The sport is viewed as being confined mainly to the Afrikaans and German-speaking populations; 80% of indigenous peoples show hardly any interest in the sport.
I find this curious since every time I look up "news in Namibia" to write these blog posts, cricket is almost always one of the first items to appear on my search. I think this says a lot about how minority interests often dominate majority interest. This also says a lot about who the media is catering to.
Back to sports: football (soccer) is the next most popular sport in the country, followed by rugby. Rugby was first introduced to the country by South Africa in 1916. Namibia's rugby team is known as the Welwitschia and are frequently at the World Cup.
Other popular sports include golf, boxing, basketball, and lawn bowls. Law bowls was one of the first sports in Namibia to produce a world champion, Douw Dalitz.
Namibia has a prominent sports scene, although from what I've researched, their native peoples are not large participants. It is rather their non-native peoples who dominate the competitive sports scenes, with boxing serving as a large exception. Successful Namibian boxers have included Japheth Uutoni and Paulus Moses.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_in_Namibia
-Michelle, 3/22
No comments:
Post a Comment