Ovamboland (also: Owamboland) was the name given by English-speaking visitors to the land occupied by the Ovambo people in what is now northern Namibia and southern Angola. The endonym is Ovambo ~ Owambo.
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Before the First World War, some infrastructure in the area was provided by local Finnish missionaries of the Finnish Missionary Society, who established Ovamboland as their first mission field in 1870, the first mission being at Omandongo.
During the First World War South African troops conquered the German colony of South West Africa in 1915, and took control of Ovamboland in 1917, though it still lay outside the "police zone".
Following the Odendaal Commission in the 1950s the South African government decided to apply the apartheid policy in South West Africa, which South Africa continued to rule in terms of a League of Nations mandate, and continued to do so after the mandate was revoked in 1968.
Ovamboland then became a bantustan called Owambo, intended by the apartheid government to be a self-governing "homeland" for the Ovambo people. It was set up in 1968 and self-government was granted in 1973.
Owambo was the setting of a protracted counter-insurgency war that formed part of the Namibian War of Independence in Namibia, or South African Border War in South Africa.
Owambo, like other homelands in South West Africa, was abolished in May 1989 at the start of the transition to independence. The region is now commonly referred to as The North but the term Ovamboland is still in use. More than half of the entire population lives here on just 6% of the Namibian territory.
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