On my way from Swakopmund to Windhoek, I saw maybe a hundred enormous termite mounds. With a dozen lizards, a handful of parakeets and dozens of turkey sized birds in Swakop whose name I don't know, they constitute my entire experience of wildlife in Namibia. I saw more wildlife during my two months in West Texas in 2006.

In their introduction to Margarethe von Eckenbrecher's Africa: What It Gave Me, What It Took from Me, D. P. Crandall, Hans-Wilhelm Kelling and Paul E. Kerry write:

White hunters also introduced firearms to the Nama, which, according to Bridgman, changed the way the Nama were able to pursue game. Whereas they had previously relied on bows, arrows, spears, and other weapons, which unintentionally served to keep an ecological balance, with guns they could take down animals with an ease and frequency never before imagined. Great herds of elephants and other game animals were thereby decimated in rather short order.

[...]

The presence of stores and trading posts coupled with the growing availability of goods directed at natives led to unforeseen changes in local economies. By mid-nineteenth century, Brigitte Lau asserts, a dramatic shift had occurred among the Nama and Orlam peoples as a largely self-sufficient pastoral economy gave way to one based on commando-style raids in order to acquire through plunder the means of purchasing goods from the traders. The size of Nama and Orlam herds and flocks dwindled to alarmingly low numbers, and people actually began to lose, indeed, eventually lost—to the proportion that cattle raiding became the dominant feature of their economy—the very skills that had allowed them to make a living from the land.