Himba colour naming and what the studies showed: explained simply

The Himba are a cattle-herding people of northern Namibia. Their language, Otjihimba, has five basic colour terms, and their boundaries differ from those of English. Careful studies found that Himba speakers remember and sort colours along their own categories. A television demonstration later turned this into the claim that the Himba cannot see blue. That claim is false, and the researchers never made it.

Serandu (approx.)#C0392BDumbu (approx.)#D9C77AZoozu (approx.)#1F2233Vapa (approx.)#F2F0E6Burou (approx.)#2E8B8B

The Himba terms

As described by the psychologists Debi Roberson, Jules Davidoff and Ian Davies, the five terms are roughly as follows. Serandu covers reds, oranges and pinks. Dumbu covers beige, yellow and some light greens. Zoozu covers dark colours, including dark blue, dark green, dark red and black. Vapa covers white and pale colours. Burou covers many greens and blues, and the word is thought to be a borrowing from German or Afrikaans. The system suits its speakers perfectly well. Cattle, which matter far more, are described with a large and precise vocabulary of coat colours and patterns.

What the research found

In studies published in the early 2000s, Himba adults and children were asked to remember a colour chip and pick it out again, and to judge which chips were most alike. They did better when the choices fell into different Himba categories, just as English speakers did better across English ones. In other words, colours with different names were easier to keep apart. The results concerned memory and judgements of similarity. Nobody found that the Himba fail to see any colour, and their colour vision is as normal as anyone's.

How the story grew

In 2011 a BBC documentary showed a ring of green squares with one blue square, and said Himba viewers struggled to find it. The images on screen were made for television and were not the test materials, and the experiment as shown does not appear in the published research. The clip spread online together with the idea that ancient peoples could not see blue. Writers on the Language Log blog at the University of Pennsylvania traced the muddle in detail. The real finding is the modest one: categories affect speed and memory near their borders.

Sources and further reading

About this page

Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.