#04 Namibia’s “Damaraland”: A multicultural experience

Namibia’s “Damaraland”

… a multicultural experience

If you like to listen to authentic Damara music then this Episode is for you. It contains ancient Damara children songs which you are unlikely to find anywhere else. Many books about Namibia introduce you to the southern Kunene region as special ethnical place where the Damara live. However, Damara is just a language, which is spoken by quite a few ethnical groups. Today, the southern Kunene region is a multicultural place, because many people have a different cultural background.
This is, because they were brought from South Africa by brutal force to Damaraland’s stony desert. This initiative was called by the former apartheid government the ‘the Black Spot Removal Programme’ and started at about 1973/74. Johannes Chola the grandfather from Ichnatzitz Jansen is over 90 years old and worked underground in a Cobalt mine close to Johannesburg before he was brought to this place here. Today, there are initiatives to let the people return but many of them still live here, in Damaraland, how they still call it, because that’s now the place where their hard is.