[LINK] "Lüderitz v !Nami≠nüs: dispute over town's name divides Namibia"

[rfmcdonald]

The Guardian's Africa correspondent David Smith writes about the controversy associated with giving the Namibian port of Lüderitz a Khoisan name.

Namibia was a German colony from 1884 to 1919, then administered by apartheid South Africa until 1990. It is still home to a small German population.

In 2013, the Caprivi Strip – a 280-mile (450km) area known for its tropical rivers and wildlife and named after count Leo von Caprivi – was rechristened the Zambezi region, after the river that forms the northern border with Angola.

At the time, the president, Hifikepunye Pohamba, also announced that Lüderitz would be called !Nami≠nüs, which means “embrace” in a Nama language and incorporates click-like sounds, often represented in written form by punctuation symbols.

According to the newspaper the Namibian, !Nami≠nüs was the original name given to Lüderitz by the !Aman community, a Nama subtribe that was the first to settle at the coastal town. German tobacco merchant Adolf Lüderitz is said to have bought the town from a Nama chief and named it after himself.

In 2004, Germany apologised for a genocide that killed 65,000 Herero people through starvation and slave labour in concentration camps that, according to some historians, later influenced the Nazis in the second world war. The Nama, a smaller ethnic group, lost half their population in what one book has described as the kaiser’s Holocaust.

But some in the town are resistant to the change and are calling for a referendum. Speaking on behalf of the business and tourism sector, Ulf Grünewald said an overwhelming majority of residents who attended consultation meetings were against it, according to the Namibian.

Businesspeople fear it will badly affect their business, Grünewald added. “They are selling their businesses under the trade name Lüderitz.”