By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 11
One mid-sized mall in a former apartheid township is a small building carrying a large argument about how Namibian cities grow.
On 6 June 2026 a mid-sized shopping centre opened on the edge of Goreangab, in the greater Katutura that apartheid planners built to keep black Windhoek out of sight. President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah opened it and called the area a centre of resilience and progress. For a single building, the Goreangab Mall carries an unusually heavy load of meaning.
Read across its parts – the concrete, the capital, the coalition, the culture and the theory – it is a case study in how a Namibian city decides to grow, and at whose expense or benefit. The mall is small; the argument it stages is not.
A building against a history
Katutura was created by removal. Its name, in Otjiherero, is usually rendered as the place where people do not want to live, a memory of the forced relocation of black residents under apartheid planning. Goreangab today includes the city’s largest informal settlement, home to roughly 80,000 people, part of a Windhoek whose urban population grew by around two-thirds between 2011 and 2023.
Against that backdrop a formal mall is inescapably political. The President read it as a reversal of exclusion, a place built to keep people out now hosting banks, shops and jobs. Whatever else it is, the centre is a marker that formal capital has, at last, chosen to build where the state once forced people to live. In a city still shaped by that geography, the location of an investment carries as much meaning as its size.
The mall’s first meaning is where it stands, not what it sells.
The property bet beneath the symbolism
Stripped of symbolism, Goreangab is a property decision. Oryx Properties and Safland Property Group put N$270 million (about US$15 million) into 14,500 square metres of retail on a site the sector had passed over, anchored by a supermarket and a transport deck for the minibuses most shoppers use. It sits within a wider Goreangab Waterfront scheme carrying 2,500 homes under construction.
For a listed landlord like Oryx – the only primary-listed property company on the Namibian Stock Exchange, with a portfolio valued above N$4.1 billion – the mall is a test of whether underserved settlements can be the sector’s next pipeline. If it holds occupancy, others will follow it into the townships.
The symbolism opened the mall; the rent will decide if more get built.
A coalition and its promises
The centre took a coalition to raise. Standard Bank Namibia lent N$178 million towards it, the developer Safland put employment creation at the centre of its pitch, and the President added a public challenge that the mall source produce locally and strike offtake agreements with Namibian farmers. Around 340 construction jobs and close to 360 permanent posts hang on the follow-through.
Those promises drew a crowd. Hundreds of residents queued for weeks to hand in CVs, some waiting more than a fortnight and asking only that applications made with hard-earned money not be discarded. It was a reminder that in a settlement shaped by unemployment the jobs are not a side benefit but the point, and that a project of this kind is watched most closely by the people who need it most. The coalition’s credibility rests on whether those commitments are tracked long after the opening, or quietly forgotten once the building is full.
A mall is judged less by its opening than by the promises it keeps.
The margin question the theory raises
Development research warns that a formal mall in an informal economy can subtract as well as add. Studies of township centres elsewhere in the region found formal retail taking market share straight from the small traders nearest it, moving margin from many hands to few. The optimistic model, by contrast, treats a retail node as a centre that draws services and spillovers around it.
Which model Goreangab proves depends on integration – whether it buys local produce, hosts local traders and hires local staff, or seals itself off as an enclave. The President’s local-sourcing challenge aims at exactly that seam, because the same building can irrigate the economy around it or drain it. The distinction will not show on opening day; it will show over the following years, in whether the informal traders nearby keep their custom or lose it aisle by aisle to the anchor tenant.
Whether the mall adds trade or merely relocates it is still unwritten.
The living culture it must not flatten
There is also a Katutura the mall did not create and should not erase. The area already draws visitors to the Oshetu market and its kapana grills, to Eveline Street and to the Penduka craft village on the Goreangab Dam. That informal, cultural economy is the district’s character and a real source of local income.
Convenience retail and that living culture sell different things and can coexist, but only by design. A Goreangab that keeps its market and its craft village alive, with the mall as a convenient waypoint rather than a replacement, is a richer place than one that pulls all custom indoors and behind a single anchor tenant.
The measure of the mall is whether Katutura is still itself around it.
For anyone weighing where Namibia’s cities go next – investors, planners, officials and the communities themselves – Goreangab Mall is a small building worth reading closely, because the next one is already being planned. The decision it frames is whether formal development in the townships is built to integrate with the people and trade already there, or to stand apart from them, and that choice, not the ribbon, is what the country will be judged on.
Sources: The Namibian; Namibia’s urbanisation and poverty (Canon Collins Trust); Oryx property portfolio valued at N$4.1 billion (Windhoek Observer)
