The Ovambo people also called Aawambo, Ambo, Ovawambo are a Bantu ethnic group native to Southern Africa, primarily modern Namibia.
They are the single largest ethnic group in Namibia, accounting for over half of the population.
They are also found in southern Angolan province of Cunene where they are more commonly referred to as "Ambo".
The Ovambo consist of a number of kindred Bantu ethnic tribes who inhabit what was formerly called Ovamboland. In Angola, they are a minority, accounting for about two percent of the total Angolan population.
There are an estimated 1.6 million ethnic Ovambo, and they are predominantly Lutheran Christians (97%).
Their language, Ovambo language, also called Oshiwambo, Ambo, or Kwanyama, belongs to the southern branch of the Niger-Congo family of languages.
Ovambo peoples live in north-central Namibia (Oshana, Ohangwena, Omusati, and Oshikoto regions) and south-central Angola (Cunene Province). This land, called Owambo, is characterized by sandy soils, flat terrain, and periodic flooding. Rains fall between October and April: a short rainy spell is followed by a drier interval, then by a long rainy season. There are no permanently-running rivers but, in years of good rains, broad shallow channels (sing. oshana) fill with water flowing south from higher lands in southern Angola. When dry, these floodplains are covered in grasses. At slightly higher elevations the land is covered with bush, forest, and cultivated fields. Many Namibian Oshiwambo-speakers have moved in search of economic opportunity, and can be found in towns and cities throughout Namibia. A person who rarely or never returns to Owambo may be called ombwiti, a label that implies a loss of language, culture, knowledge of kin, and respectful behavior; the term is seen by some as derogatory.
There are roughly 1.5 million Oshiwambo-speakers, about two-thirds in Namibia and one-third in Angola. Demographically, they occupy very different positions within these countries. In Namibia, the 2011 census reported a total population of 2.1 million people divided into eleven ethnic groups; Oshiwambo-speakers are by far the largest group, comprising about half the population. Angola is a far more populous country, and Oshiwambo-speakers there are a very small minority, comprising about two percent of this ethnically-diverse country.
Ovambo people speak Oshiwambo, a Bantu language which belongs the larger Niger-Congo phylum. It include the Oshikwanyama, Oshingandjera, Oshimbadja, Oshindonga and other dialects. Over 2 million people in Namibia and Angola speak Oshiwambo and over half of the people in Namibia speak Oshiwambo, particularly the Ovambo people.
The language is closely related to that of the Hereros and Himba, Otjiherero. An obvious sign of proximity is the prefix used for language and dialect names, Proto-Bantu *ki- (class 7, as in Ki-Swahili), which in Herero has evolved to Otji- and in Ovambo further to Oshi-.
Linguistically, the Ovambo can be divided broadly into two groups. The first includes the Ovakwanyama and all the southern Angolan peoples, whose dialect is known as Oshikwanyama and distinguished. The second includes the Ondonga and all the remaining Ovambo peoples, the dialect known as Oshindonga.
The Ovambo started migrating to their current location from the northeast around the 14th century from the Zambia region.They settled near the Angola-Namibia border then expanded further south in Namibia in the 17th century. They have a close cultural, linguistic and historical relationship to the Herero people found in more southern parts of Namibia, and Kavango people to their east settled around the Okavango River.
In contrast to most ethnic groups in Africa, the isolated, low density pastoral nomadic lifestyle left the Ovambo people largely unaffected by the Swahili-Arab and European traders before the 19th century. When Germany established a colony in Namibia in 1884, they left the Ovambo people undisturbed. The Germans focussed on the southern and coastal regions. After the World War I, Namibia was annexed into the South African administration by the British as the South West Africa province. This brought major changes, with South African plantation, cattle breeding and mining operations entering the Ovamboland. The colonial Portuguese administration in Angola, who had previously focussed on their coastal, northern and eastern operations, entered southern Angola to form a border to the expanding South African and British Imperial interests. The Ovambo people launched several armed resistance in the 1920s and 1930s, which were all crushed militarily by the British and Portuguese forces.
The South African administration continued the so-called "Police Zone" in south, a region created by the Germans covering about two-thirds of the province later to become Namibia. Ovambo people were not allowed to move into the Police Zone, neither other tribes nor Europeans could move north without permits. This isolated the Ovambo people. However, because of labor shortage in the Police Zone and South Africa, in part because of massacre of native Africans such as through the Herero and Namaqua genocide, the South African government allowed migrant wage labor. Numerous Ovambo people became migrant labor, but with segregation and highly restrained human rights, in South African towns such as Cape Town and in the Police Zone.
The South African Apartheid rule was brought into the Ovamboland in 1948. The South African government declared the Ovamboland as independent province in 1973, and appointed chiefs aligned with the South African government policies. The Ovambo people rejected these developments, and in 1975 the appointed chief minister of Ovamboland was assassinated. In conjunction with the armed SWAPO movement, Namibia and its Ovambo people gained independence in 1990 from South Africa.
Each Ovambo group (kingdom) occupies its’ own area within the Ovambo region as a whole. Estermann (1976:51) writes that tracts of no-man’s-land, several kilometres in depth, used to separate one kingdom from another. The establishment of homes was traditionally prohibited within these zones of forest or bush, which were quite discernible in the 1920s. By the 1950s (Estermann’s time of writing), however, people were starting to occupy the buffer zones, leading to their virtual obscurity.
The area occupied by one group is known as oshilongo (country) falling traditionally under the jurisdiction of the king (ohamba) or paramount chief. However, in order to render it more manageable, the oshilongo is sub-divided into districts - omikunda (omukunda sing.) - which are governed by omalenga, district heads and counsellors of the king. They are appointed by the king and are responsible to him. Women as well as men could be district-heads, for example the king’s mother always had her own large district some distance from the king. About 15-20 households were established within an omukunda, with distances between them ranging from 500 m up to 3 km or more (Loeb 1962:42; Tuupainen 1970:16; Williams 1988:460).
The Ovambo household (ehumbo) is a self-contained economic unit, although cooperation between
them during weeding and harvesting is common, as is the sharing of cattle herding between morning and evening milking (Williams 1988:48). It is a large, roughly circular, structure composed of several huts and living areas separated from one another by tall wooden or millet stalk palisades. Palisades also form intricate connecting passageways which allow access to the various areas. In the centre is a large meeting area (olupale), and around the outside are fenced areas for the cattle.
The entire structure is enclosed within a thick wooden palisade about 6-10 ft in height (Hahn 1928:10; Williams 1988:45). It is occupied by a polygamous family unit comprising usually a husband, 2-4 wives and all their children. It was not uncommon, however, for other kin members to reside there as well - particularly newly married couples with no ehumbo of their own. Each wife has her own cooking facilities and food storage area in her living quarters, and her children live with her until old enough to marry (girls) or move into the cattle pens with other adolescent boys. Ovambo marriage is preferentially based on clan exogamy and kingdom endogamy, although marriages between members of two different Ovambo kingdoms are not uncommon. The system of descent is matrilineal.
Traditionally, Ovambo peoples pursued an agro-pastoralist economic strategy. The climate is semiarid and there are no rivers, so they dug waterholes and wells to make water available through the dry season. They grew drought-resistent millet and sorghum, along with beans, Bambara groundnuts, pumpkins, and melons. Households broadened their resource base by keeping cattle and goats, and some of the men and older boys left home for five or six months during the dry season to bring the cattle to better-watered pastures. Over the course of the twentieth century, increasing numbers of Ovambo men, especially in Namibia, turned from herding to migrant labor, while women and children worked in the fields and tended much smaller numbers of livestock. In the early twenty-first century, households in rural Owambo continued to produce most of their own food, supplementing their home-grown diet with wild fruits, nuts, and greens, and with purchased foods, both locally-produced and imported.
In the colonial era there was no cash-cropping or commercial ranching. In Namibia, ever since a veterinary cordon was established in 1896 to protect the commercial herds of white farmers from diseases like rinderpest and foot-and-mouth, residents have been forbidden to transport cattle or beef outside Owambo. Business activity grew slowly through the colonial era and then rapidly after independence. Oshiwambo-speakers have taken advantage of opportunities to engage in business activities elsewhere in the country since the end of apartheid. In Angolan Owambo, commercial activities were suppressed by the civil war between 1975 and 2002. The coming of peace has revitalized local markets in crops and livestock, and enabled many rural Ovambos to move to nearby towns that had been depopulated during the war.
Some Ovambo women are skilled potters and basketweavers, making a variety of containers for home use, local sale, and the tourist trade. In precolonial and early colonial times, men made weapons and household objects out of wood. A few men trained as blacksmiths and made tools for farming and food processing, weapons, and jewelry. These male trades declined dramatically with the rise of male migrant labor and the introduction of mass-produced goods that men could purchase with their wages.
During the precolonial era there were no organized markets or full-time traders. Nevertheless, people living in Owambo traded iron, copper, salt, foodstuffs, livestock, and household items with each other and with neighboring peoples. Long-distance trade, including trade with European merchants, was monopolized by royalty, who used some of the goods they acquired through trade as status symbols, and some (such as horses and guns) to implement their rule and defend their lands. Labor migration democratized access to foreign goods, and new status symbols such as striped red cloth—first imported in the early twentieth century and worn in the early twenty-first century for special occasions—became widespread. Both formal and informal trade between Namibia and Angola at Oshikango (a key border crossing in Owambo) grew dramatically during a mid-1990s interlude in the Angolan civil war, and continues to play an important role for people living on both sides of the border. In addition to Namibian wholesale operations exporting goods to Angolan buyers, Angolan Ovambo bring livestock and foodstuffs to sell in Namibia and use the proceeds to buy goods unavailable or more expensive at home.
In the household economy, men and boys are responsible for herding livestock, milking cattle, churning butter, and constructing and repairing homes. Women and girls are responsible for pounding millet into flour, preparing meals, brewing beer, fetching water, gathering firewood, and keeping the home clean. Traditionally, women also did the bulk of the agricultural labor once the men had cleared and fenced the fields; today both men and women plant, weed, harvest, and thresh as necessary, though women do more of this work as men are more likely to work outside the home.
Males are responsible for building households and granaries (omaanda), clearing waterholes and fields, iron production, the manufacture of all wooden items and hide goods, salt procurement and hunting. Females are concerned with most child care, all food preparation, the production of baskets and pots, thatching of dwellings, the gathering of wild fruit and vegetables and the collection of water (Hahn 1928:25; Estermann 1976:143-5).
“It is the job of the young men to attend to the goats and cattle, taking them to find grazing areas during the day, and bringing them back to the home in the evening.”
Fishing is a joint enterprise, although the methods adopted by men and by women differ. Women actively fish with tall, conical baskets in the oshana pools, whereas men construct traps across the narrower water-courses, consisting of weirs (olua) with conical baskets (omidiva) in the apertures (Estermann 1976:142).
Men pay a traditional leader for the right to farm and establish a household on a plot of land for life. The right of traditional authorities to allocate land in this way has been recognized by state law in Namibia since 2002; the same law also grants the state ultimate ownership of communal land in former ethnic homelands like Owambo. In some areas, wealthy people have installed illegal fencing to keep portions of communal grazing grounds to themselves, which has sparked conflict over access and caused land degradation in surrounding areas crowded with livestock.
Ovambo people reckon kinship matrilineally, tracing descent through mothers only. Matrilineages are grouped into larger matrilineal clans, each with its own name inspired by something significant in the life of the founding ancestor, whether a lion hunt (lion clan), herding success (cattle clan), or extensive travel (road clan). These exogamous clans are celebrated in song and dance at weddings, and members praise their clan by naming the waterholes dug by clan ancestors that continue to provide water. Clan membership is less relevant to the lives of Oshiwambo-speakers raised outside Owambo, who may not even know the name of their own matrilineal clan.
Siblings (aamwameme, the children of one mother) are especially close. The children of sisters also call each other aamwameme and treat each other as siblings. A suffix (-gona) can be added to indicate that a relative is a cousin rather than a sibling, but this is distancing and rude. Terms for birth position (oldest, middle, youngest) are often used as terms of address, both between relatives and between friends.
Traditionally, groups of girls went through an initiation ceremony (olufuko or efundula). This ceremony included tests to ensure that girls were not pregnant and were educated about their new roles; it concluded with a community-wide celebration. Girls went through initiation anytime between puberty and their early thirties, depending on when their household and matrilineal relatives felt economically prepared to contribute to the ceremony and to lose their labor. An initiated woman could have sex, bear children, get married, and move away to live with her husband near his matrilineal relatives. Polygamy was the traditional ideal.
Christian missionaries strongly opposed both female initiation and polygyny, and the norm in highly Christian Namibian Owambo in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been monogamous marriage with a Western-style church ceremony. Insofar as polygyny has persisted, it has gone underground; that is, a “polygynous” man has one wife but maintains long-term relationships with and provides material support for one or more additional women and any children they bear. Female initiation was abandoned entirely, but in the early twenty-first century students began performing elements of the ceremony as part of school cultural competitions. In 2012, the first olufuko in decades that effectuated the participants’ transition from girlhood to womanhood took place in Ombalantu. Sponsored and supported by traditional leaders and government officials, this became an annual event, with more and more participants coming from all over Owambo. Some have criticized the ceremony as degrading to women, backward, encouraging promiscuity, and incompatible with Christianity, while others have praised it as traditional, educational, revolving around family and identity, and contributing to self-respect. On the Angolan side of the border, female initiation never died out, and a small minority of Namibian Ovambo girls crossed into Angola to be initiated during the period when that wasn’t possible closer to home.
The domestic unit centers around a man as head of household, his wife or (traditionally) wives, and their children. Additional relatives, such as foster children, widows and their children, or single adults join households for varying lengths of time. Residence was traditionally patrilocal, with adult men building households near those of their matrilineal kin. Due to population pressures in Namibian Owambo in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, residence became neolocal, determined by the availability of land and/or job opportunities.
Traditionally, when a man died his matrilineal relatives inherited his movable property, with his wife/wives and children receiving only a small amount of food and a few household goods at the discretion of the direct heirs. His farmland reverted to the local headman for resale; the deceased’s matrilineal kin had first option to buy. In Namibia, these inheritance norms were contested throughout the twentieth century by some Ovambos and by Christian churches, but to little effect. In 1993, the traditional authorities determined that widows must be allowed to continue living in their late husbands’ homes as head of household without paying anything for the transfer of the land—a position incorporated into statutory law in 2002. Many widows have since been able to take advantage of this policy, and cases of dispossession have declined dramatically.
Children are socialized at home by their parents and other older relatives to participate in household tasks, to know how they are related to others in their social world, to care for their juniors, to be respectful to their elders, and in general to have a group orientation. The highest praise is to say that a person has ombili (“peace”), meaning that he or she gets along well with others. Before the widespread availability of formal education, children were schooled through the stories told and riddles posed by their elders at evening gatherings around the fire. Older people lament that this tradition has fallen by the wayside as the focus is now on Western-style formal education, highly valued as a route to economic success. Peers both at school and in play groups also play an important role in the socialization process.
Social status was traditionally based on membership in, or strong connections to, a royal lineage. For men, status also depended on the size of their herds and households, requiring hard work and social skills, with inheritance playing a role. To a lesser degree, women could use the same means to accumulate property, and also gained status through bearing children. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, status can also be earned by both men and women through education, wage labor, and entrepreneurial activity. Older people are shown respect by younger people.
In the precolonial era, Ovambo peoples lived in independent polities. Most were centralized and led by a king or queen chosen from the royal lineage. Monarchs were responsible for ensuring fertility and productivity and for protecting people and their property. They controlled the distribution of land, decided the timing of productive activities, kept grain stores for distribution as needed, maintained security forces, headed the court system, and carried out religious rituals essential for the fertility of the polity. Some polities were decentralized; for example, in the distant past the residents of Ombalantu killed their cruel king and vested power in popularly-chosen village leaders. In centralized kingdoms royal power was both sacred and secular, and was executed by councilors and other appointees, while in Ombalantu village leaders wielded secular power and members of the royal lineage carried out religious rituals.
During the colonial era, traditional leadership was made subservient to the South African and Portuguese colonial administrations in the interest of meeting colonial needs, losing considerable credibility as a consequence. In Namibia since independence, traditional leaders have worked to improve their reputations and demonstrate their relevance; they play an especially important role in land allocation and dispute settlement.
Social control is exercised by the Namibian or Angolan police force and court system and by traditional authorities. On the Namibian side of the border, traditional authorities have worked since independence to codify customary laws and norms, changing some in the process to accord with the country’s constitution, particularly on issues of women’s rights. People strongly support these changes, which have made the system more predictable and fair. Enforcing social norms also happens informally within households and communities, where the most highly valued character trait is the ability to get along peacefully with others.
External conflicts during the precolonial era primarily involved raiding for cattle and slaves; these intensified with the introduction of guns by European traders in the mid-1800s. During the colonial era, there was extensive conflict with the South African authorities on the Namibian side of the border and with the Portuguese authorities on the Angolan side of the border. Since independence in 1990, Namibian Oshiwambo-speakers have taken pride in living at peace, while Angolan Oshiwambo-speakers have worked on building more secure and prosperous lives in the aftermath of the civil war that ended in 2002.
Traditional religion
The traditional religion of the Ovambo people is the primary faith of less than 3%, as most state Christianity to be their primary faith. The Ovambo's traditional religion envisions a supreme being named Kalunga, with their rites and rituals centered around sacred fire like many ethnic groups in southwestern Africa. The Kalunga cosmology states that the Supreme Being created the first man and first woman, who had a daughter and two sons. It is the daughter's lineage that created Ovambo people, according to the traditional beliefs of the matrilineal Ovambo people.
The rituals involve elaborate fire making and keeping ceremonies, rain making dance, and rites have involved throwing herbs in the fire and inhaling the rising smoke. The head priest traditionally was the king of a tribe, and his role was in part to attend to the supernatural spirits and be the chief representative of the Ovambo tribe to the deities.
Christianity
Christianity arrived among the Ovambo people in the late 19th century. The first Finnish missionaries arrived in Ovamboland in the 1870s, and Ovambo predominantly converted and thereof have identified themselves as Lutheran Christians. The influence of the Finnish missions not only related to the religion, but cultural practices. For example, the typical dress style of the contemporary Ovambo women that includes a head scarf and loose full length maxi, is derived from those of the 19th-century Finnish missionaries.
The Ovambo now predominantly follow Christian theology, prayer rituals and festivities, but some of the traditional religious practices have continued, such as the use of ritual sacred fire. They also invoke their supreme creator Kalunga. Thus, the Ovamba have preferred a syncretic form of Christianity. Most weddings feature a combination of Christian beliefs and Ovambo traditions. Their traditional dancing is done to drumming (Oshiwambo folk music).
In the indigenous religion, rituals were carried out by laypeople and also by specialists with varying levels of training and status who performed rites on behalf of either commoners or royalty as needed and were paid for their services. In Christian churches, priests or ministers play a central role alongside lay leaders who do Bible readings, assist with rituals, and run abbreviated services when a priest or minister is not available.
In the indigenous religion, there were life-cycle ceremonies at critical stages like birth, female initiation, and death, and in the kingdom, there were a series of ceremonies related to the burial of an old king and the installation of a new king. Rainmaking rituals were especially important for the success of the agro-pastoral economy. Offerings were made to the spirits at key moments in economic life (at harvest, at the start of fishing season, before excavating salt or iron), in times of misfortune (whether individual, such as illness, or societal, such as drought), and after breaking a taboo. For many Christian Ovambos, attending Sunday church services is an important part of life; church-based life-cycle ceremonies like baptisms, weddings, and funerals have replaced their indigenous equivalents.
Traditional dance, uuvano, involves complex, improvised, full-body movements in response to polyrhythmic clapping accompanied by repetitively-sung lyrics. Uuvano were traditionally performed to celebrate weddings, homecomings, and female initiations. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, they also are performed at political events, fundraisers, cultural exhibitions, and gym classes. Christian hymns are sung in church, and Christian youth and women’s groups compose songs in hymn style for performances at their own gatherings and at public events.
Women weave patterned baskets and make strings of tiny beads (ostrich eggshell, glass, or metal) to wear around their necks, waists, and ankles. Traditionally, men carved wooden objects for household use which they decorated with geometric designs. Before widespread conversion to Christianity, women wore elaborate hairstyles that indicated fine-grained status ranking in regard to age, initiation, and marriage, also varying somewhat according to clan and polity affiliation. Folktales and riddles played an important role in traditional home-based education, and some have been included in school readers.
Traditional medical practioners, known as oonganga, specialize in particular approaches and afflictions. They diagnose the cause of illness as natural, or as attributable to taboo transgression, witchcraft, ancestral anger, and/or Kalunga, and they prescribe the relevant treatment, ranging from herbal medicines to animal sacrifice. Missionaries strongly opposed traditional medicine and introduced biomedical care; few took advantage of such treatment through the first half of the twentieth century, after which more and more Christian converts started choosing biomedicine, now widely preferred to traditional medicine for many illnesses. Biomedical care is much more widely available in Namibia, where the South African regime first subsidized mission clinics and then took charge of the medical system, and where the post-independence government has invested greatly in expanding access, compared to Angola, where the missions provided only limited care, the Portuguese regime offered no support, and the civil war devastated the post-independence economy. There, oonganga continue to play an important role in the early twenty-first century, and they sometimes cross the border to carry out healing rituals in Namibia.
In the indigenous belief system, people continued to play important roles in the lives of their descendants after death. In addition to having provided their descendants with cattle, land, and waterholes, ancestors continued as protectors and helpers after death as long as they were remembered and respected through frequent, small offerings. If neglected, they could cause various misfortunes to afflict their descendants, who then required the intervention of an onganga (healer). Royal ancestors played a particularly important role as intermediaries with Kalunga, the supreme creator and provider of rain. Christian missionaries challenged these indigenous beliefs: in Namibia, Christian converts widely abandoned rituals related to the ancestors, and Kalunga became the Christian God in heaven. It is likely that Ovambos living in Angola maintain stronger beliefs and practices related to the ancestors.
The traditional home is a complex of huts surrounded by a fence of large vertical poles linked by two horizontal poles on each side. The complex is a maze with two gates but it is easy to get lost within the homestead. Each hut generally has a different purpose, such as a Ondjugo (the woman of the homestead's hut) or Epata (kitchen area).
The Ovambo people lead a settled life, relying mostly on a combination of agriculture and animal husbandry. The staple crops have been millet and sorghum (iilyavala) beans (omakunde) another popular crop. In drier regions or seasons, pastoral activity with herds of cattle (eengobe/eenghwandabi) goats(iikombo/onakamela) and sheep (eedi) becomes more important. The animal husbandry is not for meat (ombelela), but primarily as a source of milk (omashini). Their food is supplemented by hunting, fishing, and gathering.
During the colonial era, the Ovambo were active in elephant(eenjaba) hunting for their tusks to supply the ivory demand, and they nearly hunted the elephants in their region to extinction.
Each Ovambo tribe had a hereditary chief who is responsible for the tribe. Many tribes adapted representation by having a council of headmen who run tribal affairs. Members of the royal family of the Owamboland are known as aakwanekamba;ovakwaluvala,ovakwamalanga,ovakwaanime,aakwanyoka and many more only those who belong to this family by birth, through the maternal line, have a claim to chieftainship. The tribes figure their descent by a matrilineal kinship system, with hereditary chiefs arising from the daughter's children, not the son's. Polygyny is accepted, with the first wife recognized as the senior.
Ovambo brew a traditional liquor called ombike. It is distilled from fermented fruit mash and particularly popular in rural areas. The fruit to produce ombike are collected from Makalani Palms, Jackal Berries, Buffalo Thorns, Bird Plumes and Cluster Figs. Ombike, with additives like sugar, is also brewed and consumed in urban areas. This liquor is then called omangelengele; it is more potent and sometimes poisonous. New Era, one of the English-language daily newspapers, reported that clothes, shoes, and tyres have been found to have been brewed as ingredients of omangelengele.
“Rituals dealt with the transition between girlhood and womanhood in Ovambo societies on the northern floodplain, grappling with issues of sex and death, generation and regeneration, and its implications were understood to embrace the entire social body.” Male circumcision has been present. “Cows play a particularly important role in funeral rituals, too. When an Ovambo man dies, his body must remain in the house for at least one day before burial, during which time all his pets must be killed.
Traditional Ovambo compounds, called kraals, have gates used by both cattle and humans. At death, the Ovambo believe that the owner may not pass through this gate, or the cattle will die and the kraal will come to ruin. A new hole is cut for him to pass through. A bull is slaughtered, cooked without oil or flavoring of any kind, and a portion is eaten by everyone in the village. Then the kraal and all its contents must be moved at least 50 feet (15 meters). The cattle are not permitted to rest on the same earth that witnessed the death of their owner.”
According to information provided by a German writer Hermann Tonjes (1949), while Owambo communities historically used to practise circumcision, it was applied to adults, but reserved for nobility, the wealthy and to those in high office serving the King. During those days, traditional circumcisers used to charge substantial fees for their services. There were also some cases of death due to circumcision. Young men who qualified for circumcision (“etanda” in Oshiwambo) were escorted by their fathers to the place where the circumcision was to take place, known as “oshombo” or “ontanda”. Circumcision was seen to be a physical and spiritual intervention. In terms of the latter, circumcision linked the young man to the spiritual world of his ancestors to secure his fertility. Male initiation rituals, “etanda”, or circumcision belonged to the recognised tradition of all Owambo societies of Northern Namibia and it is only from Ongandjera that we have no descriptions of it. At some point in time there does seem to have been circumcision there too, judging from the name of the month of July, “mupita omulumentu”, which translates as “the coming out of men” (elc Nameja, 1385:1934). This was the time of year when circumcision camps were held in other Owambo societies. A number of neighbouring communities of the Owambo also undertook the practice; the Nyaneka-Nkhumbi, the pastoralist groups of the Herero, the Chokwe, the Zimba, the Hakavona, the Kwanyoka, the Himba and the Kuvale (Estermann, 1981:32 and 1979:50). These neighbours were historically linked to the Owambo. The Nyaneka-Nkhumbi are held to be ‘the progenitors’ of certain Owambo kingdoms, including Uukwambi, Ombalantu and Ongandjera (Williams, 1991:30, 31). In 1949, Seppo Teinonen, a Finnish theologian, compiled the available information on circumcision among the Owambo. His résumé, presented below, shows that there had been a great deal of variation in the custom. Male initiation was called “ohango jaalumentu”. According to Tönjes it was abolished in Uukwanyama in the years 1885–1890 and earlier than that in Ondonga. Hans Schinz, who travelled in the area in 1884–1887, said, circumcision was in practice in Ondonga earlier (Teinonen 1949). For several reasons, Teinonen found it difficult to give an exact description of the ritual as very little has been written on subject matter. Most of the information is secondary, and the practices vary from one society to another (Teinonen1949:24).
Body paint: Other tribes in this area use ochre, a reddish pigment extracted from iron ore and smear it all over their bodies.
Piercings: “Women wear elaborate braids and copper or leather bands around their necks, making their figures appear very elongated.”
Scarification: “Women wear elaborate braids and copper or leather bands around their necks, making their figures appear very elongated.”
Adornment (beads, feathers, lip plates, etc.): “Women wear elaborate braids and copper or leather bands around their necks, making their figures appear very elongated.”
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