Vaalgras
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Vaalgras
Vaalgras ( af, pale grass) is a village in Namibia's ǁKaras Region. Located northeast of Keetmanshoop, the village is also home of the ''Vaalgras Traditional Authority''. It is home to a community of the Oorlam people, a group descends from the OvaHerero, Nama and other groups.Vaalgras community patches up wounds
''The Namibian'', 22 March 2006


Notable residents

* Emil Appolus * *

Emil Appolus
Emil Appolus (10 March 1935, in Vaalgras, ǁKaras Region - 28 May 2005, in Keetmanshoop) was a Namibian politician and businessperson. Living in Cape Town, Appolus was part of early discussions on Namibian independence. In 1957, Appolus became a founding member of the Ovamboland People's Congress, the forerunner to the current ruling party, SWAPO. When the OPC merged to create SWANU, Sam Nujoma and Fanuel Kozonguizi were two of the five members of the executive committee. He authored the first Black newspaper in Namibia, The South West News (Afrikaans Die Suidwes Nuus). The South West News was later banned for nationalistic content. After involvement in the 1960-65 Congo Crisis, Appolus ended up in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where he was deported to Pretoria, South Africa for illegally leaving the country. After receiving bail, Appolus fled to Bechuanaland (now Botswana) en route to Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Appolus was the first SWAPO representative in Cairo, an importa ...
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Willem Konjore
Reverend Willem Konjore (30 July 1945—10 June 2021) was a Namibian politician. He was a member and a deputy speaker of the National Assembly of Namibia, and served in cabinet from 2005 to 2010. Early life and education Konjore was born on 30 July 1945 in Kais, a small settlement in what today is the ǁKaras Region. He trained as a teacher from 1966 to 1967 at St Joseph's Teacher Training Centre in Döbra and studied theology in the Diocese of Keetmanshoop and Mariental from 1976 to 1979. From 1968 to 1990 he worked at several schools, first as teacher in Tses in southern Namibia and later as principal and manager in Khorixas. Political career A member of SWAPO, Konjore was a member of the National Assembly of Namibia beginning with the Constituent Assembly in 1989 and ending following the election of the 5th National Assembly in 2010. He served as deputy speaker of this body from 2000 to 2005. He was appointed Minister of Environment and Tourism in 2005, and was moved ...
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Eric Biwa
Eric Biwa (born 8 May 1953 in Vaalgras, ǁKaras Region) is a former Namibian politician with the Patriotic Unity Movement (PUM), a party which was a member of the United Democratic Front (UDF). Pre-independence A former combatant in the Namibian War of Independence with SWAPO's armed wing, Biwa was one of many alleged spies detained near Lubango, Angola in the 1980s. Biwa founded the PUM in July 1989 ahead of the 1989 elections and immediately led the party into the UDF alliance. Biwa was a member of the National Assembly of Namibia from its founding as the Constituent Assembly A constituent assembly (also known as a constitutional convention, constitutional congress, or constitutional assembly) is a body assembled for the purpose of drafting or revising a constitution. Members of a constituent assembly may be elected b ... prior to independence in 1989 until his resignation in 2003. He was replaced by Gustaphine Tjombe.
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Namibia
Namibia (, ), officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in Southern Africa. Its western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Zambia and Angola to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and east. Although Kazungula, it does not border Zimbabwe, less than 200 metres (660 feet) of the Botswanan right bank of the Zambezi, Zambezi River separates the two countries. Namibia gained independence from South Africa on 21 March 1990, following the Namibian War of Independence. Its capital and largest city is Windhoek. Namibia is a member state of the United Nations (UN), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the African Union (AU) and the Commonwealth of Nations. The driest country in sub-Saharan Africa, Namibia has been inhabited since pre-historic times by the San people, San, Damara people, Damara and Nama people. Around the 14th century, immigration, immigrating Bantu peoples arrived as part of the Bantu expansion. Since ...
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ǁKaras Region
The ǁKaras Region (pronounced , with a lateral click) is the southernmost and least densely populated of the 14 regions of Namibia; its capital is Keetmanshoop. The name assigned to the region reflects the prominence of the Karas mountain range in its southern part. The ǁKaras region contains the municipality of Keetmanshoop, the towns Karasburg, Lüderitz and Oranjemund, and the self-governed villages Aroab, Berseba, Bethanie, Koës and Tses. ǁKaras' western border is the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Its location in Namibia's south means that it shares a long border in the south and east with the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. Domestically, it borders only the Hardap Region, to the north. Politics As of 2020, ǁKaras had 56,352 registered voters. The name of this region was Karas Region (without the alveolar lateral click of the Khoekhoegowab language) since Namibian independence in 1990. In an effort to consolidate spelling, it was renamed to ''ǁKaras Region ...
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Keetmanshoop
Keetmanshoop is a city in the ǁKaras Region of southern Namibia, lying on the Trans-Namib Railway from Windhoek to Upington in South Africa. It is named after Johann Keetman, a German industrialist and benefactor of the city. History Before the colonial era, the settlement was known as ''ǂNuǂgoaes'' or ''Swartmodder'', both of which mean "Black Marsh" and indicated the presence of a spring in the area. The first white settler, Guilliam Visagie, arrived here in 1785. When in February 1850 the Kharoǃoan clan ( Keetmanshoop Nama) split from the Red Nation, the main subtribe of the Nama people, they settled permanently here. In 1860 the Rhenish Missionary Society founded a mission there to christianise the local Nama. The first missionary, Johann Georg Schröder, arrived in Keetmanshoop on April 14, 1866, which is now marked as the founding date of Keetmanshoop. The mission station was named after the German trader and director of the Rhenish Missionary Society, , who supp ...
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The Namibian
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with pronouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of pronoun ''thee'') when followed by a v ...
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Oorlam People
The Oorlam or Orlam people (also known as Orlaam, Oorlammers, Oerlams, or Orlamse Hottentots) are a subtribe of the Nama people, largely assimilated after their migration from the Cape Colony (today, part of South Africa) to Namaqualand and Damaraland (now in Namibia). Oorlam clans were originally formed from mixed-race descendants of indigenous Khoikhoi, Europeans and slaves from Mozambique, Madagascar, India, and Indonesia. Similar to the other Afrikaans-speaking group at the time, the Trekboers, Oorlam originally populated the frontiers of the infant Cape Colony, later living as semi-nomadic commandos of mounted gunmen. Also like the Boers, they migrated inland from the Cape, and established several states in what are now South Africa and Namibia. The Oorlam migration in South Africa also produced the related Griqua people. History Beginning in the late 18th century, Oorlam communities migrated from the Cape Colony north to Namaqualand. They settled places earlier occupi ...
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Herero People
The Herero ( hz, Ovaherero) are a Bantu ethnic group inhabiting parts of Southern Africa. There were an estimated 250,000 Herero people in Namibia in 2013. They speak Otjiherero, a Bantu language. Though the Herero primarily reside in Namibia, there are also significant populations in Botswana and Angola. In Botswana, the Hereros or Ovaherero are mostly found in Maun and some villages surrounding Maun. These villages among others are Sepopa, Toromuja, Karee and Etsha. Some of them are at Mahalapye. In the South eastern part of Botswana they are at Pilane. There are also a few of them in the Kgalagadi South, that is Tsabong, Omawaneni, Draaihoek and Makopong Villages. Overview Unlike most Bantu, who are primarily subsistence farmers,Immaculate N. Kizza, ''The Oral Tradition of the Baganda of Uganda: A Study and Anthology of Legends, Myths, Epigrams and Folktales'' p. 21: "The Bantu were, and still are, primarily subsistence farmers who would settle in areas, clear land, or ...
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Nama People
Nama (in older sources also called Namaqua) are an African ethnic group of South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. They traditionally speak the Nama language of the Khoe-Kwadi language family, although many Nama also speak Afrikaans. The Nama People (or Nama-Khoe people) are the largest group of the Khoikhoi people, most of whom have disappeared as a group, except for the Namas. Many of the Nama clans live in Central Namibia and the other smaller groups live in Namaqualand, which today straddles the Namibian border with South Africa. History For thousands of years, the Khoisan peoples of South Africa and southern Namibia maintained a nomadic life, the Khoikhoi as pastoralists and the San people as hunter-gatherers. The Nama are a Khoikhoi group. The Nama originally lived around the Orange River in southern Namibia and northern South Africa. The early colonialists referred to them as Hottentots. Their alternative historical name, "Namaqua", stems from the addition of the Khoekhoe ...
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Populated Places In The ǁKaras Region
Population typically refers to the number of people in a single area, whether it be a city or town, region, country, continent, or the world. Governments typically quantify the size of the resident population within their jurisdiction using a census, a process of collecting, analysing, compiling, and publishing data regarding a population. Perspectives of various disciplines Social sciences In sociology and population geography, population refers to a group of human beings with some predefined criterion in common, such as location, race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. Demography is a social science which entails the statistical study of populations. Ecology In ecology, a population is a group of organisms of the same species who inhabit the same particular geographical area and are capable of interbreeding. The area of a sexual population is the area where inter-breeding is possible between any pair within the area and more probable than cr ...
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