful harsh anomaly of a nation? The unique and isolated geography of Namibia have made it a unique ecosystem of creatures capable of surviving the harsh desert environment (to say nothing of the creatures which team in the rich coastal waters). Desert dwelling creatures have had a long time to adapt to the hostile conditions of the world’s oldest desert. One of the most unique of all placental mammals is found in Namibia. I’ll address this bizarre fossorial hunter in my next post.
Hint: It's not the mighty African Elephant (one of my favorite creatures), but strangely enough african elephants do live in Namibia.
ferrebeekeeper 