book excerpt

The Himba live on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. In 1996, we visited northern Namibia to find out how a proposed hydro-electric dam would impact their herding economy and culture. In this out-of-the-way corner of Africa, industrial resource extraction and mass tourism were just beginning and, wherever we went, we found ourselves drawn to the contact zone between these tribal people and the global economy.

The first excerpt tells about life in a village along the Kunene River that winds through the semi-arid landscape and forms the border with Angola.
The second excerpt is set in Opuwo, a town of 4,000, the largest in the area, an old South African army base that has become the region’s administrative centre.

VILLAGE
THE HEADMAN WHO INVITED US TO STAY in his village was named Karamata and his village lay an hour’s walk upstream from the tourist camp at the top of Epupa Falls. A bumpy track ran past the village, a route popular with the 4x4 crowd.

The first few times I walked into the semi-circle of mud and dung huts that made up Karamata’s village, I hesitated, unsure about how to respect the Himba custom of not crossing between the holy fire and the main hut. There was nothing obvious by which to distinguish the main hut from the other three, and nothing I could see to indicate which of the two fires was holy. The fires were small, barely smoking affairs, not big roaring fires like the kind David and I and the rest of the white people made at Epupa Falls. I thought maybe by following our translator, a man named Jackson, that I would be okay, but Jackson didn’t seem to have any qualms about walking anywhere, and after wandering around behind for awhile, I began to feel like I was crossing the line over and over again.

After a day or two, the rocks and huts began to look familiar and the two fires became easy to distinguish. The cooking fire often had an old tin can boiling away on it. The holy fire was not used for cooking, and the rocks around it were well back from the wood, far enough away that a person could sit on them. The holy fire was a short distance in front of the first wife’s hut and early in the morning Karamata could usually be found here, with one of his children sitting close beside him. The holy fire was the conduit of ancestral voices. Only people who had been introduced to the ancestors were allowed to cross the line. Karamata explained that the fire had been passed down to him from his father. Though his father was dead, he could speak with him when he sat at the fire; he laid out his problems and his father gave him advice about what to do. To my untutored eyes, the holy fire often looked like it had gone out, but wood in the Kaokoveld was dry as a bone and held heat for hours. Karamata would squat down and, with his face next to the earth, blow in the coals and the holy fire would spring up again, smoking orange.

••

THE GOATS CRIED LIKE BABIES. They raised their noisy voices first thing in the morning and cried throughout the day. Only at night were they quiet.

“How many goats do you have?” I asked Karamata. He had taken to joining us around the fire in the evening and sharing our supper. He told us there were too many goats to count. The Himba way of knowing the world had not, until recently, involved putting numbers to things. Like Maria, Karamata didn’t know how old he was. “We don’t count years,” he said. He was unfamiliar with numbers, although, as we would find out, he did understand that there is meaningful difference between $20 and $200. Throughout the region, we would meet people who were learning to count under the tutelage of money, looking long and hard at the coins in their hands, trying to understand how much purchasing power they held, what they could trade them for in the store, whether it was sufficient to procure a bag of candy, a bottle of wine, or a fifty kilogram sack of ground corn.

When it came to his herd, Karamata didn’t need numbers. Ever since he was a child, he had spent his days tending goats and cattle, and he could tell if an animal was missing simply because he knew each one of them. In their turn, his children were already involved in caring for the herd. Each morning they trailed behind their father as he made his way through the animal enclosure, sorting the babies from their mothers and preparing to send the herd out for the day. When I did a count I tallied over a hundred goats and about fifty longhorn cows. Despite the dry land in which they live, the Himba are among the wealthiest herders in Africa. The herd was Karamata’s living bank account, requiring daily walking, feeding, and watering. Herding was one part physical labor to three parts killing time, and was an activity well-suited for the children. Even the little three-year-old was comfortable around the animals, picking up baby goats and carrying them around like children back home heft kittens. The previous afternoon, the girl who was six or seven had dashed in front of a group of about twenty stray cows, shouted, thrown a few stones, and redirected the big beasts.

At night around our fire, the subject of medicine came up frequently and barely an evening passed when Karamata didn’t ask us for pills, usually for the pain he got in his stomach, sometimes for malaria. One night Karamata asked if we had any medicine for jackals. He was worried about jackals getting the baby goats and said he was going to have to make a big fire to keep them away. He said there were no lions anymore, so he didn’t have to worry about them, but his goats were still vulnerable to attack from crocodiles, who ate them when they were drinking at the river, from leopards, and worst of all, from jackals.

I added another stick to the fire and asked Karamata how many children he had. He didn’t know, but said he had other, older children, some of whom were across the river in Angola. With that he rose to leave, explaining that because his first wife was away, he was sleeping with their child and he didn’t want to wake the little one by returning to the hut too late.

TOWN
WHEN WE WALKED THE STREETS of Opuwo, we felt like we were seeing into the future. We took to calling this town of 4,000 the “contact zone.” Students in white shirts mingled with Himba women in traditional dress. There was a big warehouse store where tourists in khakis waited to pay for their purchases along with women dressed like Maria. It was a frontier town, a place where conflicting norms and interests walked the same streets. It was the front line of change, a place where the world of the Himba and the wider world that we represented were pressed up against one another.

The hospital was why people went to Opuwo. The town had been an important South African military base during the war and the large hospital was part of what was left of the base. People coming to the hospital were usually accompanied by family members who hung out in Opuwo until the patient was ready to go home.

The centre of town still resembled the military compound it had been until 10 years ago, but on the outer edges there was a burgeoning suburb of mud brick houses crowded together on crooked streets. Morning fires burned in outdoor kitchens. The lanes were narrow and full of people, goats and the odd chicken.

On a barren stretch of ground beyond one of the suburbs, we found two Himba huts. At our feet lay a discarded sneaker, bits of broken plastic, and pieces of paper. The huts fit in with the trash. They were traditional Himba dwellings but wrapped in pieces of plastic and cardboard instead of mud and dung. An old man with shockingly thin arms and legs was hunched over in front of one of the huts. The scene reminded me of what we’d heard about the droughts of the mid-‘80s when the death of their herds brought many Himba to town where they built shanty huts out of cast-off materials and survived on handouts from the government.

Several women were sitting nearby on a piece of cardboard, and one of them was reclining while the other two braided her hair. Braiding is a time-consuming process that involves twisting pieces of hair with ash. The women’s actions were unhurried. Though we had been alarmed by the appearance of the old man, from what we could gather from the women, he was simply very old. This camp on the outer edge of town was primarily a place to stay while waiting for relatives who were receiving treatment at the hospital.

Most people passed the day in the nearby market where freshly killed goat and beef hung from hooks in open air stalls protected from the sun by palm frond roofs. In the market, women knelt over small fires cooking bread and meat and offering it for sale. Buildings made of mud bricks lined one side of the market; they were dark little bars that seemed always to be open and usually to be full. The market was crowded and sometimes the bars spilled out and the whole lane would fill with exuberant drinkers.

At such times, I tended to gravitate towards the women, crouching next to them, sharing peanuts and playing with their babies. Unlike the braided hair of Himba women, mine was forever blowing around in the wind. Often ochre-stained fingers would reach up to my face and one of the women would pull strands of hair from my mouth with an indulgent fussing look.

••

THE FOREIGN COMMUNITY in Opuwo was small and split between missionaries who tended to keep to themselves, and a few dozen aid workers, teachers, doctors, nurses and engineers who sometimes gathered for parties.

This dinner party was at the home of a teacher from England and a dozen foreigners were struggling to keep a conversation going until the subject of tourists came up. Everyone laughed at how inaccurately the tour brochures depicted this place. The Scottish doctor told about the in-flight travel video she had seen while flying back to Namibia after a recent visit to Scotland. The video had explained that the Himba belonged to a primitive tribe, that many of them had never seen white people before, their language had never been written down, and that in order to speak to them, the film crew needed two translators. The video footage had panned across a village and then moved in on the headman who, according to the translate, said, “We are happy to have you here and are glad you want to see how we live.”

The doctor laughed as she told us this. In her year at the hospital she had learned the Herrero language, which is spoken by the Himba, and come to know many of the people who lived close to town. The video footage was from a village on the main road, one she had visited many times. The headman shown on the film was a man who came to see here at the hospital almost every week. In the video, his words had been translated from Herrero to Afrikaans and then into English, but the doctor listed to the Herrero and did her own translation. What she heard the headman say was, “I don’t understand why you are here. You used to live like this once too. And who is getting the money for this anyway, because I haven’t been given any.”