* * *
Several more months passed before I was ready to call home. Initially, I phoned a cousin my age who lived in Opuwo and asked her to tell my parents that I was alive and well. My parents were at the farm, where cell phone reception was poor, so I asked my cousin to get word to them and have them come to town as soon as possible. I told her to inform only my parents; I did not want anyone else to know where I was at the moment, especially my uncle Gerson. His close relationship with the man called Angel made me suspicious of him the most. It was difficult to have such doubts and misgivings about close family members, but that was my reality now.
When I was certain my parents were in Opuwo, I phoned again. I spoke with my mother first, who wept into the phone so uncontrollably that it took a long time before I could even understand her. Eventually, my mother described how they had tried to find out what happened to me. First, they reported me missing to the Namibian police. But the police asked a lot of questions about why they were in Angola in the first place. The government was in the midst of a crackdown on cattle rustling and illegal cross-border traffic with Angola, which made my parents fear that they, or perhaps Gerson, would get into serious trouble. So my father decided to take matters into his own hands and returned to Angola himself, carefully retracing our previous route until he found the farm where I had been taken. But his presence quickly aroused suspicions among the locals, and they reported him to the Angolan police. He was detained for several days before being loaded onto a truck and taken back to the border, where he was unceremoniously dumped with Namibian immigration officials. After that, there was little they could do but pray.
After hearing what my mother had to say, I agreed to speak with my father. He listened in silence as I recounted my story to him. I wanted to interpret his silence as shock, but it was never easy to tell with him. I knew my father was a slow and methodical thinker who needed time to consider things before responding. And what I was telling him would probably take some time to sink in.
As I neared the end of my story and informed my father that I was in Ethiopia, he paused for several seconds before asking, “Can you hitch a ride home?” I smiled to myself; my father had no idea of the vast distances involved here—he had never heard of places like Dubai or even the Middle East. Like my grandfather, he could never bring himself to believe that the world and its phenomena were larger and more complicated than what he understood from his own experience. I knew it was how they thought of the world’s potential for evil as well. I remembered what Queen Victoria used to say about such men who frequented the Big Ground brothel: they were perfect marks.
But I also knew that, down deep, my father was a good and decent man. I wondered if that was why I wanted to blame him for everything that had happened to me—because I had always assumed that his basic goodness would protect me. But that was a child’s way of thinking, I thought, and I was anything but a child now. Realizing that my father’s moral strength was also his vulnerability, I felt an overwhelming rush of both pity and love for him. “I do not blame you for what has happened to me,” I blurted out. “And now I know it was wrong for me to do that. I have let that heaviness go from my heart. I know that you are not to blame.” And then, because it felt right, I added, “I am free.” I was not quite certain if I was referring to my personal freedom or freedom from the guilt in my heart so I could move forward with my life. But it was probably both.
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. Finally, my father, perhaps recognizing that I had forgiven him without actually speaking the words, replied, “I am sorry, my daughter.”
For the first time since arriving in Ethiopia, I felt a strong desire to return home to Namibia. Until that moment, I had been uncertain where I was meant to be; but my father’s words were like a beacon pointing the way home.
Almost immediately, we began discussing my return. After I explained to my father that I would have to fly on a plane, he responded with a sudden firmness that Gerson would pay for it. He was the only member of the family who had that kind of money, he said, and even if he did not, he could always sell the new truck he had just bought. I had my doubts, but my father said that he would visit every chief and headman in the area and call Gerson to a meeting around the Holy Fire. “He cannot say anything,” my father said flatly. There was a hint of anger in his voice that I had never heard before. “He will only say yes.”
And in the end, my father was right. During the meeting with the chiefs and headmen, the decision was made to have Gerson pay for my flight home. He had little choice but to agree to everything; he was peppered with questions about his association with Angel, and his answers aroused so much suspicion that by the time the traditional authorities were finished with him, even he had to admit some degree of guilt. It was generally agreed that there was much more to the story than Gerson was willing to divulge, and many people believed that he lost his honor around the Holy Fire that day.
Finally, it was time for me to visit the Namibian embassy in Addis Ababa; I needed to somehow obtain a passport and whatever paperwork I needed to return home. As I struggled to explain my situation to a low-level clerk at the counter, an embassy official approached and asked me in Otjiherero, “Peri vi?” (How are you?) Astonished, I replied, “Motja vi?” (What do you want to say?) The man smiled and glanced at the clerk, who was filling in some form with information I had been giving him, and said facetiously, “Omuzandű nguí má tjangá ombapíra ko"mítiri yé.” (This boy is writing a letter to his teacher.) He winked and motioned for me to follow him.
He led me to a spacious office, where he had me sit and recount my entire story. When I finished, the man simply stood up, excused himself, and walked out. He returned in about thirty minutes and told me, “You must come back next week. All of your documents will be ready.” Noting my astonishment, he told me that he was sorry for what had happened to me, but he knew when he first saw me that I had suffered a great deal. “You are Himba and a daughter of Namibia, so it is my responsibility to help you,” he said, adding that he would personally see that everything was taken care of. I thanked him repeatedly and promised to deliver a bag of gifts to his children back in Windhoek. It was the only favor he asked in return. As I was leaving and still trying to express my gratitude, he waved his hand as if it were nothing, smiled warmly, and took me by the arm, saying, “Ngamwa otjina tji yanda.” (Everything has an end.)
* * *
It had been three and a half long years since my abduction, but to me the end seemed to come very quickly. Within two months of the initial phone call to my parents, I was boarding a plane home. Saying goodbye to Almaz was difficult; we had been through much together and grown very close. I trusted my friend more than anyone else now. In fact, she was the only person who made me feel like there were still individuals in the world who could be trusted. Almaz even managed to pay me back all the money I had invested in her business, and then some. My friend had found her calling and was full of different ideas for business ventures, still hoping that I would somehow be involved in the future. She promised to visit me in Namibia very soon. On the day of my departure, we embraced one last time. “God bless you, sister,” Almaz said.
And with those words, I returned home.
EPILOGUE
IT IS 2018 and I have been back in Namibia for almost eight years now. I am twenty-seven years old. I live in Windhoek, my country’s capital city, where I can live a life of relative anonymity yet still call upon a large network of extended kin when needed. These relationships are important for getting by in a country where a common part of greeting strangers is to work out exactly how you are related. Most of the time, however, I keep to myself. When friends come to see me, it is as if I cannot see them. I am often enveloped in my own solitude.
I had never even been to Windhoek before, and I laugh to myself whenever I think of the route I took to finally get here. As my grandfather used to say, there is a short road and a long road to everywhere. I took the l
ong road to Windhoek. But once here, I have found so much of life—the sights, the sounds, even the smells—familiar. Everything, it seems, has a memory. Sometimes, I wonder what this city would be like if I had never been abducted and instead had come straight here from Opuwo. I think it would have been the most exotic and frightening place I had ever known. But now? Now it is just home. My home.
I work as a seamstress for a distant aunt who runs a dressmaking business. We specialize in making the famous traditional dresses worn by Herero women, a tribe closely related to the Himba. Their Victorian-inspired dresses—called Ohorokova—have a long and cherished history in Namibia. The dresses themselves are highly elaborate, voluminous creations worn over a layered maze of petticoats. They are made with an array of colorful embellishments, including a stunning headdress where the cloth is folded over and over in a particular way to make two long points symbolizing cow horns. In this manner, the women pay homage to the animals that are so central to both Herero and Himba culture. I love to work with all the different kinds of fabrics that come from all over and blanket our tiny shop in a billowing explosion of layered colors and patterns. My favorites are Chitenge from Zambia and Shweshwe from South Africa. When I create Ohorokova out of these rich African textiles, I like to think that I am making some kind of magical shield for women, something that will protect them from everything I experienced.
The chiefs and headmen from my area have watched over me since my return. They inquire after me all the time, even appointing an intermediary—a truck driver whose route takes him between the Kunene and Windhoek—to look in on me now and then. On one such visit, he delivered a plastic bag crammed with Namibian dollars, money raised by the traditional authorities to help me get back on my feet. I could hardly believe it. That money allowed me to begin classes at a local university. I am now two years into getting a business management degree. By continuing my education, I know that I am creating my own personal shield.
I received money from my uncle Gerson as well. I was told that the money came from the sale of his truck, something the chiefs and headmen, on the advice of my father, pressured him to do. But as far as seeing my uncle again, I must go by what my head and my heart are telling me, and both say to stay away. People are not always what they seem. The rumors about his true involvement in my abduction are too strong to ignore. In his pursuit of money and a modern life, he has completely abandoned the old way of doing things. Not everything about the old ways is bad, just like not everything about the new ways is good. It is like my father and my uncle are watching the same herd of cows from opposite sides of a field, and I have spent time with each, seeing the herd through their eyes only. But I know now that the best view is from the center. That is where I will sit.
I did not return to the Kunene until I had already been back in Namibia a year. I associated the region with my childhood and a time when I was ignorant of the evil in this world. And I felt I had moved forward with my life. I also hated how people there gossiped about me now, spreading rumors that almost always had to do with witchcraft, as if I were to blame for what they thought they knew about me. But mostly I think I was just putting off seeing my father.
* * *
When I finally did visit the Kunene, my father insisted that he be the first to see me. We were going to meet in Opuwo, but when I finally arrived I learned that the truck that was supposed to bring my father to town had broken down, so he had decided to walk the remaining one hundred kilometers or so. Nobody knew exactly where he was, and he did not own a phone. But I was not really worried; for a Himba man like my father, walking such distances across the Kunene was nothing, it was normal. Even so, I felt I should at least try to meet him halfway, so I phoned a cousin whose boyfriend had a car, and we set out in his general direction.
We slowly made our way along the lonely back roads of my home area, passing isolated villages and the occasional donkey cart. The dirt roads were heavily corrugated and in some places completely washed out by recent flooding. It had been raining in the Kunene, and a thin glaze of faded green grass sprouted up between the red rocks to cloak the lacerated countryside. To most outsiders, it must have looked like nothing, but to me it seemed like the Kunene had been transformed.
We were crossing a wide, flat stretch of desert plain when I spotted a lonely figure walking on the side of the road directly ahead of us. At first, he was just a wavy apparition in the rippling heat of the afternoon, but eventually I made out the sparse attire of a Himba man: walking stick, sandals, cloth skirt—and on his upper body a tattered sport jacket with no shirt. As we drew closer, I recognized the determined, steady gait of my father.
After going through the customary greetings, my cousin and her boyfriend decided to drive to a nearby village to find something to drink, informing us that they would return in a couple of hours. So my father and I walked off to sit in the shade of a group of mopani trees. We talked for a long time, mostly about family: how excited my mother was to see me, how my brothers were doing, the latest news about different aunts, uncles, and cousins. I had already heard about my grandfather, who had died just six months after my abduction. According to my father, the Old One would not stop talking about me toward the end. He spoke constantly of being able to hear my vibrations through the ground; vibrations that grew increasingly faint, which made him think that something had gone terribly wrong. It was my grandfather who finally convinced my father that leaving me in Angola was a mistake and that he should return to look for me before it was too late.
When my father came home without me, my grandfather was as devastated as anyone. He refused to eat and fell into a long depression. Ultimately, he became ill, though nobody could say exactly what was wrong with him. Even the local healer, who never failed to identify the cause of a person’s misfortune, was for once perplexed by my grandfather’s condition. But one night, as my father sat alone by my grandfather’s side, the Old One confided in him that he was not really sick at all; he had simply made a decision to move on. “I must go and call upon the elephants to find my granddaughter,” he whispered to my father. “It is the only way to help her and bring her home.” To this day, I am certain that it was my grandfather, at the head of a thousand charging elephants, who ultimately rescued me.
My father grew silent as he stared out across the broad, windswept valley surrounding us. He sifted sand absentmindedly through his heavily callused fingers. Finally, he said distantly, as if to himself, “A man does not start his farming with cattle, he starts it with people.” I knew the phrase—it was an old Himba proverb. I had heard it many times before. Shifting his gaze downward, my father stared intently at the finely granulated sand in his hand, as if reading a book. There was another long silence. “I have failed you, my daughter,” my father said, looking up at me. “I have failed my family. And I will live with that failure every time the sun rises. Each time I see your face, I will know that the suffering I see there is due to me.” He turned away and looked in the opposite direction. I knew that he was crying, but I remained silent. It would have been embarrassing for him if I tried to console him. Besides, I was trying to compose myself.
After a few minutes, when I thought we had both recovered, I said, “As I told you on the phone, my father, I have truly let go of these things. Now that we are here together, I know this is true. The darkness in my heart is gone—at least when it comes to holding that darkness against other people—against you.” I told my father about the healer in Addis Ababa and how I was now moving forward with my life. I told him what I knew to be true; I told him what was important for him to know. But I did not tell him everything.
My father said he would return to the village. I offered to drive him back, but he wanted to walk. So we said our goodbyes, and I began making my way back to the road. I glanced back once, and the image of that moment—of my father sitting under the mopani tree—will stay with me forever. It is the image I associate with everything that I did not tell him. What did I hold back? It is this:
that though it was true that I forgave him, it was also true that our relationship was forever changed. While you can forgive someone something, it does not mean that its presence is gone; it is still there, and the relationship is changed because of it. But I believe my father understood that too.
After the meeting with my father, the path was clear for me to connect with the rest of my family. We held a big event with over a hundred people in attendance. The number of friends and extended family members who made the trip to Opuwo to see me was truly overwhelming. There were as many as six cooking fires with over twenty large cast-iron potjie pots all filled with different stews and meats. The aroma alone brought back all the good memories of my childhood.
So many things had changed over the course of a few years. I met relatives I had not seen since I was a little girl, and some I did not even know I had. While I was away, my brother Timo had gotten married. He now had a two-year-old boy and a newborn baby girl. My other brothers were so grown up that I hardly recognized them. As for my mother, she remained by my side the entire time. Each time she looked into my eyes, she began to cry. And she never let go of my hand, as if afraid that I might float away if she did. Throughout the party, the older people kept filling my pockets with handfuls of soil—the red ocher sand of Himbaland—to ensure that the ancestors remained close and always watched over me.
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