Ovamboland

Ovamboland (also: Owamboland) was the name given by English-speaking visitors to the land inhabited by the Ovambo people in what is now northern Namibia and southern Angola. Its endonym is Ovambo ~ Owambo.

Before the First World War, some infrastructure in the area was provided by local Finnish missionaries of the Finnish Missionary Society, who established Ovamboland as their first mission field in 1870, the first mission being at Omandongo. Finnish scholars have studied Ovamboland quite extensively, mainly from the point of view of their own missionary work.

During the First World War South African troops conquered the German colony of South West Africa in 1915, and took control of Ovamboland in 1917, though it still lay outside the "police zone".

Following the Odendaal Commission in the 1950s the South African government decided to apply the apartheid policy in South West Africa, which South Africa continued to rule in terms of a League of Nations mandate, and continued to do so after the mandate was revoked in 1968.

Ovamboland then became a bantustan called Owambo, intended by the apartheid government to be a self-governing "homeland" for the Ovambo people. It was set up in 1968 and self-government was granted in 1973.

Owambo was the setting of a protracted counter-insurgency war that formed part of the Namibian War of Independence in Namibia, or South African Border War in South Africa.

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