The Uncanny Capital: Mapping the Historical Spatial Evolution of Windhoek

Abstract

This paper has traced the historic spatial development of Windhoek through five distinct socio-political epochs. These different periods’ spatial, aesthetic, and representational effects on the city’s urban landscape are presented in original maps, allowing a spatial-to-scale comparison and analysis of the city’s development. Rather than the discrete chapters in Windhoek’s urban development, successive occupations’ spatial compositions are shown to have been assembled from and grounded in the geomorphological, spatial, social, and administrative conditions preceding them. The paper expands the concept of the uncanny, the colonial drive to recreate home in foreign lands and local resistance to this, from the architectural to the urban. It describes how infrastructure, residential typologies and neighbourhood morphologies, memorials, places of memory, and public space were designed to segregate and subjugate Windhoek’s population and how this spatial legacy continues to inform city-making in Windhoek today. In doing so, the paper challenges the notion that the city’s spatial structure, layout, and urban planning are neutral quantitative entities.

Introduction

Settlement at the site of present-day Windhoek can be traced back to the Stone Age, but a lack of archaeological research and preservation as Windhoek expanded has destroyed or buried much of this historical record, leaving most of its pre-colonial history uncharted. The diverse claims to the site are reflected in its many names: /Ae//Gams in the Nama language and Otjomuise in the Otjiherero language meaning ‘place of hot water’ and ‘place of steam’ (Böhm, 2018, p. 206). In 1837, the trader James Alexander called it Queen Adelaide’s Bath; in 1842, the missionaries Carl Hugo Hahn and Heinrich Kleinschmidt named it Elberfeld (Zollmann, 2010, p. 216). Windhoek’s history of successive territorial occupations has inscribed its urban landscape with spatial relationships, places grounding belonging, and sites of memory and erasure.

Windhoek was, successively, the centre of the Oorlam Empire, the headquarters of the German Protectorate of South-West Africa, the capital of German South-West Africa, the capital of the mandated territory of South-West Africa administered by South Africa, and finally the capital of independent Namibia. These epochs imprinted their distinct spatial and aesthetic logic onto Windhoek’s urban landscape. Much prior urban research on Windhoek has focused on specific timeframes, setting aside an analysis of how these were grounded on prior spatial conditions and power relations. This paper traces the settlements’ spatial history, grouped into five distinct eras, through a series of original maps, beginning in pre-coloniality. In doing so, the continuities in the settlement’s spatial evolution are revealed. This spatial analysis aims to provide a historical reframing to examine present-day Windhoek’s spatial structure and city-making processes.

This analysis is theoretically framed by Obert’s development on Vidler’s notion of the architectural uncanny (Vidler, 1992), the condition of modern estrangement as particularly exemplified by post-colonial cities (Obert, 2015). Traces of colonial occupations remain carved into the urban landscape of Windhoek, the cause of the ‘anxious, unsettling, even inhospitable’ atmosphere, which retains spectral traces of subjugation and oppression as constant reminders of the colonial past (Obert, 2015, p. 2). The uncanny, for Obert,¹ lies in colonial pursuits to recreate home in foreign lands and the colonised subjects’ resistance to this. This paper develops the concept of the uncanny not only as one of architectural objects and symbols but as embedded in the city’s urban landscape and administrative processes.

Europeans produced most historical socio-spatial records on Windhoek in the period leading up to formal colonisation. The geographer JB Harley has drawn attention to maps as representations of power, showing how cartography was employed as a tool of colonisation, ownership, and exclusion (Harley, 2011). The early maps and place names of Windhoek are no exception. This paper acknowledges that absences and misrepresentations are fundamental to these sources, reflecting unequal power relations, racial oppression, and a White minority perspective with specific territorial ambitions.

An Ancient Settlement

In the 1960s, during alterations to Windhoek’s centrally located Zoo Park on Independence Avenue, prehistoric elephant kills and a variety of quartz stone tools were found dating back to Stone Age hunters from 5200 bc. Soil samples taken during the excavation showed that the surrounding area, now Windhoek’s CBD, presented abundant water and vegetation in contrast to the surrounding highland savannah. Several geothermal springs surfaced along a 1.5-km north–south geologic fault, arranged parallel to a ridgeline. The cooling spring water seeped down the slope towards the valley, creating a swampy area with lush vegetation (Scott et al., 1991), creating an ideal environment for the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Stone Age.

Fossilised skull findings near Windhoek in the 1960s, similar to the Boskop Man discovered in South Africa, indicate human habitation of the area from the Middle Stone Age (Sydow, 1969). Similar skulls nearby were found but destroyed by farmers (Sydow, 1969), a likely fate of much of the archaeological evidence as Windhoek developed. The language groups, social structures, migration patterns, and habits of the site’s inhabitants, from the Stone Age to the arrival of Europeans, remain largely undocumented, as do the spatial characteristics of their settlements. Herero and Damara folklore points to settlement at Windhoek around the eighteenth century (Heywood et al., 1993). The following chapter outlines the conditions leading to the establishment of a permanent settlement, eventually called Windhoek.

The Cape Colony and Trade Routes

European traders and missionaries from the Cape Colony established regional trade routes in the late eighteenth century, bringing significant political, social, and economic change to central and southern South-West Africa.² These changes included the Cape Colonial and transatlantic slave trade (Gewald, 1995). The region was inhabited by different language groups of foragers, hunters, and herders, whose complex relationships were defined by kinship, trade networks, and resource competition (Wallace & Kinahan, 2011, p. 46). These groups did not claim exclusive rights to specific territories but inhabited the region in fluid-mediated arrangements (Lau, 1987).

Figure 1 illustrates the regional system of trade routes. On the West coast, Walvis Bay was a natural deep-water harbour and had been charted and intermittently used by Europeans as far back as the fourteenth century when Diogo Cão and Bartolomeu Dias touched on the South-West African coast. The trade routes from the Cape Colony to central Namibia navigate the Great Escarpment, one of Africa’s major topographical features, steeply sloping from the high central Southern African plateau towards the oceans surrounding the tip of southern Africa on three sides. The Great Escarpment separates the mobile dunes of the Namib Desert, a 100–150-km tract of continuous desert running along the western edge of Namibia from the Central Plateau (Goudie & Viles, 2015). The trade routes ran inland of the Great Escarpment, avoiding the shifting desert sands. Windhoek is situated at their junction along the only passage through the mountainous central plateau connecting to Walvis Bay at the coast. The geomorphological conditions that shaped the trade routes combined with information from a German colonial exploratory map documenting grazing lands and water sources to sustain livestock in arid South-West Africa are described in Fig. 1, highlighting the favourable trade and human habitation conditions of the Khomas Hochland Plateau surrounding Windhoek.

Fig. 1

Pre-colonial Southern Africa, by author. Reference: (Gewald, 1995; von Francois, 1899) Overland trade routes in south-western Africa up to 1840 Erzfundstellen, Weide-u.Wasserverhaltnisse in Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika

Oorlam Windhoek

Windhoek’s origin and name come from the Oorlam, a mixed-race group who assimilated and migrated from the Cape Colony, settling in central South-West Africa in the nineteenth century. The Oorlam embodied the transformations sweeping across the region along the trade routes, incorporating some of the skills, identities, and language of the White settler Cape Dutch; embracing Christianity and monogamy; relying on guns and violent cattle-raiding practices by commando; and surviving mainly through trade with the Cape (Wallace & Kinahan, 2011, p. 51). These practices assembled new economies and forms of social organisation for the Oorlam, also altering the size, spatial layout, and permanence of settlements of local Nama, Herero, and Damara groups (Lau, 1986). Windhoek’s geomorphological characteristics were well suited to the Oorlam. The area was favourable for trade, militarily defensible, nestled within the Auas, Khomas Hochland, and Eros mountain ranges. It had sufficient grazing and water to sustain its inhabitants and the herds of raided cattle which were the primary commodity traded with the Cape Colony. In 1842, after a series of violent skirmishes and alliances with indigenous groups, Jonker Afrikaner, an Oorlam captein³ settled at Windhoek.

Under Jonker’s leadership, Windhoek became a bustling market town at the centre of the Oorlam empire of 2000–5000 inhabitants,⁴ with a stone chapel and skilfully constructed paved roads called baaiwegs to Cape Town and Walvis Bay (Böhm, 2018, p. 207; Wallace & Kinahan, 2011, p. 61; Zollmann, 2010, p. 216). Jonker, of Christian faith, cultivated relationships with European missionaries, who built a Rhenish Mission in the Klein Windhoek valley in 1871 (Beris, 1996, p. 56). Oorlam regional control was gradually challenged and eventually overthrown by the Herero in the 1860s; after which, Windhoek went into decline, and the Oorlam settlement was eventually largely abandoned.

Figure 2 combines a geomorphological mapping of the site’s Stone Age characteristics, combined with the earliest cartographic document by German officer Edgar von Üchtritz in 1891, who assessed the site’s suitability for the settlement of the German Colonial Society for Southwest Africa (von Francois, 1899, p. 120). The map shows the two clusters of geothermal springs on either side of the mountain ridge. The prehistoric elephant kill was in the swampy area to the west of the mountain ridge, which was bisected in a north–south direction by the trade route, southwards to the Cape and northwards to the coast. Jonker residence and the whitewashed stone church holding up to 600 people (Heywood et al., 1993, p. 6) were to the east of the ridge, on relatively flat land and 2 km removed from the trade route, for defensive purposes.

Fig. 2

Traces of Oorlam Windhoek, by author. Reference: Windhoek 1891, Üchtritz, Namibian National Archives, NAN-Map 1546

Von Üchtritz’ map, penned when Oorlam Windhoek was in ruins, indicates demarcated land parcels around Jonker’s residence and, further east, in today’s Avis, a cluster of huts around the geothermal springs. Despite the source map’s lack of details, a comparison to the preserved ruins of the Oorlam settlement ǁKhauxaǃnas in south-eastern Namibia will guide further discussion on Oorlam Windhoek’s spatial characteristics. ǁKhauxaǃnas was built near a reliable water source, with a stone perimeter wall enclosing a large area containing many dwellings constructed using a rectangular construction dry-stone method typical of colonial stock enclosures (Wallace & Kinahan, 2011). The settlement was positioned atop a slope, the defensive wall facing the approach from the Cape Colony, made up of distinct clusters of huts with individual access points through the wall, the lack of communal facilities expressing the social hierarchy of relatively autonomous family groups similar to other nomadic pastoral aggregation camps in Namibia (Wallace & Kinahan, 2011).

Oorlam Windhoek had two parts: a relatively openly accessible place to the west for trading and keeping incoming herds of cattle and the geothermal springs and lush swampy area providing grazing and water, with metal workshops and marketplaces attracting visitors from other settlements. The fortified permanent dwellings and cultivated fields were located on the ridge’s east, strategically using the hill as protection. Figure 2 shows a road perpendicular to the north–south trade route via a small pass in the ridge, leading to the largest land parcel in the eastern valley, containing the stone construction of Jonker’s residence, mission church and gardens, and an ox-enclosure. Like ǁKhauxaǃnas, this main entrance was likely fortified and the only opening large enough to admit an ox-cart. The other smaller land parcels are topographically arranged in the valley to be accessible via the largest, indicative of a social hierarchy of family units with Jonker at its apex. Von Üchtritz’ map labels the south-eastern cluster of dwelling Alte Pontoks (old huts), implying a circular mud construction, likely housing the indigenous groups that lived alongside, or were indentured to, the Oorlam.

Oorlam history remains inscribed in the toponomy of the place that has turned into modern-day Windhoek. Figure 2 shows present-day Jan Jonker Street and former Mission Road.⁵ The Rhenish Mission, ransacked in 1880 during the final destruction of Oorlam Windhoek by the Herero, was later taken over by the German troops, converted into the magistrate’s residence and eventually purchased by a new Roman Catholic Mission in 1899 (Beris, 1996, p. 57). In present-day Windhoek, the building remains innocuously tucked behind the Klein Windhoek Police Station on Sam Nujoma Drive. Some of the still-extant mission gardens and natural springs were redeveloped into the high-end ‘Am Weinberg’ Estate in 2004, incorporating the 1901 German colonial ‘Heritage House’ and today situated on Jan Jonker Road.⁶

Windhoek’s Oorlam history remains contested in modern-day Namibia. In 1965, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the German founding of Windhoek, the South African administration erected a monument outside the central municipal building, celebrating the German officer Curt von Francois as the city’s founder. The memorial and commemorative act were designed to strengthen White settler identity and allegiance between Afrikaans and German speakers, claiming the city as White settler heritage (Silvester, 2005). This act simultaneously expunged the settlement’s pre-colonial history and Oorlam origins and delegitimised non-White residents’ claims to belonging in the city, a symbolic un-homing and an uncanny constant reminder of displacement. Contestation around Windhoek’s provenance has recently crystallised around the monument, as calls to remove the statue as a symbol of colonial misrepresentation were refuted by von Francois’ Damara-speaking descendants, petitioning for its preservation (Ndeyanale, 2020). The statue was finally removed in 2022 (Melber, 2022).

The German Military Encampment

In 1890, a small contingent of German Schutztruppe⁷ led by von Francois, desperately needing a territorial headquarters for legitimacy and defensive purposes, declared the largely abandoned Oorlam Windhoek as their headquarters for the German Protectorate of South-West Africa. The choice of site was not incidental, capitalising on Oorlam-established urban infrastructures such as stone dwellings, paved roads, and agricultural irrigation systems and its trade and strategic significance (Heywood et al., 1993, pp. 10–11).

Figure 3 shows the German military encampment, tracing some elements of von Francois’ 1892 map, Windhoek’s first documented town-planning attempt. The settlement was divided into three distinct spatial parts: Groot Windhoek, Klein Windhoek, and the ‘Military Ridge’. Groot Windhoek accommodated stone and brick administrative buildings; its rectilinear grid-like pattern alluding to landscaped gardens reflects the imperial ambition to control and order natural landscapes. The ‘Military Ridge’ built on higher ground above Groot Windhoek for surveillance included canteens, field hospitals, forts, watch towers, stables, and storerooms, in a scattered arrangement. Klein Windhoek to the east centred around the Roman Catholic Mission and cultivated gardens. The Klein Windhoek valley used the Oorlam-built irrigation channels, roads, and remnant plantations and later provided harvests to the whole colony, remaining agriculturally productive until the 1960s (Heywood et al., 1993, p. 17). Arable land was divided into parcels of approximately 2 acres, indicating the introduction of colonial property rights, a set of legal and administrative processes by which permanent ownership was granted to White settlers.

Fig. 3

The military encampment 1890–1904, by author. Reference: Gr. Windhoek und die landwirtschaftliche Kolonie Kl.Windhoek, 1892, Namibian National Archives, NAN-Map 5954; (Moser, 2007). Die Anfänge Windhoeks. Ein Beitrag zur Frühgeschichte Südwestafrikas Fruühe Messstichaufnahme der Kaiserlichen Landesvermessung von DSWA im Mastab 1: 50 000, Auschnitt aus Blatt 1 Windhoek 1901

The 1890 Stone Fort, emulating a typical Roman military camp (Peters, 1983), remains at the city’s symbolic centre. The Fort became the administrative and logistic heart of the city, used by civilians and the military for storage, living quarters, and general civic assembly (Heywood et al., 1993, pp. 12–13). The homes of White farmers and merchants were arranged along the trade route opposite the formal landscaped arrangement of Groot Windhoek. Huts housing indigenous inhabitants were dispersed along the military ridge, likely for convenient proximity of workforce and surveillance over it. These indigenous huts also became the scene of an emerging ‘sexual economy’ preying on local women (Hartmann, 2007).

The colonial state in South-West Africa was relatively weak, its spaces of control small ‘islands of authority’ within the territory (Zollmann, 2010, p. 215). Figure 3 shows this unequal application of control replicated at the city scale, the contrast between the orderly greened landscape of Groot Windhoek conspicuous compared to the scattered private and military structures, settler homes, fields, and indigenous huts of the Military Ridge. Windhoek had defined ‘Europeanised’ spaces reflecting a formal colonial order, areas grounding White settlers’ claims to belonging. These islands of authority later evolved into systematic spatial tools of exclusion to the non-White population, uncannily demarcating Black and White spatial practices and bodies. As Windhoek grew, a lack of administrative enforcement, the hilly topography, poor anticipation of non-military functions, and private landholdings led to Groot Windhoek’s grid layout being abandoned in favour of organic and piece-meal growth (Böhm, 2018, p. 228). By 1903, Windhoek was the dominant urban settlement in South-West Africa, boasting a White civilian population of around 500 and 2000 African residents, many of whom ‘had arrived…under coercion’ (Wallace & Kinahan, 2011, p. 154).

German Colonial Windhuk

The colonial state in South-West Africa, prompted by international and local developments, began formalising in the 1890s. Windhuk experienced a flurry of construction, transforming the settlement from a military encampment into a settler frontier town scattered with architecture representative of the colonisers’ aestheticised sense of belonging and propriety. The ever-expanding colonial aspirations crystallised local resistance, resulting in the 1904–1908 war and genocide inflicted on the Herero and Nama people.

Figure 4 shows the spatial configuration of German Colonial Windhuk; its spatial structure and layout are clearly derived from Oorlam Windhoek. The commercial city centre, formerly Groot Windhuk, along the erstwhile Oorlam trade route, claimed by the Germans as Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse, and Klein Windhuk’s agricultural infrastructure, natural resources, and defensible layout transformed into a White residential suburb. The ‘Military Ridge’ overlooking the city developed into the symbolic tripartite of the colonial crown. A railway, completed in 1902, connected Windhuk with Swakopmund on the coast. The railway was laid roughly along the former Oorlam baaiweg trade route, reinforcing the settlement’s north–south axis. Black residents, providing crucial labour to the settlement, lived in locations,⁸ while White settlers lived in suburbs. In 1912, a new road was blasted through the mountain ridge creating a more direct connection to Klein Windhuk (Bähr, 1970, p. 45), named Curt von François Straße. Despite outnumbering White residents by more than two to one (Böhm, 2018, p. 302), Fig. 4 shows the spatial discrepancies between suburbs and locations. Building regulations codified legally admissible structures, stipulating expensive, imported, and extraneously crafted building materials and lengthy legal processes to register these, essentially excluding the Black population from legal home ownership.

Fig. 4

German colonial Windhuk, 1904–1915, by author. Reference: Director of Works Office, Windhuk. January 1921, Namibian National Archives, NAN-Map 1570; (Böhm, 2018) Author’s representation based on map showing Tram System 08 July 1921, no scale)

Figure 4 shows the locations scattered throughout Windhuk (#4, 9, 10, 16, 17, 19), the Black workforce in proximity to railways, gardens, and compounds for road construction and maintenance. After the war, these were consolidated into the Main Location (#14) to better control the Black population. The siting of the Main Location employed features of the natural landscape, its ephemeral rivers, for spatial containment. The new railway became a deliberate barrier to the city and the suburbs. The new industrial areas bookending the city centre further reinforced this east–west separation of Black and White residents. Klein Windhuk’s topological relationship to the city, initially an Oorlam military defence strategy, was reconditioned as a fortification and consolidation of White suburban space. Places of worship, hospitals, and cemeteries were also segregated. Black amenities were typically built within walking distance of the locations, like the Klein Windhuk location and Roman Catholic Church (#10), Veronica Street Cemetery (#8), Lukas church ( #7), the Klein Windhuk location church (#9), the city-centre police (#16) and government locations (#18) and the Lutheran church and cemetery (#17), the Main Location (#15) and its cemetery (#12), and the railway workers compound (#19) with its hospital and cemetery (#20). Unlike other German colonial cities such as Qingdao in China, Windhuk was not intended as an example of German empire building, and the lax enforcement of regulations along with local contestations and administrative exemptions led to the relatively ad hoc development of the city (Böhm, 2018, p. 43). This ad hoc development is evidenced by the scattered Black locations and attendant public spaces across the city, forming a walkable network of Black residential areas’ public spaces.

Metcalf describing British imperialism in India considers colonial architecture a tool of political power emulating the colonisers’ history, thereby confronting and silencing incomprehensible local aesthetic and spatial traditions (Metcalf, 1989). The German colonisers similarly aesthetically imprinted their ambitions into Windhoek’s architectural landscape. The city’s ‘colonial crown’, a trio of administrative, religious, and military buildings characteristic of the ideal German colonial city (Speitkamp, 2008, p. 118), was expanded from the 1892 Stone Fort (#2) to include the 1910 neo-Romanesque Christuskirche (#5) and the 1913 administrative building dubbed Tintenpalast and its accompanying formal gardens (#3). These buildings, adapting Wilhelminian architecture into a local vernacular, SWA Veranda Style,⁹ reproduced an idealised version of a typical provincial German town. To the non-European population, these structures were alien in material, construction method, and form. There were ‘abundant gardens in European residential quarters’ with ‘central areas interspersed with public parks and tree-lined squares’ (Böhm, 2018, p. 48). By comparison, archival photographs show no greening in the Main Location save for a line of trees creating a boundary to the city centre.

Memorials to German sacrifice and military victory were erected, some of which remain today. The equestrian statue, the Reiterdenkmal, waserected in 1912 next to the Stone Fort on the site of the former prisoner-of-war camps. It would, in time, become a symbol of settler culture and the genocide simultaneously, metonymic as the Herero name for Windhoek, and iconic of tourism, highlighting Namibia’s unique (German) cultural dimensions (du Pisani, 2015; Elago, 2015; Peters, 1981; Silvester, 2005). The siting of memorial markers celebrating German military achievements was also a re-writing of Windhuk’s history, claiming the space in the city centre and dislocating the Herero and Nama history and place-specific memory of the war. Colonial naming practices, allocating and fixing meaning, also transferred emotional and cognitive ownership of places to the German colonisers while excluding Africans (Aleff, 2017). This dissonance at the city centre has endured, underpinning the process and design of a new layer of memorials in 2009, designed to claim the site’s history in service to a new politically expedient narrative.

The aftermath of the 1904–1908 war and genocide doubled the Black population to 4000 in 1915, outnumbering the White population by more than half (Wallace & Kinahan, 2011, p. 191). The war also marked the emergence of a phenomenologically unsettled post-conflict landscape, haunted by individual and collective traumatic memories of the genocide. As the German colonial regime began constructing the Main Location, the project of dislocating Black residents from sites anchoring belonging such as churches and cemeteries to suit the town-planning demands of the White minority began. The German colonial era generated the city’s spatial and legal conditions for segregation by encoding different spatial and material parameters for Black and White residential neighbourhoods, an aesthetic reinforcement of the east–west division set up by the railways and industrial areas. These colonial building regulations and legal system of property rights remain in place today, manufacturing the administration’s punitive stance towards informal self-built settlements and unregistered land tenure.

Apartheid Windhoek

South Africa overthrew South-West Africa’s German administration in 1915 during World War I. British forces briefly administered the country, which South Africa ruled from 1921 as a Mandated Territory of the League of Nations. After World War II, the Nationalist South African administration effectively governed the country as a province of South Africa, despite international protests. The interwar period, from 1915 to 1946, began with a relatively weak body politic in South-West Africa and ended in a consolidated apartheid state with clearly defined control of geographic space (Hayes et al., 1998).

In 1927, the Municipal Council issued regulations setting the minimum standard for erected shelters for Black residents, with four classifications: category A, ‘ramshackle tin hovels’; category B, ‘second-hand timber frame with ridged roof’; category C, ‘better than average’; and category D’s ‘brick houses resembling features of European housing standards’ (Melber, 2016, p. 9). The Main Location was subdivided into ethnic sections, a spatial precursor to the emanant state policy of ethnic segregation. The types of homes were analogous with assigned ethnic identities, with most category C houses occupied by Herero residents and category D houses primarily found in the Coloured section (Melber, 2016, p. 9). Housing typologies and materials were thus again employed to reinforce difference and segregation, this time between different ethnic groups within the locations.

Apartheid was enforced more rigidly in South-West Africa than in South Africa (W. C. Pendleton, 1996, p. 38). The apartheid regime increasingly legislated and restricted Black urban residents (while promoting White immigration), using pass systems based on employment, curfews, and repatriation to the rural homelands set up by the 1961 Odendaal Plan. As a result, for the first time, in the city’s history, its White population matched the African and Coloured populations (Melber, 2016, p. 9). The suburb of Windhoek West, west of the railway line, expanded as the need for White residential space increased. The nearby Main Location had long been a source of consternation to the South African administration, undermining apartheid ideology with its vibrant culture, social life, and ethnic groups living together in relative harmony (Gewald, 2009; Melber, 2016; Wallace & Kinahan, 2011). A 1952 inspection report described the area as a public health hazard (Obert, 2016). Public health was used to justify White ‘fears of spatial and “moral” transgressions’, and Black women, in particular, found themselves pathologised by apartheid ideology (Wallace, 1997, pp. 43–46). In 1959, the South African administration’s decision to forcibly relocate Main Location residents led to protests, resulting in the Windhoek massacre that killed at least 13, pre-dating similar events in Sharpeville, South Africa.

Infrastructural and civic projects of unprecedented scale and ambition permanently inscribed apartheid’s ideology as it evolved onto Windhoek’s urban landscape. Figure 5 shows the ways these projects shaped Windhoek. Infrastructural works began around 1929, with the Avis Dam reservoir (#6) constructed with relief funds during the interwar years¹⁰ along with road improvements and a waterborne sewerage system. This work was mainly undertaken by White workers, who were privileged and compensated above Coloured or Black workers (Böhm, 2018, p. 226). In 1930, the railway was extended eastwards to Gobabis, tracing the hill above Jan Jonker Street. The new townships, Khomasdal (#14) for Coloured people and Katutura (#13) for Black people, were separated from White Windhoek by the construction of the Western Bypass Highway in the 1970s. Haarhoff describes this spatial tactic in apartheid South Africa, where planning handbooks detail the use of railways, main roads, rivers, streams, and ridges as appropriate ‘separation media’ for ‘buffer strips of 200 to 500 yards’ ‘insisted upon by the Minister of Bantu Administration’ (Haarhoff, 2011, pp. 188–189). The Western Bypass Highway which functions as a buffer, restricting access from the west to the city, was fixed unto the urban landscape by modernist land zoning, claiming municipal land for road reserves, electricity lines, sewerage, and mandated street setbacks, ensuring the exclusion of later private urban-infill growth. The new Northern Industrial (#11) and Lafrenz Industrial (#12) reinforced this multi-layered buffer to the north, and the 1956 Eros Airport (#4) and Southern Industrial to the south.

Fig. 5

Apartheid Windhoek, by author. Reference: (Bähr, 1970; Melber, 1988; Simon, 1991) Windhoek 1960s Street Atlas Bd. 24, Katutura: Alltag im Ghetto Fig. 12.1, Windhoek

Katutura, ‘the place where we do not stay’ in Otjiherero and Khomasdal, were laid out in a spatial schema typical of apartheid-era townships for maximum control and surveillance. The townships were arranged in strict right-angle plans with no cul-de-sacs, flood-lit perimeter roads, and a single access from the Western Bypass (Müller-Friedman, 2008). This uniform and panoptic layout required a flat topography, without hills and landscape features obscuring sightlines or providing refuge. As seen in Fig. 5, the area 7 km northwest of the city was suitably flat, with ephemeral riverbeds later employed as smaller buffer zones between different ethnic groups within the townships.

Civic buildings erected by the South African administration typically had a modernist aesthetic. These included the 1964 addition to the Tintenpalast, titled the Building Complex of the Legislative Assembly of the Whites of South-West Africa, and many schools, post-offices, hospitals, police stations, and local administrative buildings still in use today. These tall, functionalist concrete structures continue to operate as neutral civic architecture,¹¹ their racially separated entrances removed. Apartheid planners emulated the cellular, monofunctional British and US-American suburban model, which proved to be an optimal urban form for segregation (Friedman, 2000). Modernist town planning, with single-use zoning, legally entrenched bulk factors, wide streets, strict setbacks, and the unrelenting uniformity of erf sizes ensured that the newly planned townships could never reach the densities and spatial complexity of the older suburbs. The townships, furthest from the city, burdened Black and Coloured residents with daily travel. Windhoek was designed for a car-owning population from the 1960s, despite most residents being unable to afford a private car. Regulations enacting civil engineering standards to optimise traffic flow also expressly prohibited streets from functioning as public spaces, banning gathering, performance, singing, begging, and unsolicited economic activities (Roland et al., 2022). The new street network disregarded the hilly topography and landscape features, favouring a rectilinear, wide, and overwhelmingly disorientating uniformity, a contrast to the topographically responsive variations of the street network in the older parts of the city. Modernist town-planning principles continue to dictate Windhoek’s urban growth, the formerly ‘politically oppressive urban model’ now considered ‘normative and neutral’ and relevant in the post-apartheid era (Müller-Friedman, 2005, p. 49).

Loopholes in apartheid planning legislation stipulated that cemeteries and places of worship could not be destroyed, even when Black residents had been relocated. The Main Location cemetery (#2), the city centre Evangelical church (#5), Klein Windhoek’s Roman Catholic Mission Church (#6), Lukas Church (#7), Veronica Street cemetery (#8), and Klein Windhoek location church (#9) were abandoned yet preserved, as pass laws denied former residents’ access. With Namibian independence imminent in 1988, the municipal council established a new, desegregated suburb, Hochland Park, on the site of the Main Location (today called the Old Location), re-orienting the street grid to erase all traces of the former township (Gewald, 2009). The Main Location cemetery was officially re-opened in 1995 as the Old Location cemetery.

The Old Location became synonymous with African unity opposing apartheid (Melber, 2016). In the context of South African cities, the term township has come to describe a typology of spatial design that encapsulates the estrangement of city, suburb, and township; demarcating lines of wealth and poverty; access to resources; crime and violence; and forms of exclusion that continue to plague post-apartheid urban landscapes (Murray et al., 2007, p. 6).

Windhoek in Independent Namibia

After a long struggle, Namibia gained independence from South Africa on the 21st of March 1990. Euphoric celebrations spontaneously renamed Windhoek’s main thoroughfare, Kaiser Street (previously named Kaiser Wilhelm Street), to Independence Avenue. White fears of violence in Windhoek proved unfounded, and some suburban property prices increased (Simon, 1995). The SWAPO (South-West Africa People’s Organisation) party, agitating for independence since the 1960s, held a two-third majority in parliament from 1994 to 2019. SWAPO governs Namibia by ‘democratic authoritarianism’, a form of administration and political culture combining elements of democracy and authoritarian rule (Melber, 2015). State-managed modernisation and a de-ethnicised, uniform national identity are key official projects designed to intensify the politics of belonging in independent Namibia (Forrest, 1994).

With the gradual repealing of apartheid legislation from 1977, Windhoek experienced an administratively unchecked population influx for the first time. The city lacked a long-term and inclusive planning vision, and vested interests in the property market ensured that the apartheid planning model was not meaningfully changed. Poor Black residents, streaming into Windhoek in search of jobs, education, and better healthcare, lacked affordable housing and serviced land, settling in clusters of self-built shelters in the open council-owned land in the city’s northwest. From 1990 onwards, the city designated ‘reception areas’, where temporary informal settlement was accepted, aiming to relocate residents as the city built new, formal suburbs.

Figure 6 shows the urban growth of Windhoek, the reception areas becoming an expanding ring of permanent peri-urban informal settlements surrounding Goreangab Dam (#17), built in the 1960s. Katutura and Khomasdal today house at least 50% of the city’s population on just 25% of the urban area, with densities approximately four times higher than elsewhere (Frayne, 2000, p. 58). Circular migration, where strong rural ties are retained and residence in Windhoek is considered provisional (Frayne, 2007), is typical of many informal and low-income inhabitants. Katutura, the former apartheid-era township, is both a ‘narrative point of reference central to the construction of Namibia’s national identity’ and ‘a mirror reflecting the changes and social challenges Namibia has experienced since independence’ (W. C. Pendleton, 1996; Steinbrink et al., 2016). The term township has come to describe a spatial typology that epitomises the estrangement of city, suburb and township, separating wealth and poverty, signifying the typical forms of exclusion that continue to plague post-apartheid urban landscapes (Murray et al. 2007, p. 6).

Fig. 6

Windhoek in independent Namibia, by author. Reference: Average income per township. Sustainable Urban Transport Master Plan, City of Windhoek, 2013

Town planning in Windhoek continues to be preoccupied with single-use zoning, set-backs, and bulk restrictions and remains largely unchanged from 1976. Emulating colonial and apartheid ideals of isolation and segregation, town planning laws and conventions in Windhoek continue to obstruct attempts at an integrated, responsive, and dense urban fabric (Frayne, 2000). The colonially imposed high standards and costly legal processes for urban development have not been fundamentally altered (Peyroux, 2001, p. 293) to the detriment of poor residents. The legacies of both colonialism and apartheid remain firmly embedded not only in the city’s built environment but also in the systems, tools and imaginaries that reproduce them, the “strong residue of colonial attitudes [...] encoded in legislation, building codes, [and] surveillance procedures” (Rogerson, 1990, p. 39). Windhoek’s Structure Plan, the document that outlines the city’s town planning goals, considers streets as functionally engineered spaces, hierarchically ordered by vehicular carrying capacity. The plan finds urban environments constructive economically while emphasising the negative social impacts of cities, such as crime, visible poverty, and the deterioration of family structures. According to the plan, these social ills require rigorous control through ‘new street layouts which concentrate on designs which improve local surveillance or can be privatised’ (The Windhoek Structure Plan, 1996, sec. 8), the opposite of making streets inviting to the public. Public space is not mentioned in the document.

With independence, the former townships Katutura and Khomasdal were reclassified as suburbs and administered under the same frameworks as the former White suburbs (Müeller-Friedman, 2006). The fundamental failure to address the urban morphological asymmetries in proximity, density, flexibility, public space provision, and amenities that mark the difference between the former townships and suburbs is clear in Fig. 6. Windhoek’s healthcare facilities (#6, #13, #14, #15, #16), tertiary education (#4, #12), and major shopping centres (#6, #7, #11) are clustered in the former White suburbs, close to the city centre and industrial areas where most residents work. The Western Bypass demarcates a clear break in the urban landscape, separating high-income areas from middle-, low-, and no-income areas. Vehicle ownership west of the Western Bypass remains markedly lower per dwelling, coupled with the lowest household incomes in the city.¹² The buffer zone around the highway has become reinforced as an impermeable, low-density threshold through the construction of state-owned institutions, typically designed with no relationship to the street and surrounded by enormous, fenced-off grounds.

The Namibian government generally retained the old monuments and landmarks, partly to avoid alienating the economically significant White population (Obert, 2015). Windhoek’s colonial crown in the city centre has been augmented by a new layer of memorials, a spatial superimposition that has been referred to as ‘breaking the [colonial] crown’ (Kössler, 2007), a bold assertion of nationalistic self and explicit breaking with the past (Kirkwood, 2011), an ‘obliteration of history’ (Gewald, 2009), and ‘accentuating a multi‐layered built environment and memory narrative’ (Obert, 2015). Windhoek’s ‘hill of power’ (Gwasira et al., 2004) has been reinscribed with memorials echoing the militant liberation narrative favoured by the SWAPO party. The removal in 2015 of the Reiterdenkmal equestrian statue made way for the Independence Memorial Museum, Sam Nujoma statue and the Genocide Memorial, designed and constructed between 2002 and 2009 by North Korean firm Mansudae Overseas Projects (Kirkwood, 2011).

Although the new memorials aesthetically signal national liberation in the city (Becker, 2017), their distinctly post-colonial form (Shiweda, 2005), dubbed North Korean Stalinist Realism, is both architecturally and spatially uncanny. By allowing the abusive authoritarian regime in Pyongyang to design and construct these memorials, the Namibian government denied its citizens an opportunity to produce cultural value and markers of a democratic, independent society, adding a new layer of estrangement to Windhoek’s memorial landscape (Obert, 2015). The superimposition of new landmarks and monuments on the city’s colonial crown deliberately reflects and consolidates the interests and power of the present government by grounding them on past regimes. In doing so, the independent government has replicated the colonial logic of importing and centrally placing an architectural form and monumental aesthetic to impress an ideological standpoint onto the local populace.

Windhoek’s historical estrangement is echoed in the sites of displacement marked in Fig. 6 (#5, #8, #9, #10), churches and cemeteries that were abandoned when their communities were forcibly relocated. These important historical remainders remain relatively overlooked in present-day Windhoek, unmarked and often dilapidated sites, eerily dissonant with their high-income suburban surroundings. Figure 6 marks the sites of erasure; places where Black and Coloured communities lived are now built over with innocuous shopping malls or high-income residential suburbs. Instead of commemorating these sites, Namibia’s independent government has created a new, a-historical space for ritual and remembrance. Heroes’ Acre (#18), the 700-acre war memorial honouring liberation fighters, designed and built by Mansudae, 13 km south-east of the city on a previously empty site, accessible only by private motorcar. The monument is a spatial manifestation of Namibia’s dogmatic ‘combat literature’ (see du Pisani, 2007; Melber, 2016; Saunders, 2002), legitimising the SWAPO liberation narrative rather than providing an inclusive place of remembrance and reflection for the nation. The Namibian government has demonstrated a lack of political will to challenge desegregating and unequal development in the city (Peyroux, 2001, p. 289). The siting of Heroes’ Acre is a further demonstration of this: located farthest from the poorest and most populated north-western suburbs of Windhoek, virtually inaccessible to low-income residents who do not own a car, and providing no economic or tourism-based benefits to surrounding communities.

Although the colonial legacy of land dispossession has been the subject of National Land Reform Conferences held in 1991 and 2018, independent Namibia has been beleaguered by the absence of an urban policy.¹³ In 2018, it was estimated that 40% of Namibia’s 2.4 million inhabitants lived in ‘informal shacks’¹⁴ mainly in the capital. Despite lifting restrictions on property ownership, the capitalist housing market has inhibited residential racial integration (Simon, 1996). The challenges facing post-apartheid city planning, including the negative influence of politics, a compliance-driven legal framework, an unsupportive institutional environment, and the power of private developers, continue to be widely discussed in the South African context, with many clear parallels to Namibian cities (Berrisford, 2011; du Plessis, 2014; Moodley, 2019). The ongoing rural–urban influx of low-income residents continues rapidly, expanding the city’s north-eastern areas.

Conclusion

This paper has traced the historic spatial development of Windhoek through maps representing five distinct socio-political epochs. These different periods’ spatial, aesthetic, and representational effects on the city’s urban landscape have been discussed to highlight historic continuities and disjunctions. This analysis enhances an understanding of the origins of the spatial structure of the city, its socio-economic segregation, and the sites of displacement that haunt it. Rather than discrete chapters in Windhoek’s urban development, successive occupations’ spatial compositions have been shown to have been assembled from, and grounded in, the geomorphological, spatial, social, and administrative conditions preceding them.

The geomorphological conditions of the site were conducive to human habitation from the Stone Age, but the permanent settlement was occasioned by the Oorlam, originating from the Cape Colony’s trade and slavery network. Oorlam Windhoek’s spatial layout was tailored to the topography, separating easily accessible public areas for regional trade, markets, and workshops, from private residential and religious spaces, using natural landscape features and hills for defensive purposes. The military-defensive topological relationship of residential and commercial space was reconditioned during German occupation as a fortification and consolidation of White suburban space. The German military capitalised on the infrastructures, spatial arrangements, and agricultural foundations left by the Oorlam.

The German colonial epoch introduced private land ownership, the legal processes by which property rights were accrued, and building regulations controlling the size, layout, and materiality of legally admissible buildings. The building regulations legally encoded the distinction between permanent and temporary structures, synonymous with the difference between White and Black dwellings. This aesthetic and architectural typological distinction was extended to urban areas, where administrative limitations fabricated the areas of unequal control, the areas of extreme order appropriated as spatial devices grounding White settlers belonging onto the urban landscape while excluding Black residents.

This conceptual separation of Black and White architectural aesthetics and urban morphology was systematised and enumerated under apartheid. Domestic space became an aesthetic project of assigning material and spatial standards to ethnic groups, spatially embedding estrangement and difference between the non-White population and promoting unity within the White population. Apartheid’s extreme segregation and control attempted to erase Black and Coloured bodies and spatial practices from the city centre and formal suburbs, a strategy that continues to underpin Windhoek’s urban landscape, with distinctly different spatial, aesthetic, and behavioural conventions between the city’s east–west income divide.

This asymmetry is reproduced aesthetically in the former White suburbs, whose relatively flexible urban morphology, varying erf sizes, amenity clusters, and street hierarchy have allowed for organic densification along commercial nodes. In contrast, the former township of Katutura continues to suffer from a lack of proximity to amenities and employment opportunities, the uniform spatial schema resistant to permanent change. The formerly White city spaces’ absence of a definitive urban character has been described as a lack of vitality or ‘un-African’-ness (Steinbrink et al., 2016, p. 26). Successive mayors have enthusiastically endorsed Windhoek’s status as ‘The Cleanest City in Africa’, their discourse on order and propriety highlighting the difference in status between the clean city centre and formerly White suburbs and the disordered, informal North-West (Tjirera, 2020).

Successive regimes have imprinted their politics in the siting and aesthetics of Windhoek’s memorials and public spaces. The dislocation of non-White residents from places of memory and sites that foster a sense of belonging has remained a characteristic of Windhoek throughout its history. This logic still guides spatial memory and memorialisation in Windhoek today. Each regime has left its mark on the city’s urban landscape, in monumental civic works and architectural aesthetics, in power structures encoded into the urban fabric and its production, and in the destruction or indifference to places and sites of memory that are not politically expedient. These historic displacement and erasure sites remain forgotten or neglected, with strange derelict spaces scattered throughout the city. Windhoek’s memorials to independence are produced by an authoritarian foreign entity using an imported architectural aesthetic to refashion history into a political expedient narrative rather than producing meaningful spaces to negotiate the country’s emerging democratic culture.

Windhoek’s present-day spatial structure, layout, and urban-planning legislation are neither neutral nor rational, having evolved from colonial and apartheid ambitions of segregation and dominance, which continue to serve commercial interests and land-owners, at the expense of the poorest residents. By disregarding the former townships’ urban morphological and material preconditions and administering them as suburbs, the city authorities have entrenched Windhoek’s asymmetrical and unequal development.

Pieterse, discussing South African urbanism, names this ingrained and persistent structural inequality the deep code of post-apartheid cities,¹⁵ suggesting urban development and planning policy ground itself in an examination of the qualitative, identity-making practices that produce African cityness rather than the current quantitative developmentalist discourse (Pieterse, 2010). Windhoek’s spatial analysis has shown that this uncanny cityness remains layered, contradictory, and contested. Recent multidisciplinary spatial theorisations of Johannesburg, analysing elements of space, identity, and affect, describe the city’s dynamic, multiform, and paradoxical urban conditions under the broad theme of anxiety (Falkof & van Staden, 2020), a concept related to the uncanny. Grounding spatial theorisation in an analysis of the historical morphogenics of urban landscapes, and their specific affect on local spatial practices and identity, allows for productive comparison without resorting to uniformity or oversimplification. Simone refers to this uncanny urban condition as multiplex, the negotiations between ‘locally and externally generated urban development knowledge’ (Simone, 2004, p. 241). Mbembe and Nuttall consider South African cities fundamentally embedded in ‘multiple elsewheres’ (Mbembe & Nuttall, 2004, p. 348). Successive colonial claims and resistance to them have been inscribed and superimposed onto Windhoek’s uncanny urban landscape, conditioning the city’s mechanisms, language, and imagery.