The Republic of Namibia is a country in south west Africa. It has a total area of 824,290 km2. The climate is desert; hot, dry; rainfall sparse and erratic. The terrain is mostly high plateau with the Namib Desert along the coast and the Kalahari Desert in the east. Natural resources are diamonds, copper, uranium, gold, lead, tin, zinc, salt, vanadium, natural gas, fish; suspected deposits of coal and iron ore. The religion is predominantly Christian. The principal language is Afrikaans spoken by about 60% of the white population, German 33%, and the official language, English spoken by about 7% of the population; there are also several indigenous languages.
Namibia was annexed by Germany in 1884, and conquered by South Africa in 1915. The League of Nations granted South Africa a mandate to govern the territory in 1920. The mandate was terminated by the UN in 1966 but this was ignored by South Africa, as was the 1971 ruling by the International Court of Justice that the territory be surrendered, and this resulted in a violent uprising led by SWAPO that resulted in independence for Namibia in 1990. Research Namibia