Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
patients and people living with HIV, as well as orphans and vulnerable children. It's a
small contribution but a good example of how grassroots initiatives begin.
With around 180,000 people living with AIDS (according to UNAIDS), half of them
women over the age of 15, it's still a massive problem for the country. In 2008 the prob-
lem of coerced or forced sterilisations for women living with HIV came to light, and only
after four years of proceedings did the High Court of Namibia rule in July 2012 that med-
ical practitioners have a 'legal duty to obtain informed consent from a patient'. Although
the findings did not include a link between the sterilisations and the HIV status of the wo-
men, the court's ruling has been acknowledged as an important step in recognising the re-
productive health rights of women regardless of whether they are HIV-positive. The case
has brought widespread global attention as more HIV-positive women who claim they
were forcibly sterilized continue to come forward in Namibia, although the government
denies that forced sterilisations for HIV-positive women is government policy.
On the environmental front, Dorob National Park is Namibia's newest national park,
opened in 2011. Dorob basically replaces the old National West Coast Tourist Recreation
Area on Namibia's Atlantic Coast, although the new boundaries are bigger. Although
entry fees and applicable regulations are still murky, what is clear is that the creation of
this park means that Namibia's entire coastline is now protected, beginning with Skeleton
Coast Park in the north, then Dorob, Namib-Naukluft, and finally Sperrgebiet in the south.
In fact, the Namibian Government eventually hopes to consolidate all four parks into a
proposed Namib Skeleton Coast National Park, which would cover nearly 11 million hec-
tares.
History
In the Beginning
Namibia's history extends back into the mists of time, a piece in the jigsaw that saw the
evolution of the earliest human beings. The camps and stone tools of Homo erectus (liter-
ally 'man who stands upright') have been found scattered throughout the region. One ar-
chaeological site in the Namib Desert provides evidence that these early people were
hunting the ancestors of present-day elephants, and butchering their remains with stone
hand axes, as early as 750,000 years ago.
By the middle Stone Age, which lasted until 20,000 years ago, the Boskop, the pre-
sumed ancestors of the San, had developed into an organised hunting and gathering soci-
 
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