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( Namibia)
Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in southern Africa on the Atlantic coast. It shares borders with Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east, and South Africa to the south. It gained independence from South Africa in 1990 and its capital city is Windhoek (German Windhuk). Namibia is a member state of the United Nations (UN), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the African Union (AU), and the Commonwealth of Nations. It is named after the Namib Desert and is the second most sparsely populated country in the world after Mongolia. Once a colony of Germany and later occupied by South Africa's apartheid government, Namibia gained full independence in 1990 following South Africa's withdrawal from Angola. The estimated population of Namibia is 1,820,916. Estimates for this country explicitly take into account the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS which lowers the population growth rates in a way not otherwise expected lowering life expectancy, causing higher infant mortality and death rates, and causing changes in the distribution of population by age and sex. The dry lands of Namibia were inhabited since early times by Bushmen, Damara, Namaqua, and since about the 14th century AD, by immigrating Bantu who came with the Bantu expansion. The first Europeans to disembark and explore the region were the Portuguese navigators Diogo Cão in 1485 and Bartolomeu Dias in 1486, still the region was not claimed by the Portuguese crown. However, like most of Sub-Saharan Africa, Namibia was not extensively explored by Europeans until the 19th century. Namibia became a German colony and was known as German South-West Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika)[3] – apart from Walvis Bay, which was under British control. From 1904 to 1907, the Herero and the Namaqua took up arms against the Germans and in the subsequent Herero and Namaqua genocide, 10,000 Nama (half the population) and 25,000 to 100,000 (possibly 65,000) Herero (three quarters of the population) were killed. South Africa occupied the colony during World War I and administered it as a League of Nations mandate territory until after World War II, when it unilaterally annexed the territory, without international recognition. In 1966, the South-West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) military wing, People's Liberation Army of Namibia, a guerrilla group launched a war of independence, but it was not until 1988 that South Africa agreed to end its administration of Namibia, in accordance with a United Nations peace plan for the entire region. Independence came in 1990, and Walvis Bay was ceded to Namibia in 1994 upon the end of Apartheid in South Africa.
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