Where Fire Speaks

by David Campion

  Etanga lay beside a wide riverbed that, like most rivers in Namibia, ran above ground only in the rainy season. The general store was built on a rise above the river and the small clinic and two-room school were down the hill. That was pretty much the whole town. Kanguti explained that most people lived in traditional villages, the closest of which was a ten-minute walk away.

  We walked back to the store and Kanguti told the men drinking beer out front that we wanted to meet the headman. They said the headman had gone back to his village and suggested that we take a gift when we went to see him, and that what he liked best was snuff and sparkling wine.

  It was dim inside the store and after the bright sun of the afternoon, it took a while for our eyes to adjust. There was a counter in one corner. The wall decorations bore the familiar red and white of the world’s favorite beverage. The shelf held bottles of cheap South African wine, packages of ground corn, bags of tobacco, matches, and not much else. There was a lot more stuff in the back of our truck, confirming the feeling I’d had that, for many people, we were the store.

  We had been gone for over an hour by the time we returned to the truck. As we approached, we could see that the back flap of the canopy was wide open, and realized that we had forgotten to close it. My first instinct was to rush ahead, but I restrained myself, and walked casually around to the back of the truck, and when I looked inside, I saw that nothing had been touched.

  FUNERAL

  We were going to the headman’s village and had been walking steadily uphill for half an hour, sweating under the winter sun. The village lay on a plateau and remained hidden until the moment we stepped into it, right in front of several dozen men who were sitting cross-legged on the ground. They stopped talking and watched as we stood there, catching our breath. The huts behind the men were large, and the village looked impressive, like the home of an important person.

  Kanguti stepped forward to greet the headman, a middle-aged man who had an air of authority. Kanguti relayed to us the headman’s short speech of welcome in which we were thanked for coming to meet him. David and I nodded and smiled at the men around us, none of whom smiled back.

  We had taken the advice of the men in town, and brought tobacco and sparkling wine. When David put our gift forward, the headman told Kanguti that we should give it to his father, and pointed at an ancient man sitting on a decaying lawn chair near the center of the circle of men. With Kanguti beside us, David and I knelt in front of the headman’s father. My eyes were at the same height as his bony knees; the hands resting there were long and thin and bent as if by the wind. David explained where we were from, and that we were honored to be there, and that he would like to take some photographs so that the people back in our country could see how the Himba live.

  The old man nodded as Kanguti relayed David’s words, and then the old man made a speech which Kanguti translated. “The white man comes with power. He has more power than the black man. When the white man came, the black man lost his power. We are glad you are here with your power.” Our gift of sparkling wine and tobacco lay near the old man’s feet. “Dankie,” the old man said, using the Afrikaans word for thanks and giving us his blessing. “Okuhepa,” David said in reply, using the Herrero word for thanks. The men around us repeated the word, okuhepa, okuhepa, and laughed.

  Kanguti informed us that we had arrived in the middle of a funeral for one of the women of the village. The men were about to kill a cow for the feast, but first they were holding a council to discuss problems in the area. David took photographs as the men talked. Kanguti listened for awhile, then moved over beside me and said that two young men from the area had been stealing goats to buy alcohol. The decision of the group was that the fathers of the culprits would pay for the stolen goats, six goats for each one that had been stolen. Justice, Kanguti told me, was paid out in animals. Hurt a man, make him bleed from the head, he said, and he figured you would pay eight cows.

  The men were also discussing whether or not to build a cattle dam that would ensure a regular supply of water for their herds. A scrap of paper was passed around with two numbers written on it: $400,000 and $120,000, the prices for the two options being considered. I was told that the larger dam would cover four kilometres. I was unclear about the location of the dam or where the money would come from to pay for it but, in the end, Kanguti told me that the choice was made in favor of the cheaper dam.

  After awhile, some of the younger men left the discussion and went into the cattle enclosure and came out leading a big red cow with horns that easily spanned six feet. I watched as one of the man planted his thumbs in the cow’s flared nostrils. Two of the strongest men then twisted its neck, until the animal fell over. Once the cow was lying on the ground, the men knelt side by side and their thighs flexed as they pushed their knees into the cow’s throat, blocking its windpipe. The animal struggled at first, the back legs flailed, then the cow lay still for long minutes of quiet suffocation.

  Once the animal was dead, its belly was slit and the organs, released from their skin casing, spilled onto the ground. The headman came over to examine them. Another elder joined him, the young men crowded around, and everyone stared intently at the thick loops of exposed intestines. David moved into the circle and began taking pictures but several of the young men interrupted him, holding out their hands and asking for money. They wore T-Shirts above their skirts, and their demeanor was challenging, several generations removed from the gentle look of the headman’s father. The entrails waited while David emptied his pockets and gave all the coins he was carrying to a young man in a suit jacket who then divided the money. Seven dollars in change kept him busy for as many minutes with everyone arguing about how to make sure each of them got their share.

  Once the coins were divided, the headman took a thin stick and probed the folds of tissue and fat, reading the fortune of his community in the entrails of the cow. I thought about how the cattle’s economic significance was mirrored by their central role in spiritual practices, and wondered what the anthropologists could have told me about what the headman was doing. The young men crowded around him, and just before noon one of their digital watches beeped out the time. By quarter past the hour the headman had finished reading the guts of the cow and four more wrist watch alarms had gone off.

  While the young men were cutting the cow into pieces, the headman came over and squatted down beside me. The wind was blowing and I was trying to keep strands of hair out of my mouth and away from my eyes. He held a hand-rolled cigarette and gestured for a light. I passed him my lighter and moved my hands to block the wind for him. He got his smoke going in one try. We smiled at one another and I felt, for a brief moment, like I belonged.

  One of the young men handed David a big piece of meat. The rest of the animal was being shuttled, hunk by hunk, over to large metal drums that looked like they had once held fuel, but were now on the fire, full of boiling water. Our piece of meat hung thick and bloody from David’s hand. We decided to take it home and make supper. It was a welcome gift as we hadn’t had meat in over a week. The rest of the afternoon we devoted to cooking a stew. Kanguti went off and got his brother, some of the kids from the local school showed up, and a few hours later we served our own feast.

  SHOES

  Kanguti’s feet showed through the broken stitching of his leather loafers that were a couple of sizes too big. People who had adopted western clothes wore whatever kind of footwear they could get; the size, style, and state of repair didn’t matter. When we got back to camp after visiting the headman, David dug out the sneakers he had brought for the jogging that he hadn’t been doing and gave them to Kanguti who immediately sat down, pulled off his loafers, and pushed his bare feet into the sneakers. Etanga was a quiet place, and Kanguti hadn’t asked us to pay him for translating. There were no tourists around, no other white people in the region except for the two anthropologists. I think we were entertainment for Kanguti. He hung around our camp constantly, drinking tea and sharing sup
per. On our visit to the headman, Kanguti had been wonderful and seemed to enjoy being at the middle of the conversation, acting as translator. We had been fortunate to have him as our mouthpiece and the sneakers seemed a good way of saying thanks. His brother inherited the loafers and Kanguti walked around with a purple swoosh on the side of his feet.

  MEETING TREES

  At seven o’clock in the morning, the sun was bright, the air was freezing, and I was in bed under three blankets with a toque pulled over my ears. When I finally poked my head out of the truck, I looked right into the unblinking yellow eyes of a large owl. The owl was on the bottom branch of the nearest tree. Our camp was along a dry riverbed, just over the hill from the village. There were birds up and down the riverbed and three huge trees stood testament to the fact that, while no water was visible, it was there beneath the ground. Kanguti had called them meeting trees.

  The kettle had just boiled for tea when the first visitor arrived. After the exchange of greetings, he thrust out his arm to show his wristwatch. It read 20:04 – exactly twelve hours off. David bent over the man’s hand in what had become a regular ritual between him and many of the men we met, aligning their time with the rest of the world. By nine a.m., the air was hot, and when I stepped beyond the protective shade of the meeting trees, my ears began to burn in the sun. The next man to arrive wore shorts and carried a skinned goat carcass over his shoulder; he asked for a cigarette and two dollars. He stayed for tea too, doing as the others had done and putting heaping spoons of sugar into his mug. The sound of pop music reached us and a man in pleated trousers came into view carrying a radio playing an African version of a ’70s disco tune.

  The shady ground under the meeting trees had become our living room and the world moved through it freely, sporadically, unannounced. People came over when we started to cook and stayed until we shared a meal. Kanguti, his brother, and the boys from the nearby two-room school spent many hours leaning against the tree, sometimes talking, sometimes just watching us. One afternoon, I wrote in my journal with four pairs of school-boy eyes following every move of the pen. The next morning, several young mothers arrived and settled down in the shade of the trees. One of them grabbed the teat of a nearby goat, picked up a beer bottle from somewhere, and squirting milk into the narrow opening, filled it and drank.

  Most of our visitors were men; those who stayed the longest seemed to be the young ones caught between cultures. They were usually wearing western clothes, tight T-shirts, tattered shorts. When they asked for things, their tone was sometimes belligerent, and there was often a hardness in their eyes. Later, I would read about these footloose young men in American anthropologist David Crandall’s book about the Himba. He writes about the rise in cattle rustling and how, in regions where employment opportunities are rare, cattle theft is one of the few ways young men have of obtaining the money required to buy things.

  The most common requests we got were for cigarettes and soap, candies and ground corn. Money was popular, as was our truck. We were asked for rides two or three times a day. People wanted my shoes and my shirt. “I’ll give you a goat for that,” one man said, pointing to our only lawn chair. Offers to trade were rare; usually we were just asked to give things away. The goat sounded like a great deal and if the chair hadn’t belonged to my mother-in-law, we would have eaten it that night.

  SCHOOL

  Word of our arrival reached the school before we did and a dozen students were outside waiting for us, ranging in age from six years old to their mid-teens. They were mostly boys, dressed in clean T-shirts, who knew enough English for a conversation. We told them we were from Canada, which didn’t get much response until we explained that Canada was next to America, and then they all nodded. A young, bright-eyed kid asked for pens and we promised that if they came to visit our camp site, we would give them some.

  The boys arrived in the afternoon when classes were over; they had changed into shirts full of holes and tattered shorts. The oldest, the one who seemed to the leader of the group, was named Eddy, fourteen years old and in Grade 3. His parents didn’t want him to go to school, he said. His father had said to him, Why go to school? What is learning? Who will look after the cattle and the goats? The children explained that for most of their parents, school meant the kids weren’t able to help with the herds because they were away from their families, learning to read and write instead of learning to find the best grazing or water. Sometimes their parents took them out of classes for weeks or months at a time to move with the herds to distant cattle posts.

  Hours later we walked them back to the school and they showed us where they stayed in a shed of corrugated tin that was home to a dozen children. The floor was concrete and there was a single bed frame pushed up against the back wall with a board lying on it instead of a mattress. Most of the kids slept on the floor. They each had a set of good clothes that they kept for school, and these, along with three blankets, were hanging from the ceiling.

  The school consisted of two classrooms with desks and chairs lined up in rows. Beside a picture of a smiling Dr Sam Nujoma, the president of Namibia, there hung a poster showing different kinds of land mines, grenades, and mortar shells. “These bombs will kill!” the poster read. There was graffiti on the walls, one a drawing of a Volkswagen bus with the words “Face it baby” written beside it.

  In my frame of reference, education had always seemed like an unmitigated good, yet here its benefits seemed ambiguous. Later, in a report submitted by a Namibian lawyer to the World Commission on Dams, I would read: “One perception is that a low level of schooling may lead to dissatisfaction with the Himba way of life while not equipping youth with marketable skills – with the result that a school-leaver ends up as a low-paid wage laborer rather than a self-employed and relatively wealthy herder.” Eddy came to mind when I read this. Our conversation under the meeting tree that afternoon had turned to his ambitions. The reason he was at school was because he wanted to be a movie director. He was full of pride when he said this and the younger boys looked at him with respect. He was here, at age fourteen, studying to pass Grade 3, because he knew he needed to learn to read and write in order to direct movies.

  MAGIC

  The healer was from Angola and specialized in curing people who had been cursed. The men who gathered to drink beer in front of the store had told Kanguti the doctor was coming, and when he arrived, Kanguti helped make the arrangements for David to photograph a healing. It cost twenty dollars and a pouch of tobacco.

  We had first heard about curses from a doctor at the Opuwo hospital, who told us there was a high level of anxiety among his patients because they feared that they may have angered their ancestors. He said the dead who are unhappy with the living can curse them, and related the story of a young woman who left home after hitting her mother. Sometime later, when her mother died, the daughter took sick, saying she was cursed by her mother, believing that her cure, her release, would come only with death. She died eventually, like other patients the doctor had seen fail without any reasons that his medicine could discern. One of the Belgian anthropologists was doing fieldwork on witchcraft and had explained to us that anyone, alive or dead, could place curses on others. There was rumored to be a growing trade in the sale of magical spells to make people rich and these were said to sometimes involve causing harm to anyone standing in the way.

  The Angolan healer was a thin man with a serious face; he wore a New York Yankees ball cap and a land mine T-shirt that read “Don’t Touch It! Report It!” The patient was a man of about forty-five who had been feeling ill for weeks. He believed he had been cursed, and if it wasn’t by someone living, maybe a friend or family member who was angry or jealous, then it could be the curse was laid by an ancestor whom the man had managed to offend, perhaps by failing to perform a special ritual in his honor. The man believed he would stay ill until the source of the curse was identified and a cure prescribed. Kanguti told me that, just as our doctors look in a book, this doctor looks in
the meat of animals to find the medicine required to heal his patient.

  We left the man’s village and headed downhill to a spot near a dry streambed. The patient sat next to the doctor, surrounded by family and friends, me, Kanguti, and the hovering photographer. The goat lay at the center and the doctor began by pressing his knee into the animal’s throat and strangling it. He then picked the goat up by the ears, opened its mouth, and looked at its teeth, all the while pointing and talking. Everyone listened intently. I felt too shy to ask Kanguti for a translation, so the scene played like a foreign movie without subtitles.

  The doctor opened the goat in layers, going through the skin, into the tissue, and finally down to the organs. Once he had cut into the abdomen, his hands worked around the rib cage for many minutes, pulling organs out of the animal, and laying them, still attached by sinew and tissue, to one side. The men moved in closer. I moved back, beyond the shade of the tree and into the midday heat while the doctor unraveled the goat. The healing had been going on for over an hour. Up in a cloudless sky, the thin white line of a contrail indicated an airplane passing by overhead, so high up that the sound didn’t reach us.

  GIVING