A Drink of Dry Land

by Chris Marais

  For here you will encounter an unending array of signs that offer Namibian Stones for Sale. That’s like selling handfuls of sand in Sossusvlei. And if you stop at any of these stalls, people from the nearest village will come running, their faces wreathed in smiles. And you won’t be able to resist buying a klippie or three. They’ll tell you they’ve got their herdboys on the case all day, looking out for something special in the veld as they pass.

  But that’s not the whole story of the stone business in Damaraland. These stones are also great tyre shredders, and as a result you’ll find many informal repair sheds on the road to Khorixas. Some sell beer as well. Not the coldest you’ll ever drink, but who cares? They’re patching up your tyres for a pittance, you’ve got a piece of shade and lots of time. As my friend Jan van de Reep from Huab Lodge would say:

  “Why hurry? The snail and the racehorse celebrate Christmas on the same day.”

  The official entrance to Damaraland, however, happens as you crest a rise and look down at a landscape that Ridley Scott would instantly admire and cast in his next epic badlands movie. At an abandoned tourism reception centre there was an old tyre on the side of the road painted as a Welcome sign.

  The geology of the land became stranger and stranger as we approached a village called Vrede and saw a light-khaki sand formation twisted and eroded by the wind into the shape of the Sorting Hat from the Harry Potter films.

  We came to a giant meerkat (I think he was made of glass fibre) standing under a lodge sign. He looked like a tall man in a meerkat suit furtively looking over his shoulder as he peed into the dirt.

  On the way out to the famous Twyfelfontein etchings, we saw a herd of springbok maybe 50-strong, the largest herd we’d seen, literally flying across the road in huge bounds. Once on the other side, they calmed down and busied themselves with scratching their ears, gazing vacantly out into the distance, nibbling grass and biting at the itchy parts of their shoulders. Once, there would have been vast herds up here, when the land was lush and the Bushman was boss.

  There’s a spring on the eastern slope of the Twyfelfontein Valley, above which is a large terrace. Back in time, perhaps 10 000 years ago, a Bushman hunter would have gazed out over the plains from this terrace. He would have been able to see his prey from a long distance and, with his awesome array of talents and methods, it would not be long before the entire clan would sit down to the kind of slap-up meal any hunter-gatherer would crave.

  They would have had superb shelter up here and no end of water supply and, if threatened, they might well have been able to defend the heights. So, once a man had had his fill, satisfied his wife and played with the kids, what was he to do with his time? Talk about stuff with his mates? Perhaps get into some serious wall painting, illustrate the story of hunts? Or do some rock etching, for a more permanent impression of the day’s events?

  This Twyfelfontein spot was, like the Cederberg down south in the Western Cape, a great leisure option for Man of Old. This is probably one of those special African places where a man had the high ground, no end of food and water and time to spare for art. As we all know by now, there was no satellite TV back then. Oprah, the eight o’clock news, Law & Order and Saturday sport were far off. So they etched. And etched some more.

  And I’m not sure what they did to escape reality in those days, but, looking at some of the etchings up there, I’d say there was a fair amount of hallucinogenics to be had.

  Our guide was Dion So-/oabeb, a tall, good-looking young man with a degree in Rock Art Studies from what was then the Cape Technikon. We climbed up the mountain and saw our first set of etchings, extraordinarily beautiful on the tumbled Etjo sandstone.

  They showed a variety of animals acutely observed and immediately recognisable: a hyena with humped shoulders, rhinos with long horns, kudu, lion, hippos and springbok. There was even an elephant.

  Ten years previously, Les Bush and I had been clambering over these very rocks, chatting to our guide, whose life’s ambition was to move to Jo’burg and join the jobless throng. A call from below directed us to a family of desert-adapted elephants wandering off in the distance. It had been a brief, tantalising sighting but it had sustained me for a decade. I was secretly hoping they’d be back, so I kept looking wistfully down the valley.

  But, as the saying goes: a watched elephant never boils into view.

  At a certain rock the etchings, at least 6 000 years old, exaggerated the look of an animal: a giraffe’s chest might bulge out, a lion’s tail might be far longer than normal, the horns of a rhino might be abnormally stretched. This, said Dion, was because these animals had a spiritual significance.

  “This is how they were seen in a trance.”

  The dancing shaman would have put himself into a trance state (which entailed bleeding from the nose, sweating and perhaps frothing at the mouth – the same symptoms they would have observed from a dying eland) and would have entered a pantheon of wild animal visions. Each beast had a particular significance. Giraffes with their elongated necks would bring rain. Rhinos would guide energy through their horns. The elephant signified peace. A lion, with its sharp claws, was invoked to heal the sick.

  On other rocks we found outlines of seals and a penguin, even the head of a cobra. There were also etchings showing circles with pecked-out dots in the middle. These, we were told, were focus circles, taking the shaman into the form of the required animal.

  “I met a traditional healer in the Drakensberg,” said Dion. “As part of his training, he stayed underwater for five days. While I was there, he brought rain. And then he chased it away.”

  I would have given anything to have once been part of such an ancient Bushman evening. In fact, I got far more out of Twyfelfontein this time round.

  I was just moaning a little about not having seen a desert-adapted elephant on this trip.

  “There they are!” Jules yelled. And there they indeed were, a number of them, facing us in the late afternoon. And the fact that they were built of clay and dung and stood immobile and life-sized outside a village craft shop made the moment even more special.

  But not as special as what came next, when we saw a sign to the Petrified Forest and swerved in, to be met in the car park by one Barnabas, wiping sweat from his brow after a hectic bicycle race across the veld to reach us.

  “Come in, friends! That will be N$10 each. Thank you. For you today, I have lovely petrified trees and even a couple of Welwitschias.”

  We walked up a small hill and found a petrified sapling.

  “What did you do to the forest?” I wanted to know.

  “Nothing. It was always like this.” We’d been royally conned by young Barnabas, but in the sweetest possible way. And when he tried to sell us some of his Damara stone collection, how could we refuse? We gave him fruit, a few more dollars and then saw his eyes light up like Halloween at the sight of my Skaaplek, that bag of fabulous cab-odourising industrial tobacco lying on the back seat.

  “Ten more stones,” I said. By now he was looking like Tolkien’s Gollum and the Skaaplek had become his Precious.

  “Take what you want,” Barnabas slavered. “Only give me the tobacco.” Which we did. Our new Damara buddy climbed onto his bike, clutching at his marvellous sack of baccy and headed back to his homestead.

  “We’ll be fighting over this tonight!”

  Chapter 21: Otjiwarongo

  Cats & Dogs

  Serious country music ruled the airwaves over Otjiwarongo’s annual agricultural show as we booked into a B&B with fairground frontage. “From the discos of Opuwo to the showgrounds of Otjiwarongo,” I said. “Give me more.”

  In between, we’d been listening intently to Namibia’s FM radio, which brings out the Brylcreem and bobby sox in a soul. It’s Fifties to the core, in its music playlist and the tone of its genteel talk shows. Art deco of the airwaves with essence of African outback:

  “Last week Mrs Swart from Grootfontein wanted to swap her two retriever puppies for a baby’s
pram,” said the record-spinner in her mellow porch-front voice. “Today, we found a Mrs Frankenfeld in Swakop who has a pram for her and wants to meet the puppies. Mrs Swart has agreed to bring them through next week.”

  This was national radio, but it felt like a huge unseen comforting hand of communication stretched over a vast dry country of fewer than two million souls. Someone was going to drive 1 000 miles to swap a brace of puppies for a pram. Only in Namibia. Or maybe also in Coober Pedy, Australia. Just as much fun as Radio Nama from down south.

  And then there was the Otjiwarongo Agricultural Show. The announcer, switching effortlessly between Afrikaans and English, was exhorting the public to come and look at the pragtige perde (beautiful horses). We walked over the road and into a happy multiracial throng, everyone smelling of well-grilled boerewors rolls.

  A group of wobbly drum majorettes went through their paces, the crowd gasping sympathetically every time their nervous leader dropped her spinning baton.

  In the exhibition ring, saddle horses cantered in a lather of excitement, their riders tense.

  “Ry hom liefie (ride him lovey),” urged one of the husbands from the stands. And his wife promptly won first prize.

  Jules had been here before, back in July 2000, and had been swept off to the local German Festival.

  “Most of the town was in fancy dress,” she told me as we wandered about the show. “They wore brocaded-cloth Trojan helmets and battery-powered bow ties that flashed alarmingly into the night, like coded distress signals.”

  For once, my wife had not been dressed for the occasion. She had also been lost among the Oktoberfest singing circles about her, but after a draught beer or three she caught the spirit of the thing. This time around, however, essential khaki was in vogue among the farming folk.

  Big Beef with serious eyes peered short-sightedly from various enclosures. Over at the environmental tent, Nelson, who at 29 was one of the oldest Cape griffons in captivity, shuffled about his enclosure, fussing with the straw and apparently looking to build himself a nest. He was drawing attention to the fact that there were only 11 of his kind left in Namibia.

  But the stars of the tent were the predator people.

  Fifteen years before, when Laurie Marker left America to start up what would become the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF), an exhibit championing predators at an agricultural show in Otjiwarongo would have been as unlikely as instant world peace.

  In fact, these days Otjiwarongo markets itself as the Cheetah Capital of the World.

  Namibia is home to 3 000 of the world’s 12 000 cheetahs, the largest single population in the world, with the highest concentration being around this little town in the north.

  “If I were King around here,” I told Jules, “I’d have them stick up a 30-metre glass fibre cheetah at each entrance to Otjiwarongo. And light it up from the inside after dark.”

  “Thank goodness you’re only passing through,” she remarked.

  Years before, the farmers of Namibia had driven lions and hyenas (prime enemies of the cheetah) off their land. As a result, in central Namibia, cheetahs always prospered.

  Well, not quite. During the 1980s, livestock farmers killed close to 7 000 of them. One farmer alone admitted to killing 17 cheetahs in a few months. Another 1 000 were exported live (there are at least 1 200 in captivity around the world).

  At the time, Laurie Marker had a top job at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington DC. She made a number of trips to Namibia to study gene pool issues in wild and captive cheetahs.

  It became her dream to release a captive-born cheetah, Khayam, into the freedom of the Namibian veld. Marker ended up living with veterinarian and farmer Arthur Bagot-Smith and his family for three months.

  Khayam taught Marker and others that the 18 to 22 months that a cheetah spends teaching her cubs where and how to hunt, and how to avoid predators, were irreplaceable. Khayam would never have survived in the wild.

  Bagot-Smith and Marker met in 1977 when he treated Khayam for an obstruction of the intestine.

  “When I first met Laurie, she was very scientifically minded. I said to her, listen my girlie, you’ll never save the cheetah through a microscope eyepiece in the US. Too many cheetahs are being killed in Namibia. You have to come here and do something. She said ‘I’ll be back’.”

  Laurie returned in 1990 for good, bought three farms outside Otjiwarongo and started transforming farmhouses and outhouses into offices and research centres.

  The first lonely years at Eland’s Vreugde farm took jaw-cracking courage.

  “The farmers thought I only cared about the cheetah, not people like them, and they put me through hell,” she said. “They’d invite me to come around for tea and to see the cheetahs they’d shot. Some told me how they rode down cheetahs on their horses until they were exhausted and beat them to death with their rifle butts. I had to just grit my teeth and be polite. You win them over one by one.”

  But working with the farmers was crucial. At least 90% of Namibia’s cheetahs range free over farms. Namibia’s livestock farmers are the custodians of the last truly viable population of cheetahs, and their prey, in the world.

  Just over 10 000 years ago, the cheetah as a species almost died out, probably reduced to a double handful of breeding individuals. As a result, the genetic pool is poor, and small populations make inbreeding a virtual certainty, which is another reason why Namibia’s comparatively large cheetah population is so important. If the fight for the cheetah’s survival is lost here, the future of the whole species will be threatened.

  The increase in game farms around Otjiwarongo might have been thought a positive development, but game farms are surrounded by impenetrable game-proof fences.

  Game farmers, the CCF found, are far less tolerant of cheetahs, because they often keep small numbers of exotic game species in camps that are not electrified against predators. A study carried out in 2002 revealed that five game farmers alone were responsible for the deaths of 92 cheetahs.

  The livestock owners remained the cheetah’s last real hope. So Laurie set about finding a way to avoid conflict between the two.

  She was already broadly familiar with the problems North American ranchers had with wolves and coyotes, and the success that had been achieved using dogs to guard the livestock. Eventually she settled on the most likely candidate – the Kangal, or Anatolian Shepherd. These dogs come from Turkey, where they have protected livestock from predators for over 6 000 years.

  Anatolian Shepherds are rangy dogs, slightly taller and much more imposing than your average Labrador. Their coats are pale, so they reflect the sun, and their surface hair is hollow – excellent insulation against heat and cold. The dark markings over nose and eyes protect them against the sun.

  As young puppies, they are put in with whatever creature they are going to protect, and grow up thinking they are part of the herd.

  “A goat with a big bark,” as Marker put it.

  Her hugely successful idea of using dogs to save big cats won her worldwide respect. In 2000 she was named one of Time magazine’s Heroes of the Planet.

  Jules had a run-in with one of those Anatolian Shepherds herself on that July 2000 trip. Her journal read:

  “The sun was going down, turning a herd of goats into creatures of gold.

  “There was even one standing straight up on its hind legs like a gerenuk (a type of gazelle), helping itself to the topmost leaves of a tasty shrub. Others were pottering about, playing king of the termite heaps, nibbling grass, lurking in a happy pre-dusk haze.

  “I crept up and focused on the gerenuk goat while a friendly piebald one gently sampled my camera strap.

  “Suddenly a blonde goat under a bush detached itself from the throng with a panic-inducing snarl, rushed at me, barked twice and stood firm in front of the flock, growling and throwing the piebald-strap-nibbler a withering look. I backed away without hesitation. These dogs usually just warn off jackals, cheetahs and leopards, but one or two of
them have been known to cause serious damage to a persistent predator.”

  Farmers who were losing 12 to 14 animals a year now reported zero losses. Two out of three farmers around Otjiwarongo no longer killed cheetahs.

  “The dogs could be used to protect any herd – sheep, ostriches, even chickens,” said Marker.

  “Cattle, however, are too big. They tend to step on the pups. For large livestock, we recommend donkeys.” They’re cheap, loyal, loud and lose their tempers spectacularly when predators threaten.

  If bought commercially, each dog could cost up to N$5 000 (the same in South African rands), but the CCF had set up a breeding programme and the dogs went free to all farmers committed to training them and monitoring their progress.

  Livestock farmer Hans Gunther Gartner recounted an incident where one of the donkeys protecting the cattle brayed a warning, and the Anatolian Shepherd recognised the alarm signal, came over and chased the cheetah away.

  “Very intelligent, very sensitive dogs. If you punish him, he takes it very hard. You only need to show him once.”

  Once his dog “took a poultry”, and he ran to punish it, Gartner told us.

  “The dog quickly swallowed the bird, but when it saw how upset I was, it never touched another chicken. It’s very clever and wakey, that dog.”

  Bagot-Smith was another fan of Anatolian Shepherds, especially of his own one, Amy.

  “If she doesn’t come back at night, I know that she’s with a ewe that is lambing. She will lie next to the lamb, and not let anything near it. I never have to worry or keep a heavily pregnant ewe back. The dog takes care of it all.”