by Tahir Shah
And, on the beach itself, Gotfod pointed out canine footprints circling the putrefying carcass of a humpback whale – covered in ghost crabs. No one’s quite sure why, but dozens of such whales have been beached in recent months. The only consolation is that their death means life for others.
‘See how the black-backed jackals have been trying to get through the whale’s thick hide,’ Gotfod mumbled, pointing to teeth marks in the leather. ‘It’ll take a few more days before the rot softens it for them.’
We veered over dunes as high as any on earth, the sands roaring as the Land Rover descended. Then, jolting from side to side, we cut a path inland up a rock-strewn canyon.
Again, Gotfod nudged a hand to the distance. He was pointing to a straggly windswept plant, called Welwitchia mirabilis. Found only in a few areas of the parched Namib, it’s a living fossilized tree. Despite its humble profile, with a wide trunk that reaches no more than a few centimeters in height, individual specimens live for a thousand years or more.
Having crossed a moonscape of cracked grey mud and many more dunes, we reached the first place with any real vegetation. There was even the odd puddle of water.
Gotfod insisted it was actually a riverbed.
‘It’s the Waruseb,’ he told me, ‘but it’s dry most of the year. ‘We’re in the rainy season now, that’s why the oryx are here.’
Watching us from a distance, were a dozen or so of the antelopes, their straight tall horns rising like lances above them. Their innate curiosity must surely keep their numbers down. After all, there were predators around.
Grinding a path eastwards, Gotfod gave a thumb’s up, and almost grinned. He’d picked up a track. We progressed past a lone male ostrich, and a herd of springbok, who pronked away in all directions at the sight of us. Then, turning slowly to the right, Gotfod applied the brakes.
Touching a finger to his lips, he motioned out the window.
Twenty feet away, a dead oryx was lying on its back, blood dripping from the nose. It had just been killed. Craning his neck, Gotfod pointed again. A lioness was panting in the shade of a thorn bush, taking time to cool down before devouring her kill.
As we sat there watching, a desert elephant suddenly stormed up, blasting itself with a trunkful of dust to keep cool. Caught off-guard, the lioness retreated into the bush, vexed, but unwilling to attack a creature so many times her size. After a tense few minutes, the elephant rejoined the rest of the herd, trampling through bulrushes nearby.
Like the other creatures found on the Skeleton Coast, the elephants have adapted to the desert climate. Able to endure days of thirst, as they roam vast distances in search of sustenance, they can even cross the towering dunes. And, when they reach a dry riverbed like the Waruseb, they use their tusks to dig down, creating pools on which the entire food chain feeds.
Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It’s just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.
Visitors tend to fly in by Cessna for a few days, and stay at one of the handful of lodges. Lost in an expanse of rolling dunes, these rely completely on the air-link. All food and supplies are flown in, and everything – from garbage to dirty bed-sheets – are flown out. Only the fresh water supply is local. Beyond precious, it’s fetched by tractor at a borehole thirty miles away.
Apart from the odd tourist, the only other people to be found are the nomadic Himba. Adorning their bodies with ochre and butter, to protect from the ferocity of the sun, they have spent centuries roaming the Skeleton Coast and nearby regions. It’s thought they migrated from East Africa, and there’s proof of this in their language – it contains some Swahili.
Gotfod took me to a little Himba encampment some way inland from the shore. Surrounded by a crude stockade, much of it topped with thorns, the hamlet was well defended against predators from outside. Hailing from the Herero, sister tribe to the Himba, Gotfod could speak their language.
‘The Himba venerate their ancestors,’ he told me, pointing to a sacred fire. ‘They keep it burning in the centre of the community and they never allow it to go out.’ His smile suddenly vanishing, he added: ‘Please make sure not to pass between the dead tree and the fire.’
‘Why not?’
Gotfod seemed uneasy.
‘Because it will make them sad,’ he said.
The oldest man in the community beckoned us over. His neck hidden in a mass of beads, a woolly hat pulled down over his head, he was grinding snuff in a metal tube.
‘In the droughts the lions get hungry and try to attack us.’ he said. ‘One came last year,’ he said slowly; ‘it jumped over the stockade and ran round and round. We were frightened. After all, there were children playing on the dead tree.’
‘Did you kill it?’ I asked.
The old man grimaced.
‘We’re not allowed to kill lions any longer. It’s against the law.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘We made a great noise and chased it away!’
For the Himba, the temptation to embrace modern life must be very real, if only as a way to escape dire poverty. Their sister tribe, the Herero, were converted by Christian missionaries a century and more ago. Many of them have their own houses and plenty of possessions. Herero women still sport colourful home-made dresses, reminiscent of those worn by the Victorian missionaries who brought them the word of Christ.
Travelling by ox wagon, the Afrikaans-speaking Voortrekkers travelled from the Cape Colony into the interior, and up Namibia’s Atlantic Coast. They converted and conquered as they went, settling lands with European ranching methods.
Their ancestors are still found throughout Namibia, especially in the remote desert realm of the southern Namib. Proud of their ancestry, many of them now work with tourism, especially at Sossusvlei, where the massive red dunes are found.
Taking its name from the baked mud pan, dry for all but a few days each year, the dunes draw visitors from all corners of the earth. The highest soars to three hundred and eighty metres. Tinted red by the high iron content, it glows almost crimson at dusk.
Reeling over an eternity of dunes, scorching hot, fine, loose sand, I reached a second pan known as ‘Dead-vlei’. Like something out of a sci-fi film, it was peppered with the remnants of a wind-seared forest, encircled by dunes. The gnarled trees there are said to be more than six centuries’ old, relics of a time when there was more water and less sand.
A little further to the south, at the small town of Aus, I came across Piet Swiegers, whose ancestors have made their home in southern Africa since the seventeenth century. Passionate about Namibia, Piet makes a living by showing off the country’s raw beauty to others.
Wild desert horses are one of the marvels found on his family’s land. More than two hundred of them in total, their numbers rise and decline depending on the rains. They’re thought to be descended from horses set free by soldiers during the First World War almost a century ago. As with everything else, they cling to life in a place where day to day survival is in itself an achievement.
Another curiosity on the farm is the bullet-ridden 1934 Hudson Terraplane. The rounded bodywork now russet-brown with rust, it was supposedly the getaway car of diamond thieves, shot at long ago by police.
The story might sound farfetched, and anywhere else it would be. But Namibia is a land of diamonds like no other. And a stone’s throw from Piet’s farm is the greatest testament of all to diamond fever.
Known as Kolmanskop, it sprouted up as a prim German town a century ago, in the middle of the Namib. There were diamonds everywhere, many of them on the surface, allowing prospectors to simply crawl about on their bellies to find them.
Over millions of years, the gems were flushed into the Atlantic from the Orange River in Namibia’s south. Then the Benguela current forced the diamond-bearing sands ashore, forming the Namib desert.
&
nbsp; The result was that easy pickings of the high quality stones led to plenty of instant millionaires. And overnight fortunes brought luxury.
There was a power station and tramway, a casino, a skittle hall, a Champagne and oyster bar, and an ice factory, a theatre, restaurants, and a huge hospital equipped with Africa’s first X-ray machine.
But intense mining saw boom lead to bust.
Abandoned in the early ’fifties, Kolmanskop is today a ghost-town. Sand dunes fill the houses now, the paint stripped away from the walls, blow-torched by the wind.
In one of the buildings down near the tramway, I found a torn scrap of photograph. Black and white and burned on one side, it showed a young German couple, in Sunday best. They were straining to look serious as people used to do when posing, the tramway sign ‘Kolmannskuppe’ behind them. Like everyone else, they must have left when the diamonds were all mined out.
But there are still plenty of the precious stones nearby.
Kolmanskop is located within the restricted diamond zone, known as the ‘Sperrgebiet’, an area of more than 10,000 square miles. Managed by De Beers, entry is forbidden, and it’s under armed guard round the clock.
Twenty minutes’ drive from Kolmanskop, the neat little German town of Lüderitz gives a hint of how life at the ghost town may once been. Although located on the coast, it was constructed about the same time, and with the same Teutonic attention to detail as at Kolmanskop. There’s a sense that the glory days are long gone, a faded grandeur and irresistible melancholy.
Basking in the genteel glow of mid-summer light, Lüderitz was once gripped by diamond fever, too. The boom began when, in 1908, a station-master on the diminutive Aus to Lüderitz railway line, spotted something glinting between the tracks. Quietly, he staked out a claim, made a fortune, and lost it, before dying penniless.
At the town’s Kegelbahn, the century-old skittles hall, the descendants of diamond miners and Voortrekkers bet over beers and hardwood balls on a Thursday night. Among them, Alexi, a Russian trawlerman, who was washed up in Lüderitz years ago. Downing his beer in one, he ordered another, then peered out at the street.
‘Perhaps I’m crazy to live here,’ he says all of a sudden. ‘It’s just as well if I am, because a little madness helps you to bear the silence of the Skeleton Coast.’
THIRTY-SIX
Ostrich Hats and Model T’s
IN A BIZARRE QUIRK OF HISTORY, it was the Model T Ford that spelled the end of ostrich feather hats.
Awash with great billowing plumage, the bonnets had been at the height of fashion during the Edwardian age. They were much admired when worn in equally-fashionable open-topped limousines. But, with its small doorway and cramped interior, Mr. Ford’s economic Model T meant that fashion had to take a back seat. The result – the collapse of South Africa’s burgeoning ostrich trade, and bankruptcy on an unimaginable scale.
But, almost a century on, and the former farmlands of South Africa’s big bird business are at last witnessing a come back. This time round the ostriches roam free, along with a full gamut of wildlife, on land where the only shots taken today are through long lenses.
It’s five a.m., and I’m furled up in a wool blanket, perched on the back of an open-topped Landcruiser – fretting because my Blackberry’s lost the signal. All I can think of is how my bloodstream needs caffeine, and how a day without e-mail will take months to set right. But then, suddenly, there’s a muffled cry against the first rays of silvery African light.
I glance up, squint uneasily into the middle distance.
Fifteen feet from where I’m crouching, still clutching my Blackberry, is a massive bull elephant. He’s looking at me disapprovingly, ears flapped forward, tusks bowed down, as if he’s about to charge.
The world slips into sharp focus while my adrenal glands prepare for fight or flight. As someone who spends his life mollycoddled by technology, and rather meaningless luxury, I realized right then how separated I’d become from the brutal reality of the natural world.
For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news – as you learn how much more of it’s been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that is my home.
My ranger guide, a South African version of Crocodile Dundee, called Brendon, fishtailed the vehicle out of harm’s way a moment before the tusks reached their target. Sighing with relief, we continued on the morning game drive, and on our quest for lion cubs.
Nestled in the wilderness of the Eastern Cape, one hundred and sixty kilometres from Port Elisabeth, Kwandwe is one of a new breed of private game reserves. A great lure from the beginning has been that the region is malaria-free. Once populated by a full compliment of wildlife, it was ‘settled’ by white farmers in the 1830s, ringed with fences and farmed for ostriches. Regarded as little more than vermin, the original fauna was picked off for trophies and for sport, leaving a decimated animal population.
The original settler and his family worked the land and are buried beneath it. Beside their graves is another – oversized and angular – the farmer’s favourite horse. In one of the lodges there’s a faded sepia print of the family’s Edwardian generation. Sitting to attention, dressed in the Sunday best, the women are all sporting the fabulous ostrich hats that brought them such wealth. But when the bottom fell out of the ostrich business, the farmers’ own world collapsed.
For much of the twentieth century, the farmsteads lay silent. Then, following a dream, naturalist Angus Sholto-Douglas, who manages the reserve, was approached by an American investor. The rest is history. Over a decade, they bought up nine farms, encompassing more than twenty thousand hectares, and prepared them to receive wildlife once again.
‘It wasn’t so simple as trucking in animals and letting them get on with it,’ says Angus. ‘Painstaking planning was necessary to check the kinds and quantities of animals this vast property could sustain.’
Long before the first creatures arrived, two thousand miles of fencing had to be removed, along with telephone lines, water troughs, dangerous machinery, and the odd farm building. The result was a wilderness, returned to its natural state, a landscape unblemished by Man.
The foliage, known as ‘succulent thicket’, was in good shape and ready for the food chain. Gradually, over months and years, the animals were reintroduced.
Taking care to ensure they were as unstressed as possible after the drive, they were held in bomas, huge pens filled with trees and foliage – in which they could spend weeks getting used to their new environment.
Herds of elephant, Cape buffalo, hippos, giraffes, and six rare black rhinos were introduced early on, in a Noah’s Ark of creatures. Then came the cheetahs, the lions, the brown hyenas and the leopards. The carnivores had plenty to support them – oryx, eland, zebra, gemsbok and springbok, all of which graze on the grassland and scrub.
With the aid of a tracker, perched in a hot-seat mounted on the vehicle’s bull bars, Brendon takes great care to give the animals their space.
‘This is their home far more than it is ours,’ he says, ‘and it’s critical that we don’t do anything that will impact on their world.’ Pausing to steer up an abrupt incline, he adds: ‘I once saw a tortoise on its back out here. It was struggling to turn over and was about to become a predator’s lunch. I flipped it over and, by doing so, I changed the order. I think about it even now. Because I allowed a tortoise to live, a predator may have gone hungry.’
At Kwandwe you can’t help but be touched by the order of natural world, and by the humans who strive to maintain it. On a continent where the animal kingdom is under constant threat, there’s a sense that in this small corner of Africa great achievements are being made. Yet despite all the work, poachers still succeed in their dastardly work. Last year more than three hundred South African rhino were killed illegally, the black market value at their horns put at about £35,000 for a single kilogram.
Without doubt the way forward, the new breed of private game reserves, like Kwandw
e, offer low impact safaris in which you’re far more likely to see animals rather than other tourists.
In addition to the balance of nature, the Kwandwe reserve has ensured another all-important balance – that of the local community. A number of small villages are found on the reserve, and those who live in them are at the heart of life. Some are employed as staff in the lodges, or as rangers and trackers, while others are involved in community projects. One endeavour is gathering the traditional knowledge of medicinal plants from the elderly, and recording its wisdom for generations to come.
Spend a few days watching animals in their native habitat, and you begin to forget all about the pressures of e-mails and the Internet. Even a diehard Crackberry addict like myself couldn’t care less about the world I’d left behind. My priorities had changed. After a couple of days all I could think about was seeing lions and their cubs.
On the last morning, with only minutes to go of the final game drive, Brendon Crocodile Dundee spotted fresh paw prints in the dust. Risking his life, the tracker clambered onto his hot-seat and, through a sixth sense of his own, led the way.
Minutes later, we came upon them.
A pair of lionesses in the early morning light, a nest of honey-yellow cubs scampering about beside them. It was one of those moments that gets etched onto your memory. And I hope it will stay with me always.
As we turned quietly round to head back to the lodge, I mumbled prayer of thanks to Henry Ford. After all, had he not come up with the Model T, ostrich hats might still be in vogue, and the magic of Kwandwe might never have been conjured at all.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The People of the Cloak
SINCE THE FOUNDING OF ISLAM, almost fourteen centuries ago, one family has remained at the centre of the Faith.
Revered by all Muslims, and bound by rigid codes of conduct, this clan has been responsible for the spread and diffusion of Islam. In times of uncertainty, such as these, its members have the solemn duty to speak out and steer the religion back to its true path.