S.W.A. is the name of Namibia, once a German colony, before its independence. It’s a desert country, with a territory extension nearly three times that of Italy and which has as main economic sources the mining industry (diamonds, uranium, gold, lead, zinc, copper, silver and tin), the fishing industry and the cattle and sheep breeding, the wool industry and only recently tourism, in particular hunting tourism. Every activity is essentially under foreign control, mostly South Africans and white men of German origin (Afrikaans).

With independence it was named Namibia after Namib, its most important desert. Population is just under two millions, of which one sixth is represented by Afrikaans (white men of German origin) and the rest by several black tribes not all of them autochthonous. Best known tribes are the Herero and the Damara, most peculiar are the Himba and the Bushmen, even though this last tribe is nearly disappearing. 

Social tensions are still strongly present between the black tribes of the desert, the suburban dwellers and the white colonist descendants. Racism is manifest and widespread, even though racial discrimination has been banished. The Republic of South Africa has administrated S.W.A. on behalf of UNO from the end of the II World War for nearly fifty years and has left its considerable imprinting, so much that the Namibian Dollar and the South African Rial still today have the same change. In Namibia every land is enclosed by fences in order to exclude anyone else from it, everything is organized mostly by nature to overwhelm people.

I have tried to explain in a short summary what I have found, same sides of one polyhedron, in a social context in which environment strongly influences life and therefore death.

Aldo Basili