Where Fire Speaks

  Maria’s husband took David over to share a drink with the headman whom David had driven to Epupa Falls. Another man shouted, “Hello Mrs David!” and I turned to find the border guard in the Nike windbreaker waving at me. One of his friends went over to the truck for a refill from the barrel that held a distilled drink called okandjembo. The bottle was passed from hand to hand in a genial fashion, and when it came round to me, I took a sip too. The clear liquid burned going down and tasted like vodka gone very wrong.

  The border guard had been drinking for awhile; he kept calling me Mrs David and flirting in an outrageous manner that sometimes strayed towards threatening. I looked around for my husband and saw him dancing with the young men. The border guard leaned towards me. Why, he wanted to know, were we staying with these Himbas? They are stupid, he said. They don’t know how to live properly. He and the other border guards were trying to help them and get medicines for them when they could. They were also watching the Himba, spying on them, and he alluded to all manner of things crossing the porous border of the Kunene River. He wove politics, guns, and diamonds from Angola into our conversation, which was twisted by drink and regularly interrupted by Maria, other border guards, and whooping men.

  It didn’t take long for one bottle to be emptied, another bought, and I felt like it was probably my turn to buy the next round. Sharing alcohol was something I had thought I would never do here. It was unnerving how what had seemed so straightforward back in Canada was turned inside out on this sun-baked earth. The age-old rite of cementing friendship with drink crosses many cultures, and not taking my turn in buying a round would be both rude and patronizing. The next time the bottle was empty, I gave the border guard ten dollars and he went for a refill.

  I was relieved when David got back to me. He was excited because the headman had said that if we wanted to learn about the Himba, we should come stay in his village. It was located along the river and would be greatly affected by the dam. They had decided we would go to the village the next morning. Now, however, night was starting to fall, and the headman was passed out stone cold on the ground. We walked back to our campsite in the dark, stumbling over the rocks.

  KARAMATA

  The headman’s name was Karamata and his village lay an hour’s walk upstream from Epupa Falls. A road ran between the village and the river, a bumpy route popular with the 4x4 crowd, and it was beside the road, under cover of several large trees, that we parked the truck and made camp.

  The first few times I walked into the semi-circle of huts that made up Karamata’s village, I hesitated, unsure about how to respect the holy fire and not cross between it and the main hut or the cattle pen. The cattle pen was easy to identify, but there was nothing obvious by which to distinguish the main hut from the other three, and nothing I could see to indicate which of the two fires was holy. The fires were small, barely smoking affairs, not big roaring fires like the kind David and I and the rest of the white people had made at Epupa Falls. I thought maybe by following Jackson I would be okay. The holy fire was something the Herrero shared with the Himba, but Jackson didn’t seem to have qualms about walking anywhere, and after wandering around behind him for awhile, I began to feel uncomfortably like I was crossing the line over and over again.

  After a day or two, the rocks and huts began to look familiar and the two fires became easy to distinguish. The cooking fire often had an old tin can boiling away on it. The holy fire was never used for cooking, and the rocks around it were well back from the wood, far enough away that a person could sit on them. The holy fire was a short distance in front of the first wife’s hut and early in the morning Karamata could usually be found here, with one of his children sitting close beside him. The holy fire was the conduit of ancestral voices. Only people who had been introduced to the ancestors were allowed to cross the line. Karamata explained that the fire had been passed down to him from his father. Though his father was dead, he could speak with him when he sat at the fire; he laid out his problems and his father gave him advice about what to do. To my untutored eyes, it often looked like the holy fire had gone out, but wood in the Kaokoveld was dry as a bone, and held heat for hours. Karamata would squat down and, with his face next to the earth, blow in the coals and the holy fire would spring up again, smoking orange.

  WIVES

  Karamata’s youngest wife was named Montebella and she liked to party. We had met her when we were still camped back at Maria’s hut. We had been sitting around the fire, almost ready for bed, when Maria came down the trail with her two-year-old daughter on her back and a baby strapped to her stomach. She dropped down on a stone near the fire and sighed. The baby’s mother, she said, was too drunk and kept falling down on the path. A few minutes later, we heard laughter and then Montebella stumbled into camp, her knees scraped and bleeding, her mood boisterous.

  Montebella was pretty in a hard, challenging way. The set of her face, the attitude with which she pulled on a cigarette, seemed to belong in a smoky nightclub. She was skilled at getting white men to give her cigarettes and fearless in approaching them. She was part of the crowd of younger Himba who spent most afternoons at Epupa Falls where there was usually a bottle being passed around.

  Montebella had been at the big party when Karamata had invited us to come stay at his village. The next morning, when we were preparing to move to his village, Montebella had came over to ask for a ride. It was then that we learned she was his wife. When we arrived at the village, she headed for the nearest tree, lay down in the shade with her baby on a cloth beside her, and went to sleep.

  The second wife had welcomed us. She was rocking a gourd back and forth with one arm, and holding a baby girl with the other. Her long legs were stretched out, her ankles adorned with the thick cuff of iron beads women receive at puberty and wear ever after. When she smiled, her eyes were warm, without the scorn Montebella’s eyes could hold. She patted the ochre-stained rock beside her and invited me to sit down. The butterfat on her body was rancid in the hot sun. Flies swarmed, landing on her and me and the baby.

  I reached out my arms, asking if I could hold the baby. There were two babies at the village, Montebella’s little boy and this little girl. Over the week we spent with Karamata and his family, the babies were always nearby and seemed to spend much of their time being held, if not by their mother, then by the headman or one of the other children. The little girl relaxed against me, staining my shirt with ochre. She seemed healthy, her limbs were strong, her mood content. When I kissed her head, her mother smiled approval.

  The first wife was the oldest and I hadn’t spent much time with her until one afternoon when she sought me out and invited me to come and learn from her about “women’s things.” I asked Jackson to join us and we left the bright heat of the afternoon to crawl into the cool dim interior of her hut. We sat on the floor of hard packed earth, around a tiny slightly smoking fire. Jewelry hung off bits of branches sticking out from the wall like hooks. A blanket lay in a heap near the wall next to a shallow cardboard box containing a package of sugar and a box of tea.

  The headman’s first wife held out a container made from a piece of cow’s horn and put it up to my nose. It was filled with a paste that smelled faintly fragrant, organic but not unpleasant. She pantomimed rubbing it under her arms and under her skirt. Then she picked up another container, this one holding what seemed to be a blend of grasses. She took a pinch, blew on the fire to bring a few sparks to life, then sprinkled the grasses on the fire. It worked like incense; the scent wafted up with the smoke, but before it filled the room, she moved into a squatting position over the tiny fire, pulled a blanket around her waist, and used it to trap the smoke between her legs. Jackson looked uncomfortable. “They do this for the men,” he translated.

  I told Jackson to ask the headman’s wife if there were any questions she wanted to ask me. She spoke with a gleam in her eye, and then Jackson translated. He said that when the wife sleeps with her husband, she takes off her clothes, and the woman
wanted to know if I wore my clothes when I slept with my husband.

  I laughed. Jackson was embarrassed and wouldn’t meet my eyes. I shook my head and mimicked undressing. She laughed, looking delighted.

  She spoke again and Jackson told me she wanted to know whether my husband and I “did our business,” as he put it, in the day or in the night.

  “Both,” I told Jackson, wondering what words she had really used for sex.

  Next she asked Jackson what I did if my husband wanted to do business and I didn’t want to.

  “I say no,” I told her. Jackson translated, then said she wanted to know what happened when I said no. I laughed. “Then we fight,” I said.

  She responded by saying that if the woman said no, the man would hit her. Even if the woman was feeling bad, Jackson translated, it was her job to sleep with her husband. She may say that she isn’t feeling well, but she must still tell her husband to go ahead and do his business.

  I got Jackson to ask her if the wives fight, and he told me she said they all got along.

  The dangerous gleam came back into her eye and Jackson’s voice was barely audible when he translated her next question. She wanted to know whether my husband and I did our business front or back. While asking the question she knelt on her hands and knees, doggy style, looking at me over her shoulder. I didn’t need Jackson’s muted translation to start nodding, and she and I burst into laughter.

  Jackson looked like he was ready to crawl out of the hut when I asked if she liked it when she and her husband did their business. Her voice was quiet when she answered and Jackson relayed the words as, “Ah, it is just what a woman must do. There is a husband and there is a wife and they sleep together.”

  I said that in my country there were some women who chose to sleep only with other women. They did not sleep with men. When Jackson had translated my words, she nodded and said that, yes, they knew about that too, but the men didn’t like it, so they had the women sleep in different huts.

  Jackson’s eyes had been fixed on the floor for most of the conversation. He had been inching closer to the door and now he looked like he was about to leave. I thanked the first wife and followed my translator back into the sunshine.

  The next morning we learned that the first and second wives had received word that a relative had died in a distant village. They were smiling as they made their preparations to go to the funeral where, they told me, they would sit and cry for many days, maybe a week. The sun had climbed well into the sky by the time the two women walked out of the village and started down the road. Each of them carried a cloth bundle on her head, and the second wife had her baby on her back. Several of the children started with them down the road, as did David, hurrying ahead to photograph the travelers before everyone said a final goodbye and the women continued on down the rutted track by themselves.

  GOATS

  The goats cried like babies. They raised their noisy voices first thing in the morning and cried throughout the day. Now it was night and they were quiet. “How many goats do you have?” I asked Karamata. He had taken to joining us around the fire in the evening to share our supper. These evening conversations were calm and friendly, and even Jackson seemed to relax and enjoy them. Karamata looked at me and said, “There are too many goats to count.”

  The Himba way of knowing the world had not, until recently, involved putting numbers to things. Like Maria, Karamata didn’t know how old he was. “We don’t count years,” he said. He was unfamiliar with numbers, although, as we would find out, he did understand that there is a meaningful difference between $20 and $200. Throughout the region, we would meet people who were learning to count under the tutelage of money, looking long and hard at the coins in their hands, trying to understand how much purchasing power they held, what they could trade them for at the store, whether it was sufficient to procure a bag of candy, a bottle of wine, or a fifty-kilogram sack of ground corn.

  When it came to his herd, Karamata didn’t need numbers. Ever since he was a child he had spent his days tending goats and cattle, and he could tell if an animal was missing simply because he knew each one of them. In their turn, his children were already involved in caring for the herd. Each morning they trailed behind their father as he made his way through the animal enclosure, sorting the babies from their mothers and preparing to send the herd out for the day. When I did a count I tallied over a hundred goats and about fifty longhorn cows. Despite the dry land in which they live, the Himba are among the wealthiest herders in Africa. The herd was Karamata’s living bank account, requiring daily walking, feeding, and watering. Herding was one part physical labor to three parts killing time, and was an activity well-suited for the children. Even the little three-year-old was comfortable around the animals, picking up baby goats and carrying them around like children back home hefting kittens. The previous afternoon, the girl who was six or seven had dashed in front of a group of about twenty-five stray cows, shouted, thrown a few stones, and redirected the big beasts.

  At night around our fire, the subject of medicine came up frequently and barely an evening passed when Karamata didn’t ask us for pills, usually for the pain he got in his stomach, sometimes for malaria. One night Karamata asked if we had any medicine for jackals. He was worried about jackals getting the baby goats and said he was going to have to make a big fire to keep them away. He said there were no lions anymore, so he didn’t have to worry about them, but his goats were still vulnerable to attack from crocodiles, who ate them when they were drinking at the river, from leopards, and worst of all, from jackals.

  “Your gun,” David said, “is medicine for jackals.” We knew about the gun because earlier that day, the young white man who ran one of the lodges at Epupa Falls had ridden over on his ATV to visit and Karamata had brought a rifle out of his hut to ask for help in fixing it. The gun had been given to Karamata by the South African army during the war. The young man from the lodge was a regular visitor at Karamata’s village; he knew all about guns, and after checking it over, determined it was in need of cleaning, and took it away, promising to bring it back soon.

  I added another stick to the fire and asked Karamata how many children he had. He didn’t know, but said he had other, older children, some of whom were across the river in Angola. With that he rose to leave, explaining that because his first wife was away, he was sleeping with their child and he didn’t want wake the little one by returning to the hut too late.

  SQUATTING

  Like Karamata’s family, we were spending most of our time outside, heated by the sun, blown by the wind, surrounded by flies. The weather touched our skin from the moment we crawled out of our truck in the morning until we crawled back into it at night. At first I felt battered by it. I was used to living indoors where I could watch the weather and the bugs without feeling them on my face.

  Much time was spent hanging around the fire with the family. They could sit on their heels, talking and looking totally relaxed for hours. I tried to copy them, but when I dropped down on my heels, my thighs began to burn and in less than a minute I would have to shift my weight from one foot to the other, and didn’t manage more than two or three minutes before having to pull out of the squat. We had brought two camp stools with us and when one of them broke, David and I started taking turns sitting on rocks, squatting to eat, putting our asses on the earth.

  I didn’t mind losing the camp stool. Our belongings felt so much more visible around the Himba. Every time I opened the back of the truck, their curious eyes roamed over everything. Under their scrutiny, I began to feel the weight of my possessions. Some days it felt like they wanted everything we owned. Karamata’s family used us like a store, coming in the morning to get sugar and tea, asking regularly for sacks of ground corn. Once the goods were gone, the paper packaging hit the ground. Remnants of what white people had given Karamata’s family littered the village. They were accustomed to organic garbage, stuff that melted back into the landscape. The refuse near the fire spo
ke of the way economic norms were blending; the hoof of a goat beside a faded pop can, candy wrappers next to several cow bones.

  TOURISTS

  At least once a day, a couple of Land Rovers would appear, jerry cans and spare tires strapped to their roofs. The children always heard them coming long before I did. They would race to the road and wave like mad. Sometimes the vehicles stopped, the cameras came out, the kids formed up into a line and stood still, staring into lenses. Then the candies were handed over, doors slammed, engines accelerated, and the kids’ voices would clamor for more as the vehicles drove away.

  One afternoon, two guides brought their clients to the village: an Italian couple with large camera bags who spent a lot of time consulting about their equipment, and a retired American in a wide straw hat who kept his arms folded across his chest and talked mostly to his guide. There we all were: two guides, the American, the Italians, David and me, all watching the Himba. A chicken strutted past the fire, followed by a skinny white dog.

  Two of the kids scraped cornmeal porridge out of a bucket, using their hands like scoops. Montebella was sitting in the shade rocking a gourd back and forth, not looking at anyone.

  David motioned for me to move aside so he could take pictures of the tourists taking pictures of the Himba. I talked with one of the guides, a South African who had served in Namibia during the war. He worked as a private guide for wealthy foreigners on the game park circuit. His American client joined us and they talked about their itinerary; the next stop was drinks at sunset on the cliff overlooking the falls.