Namibia is a large, dry and thinly populated country on the southwestern coast of Africa, and its religious composition was set largely by German and Finnish mission work in the nineteenth century.
The Rhenish Missionary Society began working among Nama and Herero communities from the 1840s, and Finnish missionaries entered the far north among the Ovambo peoples from 1870. Because the northern population was the largest, the Lutheran churches that grew out of those missions became the country's dominant religious bodies, and Namibia is now one of the most Lutheran countries outside northern Europe. Catholic and Anglican missions followed, and independent African churches are also present.
Older traditions have not disappeared. The Ovambo, Herero and other Bantu-speaking peoples maintained ancestor-centred practice, and among the Himba of the northwest the holy fire kept between the headman's house and the cattle enclosure remains a working institution, the point at which the living family communicates with the ancestors and through them with the creator, Mukuru. San communities in the east and northeast keep the trance dance tradition documented across the wider region.
The churches took political positions during the long South African occupation. Church leaders issued a public letter to the South African prime minister in 1971 calling for independence, and the churches were among the few institutions able to speak in the decades that followed.