Dear Editor,
Recently, I heard conversations on the name change of Lüderitz. I visited Lüderitz in December 2014. To my amazement I found a living German museum with houses built over a 100 years ago. Not many towns in Namibia have that part of history alive.
It was from the mining settlement of Kolmanskop outside of Lüderitz that we had the first electrified town in the whole of Africa, the switchboards are still there to touch. Here in 1910 people made ice blocks and had cold rooms in the desert, light bulbs, conveyer systems, X-rays, state-of-the-art hospitals and electricity everywhere.
While I fully support the name changes of Caprivi region to Zambezi and from Lüderitz constituency to !Nami#nus, I fail to see what is the matter with Lüderitz as a name for the town. It is part and parcel of Namibian history and it is the name that brings tourists to this remote town. We must stop arguing about things we do not know or understand, let us learn world history and the history of inventions, exploration and innovations and see why people visit the town.
The name is as part of the town as is the Cray Fish Festival. People also need to see the dark side of the town like the history of Shark Island. But nobody will come and visit the area if we replace it with the name of a town which never existed and erase the town from the map by erasing a 100-year-old name. The Lüderitz economy is linked to the name as a brand name and marketing tool. It’s part of history as are Aus and Bethanie missions on the same route. I rarely mind about names and often we can change them, but the name and this town are one.
In May 1883, Lüderitz bought the anchorage at Angra Pequena and the land 8 km around it from Captain Josef Frederiks II of Bethanie for 100 pound in gold and 200 rifles. Three months later, on August 25, Frederiks sold Lüderitz a stretch of land 140 kilometres wide, between the Orange River and Angra Pequena, for 500 pound of gold and 60 rifles. Lüderitz named the sum of all his South-West African acquisitions Lüderitzland.
Lüderitzland, today part of the Sperrgebiet, was far bigger than Frederiks had thought because the German miles were larger than the common mile in the then English territory.
However, the town of Lüderitz was not part of this dispute and thus legal. Frederiks was only concerned about the illegally acquired inland area, not the shore of the Atlantic Ocean where there were no settlements and which was of no value to his tribe.
The bay itself was genuinely bought and the harbour and all around developed by the engineers of the time when the rest of the much of the landscape was literally in the dark, go and see the living museum of Lüderitz still standing today.
People survived in a hostile environment and created a town, with its social clubs for the first settlers, even a library was built in the dunes. And again in a place as un-inviting and harsh as the Lüderitz bay, a 100 years after we have preserved the architecture and German culture, it should be an example of what we could do in the north to attract tourist to discover the old way of living and its natural environment. Not many know that more tourist pass through the small town of Lüderitz than in the whole Kavango Region. Lüderitz is among the 10 most-visited places in Namibia with 7 percent of all holiday visitors making the trip to this far remote area because of its name, according to the MCA exit survey 2013.
Removing the name of the town is killing off the economy, and the whole tourist sector there. I myself went there because of the strange name and I was not disappointed as it is linked in stone and around every corner we have a vision in the past, the good and the bad.
*Patrick Hilger
Economist and active member of the hospitality sector living 1 450km from Lüderitz in the Kavango Region, caring for Namibia.