Namibia was inhabited by shrubs for millennia, then colonized in 1884

Namibia was inhabited for thousands of years by the distinct San, Damara, Herero, and Nama Bushmen cultures until the 19th century. The most well-known of these groups, the San Bushmen, are also the region's oldest indigenous inhabitants (Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa), living as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Then, as with many other African countries, Europeans arrived in the nineteenth century. Although Namibia was technically British territory, German colonists arrived on the coast at Valvis Bay in the 1880s and quickly took over the territory known as "South-West Africa" in Germany.

This occupation has made Namibia a completely unique country in the region; the majority of Namibia's architecture is German. There are German newspapers, and the majority of the population speaks German as one of their primary languages. However, as with most African colonial empires, the indigenous population was subjected to brutality. During the so-called Herero Rebellion, which lasted from 1904 to 1907, the local Herero and Namaqua tribes took up arms against the colonialists, resulting in what has been dubbed "the first genocide of the twentieth century." German government officials ordered the annihilation of the Natives, wiping out half of the Namak population and 80 percent of the Herero population.