Africa's cleanest capital — German colonial buildings, kapana street food, and the gateway to the Namib Desert and Etosha
Windhoek (population 450,000, the capital and largest city of Namibia) is the most orderly, well-maintained capital in sub-Saharan Africa — a city that functions efficiently by the standards of any continent, with reliable water, electricity, and public services in a country of only 2.7 million people spread across 824,000 km². The German colonial legacy (Germany's South West Africa, 1884–1915) is unusually legible in the architecture: the Alte Feste fortress (1890), the Lutheran Christuskirche (1910), and the Tintenpalast (Parliament building, 1913) are genuine German colonial buildings in t…
Windhoek was established as the administrative capital of German South West Africa in 1890 by Major Curt von François, who built the Alte Feste fortress on the site of a Herero chief's kraal. German colonial rule (1884–1915) was marked by the Herero and Nama genocide (1904–1908) — the systematic mass killing of the Herero and Nama peoples in response to an uprising against colonial land seizure, considered the first genocide of the 20th century, in which 60,000–100,000 people were killed by starvation, murder, and concentration camps. South Africa administered the territory as South West Afri…