Where Fire Speaks

by David Campion

  SHOPPING

  Men were always asking if they could have our dog. David said it was because they thought he would keep jackals from stealing their goats. One afternoon a man drinking beer insisted I sell him the dog. I told him I would trade the dog for a cow, knowing that the price for a cow in Opuwo was $1,000. He looked shocked and then laughed and laughed, saying a cow was too much to pay for a dog.

  Another day a young man approached me, smiling and friendly. He spoke English and wanted to sell me a bracelet made out of plastic piping. I told him I didn’t have money to spend on jewelry and his face turned ugly. “If you don’t have money, why did you come here?” He waved his hands, angry and disgusted, as if to brush me out of the market. We were near the clothing store, piles of second-hand clothes spread out on a large tarpaulin – overcoats piled next to T-shirts and jogging suits. Nearby, a woman was buying school clothes for her daughter. The mother wore a goat skin skirt. Her daughter no longer wore braids over her face; instead her hair was cut short. The dress her mother picked out for her was blue with white polka dots. I wondered where it had been made. The brand names of the piles of clothing seemed to mean nothing to the women shopping, but they resonated for me. Sweaters from Smart Set, Daniel Hechter, an Izod Lacoste golf shirt, and on one unhappy-looking woman’s head a scarf with the famous interlocking “C”s of Coco Chanel.

  The men in the market wore T-shirts from all over the world: Milan International, West Virginia, the Paris Dakar Rally. One from Hash House Indonesia caught my eye; the boy wearing it was buying a flat of Cokes. I watched him walk away and wondered what the shirt meant when worn by someone who couldn’t read and didn’t know what Indonesia was. Another teenager was wearing a Vancouver T-shirt. We had visited friends in that city before leaving for Africa, and the words on his chest gave me a bitter-sweet feeling. I asked him if he knew Vancouver and he shook his head. I told him it was a city in my country, and he looked at me blankly. At one time the T-shirt was probably a souvenir of somebody’s trip. Its meaning was different now. T-shirts were something the men seemed to be proud of, like their wristwatches.

  SOAP

  One afternoon, we came across three young men washing their T-shirts in the front yard of a house. They were using an old ammunition case as a makeshift washtub. They had a box of laundry soap and once they had finished with their clothes, they used the soap on their bodies.

  The evangelical preachers exhorted the people to wash themselves, put on clothes, and come to Jesus. We had received many requests for soap, usually from men. Women were given soap when they came to the hospital, and asked to wash off their ochre. They had to wear green hospital smocks over their bodies, and paper towelling wrapped around their braids so they didn’t stain everything. Traditionally, the women “wash” with the paste of butterfat and ochre which they rub into their skin each morning. But the ochre leaves stains. When Karamata’s wives rode in the back of the truck, their headdresses left marks all over the ceiling of the canopy, and the foam mattress we slept on was never clean again. The women rub off on the world around them, which wasn’t a problem with tree trunks and stones around the fire, but isn’t great for upholstery. I read recently about two women who said they had stopped using butterfat and ochre and wore dresses instead because white people didn’t like giving rides to women who stained their cars.

  PHOTOS

  When tourists pulled into Opuwo, their first stop was usually the gas station or the PowerSave, both popular places for Himba to position themselves for photo opportunities. One morning in front of PowerSave, an air-conditioned bus pulled in and let out its load of middle-aged Europeans. A couple in khaki made a beeline for me, the only white person in the vicinity. They were friendly Brits who wanted to photograph the Himba and were concerned that they do it in a way that didn’t upset anyone. I explained that taking photos was a matter of asking permission and negotiating a price.

  They approached two women who were standing nearby and gestured with their cameras. One of the women held up four fingers and said, “Dollar.” Other members of their tour group saw what was happening and went over to the women too, forming a line and one by one pointing their cameras at the bare-breasted women, paying them, then heading back to the bus.

  These encounters were usually awkward. There was a role reversal here, one of the few exchanges between Himba and foreigner in which the burden of desire rested with us instead of with them. There was a measure of nervous tension on the part of the picture taker: exotic photographs are an important part of a successful vacation, and the Himba were exotica that talked back and asked for money.

  Tourists often took pictures without saying a word to their subjects; the only eye contact came through the viewfinder, the only physical connection the coins in outstretched hands. I wondered how it had come to be that getting pictures of these people was more important than actually meeting them. It seemed tourists came to take their own versions of the photographs they had seen in tour brochures and travel magazines.

  GOSSIP

  For weeks we had been hearing rumors about a French girl who had spent a year living like a Himba and written a book about it, one of those bestseller gone-native kind of books. The Belgian anthropologists said they had heard of a white woman who had stayed for awhile in a village near Etanga and dressed like a Himba. Gary thought that the Peace Corps volunteer he had replaced told him about a French woman who got stranded in the bush and ended up staying with the Himba. Nobody knew her name. I was skeptical about whether or not she existed until she showed up looking for me.

  Her name was Solenn, she had just arrived from France, and someone had told her about the other foreigners in town who were interested in the Himba. She was young and pretty and the rumors were true. Three years before she had spent six months living with the Himba. I seem to recall that she had been traveling through the area, fought with her companions, and gotten out of their vehicle near a dry riverbed in the middle of nowhere. She had fallen ill and spent a miserable two days lying sick and alone until passing villagers found her, took her home, nursed her back to health, taught her Herrero, and gave her the name Girl Who Moves With The Wind. She had stayed in the area for about a year, coming and going from the village that had adopted her. That was in 1993 when the Himba were still relatively unknown. When she had returned the following year, in the wake of visits by Discovery Channel and National Geographic, the people had started charging for photographs. She was back now for the first time in two years and, when we compared notes, found that the price of a photograph had doubled since then, up from two dollars to four.

  Solenn had been working with a geologist to organize the Himba end of a United Nations event honoring the year of indigenous peoples, bringing representatives from the Aborigines, the San Bushmen, and the Laplanders to visit the Himba. Kapika and the other headman had been consulted, and a village chosen for the occasion. The visitors had been due to arrive in the early evening and stay overnight. When Solenn and the geologist got to the village the next morning, it was deserted. They found everyone in the nearest town in the middle of a drinking party with the headman passed out. The geologist spent the day ferrying the villagers back to the village, while Solenn tried to sober the men up with ground corn and tea.

  When the visitors arrived, the Aborigine woman tried to make conversation with the headman, commenting on the cattle she had seen. “No, there are no cattle here,” the headman said. “We do not have any. But if you want to give us some, we need them.” The more politically astute tribes tried to tell the Himba about their experience with dams but, Solenn said, the Himba wouldn’t listen, repeating “We will die,” and refusing to talk about it. At one point, the tribal representatives asked that all the government workers and missionaries in the group leave for awhile. Someone threw a cooking pot at a missionary and a fight had broken out.

  I told her about our visit with Kapika and she laughed. “They are rich,” she said, “and Kapika most of all.” She specula
ted that it must drive the government mad that they don’t pay taxes. But if they paid taxes, she said, then their farms would have to be recognized as legally belonging to them, as being their land.

  DANCING

  The wind was gusting and at the far end of the market, a group of women were clapping their hands and stamping their feet. Every few minutes someone would break into a solo while everyone else cheered. A woman in a long dress came and stood beside me. Her skirt was dirty, her eyes were mischievous, and she pointed at the dancers, suggesting I join them. I laughed and motioned for her to join them instead, and she did, standing in line with the clapping women for awhile before doing her own wild solo. When she stopped, she pointed at me, and held out her hand. I felt the eyes of the market turn our way as she helped me pick up the odd rhythm of the clapping, and pound my feet, heavy in hiking boots, into the ground.

  A local headman was watching and David asked permission to take pictures, and paid him the obligatory photo-taking fee. He asked if this was a special occasion and was told that the women were dancing because they were happy. More women joined and the line became a circle, men joined in and the volume rose. There was no order that I could discern, but everyone seemed to dance alone at some point. When a woman reached out and pulled the photographer into the middle, the crowd whooped with laughter.

  FUTURE

  The soft-spoken man was both a doctor and a missionary; he was from South Africa and had been in Opuwo for five years. His yard was one of the few where flowers grew and his living room was decorated with pictures of his many children. We spoke about health conditions among the Himba, and talked about what he had observed: there were no heart attacks, little hypertension, and no heart disease; it was things like respiratory infections and malaria that tended to kill people. He expressed concerned about the new health risks that a large dam would generate. The stagnant water would be a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes and other water-borne illnesses, and the road improvements and influx of workers would bring more AIDS cases into the region and HIV rates were already high in nearby Ovamboland.

  I told him about the drinking party at Epupa Falls and he shook his head. He said okandjembo was made from maize flour mixed with sugar that was left to ferment before being boiled and distilled. He talked about how the people used to make their own beer, and only had it occasionally, but now whenever the trader comes, people binge. The alcohol supply in Kaokoland was still sporadic, but he had heard of traders who traveled twelve or fourteen hours into the edges of the desert. He said okandjembo kills brain cells, which makes it harder to think clearly. He was seeing cases of cirrhosis of the liver and a condition called pellagra that results from a niacin deficiency people get when they stop eating and keep drinking. He told us the country’s only detox was a three-day program in the capital.

  I asked what he felt would happen in the future, and he reflected a moment before replying that he thought there was a wisdom in the Himba, an ability to reject pieces of western culture. In his role as a missionary, he had spent a lot of time with several chiefs in the area and he talked about how they were refusing some aspects of our culture. He gave the dam as one example, and also talked about a headman who had asked for a school in his area, but wouldn’t send his own children there, saying it was the lazy ones who were sent to school. I liked his hopeful perspective but couldn’t get past the fact that the future was in the children, not in the old people, and the ways of the west seemed to be especially appealing to the young. I asked him about this and he said that, yes, the wise ones he spoke of were older men and the youth, he had to admit, seemed vulnerable and did not wear wisdom in their eyes.

  He said that attendance at school was increasing and we talked about how kids who went to school didn’t get a practical education in goat herding and were losing the expertise required to maintain the self-sufficiency of their ancestors. Instead, kids who went to school emerged literate, with skills suited to office jobs. The local economy didn’t have many jobs to offer, and these kids were in an awkward place, no longer able to participate in their parent’s world, often disdainful of traditional life, and yet unable to move ahead in our world either. The doctor thought that might be changing; he had heard recently of a young man who was selling insurance, and I wondered aloud if that was what the future looked like – a Himba insurance salesman.

  CULTURE

  We were picked up after supper by one of the students who had taken a liking to us. There was a cultural festival at the high school that evening and we were invited. Well-dressed townsfolk filed into the gym and filled the rows of chairs set up for the event. The festival began with a prayer, after which we watched the students perform military marches, dressed in white shirts and dark pants. The school choir sang and groups of students did the dances of different tribes. There were Herrero dances, Zemba dances, and two Himba dances, one by girls wearing yellow dresses, another by the young men who, I couldn’t help notice, were all wearing either shorts or underwear beneath their skirts. The audience clapped at the end of each dance.

  One of the final performances was a demonstration of the holy fire performed by two young men wearing suit coats and funny hats. There was much laughter from the other students when they came in carrying a tree branch, laid it on the floor, and slowly sat down. The student who had brought us leaned over and told me they were pretending to be old men, and that was why everyone was laughing. The teacher who was running the event brought the microphone over, crouched down, and spoke in Herrero; the student beside me said he was explaining that the holy fire was where the old men talked to the ancestors. The ripples of laughter persisted as the two “old men” shifted around and pretended to light the fire.

  The evening ended with speeches from a community leader, but even before he got up to talk, most of the students had already slipped out of the auditorium. They were headed, my friend told me, for the disco down the road.

  “Our traditions are our life,” the speaker said to an emptying hall, “we must remember them.”

  MONEY

  When we finally added up the money remaining in the envelope under our bed, it wasn’t enough to cover our gas back to South Africa, not even if we traveled the shortest route. Our credit cards had been dead for months and we had empty bank accounts on two continents. It was what I had feared would happen; we had given away more than we could afford and were left short in a place where all the other white people seemed to be flush. Outside the store in Etanga, a woman had laughed at me when I told her I didn’t have any money. The old man next to her had said, “White people always have money.”

  We joked about selling the truck, buying some goats, and never going home. Then we decided to sell my camera. The closest store that sold electronic goods was a half day’s drive away, so there was a chance somebody might want it. Within hours of conceiving this plan, I ran into one of the Americans who taught at the high school. He was with a young Namibian teacher and while we sat talking, she mentioned that on her recent vacation to the game reserve her camera had been stolen and she wanted another one. I offered to sell her mine and she paid me on the spot.

  We went outside and I took a few pictures of the two of them, shooting off the last frames on the only roll of film I shot in Namibia, and handed over my camera. When David came back we packed up, drove out of Opuwo, and never saw another Himba.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Even as we counted ourselves fortunate to be in a place where people still spent time in the way the rest of us spend money, David and I couldn’t escape the feeling that the future in Namibia had already been written. The story of contact between indigenous people and the “developed” world has been played out many times in the past few centuries. There are always variations, but the same themes have tended to repeat themselves. In the six years that have passed since we visited Namibia, the story of the Himba has continued to unfold.

  Chief Kapika traveled to Europe within a year of our visit to tell politicians and t
elevision cameras about the dam proposed for Epupa Falls. His trip spurred environmental and human rights organizations to take up the cause of the Himba, and resulted in an international campaign against the dam and a strong lobby for the recognition of Himba land rights. Plans for the dam stalled in 1999 when talks broke down between Namibia and Angola about where on their shared border to locate it. The government is still talking about the project, but today the dam seems more rhetoric than reality.

  At the Opuwo Hospital over the last two years, the number of people admitted with HIV symptoms, including some Himba, has risen drastically. AIDS has spread throughout Namibia and the country now has one of the highest HIV rates in the world (twenty percent of adults are infected). In an odd twist, the population of the country is expected to drop as a result of AIDS, and with it will drop the demand for electricity, which will further reduce the economic viability of a dam at Epupa Falls.

  Late one night, while scrolling through a website for Christian missionaries based in Opuwo, I came upon a picture of a young man whom we had met at the anthropologists’ camp. His name is Makuma and he was the son of the headman who had propositioned me. He is the young man holding the flashlight on page 13 of this book. In the photo on the website he is holding one of the solar-powered tape recorders the missionaries are distributing so the Himba can play tapes of sermons and gospel songs.

  Two months ago, Namibia’s daily paper ran an article about the Himba and the changes they are facing. The reporter visited a village along the Kunene River and spoke with a woman there about how the people have adapted to new foods, let go of some of their nomadic ways, and are dealing with the threat of AIDS. The woman said to him, “If a person is dressed like me, you don’t get AIDS. Those wearing clothes get it. They go to towns and get it there. That is where they also drink too much alcohol.” She went on to tell the reporter about her daughter who goes by the name of Maria. She explained that Maria no longer wears traditional clothes, having stopped wearing them after the birth of her son. The woman was quick to point out that, while her daughter wears “township clothes,” she is not HIV positive.