NORTHERN NAMIBIA

Thirteen days of travel northward in Namibia and (other than the City of Swakopmund; pop: 20,000) we’ve seen three people.   Not a village, town or even a compound has crossed our path.   Where are all the Namibians?  Does anyone live here?

 It would take another few days before we bumped into the 2 million who call this place home.

In the meantime though, the scenery is spectacular.   Hundreds of kilometres of red sand desert or rocky wilderness.  Gorgeous rust-colored granite mountains or green valleys appear mirage-like, around a corner, lit up by the diffused sunlight of a foggy morning or  shrouded in ambiguity as stormy,  lightening-filled skies loom on the horizon.  It is the joining of the western and eastern thirds of the US; Big-Sky Montana, Utah and Nevada meet New England in the vast emptiness of the moon.

Namibia is not like the rest of Africa.   Tap water is potable.  Hot water, electricity and paved roads abound.  There are clean, well-lit and well-stocked supermarkets.  And unlike West Africa, the heat and frenzy of a desperate people are absent.

We drove along Namibia’s western shore, known as the Skeleton Coast for its treacherous shoreline.  According to the guidebook, early Portuguese sailors called it “As Areias do Inferno” (The Sands of Hell), as once a ship washed ashore, the fate of the crew was sealed.

Our first stop outside of Swakopmund was Cape Cross, home to thousands of seals sunning themselves and playing in the surf.  It smelled awful but it was so much fun to view the seals up close and personal – milking from their mothers’ breasts (what are seals’ breasts called anyway?), playing in the ocean and lazing on the sand beneath the boardwalk on which we walked, meandering among them.

We bush-camped at Spitzkoppe (“Pointy Head” in Afrikaans) and saw 6,000 year-old drawings painted in caves that sheltered the descendants of the original Man, and watched as both the sunrise and sunset transformed the valley into spectacular shades of orange, red, mint green and white.  (See photos at above link).

But the highlight so far was the visit with the San Bushmen including a night of camping in their village.  The San were the original inhabitants of Southern Africa.   Only 2,000 of the 30,000-member tribe remain in the bush,  hunting and gathering as they have for 300 hundred centuries – an astounding 30,000 years!.   The majority however are in transition.  This generation is the first to have moved permanently out of the bush, settling on land given to them by the government.  For them hunting is only done at the supermarket.   But the gathering of nuts, berries, medicinal plants, and beauty supplies is still practiced. 

We turned off the main road and drove along what can only be described as sand pathways which twisted and turned amongst the scrub, knee-high bushes and the occasional tree, traveling deep into their tribal past.  Arriving at last, we had our first encounter with aboriginal Namibians.

The main sources of income now for the San are government subsidies and tourism.  As we pitched our camp they changed from their “street” clothes into their bush costumes, transforming their village into a living museum, to teach us what it was like to have lived in the bush, completely dependent on hunting and gathering for survival.

 The San is a complex egalitarian society without hierarchy, and because they were never able to build up a surplus of food, full-time leaders and bureaucrats never emerged.  There were no aninals, crops or possessions; no ownership and no Chief.   While it has been noted in 17^th century literature that their lifestyle was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” recent ethnographic data has shown that “hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure time than members of industrial societies.” (Lonely Planet).

When the school bell clanged loudly at 7 am, children came running from all directions, darting barefoot in the sand and bush, scurrying between the donkeys and acacia trees to get to their classrooms before the bell stopped ringing.  We rose with them and spent almost 3 hours on foot learning about San traditions and their secrets of survival.   The San alphabet contains 4 different clicking sounds,  mesmerizing to hear – I could listen to them speak all day -  and extremely difficult to mimic (hopefully, the video at the above link will be audible enough to detect the clicks, clacks and snaps of their tongues and palates).    After dinner they entertained us with traditional song and dance and answered our multitude of questions with humor, patience and grace.  The night was cloudless and the southern sky was ablaze with stars; the Milky Way dazzled, undimmed by the bright lights of the faraway city.

The next day we were off to Etosha National Park, at 20,000 sq. kilometers it ranks among the world’s greatest wildlife preserves.  Its name, which means “Great White Place of Dry Water,” is taken from the greenish-white Etosha Pan, an immense, flat saline desert, and is home to a great diversity of wildlife, including lions, oryx, wildebeest, giraffes, zebras and rhinos, to name just a few of the animals we saw, some of which were crossing the dirt road we were driving on.  (No walking is allowed in the park – or even stopping to pee - way too dangerous to exit the vehicle.)

We are now in northernmost Namibia, on the banks of the Kavango river, which separates it from Angola, just a stone’s throw away.  Tomorrow we enter Botswana and the Okavango Delta, THE place to be in southern Africa, where we will canoe the delta for 2 days and nights.