Where Fire Speaks

by David Campion

  Karamata’s kids finished eating and started wrestling with one another. The smallest one raced up to where we were standing and the guide crouched down to play with him in what was the first direct interaction between the newcomers and Karamata’s family. Everyone’s attention shifted to the burly man and the little boy. The child backed off a few paces, then ran up to the guide again. The boy was of that age, barely two years old, when children can feel that they are the center of attention and love to play to an audience. He ran away and came back waving a piece of clear plastic sheeting. The guide picked the child up and placed him in the middle of the piece of plastic, then pulled the sides of the plastic up to just above the boy’s waist. The child squealed in delight as the guide lifted him up as if he were groceries in a bag. The tourists watched, Karamata watched, even Montebella watched.

  CARS

  When tourists stopped at the village, I thought about how white people must appear to the Himba. It looks like all we do is drive around in vehicles stocked with food, take photos, and sit beside roaring fires. They don’t see us working, and have no way of knowing that our lives are not an endless round of sight-seeing.

  In the evenings, we tried to explain some of the complexities of our world to Karamata. One night we asked Karamata if he thought all white men have cars and he said yes. David then explained that the truck we were driving was not ours, that it belonged to his father and soon we would have to give it back. He explained that in Canada we didn’t own a car, that we often walked. It took awhile to make it clear that David was a white man who did not own a car. Once he understood, Karamata burst into laughter.

  CHANGE

  One day a relative of Karamata’s came by. Like David, he spoke some Afrikaans, so the two were able to talk. “Change is come,” the man said. “It is time to change.” He was wearing shorts and a windbreaker. “Some other of my brothers have put on pants,” he said, “and I followed them.” He explained that his wife didn’t wear traditional clothes anymore either.

  The man asked the family why David wasn’t paying for the photos he kept taking. Montebella answered that we were giving them ground corn, tea, and salt. Before he left, the man asked David to give him some soap, sugar, a blanket, and a water container. “But if you are not going to live like a Himba anymore,” David said to him, “you must get these things for yourself.” “Yes, I know,” the man replied, “but it is not easy.”

  The next morning I joined Karamata at the fire where he was boiling coffee in an old army helmet. He asked for sugar and told me he wanted a truck. When I asked why, he explained that if the children got sick, he would need a truck to get them to the hospital.

  Before we came here, I had expected to find that the Himba’s traditional ways were intact and threatened only by the prospect of the Epupa dam. What we were finding instead was that, while many of the people still lived as herders, based within family units and moving with the seasons, western norms and goods had already made great inroads. The sources of change seemed to be as simple as desire and as complicated as global economics; I felt uncomfortably that David and I embodied both.

  EXCHANGE

  We had been at Karamata’s village for the better part of a week when we decided it was time to go. Over the last few days, Jackson had been less willing to join us when we visited with the family, less willing to translate conversations. And, when he did translate, sometimes he appeared not to be listening, and then, after someone had spoken for quite awhile, he would sum up their words in just a sentence or two. I wondered what we sounded like coming out of his mouth and feared that the words we said were sometimes quite different from the ones Karamata heard. When we told Jackson we would be leaving, he said he was glad, he was tired of spending so much time with people the Herrero consider poor cousins. “Himba means beggar,” he said. “They ask for things even when they have them. They have tobacco, they have cornmeal, and still they ask for it.” He didn’t understand why we were interested in them. “They are so dirty,” he said, expressing the disdain that some of his countrymen shared, for Namibia was struggling to join the modern world and for some people the Himba could be an embarrassing reminder of a collective and not-so-distant past.

  I sensed that Jackson was also keen to get back to the main road and find new clients. He had figured out that David and I weren’t big time journalists. Our food was a giveaway. Lunch was tinned beans, and supper was almost always ground corn and gravy; there were no Cokes or cookies. When we first met, we had agreed to pay Jackson a daily rate of fifty dollars, but in the past few days he had dropped broad hints about how people he had worked for in the past, TV people, had given him a big tip after spending only a day or two with the Himba.

  On our last night, Karamata got Jackson to tell us that there had been other people who had camped at his village and taken pictures; they had been from America, had a TV camera, and had paid $200 for each day they stayed and took pictures. We had been at the village for almost a week and the idea that now Karamata expected us to pay $200 a day was alarming. David tried to explain we didn’t have much money, and that we had thought the food we had given the family was in exchange for taking photographs.

  We would later learn that several international film crews had come through the region two years earlier. Men had been asked to take off their T-shirts and digital watches, while women had been paid to get rid of the candy wrappers, pop cans, and liquor bottles lying around. Photographs had become a means by which the Himba were leveraging themselves into the cash economy. Karamata was merely trying to maximize his return.

  He asked for a present instead of money, and requested “a bag big enough for a chief.” We offered him the one that held our clothes, complete with double zippers and adjustable shoulder strap, but he wanted the cheap plastic one that held our toiletries. Karamata was grinning when we handed it over. He stood up and walked around the fire, swinging the bag. He couldn’t stop smiling. “I’m like a baboon, so proud of what I’ve got,” he said.

  We left in the morning. Karamata was walking the goats out of the village when we went to say a final goodbye. He thanked us again for the bag, and we thanked him for letting us stay with him and take pictures. Then we got into the truck and drove away.

  CAMERAS

  Back at Epupa Falls, a man was lugging a tripod towards a group of white people with cameras who were watching a church service taking place under the tree near where the liquor truck had been parked a week before. Many of the bar patrons were there, the men sitting in the shade, the women singing and clapping in response to the directions of black men in pressed trousers and white shirts, one of whom I recognized as Amos, the caretaker of the campground.

  The children milled about while their parents listened to Amos preach. Later, I would learn what the gist of his sermon had been: wash yourself, get dressed, and come to Jesus. We had parked nearby so that David could photograph both the tourists and the church service. I was rummaging in the back of the truck when a hand touched my thigh. A little face looked up at me, eyes wide. She was about three years old, dressed in a loincloth with a thick coil of beads around her neck. Two middle-aged white women with cameras were following her. I nodded at them, they nodded back, then spoke to one another in what sounded like German.

  The little girl let go of my leg and headed back towards the church service where the preachers were now laying their hands on the foreheads and backs of those gathered and calling on Jesus with loud voices. The two women hurried after the child.

  QUESTION

  We found a spot along the river where the sand was thick, and the palm trees provided shade during the afternoon. We began to make do without Jackson and found that, despite our limited vocabularies, we could patch together communication out of a few Herrero words, lots of gestures, and funny faces. David’s knowledge of Afrikaans was useful as well, as there was often someone around who spoke enough to help us through more difficult conversations.

  There was nothing difficul
t about the conversation I was having most often. Again and again people asked me, Are you a woman? Are you a man? I learned to recognize the words: omukazendu for woman, and omurumendu for man. I would say omukazendu, then when they repeated the word, usually still with a questioning tone, I would nod vigorously. People often continued to look like they weren’t sure I was telling the truth, so I would cup my hands under my breasts, making the small mounds visible through my shirt, and bounce them for emphasis. Some of the women and children would ask the question every time they saw me, then laugh like crazy when I jiggled my breasts.

  One afternoon, Maria came by with her daughter. She checked her hair in our hand mirror, and got me to help her tidy it up, showing me how to fluff out the end of the braids. Another trader had arrived with a truckload of alcohol and Maria was off to the bar. I tried to explain that drinking wasn’t good for her unborn baby, but she disagreed with me. Smoking that stuff the men sometimes get from Angola was bad, she said, meaning marijuana, but mint punch was fine. She checked her hair in the mirror one more time and headed down the road to the party.

  FOREIGNERS

  We met a friendly young South African who was scouting the area in preparation for starting a tour guiding business. His name was Jako, he was Afrikaans, and he had been stationed here as a medic with the South African army during the war. He told stories of SWAPO trackers who could follow a trail down on their hands and feet as fast as a South African soldier could run.

  “There were no bonfires on this bank ten years ago,” he said beside our fire that night. “Light a cigarette here and it could be your last.” Now he was back with the long hair of a hippie, carrying basil and oregano he had grown in his garden. “You must live by the moon,” he said. He also said that the soldiers, bored during a long, hot, and often slow war, would sometimes throw grenades into the river to blow up hippos and crocodiles.

  Another afternoon two professors from the University of Nevada came along in an old Land Cruiser. They were biologists counting the animal population in the Kaokoveld. They said that the last of the coastal lions had been killed a few years before and that instead of the numerous herds of black-faced impala that roamed the Kaokoveld a few decades ago, there were now maybe 200 impala in the entire region. The professors had been to Epupa four years earlier when there had been no permanent Himba settlement at the falls. The Himba came here for water sometimes, they said, but now a lot of them live here. It’s like the American Indians, one of them commented, gravitating to the forts, picking up alcohol and Christianity.

  A French photojournalist arrived at Epupa Falls and he said that it was the same story all over the world. His name was Pierre and he had been photographing indigenous people for fifteen years. Everywhere he’d been, he had encountered the same situation, traditional cultures weakened by industrial development, alcohol, and drugs. He said the Himba were the most traditional people he had seen yet. “They eat well here,” he said. “They’re not under demographic pressure. Their culture is still strong. Nevermind that Coca Cola is here, it’s everywhere.”

  Pierre talked about the gap between what he saw in the field, and what the magazines did with his pictures. A tribe he stayed with in Thailand had been pressed into service as opium runners by powerful drug lords. Many people were addicted to heroin and AIDS was rampant. In one day he watched a man of twenty-six and a child of eight die of the disease. Using his photographs, a magazine back in Europe had made a story about a tribe practicing the traditions of their fathers; one paragraph mentioned social problems. Pierre said the magazines make dreams for people with grey lives.

  EMERGENCY

  In the middle of a hot afternoon, when we were swapping stories with Jako and Pierre in the shade of the palm trees, a man walked into our campsite with his wife and young child. He said the border guards had told him to come to our camp and he held out a wounded hand for us to see.

  The man had cut into his hand while chopping wood and sliced between thumb and forefinger almost to the wrist, leaving a gaping cut that was full of sand. The family lived half a day away from Epupa Falls and had walked to get here. Jako pulled out his medical kit and set up an examining room on a blanket. When he asked the man to move the thumb, nothing happened. The tendon is probably severed, he said. The man sat without flinching while Jako probed the wound, then spent most of an hour cleaning out some of the sand.

  “There is nothing more I can do,” Jako said, looking worried. There was no point in stitching it up as what was really needed was surgery to reattach the tendons. Jako said the only way the man might get the use of his hand back was if he got to hospital as soon as possible.

  The hospital was in the big town of Opuwo, the place the liquor traders came from, the administrative capital of the region, a half day’s drive down the road. I thought of Karamata’s desire for a truck so he could take his children to hospital as we drove the man, his wife, and their child, towards the technology that would give him back his hand.

  Visiting

  OPUWO

  We were stopped before we reached the town by a group of kids who had stretched a length of string across the road at waist height. They wanted candy and money. Otherwise the drive to the hospital was uneventful.

  We stayed in town after leaving the man in the care of a well-starched nurse, and it was here that we met the Belgian anthropologists. They were a couple about our age, and had been living with a family in a remote village for a year. This was their second stay. On their previous visit, they had used donkeys, but the problem with donkeys was that when they weren’t in use, they were left to wander, and finding them again sometimes took days. Trucks didn’t wander, but dealing with breakdowns could be as much of a problem as hunting for donkeys. They were in town for repairs and to load up on supplies.

  We spoke with the anthropologists several times and learned there were half a dozen anthropologists working in the area. One night we went to the disco where we drank beer with them and danced, and on the walk home, they invited us to visit them at their camp. Almost two weeks had passed since we had come to Opuwo and delivered the man with the cut hand to the hospital. He had been taken to the capital and doctors there had reconnected the tendon in his thumb.

  We had stayed in Opuwo because when we walked its streets we felt like we were seeing into the future. We had taken to calling this town of 4,000 the “contact zone.” Students in white shirts mingled with Himba women in traditional dress. There was a big warehouse store where tourists in khakis waited to pay for their purchases along with women dressed like Maria. It was a frontier town, a place where conflicting norms and interests walked the same streets. It was the front line of change, a place where the world of the Himba and the wider world that we represented were pressed up against one another.

  We had spent our time in Opuwo watching a lot of drinking, and now the idea of returning to the bush was appealing. It felt like a chance to leave the harsh confusion of the future and escape to the tranquility of the past. That feeling held a typical western bias; Opuwo wasn’t the future, the bush wasn’t the past – they were both present realities – but our feelings came straight out of the belief that history travels in a line and that our way of life is at the most advanced end of that line. From this point of view, other ways of living are often described as being from the past, even when they are being practiced in the present. We had enjoyed being out in the village where the norms of the Himba were still dominant. Life was quieter, slower, and further removed from the world of cars and pop cans that I knew so well. I wanted to go back to the village and liked the idea of doing so in the company of English-speaking experts.

  ETANGA

  The village where the anthropologists where staying lay on the far side of a mountain range and the road had to be descended in first gear, one rock at a time. These low mountains were the quietest place we had visited, and the first where four-wheel drive might have been useful. In early afternoon, we came round a corner and saw the town of Eta
nga spread out beneath us: a few scattered huts, a couple of small square buildings, and what looked like the anthropologists’ truck coming along the road. The anthropologists were surprised to see us and said they hadn’t been expecting us. They explained that their truck had developed a new problem, and they had decided to get to the mechanic in Opuwo before it broke down in the middle of nowhere. They would be back within the week, and if we wanted to hang around town, they would take us to their village when they returned. They said to visit the headman of the area and obtain his permission to camp. Then they got in their truck and drove away.

  Not knowing quite what to do, we drove into town. By the time we got out of the truck, everyone in the vicinity had gathered. They wanted to know where we were from, asking the question in Herrero and in Afrikaans. Where were we going? What were our names? Did we have a cigarette? A young man wearing aviator sunglasses and a camouflage jacket pushed his way through. He was about twenty, spoke English, and introduced himself as Kanguti.

  We explained that we wanted to stay for awhile and Kanguti offered to give us a tour. David got his cameras together while I looked for the dog’s leash. Every village had a few scruffy dogs who slept in the dust and got rocks thrown at them when they got in the way. Me and my dog, attached to one another by a leash, got stared at a lot. Our dog was big enough to frighten people, and young enough to run off and cause trouble, but the real reason for leashing him was to keep him out of the photographs. I couldn’t find the leash, so asked David to improvise something, and the crowd moved with him to the back of the truck, and watched as he pulled aside the curtain and revealed our supply cupboard. When he cut off a length of cord, the man sitting on a donkey spoke up, and Kanguti told us the man wanted some cord to make a bridle. David cut him some and we headed off on our tour with a large crowd in attendance.