R&J Hall's Durban Mission -- Trip to Namibia

In mid-August, we had the opportunity to travel, as delegates from the KwaZulu-Natal region of the UCCSA, to the denomination's biennial Assembly in Windhoek, Namibia. This gave us the opportunity, before the week of the Assembly itself (see the next page of this web site), to do a few days of touring in this intriguing land -- which opportunity we took. We were only able to spend a few days, but enjoyed it a lot.

Namibia is a HUGE country (318,000+ square miles -- South Africa is 470,000+) with only 1.8 million people (South Africa has 43 million, by the last estimate, with a new census pending), and half of the Namibians are clustered around Windhoek, the capital. The north, which we didn't get to, is central African in nature, reportedly lush and wet -- presently it has substantial numbers of Angolan refugees, fleeing the war between that government and UNITA. The rest of Namibia is varying degrees of dry. A lot of the southern part of the country is the scrub desert similar to the Karoo, which we'd seen in South Africa. But along the coast, including in the Namib-Naukluft National Park we visited, there are massive, bare sand dunes, incredible sights. The Namib Desert, we're told, is the oldest extant desert in the world. The diamond areas you may have heard of are further south from where we were.

The Namibian people are a complicated collection of very different black African groups, very different in the north from the rest of the country, with maybe 14% of the rest of the population split between whites of German and some South African extraction, and people related to the Cape Coloured populations of South Africa. English is the official language, though it's no one's home language; around Windhoek and Walvis Bay, Afrikaans seems to dominate. In Swakopmund, we ran into German speakers, white and black. An interesting place.

Namibia is the former South West Africa, one of Kaiser Wilhelm's "places in the sun" from the Berlin Congress at which the European powers of the late 19th century carved up Africa into pretty much the borders that it has today. After World War I, SWA passed to South Africa as a trust territory under the League of Nations, and then under the UN, technically. During the height of the Apartheid era, there were attempts to introduce the system also in SWA. Eventually, in one of the lead-ups to the coming transformation in South Africa itself (and in an international deal which included removal of Cuban troops from Angola), Namibia became independent in a transitional process from 1988 to 1994. More than that, you can look up.

We post no pictures of birds, but we saw plenty, and added many new ones to our Southern Africa list.