I discovered that I had a real knack for learning languages. I practiced at home by engaging in short conversations with my uncle every morning and evening, mostly in English but also in Afrikaans and the distinctive click languages of the Nama and Damara. He encouraged me to respond to greetings from visitors in both their native language and English. And whenever we came across white people in town, he challenged me to walk up to them and start a conversation, even standing to the side and timing me with his watch to see how long I could go. Eventually, one minute became two, two became three, and so on. I enjoyed my uncle’s challenges and found my confidence grew with each passing day. I liked it when strangers responded warmly to me and commented on my intelligence and outgoing personality.
As time passed, everybody seemed to forget that I was supposed to return home to the village after a year. My mother returned on occasion, at first for only a few weeks at a time, but eventually weeks stretched into months until she was spending as much time in the village as she did in town. I lived in Opuwo full time, however, and threw myself into my education, graduating from primary school only a year behind my age group despite starting school so late. By 2005, when I was fourteen and beginning secondary school, I was completely accustomed to town life. The village became a distant childhood memory.
I loved living with my uncle Gerson. A constant procession of visitors came to see him, and his house was always busy and full of life. They often sat in the backyard next to our tent, drinking beer and discussing various business deals. Most of these schemes had to do with buying, selling, or trading cows. In contrast to my father, my uncle was thoroughly modern in his beliefs and mannerisms: He preferred speaking English, almost always wore a suit and tie, and was interested in cattle for their cash value only. He disliked keeping livestock for any length of time and always complained how expensive it was to pay somebody to look after them. He was strictly in it for the money and always wanted to buy low and sell high in as short a time as possible. He dreamed of buying a small truck so he could transport goats and cows himself and expand his operations farther north toward Angola, where demand was skyrocketing. Like everybody, he wanted to cut out the middlemen, most of whom were Angolans coming down to Opuwo. If he could bypass them, I often heard him say, he would double or even triple his profits. Sometimes I wondered how my uncle could possibly be related to my father, who seemed dull and even a little simple by comparison. As I grew closer to Gerson, I began to think of him in ways once reserved for my father.
One of Uncle Gerson’s business associates who came around the house more and more often was an Ovambo man named Angel. He lived in the capital city of Windhoek but claimed to have many contacts in Angola. Angel was young—maybe in his midtwenties—and always dressed stylishly, usually in designer jeans and business shirts with an open collar that showed off a large gold chain and crucifix. He even drove his own truck, a brand-new Toyota Hilux double cab with tinted windows and custom burnished rims. It was almost always filled with electronic goods and cases of Tassenberg, a cheap yet popular wine that was the preferred choice of people who wanted to get drunk fast. Whenever Angel came to visit, his first order of business was to hire a private security guard to watch his vehicle. He had an air of superiority about him that I attributed to living in Windhoek or maybe from just being Ovambo, a tribe that Himba were often taught to distrust. He clipped his greetings, sometimes forgetting them altogether, a trait that everyone took as a dead giveaway that someone was from the capital city. I also noticed how Angel fidgeted when my uncle spoke, bouncing his knee up and down or tapping his beer bottle with the large gold ring on his pinky finger. At the same time, however, he was watchful and intensely curious. When I caught him staring at me, which was often, he would smile and call me “Gal Level”—the name of a popular female hip-hop duo in Namibia—and then follow that up with some comment about my physical appearance. “You don’t have the big legs and sagging tits of most Himba women,” he once told me. “You have all the best qualities of a Himba, but you’re long and lean like an Ovambo woman. That is good.” By now, I was used to comments about my looks; people around town often referred to me as omundu omuwa omure—tall, beautiful one. But there was something about Angel’s words and mannerisms that made me uneasy. Part of it was the way he switched from Otjiherero to English when speaking to me, peppering his comments with American slang as if testing my English-speaking abilities. From the very beginning, I thought there was something predatory about him.
* * *
In 2006, when the rains failed, people in Opuwo did not think much about it at first. Drought was nothing new. We had all lived with unpredictable rainfall for generations; it was a fact of life. But in the Kunene, it did not take long for a drought to evolve into something serious, a process that began in the bush and slowly infected Opuwo like a virus. To the Himba, each drought had a personality, a life of its own, even a name. My grandfather used to tell me about the particularly devastating drought that had hit the area in the 1980s. Like all the elders, he called it Kate Uri—just go and die—a common remark made to those who fell by the wayside as everybody trekked across the desert to emergency relief shelters in Opuwo. Even at its peak, the 2006 drought was not nearly as bad as Kate Uri, but everybody agreed that things were different now. Rainfall patterns were already erratic, and conditions in general were much drier than they had been in previous decades, making even minidroughts potentially devastating. Initially, government officials bickered over whether or not to call it a drought, with most referring to it with vague words like “below-normal to near-normal rainfall.” My uncle suspected that they thought the word drought would cause widespread panic, but he also believed they did not want to release the millions of dollars in emergency funds that came with such a label.
Meanwhile, news spread about how all the good cattle grazing areas were enduring prolonged dry spells, teased here and there by flash floods caused by violent, localized rain bursts that were almost as devastating as the drought itself. Small earthen dams that many people relied on dried up, leaving behind veiny, cracked shards of baked clay where dung beetles left their distinctive crisscrossing trails. Swarms of voracious red-billed quelea birds roamed the Kunene and devoured everything that was not already dead, and everybody talked about how hundreds of elephants had fled Etosha National Park, pulling up pipes and destroying holding tanks in a desperate search for water. As the months passed with no sign of rain, people worried that there would not be sufficient feed for their livestock. Things were becoming serious.
Our government officials continued to bumble their response. Lacking long-term measures like drought-resistant crops or range management programs—things that people had been requesting for a long time—they relied on people’s patience as they conducted a “case study” on the matter. People made jokes about such government case studies. But the jokes stopped when the government told farmers to sell off their animals to “ease the strain on the fragile grasslands.” To my people, that was like asking a man to cut off his legs just to get by.
For the first time in two years, my father came to Opuwo. He told Gerson that the drought had hit our area hard and the land was slowly but surely dying. If something was not done soon, he said, the herd would die. He was anxious for any news regarding drought relief or emergency assistance from the government, but there was nothing. In years past, my father would have taken the herd south toward the Hoarusib River, where there was still water and good grazing land. Wildlife also concentrated around the Hoarusib, which made for good hunting. But moving south was no longer an option, not since the area had come under the control of something called the Community-Based Natural Resource Management program and a host of new political entities called communal conservancies. While my father did not fully understand the conservancy movement, he knew—like everybody—how it had come to have a tremendous impact on every village and household in our area over the past ten years. Conservancies themselves did not exist in our immedi
ate area yet, but they controlled all the land to the south and west, places where my father and others took their livestock during the dry season and times of extreme drought. For as long as my father and grandfather could remember, the chiefs and headmen had permitted them to graze their animals in these areas, an agreement our family had hammered out based on long-standing relationships of trust and respect. But as communal conservancies sprang up everywhere, gaining power and influence, my father was forced to deal with conservancy management committees. Members of these committees were brash young men who were not part of the established traditional authority structure but who nevertheless had a hunger for power and influence. My father had never met these men before, and they spoke in terms he did not understand, often producing things like paper maps and “strategic plans.” My father could not read, so they had to explain to him how the land was now divided into “management zones” for different activities, such as wildlife, livestock breeding, tourism, and trophy hunting. Grazing areas, they said, were for conservancy members only, so he was no longer permitted to hunt or graze his livestock there. My father pled his case to the chiefs and headmen, but they were now advisors to the conservancy management committees and suggested he take it up at the next annual general meeting. But he soon discovered that these meetings were for conservancy members only. And so it went for my father and almost every cattle grazer in our area.
I watched as my father and uncle huddled together and discussed the growing crisis. My father looked unsure of himself, something that worried me because I had never seen him act that way before, especially when it came to his own household. Uncle Gerson must have seen it too, because he tried to persuade my father to drive a large herd of cattle north into Angola. The cows were going to die soon anyway, he argued, so why not sell them before that happened? With the right connections, he argued, they could make three or maybe four times as much money by selling the animals in Angola. And his friend Angel had those connections. My uncle was so convinced of his plan that he offered to buy fifty head of cattle himself and split the profits with my father.
My father listened to his younger brother quietly as he smoked his pipe. “What would I do with money?” he asked. “I have no pockets to keep it in.”
I had heard him say these words many times before. It was one of my grandfather’s favorite things to say too. But under the current circumstances, I could not help but think how stubborn my father sounded now, even a little foolish.
Uncle Gerson did not give up, however, and he continued to press his brother on the idea. He emphasized how the drought would kill everything.
“Animals will soon die,” my father agreed. “But the drought is only the trigger. The conservancies are the gun.”
The following day, my father returned to the village, but he was back in Opuwo in a few weeks. The news was not good: Things were deteriorating quickly as competition grew fierce for the remaining water holes and good grazing areas. My father talked about old alliances cracking under the strain and described how fights had broken out as the wealthier and more powerful families tightened their grip on the best water holes. The chiefs and headmen held emergency meetings, but nothing happened. As the crisis deepened and emotions ran high, groups of armed militia took to patrolling the best grazing areas. The most vulnerable people tried digging ghoras in the sandy riverbeds, sometimes spending days excavating pits twenty or thirty feet deep with their bare hands in a desperate search for water. But their efforts were in vain and left the land pockmarked with empty holes. I heard my father say it was as if the desert itself were moaning at the futility of it all.
While in Opuwo, my father attended meetings with other Himba men from around the region who had been experiencing the same problems. They sat under a giant camel thorn tree across from the regional governor’s office, discussing the drought and their dwindling options.
One day, I brought my father some goat meat as he sat under the tree with thirty or forty other men. I listened intently as each individual stood and spoke about the crisis. Time and again, their speeches came back to the growing power and influence of communal conservancies. They agreed that while the current drought was severe, it was still a “normal drought,” or a situation they had all experienced and come to expect in the Kunene every five years or so. What had changed was the way people were interacting with the land; practices were now written on paper documents and kept in conservancy offices. Everybody agreed that this new way of thinking originated with white men from the World Wildlife Fund and other environmental organizations. The “wildlife men,” as everybody called them, had been frequent visitors to Himba territory in recent years, conspicuous in their brand-new safari shirts and hiking boots as they smiled while the Namibian sun turned their faces from pink to red. They were very good at delivering a seemingly endless supply of strategic planning meetings, workshops, and assorted gatherings, and everybody joked that such events would have been poorly attended if not for the free food. But along with the free food came promises of local jobs and income that could be earned from wildlife, promises that were delivered with colorful summary charts and fantastical graphs depicting how much money could be generated by the conservancy movement. By the time the white men left, the land was divided with lines no Himba could see. Wildlife and tourists saw them, however, because they poured into these areas in growing numbers. And while the tourists liked to point their cameras at both the wildlife and the Himba, they did not seem to like the Himba’s cows. “Tourists want to see lions and elephants,” I listened to one old man say. “Not cow shit.” He pointed his walking stick in the direction of one of the “traditional Himba villages” that had popped up around Opuwo, noting how entire Himba families were now making a living from the coins that tourists tossed at them. “These people do not own cows anymore,” he said. “A Himba with no cows is not a Himba.”
Later that evening, my father returned to Uncle Gerson’s house convinced that something had to be done. As they sat in the backyard and discussed the situation, he peppered Gerson with questions about his friend Angel, wanting to know exactly how much money he could make them by helping them to sell their cows in Angola. Finally, reluctantly, my father agreed to the plan. Perhaps, he told my uncle, he would make enough money to drill a borehole near our village to have a more permanent water source. Uncle Gerson assured my father that their Angola plan would indeed make him a rich man, allowing him to not only drill a borehole but also build up the herd again when the time was right. In the end, my father had little choice; his own cows would soon be too weak to make the trip, and the only water holes and good grazing land that remained were in the north anyway. All other areas were divided up by the white man’s invisible lines.
But Angola worried my father. His only memories of the country were of his time fighting in Namibia’s war of independence, a struggle that for various reasons took place mostly in Angola. It was a dark, confusing period, when Angolans, Namibians, South Africans, and even Cubans clashed with one another for years. Throughout the 1980s, the fighting in Angola was a flash point for the Cold War as the United States and Soviet Union backed different factions with massive amounts of money and weaponry. Cuba and the apartheid government of South Africa became their military proxies—though each fought for their own reasons as well—and both governments committed tens of thousands of military forces to a combat zone that was as secretive as it was chaotic. At its apex, the fighting degenerated into a convoluted mess of political ideologies, rebel factions, and self-proclaimed people’s movements. As everybody knew, the war lasted for three grueling decades, claimed millions of lives, and displaced over one-third of Namibia’s population.
Yet ever since 2002, when Angola’s own civil war finally ended, the country had undergone an amazing transformation, mostly due to oil and diamonds. China had become Angola’s biggest trade partner and consumer of oil, an enviable position and one the Chinese were keen to maintain by contributing massive amounts of money and assist
ance. The vast majority of the money circulated in and around the capital city of Luanda, which became a giant oil-fueled black hole that sucked up anything of substance in the region. And Namibia, a stable country with strong ties to South Africa and historically porous borders, was in a perfect position to feed the beast. Over a few short years, the border regions between Angola and Namibia became a critical link in a vast underground network of trafficked goods. Fueled by equal parts corruption and growth, southern Angola suddenly represented a frontier land of immense opportunity. Smugglers, con men, and opportunists of all kinds poured into the region and established a healthy flow of mostly illegal and stolen goods. Northern Namibia became a conduit for everything from alcohol to electronics, clothing, vehicles, and, perhaps most importantly, livestock. For the average Namibian, particularly those who lived in northern towns like Opuwo, it was impossible to ignore the opportunity to make a lot of money in a very short time by trying one’s hand in the cross-border trafficking of goods and animals to Angola.
My father was not immune to the lure of the “Angolan Dream,” despite the fact that for him the country represented death, famine, and a meager existence living as a refugee in a foul tent city far from home. But now it promised to be a place of hope and redemption. While he harbored a fundamental distrust of the country and shared a general feeling among most Namibians that southern Angola in particular was a lawless frontier filled with criminals and cheats, he also understood that circumstances had changed. Plus, Uncle Gerson had been slowly working on him, assuring him that such risks would be minimized with the right contacts.
I Am Not Your Slave Page 3