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Namaland | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1980–1989 | |||||||||
 Location of the Bantustan (green) within South West Africa (grey) | |||||||||
| Status | Bantustan Second-tier authority | ||||||||
| Capital | Keetmanshoop | ||||||||
| History | |||||||||
• Established | 1980 | ||||||||
• Re-integrated into Namibia | May 1989 | ||||||||
| Currency | South African rand | ||||||||
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Namaland was a Bantustan and then later a non-geographic ethnic-based second-tier authority, the Representative Authority of the Namas, the in South West Africa (present-day Namibia), intended by the apartheid government to be a self-governing homeland for the Nama people. Namaland comprised an area of 2,156 km2 (832 sq mi) and was to accommodate the estimated 34,806 southern Namas of the South West African territory.
The term Namaland also covers a much broader region of southern Namibia which is the traditional home of the northern Nama or Namaqua people. Their language, Nama, is the only surviving dialect of the Khoekhoe language. The suffix -qua means “people” and can be added to the names of most Khoekhoe groups. The region of the Northern Cape south of the Orange River is called Namaqualand.