Damara

The Damara, self-styled Daman, are an indigenous people of Namibia speaking the Nama Khoe tongue, though genetic evidence links them to the Bantu Herero and Himba, suggesting ancestors exchanged an earlier Bantu language and way of life for a Khoekhoe one. Their traditions count them with the San among the country's oldest inhabitants, chiefs remembered back to the fourteenth century.

They first lived between the Kunene and Kavango rivers and later drifted south to mountains around Brandberg, Waterberg and Erongo, hunting, herding, growing pumpkins, corn and tobacco and smithing copper and iron.

An invasion about 1600 broke their kingdom, scattering them into named clans, some to the Kalahari sands and others to mountain refuges that gave them the Bergdamara, or mountain Damara, label. As Nama and Herero herdsmen took the central plateau, many Damara lost their land and became household dependents.