5. You prep for road trips like you’re heading out to discover new lands. Food in alarming supply. Cooler boxes packed to perfection. Hydration sufficient to survive seven years of drought.
6. You’ve spent your school holidays providing free labour to your relatives in the blistering North then come home looking like Charcoal Barbie.
7. You think beer, Jägermeister, and Oros are an essential part of a balanced diet.
8. You think a meal that doesn’t contain meat is a joke, an insult, or some kind of cruel and unusual punishment.
9. You blow your bonus being a “KeDecember Boss” — partying, drinking, and buying kak — then exist on a diet of pap and pilchards till circa February.
10. You’ve pledged your undying allegiance to one of two kwaito lifestyle brands: Mshasho or GMP?
11. You call golddiggers “kandeshis” and men dating older women “Ben 10s”
12. You swear by your barber or hairdresser and would rather set yourself alight than have a busted weave or a wack fade.
13. You have sent or received a text asking for “2 dollar credit”.
14. There is a maximum of two degrees of separation between you and someone who has died in a road accident.
15. You add spice to stories like you’re on Top Chef. Embellishing, misattributing, and spicing at will.
16. A week without a braai or kapana is a week wasted.
17. Actually experiencing good customer service makes you feel like you’re on some kind of hidden camera show.
18. You’ve been accused of being a “liker of things”.
19. You call staying up until dawn “sunrising” and everyone within a social media radius needs to know that this happened.
20. You call traffic lights robots.
21. You’ve woken up to gospel music and spent the next 12 hours helping your mum clean everything there ever was.
22. Most things are an excuse to drink. Bad day, good day, funeral, car wash, apocalypse, lunch.
23. You’ve been in a 1 Dollar Death Match with a cabbie who tries to stiff you on your change. This is akin to the 20 Versus 10 Dollar Duel for driving you twenty metres up the road.
24. You approach winter like a character in Game of Thrones.
25. Kwaitos from Oshakati to Oranjemund have called you ‘my size’.
26. Foreigners from all over the world tell you it’s really quite something but you’ve never been to Etosha National Park.
27. At some point you’ve had to explain that Namibia is not a province in South Africa. Although it kinda used to be…it’s a long, terrible story.
28. You always offer to share your food but etiquette requires people see the Gollum’esque truth in your eyes and vehemently decline.
29. You can go into the greasiest excuse for a shop in the desert middle of nowhere and it will have schnitzel, meatballs, and brotchen. (Because colonialism)
30. You know a bunch of black people who can speak German more fluently than their mother tongue. (Also colonialism)
31. You personify the sun and say things like “the sun never loved us” and “But guys the sun has zero chill” or “Sun’s out here showing us who’s boss.”
32. You think there is no greater thing than an overcast day, it changes your mood and because it’s “baby making weather” it may even change your life.
33. You pray for rain every day of the summer but then act like the clouds are pissing napalm when it comes.
34. You know exactly where and who you were when Michael Jackson came to Namibia. You also know why you never met him and who you have to blame. .
35. You use the words “Mxm,” “Etche!” “Nxa!” and “Ne” and “40” to articulate distaste, surprise, pleasure, agreement and doing it without a condom on.
36. You act like every sunset is the first one the world ever had but nobody minds because Namibian skies are spectacular.
37. You’ve read dead serious headlines about children turning into snakes.
38. You call home “Nam” as in “-ibia” not – “Viet-“.
39. You think you live in one of the cleanest, friendliest, most beautiful and underrated countries in the world.
40. You’ve gotten the feeling that people think you’re making all this up. Because this was fun, but seriously… where the hell is this place? 