The Last Train to Zona Verde Page 11

  Another man I met, Michael, who had a shop near Pierre’s, had migrated from Germany in 1986. Namibia was better then, he said — no crime, you could leave your door open. But now, with high unemployment, petty theft was common. And he was dismayed by the parsimony of the tourists. Of the tens of thousands of Germans resident in Namibia Michael said, “They never spend money, my countrymen.” He was looking forward to Oktoberfest, a big celebration in Swakopmund and Windhoek, with music and dancing and drunkenness.

  “I keep my German passport.” Nodding toward the street, as though at all the other Germans, Michael added, “They do the same. There are no Namibians in this country. There are Herero, Damara, Oshiwambo, Afrikaners, Basters — that’s what they say first, if you ask. Then afterward they say, ‘Oh, yes, I’m also Namibian.’ ”

  There was something colonial about Swakopmund, and perhaps it was this that the Germans liked. The old buildings still stood, some of the town looked much as it had a century before, there were no high-rises, and — owing to the hard-up townships — there was no servant problem. There were many good restaurants, the wine lists were lengthy, the prices were reasonable, the hospitality was convincing. Every evening when I returned from my forays, Herr Wacker, the general manager of the Hansa Hotel, greeted me warmly.

  “You must stay longer,” he said.

  I would have, but I had a train to catch.

  It wasn’t easy leaving the hotel. As all the other guests were filing into the dining room, I made my way by taxi to the now obscure railway station, the driver reminding me of the all-night journey through the desert and repeating that, for a hundred dollars or so, he would whisk me to Windhoek in the morning.

  But I had resolved to ride the train, and the more it was denounced (“Only black people take the train”), the greater my desire to see it. Like much in Swakopmund — many houses, the banks, some hotels, the layout of streets — the railway, too, was a hundred years old.

  I found a seat that canted back and would allow me to sleep. Among my fellow passengers, some were burdened with bundles, some with small children, family groups already settling in for the night. Across the aisle was a great fat Afrikaner reading a newspaper in his language. He was sitting alone, and his entire bulging midsection was swathed in a heavy bandage, as if to prevent him from exploding.

  In the seat ahead, a German, Klaus. He said he was ill. “I passed a bad night,” he explained. And he made the vomit gesture, his hand mimicking a flow from his wide-open mouth. “It was the biltong [cured meat] I ate.”

  Then we left the station, and when the lights in the coach went out, the desert was lit, and glittered for hours in the light of the cold moon.

  * I had written about the Zimbabwe government violently seizing these farms in Dark Star Safari. Eight months after Pierre told me this story, the New York Times reported, in 2012, that the maize harvest had been reduced by a third, 1.6 million Zimbabweans faced starvation, and the UN’s World Food Program would need to distribute emergency food aid. Before 2000, Zimbabwe had a surplus of maize, the staple food of the people.

  6

  The Bush Track to Tsumkwe

  AN EARNEST, HIGH-MINDED, well-funded, foreign-sponsored event — the sort I always either avoided or mocked — was being held in Tsumkwe, a small town in the remote northeast of Namibia. Much less than a town, Tsumkwe was a village crossroads in the Kaokoveld, a region in the center of Nyae Nyae, which was eighteen thousand square miles of infertile, drought-prone, famine-haunted, thinly populated bush — an unpromising area, it seemed, for such an expensive and scholarly effort. Yet I knew such places to be the beating heart of Africa.

  The event would be a full day’s program of talks and films, billed as “World Day for Celebrating Audio-Visual Heritage in Namibia,” organized by the Windhoek office of UNESCO. You cannot hear such a pompous title without imagining a long hot day of yawning and paper shuffling and protocol, discussion groups, noble projects (“We could start a workshop … form a committee … apply for a grant”), and endless talk—the jargonized gabbing about plans that would never amount to anything more than words on the wind. You think: What’s the use?

  I was asked if I would be willing to speak at this Tsumkwe event, at a forum devoted to the theme for the day, “Preserving a Cultural Heritage.”

  The subject, however vague, interested me, and I had nothing else to do except stay on the road. I welcomed the idea of a ride to Tsumkwe, which was 454 miles from Windhoek, the last third of it on a gravel road through uncultivated and featureless bush. And I might have something to add to the discussion.

  I said yes, fighting my skepticism, and was glad afterward.

  No train, no bus, hardly even a bush taxi went to Tsumkwe. Trucks traveled to the place at irregular intervals. At the end of the dusty road and near the Botswana border, Tsumkwe was closer in miles (about a hundred or so) to the Okavango Delta and the small town of Nokaneng in Botswana than to any place of substance in Namibia. It was home to the Ju/’hoansi, a subgroup of the !Kung, and near many of their settlements, and was regarded as a center of the last of the hunter-gatherers, who had lived thereabouts for almost forty thousand years.

  In return for two talks at the event, I’d get a ride from Windhoek. In my travel, I used no transport other than public buses and trains, and I was determined to proceed overland, though it was awkward at times. In any case, no commercial planes flew to Tsumkwe either; an airstrip had been bulldozed in the bush to accommodate the private planes and ministerial helicopters of Namibian politicians.

  Though it was only a dot on the map, in a historical sense Tsumkwe was important. It was near the base of operations chosen by the ethnographer Lorna Marshall for her pioneering study of the Ju/’hoansi, the Real People. In a fit of restless inspiration combined with wanderlust, Lorna’s husband, Laurence Marshall, a wealthy businessman and cofounder of Raytheon Corporation, took his wife and children to southern Africa in 1950. Newly retired, he said he wanted to do something constructive that would include spending time traveling with his family. He devised an ambitious — some would say reckless — plan to relocate to the remote Nyae Nyae Conservancy area and get to know the indigenous people, at that time an overlooked and undifferentiated folk called simply, and unhelpfully, Bushmen. Until that time these despised people had barely been studied, and had been pushed to the margins and ignored by the South African government, which administered what was then the mandated territory of South-West Africa. Laurence and Lorna Marshall and their teenage children, Elizabeth and John, penetrated the trackless bush in a Chevy truck, a difficult journey now, almost unimaginable in the 1950s.

  Tsumkwe then was not any kind of formal settlement. No more than a waterhole near a large black baobab tree, it was a mere unsurveyed landholding, a patch of bush (called a n!ore) that supported the hunting and foraging of a tiny group of Ju/’hoansi people. The Marshalls located themselves about thirty miles to the southeast, near a pan — a seasonal waterhole — called Gautscha. There they stayed for two years, and kept returning for more than a decade. On the face of it, the Marshalls resembled the Swiss Family Robinson on wheels; in practice, it was family rustication provoked by intellectual curiosity that bore rich anthropological fruit.

  Lorna Marshall’s book, The !Kung of Nyae Nyae (1976), was one of the earliest scholarly studies of these people. Lorna’s children were similarly inspired. John Marshall, traditionally initiated while still in his teens and fluent in the language, was to spend the rest of his life, off and on, among the Ju/’hoansi, hunting with them, studying them, filming them. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, a novelist, has written two nonfiction accounts of the Ju/’hoansi (“Ju/wasi” in her spelling): The Harmless People (1991), a mild and hopeful account of the people, and The Old Way (2006), a more sober look at the drastic changes in their culture and at the myths about their lives that are harbored by romantic voyeurs like me.

  Over a period of fifty years, from 1950 to 2000, John Marshall, a man of luminous sens
ibility, recorded the Ju/’hoansi extensively on film. His five-part documentary, A Kalahari Family, in which he interviewed Ju/’hoansi in footage now considered very rare, is regarded as a classic ethnographic visual record. He made many other films about them and their disappearing culture, chronicling the dramatic recent history of these people who, living the old way, undisturbed for 1,500 centuries, have been confronted by the outer world of bureaucrats, traders, politicians, missionaries, miners, tourists, opportunists, educators, and all the paraphernalia that the outsiders brought with them — legal briefs, guns, money, canned food, alcohol, candy, books, Bibles, and new diseases. They also brought extravagant promises, if not of prosperity in this world than glory in the afterlife. The Marshalls witnessed the Ju/’hoansi change from self-sufficient and strong to mostly dependent and much weakened. The timeline of Tsumkwe, this outpost in the bush, was like the timeline of sub-Saharan Africa, the history of Africa in a parable of exploitation and decline.

  Something else that persuaded me to participate in this Audio-Visual Heritage Day in Tsumkwe was the news that two of John Marshall’s films, recently discovered in the Namibian National Archives, would be shown there — where they were made — for the first time. I wanted to see the place, view the films, and meet the people, and I was eager to travel into the bush.

  So far my trip had been fairly straightforward. Though many South Africans had warned of physical danger, and Namibians warned of theft, I had not been seriously inconvenienced. All I had experienced were a few shouted threats, some mild racial abuse, petty thievery (sunglasses, a small amount of money), and the pleading of hungry people — but you might encounter these annoyances anywhere in the world.

  People said, “Wait till you get to Angola!”

  I asked, “When were you last in Angola?”

  They said never, that no one went to Angola because it was so dreadful. No eyewitnesses, no firsthand accounts; I was not deterred.

  I never looked for trouble and usually took the path of least resistance, though the simplest trip in Africa can be trouble for someone traveling alone. I hated taking risks, I tried to avoid them, but sometimes they were unavoidable. Going solo, I always had problems to solve. I had no car, so I had to rely on public transport. I did not make plans very far in advance, so I was always in need of a hotel room or a meal at short notice. Because of that, I sometimes had to sleep on a bus, or not sleep at all, and now and then went without meals. But I could hardly complain about such irksome outcomes in countries where so many people were destitute and slept under trees and endured long periods without food. I am not by nature a networker or a looker-up of people, so I am always dependent on chance meetings, on dumb luck, on the kindness of strangers.

  Tony, an American diplomat in Namibia, was one of those helpful strangers. He had invited me to the Tsumkwe event, and he too would be a participant. Briefing me beforehand over dinner in a Portuguese restaurant in Windhoek, he proved reassuringly amiable and well read (“You know, Thomas Pynchon wrote about the Hereros in Gravity’s Rainbow and V”). Tony was also unflappable, and he had access to a fairly new four-wheel-drive vehicle. All the best qualities for a ten-hour road trip into the bush.

  We set off early in the morning from Windhoek, driving into the sunrise. We talked about Pynchon’s books. I mentioned that, sentence by glowing sentence, the man was brilliant, but his high-density pages and wandering, infolding plot lines gave the books a bloodless literary affectation that made them almost unreadable to me. Tony, educated as a literature major, had an academic’s patience, a stomach for solving monotonous literary puzzles, and a delight in lessons learned: a difficult literary text to him was a problem in dissection, like a biology student in a lab hovering over a gutted rodent. Tony read for the challenge and possible reward of identifying obscurities and making connections. This was not my temperament at all. I hate studying books and chewing through teasingly contrived texts, the obstacle courses of deliberate difficulty. If a book doesn’t engage me, I toss it aside. I read for the visceral pleasure of it.

  Driving past browsing cattle in the savanna of the great sunbaked heartland, Tony urged me to treat the Pynchon books more sympathetically. They were fiction but historically accurate, dramatizing a period of German colonialism and atrocities that had been suppressed by German politicians and not written about much elsewhere. But in the past few years this brutal era has received much more notice and, as well, deeper and detailed scholarship.

  Germany — the last European country to acquire colonies, and the first to lose them — had attempted to exterminate an entire native population, the Herero, in South-West Africa in 1904. The wipeout had almost succeeded, in what has been called the first genocide of the twentieth century. This was largely the effort of one man, General Lothar von Trotha, charged by Kaiser Wilhelm II to carry out a Vernichtungsbefehl (“extermination order”), an actual printed document, dated October 2, 1904, a copy of which is kept in the Botswana National Archives. To von Trotha, the Herero were Unmenschen — nonhuman. They were — and a small number still are — a pastoral nomadic people. Herero seeking to cling to their traditional lands, and occasionally raiding the intrusive colonists, infuriated von Trotha.

  “All the tribes of Africa share the same mentality, in that they only retreat when confronted by violence,” von Trotha wrote to his superiors, sounding like Mr. Kurtz. “My policy was and is, to apply such violence with the utmost degree of terrorism and brutality. I will exterminate the rebellious tribes with rivers of blood.”

  Pushed by the Germans, the Herero resisted. One of the results was the Waterberg massacre, and in this and other battles (the rapid-fire Maxim guns against arrows and old single-shot rifles) it is estimated that as many as ninety thousand Herero — the great majority of the Herero people — were killed.

  Tony and I talked about this as we traveled in glorious sunshine toward the town of Otjiwarongo, passing the very spot, Waterberg, a bluish ridge in the distance, where the massacre took place.

  Somehow — in exile, scattered, in concentration camps, as slave laborers — the remnant Herero had survived. Herero women are easily identifiable by their distinctive clothing: a billowy ankle-length dress with full sleeves and an extravagant headpiece of folded cloth, called an otjikaiva, with two pointed ends that look like a flattened admiral’s hat which is said to mimic the horns of a cow.

  “I see Hereros all over the place,” I said. The Herero men were unremarkable in their clothes, but the women were unmistakable. “I saw a lot of them in Windhoek, which is full of Germans. They don’t seem to bear any grudges.”

  “The people in Namibia are generally easygoing,” Tony said. “They’re gentle. You seldom hear anyone shouting. It’s the Angolans here who have a reputation for being lively and excitable.”

  But we saw no one on the roadside or in the landscape, nothing to suggest human habitation except the cattle fences strung along the road. Now and then we saw wild game — a springbok or an ostrich or an occasional raptor hung in the sky — but there were no people, no houses, nothing but the vast hot land, yellow in the drought that had gripped it.

  Tony said, “The people in Tsumkwe are really glad you’re coming.”

  “I’m grateful they asked me,” I said, and meant it. And I smiled to think that I, who usually mocked such events, would be taking part in an NGO effort at enlightenment in this remote place.

  “What’s it like there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “This is my first time.”

  We came to the town of Otjiwarongo (“Place of Fat Cattle” in the Herero language), still a center of cattle ranching. One of the German outrages had been to push the cattle-owning tribes off the land and to engage in cattle ranching themselves. When challenged on this by right-thinking people, the Germans, and after them the South Africans, said that what the natives needed in order to achieve self-sufficiency was education.

  “My great-grandfather, the late Chief Kambazembi, had never been to
school, but he had 25,000 cattle in 1903 before we were conquered,” a Herero man, Zedekia Ngavirue, told a UN commission in Dar es Salaam in 1961 (quoted in Ruth First, South West Africa, 1963). “I have a college diploma but do not possess even a chicken.” This statement was prescient: many Africans today could make this sort of claim.

  The ancestral graves of this chiefly Kambazembi family were not far away, on the slopes of the Waterberg Plateau. Some disinterred remains had been returned from Botswana (where the family had been exiled) and ceremonially reburied as recently as 2006.

  Otjiwarongo had a German and Afrikaner population of around three thousand, mostly farmers and shopkeepers, when the writer Jon Manchip White passed through in the 1960s and found it an outpost of fussiness — Rotarianism, parking signs, and plaster garden gnomes. The number of whites had not much diminished, though a great number seemed to live in a neighborhood of walled-in bungalows two blocks from the main street. The town remained a center of ranching and farming, so on the main street was a big supermarket, repair shops, feed stores, small hotels, and many churches, including a large Lutheran church with an enormous square-sided steeple, which was also a clock tower.

  “You could probably find a cell phone here at one of these shops,” Tony said.

  I had mentioned my lack of a cell phone on our drive. I sometimes felt that I was the only person in Namibia without one, and it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to phone home.

  Some helpful directions from friendly Otjiwarongans brought us to the small roadside shop of Mr. Khan, who had an array of electronic goods in his display case. Mr. Khan explained that for about $20 I could buy a phone, and for another $20 a SIM card and usable minutes, which he would program into the phone. I now understood, rather late in the day, why rickshaw wallahs, Cambodian fishermen, and Masai warriors were sometimes seen talking on a tiny plastic phone.

  A young Herero woman, Grace, helped with the transaction.