Ovambo

Wendi Haugh

Aawambo, Ambo, Oshiwambo-speakers, Ovawambo

Ovambo peoples live in north-central Namibia (Oshana, Ohangwena, Omusati, and Oshikoto regions) and south-central Angola (Cunene Province). This land, called Owambo, is characterized by sandy soils, flat terrain, and periodic flooding. Rains fall between October and April: a short rainy spell is followed by a drier interval, then by a long rainy season. There are no permanently-running rivers but, in years of good rains, broad shallow channels (sing. oshana) fill with water flowing south from higher lands in southern Angola. When dry, these floodplains are covered in grasses. At slightly higher elevations the land is covered with bush, forest, and cultivated fields. Many Namibian Oshiwambo-speakers have moved in search of economic opportunity, and can be found in towns and cities throughout Namibia. A person who rarely or never returns to Owambo may be called ombwiti, a label that implies a loss of language, culture, knowledge of kin, and respectful behavior; the term is seen by some as derogatory.

There are roughly 1.5 million Oshiwambo-speakers, about two-thirds in Namibia and one-third in Angola. Demographically, they occupy very different positions within these countries. In Namibia, the 2011 census reported a total population of 2.1 million people divided into eleven ethnic groups; Oshiwambo-speakers are by far the largest group, comprising about half the population. Angola is a far more populous country, and Oshiwambo-speakers there are a very small minority, comprising about two percent of this ethnically-diverse country.

The indigenous languages spoken by the various Ovambo peoples are known collectively as Oshiwambo. These languages belong to the Central group of Southern Bantu languages in the Niger-Congo language family. Ovambo languages are mutually intelligible to a varying but always substantial degree. Oshindonga and Oshikwanyama were developed as standard languages and are taught in schools, spoken on the radio and television, and used in writing. Most Oshiwambo-speakers in the early twenty-first century speak at least some English or Portuguese, the official languages of Namibia and Angola respectively.

The ancestors of contemporary Oshiwambo-speakers moved south and southeast from central Angola in the 1600s, motivated both by resource scarcity and by increasing violence, as Imbangala, Portuguese, and Ovimbundu forces fought to control territory and trade, including the slave trade. They settled in a region rich in wild game and pasture that they came to call Owambo. They turned wilderness into habitable land by digging waterholes and wells, enriching the soils, and encouraging the spread of fruit trees. Over time, they developed independent polities of various sizes; some were decentralized but most were monarchical. They traded, intermarried, and occasionally came into conflict with both the San foraging peoples who had long been living in the region and the neighboring Bantu peoples. In the mid-1800s, European traders of many nationalities began arriving, bringing guns, horses, alcohol, clothing, beads, and other goods in exchange for ivory, cattle, and slaves. A series of successful raids into Owambo from the south by armed Oorlams on horseback in the late 1850s and early 1860s made guns and horses particularly desirable. Finnish, German, French, and Portuguese missionaries, both Protestant and Catholic, began arriving in Owambo in 1870, but made few converts in the first three decades of their work.

The lands which were to become Namibia and Angola were formally claimed by Germany and Portugal, respectively, at the Berlin Conference in 1894-95. Portuguese forces, despite sometimes fierce opposition, took control of Angolan Owambo between 1905 and 1917, causing thousands of people to flee south across the border. There, the Germans made no attempt to occupy a region far more densely populated and politically centralized than the rest of Namibia. Between the 1880s and 1910s, more and more Oshiwambo-speaking men left home to work as migrant laborers, building railways in Angola and working on mines and infrastructure projects in Namibia; they sought to avoid plantations and fisheries in Angola or farms and ranches in Namibia, where conditions were particularly bad and pay especially low. During this time, conditions worsened dramatically in Owambo. A devastating rinderpest epidemic in the late 1890s led to armed raids as men sought to rebuild their herds using imported firearms; elites not only organized raids targeting neighboring peoples and people living in other Ovambo polities, they also abused their positions to seize livestock from less powerful people within their own polities. Subsequently, a series of severe droughts between 1907 and 1915 caused widespread famines in which social norms broke down as people struggled to survive; thousands starved to death. While some men turned to migrant labor as a solution, some desperate people—especially children and teenagers—sought resources and refuge at mission stations, where many converted to Christianity.

In 1960, political and labor activists founded the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) to press for Namibia’s independence. Headed by Sam Nujoma, an Oshiwambo-speaker, the nationalist movement found tremendous support among Oshiwambo-speakers; as labor migrants, they experienced difficult conditions, low pay, restrictions on their movements, and separation from their families, and their experiences gave them connections to all regions of the country. Many of the organization’s leaders were soon driven into exile, where they set up bases of operation and sought international support for their cause. Over the next three decades SWAPO staged a series of strikes and protests in Namibia and waged a guerrilla war from bases in southern Angola. In response, the South African military occupied Owambo; civilians suspected of materially supporting SWAPO guerrillas were liable to be harassed, imprisoned, tortured, or killed. Thousands of people fled over the border into Angola, where they either joined the struggle or lived in refugee camps; the South African military carried its campaign into southern Angola as well, and local people were caught in the crossfire. Some Angolan Oshiwambo-speakers joined UNITA, the nationalist organization based in southern Angola whose main base of support was the closely-related Ovimbundu people. SWAPO worked with both UNITA and the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, or Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) at first, but after Angola gained independence in 1975 the left-wing MPLA took power and UNITA, with South African support, began waging civil war against the new government. SWAPO disavowed UNITA, even as some Angolan Oshiwambo-speakers continued to fight on its behalf.

South Africa wrested control of Namibia from Germany during World War I and gained a League of Nations mandate to govern the territory in 1920. South African forces killed two rebellious kings in 1917 and 1932, working to influence more cooperative leaders with the primary goal being a continued flow of migrant labor to the south. Portuguese rule in Owambo was harsher, with higher taxes, crueler enforcement, forced labor, and slave raids. When an eleven-kilometer-wide neutral zone along the border was awarded to Portuguese Angola in 1926, tens of thousands of people moved into Namibia. The relocated border split the powerful Kwanyama kingdom in two, and increasing border enforcement made it difficult for Namibian Oshiwambo-speakers to bring their cattle north to better-watered pastures during the dry season. Over the next four decades, labor migration intensified, with nearly all Ovambo men participating for at least some portion of their adult lives; many Ovambo men in Angola preferred to work as labor migrants in Namibia. A pass system allowed only men approved for work to enter white-dominated central and southern Namibia, so women and children stayed behind. South African rule in Namibian Owambo became more intrusive and more controlling over time, and the traditional authorities responsible for carrying out colonial policies became increasingly unpopular. In 1968, apartheid legislation established Ovamboland as an ethnic homeland with its own government.

Namibia finally won its independence in 1990, and the longtime president of SWAPO, Sam Nujoma, was elected to serve as the new country’s first president. Since independence, the government has made substantial investments in the former ethnic homelands, spending money to expand access to education and medical care as well as to electricity, water, and transportation. The breakdown of internal apartheid-era borders has greatly increased economic activity in Owambo and enabled all residents, not just able-bodied men, to travel or move to other regions of the country. While the first three Presidents were Oshiwambo-speakers and the fourth Damara-speaking, the cabinet has been more ethnically diverse than demography would predict. Nonetheless, there have been repeated complaints that the country is dominated politically and economically by Oshiwambo-speakers who have spread throughout the country in search of economic opportunity. In Angola, the civil war raged sporadically until 2002, leaving the countryside economically devastated. The recovery process has been slow, with little government investment flowing to predominantly rural areas like Owambo.

Before European colonization, Owambo was entirely rural. Dispersed homesteads consisted of multiple small buildings and open-air spaces for sleeping, storage, cooking, pounding millet into flour, visiting, and other purposes, all enclosed in a wooden stockade with a single narrow entrance and mazelike internal passageways designed to confuse and slow down invaders. In the twenty-first century, homesteads continued to be built in the same style, but people with access to cash use cement blocks and sheet metal roofs where possible instead of increasingly scarce wood and thatch. These new buildings are square or rectangular rather than the traditional round construction. An increase in security, in conjunction with a shortage of wood, has led to a reduction or elimination of the mazelike internal passageways.

During the colonial era, small administrative settlements were founded, attracting business activity. Over time, some grew into small and, eventually, large towns. In Namibian Owambo, such urban areas have grown dramatically since the country became independent in 1990—a result of increased investment from the central government and increased economic activity, including overland trade with Angola and closer economic ties with the rest of Namibia. In the 2011 census, the combined population of the neighboring towns of Oshakati, Ongwediva, and Ondangwa was nearly 80,000; the town of Helao Nafidi, established in 2004 after rapid economic and demographic growth related to trade across the Angolan border, had nearly 20,000 inhabitants. By contrast, the largest town in Angolan Owambo is the provincial capital, Ondjiva; battered and depopulated by the civil war which ended in 2002, by 2009 the town’s population had grown in peacetime to 19,000. As of 2011, there were only a dozen other towns on both sides of the border, with populations between 1,600 and 8,200.

Traditionally, Ovambo peoples pursued an agro-pastoralist economic strategy. The climate is semiarid and there are no rivers, so they dug waterholes and wells to make water available through the dry season. They grew drought-resistent millet and sorghum, along with beans, Bambara groundnuts, pumpkins, and melons. Households broadened their resource base by keeping cattle and goats, and some of the men and older boys left home for five or six months during the dry season to bring the cattle to better-watered pastures. Over the course of the twentieth century, increasing numbers of Ovambo men, especially in Namibia, turned from herding to migrant labor, while women and children worked in the fields and tended much smaller numbers of livestock. In the early twenty-first century, households in rural Owambo continued to produce most of their own food, supplementing their home-grown diet with wild fruits, nuts, and greens, and with purchased foods, both locally-produced and imported.

In the colonial era there was no cash-cropping or commercial ranching. In Namibia, ever since a veterinary cordon was established in 1896 to protect the commercial herds of white farmers from diseases like rinderpest and foot-and-mouth, residents have been forbidden to transport cattle or beef outside Owambo. Business activity grew slowly through the colonial era and then rapidly after independence. Oshiwambo-speakers have taken advantage of opportunities to engage in business activities elsewhere in the country since the end of apartheid. In Angolan Owambo, commercial activities were suppressed by the civil war between 1975 and 2002. The coming of peace has revitalized local markets in crops and livestock, and enabled many rural Ovambos to move to nearby towns that had been depopulated during the war.

Some Ovambo women are skilled potters and basketweavers, making a variety of containers for home use, local sale, and the tourist trade. In precolonial and early colonial times, men made weapons and household objects out of wood. A few men trained as blacksmiths and made tools for farming and food processing, weapons, and jewelry. These male trades declined dramatically with the rise of male migrant labor and the introduction of mass-produced goods that men could purchase with their wages.

During the precolonial era there were no organized markets or full-time traders. Nevertheless, people living in Owambo traded iron, copper, salt, foodstuffs, livestock, and household items with each other and with neighboring peoples. Long-distance trade, including trade with European merchants, was monopolized by royalty, who used some of the goods they acquired through trade as status symbols, and some (such as horses and guns) to implement their rule and defend their lands. Labor migration democratized access to foreign goods, and new status symbols such as striped red cloth—first imported in the early twentieth century and worn in the early twenty-first century for special occasions—became widespread. Both formal and informal trade between Namibia and Angola at Oshikango (a key border crossing in Owambo) grew dramatically during a mid-1990s interlude in the Angolan civil war, and continues to play an important role for people living on both sides of the border. In addition to Namibian wholesale operations exporting goods to Angolan buyers, Angolan Ovambo bring livestock and foodstuffs to sell in Namibia and use the proceeds to buy goods unavailable or more expensive at home.

In the household economy, men and boys are responsible for herding livestock, milking cattle, churning butter, and constructing and repairing homes. Women and girls are responsible for pounding millet into flour, preparing meals, brewing beer, fetching water, gathering firewood, and keeping the home clean. Traditionally, women also did the bulk of the agricultural labor once the men had cleared and fenced the fields; today both men and women plant, weed, harvest, and thresh as necessary, though women do more of this work as men are more likely to work outside the home.

Men pay a traditional leader for the right to farm and establish a household on a plot of land for life. The right of traditional authorities to allocate land in this way has been recognized by state law in Namibia since 2002; the same law also grants the state ultimate ownership of communal land in former ethnic homelands like Owambo. In some areas, wealthy people have installed illegal fencing to keep portions of communal grazing grounds to themselves, which has sparked conflict over access and caused land degradation in surrounding areas crowded with livestock.

Ovambo people reckon kinship matrilineally, tracing descent through mothers only. Matrilineages are grouped into larger matrilineal clans, each with its own name inspired by something significant in the life of the founding ancestor, whether a lion hunt (lion clan), herding success (cattle clan), or extensive travel (road clan). These exogamous clans are celebrated in song and dance at weddings, and members praise their clan by naming the waterholes dug by clan ancestors that continue to provide water. Clan membership is less relevant to the lives of Oshiwambo-speakers raised outside Owambo, who may not even know the name of their own matrilineal clan.

Siblings (aamwameme, the children of one mother) are especially close. The children of sisters also call each other aamwameme and treat each other as siblings. A suffix (-gona) can be added to indicate that a relative is a cousin rather than a sibling, but this is distancing and rude. Terms for birth position (oldest, middle, youngest) are often used as terms of address, both between relatives and between friends.

Traditionally, groups of girls went through an initiation ceremony (olufuko or efundula). This ceremony included tests to ensure that girls were not pregnant and were educated about their new roles; it concluded with a community-wide celebration. Girls went through initiation anytime between puberty and their early thirties, depending on when their household and matrilineal relatives felt economically prepared to contribute to the ceremony and to lose their labor. An initiated woman could have sex, bear children, get married, and move away to live with her husband near his matrilineal relatives. Polygamy was the traditional ideal.

Christian missionaries strongly opposed both female initiation and polygyny, and the norm in highly Christian Namibian Owambo in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been monogamous marriage with a Western-style church ceremony. Insofar as polygyny has persisted, it has gone underground; that is, a “polygynous” man has one wife but maintains long-term relationships with and provides material support for one or more additional women and any children they bear. Female initiation was abandoned entirely, but in the early twenty-first century students began performing elements of the ceremony as part of school cultural competitions. In 2012, the first olufuko in decades that effectuated the participants’ transition from girlhood to womanhood took place in Ombalantu. Sponsored and supported by traditional leaders and government officials, this became an annual event, with more and more participants coming from all over Owambo. Some have criticized the ceremony as degrading to women, backward, encouraging promiscuity, and incompatible with Christianity, while others have praised it as traditional, educational, revolving around family and identity, and contributing to self-respect. On the Angolan side of the border, female initiation never died out, and a small minority of Namibian Ovambo girls crossed into Angola to be initiated during the period when that wasn’t possible closer to home.

The domestic unit centers around a man as head of household, his wife or (traditionally) wives, and their children. Additional relatives, such as foster children, widows and their children, or single adults join households for varying lengths of time. Residence was traditionally patrilocal, with adult men building households near those of their matrilineal kin. Due to population pressures in Namibian Owambo in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, residence became neolocal, determined by the availability of land and/or job opportunities.

Traditionally, when a man died his matrilineal relatives inherited his movable property, with his wife/wives and children receiving only a small amount of food and a few household goods at the discretion of the direct heirs. His farmland reverted to the local headman for resale; the deceased’s matrilineal kin had first option to buy. In Namibia, these inheritance norms were contested throughout the twentieth century by some Ovambos and by Christian churches, but to little effect. In 1993, the traditional authorities determined that widows must be allowed to continue living in their late husbands’ homes as head of household without paying anything for the transfer of the land—a position incorporated into statutory law in 2002. Many widows have since been able to take advantage of this policy, and cases of dispossession have declined dramatically.

Children are socialized at home by their parents and other older relatives to participate in household tasks, to know how they are related to others in their social world, to care for their juniors, to be respectful to their elders, and in general to have a group orientation. The highest praise is to say that a person has ombili (“peace”), meaning that he or she gets along well with others. Before the widespread availability of formal education, children were schooled through the stories told and riddles posed by their elders at evening gatherings around the fire. Older people lament that this tradition has fallen by the wayside as the focus is now on Western-style formal education, highly valued as a route to economic success. Peers both at school and in play groups also play an important role in the socialization process.

Social status was traditionally based on membership in, or strong connections to, a royal lineage. For men, status also depended on the size of their herds and households, requiring hard work and social skills, with inheritance playing a role. To a lesser degree, women could use the same means to accumulate property, and also gained status through bearing children. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, status can also be earned by both men and women through education, wage labor, and entrepreneurial activity. Older people are shown respect by younger people.

In the precolonial era, Ovambo peoples lived in independent polities. Most were centralized and led by a king or queen chosen from the royal lineage. Monarchs were responsible for ensuring fertility and productivity and for protecting people and their property. They controlled the distribution of land, decided the timing of productive activities, kept grain stores for distribution as needed, maintained security forces, headed the court system, and carried out religious rituals essential for the fertility of the polity. Some polities were decentralized; for example, in the distant past the residents of Ombalantu killed their cruel king and vested power in popularly-chosen village leaders. In centralized kingdoms royal power was both sacred and secular, and was executed by councilors and other appointees, while in Ombalantu village leaders wielded secular power and members of the royal lineage carried out religious rituals.

During the colonial era, traditional leadership was made subservient to the South African and Portuguese colonial administrations in the interest of meeting colonial needs, losing considerable credibility as a consequence. In Namibia since independence, traditional leaders have worked to improve their reputations and demonstrate their relevance; they play an especially important role in land allocation and dispute settlement.

Social control is exercised by the Namibian or Angolan police force and court system and by traditional authorities. On the Namibian side of the border, traditional authorities have worked since independence to codify customary laws and norms, changing some in the process to accord with the country’s constitution, particularly on issues of women’s rights. People strongly support these changes, which have made the system more predictable and fair. Enforcing social norms also happens informally within households and communities, where the most highly valued character trait is the ability to get along peacefully with others.

External conflicts during the precolonial era primarily involved raiding for cattle and slaves; these intensified with the introduction of guns by European traders in the mid-1800s. During the colonial era, there was extensive conflict with the South African authorities on the Namibian side of the border and with the Portuguese authorities on the Angolan side of the border. Since independence in 1990, Namibian Oshiwambo-speakers have taken pride in living at peace, while Angolan Oshiwambo-speakers have worked on building more secure and prosperous lives in the aftermath of the civil war that ended in 2002.

In the indigenous religion, Kalunga was the creator god and source of rain, but was remote from humanity. While people invoked the name of Kalunga in seeking safety from dangers and assistance in times of need, they also made offerings to their ancestors to ensure the health and well-being of their households and lineages, with the royal ancestors playing an important role in ensuring the health and fertility of the polity as a whole. Christian missionaries first arrived in Owambo in 1870, and people began converting to Christianity in substantial numbers in the 1910s, during and after a series of severe droughts that caused people to question indigenous religious beliefs, including the belief that the royal ancestors could intercede with Kalunga for rain if the proper rituals were carried out. By the late 1940s, about half the population in Namibian Owambo had converted to Christianity, and by the mid-1970s, nearly everyone had converted. Most Ovambo Christians are Lutherans, with the rest largely belonging to the Catholic and Anglican churches.

In the indigenous religion, rituals were carried out by laypeople and also by specialists with varying levels of training and status who performed rites on behalf of either commoners or royalty as needed and were paid for their services. In Christian churches, priests or ministers play a central role alongside lay leaders who do Bible readings, assist with rituals, and run abbreviated services when a priest or minister is not available.

In the indigenous religion, there were life-cycle ceremonies at critical stages like birth, female initiation, and death, and in the kingdom, there were a series of ceremonies related to the burial of an old king and the installation of a new king. Rainmaking rituals were especially important for the success of the agro-pastoral economy. Offerings were made to the spirits at key moments in economic life (at harvest, at the start of fishing season, before excavating salt or iron), in times of misfortune (whether individual, such as illness, or societal, such as drought), and after breaking a taboo. For many Christian Ovambos, attending Sunday church services is an important part of life; church-based life-cycle ceremonies like baptisms, weddings, and funerals have replaced their indigenous equivalents.

Traditional dance, uuvano, involves complex, improvised, full-body movements in response to polyrhythmic clapping accompanied by repetitively-sung lyrics. Uuvano were traditionally performed to celebrate weddings, homecomings, and female initiations. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, they also are performed at political events, fundraisers, cultural exhibitions, and gym classes. Christian hymns are sung in church, and Christian youth and women’s groups compose songs in hymn style for performances at their own gatherings and at public events.

Women weave patterned baskets and make strings of tiny beads (ostrich eggshell, glass, or metal) to wear around their necks, waists, and ankles. Traditionally, men carved wooden objects for household use which they decorated with geometric designs. Before widespread conversion to Christianity, women wore elaborate hairstyles that indicated fine-grained status ranking in regard to age, initiation, and marriage, also varying somewhat according to clan and polity affiliation. Folktales and riddles played an important role in traditional home-based education, and some have been included in school readers.

Traditional medical practioners, known as oonganga, specialize in particular approaches and afflictions. They diagnose the cause of illness as natural, or as attributable to taboo transgression, witchcraft, ancestral anger, and/or Kalunga, and they prescribe the relevant treatment, ranging from herbal medicines to animal sacrifice. Missionaries strongly opposed traditional medicine and introduced biomedical care; few took advantage of such treatment through the first half of the twentieth century, after which more and more Christian converts started choosing biomedicine, now widely preferred to traditional medicine for many illnesses. Biomedical care is much more widely available in Namibia, where the South African regime first subsidized mission clinics and then took charge of the medical system, and where the post-independence government has invested greatly in expanding access, compared to Angola, where the missions provided only limited care, the Portuguese regime offered no support, and the civil war devastated the post-independence economy. There, oonganga continue to play an important role in the early twenty-first century, and they sometimes cross the border to carry out healing rituals in Namibia.

In the indigenous belief system, people continued to play important roles in the lives of their descendants after death. In addition to having provided their descendants with cattle, land, and waterholes, ancestors continued as protectors and helpers after death as long as they were remembered and respected through frequent, small offerings. If neglected, they could cause various misfortunes to afflict their descendants, who then required the intervention of an onganga (healer). Royal ancestors played a particularly important role as intermediaries with Kalunga, the supreme creator and provider of rain. Christian missionaries challenged these indigenous beliefs: in Namibia, Christian converts widely abandoned rituals related to the ancestors, and Kalunga became the Christian God in heaven. It is likely that Ovambos living in Angola maintain stronger beliefs and practices related to the ancestors.

The culture summary was written by Wendi Haugh in August, 2016.

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