Namibia

Namibia is a large, dry and thinly populated country on the southwestern coast of Africa, and its religious composition was set largely by German and Finnish mission work in the nineteenth century.

The Rhenish Missionary Society began working among Nama and Herero communities from the 1840s, and Finnish missionaries entered the far north among the Ovambo peoples from 1870. Because the northern population was the largest, the Lutheran churches that grew out of those missions became the country's dominant religious bodies, and Namibia is now one of the most Lutheran countries outside northern Europe. Catholic and Anglican missions followed, and independent African churches are also present.

Older traditions have not disappeared. The Ovambo, Herero and other Bantu-speaking peoples maintained ancestor-centred practice, and among the Himba of the northwest the holy fire kept between the headman's house and the cattle enclosure remains a working institution, the point at which the living family communicates with the ancestors and through them with the creator, Mukuru. San communities in the east and northeast keep the trance dance tradition documented across the wider region.

The churches took political positions during the long South African occupation. Church leaders issued a public letter to the South African prime minister in 1971 calling for independence, and the churches were among the few institutions able to speak in the decades that followed.

Between 1904 and 1908 the German colonial administration in South West Africa conducted a campaign against the Herero and Nama peoples that is now widely described as the first genocide of the twentieth century. An extermination order was issued, survivors were driven into the Omaheke desert and denied access to water, and the remainder were held in camps where mortality was extreme. Most of the Herero population and a large proportion of the Nama population died.

The religious dimension is direct rather than incidental. The missionary societies working in the territory were German, their personnel were present throughout, and their role was mixed: some missionaries protested and interceded, some ran the camps' spiritual care, and the mission societies benefited from the reordering of the territory afterwards. Skulls and other remains were sent to German institutions for racial research, and their return to Namibia, in several stages from 2011, was carried out as a religious as well as a diplomatic event, with church services on both sides.

Germany acknowledged the events as genocide in 2021 and offered development funding, in an agreement negotiated with the Namibian government that many Herero and Nama representatives rejected as having been made over their heads and as avoiding the word reparations.

The Herero annual commemorations at Okahandja, at the graves of their chiefs, combine Christian service with older forms of remembrance, and are among the country's most significant religious occasions.