The Last Train to Zona Verde Read online

  Look thy last on all things lovely,

  Every hour…

  Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it. Knowing that a return to Africa for me was probably out of the question — how much more can these bones take? — made me want to be scrupulously truthful. None of it was trivial, all of it was meaningful; everything I saw mattered much more. And a great deal that I witnessed in Namibia was a revelation.

  Most people come to Africa to see large or outlandish animals in the wild, while some others — “the new gang — the gang of virtue” — make the visit to tell Africans how to improve their lives. And many people do both — animal watching in the early morning, busybodying in the afternoon.

  Lots of African countries offer this opportunity — Kenya (game parks and slums), Uganda (gorillas and tyrants), Tanzania (colorful Masai herders and urban shantytowns), Malawi (lakeshore luxury and one million AIDS orphans). And there are other tourism-and-busybody opportunities, notably in South Africa, where you can travel without much trouble from a game drive on a wilderness safari to a township tour and see — by the way — that both experiences (game viewing, slumming) have a certain pathos, even an aesthetic, in common.

  One of the features of tourism through the centuries, from the Grand Tour onward, is that not far from the five-star hotels there is starvation and squalor. In most destinations you can’t be a tourist without turning your back on human desperation or holding your nose. India is the enduring example: glory in the background, misery in the foreground, no vision of gold without a whiff of excrement. But we are in Africa now, a continent plagued with foreign advisers. I have stayed in African hotels, usually the more expensive ones, where virtually every other guest was a highly paid advice giver.

  You can hardly meet a visitor to Africa who doesn’t have an opinion on how the continent should be fixed. The well-publicized high-profile do-gooders provide a gilt-edged mirror in which many of these flamboyant ambitions are reflected, through a glass, darkly.

  Four examples, wearing theatrical makeup, come to mind. The modestly gifted, semieducated, but hugely popular movie star, whose provable skills are purely thespian, decides to become an ambassadorial presence in the Sudanese territorial struggle. The aging, dissolute singer visits Malawi, adopts both a posture of piety and a child or two, and leaves with the promise of a new school. The TV talk-show billionaire hobnobs with a head of state and founds a luxurious academy for girls in Johannesburg. The married, scandal-plagued pair of superstars find seclusion from their fans in Namibia, the wife giving birth in a private hospital, and thereafter providing the maternity ward with a large endowment.

  In each case, the donors are from faraway America, professional performers, novices in Africa, and they seem weirdly euphoric — wild-eyed and deafened by the power their money has given them — for money can’t buy belief or obedience in Hollywood the way it can in Africa. These stars act out their concern in public, their patronage rising to the level of a performance, like giant infants fluttering money into a beggar’s outstretched hands and pretending to ignore the applause. It is as though they have set out to prove that a person in such a shallow and puppetlike profession is capable of a conscience.

  Does this improvisational charity do any good? History suggests no, that the countries are worse off for it. Many African economists, including Dambisa Moyo, from Zambia, and the Kenyan James Shikwati, have convincingly argued that most aid is harmful. In her book analyzing foreign aid to Africa, Dead Aid, Moyo declares that the $1 trillion that African countries have received since the late 1940s has discouraged investment, instilled a culture of dependency, and created corruption, all of which have impeded growth and retarded the nations’ economies.

  This is also the view of the Sudanese telecom billionaire Mohamed Ibrahim, who was quoted in the Wall Street Journal in 2012 as saying, “It’s my conviction that Africa doesn’t need aid.” In his view, corrupt governments are the problem. “Without good governance there’s no way forward.” Ibrahim is a generous philanthropist in Africa but refuses to give money to any badly governed country. A great deal of aid is plainly political, and much is pure theater, something that comes naturally to the performers and public figures who involve themselves in these efforts at African improvement, which, when you look closely, are often efforts to improve the irregularities in their own public image.

  Still, a lack of human charity is an appalling defect, so I am not condemning the actions of these people, only questioning them and finding them mostly misguided. And the ambiguous, self-indulgent, or egomaniacal fame hogger, speaking with the tongues of men and of angels, is never more of a clanging cymbal than when playing a starring role as a philanthropist. No one is a bossier moralizer than a decadent celebrity.

  Poor Africa, the stage on which so many outsiders dramatize their lives, test their theories, and reinvent themselves. And there are tens of thousands of others, well-intentioned organizations and generous donors who are also engaged in the business of aid. Namibia is a wonderful place to observe this parade.

  Namibia — vast country, small population, and mostly arid stony desert — receives the attention of many charity-minded Americans. There is only one city in the land, and it is hardly a city—Windhoek, the capital, has a quarter of a million people. It is the same size as Newark, New Jersey, and I can well believe that many visitors from Newark to Windhoek make the journey with the idea of telling the locals how to live their lives.

  In fact, Newark and Windhoek face some similar problems. Both cities struggle to maintain literacy programs and alleviate poverty and unemployment. One difference is that the high school graduation rate is higher in Windhoek than in Newark, where it is a mere 29 percent (so said New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie in a speech at Harvard Business School in 2011). The neighborhoods of Windhoek are dangerous, yes, and though there are fewer homicides than in Newark, there are twice as many robberies and three times the number of burglaries. Windhoekians are, however, demonstrably more polite. Windhoek has a balmier climate than Newark, and has access to diamond mines. It is not far from an unspoiled coast, and herds of lions and elephants roam nearby. Windhoek’s streets are cleaner than Newark’s too.

  This is not Newark bashing. The streets of Windhoek are swept more often than those in many U.S. cities. Arriving by bus early that morning for the first time, I stood on a wide street, impressed by Windhoek’s cleanliness, orderliness, and look of well-being. I sensed its pride, even a sort of civic smugness.

  Instead of giving advice on community development, it would make more sense for outsiders to inquire how this order came to Windhoek, and to Namibia at large, especially given the country’s colonial history, which is shamefully rich in massacres and oppression, and its war of independence, which started in 1966 and went on for twenty-four years — Namibian guerrillas pitted against the well-armed South African army, mostly in wicked skirmishes in the bush. After the whirlwind of all this trouble came years of peace and order.

  The high literacy rate (above 90 percent) accounts for the fact that there are five daily newspapers in Windhoek, not including one in German, the Allgemeine Zeitung, known in Namibia as the AZ.

  “Actually, it is written in Southwest German, the language spoken by German-speakers in Namibia,” a former editor explained to the Deutsche Welle website on the paper’s ninetieth anniversary. The editor, a Namibian-born German, gave the Southwest German word rivir as an example. “It doesn’t mean river and it doesn’t mean Fluss,” the German word for river. “It means a dry river,” or wadi.

  Deutsch-Südwestafrika, like many African colonies, started as a small private trading post, until the foreign population grew, flexed its muscles, and began grabbing more land, which needed protection. The modest trading operation of 1883 turned into a German colony, and flourished, but after the defeat of Germany
in World War I, the whole territory was turned over to the South Africans, who ran it as their colony, imposing their biases, their racial laws, their army and police, and their own settlers. Yet there had been trekkers from South Africa in this area for a century or more, and in the most remote pans and valleys of Namibia the graves of Boer trekkers bake in the sun. I was to see one cluster of seven tombstones in Etosha, northern Namibia, near an elephant wallow in the middle of nowhere, and another in Humpata, in south-central Angola.

  Race-conscious white South Africans had an obsession for categorizing people. But it proved to be a dilemma, because in SouthWest Africa people came in every shade from white to black, with all the coffee and tea tones in between. Take Edith, for example, the mixed-race woman I had met on the bus. Proud of her Namibian heritage, she was on her way to Rehoboth, with its Baster population. The Basters traced their ancestry to the early Dutch in this territory whose mingling with indigenous Nama people had produced a distinct community that proudly called themselves Basters — from the Dutch for “bastard” — a word and a designation they still rejoice in. The South African Guidebook for 1923: “The Bastards are descendants of a cross of Cape European farmers and Hottentots. They number between three and four thousand and live in the Rehoboth District. The Bastards are ruled by a chief with the title of ‘Captain.’ ”

  It was not until I arrived in Namibia that I made onward plans, but even so, these plans were vague. I had volunteered to speak at a UNESCO-sponsored event in Tsumkwe, in the far northeast, for the experience of meeting the local people, and I wanted to see the coast, but otherwise I simply had no plans other than to travel overland in a northerly direction, into Angola.

  I found it easy to find my way in Namibia, which was crisscrossed by well-trodden paths, filled with busloads of tourists from Europe. Many of them were Germans, making a sentimental journey to their former colony and agreeably surprised to find Gemütlichkeit, German hotels, German restaurants, and about forty thousand permanent-resident Germans (twice the pre-independence number). Thousands more Germans lived seasonally in the seaside town of Swakopmund, a sunny refuge from the German winter.

  Though Namibia is twice the size of California, it has a population of only two million people — one of the smallest populations of any African country — and most of them live in Windhoek or in the far north, above the so-called Veterinary Fence that bisects the country (a protection against the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease). Namibia is a land of extremes: ultrarich in minerals that range from uranium, which the United States buys in increasing quantities, to lead, zinc, tin, silver, tungsten, and gem diamonds. Most Namibians are farmers, but poor ones. While Namibia has one of the highest literacy rates and per capita incomes in Africa, it ranks near the bottom in land and income distribution.

  “Tourists say they’re disappointed — it’s not Africa,” a man named Karl said to me. I had bumped into him at Windhoek’s main rail station, where he was picking up parcels that had been sent from the coast by the mail train. By “not Africa” he meant the place was too orderly, not obviously poor or tyrannized. “But this is the way all of Africa could be.”

  We talked a little while. Karl had been born into a farming family in the small cattle-raising town of Gobabis, in eastern Namibia at the edge of the Kalahari Desert. The English traveler Francis Galton had described this remote place. One of the earliest explorers in that part of the country, Galton was also the first European to write about the animals in Etosha, in his Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (1853). I asked Karl, who was about seventy, what life had been like growing up in his hometown.

  “Very quiet,” he said. “And it’s still quiet.”

  He had gone to boarding school in Cape Town, he said, a long journey by train. “My brother and I took the narrow-gauge line from Gobabis to Windhoek, changed to the broad-gauge line into South Africa, to Upington, changed again at De Aar on the high veldt, and finally got to Cape Town — four days in the train.”

  His parents, his grandparents, all had been farmers. The somnolence and early rising of rural life: nothing changed for years, and even this elegant, white-plastered railway station in Windhoek had been in use for a century, as an important stop on the Trans-Namib Railway and in Karl’s life.

  “No tourists came here, and the country didn’t change much until they found uranium,” Karl said. “Then they needed people to work in the mines, and we got people from other countries. And some from Europe overwintering.”

  The first uranium deposits had been found in the 1920s, larger seams were discovered in the 1960s, and bigger finds were made in the seventies. New mines were opening as late as 2007. Mining by cartels accounts for two thirds of Namibia’s income but employs less than 10 percent of the workforce.

  With Karl’s help, because no one was on duty at the station, I discovered that there was only a night train to the coast, leaving in the dark, arriving at dawn. So taking it I would see nothing but the interior of the train, my disappointed face reflected in the coach window.

  Pondering the night train versus the day bus to Swakopmund, I walked back along Bahnhof Street and around the small city center, breathless in this mile-high place. Windhoek looked the way Harare, in Zimbabwe, had once looked: a colonial capital and market town with streets wide enough to allow an ox wagon to make a U-turn. Harare was now a desperate ruin on the verge of bankruptcy, but Windhoek had grown larger without having lost its character, was well kept, proud, as solid as ever, and invested in. The uniformity of the fat squat German architecture — churches and municipal buildings and bungalows — was unmistakable and looked bombproof, built to last, as though on a street in Berlin instead of in this distant plateau in the Namib Desert. “This uniformity derives from the sense of fitness and superiority of the German outlook,” Jon Manchip White wrote in his 1971 account of his journey through this country, The Land God Made in Anger. White, who traveled the area in the early 1960s, provides marvelous summaries of the history and culture, though he sometimes overeggs his descriptions, even of mild, dull Windhoek, asserting that the city gives the traveler “a sense of necromancy … The African mystery is omnipresent. The deserts press round him as pitilessly as the jungle at Kinshasa.”

  No “African mystery” now; only brisk, self-important Namibians busily talking on cell phones. I wandered into a shop and asked a man where I might buy a phone. He said they were easy to find and inexpensive, and he gave me the name of an electronics store where I could sign up for one.

  The store was on a side street, a rack of sample cell phones in a display case, and at the counter a woman was waiting on a customer. In the corner, at the edge of the counter, a small boy sat on a stool, his arms folded.

  Seeing me, the woman clerk said, “Go there,” and gestured to the child.

  I smiled and hesitated, and the boy said nothing. Then I saw that the child, about the size of an eight-year-old, was actually a grown man, with San features and bat ears and tiny hands.

  I said hello.

  “I am Jakob,” he said.

  He was polite and patient. He’d seen me hesitate, on the point of ignoring him, taking him for a child. But here he was in a responsible job, explaining what I would have to do to get a cell phone that worked in the country. And though the phone he showed me seemed very cheap, I decided to buy it some other time.

  I thanked Jakob and went away, wondering what miseries he had suffered. There were people of small stature all over Central Africa, in the Congo and in southern Angola and northern Namibia, who called themselves the Twa, or Batwa (“Twa People”). I knew of scattered groups of them in Uganda, where their villages were close to the Congo border. They gathered on the road to Bundibugyo, waving at passing cars. When a car slowed down, they called out, “Me pygmy. Take picture,” and demanded money. The Twa, who are part-time hunter-gatherers, tend to live near other peoples in a semidependent way, trading and negotiating, but have their own customs — one of which allows a woman whose hu
sband has committed adultery to strangle the woman who presumes to be her rival. (The man is not punished.)

  Jakob could have been a Twa, but I didn’t raise the delicate subject because the one trait that unites the Twa is that they are despised by whomever they live among. And even if Jakob had not been a Twa, he would probably have been identified as one of these pygmoid people who live at the margins of the country.

  I spent my time in Windhoek outfitting myself with supplies. Since I was headed to the bush after my trip to the coast, I needed more Malanil, a daily dose against malaria. This being southern Africa, I could buy the drug cheaply without a prescription, as I could my gout medicine and certain antibiotics. I found a Namibian pharmacist who helpfully described dosages. I bought batteries, insect repellent, a hat, spare socks, an elephant-hide belt, and a padlock for my bag.

  Windhoek was so rich in safari gear I could have outfitted myself for an ambitious hunting expedition — safaris do not get more elaborate or bloodier than in Namibia. The abundant waterholes and low bush make it a prime destination for shooting animals, not just the Big Five (elephant, lion, leopard, buffalo, rhino) but the great horned plains game too, like kudu, oryx, and eland. These animals are gunned down on concessions in the bush operated by safari companies, which also take care of stuffing and mounting the dead beast — the object of the whole ridiculous charade being the trophy.

  There were hunters at my hotel, easily identifiable by their funny hats, new khaki clothes, and rifle cases — like oversized Boy Scouts — and by the way they walked in small groups, warily, keeping to themselves except when they were traipsing after their local guide. The guide was the key man in the whole enterprise. He was the arranger, the facilitator, the hirer of cooks and trackers and camp staff, the man who would drive them to the hunting concession or game ranch and bring them to within easy shooting distance of the animals, for which they’d bought licenses to kill. It was safari tourism, trophy hunting for dummies.