The lack of anoxic environments in arid lands makes well-preserved fossil pollen difficult to find. The scarcity of continental palaeobotanical data in tropical arid zones restricts the understanding of aridification processes in these endangered ecosystems. It is essential to improve the knowledge about their environmental histories during the Holocene, and therefore we attempt to investigate the causes and describe the patterns of vegetation change in northern Namibia. With that aim we analyzed pollen from fossil hyrax dung that accumulated over long periods of time by sampling stratigraphically coherent sequences in five radiocarbon-dated middens. The fossil hyrax middens were found in rock shelters on the eastern desert edge in the northwestern Kaokoveld, within the so-called Nama-Karoo biome. Keywords: Namib desert, holocene, palynology, savanna dynamics, Nama-Karoo, vegetation history, Hyrax middens.