A chart of the western coast of Africa from the eleventh degree…

Title

A chart of the western coast of Africa from the eleventh degree…

Description

Karte zeigt die Küste von Süd-Westafrika mit teilweise Kongo (Stadt Pointe-Noire), Angola, Namibia und Südafrika mit dem Kap der Guten Hoffnung. Des weiteren eine Titelkartusche und eine Windrose.

c. 1738

Artist

Child

Historical Description

The arid lands of southwest Africa have been the habitat and home of the San and Damara peoples for many thousands of years. Portuguese seafarers first discovered the land for Europe in the 15th century. However, due to the inhospitable conditions in the coastal regions, there was no significant settlement for a long time. In the course of numerous African migrations, Herero, Nama, Orlam and Ovambo tribes entered the country, beginning in the 17th century. It was not until the 19th century that a strong influx of European settlers began. These came mainly from Portugal, England and the German-speaking world. In the course of the African north-south migration of peoples between the 17th and 18th centuries, first the cattle-breeding Herero, who belonged to the Bantu tribes, entered Namibia from Botswana, then in the 19th century the Nama from the Cape Province and then the Afrikaners from the same direction. They all led an extermination campaign against the San and pushed them off to the east into the Kalahari, where they were reduced to a game-herding economy. The San still live there today - more tolerated than welcomed by the governments of South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, as they have so far stubbornly resisted all "civilization" efforts. Settlement by German immigrants began a good hundred to a hundred and fifty years after the first immigrants of the black tribes now living there and two hundred years after the settlement by Dutchmen, the so-called Boers or Afrikaans, in and around the Cape and the founding of Cape Town in 1652, respectively almost 400 years after the discovery by the Portuguese (Bartolomeu Diaz, 1488) and the later founding of a colony. The latter, however, did not last because of increasing difficulties with the Khoi Khoi and was abandoned after a punitive expedition by the Portuguese viceroy, who, together with himself, never returned, and was later replaced by the Dutch. After the German merchant Franz Adolf Eduard Lüderitz succeeded in acquiring vast tracts of land through treaties with native tribal leaders ("Lüderitz Bay"), the land from the Orange River to the Kunene River was declared a "protectorate" of German Southwest Africa in 1884 and then a German colony. The news of fabulous diamond discoveries virtually triggered a "gold rush" in the imperial German Empire.