The Last Train to Zona Verde Page 19

  Otjiwarongo had seemed a welcoming enough place when I’d breezed through with Tony, the American diplomat and my traveling companion. But after a day and a half there it proved to be somnolent to the point of melancholy, or was this the predictable effect of a rainy weekend in a country town in Namibia? In the bar of my hotel a multiracial crowd howled at a South African rugby match on the wide-screen TV. Some were ranchers, as beefy as their cattle; others worked in the fluorite mine or were farmers. It was their day to drink. My bedroom stank of mildew. The desert rain fell intermittently from the sort of low grimy sky I associated with heavy industry, yet there was no industry in Otjiwarongo.

  I asked the hotel clerk the way to the main street. She told me, and added, “Yes, go for a walk. But it’s Saturday. Be careful. There will be drunks.”

  Into the drizzle I went, down the dirt sidewalk, past the one-story houses surrounded by high walls — and the perimeter walls made the houses seem more depressing than if they had been shacks. I scuffed through the litter to the only businesses that were open, the gas station and the Shoprite supermarket, where staggering boys and men shouted at passing cars, and at me.

  “You!” one of the boys called out, and because he was in a group idling at the side of the Shoprite parking lot, I decided to ask him what he wanted. Seeing me approach, he skulked among the others, just as a singled-out animal in a herd might do, for camouflage and protection.

  “Did you want to ask me a question?” I asked. But he was shy now.

  “Where do you come from?” one of the others asked. He was glassy-eyed and a bit unsteady, yet did not seem threatening.

  I told them where I was from.

  “I want to go to America,” that boy said.

  “What will you do there?”

  “I can do anything.”

  This prompt reply made the others laugh.

  “And me, I want to go,” another said. “For work and for enjoying.”

  “You can work in Otjiwarongo, or Windhoek,” I said.

  “There is no work here. There is nothing here. We have no money.”

  “Give us money,” one of the younger ones said.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I said, because they were growing in confidence, and insolence, and were now beginning to surround me.

  “He is a clever man,” the first boy said. “He is telling us lies. He is lying because he is fearing us.”

  Now I realized it had been a mistake to engage them in any sort of talk. I said, “Thank you! See you tomorrow,” and walked briskly away, down the empty road under the gray sky. I was thinking of the futility of such an encounter, because although we were in Namibia, they were boys I might have met anywhere in the world — aimless, idle, with little education and no work.

  I walked for an hour and then returned by a different route to wait out the weekend. It was one of those empty interludes in travel, an airless unrewarding delay, when nothing occurs except a rising sense of loneliness and uncertainty, a darkening of prospects, the condition of being an outsider with all of a stranger’s suspicions.

  To take the curse off the rest of the day I sat and read to pass the time — Melville’s Benito Cereno (ships, ocean, deception, mutiny). At such times I am so drawn into the detailed life of the novel that I am startled when I look up from the fiction and see gravel and cactuses and palm trees that remind me I am elsewhere.

  I was glad when Oliver showed up in his four-wheel-drive vehicle. It meant a few days of companionship and the pleasure of being on the road again, as well as a chance to find out about his aid mission. His role in Africa involved giving large amounts of money away and supervising its use.

  Oliver was the resident country director in Namibia of the American Millennial Challenge Corporation, an agency that financed foreign aid and development. The total fund was considerable, currently running at about $1 billion, and the projects were spread all over Africa — indeed, all over the globe, the dispensing of American taxpayers’ money in an effort to improve other people’s lives. One of the projects in Namibia was helping the tourism infrastructure. In an era of financial hardship for Americans, I wanted to know more.

  “Oliver goes everywhere in Namibia,” I had been told. “He loads up his vehicle with food and water and extra gas and drives into the wilderness. If there’s no road, he drives up dry riverbeds. He spends weeks in the bush.”

  He was young, mid-thirties, and quietly hearty. I liked his energy and admired his disposition. He biked and ran, even on the hottest Namibian days. He was married, with an infant son, and lived in Windhoek when he was not traveling. He had been associated with the Millennial Challenge for four years.

  Also in the car was Trevor, a lanky, good-humored Texan whose wife was a medical officer in Windhoek, specializing in the administration of HIV/AIDS programs. Trevor was contemplating his next move, but was not sure what that might be. He was nearer my age, well traveled, ironical, and, as I was to find out, knowledgeable about African wildlife. His mellow mood showed in his loose and jaunty way of walking. He was a thoughtful person but not a worrier. He said he was just coming along for the ride, interested that I was eventually heading to Angola.

  “Have you been up there?” I asked him.

  He said no. Neither he nor Oliver had been over the border, nor did they know anyone who had. Oliver had been in touch with an Angolan on the other side who said he might be able to help me, but when pressed for a definite answer, the Angolan lapsed into silence and became unobtainable.

  We drove north through small, narrow, road-straddling cattle towns, Hartseer and Vrindskap and Outjo, past the gravy-colored ridge of Fransfonteinberge, and after sixty miles or so we were rolling through the bush. The terrain was the unchanging semidesert and low thornbush that characterized much of Namibia, and it looked sterile until an ostrich strutted into view or a herd of buffalo shadowed forth to flare their nostrils. Passing not far from here 150 years ago, Francis Galton wrote in his diary, “The country is remarkably uniform, intersected with paths, and quite destitute of natural features to guide us. It is also slightly undulating, enough so to limit the view to a mile or two ahead.”

  That was true today. The few Victorian travelers who had dared to march across these parts would find much of rural Namibia unchanged, because it is so thinly populated and undeveloped. Many of Galton’s descriptions in Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, the account of his 1851 journey in what was then an unmapped country, would still apply to this enduring, crystalline, and seemingly steamrolled landscape.

  Nowhere was that truer than at Etosha, which we entered a few hours later. Apart from the gate and checkpoint, it was as Galton had sketched it:

  May 30th — We passed the grave of the god Omakuru … Came to Etosha, a great salt-pan. It is very remarkable in many ways. The borders are defined and wooded; its surface is flat and effloresced, and the mirage excessive over it; it was about nine miles in breadth, but the mirage prevented my guessing at its length; it certainly exceeded fifteen miles [actually more like eighty]. Chik said it was quite impassable after the rainy season, and it must form a rather pretty lake at that time. We arrived late in the evening at another werft [or werf: Afrikaans for the enclosure around a living area], on the south border of the grand flat, Otchikako-wa-motenya, which appears to extend as a grassy treeless estuary between wooded banks the whole way hence to near the sea.

  Galton had gone north with two companions, John Allen and Charles Andersson, and a caravan of bearers following a file of heavily laden oxen. Galton was only twenty-eight, but he was high-spirited, in pursuit of David Livingstone’s Lake Ngami. At that time, European travelers in Africa, like Galton, were searching for the source of the Nile and denouncing the slave trade. For almost two years, Galton wandered up and down what is now Namibia, the first Englishman to report on it. He did not find Lake Ngami, but he penetrated deep into the country, very near what is now the Angola border (“four or five days’ easy journey ahead”), where slaves w
ere routinely rounded up and shipped to Brazil from the Angolan port of Benguela. Galton noted the customs of the Damara, the Ovambo, and the Bushmen; he inquired about slave trading in Angola; he shot birds and big game; he crossed and recrossed the desert; and in the Victorian manner he asserted himself.

  “A man whom I had taken from Chapupa’s werft became impudent,” he wrote. “So I took active measures upon his back and shoulders, to an extent that astonished the Ovampo and reformed the man.”

  There were a few roads in what was Etosha National Park now, but the rest was bush and water and a salt pan. Galton, who first brought Etosha to the notice of the English-speaking world, would have found much of the area familiar. Twenty-five years after Galton’s visit, a young American trader-wanderer named Gerald McKiernan camped at the edge of Etosha and wrote in his diary, “It was the Africa I had read about in books of travel. All the menageries in the world turned loose would not compare to the sight I saw that day.”

  In prehistory, Etosha had been a vast inland sea and still gave that impression, as if at low tide the sea drained away, leaving the sand and crusted sea floor exposed as flats to glitter under an empty sky. Much of it was now a pan, part of it with year-round water and other sections seasonal lakes. In the open areas it was a vastness of blinding white, and it shimmered as far as the horizon and was so thoroughly bleak it seemed that we had landed on a planet made entirely of crushed coral.

  Farther east the land was more varied, with occasional clumps of trees and some parched but wooded glades, where svelte springboks sprinted and white rhinos lowered their armored heads and fitted their wide shovel mouths to the ground to tear at brown grass.

  “Giraffe at ten o’clock,” Trevor said. He raised his binoculars to his eyes and frowned under them in concentration. “And another. With a baby. Beautiful. She’s saying, ‘I think I’ll try the leaves on this branch up here.’ ”

  Two-toned herds of zebra with stiff, upright, brushlike manes trotted together shoulder to shoulder, then lifting their knees broke into a clopping gallop.

  We came to a waterhole where three honey-colored lions lay sleeping, their fatigued bodies slackened on the gravel in the late afternoon sun.

  Oliver said, “Siesta time.”

  Trevor said, “Wait.”

  We watched for a while: two slender sinewy lionesses and a broad-shouldered male lying between them with a fluffed-up mane like teased hair.

  Trevor said, “Big boy is stirring. He knows what he wants.”

  Yawning, the big lion got to his feet, tossed his mane, and padded over to the lioness on his left. Then he squatted in a regal pose behind her, raised his noble head, and thrust himself against her. This took but seconds. As he returned to his sleeping spot, the lioness he had covered rolled over and raised her dangling hind legs and shimmied on her back.

  Trevor said, “Making sure that sperm gets where it’s supposed to.”

  “That was something,” I said.

  Trevor said, “Wait. Give big boy ten more minutes.”

  In less than that time, the lion woke from his doze, yawned again, padded over to the lioness on his right, and squatted over her, knees apart.

  As the lion lay sideways and slept again, Trevor said, “He’s not done. Wait a little bit. You’ll see.”

  Just as Trevor had said, the lion roused himself and mated again with the first lioness. After this third time, Trevor predicted there would be more couplings, at roughly ten-minute intervals. And it happened. Karen Blixen wrote in Out of Africa, “You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”

  “Every man’s fantasy,” Trevor said. Then, “Oryx.”

  This sex and sleeping ritual by the three lions was taking place about forty feet from a herd of fifteen oryx, which were lapping at the edge of the waterhole along with a flock of Egyptian geese, two jackals, a file of ostriches, and two giraffes, heads down, canted forward on their wide-apart legs. And it was not a large waterhole; it was hardly bigger than a suburban family’s swimming pool. Oliver said it was rare to see all these animals, different species, several of them predators or natural enemies, sharing the water peacefully, if warily, without threatening each other.

  At sundown we returned to our lodge at Okaukuejo in time to witness herds of tourists, hundreds of them, alighting from buses and streaming from their rooms. Within minutes they were jostling in the dining room, pushing in a rowdy line to flourish empty plates that they held one-handed at their sides in the fidget of discus throwers, ready to launch themselves at the buffet. They looked fierce, their red faces and bulging eyes gleaming in the heat. There is something terrible about a naked display of hunger, and its nearest passion is perhaps lust.

  “Germans,” Trevor said, in the same tone as he’d said “Oryx.”

  They were clamoring for the platters of roast kudu and sliced chicken, basins of pasta, piles of mashed potatoes, and green salad. Four women edged forward, attempting to jump the queue, and the crowd’s panting and uneasiness were audible, intimations of appetite, many of them sighing impatiently or muttering with bad grace, and there were words, too. You could not watch all this pushing without thinking of the order at the waterhole, the placidly drinking animals. Of the one million tourists who visit Namibia, most are German, the rest from other European nations, and nearly all swing through Etosha in bulky tour buses.

  There is a rule in Africa: do not get between an elephant and the water. Trevor said, “Don’t get between a tourist and the buffet.”

  At the floodlit, fenced-off waterhole at the back of the Okaukuejo lodge, mammals gathered at either side of the barrier, the tourists to watch and whisper, the rhinos and eland to lap at the water.

  “Tell me,” Trevor said in a rhetorical tone, “what’s the difference between this and a zoo?”

  We debated this point until we were shushed and reprimanded by a stern German for talking too loud.

  We set out early the next morning to drive around the perimeter of the pan. Motoring for hours to spot animals is less interesting to me than happening upon them while en route to a destination. I used to like the sight of hippos that crept past the schoolroom where I was conducting an evening class near Lake Katwe in Uganda, or the hyena that routinely pawed at my compost heap in Malawi at night when I sat reading. I preferred animals as background rather than foreground, like the glimpse of the hefty baboon on the road to Swakopmund, which appeared from the parted grass like a pedestrian, waiting to cross the road.

  We came to a place called Halali on my map, but it was merely a dead end and a mud wallow. Nearby was a small cemetery. One of the strictest rules in Etosha was that no one should leave the safety of one’s vehicle. I mentioned this.

  Trevor said, “But I don’t see anyone checking, do you?”

  Being out of the car in this great flat sun-struck place was a liberation. The cemetery, surrounded by an old iron fence to discourage animals from violating the graves, contained the remains of seven Boers, their names and dates inscribed in old-style letters on the granite stones. All dated from the 1870s. These were people who had obviously died in this inhospitable salt pan on their way to Angola, during what was called the Dorsland (“Thirstland”) Trek, when hundreds of white South African farmers migrated north seeking greener pastures and more elbow room. One gravestone read Joh. Alberts 1841–1874 — no doubt a relation of Gert Alberts, one of the instigators, and the leader, of the trek. It was the trekkers’ fate that they had to cross the Kalahari and hundreds of miles of Etosha Desert and Ovamboland before reaching the great Kunene River and the green uplands of Angola. Just as bad as the fierce animals were the Portuguese, who stipulated that in return for the right to settle, these Dutch Protestants had to convert to Catholicism. Still, many of the renegade Afrikaners ended up farming in Angola.

  While we strolled around this small cemetery in the middle of empty glittering Etosha, Trevor suddenly said, “Elephants at two o’clock.”

  They were tiny in the distance, p
erhaps a mile away, swaying out of the shadows of a wide grove of trees as though leaving a low building. They moved slowly and at times gingerly, like barefoot children on gravel, because, Trevor said, the broken stones were sharp enough to press into the soft pads on the elephants’ tender soles.

  We watched, and within half an hour more than forty elephants had gathered at the wallow. Most of them were mothers with babies, some male elephants bullied by the bigger females, and all of them active — rolling in the mud, trumpeting, spraying themselves with squirting trunks of water, the little ones stumbling in the deeper puddles. And there we stood, beholding the marvel of this sudden herd. Seeing so many sociable elephants together while we stood gaping was our reward for visiting Etosha, and I could not help but think of the tamed and obedient, and perhaps resentful, elephants at Abu.

  Deeper into Etosha the land was flatter and without any trees, and as the day grew hotter the whole of the pan was blinding white and lifeless.

  We came to Namutoni. Francis Galton had been here too, when it was known as a reliable waterhole, “a reedy boggy fountain … We were received very hospitably and had a tree assigned to us to camp under.” He also complained, “We traveled through everlasting thorns and stones for nine hours, and offpacked at wells — wretched affairs that we had to sit up half the night to clean and dig out.”

  Some miles to the southeast of Namutoni was Otjikoto Lake, which Galton called “that remarkable tarn, Otchikoto … a deep bucket-shaped hole” filled with water. The local Ovambo told him the dark magical stories associated with the lake, “that no living thing that ever got into it could come out again.” Hearing this, Galton and his two mates stripped off their clothes, descended the bank to the water, and went swimming. Thus they “dispelled that illusion from the savage mind under the astonished gaze not only of the whole caravan but quantities of Bushmen who lived about the place.”

  The fort at Namutoni was a set of square whitewashed battlements and watchtowers in the desert that could serve as the backdrop for a foreign-legion movie. Indeed, a foreign legion had once manned it — the German soldiers of the Schutztruppe, which repelled various attacks on the garrison by the Ovambo people in 1904. Ovambo Chief Nehale, who ordered and led the attacks, is remembered by Namibians as one of their earliest anti-colonial heroes. The seven Germans of the Schutztruppe who repulsed the attacks are remembered by the Germans for their colonial heroism. After the attacks, which destroyed most of the structure, the fort was rebuilt and enlarged in 1906 to its present form, and like everything else the Germans built in the colony, it was handed over to the South Africans less than ten years later.