Herero

The Herero, who call themselves Ovaherero, are a Bantu pastoral people of south-western Africa, spread across Namibia and adjoining Angolan lands. Unlike farming Bantu peoples, they built their society around cattle: herds were the measure of wealth, and their milking customs and cattle vocabulary point to contacts with older Cushitic and Khoisan pastoral traditions.

In the 1400s the Herero migrated into what is now Namibia from the east and settled as herdsmen in the arid coastal lowlands and the inland escarpment.

The first Europeans began to settle among them in the late 1700s, and from the early 1800s the Nama, moving north from South Africa with firearms, displaced Herero clans and opened decades of bitter warfare, later giving way to cultural exchange between the two peoples.